"The Court finds that Plaintiffs have shown that their injuries are likely traceable to government-coerced enforcement for the following reasons. First, Facebook had previously reviewed the Chicagoland group, and Apple had previously reviewed Eyes Up. In both cases, Facebook and Apple had determined that the content met their requirements. Second, Facebook and Apple changed their positions and removed the content immediately after Defendants contacted them about it. And third, Defendants made public statements taking credit for the fact that Facebook and Apple had removed the content."
"Regarding the third element, and as alleged, Defendants’ actions can be reasonably understood to convey a threat of adverse government action against Facebook and Apple in order to suppress Plaintiffs’ speech" ...
"As the Seventh Circuit found in Backpage, although the defendant lacked “authority to take any official action” and did not “directly threaten the [third parties] with an investigation or prosecution,” the defendant still engaged in coercion where he “demand[ed]” rather than “request[ed],” and where he “intimat[ed]” that the third parties “may be criminal accomplices” if they failed to comply. Id. at 232, 236. Here, Bondi and Noem did exactly that. They reached out to Facebook and Apple and demanded, rather than requested, that Facebook and Apple censor Plaintiff’s speech."
I want them to actively seek foreign sovereign tech funding which come with stipulations that commit Mozilla to certain levels of privacy and anonymity.
I want them to go cap-in-hand to other countries and say "if you don't fund us then you are letting the US and surveillance capitalism get between your citizens and their government" and "do you really know what Chrome is doing with your data?"
I don't want to pretend they are simply part of a browser marketplace, but rather have them realize they are part of a civil rights effort, with powerful non-market forces they can ally with.
And I want those governments to commit to progressive enhancement guidelines like https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/technology/using-progressi... so new alternatives like Ladybird can start, and further require their agencies to test on a Firefox branch with no AI, no location tracking, full ad-blocking, etc. because while the market is free to ignore certain non-profitable users, a government should not be allowed to ignore some of its citizens.
There is a common misapprehension that the term "monopoly" can only be used when there a single supplier.
Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly : "In law, a monopoly is a business entity that has significant market power, that is, the power to charge overly high prices, which is associated with unfair price raises."
Or from Milton Freedman, "Monopoly exists when a specific individual or enterprise has sufficient control over a particular product or service to determine significantly the terms on which other individuals shall have access to it". https://archive.org/details/capitalismfreedo0000frie/page/12...
In the post-Borkian interpretation of monopoly, adored by the rich and powerful because it enables market concentration which would otherwise be forbidden, consumer price is the main measure of control, hence free services can never be a monopoly.
Scholars have long pointed out Bork's view results from a flawed analysis of the intent of the Sherman Antitrust act. For example, Sherman wrote "If we would not submit to an emperor, we should not submit to an autocrat of trade, with power to prevent competition and to fix the price of any commodity.” (Emphasis mine. Widely quoted, original transcript at p2457 of https://www.congress.gov/bound-congressional-record/1890/03/... ). Freedman makes a similar point (see above) that a negative effect of a monopoly is to reduce access to alternatives.
In it she quotes Robert Pitofsky in "The Political Content of Antitrust":
"A third and overriding political concern is that if the free-market sector of the economy is allowed to develop under antitrust rules that are blind to all but economic concerns, the likely result will be an economy so dominated by a few corporate giants that it will be impossible for the state not to play a more intrusive role in economic affairs"
Even if you support the Borkian interpretation, you should still worry about the temptation for the US government to "play a more intrusive role" with GMail accounts. I strongly doubt Google will follow Lavabit's lead and shut down email should the feds come by with a gag order to turn over the company's private keys.
"a burger and fries was $17"? That doesn't seem right.
https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/mcdonalds-old-photos/ shows a menu at McDonalds from the early 1970s. A hamburger and fries was $0.63 or (assuming 1970 and adjusting for inflation) $5.36 now. A quarter pounder and fries was $1.27, or $10.81 now. Add $0.15 or $0.20 for a soda ($1.28 or $1.70).
My first >$20 burger dinner was in 1997. That's >$41.15 now.
