Such as preventing Microsoft from buying Blizzard to prevent a monopoly on checks notes... video games? :-)
If you're worried about a 'monopoly' on Call of Duty, then I guess it's great. Otherwise I sincerely don't understand why the tech community would be supporting the FTC policies of the past 4 years.
Good. We don't need more of wasteful policies such as the FTC trying to block Microsoft from buying Blizzard because it would supposedly "create a monopoly on videogames". The FTC should _only_ intervene into essential monopolies such as water supply or electricity supply companies, not random tech stocks like Adobe buying Figma. Adobe having a 'monopoly' on software for designing websites is... not a big deal, such software is not essential.
Lina Khan's policies were very harmful for the tech sector and I think we should all be happy that her ideas will not have space in the upcoming administration.
> Lina Khan's policies were very harmful for the tech sector
As they should! It's quite literally the whole reason they exist.
Email unsubscribe links have worked well, and click-to-cancel hopefully can too! The only opponents of these policies are massive companies who rely on predatorial dark patterns. Everyone with a brain should support these "wasteful policies" because they benefit consumers.
I absolutely LOVE having one link to instantly stop being emailed from mailing lists, and I can't be happier for click-to-cancel and related legislation.
"oh no, big tech company XYZ will make 0.0001% less money this year!!!" is the energy you're giving
>Email unsubscribe links have worked well, and click-to-cancel hopefully can too!
Yes but that's not what my complaints about the FTC are. My complaint is about them trying to stop Microsoft from buying Blizzard or trying to stop Adobe from buying Figma. I don't believe there's such a thing as 'monopoly on video games' or 'monopoly on website design software'.
Them working on general, consumer-friendly, sane policies is fine! But they shouldn't be preventing M&As/investments unless critical goods are involved without a substitute - which Call of Duty and Figma clearly aren't.
celebrating saving some clicks vs entire livelihoods jobs and industries for actual people, is the kind of elite disconnect that Trump exploited to win
Monopolies can only be harmful for essential goods that don't have alternatives. The water supply is essential. Access to the internet can (perhaps) be essential. "Software to design website mocks" is definitely not essential.
True to a degree but cars also make parenting easier: you get bigger houses, bigger backyards, don't have lug your kids around on public transit, deal with the weather, don't need to worry about rail worker strikes, etc.
All America's missing is laws that allow kids to walk to school and adding more sidewalks to enable this, but this is changing over time (see Utah's free range parenting law).
Do bigger houses make parenting easier, do bigger backyards? I’m inclined towards a large communual yard (a park, if you will) being many times more efficient at keeping them busy, especially if you have a single child.
Lugging your children around on public transit builds character that chauffeuring them around in a car does not. They’ll be exposed to a variety of people and situations they’d otherwise never experience.
Similar thing for the weather. I don’t want my children to grow up thinking that any kind of weather limits their options if a car is not available.
I realize my opinions might be different if I were living in a US city, just wanted to give a different perspective.
The other great thing about public transport is you don't have to "lug" / "chauffer" them at all after about 8 or so (what age makes sense depends on area and the kid of course). They can exercise some independence.
Maybe that's true in small, peaceful countries like Denmark, but in the US children "excersising some independence" would likely be kidnapped, raped or killed.
This has never been significantly true, and becomes less true every year.
The probability that any given child will be kidnapped or otherwise threatened by a stranger is minuscule compared to the chance that they will be abused, kidnapped, or killed by a family member.
By that thinking, looking at the data, you should prevent kids from seeing their family… Understand the nonsense? But nonsense gets often commonsensical when everyone in your circle believes it. Going outside has more benefits than risks. Like biking, yes you are at risk of accident, but in the average you’ll be fitter and live longer.
The US has much better access to mental health care than any European country. Not to mention everyone who lives in a walkable city there lives in a state where healthcare access is good.
> Lugging your children around on public transit builds character that chauffeuring them around in a car does not
I'm talking about ages 0 to 3 when parents need to use a stroller. It's a huge pain to do this in public transit. It's easier when the kids are older but if you have more than one child the car still wins.
