Did anyone say you said anything untruthful? No, they just called you an asshole. You can both be an asshole and be right.
PS - Just some advice that I learned in sales 101 early in my career...focusing on shit talking the competition generally isn't a strategy that works well.
In case you were unaware, if someone's defense against being called an asshole is to say "well nothing I said was false" they're almost certainly an asshole.
I will admit that sometimes I do have fun playing the game (certainly a lot more when I was younger), but not often anymore. I feel like I "have" to do it, because there's no such thing as a free lunch, and as such stores price in the fees and so I might as well get it back in the form of traveling, but it is very weird that we just expect credit cards to do that.
Even if I concede all of this, and I really don’t, that doesn’t imply that it was a concerted effort to make Microsoft in particular a monopoly, at least not in the same way that they, for example, made AT&T a monopoly.
Are you suggesting that the existence of laws means that monopolies are inherently government ordained? Great, then that means that the standard oil example still holds.
P.S. you can actually keep replying, there’s just an artificial timer as they get nested. You can actually get around that if you click on the date/time (e.g. “2 hours ago”) and reply directly.
Aha! Neat trick to defeat hacker news's attempt to keep us from having long unproductive conversations. Let's keep it going.
Does it matter if the government purposely ordained the monopoly or stupidly made it possible by extending copyright protections indefinitely? The government is the problem either way and they shouldn't have that much power!
All you did was say that Standard Oil doesn't count as a monopoly because you claim that you need a government intervention to be a monopoly, which is not a definition I have heard and certainly does not fall under colloquial definitions. Your big rebuttle to it, as far as I can tell, appears to be "Nuh uh, now prove me wrong!!!".
There are plenty of companies that have gotten to monopolistic or near-monopolistic categories without a government declaring it; Microsoft in the 90's, for example, was famously anti-competitive and actually was briefly declared a monopoly (though that was overturned in higher courts). As far as I'm aware, it wasn't the US government that artificially made Microsoft anticompetitive.
You can have a monopoly without having 100% of the market. Even one of the most famous monopolies, AT&T throughout the 20th century, never had 100% of the market. You know this, so now you're just actively lying.
Microsoft was briefly deemed a monopoly by engaging in anti-competitive practices and abusing its market leadership to squash competition, like artificially blocking the use of DR-DOS to install Windows [1].
Have a look at what children were doing at work, and then come back.
In once case I know of, the children in a textile factory worked all day at replacing spent spools of thread on the weaving machines. They were replaced by a machine that did the same thing, at much lower cost.
Are there any jobs at your work place that would be productively performed by children? Have you ever gotten your kids to clean their rooms or do their homework?
That seems a bit reductive; I don't even know that you're "wrong", but there are a lot of factors that might have led to the United States' success. We have a lot of natural resources and a lot of our land is readily habitable.
Yes, the US also has relatively liberal economics [1], and maybe that's why the US has done well, but I think there are too many confounding variables to conclude it's purely because of economic liberalism.
[1] I mean liberal in the academic sense, not as a synonym for Democrat.
"Prosperous" is a relative term; Russia, even during the USSR days, was still significantly more prosperous than Uganda, for example.
You can say "yes but they weren't as rich as the United States", but if "being as successful as the United States" is your bar then most countries fall short. There are plenty of countries that you would consider economically liberal that aren't as prosperous as the United States.
I'm not going to claim I know "why" some countries do well and some don't, and that's my point. There are oodles of variables that end up being relevant and I think it's intellectually dishonest to pick one and thank/blame it for everything.
The US had to ship wheat to Russia to keep them from starving.
There was a billboard put up in Kansas at the time: "Welcome to the Breadbasket of the Soviet Union".
It would be worth your while to read a history of the USSR.
> pick one
The correlation between prosperity and free markets is a very strong one.
P.S. In WW2, the US supplied all its allies (including the USSR) with massive amounts of food and military aid. And the US fought WW2 in two hemispheres. That's what free markets delivered. The evidence is everywhere you look and is overwhelming.
I didn't claim that the USSR was doing well compared to the US. In fact I said the opposite.
I said that the USSR was economically more prosperous than Uganda, and was not wrong about that. Prosperity is a relative term, and pointing out that the US was/is rich isn't actually demonstrating anything outside of your inability to read.
My point wasn’t Uganda, my point was, and it still is, that “prosperity” is a relative term. I also have no interest in talking about the minutia of Uganda. I was pointing out that the USSR was “rich” by comparison to some other countries.
We're they more prosperous than Uganda? I don't know much about Uganda's history but the 21 million citizens of the USSR that Stalin murdered were as unpropserous as anyone could be. It was an incredibly uneven prosperity if there was any.
