Yes it's true, we can't escape the interconnected web of dependencies.

I guess my real gripe is that there are too few cloud hosting companies, and the few that exist are too big. We need many more medium-sized ones so that a single outage doesn't do so much damage, and so they have to compete against each other for business to keep their incentives properly oriented.

Or maybe he was quoted out of context.

When you use AWS to host your businesses website, and/or all the data that your business processes, and/or whatever back-end web-facing APIs your business uses, no amount of "fault tolerance" is going to keep you afloat when AWS goes down.

If we want to blame the victim, the correct accusation is: "you shouldn't outsource your critical business infrastructure to a huge megacorp that can survive without you."

wait a week or two and the details will change completely.

Trump is nothing if not mercurial. His fans will tell you he's playing 11 dimensional chess... I have my doubts, but let's say that's true. The problem is that when it comes to the economy it's not chess. It's more like basketball, and the President is the point guard calling plays, except the play being called keeps changing before the players can execute the last call. It's a tough time to be running a business, you can't plan out more than a couple of weeks.

I never buy games from EA, and this is one of the reasons why.

Personally, I am looking forward to a world full of Cronenberg creatures.

This is both a "power corrupts" situation, and a "necessary evil" situation.

Without collective bargaining, corporations egregiously exploit their workers. This will always happen, reliably, every time corporations exist, no matter who runs them, because the imbalance of power is like the ring of Mordor. Even pure-hearted Frodo will fall to corruption eventually.

So, employees need collective bargaining in order to receive fair and decent treatment, and the only way to get that is Unions.

Once unions establish themselves, however, THEY wind up being corrupted by power as well. The union administrators make quite a lot of money at their jobs, and they sure don't want that to dry up, so once things are going well for their workers they have to start asking for "even more" in order to justify their continued existence. Including asking for things that are unreasonable. They may also engage political and/or economic leverage to basically force people to be members of their union whether they want to or not. More people = more power = more money and so on.

So it is easy to point at this end-result, which is clearly bad, and say "see? Unions are bad. We should reject them." But without them the results are even worse. Much worse. So, they are necessary evils. The best we can do is group up and muster collective leverage (by voting and etc.) to push back against the evils of Unions, while still benefiting from the good that they also do.

Aside: business owners have a direct financial incentive to hate unions whether they are evil or not. So they will usually advice against abiding unions, regardless of any other detail, and will naturally overplay the evils and downplay the goods in order to make their case.

Right, the economist refer to this as "externality". Fossil fuels aren't cheap, if you factor in the costs that people using them transfer to third parties. Theoretically, if the true cost of using fossil fuels were factored into every pound of coal or gallon of gasoline consumed, then we would use *exactly the right amount* of fossil fuels. Probably not zero, but not as much as we do when we pretend pollution isn't a cost.

I wonder if this has anything to do with the general lack of open positions, leaving people facing fears of income stability and reigning in discretionary spending.

Maybe that few-years-old gas-powered car that is still perfectly functional is preferable to a pricey upgrade to a shiny new car with fewer gas stations and longer refuel times.

The emotional satisfaction of living an environmentally-friendly lifestyle is going to take second seat to practical realities, especially during uncertain economic times.

From Sony's perspective, the ISP is the absolute *best* target here. Not only is the ISP a bottleneck through which almost-all copyright infringement happens now (thus making it the perfect place to greatly block it), but Sony gets to make some other business incur all the costs and consequences of enforcement, including eating the profit loss, while Sony rakes it in.

Sony doesn't care in the slightest if entire households are harmed because one member infringes in secret, nor if that harm is actually very grievous since Internet access is now essential for daily life (and even having a job) in most of the developed world. If families starve on the streets because of this, they think that's great, as it will serve as an example to all those other evil pirates!

So, they will keep pushing for this with all their might, because they have a mountain to gain and nothing but legal fees to loose. Maybe they will lose a little public goodwill, but they are too rich to care about that.

Sony did this twice, as I recall. After being hit with a class action lawsuit and forced to do reparations, they just went out an did this a second time. And got hit with a class action lawsuit a second time, too.

Probably most of the decision-makers who were involved in those decisions have moved on by now. It's probably safe to assume that this is a different Sony. Does that mean they deserve a benefit of the doubt? Absolutely not, since all evidence here indicates that the new boss is the same as the old boss.

Sony cares about profits, and will trample families and laws underfoot to achieve them, just like all the other big businesses who are rich enough to get away with it.

That's what they've done. Or rather they've bought the politicians who create the regulatory frameworks. But if people woke up and realized they've been frog-boiled into giving away their privacy, then that would be prohibitively expensive.

I essentially made the argument that if we want capitalism to work the way we were taught in civics class it is supposed to, companies must be forced by regulation not to undermine the basic assumptions that lead to efficient operation of the free market.

I am neither here nor there on a basic income. I think it depends on circumstances, which of course are changing as more and more labor -- including routine mental labor -- is being automated. We are eventually headed to a world of unprecedented productive capacity and yet very little need for labor, but we aren't there yet.

Agreed. The promise that limiting renter's choice to a single provider would result in beneficial cost savings was one of those lies that everyone knows is a lie the moment they hear it, yet everyone with decision making power pretends it is the truth (and many other adjacent parties just thoughtlessly repeat it).

Similar to "this merger will allow us to eliminate wasteful spending on competition and thus offer higher quality service at lower prices, without firing anyone!"

Or "disallowing third parties from making repairs will keep our clients safe"

I could go on, but I wouldn't be saying anything novel or revelatory.

Anybody who is pushing AI services, particularly *free* AI services, is hoping to mine your data, use it to target you for marketing, and use the service to steer you towards opaque business relationships they will profit from and you will find it complicated and inconvenient to extricate yourself from.

The question is -- ideas that are bad for *who*? This may be a very bad idea for you and me, but it is a very good idea for Microsoft, especially as, like their online services, they will make money off of us and it will be very inconvenient for us to opt out.

In civics-lesson style capitalism, which I'm all in favor of, companies compete to provide things for us that we want and we, armed with information about their products, services and prices, either choose to give them our business or to give our business to a competitor.

Not to say that stuff doesn't *ever* happen, but it's really hard to make a buck as a business that way. So what sufficiently large or well-placed businesses do is earn money *other* ways, by entangling consumers in business relationships that are opaque and which they don't have control over, may not even be fully aware they're signing on to, and which are complicated and awkward to extricate themselves from. In other words a well placed company, like Microsoft or Google or Facebook, will constantly be looking at ways to make money outside the rigorous demands of free market economics.