Hegar

Bauxite is the obvious one. Bringing bauxite to Australia. How could you forget about bauxite?

That headline really is a thing of beauty. It’s like finding out that your trash is piling up because the city retasked all the sanitation workers to lie in fields of filth and create a heavenly host of garbage angels.

I can’t not read that in a garbled south african accent.

Uber is a bad faith actor, their business model is entirely monopoly-seeking. If they’re trying to expand into bus routes, the goal will be to reduce the choices available to just Uber.

Quick check of the post history shows nothing but vitriol and unrealistically black and white thinking. Classic signs of depression.

I hope things get better for you, but in the meantime you’re an easy block.

the operation is highly organised, technically savvy

Of course an operation this sophisticated targets people looking to buying luxury brands for cheap, that sounds like an ideal mark.

I personally believe that preserving a false and misleading picture of reality designed to trumpet a deranged cult that is working to make the world objectively worse for everyone including themselves is not acceptable.

I would say, “Look mum I love you more than anything in the world but preserving some of these movies crosses an ethical line for me.”

Of course I grew up in a house of atheist jewish academics, so making and justifying personal ethical stances that contravene wider group stances is expected behavior in my family. And we take document preservation fairly seriously.

It’s very naive to think that a weapons dealer who also kills it’s commercial airline passengers for profit isn’t also killing whistleblowers.

Google was accused of enacting a policy instructing employees to turn chat history off by default when discussing sensitive topics

According to the DOJ, Google destroyed potentially hundreds of thousands of chat sessions not just during their investigation but also during litigation. Google only stopped the practice after the DOJ discovered the policy. DOJ’s attorney Kenneth Dintzer told Mehta Friday that the DOJ believed the court should "conclude that communicating with history off shows anti-competitive intent to hide information because they knew they were violating antitrust law.

It’s perfectly reasonable to see this practice of avoiding the creation of evidence of their wrongdoing as evidence of wrongdoing, which is 100% what it is.

It’s not the same as a person using TOR, it’s a company hiding evidence.

Yes, getting sued for stepping on a mine like rounded corners is so good for inventiveness.

It’s so strange to me that people buy this BS line about IP laws having anything to do with why we get cool new things.

Either competition fosters innovation and therefore IP laws stifle it, or protecting monopolies fosters innovation and our IP laws make sense.

There has been a centralized bureaucratic autocracy in china since the legalist reforms of qin, a couple thousand years ago. Yes, the empire once united must divide but even during the long disunity before the sui and tang, there were multiple centralized autocratic states. Unity across all of the territory called modern china is not necessary to have a centralized state, and you’ll notice I never once used the word united.

forcibly “united” by external forces, such as the Western powers in the 19th century, dividing up and ruthlessly controlling economic spheres of influence

Wait were western powers dividing or uniting china? You’re claiming both in the same sentence. But that’s kind of immaterial to my point that the centralized autocratic state has existed in china for a couple thousand years and that many important new technologies came out of the cultures governed in that way.

I wouldn’t be looking for ‘game changers’ - that’s a marketing phrase with no firm meaning and very low applicability to reality. All invention is just iterating on existing ideas.

We didn’t see much cutting-edge tech coming out of China while they were recovering from the collapse of the imperial system and the colonial period, but now that they have more resources to throw at new tech, we’ll see new tech.

China has been a centralized autocratic state for a couple thousands years and has invented almost everything in that time.

More seriously though, it’s just not true to suggest that collectivist societies or autocratic states can’t invent new things. The briefest glance at history shows it’s just not true.

New things come from people having the time and resources to sit around and think about how to improve on the things we have. IP, social mobility and individualism just don’t really come into it.

“Because” often doesn’t make sense in the real world where anything that happens is the sum total of multiple factors. Especially a trend as broad as enshitification.

Being publicly traded seems like a contributing factor, but a sole owner can still enshitify through greed or incompetence.

I would guess that market consolidation and low competition are more of a factor.

Think of them as 2 methods for determining policy

They’re not though.

Democracy is a strategy some states use to achieve legitimacy in the eyes of the populace. Science is a method for producing knowledge.

Policy is determined by the financial interests of our elites, our global imperial interests, and the form of our bureaucratic institutions.

Democracy, science and policy are three very distinct domains.

Civilization is one of those great words (like Innovation) where if you’re using it, you’re definitely using it wrong.

When you say civilization, do you mean: The State, Justified Violence, Official Oppression, Bureaucracy, A Standing Army, Cultures you Agree with, or just Table Manners?

if politicians would grow a backbone, most of the problems we have would be solved

Politicians aren’t scared to do what’s right. Their job is to act in the interest of their fellow elites. The most successful at empowering their fellows are given more power. Solving society’s problems isn’t remotely on the agenda.

If anything, we want more cowardly and timid elites. Politicians with a backbone are just more dangerous predators.

I’m not sure what you mean by obsessive polygamy.

Do you mean people who feel strongly about having multiple wives or husbands? People who have many previous marriages? People who obsessively collect spouses? 😄

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There is a real phenomenon where many people try polyamory before they accept that their original relationship should end, then go back to just being single or start a different monogamous relationship.

This “transitional” polyamory is often looked down on but I think it’s another honest attempt to deal with the pressures and problems of expected monogamy.