EDIT: Ahh, here - price for a hamburger in the staffed dining car of a passenger train from Houston to Chicago, 1972, was $2, from https://archive.org/details/spacecity03spac_44/mode/2up?q=%2... while $3 gets you "grey sole with soup, salad, rolls, vegetables, and dessert." The author suggests the hamburger price is high, as an inducement "to observe formalities."
I could go back through my history to find the specific source I used, but it has absolutely no bearing on the point of the post, since even your McDonald's prices are higher than the current app+value menu prices, so I'm not going to and I struggle to understand why you wrote all that to not refute the central point.
Since the McDonald's burger is now cheaper (after adjusting for inflation) then is it also worse than it was in 1970?
Because if it's the same or better than it sure sounds an example of why people may have acquired "some implicit feeling that everything ought to be getting better and cheaper than it used to be".
My original comment was to mention that one of your numbers seemed rather high. To keep from it being a you-said-I-said thing, I gave supporting evidence. You didn't like the research I did, so I gave more supporting evidence that you are likely off by a factor of 2-3 for the hamburger prices.
Perhaps that means things weren't as expensive back then as you thought they were?
Like, while I can certainly find dresses in the $47 or higher range (you wrote "typical dress was $350") in this 1974 catalog https://archive.org/details/tog-shop-clothing-1974/page/n105... , that's from the Tog Shop, founded by fashion designer Paula Stafford, and with brands like Lacoste and the more expensive clothes list the designer or design house by name, which hardly seems typical at a time when Sears was selling dresses for less than half those prices and people made their own clothes to save money.
There's some great looking clothes in there, by the way.
And there were some expensive shitty things back then, like American cars which were soon to be trounced by Japanese imports that were both cheaper and better.
> Since the McDonald's burger is now cheaper (after adjusting for inflation) then is it also worse than it was in 1970?
Probably? I'm not going to assert it but I would be unsurprised.
> Because if it's the same or better than it sure sounds an example of why people may have acquired "some implicit feeling that everything ought to be getting better and cheaper than it used to be".
Again, what is your point? I'm sure there exists more than a few examples of things getting cheaper and better, maybe even most things? That doesn't mean it is a universal phenomenon that should be expected and cause anger when it doesn't happen.
Your multi-paragraphs about the dress... also doesn't refute the point that things were more expensive back then. There are many Temu dresses for <$10 which was $1.50 in 1970. The 1970 Sears catalog has most dresses around $10. Okay, great, the dress you prefer to compare is "only" 6.7x more expensive. You got me! Great work choosing cheaper examples than I did, for sheer pedantry! Muting you now as I don't find your post history otherwise valuable.
My point is that things weren't as dire in 1970 as you wrote. You can make your same argument without doubling their prices.
I think people are correct to be angry that RAM over the last year has gotten more expensive for the same quality.
I stopped buying jeans 20+ years ago when they started falling apart too quickly, even when I bought them from a Levis store. It may be possible to buy $212 jeans that have the equivalent durability of spending $25 on jeans back in 1970s, but wading through the dreck of expensive crappy jeans sold for brand recognition or where price is used as a false indicator of quality and durability is not worth my time.
That feeling of wasting my time is not captured by simply comparing prices.
The essay show the timescale for "getting bought out, for their products to be reamed out, for the brand to be discarded" is 20 years or more, dating from the Eagle Creek purchase to the current "potentially up for sale."
That's a long time.
That means Theodores is also okay with the same decades-long process happening to "your power tools, your boots, your sunglasses, and about a dozen other product categories where a company you trusted quietly got absorbed by a corporation you've never heard of."
And after a new company X gains market share for its quality, we should expect the vulture capitalists to come swooping by again.
On the environmental side, every one of these packs is plastic waste after 18 months rather than 10 years.
It also means the methods people use to assess quality, despite omnipresent supercomputer phones and video-quality wireless networking, is ineffective, and manufacturers worsen their products knowing that. Why hasn't it gotten better?
So no, I don't see how Theodores comment about the chain of events should make anyone else also feel okay with it.
The "simple" answer is "markets aren't like textbooks".
Consumers are lazy and greedy.
The side effect of which is not-strict-enough regulation of negative externalities. In a perfect world, people would care about the downstream environment impact at least as much as they do about their time/money. But, they don't.
