The endless scroll is predatory at every moment.

It even reloads when you stop for a while. Switch to a different tab, do something else for five minutes, come back - it reloads and refreshes everything. Why? Because that activates a primal fear in your brain that you're losing something, missing something that might've been important, so your instinct is to NOT divert your attention elsewhere.

In theory I would agree, but the issue here is that social media platforms intentionally compromise your ability to make decisions. That's what the addictive pattern is all about. You could at any moment decide to stop scrolling and get back to work or life - but everything in there is designed so that the decision is made for you and bypasses any critical thinking paths in your brain.

And while I'm the first to agree the politicians are sleazebags and are the first ones that need much tougher regulation and laws, it's a fact that laws in this area actually do work. Anti-smoking laws have reduced smoking, for example.

Someone hasn't flown in a while.

I don't click the cheapest price. What happened is that the major airlines have copied some (not all) of the budget airline shit. Luggage used to be included, now it's an extra - which causes people to bring carry-on to the max instead, which leads to the overhead compartments always being full.

Yeah, good point. No, wait, that's complete bullshit.

I've taken a number of trips on business class in the past years. What you get in business class today is what you got in economy class 20, 25 years ago.

You know what, you may actually be right if you compare multi-thousand halfway-around-the-world intercontinental flights. I've never flown to Australia, so I can't compare that. I'm talking about shorter flights (a few hours) which I do frequently and where I can compare. We might both be right.

