American Nations is probably the worst pop-history books I’ve had the displeasure of reading. Its chock full of backwards rationalizations, just-so narratives, and glaring misconstructions and omissions.
Any assessment of modern society based on this author is immediately suspect and we should honestly stop letting him write for any serious publication.
Excellent, now we have a reason to chant “USA 🇺🇲 USA 🇺🇲” until we sink due to rising sea levels.
Realistically any Libertarian dedicated enough to show up to a party conference is probably a member of the 1% of the US population that votes for them in general elections.
Now when I’m lazy and don’t support some standards in my open source projects, I’m just going to say its for security.
404 Media is worker owned; you should pay them.
Vertical integation and scale are not inherently monopolistic. Some monopolies formed because they exploited these advantages, but there are competative industries today where several vertically integrated companies compete.
Monopolies in econ 101 are not called inefficient because they extract profit. They’re inefficient because they don’t respond to market forces. Since they control all supply, they can disregard demand.
I mean if central planning can be redefined to mean decentralized capitalist markets, I’ve got a book gor you to read too.
My dude, did you even read the Peter Theil article you linked? His entire speil is in no way congruent with your point. He’s basically just saying the rent seeking from a gaining a monopoly can make high risk investments worth it. His argument is still grounded in market logic. He leaves out the people who started high risk companies they thought would be monopolies but turned out to be undesireable.
And I don’t even agree with his point, neither Google nor Amazon needed massive capital to hit the market, they needed massive amounts of capital to operate at a loss to squash their early competition to create a monopoly; something that can only be done by the horrible market distortions of a governmnet or rampant late-stage capitalist billionaires with equivalent piles of money.
Edit: I would also point out Theil is a believer in autocracy, known widely for literally owning a company whose product is disinformation, and is shilling to prevent the breakup of his monopolies. I wouldn’t trust him under any circumstances.
China has some more central planning than the US, but they lean on the same market mechanisms that the US does when it comes to most solutions, ie tax penalties/incentives and subsidies. An excellent example is their smog reduction plans.
Its also great you linked an article about Chinese steel because they do the same stuff there
There isn’t a party planner in every steel mill determining output, they let individual companies react to market forces they shape with tax structures and subsidy.
People’s republic of Walmart
Good thing Walmart wasn’t supplanted by Amazon who delegates most of whats sold to 3rd party sellers. They certainly havn’t copied that for their online sales, right?
Out of curiosity, do you think the USSR collapsed because all its own citizens thought the government was doing too good a job?
China introduced private corperations and capital because they increased efficiency and production.
Are you saying every government whose ever tried tons of central planning just messed up or randomly decided to scale it back just for funsies?
Are we just gonna ignore the fact that the whole critique of centralization is that its inefficient, ineffective, and unresponsive to peoples needs?
Like as capitalism is becoming more monopolistic, its becoming increasingly bad at delivering goods that people actually want and just becomes better at supressing and controling them. You know the same critisism thats pointed at autoritarian communism.
I don’t think this is the W you think it is.
Casablanca. Its a classic.
Plenty of people rooted for the Lions and they wore brown bags over their heads.
Trump lost and people are still buying flags and hats.
I think we’ll be stuck with this cult for awhile.
I wouldn’t be so confident that his support will wane. People love a martyr and thats what hes protraying himself as.
All that isnt to say he shouldn’t be prosecuted, but I’d expect his support to jump in the short term.
Given that this is what their lawyers have agreed to, it would be weird for an appeal.
Friendly fire was half the fun of the first game.
If everyone you know uses secure messaging apps, youre in a bubble; their adoption rate is very small.
Of the people I know, even those who use Signal/Matrix still use Chrome and GMail/Docs/Drive. They have a long way to go before they don prosthetic noses.
What’s far more likely than 3d printed prosthetics becoming fashonable is people just rolling over and accepting the distopian surveilance state.
I can’t even get most of my family to use Signal to prevent Facebook from reading their private messages, what could happen to convince them to go full cyberpunk?
Where are you getting free VM hosting?
The comment was in reference to VPN services. Sadly, given theres no right to privacy, you must pay to not be tracked.
i feel like most of your argument is rendered moot with encrypted dns solutions like DoH.
You misunderstand. Large ISPs run their own DNS servers which are preconfigured into the devices they sell. They are the intended recipient and you’d just be encrypting it in transit to their servers.
Autobrewery syndrome is rare and probably has more to do with your diet and antibiotic use than consuming a few actively fermenting drinks.
Some drinks like pulque are traditionally drunk that way and that’s why they can’t be shipped long distances. So if its been done by other cultures for thousands if years, I’m not a doctor, but I’m gonna wager its fairly safe.