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Comment by kaba0 | Hacker News Reader

People are “easy” to manipulate, especially when your control reaches basically every aspect of their life. Hiding/downplaying few articles here, shoving another into my face there with an opaque algorithm will achieve basically anything over a long time.

Also, you underestimate the effect of laziness. A company really has to do some atrocious thing to result in people leaving its services. Like, what would make the average person change from Gmail? He/she may not even know that 1) it is part of google which should be avoided now 2) what are alternative email providers 3) the whole change requires quite the technical know how.

It is simply naive to expect that “the market will solve it” to work in the general case. Competition only works when there are strict rules. Otherwise, the strongest/least fair player wins, and that’s why monopolies have to be broken up.

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I'm going to rephrase my original comment, which got flagged: There's inherent hypocrisy in having the biggest monopoly of them all regulate smaller monopolies. Because they're 'monopolies'. Right.

As if “hypocricy” was the worst possible offense. If you remove government, who will then stop other monopolies from forming in their place? Government is what all governed people, in aggregate, decide should be common principles. If they are not to your liking, then you can either leave or advocate for (often slow and gradual) change. It is often said that people get the governent they deserve; i.e. the problem (if there is one) is with people, not government. I would argue that you can’t really abolish government, any more that you can have a structureless organization:

https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

Yes, but I wasn't advocating for the abolishment of anything; I was merely pointing out that there's a double standard. To rephrase your words, don't the people get the 'monopolies they deserve'? After all, neither the CEOs nor the employees of these entities are aliens from space.

You can't just leave a government the same way you can leave a job (and become unemployed) or a product (become a non-customer); you can only switch to another one. Why don't you try parking a vessel in the international waters and see how long it takes before it's sunk.

> Yes, but I wasn't advocating for the abolishment of anything;

You advocated for the government to be broken up like a monopolist would be. I can’t really interpret that any differently.

> I was merely pointing out that there's a double standard.

Yes, it’s a double standard. Now, why do you imply that this is bad? Don’t you have to have special rules for the top level? Like, the root directory is its own parent directory, but nobody complains about “inconsistency” in file systems.

I was merely following kaba0's reasoning. If you're going to advocate for the breaking up of monopolies, why pick only the low-hanging fruit?

Your comparison is not apt. The root directory is merely a container for its subdirectories. In that way it much more resembles geography (a country being subdivided into regions, for example) than a government.

It's bad, because it's a blind spot. Governments, despite being at the top-level, have consistently grown since their inception. I'd expect the top level to be the leanest, not the fattest.

Decentralization and secessionism are highly unpopular ideas that don't look like they'll ever get mainstream acceptance. If anything, it looks like exactly the opposite trend is taking place (take the EU, for example).

Every day you read about new legislation being proposed and introduced. How often do you read about outdated legislation being abolished? Never. It's like writing an app and constantly adding new features but keeping all the existing ones. We all know how well that works out.

Even though HN shouldn't be about politics, when political rhetoric does get posted here (and it's far more common than one would expect), it's extremely one-sided.

It sounds like you would like to advocate for revolution; I can understand that point of view. The problems of government are certainly great, and I would be the first one to agree with you about its many problems, excessive size and growth. But when you seem to advocate for its removal in entirety, that’s when I stop being able to happily cheer you on.

I’m fairly sure I have no say in google’s politics, but I do have a (limited) say in my country’s. Also, the two don’t even play in the same field. The government is more like the referee in a sport.

Oh, but you do have a say: You can work for Google! It's the same as moving to a different country and becoming a citizen to be eligible to vote.

Referees, in comparison to governments, can be fired for doing a poor job.

> You can work for Google

Yeah and I will simultaneously work for google to not fk up the open web, for facebook to not disrupt democracy, and nestle to not goddamn force breastfeeding mothers on their shitty product.

How do you imagine a world without governments? The first thing they will do is put cocaine in their special food so you get addicted, add cheaper and more unhealthy components, even toxic ones, etc. Companies after a quite small size becomes the stereotypical paper clip AI, but instead of paperclips, it optimizes profit over everything else. A well functioning government with separation of power and without much corruption is good - it protects us from the cancerous outgrowth of companies.

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