The BCG vaccine has also been found to be effective against bladder cancer. One of the two manufacturers bailed out of the market about a decade ago, limiting supply for both TB and bladder cancer.

They just opened a new manufacturing facility in Durham this past Spring to make much more. Not sure if it's producing yet, but it was a four-year build.

TB affects so few Americans that you can't even get BCG for TB prevention if you want it. Hopefully high-risk folks will be able to elect to get it soon.

We don't, though the laws of supply and demand pretty much dictate that there must be some equilibrium point beyond which people buy fewer tickets and they end up losing money on non-refundable tickets.

Note that I'm not suggesting that raising prices is the right solution. It's a terrible solution.

Getting policy right is hard. Sometimes you need to prepare a mindset change or test out an approach, though certainly there are things that fail miserably due to unintended consequences. See this like developing software, but instead it is policy.

What will be interesting is how long before the W3C comes up with a solution that can work across browsers and websites, and then how long before it gets adopted by browsers and websites.

Which in a free market indicates that the price is below what the market would bear. Otherwise, they would be unable to make a profit by reselling them. So the GP is not wrong, at least from a pure price optimization perspective.

This is not to say that there aren't societal benefits from charging less than the market will bear, of course, nor saying that scalping in any way adds value. It is basically rent seeking behavior, which makes it a drain on society. But the point still remains that obviously the ticket vendors could raise the prices to what the scalpers were charging and still sell tickets. Whether the scalpers would then be able to raise their prices further is unknown.

> The software had a built-in limit of 200 bot detection features. The enlarged file contained more than 200 entries. The software crashed when it encountered the unexpected file size.

A built in limit is:

if ( rule_count > 200 )
    log_urgent('rule count exceeded')
    break
else
    rule_count++
    process_rule

This sounds like it did not have a built-in limit but rather walked off the end of an array or something when the count went over 200.

That's not actually a meaningful difference as far as antitrust law is concerned. With the possible exception of the monopoly being created by doing something illegal (which then becomes a separate violation on its own), it does not matter *how* a monopoly came to be, only that it is, and whether it causes harm to society, to customers, to other companies in the market, etc.

It's actually not. Any jacka** can buy a block of phone numbers and set up a trunk line. That's exactly why we have so much Caller ID fraud these days. I mean yes, ostensibly, but in practice, no.

Ah, but most phone companies these days don't even have a physical presence anywhere.

Entertainment monopolies have *lots* of government restraints. It really doesn't matter whether the company is an entertainment company or a toilet paper manufacturer. A monopoly is a monopoly, and subject to antitrust laws.

Except that email is surprisingly bad as a sharing medium, and 1000x as bad if you want to share large content like photos. But regardless, that's kind of moot.

Sure. None of that changes whether having basically one giant platform that almost everyone is on makes it difficult to impossible for any other company to meaningfully compete, though. And when your own platform buys another platform, that's where governments *do* start to have the right to deny a company from doing as it pleases.

There's something called a natural monopoly. Social media is likely to be a natural monopoly, in much the same way that the phone company was a natural monopoly before it was forcibly broken up and forced to provide interconnections to other phone companies using shared standards, etc. There's not a whole lot of difference other than the phone company having a higher physical infrastructure barrier to entry.

Regardless, Facebook is not blameless. They bought Instagram, effectively consolidating the potential players in that space from two down to one. And antitrust law does sometimes break up natural monopolies. It isn't about fault or blame. It is about actions taken while in that state that harm competition, harm users, etc.

Doesn't matter. Antitrust law isn't just about the users being victims. It is also about other companies being the victims by being unable to compete because of unfair competition, collusion, excessive mergers, etc. User/purchaser harm is only one narrow aspect of a much larger body of law.

It's actually more than that. For a typical website, you would be right. The problem with social media is that it is inherently social. If your friends aren't on the same site, you can't share things with them. People don't join a site that doesn't already have a lot of users, and therefore, there's an almost insurmountable barrier to entry when you end up with one or two entrenched players, in spite of it theoretically being possible to create another site.

And because Facebook is not federated, hides even public content behind a login wall, and makes sharing with non-users generally impractical, they are directly contributing to a situation where even if another company came along and created something that is better, no one would use it, because their friends and family would not be there, because they are all already on Facebook.

In much the same way that the EU basically forced Apple to open up Messages to support RCS for inter-platform communication, the only way Facebook/Instagram will ever realistically stop being a monopoly is if a government forces them to federate with other social media platforms so that you can share with your friends on other platforms. A strong antitrust judgment against Facebook would be a necessary first step towards that.

Besides, Google+ *was* better than Facebook in a lot of ways, IMO. It wasn't enough, though. I created an account, but nobody I knew was on, so I didn't ever post anything, and because people didn't ever post anything, nobody came to use it, and it ended up being a ghost town. The fact that a head-to-head competitor for Facebook emerged, backed by one of the largest companies on the planet, with a significantly better, more capable product, a more flexible sharing model, etc. and still could not successfully compete with Facebook should tell you that no, building a better product will never work.