I should make it clear that I'm not a supporter of what the USSR was, and I'm not trying to apologize for it. I'm just trying to argue that "prosperity" is a relative term and trying to nail down the "why" of it is more complicated than the libertarian "corporations good government bad" wet dream that WalterBright always spouts.
ETA:
Just to cite my sources, you can look at the GDP per capita of Uganda and Russia in 1985 here [1].
No question, the United State was way wealthier than Russia at around ~$33k, Russia at around ~$12k, and Uganda at around $800.
The USSR was horrible, Stalin was horrible, I wouldn't want to live in the USSR even if it were still around, but my point is that wealth and prosperity are reductive terms, and it's also reductive to look at one factor and say that that's the cause of everything.
Prosperity is so much more than just GDP. But look, this discussion started with someone saying our corrupt government is bad, and then throwway120385 described something horrible and called it libertarian and I just had to correct that label. People then felt the need to jump in with a bunch of mostly orthogonal disparagement of libertarianism which led to all this unproductive arguing. By the way did you see my response to you about the Microsoft monopoly? I couldn't reply because we got too deeply nested so I made it a peer comment. I'm sure it will instantly turn you into a libertarian, lol!
I agree it’s much more than GDP. That’s kind of my entire point! These terms are complicated, and pretending that these things can be explained trivially by “LOL CORPORATIONS GOOD GOVERNMENT BAD AHAHAHAH” is reductive at best.
No libertarian is saying "corporations good!" Oh my gosh, the misunderstanding is huge. Go do some actual research about an idea before blindly arguing against it. Libertarianism is all about individuals and personal property and liberty. Sure people are free to organize into corporations, but libertarianism is not about favoring or giving special advantages or esteem or whatever else you seem to be imagining to corporations. It's about giving power to individuals! The hardest thing about libertarianism is people who are afraid of needing to exercise their own power and judgement. Every other political philosophy wants to make everything Someone Else's Problem. I think libertarianism is scary because it makes you responsible for yourself.
How is putting personal liberty above all else a love of corporations? If a corporation is furthering personal liberty then sure, I'll love them. If they aren't then I won't give them my time/money/attention. Why does everything revolve around corporations for you?
It’s not that “everything revolves around corporations for me”, it’s that every time I have ever criticized a corporation to a self-proclaimed libertarian, it it always deflected and turned into “well actually this is just the governments fault because…”
Walter did this by taking the frankly idiotic position that Standard Oil actually wasn’t a monopoly, and you took the less-idiotic-but-still-bad position that Microsoft’s terrible business was actually just a consequence of government.
I feel like we're really getting off into the weeds here. I think the original question was, could they have achieved their monopoly without government help? I still think no. Their product, software, is given more protection than other types of products by copyright laws. If you sell a hamburger you can't copyright it. If you sell a circuit board you can't copyright it. PC clones kept IBM from becoming a monopoly at the exact same time Microsoft was becoming a monopoly. Why? Government protection.
Microsoft even sued a guy named Mike Rowe for selling software (mikerowesoft.com). That's insane.
I have gotten in arguments about these Flock cameras, because people will use the "if you're not doing anything wrong you got nothing to worry about" defense.
Basically the entire point of the fourth Amendment (and sort of the Bill of Right as a whole) seems to be based on the assumption that we cannot trust the government to not abuse its power, so we purposefully limit its power. At least that's the impression I got, IANAL disclaimer I guess.
If we cannot safely assume that every cop is above-board, which we obviously cannot, then it's trivial to come up with cases of "if you got nothing to hide you got nothing to fear" defense. A bad cop could use Flock to stalk an ex-girlfriend. A bad cop could find some unsavory-but-not-illegal behavior from a politician (e.g. visiting a porn shop) and blackmail them. A bad cop could, as demonstrated by this article, simply use a Flock camera to harass someone they don't like.
I didn't think this was a controversial opinion, but I do see a lot of Flock/mass-surveillance defenders so I guess it is.
Even cops that are well intended, that most people would call good, are hopelessly under trained regarding civil rights. A lot of have them have delusions of being some kind of detective and being clever about deceiving you into giving up your rights. Then they become belligerent if you don't play along.
>because people will use the "if you're not doing anything wrong you got nothing to worry about" defense.
The cop using the cameras to stalk his ex girlfriend really should have put an end to such argument. No, survellillance via an unregulated, private company that any "law environment" can access on a whim was never going to end well.
I have the exact same anecdote; it makes me wonder if this is a common enough use case that a small language model could be trained and run locally for these kinds of “configuration bullshit problems”.
I feel like a very large percentage of my Claude usage ends up having it automate configuration shit, because historically that has been the part of software engineering I have always hated.
I have to admit that I'm pretty impressed that GOG has managed to convince a lot of the big brand-name players, (including Sony! [1]) that a DRM-free way of distributing games can be viable. If there's no DRM then there's nothing stopping you from keeping a backup on your own that they can't take away.
reply