All of which would improve almost immediately with competition.

I have posted here for maybe five years. But I felt a twinge of nostalgia, so I decided to check out the latest headlines.

So I see this headline and I go: This is totally crazy, so nothing has really changed about the world during my absence.

So then I see your comment and I go: This is totally crazy, so nothing has really changed in the discourse, either.

The competition-porn security blanket was a cute idea back in the early 1980s. I was there when the Apple II, the TRS-80, and Commodore Pet were busy trying to set the world on fire. And I've watched the evolution of this space very carefully ever since. As a blue-blood digital native it's the main story of my life and times. My fascination with digital electronics began in the early 1970s. My attitude when the original home-computing toys arrived wasn't: Where did this come from? No, it was: Where have you been all these long, painful, pining year?

This was all supposed to set the world free. That's the story we always tell entering into a new age.

What do I see around me now? Five or so trillion dollar corporations dictating nearly every damn thing about this technology is developed, how it is delivered, and how it is consumed.

This is the house that competition built.

What were these companies competing for all these long years? What was the final brass ring? I'll tell you, and it should be obvious: To gain the monolithic scale to collect monopoly rent not just from their products, but also from the very context in which those products are rendered relevant to our psyches.

Sure, competition is a magic growth hormone, considered narrowly. But surely there's enough water under the bridge at this point that "considered narrowly" ought to be consider harmful. No?

So let's step back and not consider competition narrowly. What are the systemic realities of naive faith in competition?

The systemic reality is that competition injected at the bottom (a good thing) merely kicks the can down the road. The corporations then compete to rise above the discipline of competition. Maybe we double down and inject competition again, this time bigger, purer, bolder than before. Then the cycle repeats again. This time with even bigger corporations competing to rise above competition as titans, behemoths, and leviathans.

Is the government succeeding at taming these giants? Do Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook practice all that much legitimate competition? Here's a skill-testing question. Which of those five corporations is not known for commanding a primary vertical? Google has search and YouTube and the gated Android store. Scratch one. Amazon has AWS and the gated Kindle store. Scratch two. Apple has the iPhone and the gated iOS app store. Scratch three. Microsoft has government workflow integration and the PC gaming community. Scratch four. Facebook has social. Scratch five.

Even to define these verticals as duopolies requires athletic feats of imagination. I happen to use YouTube as my main social platform, and I've never had an account on Facebook. Do I strike you as a typical consumer? Or the 1% of the 1%?

I'm not just speaking here in cliche. I'm extremely well versed on free market principles, free market principles, and the theory of systems, including economic systems and human discourse systems. I spent over 500 hours consuming neoliberal podcasts featuring every possible flavour of neoliberal guest.

On a parallel track, over the past year I traced pretty much the entire evolution of postmodern thought from Hegel and Marx forward to the present times. There's actually quite a lot of neoliberal theory I'm sympathetic toward. I wish I could say the same for postmodernism, but that's another can of worms.

I like much of neoliberalism, but I'm not stupid. I can see the world plainly as it exists plainly before my eyes. We injected competition, it was wonder and vigorous for many decades, but finally and we got was monopoly on a larger scale than we've ever seen before.

What do you suppose the host talks about after conducting over 500 hours of interviews with hundreds of different guests, on mostly the same small set of topics?

Here's an eternal theme: If only we did it right, this time.

You see, every attempt to reform the world that lead to the world remaining the same as ever, only more so, shared the same universal flaw: We didn't go big enough to make $purity cure $horse. This is the one true universal excuse. It was used for socialism. It was used for market capitalism. It was used for every darn thing in between.

So the silver lining in creating worse monopolies than we've ever had before is that we forced them to make us a lot of nice toys in getting there. So I guess we have actually reformed monopoly to some degree. Once upon a time, monopolies came into existence without hardly making anyone a new toy worth having.

Okay, so what's another topic that burns eternal when you discuss the same small set of neoliberal principles for 500 hours?

Education reform. Sound familiar? It surely must. You see to be an expert, with an expert diagnosis, which in your unique genius you've managed to distill down to one word. Competition. Quite the magic trick there, I must say.

Here's a small thing. Charter schools, as normally implemented, are yet another government program. It's a government program with an extra degree of freedom inside compared to the normal landscape. But it's still a government program.

How do Charter schools mainly compete? For the quality of the parents. They often say that they are neutral. But then the application process is so arduous, that only the most truly devoted 1% of parents make it all the way through. So many meeting you have to attend with the school admissions people. What kind of family can organize that? Either a family with means, or a family with fervent devotion to the educational cause.

The vast majority of superior Charter school outcomes comes from this factor alone. Education concerns human capital. Nothing improves human capital like a sorting hat that selects only the right people, for whatever metric you wish to optimize.

Actual value-add in education has mostly proven to be a long unicorn hunt. You can figure out who your best students are easily. No matter how you teach, your best students will remain your best students. For the rest of your students, things are far more hit and miss. One teaching method might connect with one student, whereas a different method might connect with a different student. Neither of these were A students to begin with. And rarely do they become A students at the end. (There are of course some spectacular exceptions if you pray at the alter of N=1.)

Because building a school with better human capital is so much easier than improved the human capital you're stuck with, almost all the best charter schools have mostly done the former. Mostly. There are marginal gains to be had by getting the rest right. Marginal.

So what happens? The schools get good at lying about the reality that they are competing for human capital, and make a big story about how they've improved the capital of their students during their time at the school.

I think it's Finland that has gone furthest in education reform. This was also a competition for human capital, but they moved this into the teaching ranks, rather than the student ranks.

Education is very nearly the hardest degree program in Finland to get into. It would be maybe a small step down from medical school. Dullard teachers in Finland are rare birds. The students have far less class time, are given far less formal homework, but they work hard anyway, and consistently score highly in the world tables.

