_verandaguy

I'd really love to see a version of this that wouldn't get gutted between wild swings in government sentiment towards corporations (goes for a number of countries, though certainly the US more than most).

    > they will be taking a lot of people's 401k's with them

The US needs to stop allowing this kind of thing to happen, where the economy gets so hyper-concentrated in a few companies that they can hold the entire country's (and arguably much of the world's) retirement savings hostage.

We had that happen in the late 90s/early 2000s with Nortel. Before they collapsed (and infamously devastated their current and former employees' pensions in doing so), Nortel represented a THIRD of the TSX. The TSX responded by capping any individual stock at 10% of the exchange's overall value, with a forced rebalancing in the event that cap is struck.

At this point, that 10% is probably higher than it should be, since it doesn't account for entire extremely-well-funded sectors being caught up in a hype cycle like AI's, the sum of whose component stocks could easily exceed 10%.

Thank you!

@dang: title's off; the blog post is titled "How Google determines the names for bodies of water in Google Earth."

The how is operative, I think, since it changes the title from being about the process of how Google determines a name when it's there, to being about Google acting as some kind of rogue despot that goes around naming bodies of water.

What seems better to you, seems a bit nightmarish to me. If I'm going for a walk, the last thing I want to have on my mind is dealing with CRM software in any way.

This really reminds me of that scene from Wolf of Wall Street where Leo's selling penny stocks out of a strip mall office. "I never ask people to judge me on my successes, I only ask them to judge me on my failures, because I have so few" or something like that.

Sleazy.

I'm going to assume ignorance rather than snark here.

A natural monopoly is one where a product or service is:

- Widely considered fundamental to the public good (and in most cases, has very inflexible demand, meaning that people will often pay any sum to access it)

- Whose cost overheads are either fixed or grow slower than the variable costs (meaning that the investment required to scale the service not accounting for costs that scale with individual usage benefit from economies of scale)

- Easy to be gamed for profit in the hands of a profit-driven entity (either in the form of extortionate pricing directly, or cost-cutting on things like infrastructure maintenance; a good example here is how PG&E has infamously failed to maintained their power lines in California, leading to large-scale wildfires)

In the modern day, the best example of these are public utilities: water, power, road networks, public transit.

In these cases, the latter two points are used to justify public ownership, which in turn defeats the third point.

Right, but why do things this fast to begin with, especially for a product that's already publicly available?

I don't want to use a product that shifts under me as I use it several times a day. I want a product that actually moves slowly and works very reliably.

As an end user: why would I care about how many hundreds of releases a month are being pushed if maybe 1% of them have features I care about?

Speed is not the product.

Just because you make questionable choices in sourcing information doesn't mean this should be the norm.

This is a ridiculous take. University isn't the gatekeeper for information, it's a place where learning and academic study happen; these are separate dimensions of the broader concept of knowledge.

Teaching people how to think critically, how to contextualize information (both notionally as well as concretely within a given field of study), and how to develop new ideas within a field (both solo and collaboratively) have always been the value add; I say this as a university dropout who didn't appreciate this at the time.

Independent learning will only go so far if you don't know the questions to ask, and that's something you get through sustained exposure to an environment that nurtures that.

I'll mention as well that rolling back learning institutions is a very dangerous line of argument, especially in the age of misinformation, disinformation, and pervasive news-as-entertainment leading to both societal divisions and the erosion of critical thinking.

The blog post is advocating against this.

This comment is remarkable in its lack of nuance. There's a huge spectrum of, let's call it, aggressive speech, ranging from trying to organize against an oppressive figure or class, to just punching down against people and groups who have either done nothing to the author of that speech which warrants an aggressive response, or where the target of that speech is already a victim.

My opinion is that free-speech absolutism is a policy position that causes much more harm than good, and which erodes social cohesion. There should be perpetual debate about where we as a society accept where the line is between speech which is allowed and that which is disallowed.

And to wit, on the tea party analogy: how's that working for the US now?

Cost of deployment is a massive consideration in our not-yet-post-scarcity society.

It takes billions to certify a nuclear power plant, and it takes billions more to re-certify it every few decades, to say nothing of the costs of modernization.

To be clear, I consider myself generally pro-nuclear power, but let's not ignore the massive upfront and ongoing capital and operational costs that really undermine this idea that it's free power.

Sure, but it was unfortunate to pick the one dude who is well known, if for nothing else, for dying through means other than defenestration.

Which is itself a side effect of the US media treating most news as a spectacle, combined with the US (historically, but especially currently) being a phenomenally good place to be incredibly rich because much of the government will in a way that many developed nations would not allow.