From an anarcho-capitalist and Austrian perspective, the attack of these subjects is severe. The core criticism is that welfare economics often dresses political value judgments in mathematics and presents the result as scientific optimization.
The Austrian objection starts earlier than the libertarian one.
There is no measurable quantity called âoesocial welfare.â
You value a steak dinner. I value the money more. We trade. Both reveal, through action, that each prefers the new situation.
Economics observes the voluntary exchange.
Now a welfare economist writes something like:
Social welfare = Aliceâ(TM)s utility + Bobâ(TM)s utility + Charlieâ(TM)s utility.
The Austrian response is: what units are you adding?
Utility is ordinal. You prefer A to B. This does not mean your satisfaction is 17.3 units and mine is 12.8 units.
You cannot scientifically establish that taking $1,000 from one person causes less lost utility than giving the money to another person creates.
You can support redistribution as a moral or political position. But calling the resulting calculation a social welfare function does not transform the moral judgment into an objective measurement.
âoeSociety choosesâ is dangerous language.
Individuals choose. Individuals act. Individuals own things. Individuals bear costs.
âoeSociety decided to spend $10 billionâ usually means a political process selected an expenditure and taxpayers were compelled to finance it.
From an anarcho-capitalist perspective, aggregating millions of people into a fictional decision-maker hides the essential question:
Who decided?
Who pays?
Who benefits?
Who refused?
What happens to the person who says no?
Social choice theory deserves some credit here. Its own results expose serious problems with turning individual preferences into a coherent âoewill of the people.â
The Condorcet paradox shows that majority preferences can cycle. Arrowâ(TM)s theorem shows that no general ranking system satisfies several attractive conditions simultaneously.
The anarcho-capitalist reaction is almost sarcastic: you spent decades proving mathematically that there is no coherent social preference ordering, then continued discussing how experts should optimize social welfare.
Pareto efficiency is much narrower than political rhetoric suggests.
Pareto efficiency has a legitimate analytical meaning. The trouble starts when economists move from voluntary exchange to hypothetical compensation.
Suppose a regulation gives Group A benefits economists estimate at $100 million and imposes costs of $60 million on Group B.
Some welfare analysis says the policy produces a $40 million net social gain.
The libertarian response is simple: Group B lost $60 million. Did anyone ask them?
If A gains $100 and B loses $60, saying âoesociety gained $40â treats separate people as entries in one accounting ledger.
An anarcho-capitalist rejects the premise. A benefit to one person does not cancel an imposed loss on another person merely because an economist performs subtraction.
The knowledge problem destroys the fantasy of optimization.
This is the Austrian argument associated especially with Friedrich Hayek.
Economic knowledge is dispersed. Prices contain information produced by millions of independent decisions. Preferences change. Local circumstances change. Resources have competing uses.
A central analyst does not possess the information needed to calculate the âoeoptimalâ allocation.
A market does not require one person to know everything. Prices coordinate plans without a central mind directing the entire system.
Welfare economics often asks, âoeWhat allocation maximizes welfare?â
The Austrian response is, âoeYou do not know the relevant preferences, opportunity costs, entrepreneurial discoveries, future alternatives, or counterfactual prices required to answer your own question.â
The calculation problem is worse without genuine market prices.
This is the argument strongly associated with Ludwig von Mises.
A bureaucrat deciding whether resources should produce railways, hospitals, housing, batteries, or server farms needs meaningful prices for capital goods.
Those prices emerge from exchange, private ownership, profit, and loss.
Without genuine market pricing, planners are not optimizing. They are allocating according to administrative rules, political pressure, historical budgets, lobbying, and guesswork.
A spreadsheet does not solve the economic calculation problem. More computing power does not solve a missing-price problem.
âoeMarket failureâ analysis often compares reality with an imaginary perfect market.
This is one of the strongest libertarian criticisms.
The usual pattern is:
Real markets have imperfect information, transaction costs, externalities, monopolistic tendencies, and unequal outcomes.
Therefore, government intervention might improve the result.
The missing step is institutional comparison.
Government officials also have imperfect information. Regulation has compliance costs. Voters are rationally ignorant. Agencies seek larger budgets. Politicians respond to concentrated interest groups. Regulations create unintended consequences.
The relevant comparison is not:
imperfect market versus perfect government.
The relevant comparison is:
imperfect market process versus imperfect political process.
Once you make that comparison, many clean textbook conclusions become much weaker.
Social choice theory accidentally supplies ammunition to libertarians.
This field is less inherently collectivist than welfare economics.
Social choice theory demonstrates that collective decision mechanisms have deep structural problems.
Majority rule can cycle.
Agenda setters can influence outcomes.
Strategic voting changes results.
Different voting systems produce different winners from the same underlying preferences.
There is no neutral mechanism for converting individual rankings into a single collective preference under all desirable conditions.
A libertarian conclusion follows naturally: if collective choice is structurally problematic, reduce the number of decisions imposed collectively. Leave more decisions with individuals, families, firms, voluntary associations, insurers, cooperatives, charities, and contractual communities.
Social choice theory often asks, âoeHow should everyone collectively choose one option?â
The anarcho-capitalist asks, âoeWhy must everyone choose the same option?â
That question cuts much deeper.
The deepest conflict concerns consent.
Mainstream welfare economics often focuses on outcomes.
Anarcho-capitalism focuses heavily on means.
Suppose forced redistribution produces a statistical improvement under some selected welfare function. The anarcho-capitalist still asks whether coercion became legitimate because an economist assigned weights to different people's utility.
From this perspective, the central problem with much welfare economics is not bad arithmetic. The problem is a category error.
Economics studies choices, scarcity, exchange, prices, production, and consequences.
The moment an economist says, âoeThis distribution is socially better,â a moral judgment has entered the analysis. The economist should identify the ethical assumptions instead of presenting them as a technical output.
The harsh Austrian verdict would be this:
Welfare economics starts with subjective individual preferences, admits they cannot be directly measured or meaningfully added across people, constructs a mathematical social welfare function anyway, inserts political judgments into its parameters, and then announces an âoeoptimalâ social outcome.
Social choice theory is more interesting because much of its best work demonstrates why the phrase âoesociety prefers Xâ is often logically unstable.
The anarcho-capitalist alternative is less ambitious and more disciplined: voluntary exchange, private property, freedom of association, decentralized decision-making, and liability for harms. Instead of trying to maximize an imaginary aggregate welfare number, allow people to pursue different goals and coordinate through consent.
The strongest criticism is not âoeall welfare economists are socialists.â Many are not. The stronger accusation is that the framework gives technocratic politics a scientific-looking vocabulary. Words such as optimization, social welfare, efficiency, and compensation criteria often conceal the real political questions: whose property is taken, who decides, who pays, and whether refusal is permitted.

My banks site won't work in Firefox. Oddly it says it does, I have not tried on Windows. Maybe it would on Windows but I don't know why that should make a difference.