Both my kids were born in Berlin (now 6 & 8 years old) and we never owned a car. In some ways transit is even easier with a stroller as you can just roll into the subway/train instead of having the disassemble the stroller and put it into the trunk. Buses require a bit more effort to board with a stroller but newer busses allow the driver to lower them near the curb to make boarding with stroller easier. We’ve done that for the entire time our kids used strollers.
I'd bet good money on your life being overall easier in a less dense city and two cars. But yes, you can do it and people have raised kids without cars for millenia.
Life in a less dense city itself would be different (fewer career opportunities - despite remote work, less cultural opportunities, etc). Also kids become more independent earlier so we won't have to drive them everywhere as teens etc.
>All America's missing is laws that allow kids to walk to school and adding more sidewalks to enable this, but this is changing over time (see Utah's free range parenting law).
Laws and sidewalk curbs don’t stop a giant SUV/pickup truck driven by someone looking at their mobile at 40mph in a residential area.
And crossing a 50ft+ wide intersection of a 40mph road (which means people drive 50mph) is daunting even for adults, and simply not advisable after the sun goes down. Those arterial roads basically box in your kids’ roaming area.
> And crossing a 50ft+ wide intersection of a 40mph road (which means people drive 50mph) is daunting even for adults, and simply not advisable after the sun goes down.
At least here (California) those intersections have stoplights and pedestrian crossings, so the width and moving speed of the road are not relevant. The cars will be stopped when you cross by walking.
I don't remember exact age but certainly before kindergarden age my child (and all the neighborhood friends in that age range) knew how to operate the pedestrian walk buttons and cross safely.
I fully agree it can be nicer walk when you don't have to cross a larger road. But at the same time, the difficulty of doing it is often greatly overstated. Press button, wait a bit, cross. Done. This is not in the top-100 things I'd like to see improved in society.
> The cars will be stopped when you cross by walking.
You live in a place with some combination of far more traffic enforcement or far more conscientious drivers than me.
All I see when I look around is a sea of people glancing up and down between the road and their phone. It would be negligent to let my kids cross an arterial road, especially after dark.
Not sure about far more conscientious, but people do stop at red lights. Seeing someone run a red light is very rare, maybe once every 3-4 years. And even those aren't blatant, they are people trying to get through before the red but failing. So what I do (and teach the kids) is that when the pedestrian crossing goes green (or white, technically) then wait a second, look left & right, and if everyone is stopped, then cross. That eliminates the risk of someone trying to rush through in the last second, and at that point it is perfectly safe to cross.
It's currently being discussed in Europe, since the "independent import" route to import a special vehicle has started to be exploited to import unsafe American vehicles. (The Cybertruck is one example.)
And yet I frequently see (in New Zealand), properties with oversized double garages (often built to fit oversized American vehicles) and driveways that take up half the land on the property. Cars use a huge amount of space in roads, carparks, garages, and are responsible for pushing things further and further away from the home. And then somehow cars are seen as the solution for the very problems they create. There's plenty of real world evidence that there are better ways to solve this.
I don't think cars are responsible for bigger backyards at all. The size of the average property where I live only seems to be shrinking as the roads get more and more congested.
Honestly, I don't want that lifestyle. I live in the burbs with a big house and yard. We travel plenty and go to places that are dense/walkable but I love coming back home to my carbrained neighborhood with an HOA.
That's really too bad: your lifestyle does not support maximal economic output of the land you are using and tax dollars you're paying.
HOA? Hah!- those shouldn't be allowed, neither should home ownership generally. You really need to live and raise your family in an apartment.. taxes should be raised enough that we can phase out private home ownership.
Your children will attend a public school and understand and implement equity from an early age. They will learn to use and love mass transit, only the approved destinations are necessary.
The Party may decide that the 50% of your income you are generously allowed to spend on approved items is too much. Social programs aren't free, you know, you need to pay "your share."
As someone who grew up in suburban sprawl, maybe it makes parenting easier, maybe. But they also had to drive me to and from school every day, and band practice, and every single game, and whenever I wanted to hang out with my friends. I would argue my parents basically were moonlighting as my Uber driver for about 16 years until I got my own car.
Big yards are great, but empty. Mom, can you drive me to my friend's bigger backyard? That times the 5 other friends that want to go to the friend's house that has the biggest backyard. Comically the 5 cars all waiting at the same stop light before the final turn, taking up the entire residential street as we all get dropped off and later picked up.
