hi_im_miles

> The "free market" will always, always end up with large fish eating up the small fish

I still think this has much more to do with market interventions enabling 'artificially' large economies of scale. Infrastructure, police, subsidies/grants, IP protections--all played and continue to play a massive role in shaping markets today.

There are spaces on the internet where people are nice to each other, it's just they're usually heavily moderated or invite-only where there's a consequence to being an asshole. People don't act nice on the public internet because there's nothing disincentivizing being mean.

I feel the opposite actually. I’m super hungry for information provided in good faith, but there’s an overwhelming amount of copypaste crowding it all out.

The "broken" thing is (and always has been) the existence of low cost, low barrier-to-entry competitors to monopoly power.

I think absentee ownership and zoning laws have a fundamental impact on the availability of housing. It seems outside of governmental concern because their impact is already so normal. It’s normal for rich people to own/rent land they don’t occupy or use in perpetuity. It’s normal to see almost everything zoned for car dependent, single-family housing.

Trust is the biggest thing missing from most forms of advertisement. I know I will gladly check out a product that a YouTuber I enjoy recommends, but banner ads/prerolls/TV ads/etc feel like a scam reel.

We basically need a curation protocol.

The state suggests that people cannot play nicely en masse without violent control, but doesn’t actually back this assertion up with anything. Maybe I’m a conspiratorial nutcase, but my relationship with the state consistently feels like interacting with the world’s biggest protection racket.

This is exactly in line with my experience as well. There is also an idea that all skilled players are grinders, which in my experience is definitely not true; having more games played than a professional usually signals to me that they're addicted to the game but don't care much about actually improving.

> Of course, I don't expect AAAs to offer an experience like this, because human moderation doesn't scale cheaply to 10s of millions of players.. race to the bottom <3

I think it does scale, but it requires users being able to host their own servers for your game. It doesn't scale in a way that maximizes control for the IP holder, however.

As someone who does play competitive video games seriously, rather than having anti-cheat, I would prefer to play on servers/ladders where the players are vetted and where getting caught cheating has meaningful social implications. Open-for-all servers with accounts that are trivial to make is the problem to me.

Not the person you're responding to, but a recent example that caused outrage was Nintendo sending C&Ds to online Melee tournament organizers during the pandemic (using emulators with mods). I'm sure there's some way in which Nintendo is within their legal right to do this though, even if I think this behavior is a plague to art and technology.

My experience with remote work has been the opposite of this. My team is in a call for the day, and most of my time is spent collaborating with my coworkers. I find this experience to be far superior actually, as we can do things like: use our own drawing tablets at the same time, screenshare rather than look over shoulders, adjust volume for quiet speakers (huge for me), turn on closed captioning, mute chitchat when trying to focus, etc etc.

For me as a daily weed user, this "type" of munchies only persisted for so long. Curious to hear of others experiences, but after about a year of developing the habit, I became almost repulsed by very salty/greasy/sweet foods and started to crave simpler meals comprised of more fruits and vegetables.

I don’t think we need a concept of intellectual property at all to talk about why fraudulent behavior is wrong/harmful.

> Can you clarify your thought here? American people don't think and behave like they do in Hollywood TV shows. There are exceptions of course, but most pop TV shows do not attempt to accurately portray real human relationships, emotions, actions etc.

To add onto this, it's also worth noting that many movies/shows/etc are actively trying to challenge a dominant culture or way of thinking.

> This essentially is hollywood transfers its manufacturing capacity to SK, just like American industry transfers its manufacturing capacity to China.

I think this perspective is one of my many lenses you can apply to this. Another perspective is that Americans and Koreans share a longstanding history in both war and culture, and for many decades now everyday working people between the US and SK have been collaborating and bonding together. Like yeah you can say that recent collaborations between Hollywood and SK is just Capitalists Doing Capitalism, but even with the corporate restraints and conflicts-of-interest we all know too well, these works are still the product of real people working together and expressing themselves.

There does seem to be a rather large "anti-social media" current here on HN and in tech spaces in general. I find it a bit odd how common that sentiment is, since for me it has been relatively easy to tailor social media to my interests in a way that regularly enriches my life.

