- elefantenSpot on. And the mistake of considering appeasement of said totalitarian superpower by “letting them have it” would be just as enormous.
- Normalize that to global and it won’t look quite so stark. Not saying India’s development is unimpressive but let’s put things in a real context
- The Sims also still prints money and there's a new version due soon-ish. But, basically, yes agreed.
- Classically it doesn't, but colloquially it does. The dreaded "language changes and evolves" defense that frustrates pedants everywhere.
(I say this in the friendly spirit of a long-defeated fellow pedant who has hit people with your exact comment for decades)
- I concur with this take. Like many facets of culture, some people/groups will project what they want onto a given cultural entity (South Park, in this case), but that doesn’t mean one should assume they speak for it.
For example, the “men’s rights activists” group appropriated the idea of “the red pill” from The Matrix. They certainly differ wildly in worldview from the Wachowski siblings.
- A lot beyond the scope of the time I have to comment here. Read it with an open mind, knowledge of tech business, knowledge of how things unfolded since it was published and see for yourself.
But some short hand:
-Assumes vertical integration is necessarily abusive
-Assumes lowering price is necessarily a setup for anti-competitive practices. This one’s particularly ironic because lowering prices is definitely a first-order good for consumers and businesses that buy those goods. Bezos’ famous saying was “your margin is my opportunity” —- would you rather the standard continue to be massive retailer markup profit that goes straight to retail corps?
-Vague scare tactic claims that expanding into media production etc will somehow (yadda yadda, Step 2: ???) lead to monopolies in every category they enter.
The TLDR of the problem with Neobrandeis is it forms a very opinionated paranoid notion that size can only lead to bad things and no good things. It is a lazy dodge around the traditional responsibility of regulators to identify and regulate actual anti-competitive behavior when it actually happens By constraining companies from using any form of size or integration-related advantage, it lowers the pressure to actually be competitive and innovative for everyone else. I’m not saying everything should be unconditionally allowed, there’s a balance to strike. But when you just have a blunt “anti-size” hammer, you’re gonna do collateral damage to a healthy competitive ecosystem in a damaging way.
- I agree with your general point, but Khan was excessively trigger happy in a way that highlights exceptions to your observation. E.g. blocking Meta acquisition of Within was nonsense that did nothing to validate the concept of VR fitness as a promising category (anytime soon)
Edit: Within, not Withings
- https://www.yalelawjournal.org/pdf/e.710.Khan.805_zuvfyyeh.p...
She got boosted by an insurgent group of law professors who spearhead whats called the Neobrandeis moment. Their theory is that anti-trust should be preemptively enforced against size for its own sake.
This is the article she wrote for her law review as a law student which put her on their radar and they started calling her a "rising star" etc etc, which snowballed into the performative appointment by the Biden admin.
Feel free to read through it.
- Doesn't have to be a perfect success rate... how about just something other than abysmal failure rate?
Asserting a sloganized refrain is not very convincing. Make a real argument. Here are some counterpoints to "big is bad" Neobrandeisianism: -Scale enables better economics for certain businesses which consumers and other businesses then benefit from. -Large size allows additional speculative cutting edge R&D funding which the whole world benefits from even if it never pays off. -Being big on its own is almost never a cheat code to permanent monopoly / monopsony lock-in, especially in the technology business. That comes from actual anti-competitive behavior or regulatory capture (which ARE the parts that should be regulated, rather than targeting or preventing size for its own sake).
The S&P point is more than a bit overstated and it also doesn't really matter? The subset of the S&P that's performing well will naturally get weighted higher over time, until the performance changes. It doesn't really matter if the S&P is driven by 5 enormous companies or 500 equally-sized ones. Whatever works at the moment is what gets rewarded with capital -- that's the point of the system and it's been more effective than any alternatives. Besides, it'd be poor investing practice to be literally all-in on the S&P.
- Her opinion should not be taken seriously on the matter. It's not just the empirically terrible track record she had as a regulator and the baffling cases she brought to bear (imo proof of your point that she had an overgeneralized bias). It's also that she was demonstrably inexperienced at the time she was selected! It was clearly performative political appointment, which the Biden administration was pretty egregious about (and so have both Trump administrations, this is not a political point).
