ask your provider.

@akkartik yes. they very much are tacitly coordinating across a variety of dimensions on which they agree not to compete to reduce pressure on profit. your examples, shrinkflation, planned obsolescence, are good ones for some industries, i think.

Basically, Tesla will print money because it will be the only untariffed supplier of Chinese EVs. Great industrial policy there. https://bsky.app/profile/cronkhitemedia.bsky.social/post/3ldlwwqtois2m

@akkartik is it? it strikes me as quite instrumental, an important component of provision of even essential goods and services, or would be if vendors didn't tacitly coordinate on failing to provide it.

if we're so much richer now, why can't we afford someone to answer the phone when we call up a business?

“The U.S. government has never entered the World Series of Poker. Nor has it gone to Vegas to bet billions [of] taxpayer funds on roulette or built a strategic Powerball ticket reserve, but it appears to be genuinely entertaining the idea of rolling the dice on Bitcoin.” @jp_koning http://jpkoning.blogspot.com/2024/12/after-twelve-years-of-writing-about.html

tech titans are like that joke about self-styled "non-conformists" ostentatiously converging on the same set of "eccentricities".

LLMs everywhere! nuclear announcements within days of one another! must contribute to inaugural fund of bold new administration!

truly these are independent minds.

“Either democracy was on the ballot in November, or it wasn’t, and if it was, it makes no political, ethical or strategic sense to act as if we live in normal times.” @jbouie https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/18/opinion/democrats-trump-opposition.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare ht @jeffjarvis

or maybe not, linkedin.

weird how the we-have-to-introduce-incentives ed reform crowd has so little to say about a democratic party that hews strictly to seniority despite failure after failure by incumbent leadership.

do your kids get COVID vaccinations at their pediatricians, along with flu + other childhood vaccinations?

both here in Florida (stereotypically) but also in California, pediatricians who had every other vaccination did not have COVID, and we‘ve had to use Walgreens or CVS to get the kid a COVID shot.

weird social media person: hey, watch this. pennies fall upward!

professor of something: pennies fall downward

MAGA house member: the government is knows all about the antigravity devices and is hiding the truth

people on X: antigravity is real

people on BlueSky: i’ll never speak to those morons

people on Mastodon: here’s a cool CSS trick!

@jonathankoren you should always kick the tires on a new submarine.

“It is a sign of how corrupt political debate has become that these patent monopolies, which are equivalent to tariffs of many thousand percent, are referred to as the “free market” in most discussions. Patent monopolies have a clear public purpose, to promote innovation, but they are nonetheless a major form of government intervention in the market.” @DeanBaker13 https://cepr.net/government-granted-patent-monopolies-lead-to-corruption-47284/

collapse, civil war, the cause of these things won't be ennui. but even as the machetes bite, they will tell themselves it was.

data has become the opiate of the professionals, inkblots only they can properly interpret, from which they weave accounts of the world in which everything is fine for everybody if only they wouldn’t change anything serious, and anything who says otherwise is objectively, mockably wrong.

i read people on bluesky describing a crisis of affluence and i tell you i don’t know what country we’re sharing.

i live in a country where the crisis is cost of living, where the burden of securing “ordinary” goods like safety, shelter, decent peers for ones kids, health care has become impossible.

people who quietly know the community they’ve joined up with is not right. but who are making good money, and feeling so fulfilled by great projects membership in that community helps get funded.

i suppose one shouldn’t be surprised to find that capital is on the side of an autocracy of capital.

“data” tells you much less than you think. the odds that you interpret it in a way that accurately addresses the question, rather than in a way that provides an answer you have some interest in, are not so great. “data” says nothing without interpretation, and we are all unreliable interpreters.