So let's all blame the scapegoat.

Yeah,

I kinda like Disney+, my family and I do watch quite a bit of content on it. It has gone down hill some though. I don't really pay for the ad tier it is bundled with my wife's mobile plan (so yes I do pay for it) but that bundle includes other features/services/tethering rules we want and is still the most economic to get them, at least without completely switching carriers.

I don't think I'd be a subscriber if we had to pay 'full rate'

$20 for ad free
$15 for w/ads

Would free be
$0 w/MOAR Ads!

Or would it be a limited selection of content, stuff comes out first on the paid subs levels?

Something even more aggravating and dickish like the first 8 episodes of whatever free, but oh look you have to subscribe to get episodes 9 and 10?

Regardless of what youtube and Tubi etc might be doing there is psychology in play here that I expect is going to leave either subscribers or would-be subscribers feeling resentful about the model.

Nope. It was on broadcast news, they thought it interesting he was talking about the right to repair farm equipment and cars while at a Deere factory.

If that's how you want to think about it, sure.

At some point I suppose you'll come to the realization that concierge medical services are all fine and dandy if you're a one-percenter, but don't really scale very well.

Idunno dude. It's just so fucking egregious it tends to come to front of mind when many of those same academics complain about politics interfering with dispassionate pursuit of truth.

The hypocrisy is strong, and it is worth remembering.

They are counting some combination of legitimate risk, FUD, and protectionism to ultimately protect them from the Chinese models.

The reality is at some point in the not to distant future it will be cheaper to put enough AI accelerator hardware in workstations to give most folks using Claude/Claude code and similar a perfectly acceptable degree of performance. It always goes this way - it is never cheaper put hardware behind the glass when it can go under the desk long term. The only reasons to do it usual boil down to management and wanting to do something more bleeding edge that hasnt filtered to commodity hardware yet.

Of course for online applications that need to scale, and for complex engineering or very large data volume tasks, sure "Cloud AI" and certainly for anyone who needs to train a model. However the idea these guys are going to get individuals and business to keep paying $200 for tokens to use some desktop AI assistant is unrealistic, and down goes the datacenter volume requirements along with that.

Again I am not saying there isnt a new industry / space here or that it is all a bubble but the current Anthropic/OpenAI/Grok business model persisting for a whole lot longer does not appear to me anyway to that it fits the patter of the last 25 years of White-Collar-targeted IT systems.

Let me caveat that I also think the sorts of people making big investments in Data Centers are not stupid and at least see this as a likely outcome as well, presumably they believe they can sell the space/capacity to other users for other applications. If so why not charge the Anthropics of the world with the VC money huge premiums to rush build outs while you can get them? As long the assets are still marketable after that business drops off, it is a win!

It's fine. Plenty of money, good salaries, and lots of open positions in academic and industrial r&d.

Unless of course you went full lefty-loon-woke in the last decade and went on record that according to science chicks can have dicks and dudes can (and should!) wear dresses.

Then I suppose we're occupied france, the gulags, and the cambodian killing fields all rolled into one.

By which you mean they disappear their treehuggers instead of indulging them so that nothing can get built without lots of delays and legalized bribes (read: donations to environmental groups)?

Sorry guy. The graft over there is omnipresent. Red envelopes stuffed with cash are a form of life. To the point of you best have one to give to the doctors if you or your relative is hospitalized.

As much as I want to say, it might be useful to have Web Based E-mail interface that will work in a basic / legacy browser, I don't know this is really true.

Not much of the web works at all if you try to use it with anything not Chromium or Apple-Webkit from less than five years ago. YMMV with recent Mozilla engines.

The few places where I can see someone maybe wanting to use this are the very places that people definitely should be isolating from all things Internet, especially not exposing it to e-mail content, which even if restricted to being from the local domain could still contain something malicious accidentally forwarded.

I can certainly understand why people would want / maybe just like or prefer a range of other legacy mail client. I mean if you handle a lot of mail and have been using Pegasus or something for the last 30 years and its all muscle memory, sure I get it. Moving from OWA-lite to OWA though probably isnt much bother for most people. At some point it makes sense to drop software likely very few folks are using.