Eh, going to my friend's house is tedious. I'll just fully immerse myself in world of Warcraft, get fat, get socially maladjusted by spending all my time on the internet and 4chan, and enter college as a practically sociopathic asshole with no social skills.
Could just be me. But if I have kids, I'm raising them somewhere where they can just get on a train to get to band practice.
This was the life of my farmland friends in Wisconsin. In Houston if I had ridden my bicycle the mere 2 miles to my friend's house (half mile to leave my neighborhood, half mile to enter his, one mile or so on actual roads), I would almost certainly have one day been killed by a car or truck that failed to expect a kid on a bike.
We didn't have sidewalks. That area is still missing sidewalks actually.
In some ways our beautiful outside world is safer than it was 60 years ago, in others perhaps it's more dangerous.
How much of the increased rail use is helping increase GDP, though, rather than being purely leisurely trips with little long term value for the economy? More people going to hike in the forest on the weekend technically increases GDP but doesn't add much value to the economy overall.
Keep in mind there’s only about 50 miles of high-speed rail in the U.S. so far. With major cities like Dallas and Houston or San Francisco and LA still unconnected by fast rail, there's significant room to boost GDP and improve lives. Expanding rail isn't just about GDP growth, it's about enhancing daily living and connecting communities more effectively. As RFK famously noted, GDP measures everything ‘except that which makes life worthwhile’. Rail development does both, supporting the economy and enriching our lives.
Almost nobody will take that train daily, and it is stupid to think anyone would or should. However it is reasonable to expect the train will be crowded from all the people who take it less often. Companies send their people to other cities often for various business reasons. People take several vacations per year. Nobody is doing this daily - but the sum total of weekly, monthly, yearly, and once in a lifetime trips add up to a lot of people very day.
If I could take a train instead of a plane, I would. Doubly so if it saved me money. Savings for individuals means more money to spend on other things.
For many it helps cover the gigantic rent hikes. Many workers need public transportation to commute because they can’t afford a car, which keep becoming more expensive because cheap cars don’t make profits. It was not rare before for public transport subs to cost upwards of 100 EUR
Is Texas "coming to terms" with it, though? Cars don't scale infinitely but are also way more flexible than rail lines could ever be. If your goal is to have everyone work in downtown Dallas then yes, they suck. But you can just build offices and manufacturing facilities all around the state instead, avoiding the creation of single bottlenecks.
> has huge ongoing costs in terms of resource and energy use
TxDOT (government organization responsible for road maintenance) has a budget of $30B/year or about 10% of the total state's budget. Not that big of a deal for Texas.
That figure includes every single government-owned street, AFAIK. Total infrastructure costs are higher but don't seem that much higher than in Germany?
> Cars don't scale infinitely but are also way more flexible than rail lines could ever be
I'm not convinced this is true. Because a train enables more density, it enables more places you can reach once on it. A car enables more geographical area, but there is a lot less things to do in that area, and those things to do are what matters. If you want to go camping miles from anyone else than a car will get you there, but if you want to do a city activity (restaurant, movies, live music, show, work) a train can get you to a much greater variety of those things.
Note that with both the real question is the network. A car where there are not roads won't get you anywhere. A car where there is one road doesn't get you far. Same for a train - I live in a city without a train and so obviously I can't get anywhere on it. I've been in cities with trains and I was able to get places on it - enough that I didn't need to have a car.
Yep, ideally OP should formalize their theory into a bet and accept people to bet against them. Say, $5k on OpenAI <insert some horrible outcome> in 10 years. Money could be kept in escrow with a trusted third party.
No, S3 pricing for example is predictable, and written in a contract. There's no way for AWS to charge you 3x amount of dollars for 1GB tomorrow. They need to announce it in advance, and give you time to exit the contract if you disagree with the new price. It's really not the same. OpenAI can just tell you your prompt from tomorrow used up 20x times reasoning tokens. There's no advance warning or predictability. I really don't understand how you can claim the situations are identical.
Or just give yourself permission to not reply to people. Make a big visible unsubscribe button and relax knowing that anyone can just quit if they don't like it.