The only way other sites "compete" is by being entirely orthogonal to Facebook, targeting largely non-overlapping demographics and largely non-overlapping sets of features. But that's not really competing. That's coexisting. I would argue that Facebook has no actual competition, except perhaps in the vague, wishy-washy "competing for eyeball time" fashion, in which case everything online and offline is a competitor.

I heard earlier today that a court has determined that since governments are using all of this data, including license plates, that a FoIA request for all of the license plate data gathered from Flock in a city area for a range of dates was valid.

They want to have a power advantage over their serfs but turning their advantage into a burden changes that dynamic. Something to look into for those so inclined.

We seem to be well past the point of being able to expect them to follow the Law or "do the right thing".

> I see no reason why the government shouldn't be allowed to buy the same data that jim-bob the farmer can purchase.

Jim-bob is likely to face some serious problems if he smashes down your door and drags you away in a pre-dawn raid.

The IRS people get a promotion.

This is why the Constitution places strict limits on the actions of government agents.

(in its original interpretation)

Here I am about to think "damn, people losing their jobs to AI" and then I realize its the "pizza in 4-easy payments" people.

They should probably go all-in on AI as soon as possible. For their investors' sake.

Yeah, I'm having trouble wondering what's wrong with the universe if a judge thinks that Facebook hasn't basically obliterated all competition in social media.

YouTube is not really social media. YouTube shorts tries to be Tik Tok, and Facebook Reels tries to be Tik Tok, but they're fundamentally different things, because short-form video targets an entirely different category of people than social media and largely serves a different purpose — to entertain, not to inform.

Google/Alphabet's social media site was called Google+, and it died because everybody was on Facebook and Instagram, so nobody used it.

YouTube sharing is too public (and hard to use in any other way now that Google+ circles no longer exist), so it's not really a place to share pictures of your family and share stories with your friends. If it competes with anything in the pseudo-social space, it would be Twitter/X, which I would argue is a microblogging site, nota social media site. They have a fundamentally different kind of target audience.

Apple Messages isn't social media at all. It competes only with SMS. Same with WhatsApp. I can maybe understand a judge concluding that buying WhatsApp didn't meaningfully stifle competition, because no platform for basic point-to-point communication is ever going to prevent competition by apps that come on your phone (e.g. Messages).

But saying that Instagram didn't stifle competition is a cop out. Instagram (3 billion) and Facebook (3 billion) are the only two sites left standing that I would consider to be social media sites, with the sad exceptions of Truth Social (6.3 million), and Mastodon (1.8 million).

If you're in an industry where you have somewhere between three and six billion users and your next largest competitor has one fewer zeros in its user count, and all of the other competitors have three fewer zeros in their user count, you haven't just stifled competition. You've effectively eliminated it.

And Facebook/Instagram have incredible amounts of power when it comes to breaking the open web, hiding content behind a login wall that makes it basically impossible to share things with the public unless they are Facebook/Instagram users themselves, which makes it even harder for competitors to break into the space, because everyone has to be a FB/Insta user if they want to see the content that people create on those site. You can't just casually discover FB/Insta content. So that aspect also strongly leans towards Facebook/Instagram being a monopoly.

The only way you can realistically conclude that Facebook and Instagram aren't a monopoly is if you ignore all of the actual social use of social media and treat them as nothing more than a platform for influencers and bulls**t peddlers to make themselves seen by the whole world. And yes, for that narrow space, all of those platforms compete. But for social media itself — sharing of semi-private information with a close circle of friends and family — none of those other sites actually compete with Facebook and Instagram in any meaningful way, which makes this decision downright appallling.

But congratulations, Facebook, on amassing so much power that the government can't rein you in. I weep for the future of our world, because this really should have been open and shut, and Instagram should have been broken off years ago, the second Google+ proved that competing with that behemoth was infeasible.

But if that wasn't enough proof, the abject failure of Truth Social, where even Donald Trump's enormous influence wasn't enough to make a second traditional social media site become large enough to be viable, should be absolute inarguable proof that the Facebook/Instagram combination stifles competition. It does. Massively. Its very existence makes competition almost impossible, ensuring that the only even semi-social sites that can ever exist are those that focus on largely non-overlapping markets like microblogging.

And I really can't imagine how anyone could look at the evidence and conclude otherwise, because it is so incredibly obvious to me.

OK, that was pretty funny. +1.

This.
Credit options are usually convenient, and often have other benefits like interest free periods, cashback or airmiles etc. Lots of people use them who could easily afford to pay up front.
If you end up paying the same, but get some kickback or defer payment until later why wouldnt you?
A lot of the users aren't people who can't manage their money, it's the opposite - people who know how to manage things optimally.

I mean maybe, in theory, but how often do prices actually drop on hotels? Prices are usually based on occupancy, so unless somebody cancels a block of a hundred rooms or something, this seems unlikely to make a meaningful difference in hotel revenue.

Meanwhile, if this had happened five years ago, it would have meant not going on trips for me, because traveling with my dad in his last couple of years had a decent risk of having to cancel.

There are people for whom being able to cancel a trip without significant penalty is the only thing that makes travel possible. And if hotels are more concerned with maybe losing a few bucks in rare circumstances than they are with whether the elderly and disabled get to have a vacation at all, then F**K those hotels. They aren't worth doing business with.