BraveSirZaphod @ BraveSirZaphod @kbin.social

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2 yr. ago

Essentially every business charges an amount just under that which would cause their average customer to switch to a competitor, yes.

McDonald's may be a legal fiction, but the franchise owner who set this particular price is not; he's a very real person exploiting the value derived from being one of very few options at a rest stop. Expecting him to do anything else is not a particularly practical strategy. If this is seen as objectionable, you need to eliminate that scarcity value by either opening the space up to additional competitors or using government to mandate as part of the rest stop leases that profit margins stay within a reasonable level.

There are actual solutions here, but wagging your finger is not one of them.

You're describing essentially every business ever.

Hell, more than business even. You presumably wouldn't voluntarily take a pay cut, no? McDonald's isn't going to voluntarily charge less than they can either.

You're loosely describing most of human history.

"Let's take these plant babies and grind them into a pulp, drown it, let it be eaten by a bunch of tiny monsters until they fart enough gas, and then burn it" also sounds kinda weird. Welcome to the universe; shit's a little whack.

It's not that genuine passion and altruism isn't acknowledged; the entire open source software world is a testament to that.

You asked for an explanation as to why Free modern hardware hasn't been developed yet. The simple answer is that passion and altruism has not yet been a strong enough incentive to motivate anyone to do it. He's not accusing you of being lazy or hypocritical. The reason why you haven't done it yet is the exact same reason why anyone else who could do it also hasn't done it yet. It's very very hard, and passion doesn't pay the bills or feed you. Limited to a hobby, it's simply more work than most people could ever hope to achieve in their spare time.

It's more complicated than sheer greed.

The fact of the matter is that actually producing any modern technology takes a massive amount of work, and up til this point, no one has gathered enough motivation and free time to do it all for any modern hardware just out of pure altruism. There's a reason why companies have to pay hundreds of engineers a huge amount of money to get anything developed; those people are not going to do this incredibly difficult work just for fun and moral satisfaction. It's easy to point the finger at corporate greed for some things being locked down, and to be clear, there's plenty of valid criticism to go around, but it has to be at least considered that most of this stuff would never have been developed in the first place if it wasn't for those same companies. Your average person is not going to assemble a motherboard from parts and schematics.

Wouldn’t anyone just be curious to figure out how stuff works?

To this point, quite frankly, no. Average people simply do not care about this very much. They want to just turn on their magic internet box, get their work done, play their games, consume their media, and move on without any further fuss. The fact of the matter is that most people have no clue what a BIOS is, could not care less if it was proprietary or not, and have zero interest in learning about flashing them or why they would ever want to do that.

This article is about the Senate, where Dems lead proceedings. Mitch McConnell also supports this bill.

There may be a filibuster if it doesn't have 10 or so Republicans supporting it, but those votes are probably there. The Senate GOP is generally pro-Ukraine and a fair bit less overrun by moronic populism than the House GOP, which is a certifiable clown show at this point.

This is psychotic.

Well, in multiple ways, really.

There's an uncomfortable fundamental truth that people will generally prefer a seemingly peaceful dictatorship that doesn't negatively affect them personally over ostensibly democratic chaos and violent anarchy, even if plenty of other innocents get caught up in the mess. I honestly don't know if I can say that that's fundamentally wrong, and I'm not in any real position to comment on it because I have no idea what it's like to be terrified every time I leave my house (El Salvador had a higher murder rate than active war zones), but that doesn't change the fact that this is one incredibly slippery slope. It takes a very wise and benevolent person to wield that level of power in a fair and just way, and Bukele doesn't exactly inspire confidence there. More than anything, I'm just thankful that I don't have to make these kinds of decisions.

You should also toss in the fact that the British had promised the Levant to the Hashemite family of Arabia in exchange for their assistance in the Arab revolt against the Ottomans in WWI (see Lawrence of Arabia for an interesting but highly skewed portrayal of this), and then secretly plotted with France to divide the land up between themselves while also allowing significant Jewish immigration into Palestine. This enraged the Hashemites, who stopped working with the European powers. Britain in turn stopped supporting them, continued supporting their other Arab allies in eastern Arabia, namely the House of Saud, and this resulted in the Saudis eventually conquering nearly all of Arabia and creating the wonderful state of Saudi Arabia we know today.

The Hashemites did get minor states in Iraq and Syria, which collapsed relatively quickly, as well as in Jordan, where they still rule as its royal family. If you've ever been, you'll know that Jordan is much more progressive than Saudi Arabia, with no Islamic law, an open Christian minority, no laws against homosexuality or alcohol, and you can even find a gay bar in the capital.

If you had to point a single finger for why the modern Middle East is such a mess, the British wouldn't be a bad target at all.

China will not seek to “own” outer space

Let's see China get out of other nations' ocean space first and then we can talk about outer space.

To be clear, what I'm not saying is that everyone should sell their car today and just walk or cycle ten miles every day. People are always going to do what's most convenient for them, and attempting to blame individuals for that is moronic and counter-productive.

The energy should be squarely aimed at restoring other options so that people aren't forced to buy a $20,000 object that depreciates to nearly nothing, plus gas and insurance, just to live their normal daily lives. There will always be some areas where cars are necessary to some degree; I myself grew up twenty miles outside of a town of 4000 people. You need a car there. But there are millions of people who live in areas that used to be perfectly livable without cars, well-serviced by local and regional transit, and filled with walkable local businesses until the infrastructure was literally ripped up. A lot of those bones are still there, and that's where the focus should be.

The important element that needs to be, and now is, talked about more is that this state of affairs is not normal or natural. It was very deliberately created by car manufacturers in order to make life without a car be essentially impossible.

There's been a big boom in interest in urbanism in recent years and increasing awareness of just how the US got so car dependent. Toss in a quick trip to Europe at some point, add in people explicitly saying "the reason you liked these old cities so much was because of transit and lack of cars", and it's an idea that spreads itself.

He literally does not have the legal power to do that.

Biden has pardoned a lot of federal marijuana charges, but a core part of the Constitution is that the federal government's authority to interfere in state justice systems is very limited.

Because doctors have a financial incentive to order and perform/give expensive procedures and drugs that may not necessarily be medically necessary.

This is obviously a somewhat different situation, but I'd remind you that lots of doctors made a lot of money by unnecessarily prescribing Oxycontin that the spiraled into the opioid crisis.

It's not unreasonable for there to be some kind of check, though to be clear, I'm not saying the current system is good. But, insurance just automatically paying for anything a doctor orders is open for abuse, and that needs to be addressed one way or another.

"just make them do X" carries an implication that the relevant party actually has the ability to do the thing.

It's like taking the legal cases against Trump and simplifying them to "just put him in prison lol"

Gonna take it you didn't read the article, because this literally is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau:

Under the proposal, banks could continue to charge fees when a customer’s account falls below zero, but either at a price in line with the bank’s actual costs to administer the overdraft or at an established benchmark created by the new rule.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) proposed potential fees of $3, $6, $7 or $14 and is seeking feedback from banks and the public on what would be appropriate. Current overdraft fees often push $30 or more, taking a significant bite out of low-income accounts.

You're vastly overestimating the powers of the executive branch.

Very little 'big structural changes' can happen without Congressional support, and Biden at this point has an actively hostile Congress.

I can understand why people blame him anyway, but that doesn't actually make much sense.

Oh, in that case, this is almost assuredly a net positive.