I use Facebook for finding and registering to IRL events, and Instagram / Tiktok / Twitter almost exclusively for consuming tech, programming, and gaming content. With exes of mine, they seemed to mainly be scrolling through either comedy content or content related to their interests.

I'm sure it's very possible to engage with social media in unhealthy ways, but for the issue of modern life feeling isolated or empty, I wonder if social media has become an easy scapegoat for deeper societal problems. (some possibilities: work that doesn't feel meaningful or rewarding, insufficient leisure time, car-centricity / hostile urban planning)

Not sure why you would expect people to act any differently when given freely reproducible content. The only solution here would be making adblock illegal and ramping up surveillance.

I think the blame is appropriately placed here, no one is forcing them to take sponsorships without due diligence. It’s not exactly secret knowledge that these VPN providers can be scummy.

I am extremely skeptical that there is no financial incentive to being first-to-market and building a reputation as an innovator, even at a "higher level", especially when these incentives are completely overshadowed by the ones created by IP. I don't believe all financial incentive disappears just because you eliminate the ability to rent-seek through a state-backed monopoly.

The problem here is that people also love to defend the current system, while actively prohibiting alternatives from ever taking root.

The flaw with this argument is the assumption that incentives cannot exist towards innovation without IP protections. It's obvious why investors will seldomly invest in non-protected innovation: monopolies are just significantly more lucrative. Absent that incentive, are there no truly no alternatives? Was this assumption ever tested prior to these policies being implemented?

I think it's also worth asking why the available funding for innovation is almost exclusively in the hands of capitalists in the first place. Do they simply have superior business acumen, or are there protections / rent-seeking behaviors at play here?

But why have them at all, especially if we’re going to shoot for arbitrary amounts of time?

I don’t buy that IP protections incentivize innovation anymore than they prevent it. The reality is that the gains from intellectual property are not distributed evenly, and corporate executives know this. If IP is making you millions of dollars, that is a very different situation from IP just “making you a living.”

Even if you are doing well as a small IP-based business, you’re still stuck paying a premium on everything you buy (thanks to the existence of IP monopolies), and you still have little recourse against IP violations from large corporations and anonymous pirates.

I just don’t get how this isn’t all an enormous waste of resources for anyone but the already rich, or a completely raw deal for people who mod games, remix music, repair electronics, etc etc.

Though this is only one person's personal experience, to me this was an illuminating conversation on the state of medical device repair as a consequence of strong IP protections:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsJG2ODOcXA

The problem is that there is no way to experiment with other ways of funding health care research, as the cost of doing so is set at highly entrenched monopoly prices. There is no reason for those with capital to consider alternatives when there is already so much money to be made in the existing system.

I too believe that medical innovation would be wrecked by the elimination of patents, but I think that is less to due some inevitable aspect of human nature, and more due to existing incentive structures that have been created by means of policy.

I have zero faith that regulation here will realistically have any effect other than inching Amazon a bit closer to being a quasi-state service, and I also have zero faith in that improving customer service at all.

Yeah, this article is assuming a competitive environment when in reality there exists an arsenal of state tools available for corporations to entrench themselves as monopolies: IP protections, subsidies/contracts, regulatory capture, etc etc.

Part of this is that Facebook makes the opinions of people you know but don't really care about highly visible, which I think leads to some of the animosity you see on the platform. When the person you're confronting is the uncle of someone you talked to once back in high school, there's little incentive to be kind.

For me, organizing stuff is something I enjoy to a point where I'd consider it "living my life". I get a lot of joy out of using emacs/org mode every day, but I can also totally understand someone who doesn't.

>It is up to good honest people to set the example, because yes the greedy ones will always greed away.

A focus on 'greed' or 'honesty' is missing the mark on what I'm saying here. We currently have an economy built on a foundation of historical expropriation, enclosure, colonialism, subsidy, regulatory capture, rent-seeking, etc, and heavily biased towards the resultant monopolies/oligopolies. As a consequence, prices are set at this inflated level of profit, and those who perform labor outside of the interests of these corporations typically aren't able to afford the costs of living (especially without breaking the law). "Greed" isn't really the issue here; the issue is systemic privilege born through violence.

>History has shown me that it doesn't matter what economic and political system is instituted

It's pretty intuitive that a political system is generally going to be favorable towards those who instituted it, outside of happenstance benevolence from a political elite.