It's as if people believed that all the microcomputing software of the 1970s and 1980s, from VisiCalc to Zork to the Macintosh, was done by waterfall design.
The descendants of the Muslim colonists were defeated by the descendants of the Roman colonists, fighting under the banner of the Roman Church, and not by the native and indigenous people of the Iberian peninsula.
The native and indigenous people of the Iberian peninsula would be the Celtic, Iberian, Celtiberian and Aquitanian tribes conquered, colonized, and assimilated by the Roman Republic. The land was later occupied by the Germanic peoples before entering Muslim rule.
>were defeated by the descendants of the Roman colonists
Incorrect, by native Spaniards whose ancestry is overwhelmingly indigenous:
"Modern Iberians' genetic inheritance largely derives from the pre-Roman inhabitants of the Iberian Peninsula who were deeply Romanized after the conquest of the region by the ancient Romans"[0]
They are the indigenous people to Iberia, not MENA colonists nor Romans.
>fighting under the banner of the Roman Church
Not relevant, still indigenous people.
>and not by the native and indigenous people of the Iberian peninsula.
False as proven above.
>The native and indigenous people of the Iberian peninsula would be the Celtic, Iberian, Celtiberian and Aquitanian tribes conquered, colonized, and assimilated by the Roman Republic.
Spaniards are Iberian, they are the indigenous, native people to Spain. They may have been assimilated into the Roman Republic and Visigothic Kingdom, but they are the indigenous people to their lands.
>The land was later occupied by the Germanic peoples before entering Muslim rule.
Germaic influences leave a smaller genetic mark than Roman in modern Iberia.
"Spaniards, or Spanish people, are an ethnic group and nation indigenous to Spain."[1]
> The 400,000 dead soldiers died mostly to disease.
I believe that in every major war of the 1800s, more soldiers died from disease than from combat.
Consider the War of 1812. "fully three-quarters of the war deaths resulted from disease, most commonly typhoid fever, pneumonia, malaria, measles, typhus, smallpox and diarrhea" - https://www.nps.gov/articles/military-medicine.htm
Oh, hey - in the Franco-Prussian War more soldiers died of combat than from disease (for the Germans, 28,000 battle deaths vs 12,000 by disease, and for the French, 77,000 battle deaths vs 45,000 by disease) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franco-Prussian_War , so I was wrong! Though those numbers exclude "162,000 German[ civilian deaths] in a smallpox epidemic spread by French POWs" and "450,000 French civilians dead from war-related famine and disease".
You are completely right. Disease has been the major killer in most military campaigns of history. The original post stated that 400,000 soldiers died "mostly from starvation and exposure", which isn't correct. However, loosing over a third of an army to disease in 52 days, before any major battle solely to disease (Allen, B. M., https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA398046.pdf), is unusually high.
Starvation became a major problem later as supply chains broke down, and exposure became a major problem on the retreat. Though the retreat from Moscow included only about 100,000 people.
In this case, the judge explicitly considered and rejected the applicability of every one of your points, writing at https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ilnd.49... :
"The Court finds that Plaintiffs have shown that their injuries are likely traceable to government-coerced enforcement for the following reasons. First, Facebook had previously reviewed the Chicagoland group, and Apple had previously reviewed Eyes Up. In both cases, Facebook and Apple had determined that the content met their requirements. Second, Facebook and Apple changed their positions and removed the content immediately after Defendants contacted them about it. And third, Defendants made public statements taking credit for the fact that Facebook and Apple had removed the content."
"Regarding the third element, and as alleged, Defendants’ actions can be reasonably understood to convey a threat of adverse government action against Facebook and Apple in order to suppress Plaintiffs’ speech" ...
"As the Seventh Circuit found in Backpage, although the defendant lacked “authority to take any official action” and did not “directly threaten the [third parties] with an investigation or prosecution,” the defendant still engaged in coercion where he “demand[ed]” rather than “request[ed],” and where he “intimat[ed]” that the third parties “may be criminal accomplices” if they failed to comply. Id. at 232, 236. Here, Bondi and Noem did exactly that. They reached out to Facebook and Apple and demanded, rather than requested, that Facebook and Apple censor Plaintiff’s speech."
reply