South Korea does everything exactly the other way. Stories are written about high school students in Korea jumping out of windows. After you sleep through most of the official school day, off you go to the second, private sector school day. And all they ever graduate are narrow technocrats. It's a disaster on wheels.

Blowing smoke up the ass of competition sure beats having to know something about the real world. Makes you sound smart, without typing your fingers off, like I've just done.

Which is why I finally moved on from Slashdot to greener pastures.

Not when they already have US citizenship and can apply for jobs in the US. Pay is far, far, better in the US than it is in Europe. You'd be crazy to take a lower paying job, away from family, in a foreign country, just because that's where you got your degree.

The jarring price difference come from the cost of R&D. The drug company is trying to recover all the money it spent developing the drug, getting it through human trials, and covering it's ass in case they get sued for missing a side effect. Mr. Oliff is just play for the cost of the raw materials. Pharmaceuticals are like software. Getting a high quality product without bugs / side-effects is hard. Making copies of the finished product is easy.

San Francisco gets a lot of conservative hate because it's the proving ground for many left wing policies. It's a high tax city, in a high tax state, with possibly the most left wing population in the country. And what do they have so show for all those taxes and left wing government programs? Not much.

That San Francisco has the same violent crime rates as Orlando Florida and Mobile Alabama in itself isn't noteworthy. What makes it noteworthy is that the left keeps pushing for similar policies across the country when the results show those policies just don't work. With the amount time, money, and effort being spent San Francisco it should be an exceptionally nice place to live. But it isn't. It's still no better off than Nashville, Orlando, Mobile, or a dozen other cities that, by comparison, have done little solve problems like crime and homelessness.

For decades the left has been saying we need to pay more tax so a bigger better government can solve these problems. And here you are saying "stop relying on public resources" to solve exactly those problems. If San Francisco was a business you'd be suing them for bait and switch.

The people aren't paying the insurance is paying for it. And at that price it makes sense whether your insurance is public or private. The current treatment costs $6.4M because they needs transfusions every two to five weeks for the rest of their life. So this will not only give people a better quality of live. But it will save their insurance company / government money as well.

Capitalist systems grow by increasing productivity, increasing profits by being more efficient. That's why GDP per capita continues to climb.

Communist / command economies aren't driven by profits. So there is no inherent push to be more efficient. And the economy stagnates.

You asked for "a single example" and you got several examples. Now you're complaining that one of those examples only make up a small part of the show.

Stop trying to move the goals posts.

An operation system is only as valuable as the ecosystem of applications that support it. Without apps it has no value. Just ask Nokia and Microsoft. People aren't buying iPhones for the operating system. They're buying them for access to Apple's walled garden. And it's that walled garden that sets it apart from all the Android competition. Apple has a reputation for being very strict about what it allows on it's app store, and for putting a heavy focus on user experience. Whereas the Android app store is rife with garbage apps. And Windows Phone app store never took off, which is what killed that platform. Apple's iron fisted approach to the combination of hardware and software (both OS and apps) is it's selling feature. Not the OS, not the hardware.

But the US is not the exception here. Only occasionally do we hear about these kinds of lawsuits happening in Canada, or Australia, or South Korea, or Japan, or Taiwan. The EU in contrast is making headlines every month with some new case targeted at large tech companies. If we saw the same thing happening in other industries like automotive or ship building then we could pass it off as the EU just being lawsuit happy. But we don't see that happening. It quite clear that the EU has targeted the tech sector specifically. And the fact that this is a sector the EU has tried bitterly to compete in without success is not an accident.

Which is wrong. The appeal of Apple products is their walled garden, and the tight integration of software and hardware that comes from that. If the iPhone was running Android and had to compete solely on the quality of it's hardware, it would not be nearly so successful. The same would be true if Apple laptops were running Windows, they'd sell but nearly as well. Hardware wise there isn't really anything special about iPhones, iPads, or MacBooks.

The EU has it backwards. Apple isn't using it's hardware to sell software. It's using it's software to sell hardware. That's a big part of the reason Apple doesn't sell or license macOS or iOS separate from it's hardware.

But ultimately this antitrust case isn't really about any of that. What's really about is protectionism. The EU has struggled to compete in the tech sector and has made a concerted effort these last few year to go after a mostly foreign industry for the benefit of their domestic businesses. This case is just one piece of that larger effort.

In order to properly file their application with the FAA they needed be close to finishing the design of their vehicle. But to do that they had to build and test several prototypes. To build and test those prototypes they first had to build starbase.

If they had filed before building starbase the FAA would have come back questions about the vehicle that couldn't be answered. And the application would have been rejected.

I assume because you weren't clear on what you were referring to. The fact that you are pouting suggests my assumption was correct.

The battle between left and right was decided 30 years ago. The USSR went bankrupt and imploded. China and Eastern Europe abandoned socialism for capitalism, enabling their people to climb out of poverty. The Democrats had to move to the centre with Clinton's "third way'. The Labour party reinvented itself saying "we're all Thatcherites now". We know right doesn't have a problem with reality, because they've been right all along.

It's about protectionism. The EU has struggled to compete in the tech sector and in recent years has made a concerted effort to regulate that market to the benefit of European businesses.

I can only assume that you are referring to calls to repeal S230. In which case I would point out that the key word there is repeal. Repealing a law mean less government not more. It would be the government stepping out rather than stepping in. Which is the opposite of what you are claiming.

What private property are you talking about? No one is asking that twitter be turned over to the government.

Parentage has nothing to do with "gender identity". Unless maybe there is some new transoffspring quackery that I've not yet heard about?