Free market ideologues are too dumb to understand local minima.
An ideal free market is a global minima (in theory). It's the best.
A non-ideal free market (heavily subsidised and regulated) might be close (in parameter space) to a global minima, but might be highly suboptimal compared to a local minima.
It's not even that. Free markets by themselves (as implemented thus far) DO NOT ACCOUNT FOR EXTERNALITIES.
I have yet to see reasonable fix to the tragedy of the commons in a free market situation, and that's one of the most basic things one is fucking introduced to when studying economics and game theory.
Anybody who thinks health care is best served solely privately should have to pay to be diagnosed for something; either that or they've been failed in their privately funded education.
In the past I have read some libertarian literature that suggested the answer to the tragedy of the commons was that there should be no commons. Everything should be privately owned. How that would actually work in practice is way beyond my tiny brain.
It doesn't matter if it works in practice - it's religion, so it doesn't have to be true. We sent rockets up into space and there wasn't a giant man there watching us, but people still believe God exists. We tried living in a free market and everything turned to shit, but people still believe in libertarianism.
I think the theory is that if people owned the forest, the rivers, etc, they would have an incentive to take care of them for the long term. As we've seen with how companies have had all the value sucked out of them by private equity, leaving nothing but husks, I think this is a pipe dream.
Former libertarian here. The issue with libertarianism is that it does not explain the state of the world. The world is inherently unregulated. If libertarianism was superior it would have outcompeted other systems and it would have been the dominant system right now.
Historic explanations are even more problematic. How does libertarianism explain nomadic cultures or rice growing cultures (that tend to be highly collectivist)?
Their "andon" just means that if anyone suspects a fault, they raise a red flag (old school andon - a literal flag, US companies heard it and made it an app lol) and the line goes down until it's fixed.
This isn't anarchy or even democracy. It's totally standard for anything safety critical, Toyota just treats a flaw in a Corolla engine the same way most people treat airline crashes.
A US carrier group has tonnes of heirarchy but if the lowest ranked person sees loose spanner on the deck the whole thing shuts down instantly.
It is an interesting thing about the best military organizations is that they have hierarchy but also push a lot of responsibility downward. E.g. we don't see anything noble about The Charge of the Light Brigade
An infantry platoon does have leaders, it does follow orders, it is the thin edge of a very long wedge, but it has a lived reality of the members improvising under pressure.
IANAL but if you send a DMCA notice and they ignore it, they are (partly) liable. That's the point of DMCA.
File in a small claims court (or notify of your intent to do so) and see how long it takes to get a response ...
I wonder if you could probably even suggest a fee for damages, wasted time, etc due to their slow response and hope it's cheaper than them getting a lawyer to assess it ...
You would need to be the owner, and would know where to file though. If it's not your content, and you're "helping a friend" (but not actually legally representing them) then my guess is they haven't received a valid DMCA.
Also, register the copyright, assuming that's still working under the current administration. (Trump is trying to fire the head of the Copyright Office, which is part of the Library of Congress and doesn't report to Trump.)
I was legally representing them. I had their photo ID and a signed legal authorization letter and screencasts of their private creator portal showing infringed works and dossier of side-of-side comparison of infringing URLs and original URLs with publishing timestamps highlighted. All the submitted documents were signed. It hardly gets more concrete than that.
I mean, you can block or ignore them if you’re sufficiently good at bullshitting, and they lose steam before figuring out your weak spot.
Which statistically for the insurance industry happens with 90% or so of all claims.
If you give yourself just enough plausible deniability to work around the penalties (or even if you don’t, if the math is in your favor enough!), at a minimum it can give you a boost for the next quarter, which is key.
I'm all in favour of lowering barriers to entry, too. We need more competition.
Be that from startups, from foreign companies (like from China), or from companies in other sectors branching out (eg Walmart letting you open bank accounts).
I feel like millenials are kind of programmed to think that the customer is always right (or at least that this is the only stance you should take).
Will some younger generations think that the world is better off without the people who think that screaming at people is OK as long as you are a customer?
The original phrase "The customer is always right" had an important caveat: "... in matters of taste". Somehow boomers managed to forget the caveat and created a culture of treating customer service workers like personal slaves and demanding to be treated like royalty. I don't know that Millenials think the customer is always right, but I do see that the Zs think anybody can be wrong, especially customers, and I love that about them.
> The original phrase "The customer is always right" had an important caveat: "... in matters of taste".
