You can get reasonably big, but in most Western markets public companies who are owned by the same few institutions have a controlling anticompetitive share.

Wtf is happening in the US? Here I get an advertised monthly price for my subscription, I set up a direct deposit for that exact amount, when I buy it, then forget about it.

Maybe there is a commencement fee one time for the equipment they give me or work they do, but that’s all.

How is it legal to advertise and agree on a price, then send random bills?

Nope, because the biggest shareholders in the vast majority of companies are financial institutions like Blackrock, that coincidentally have large commercial real estate portfolios as well.

Individual shareholders are a drop in the ocean next to that immense amount of centralized wealth. When you think of shareholders, it’s not even the 1%, it’s a couple hundred people who own everything.

It’s aliens. There is no other sensible explanation.

It’s not “governments”, it’s the “US government”. Here in Europe, it just works.

Yep, but the social credit score thing AFAIK is not really implemented that thoroughly or at all. This thing is pervasive in the US and people keep defending it for some reason.

Nah, I imagine you lose credit by going bankrupt trying to pay for medical bills.

But they can still be rented from the government which can still own people as long as they had some drugs planted on them, right? I mean you just went into Slavery-as-a-Service instead of a proper ownership model.

Let me be a bit more optimistic:

Mass surveillance

I think we’re already there, and despite the fact you can see laws signed that would point to more surveillance, you can’t ban encryption effectively. It’s kinda hard to ban maths, much harder than weed or booze, and see how they went. Point is, these laws IMO drive awareness of the issue, and everyone can just encrypt their stuff easily, and enforcement of a ban on that is near impossible.

Regionalistic Economies in place of globalism

That’s the geopolitical dream of some countries … but I don’t see the current world order in trade buckling. That said, let’s say that the current world order changes by the USD losing the world’s biggest reserve currency status, what then? Will some countries simply not trade with others because of that? Maybe some pecking orders will rearrange themselves, but no one is interested in destroying the system, people just want their country to dictate instead of the US.

Widening wealth disparity

I don’t think it can widen much more, as the pendulum swings both ways. See how socio-economic woes destabilized the US. We either fix the billionaire problem in a legal orderly fashion, or it resolves itself in an uglier way. It can’t get much worse than this without social order breaking down, and then it’s all moot. The rich can move to their New Zealand bunkers or the Moon to escape the mob, it’s not that much different from them dying or going to prison as far as the rest of the world is concerned.

Intensified distrust of our governments

Have we ever trusted them? And to be honest, should we trust them? I mean I think governments are less untrustworthy than corporations, but still, they have power, and thus should be scrutinized. And besides, the loonies who always vote for the biggest idiot already don’t trust the government. If this growing distrust results in more participation in politics from decent people who just want to live their lives, that’s a good thing.

Yeah, as the pinnacle of human achievement, we need to bring traffic congestion to the skies.

Why would the TSA care about when I check in?

I’m a huge fan of the originals, still boot Black Hawk Down up from time to time.

Judging from the trailer, this is not a reboot of the series, but a Battlefield 2042 / Call of Duty mashup multiplayer hero shooter. Except I guess less polished. Kinda bummed out to see the owners of the IP use it for such a blatant trend chasing cash grab.

Since the DMCA, just the circumvention of copyright protection measures is a crime. It’s stupid, but the point is that even if training AI on the data is completely legal, if the data was protected with something that is also used to protect copyright, and you needed to circumvent that to get access even for legitimate purposes, you’ve broken a law.

Copyright has been made obtuse and stupid and damaging to society by big IP holders, it’s just now there’s big corps on the “infringing” side too. This will get interesting.

I’d be careful around interpreting any challenge to big business as the doing of hostile foreign powers. That line of thought rationalizes corporations being above the rule of law, which is kinda fascistic.

The point I think is that a “console” is from a certain PoV a locked down piece of hardware only able to run certain software in certain ways. So eg. Stadia was a console, while AWS virtual desktops are not, despite both being just VMs running on some cloud service.

Point is, it’s the software that makes a console, not the hardware.

TBH it’s not like one religion is worse than others in this way. We’d still have the same state-adopted weirdness, except we would be arguing about whether Jupiter is for sex ed or not.

That said, it would be interesting to see how Islam would have ended up looking like if there is not a lot of Christians to take inspiration from.

Yes, but the point of the law is that apps that you install that are not from the official store actually have to work. It even has clauses so that installing stuff from different sources than Apple can’t intentionally be a worse experience than the official app IIRC. That might be just for messaging though.

I think there is a difference between “capitalism” and “capitalism”.

I think a more nuanced argument is that better games come from companies that are not primarily driven by the quarterly revenue cycle of Wall Street, that is defined as “capitalism”.

I think it’s more of a hit-and-miss, and good corporate leadership is the kind that people forget it’s there when good games come out. I mean CDPR had a CEO both when Witcher 3 was the thing, and also when Cyberpunk 2077 was the thing that flopped. Obviously, people were more interested in the beancounters’ influence in the latter case.

Quite a lot of companies like that to be honest.

AIs are deliberately designed to not copy-and-paste.

AI is a marketing term, not a technical one. You can call anything “AI”, but it’s usually predictive models that get called that.

AIs are deliberately designed to not copy-and-paste. What would be the point of one that did? Nobody wants that.

For example if the powers that be decided to say licenses don’t apply once you feed material through an “AI”, and failed to define AI, you could say you wrote this awesome OS using an AI that you trained exclusively using Microsoft proprietary code. Their licenses and copyright and stuff doesn’t apply to AI training data so you could sell that new code your AI just created.

It doesn’t even have to be 100% identical to Windows source code. What if it’s just 80%? 50%? 20%? 5%? Where is the bar where the author can claim “that’s my code!”?

Just to compare, the guys who set out to reimplement Win32 APIs for use in Linux (the thing that made it into MacOS as well now) deliberately would not accept help from anyone who ever saw any Microsoft source code for fear of being sued. The bar was that high when it was a small FOSS organization doing it. It was 0%, proven beyond a doubt.

Now that Microsoft is the author, it’s not a problem when Github Copilot spits out GPL code word for word, ironically together with its license.