The essay (literally, a homework assignment she did at law school) for which she became famous that criticizes Amazon for being big is so chock full of errors, misconstructions and faulty logic, that it's an indictment of some really poor political habits and instincts that the US is prone to. That due diligence in vetting her as a rigorous and informed thinker on the topic failed is an unequivocal failure.
- The capitalization makes it a Tesla reference, which has notoriously been promising that as an un-managed consumer capability for years, while it is not yet launched even now.
- This is feeling like a retread of climate change messaging. Serious problem requiring serious thought (even without “AI doom” as the scenario, just the political economic and social disruptions suffice) but being most loudly championed via aggressive timelines and significant exaggerations.
The overreaction (on both sides) to be followed by fatigue and disinterest.
- The third one is the only correct way to interpret the title.
- Plenty of room for equivocation with words like "endorse", so depends what you mean by it.
I mean, literally in the first video he makes the standard argument that terrorist designations are politicized but you have to "look at who's right". And it's all in the context of defending Hamas and Hezbollah etc
And that's immediately followed by a clip of saying "America is biggest terrorist organization".
Obviously, the streamer is taking a "critical IR" type of standpoint.
So, I'm not sure what standard you're looking for. I never said anything about who's right or wrong, either among the streamers or the underlying sides of the conflict.
But the statement that he "endorses" Hamas etc doesn't seem so farfetched in the overall context.
And I apologized for the snark in my comment providing the link -- that was motivated by pointing out how readily available information is for self-assessment of the claims vs. calling for the original commenter to cite their claims (which most people are not doing in most HN comments).
- Fair enough and sorry for the snark. Certainly it's worth aiming for, but I don't think the standard here is that every claim has to be cited.
A better version of my post would be to point out that it took 3 seconds to get some initial info with which to do a quick pass of self-assessing the claims.
I agree with your original point that rhetoric gets stretched a lot on these contentious topics.
Browsing some of the clips myself, I think it's a bit less than a slam dunk on the narrowest interpretation of the streamer "supporting" various groups... but a pretty convincing display of a strong bias wrt said contentious topic.
And to zoom back out to the context of the original comment vis a vis the posted article, it provides some useful context about why this person might be targeted for additional screening by domestic security organizations -- regardless of what one thinks about the validity or wisdom of those particular decisions.
Edit: And to your original framing, I think it's very easily apparent that this streamer is not a simple case of "concern for civilian deaths" -> "endorses Hamas". He's very consistently making the claim that they (and others) are emancipatory groups which are being maligned as terrorist.
- Or just implement vastly more automated ticketing systems. They are standard in many countries. They could be implemented with limited-purview privacy preserving architectures where that aligns with expectations and values.
But people speeding, driving aggressively, driving anti-socially (by trying to speed past lines and cut in at the front), running lights and stops... this could be squashed forever, saving lives and ultimately making life more pleasant for everyone.
- As others in the thread mention, these are problems of political economy that no person or mega corp or even nation state can solve.
So, continuing to also work on other things is both rational and morally sound.
Progress in one area unlocks new possibilities in other areas. E.g. abundant near-free energy would make eliminating poverty a more tractable political problem than it has proven to be.
- Does it though? Maybe in absolute terms it spends "a lot" of thought on these things, but in relative terms it borders on nothing.
Measure it by VC dollars invested and what actual orgs at tech companies are assigned to. It's almost ALL on a 1-10 year horizon.
So, as gp notes... is it really that harmful to allocate <1% to "sci fi" ambitions, especially when most of what they actually produce is short-horizon, immediately-usable stuff?
- Putting aside the nebulous notion "contribution to hard science"...
She became famous for adopting a strain of strident and problematic activism, using it to attack her colleagues and making claims just as wild as some of the ones she cherry picks to critique.
It's not at all surprising that she ended up an extremely divisive figure. And meanwhile, the state of the art sped far ahead of where she drew her line in the sand.
It's hard to find discussion of her that isn't strongly biased in one direction or another (surely, my own comment included). In my experience (sample size 1), when she gets brought up (or involved), the quality of the discussion usually plummets.