Is this an April's fool day? Like... Apple is really apologizing for this? Why do they crave to people without basic logic foundation operating on a premise "my interpretion of the ad is 'the' interpretation everyone should use"? The ad is great. Yes, they were able to squeeze unbelievable things into this little thing; we are living a world of science-fiction. Why apologize?

I'd guess nobody is doing this for most consumer products. Apple may be. This would probably significantly reduce competition....

This is really stupid. Price cartels are inherently unstable even in smaller numbers as each member of the cartel has a financial incentive to cheat the cartel and offer lower prices. That's why cartels resort to different types of cartel (e.g. geographic) and complement it with monitoring and compensation (for NOT offering something on sale) or fines (for breaking the cartels rules). The software does none of this and on top of that a huge part of market is not using the software. The probability of this SW being able to change market price to some above-equilibrium level is close to 0.

The funny thing is that in most places private companies are forbidden to build such complexes... Yet these are a very nice solution.

The 'leave your appartment empty' is actually 'the' idea behind cartel; but any owner would think twice to do that for any longer stretch of time. So if that leads to faster market convergence - great. If it doesn't and the landlord sees that it is empty for more than a few weeks, he would be losing money keeping that empty; on a market with just a few participants they lose market power very quickly. Do you know what's the biggest problem the cartels have? Cheating. And we are talking about cartels comprising of just a few companies. How big do you think the cheating is going to be if you have thousands of people doing that without any enforcement or compensation? Big. So this is really non-issue. The rents are getting higher because of supply&demand (which, in the end, is likely mostly driven by inflation). The 'software causes this' is, in the end, just a correlation. Not causation.

That's not very insightful. Retroactivity is generally not allowed, except the case where the crime has lower sentence or is no longer a crime. Your honor, I engaged in gay sex 2 decades ago. Yes, you will be sentenced because at that time that was a crime.

> Your analogy doesn't fit at all. There's more than one worker. When one worker misses their shift, other workers do the work. And since this is a "gig economy" system, there isn't a limit to the number of workers. And that costs the company more as they have to rearrange and maybe even pay more to other gig workers for fast rearrangement. So how come the nalogy doesn't work? > But sure, enjoy your dinner, delivered by someone who vomited on the way to your door. Sounds great! I'd complain and the company would not hire them again. Easy.

So I am required to contract a person that happens to cause me higher costs and not contract a different person that would make more profit for me, because.. well, because I contracted them earlier?

Say you go to some small shop that happens to be closed because the owner is ill. Let's say this happens several times during a month, as the owner is really fighting some disease. When he is open, the inventory is often lacking as he didn't have time or energy to properly organize the shop. Should you be required by law to continue trying to buy at his shop?

"In other countries, motivation is taken into account, and illness (backed by a free doctor's evaluation) is a reason to miss a gig and not be penalized for it"

Sure, we contract people on gigs and we do have a clause in the contract that in such cases we do not require them to pay any contractual fine or compensation.

I'm surprised, however, that there is a law that we must contract such person next time; suppose you are contracting a singer that is 50% time ill (happens to some people). And there is another singer who misses 5% of the gigs because of illness. Are you telling me the law requires me to hire the 50% ill person, because.... well, because we did do some business together in the past?

So discriminating against people who have objectively worse productivity than the others is... wrong? If a person doesn't cancel their gig in time, it does cause costs to the employer/contractor. It doesn't matter what was the reason, it just causes additional costs. So the person does, indeed, have lower productivity from the point of the employer/contractor. I just wonder when we start suing home-owners that they won't re-hire painters or other suppliers that repeatedly failed to deliver without asking and 'properly' evaluating the resons for the bad delivery...

> When you throw plastic bottles in the trash, where do they go?

Depends, but they are either recycled or burnt, a little precentage ends up in a landfill. As far as I know they don't end up in the rivers, ocean or on similar places.

> Companies that sell environmentally unfriendly materials should also be responsible for their disposal.

No. People who dispose of these materials should be responsible for their disposal. We *do* require some companies to pay for the disposal as a second-best solution because some people would rather throw their old fridge anywhere instead of paying for the proper disposal.

You bought the product, you are responsible for it's proper disposal (assuming you knew what you bought; obviously the seller should make you know if you bought something toxic). Rights come with duties. It is your duty to ensure that your property doesn't interfere with other people's property or doesn't pollute the environment.

That's why I don't have a credit card and all other payments are automated... guess otherwise I'd be already diagnosed for some time.

It's a little more complicated. When the goverment controls it, you usually get outdated, low-quality, high-priced results. Not always, but often enough. It's the result of perverse incentives and inability of socialist calculation. When the government tries to control the price, it ends up either with low quality or high price. If you read the Jean Tirole Nobel prize documents, that was basically his conclusion. The 'problem' with monopolies is not necessarilly the monopoly rent, but rather the fact that the non-price-discriminating monopoly is inefficient (they keep the produced volume of goods artificially low). However, price discriminating monopoly is efficient. In light of this, the obvious question is: is the monopoly rent really such a problem? From where comes the 'MUST' regulate it? I didn't see it in any textbook. All the textbooks said: a natural monopoly ends up in such-and-such situation. We can put up with such situation. It's not that bad, in the end.

Can we ban also denying that communism/socialism killed ~ 100M people in the 20th century and the whole 'it was bad people hiding behind the great socialist ideals' farce?

I always thought that the way to win a discussion was a good argument. Not banning the other viewpoint from discussion. And I think we should apply that principle everywhere. To fight both 'holocaust deniers' as 'socialism deniers'.

I think it boils down to our own insecurity: we don't quite know the good arguments to refute holocaust deniers. In general, winning a discussion with good arguments is surprisingly hard even when the matter seems clear and simple. It's much easier to ban the other side of the argument. Shouldn't we try to find the good arguments instead?

"Some critics of UBI say that it could incentivize people not to work"

"A: If you have a job, you're not going to stop working for $1,000 a month. What you're going to do is you're going to tell your boss: "No, I'm not doing this because it's not acceptable and I have $1,000 dollars that I can use for the next two months until I find a better job." So if you want that job done as a boss, you're going to have to improve the conditions or the pay...."

So, economically speaking, this will move some segment of the supply curve to the left. That means, it will incentivize some people not to work. Why didn't he just answer 'yes' to that question?