Be careful what you wish for.
Perhaps as a shopper there is a certain charm to the "mom and pops". Uneven, some good, some bad. Definitely more character
But as a worker, or as a poor consumer, Walmat is better.
The pay is regular. If mom and pop had a bad week, so might you
The hours are regular. Mom and pop work so hard, and their employees are "just like family"
The goods are a reliable price and quality. Walmat gets criticised for selling bad products, but they are reliably bad products, and cheap. You know what you are getting.
I am no cheer leader for capitalism, nor big box retail, but do not get foolishly romantic about the small scale capitalism they have pushed aside.
The problem is not the just the participants, the problem is the system itself.
You'd need some good old fashioned real world statesmen to make something like that happen.
Apple's value proposition is that fundamentally everything they make plays well with each other, and that investments in one product frequently pay off in other (often future) products. Break that into silos and they're individually less compelling.
Make reverse-engineering and emulating official clients legal and suddenly the monopoly problem goes away, because even if Apple only wants their iStuff to work with other iStuff, it will work fine with Android now that it can (legally) reverse-engineer and reimplement the protocol the iStuff uses and pretend to be an iStuff.
"Protocols, not platforms."
That doesn't mean the empires are a good thing.
The Internet was always going to be a cultural amplifier. Those of us who grew up when culture wasn't just about greed, narcissism, and sociopathy assumed it would amplify all those old-fashioned values: intellectual curiosity, informed democracy, and public education.
It actually does that. Up to a point. It's far easier to get accurate information about almost everything than it used to be.
But it's been swamped by narcissistic garbage, automated exploitation and greed, and pathocracy.
That's not really the Internet's fault. It's just amplifying the culture it's a part of. The mistake the idealists (like me) made was underestimating just how toxic and self-destructive that culture is.
In reality, as https://www.cochranelibrary.com/web/cochrane/content?urlTitl... points out
> this review did not assess at the impact of wearing a mask in comparison with not wearing a mask.
Indeed the wording of the review was confusing but still.
True. And accurate information
Wait a sec, I'm pretty old, but totally missed this era before human greed and narcissism. When exactly are we talking about?
I get that it's easier to engage with what one wants someone to have said, rather than what they actually said, but why quote the relevant part just to ignore it? Fiendish!
Cheers!
Maybe I should change the radio out and put in something with an audio input or whatever the norm is to connect old car speakers to an iDevice :)
The thing is if you are consuming that sort of media then you aren't really going to know what is going on in the world.
It's that old dilemma. Don't read the news and you will be uninformed, read the news and you will be misinformed.
Roads too. And water supply? Realistically all things that are natural monopolies seem to do better under democratic governance.