This is not true. This is fairly recent Internet revisionism with no historical basis, an attempt to "well ackshually" the phrase into something else to make a point.
"The customer is always right" has always meant, "It's better to appease occasional assholes than to risk ever disappointing a customer with a legitimate grievance." Of course, TCIAR is not a natural imperiative. It's an unproven philosophical proposition that may or may not be appropriate at any given time and in any given industry.
To the extent that there is an "original" formulation, it might be Marshal Field's "Give the lady what she wants," which is (probably intentionally) vague on exactly how it should be applied. (And remember that "lady" in Field's time had some classist connotations that are less present today.")
People want to spend money to fix a problem that fundamentally requires effort on their part, not tech.
Vacuuming is actually the easiest bit of cleaning a house IMO - getting the floor clear (if you have kids, or out of control hobbies, or are just lazy or a bit of a horder) is hard.
People aren't stupid, they kind of know this. But just like buying expensive gym equipment they think that a new toy will incentivise them do the hard bits.
"If I buy a new gizmo I'll finally start cooking healthy delicious food" is a great pitch.
It was “easy” to vacuum before but we never did a thorough job. All too often we just vacuum what we can see, never under the couches, etc.
Now that we have to move everything so it can complete the full map we have a much cleaner house. It encourages us to move all of the chairs, toys, etc.
There's a left wing cooker conspiracy theory that the guy who gave Ukraine the Javalin anti tank missiles and forced NATO to increase military spending to 5% of GDP is actually a secret Russian agent.
I didn't group NATO and the US separately. You thought I did, but I didn't and you just hadn't read properly.
I waffled a bit in my reply to not rub it in too hard.
And do you want to contribute with something other than nitpick or insult?
Do YOU think that an informed and intelligent person can conclude that Trump is secretly a Russian agent, given he was the driving force behind a massive hike in NATO spending (which Putin really hates)?
I'm not calling Trump competent, or consistent, or benevolent. You can say he has a weird crushed on Putin and is easily manipulated and corrupt.
You can even suggest a lot of the MAGA people who surround Trump are actually working for Russia, since Russia tries to influence a lot of groups and Trump's cronies (and the influencers Trump listens to) are often compromised.
But do you think Trump is actually consistently taking orders from Putin because of some kind of leverage Putin has? Because people say this constantly and it's (in my opinion) almost as embarrassing as Republicans and the Pizza conspiracy. Trump has done some things that are increadibly damaging to Russia, and blackmail doesn't work on a pathological liar with no sense of shame.
I'm sure you're smart enough to agree with pretty much all of this. But you disingenuously attack me because I'm attacking people who are on your side, even if you would privately admit they are dumb.
This is what I read in your comment: that Trump "forced NATO to increase military spending to 5% of GDP". Are you talking about the US there? No, tautologically, you are talking about those parts of NATO that Trump forced to increase military spending to 5% of GDP. So what is controversial about my observation that you used the term NATO to stand for a NATO without the US?
My point was that by doing so you yourself add weight (a very little weight) to the thesis of the grandparent that, at least in people's perceptions, the US has left NATO. It wasn't just a nitpick, but at the same time I did not intend to join this side or that side in some mad argument that is playing out in your mind. I freely admit that at this point I am not reading all your output.
Russian asset, not necessarily agent. At least that's the commonly spread idea, for which there is at least some circumstancial evidence: commercial projects in Russia for several decades and well documented links to Ukrainian and Russian oligarchs under Trump I just to name two.
Epstein was running what he said was legal tax avoidance system for his clients.
I'm not saying they were breaking any laws in it, but Epstein is a dodgy guy (also he used to be involved in IIRC a Ponzi scheme and was previously sacked from a big firm - red flags galore with this guy) and the scheme worked off asset prices and trusts.
If a bunch of billionaires could manipulate asset prices (selling illiquid assets like mansions and artwork between each other and their trusts) I suspect they could really bring down their tax bills. This would be illegal (I think) but you'd need to untangle a large web of transactions to prove it.
Yes. IMHO, the parts that they really don't want to come out are the financial ties. It's the connections of money (and power and influence) that is being covered up, more then the child sex crimes that are now known.
The tax fraud can get a conviction, since there's a paper trail, and juries are more likely to think "yeah this billionaire might not be a monster but they probably cheated in their taxes".
An ideal free market is a global minima (in theory). It's the best.
A non-ideal free market (heavily subsidised and regulated) might be close (in parameter space) to a global minima, but might be highly suboptimal compared to a local minima.
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