Although the Unabomber also correctly identified systemic problems anti-efficiency, anti-technology, and/or terrorism are absurd, immoral, and untenable reactions to antitrust, profiteering, automation, and/or worker exploitation.
One prescription, although not a panacea, is profit-sharing, worker-owned co-ops of tech workers. Confederations of co-ops by tech trade or area could rival or supplant MAANGs but without the perverse incentives of publicly-traded companies and their defenestration of ethics or mercurial abandonment of valuable employees.
I don't understand your question. Co-ops led by other values other than treating customers as the product to exploit. Do you not understand democratic socialism?
Co-ops just make the employees the shareholders, the shareholders still want to maximize profit. It might improve working conditions but there's still no hard incentives to treat the customer any better at the expense of profit. Currently companies already have a profit incentive structure in the form of yearly bonuses or stock options and that's not lead to greater concern for consumer focused policies.
Yeah, that was kind of my point in asking the question. Handing over companies to the employees might improve conditions for the employees but it does little to change any profit incentives they have. We need regulation and/or other external factors that force the fiduciary duty of companies (whether they be private/public/co-ops) to prioritize health, well being, privacy and the environment of both the employees and the customers.
Why not user owned, or a nonprofit, instead of worker owned? It's too easy to imagine a worker owned advertising company that still wants to control everything.
Engineers typically already partially own their companies via equity grants, but we still have the whole landscape of enshittified tech
> The Luddites warned us about Google. Too much power in too few hands leads to bad outcomes for everyone: first for workers, then for customers, then for the industry itself.
The article argues this is the problem that regulators are having to grapple with and finally have found ways they can interfere in.
I just don't know how many tools and weapons they have in their arsenal to legally counter such commercial centralizations. I also don't know if there was sufficient advantage to decentralizing 10 years ago. And I don't know if we have exhausted the advantages in last ten years, such that no further benefits are to be had.
Are you being cheeky - I can't tell. Many people would argue that cities developed after the advent of the car are not as livable as cities developed before cars.
I am not being sarcastic. I honestly think that cars have ruined our cities and wrecked our culture. Luddites were honestly right about cars. Ray Bradbury was way too prophetic for comfort!
I don't see a huge improvement when it comes to self-driving. They have all the same problems of their manual counterparts. They are loud, big, and dangerous.
> But it isn't. There's a rule. The rule is that multiple adjectives are always ranked accordingly: opinion, size, age, shape, colour, origin, material, purpose.
Haha, I’m absolutely no expert. My knowledge is broad, but far from deep. I like the saying ‘I know enough to be dangerous’, it perfectly suits me.
I agree with the general sentiment though, it’s why I come here too. That and the fact it’s a significantly healthier replacement for discussion than Reddit ever was.
There's two choices. Either they set a default, or they make the user choose which engine to use.
If they set a default, whoch is obviously the preference from a seamless experience perspective, how should Apple decide which engine to default to?
The obvious answer is let search providers bid.
If Google were paying Apple to keep other options off the platform, that would be a different story, but it's not a monopoly when a user continues to drive to the closest gas station despite there being an alternative right next door...
There's no world where it's monopolistic to be the default choice when other choices exist. They're making no effort, so far as anyone is aware, to remove other search engine choices from any devices or browsers.
And for the record, I'm no fan of Google at all. I use a different search engine on all of my devices (was a huge Neeva evangelist until they got bought and gutted by Snowflake, currently jumping between Bing and SearXNG). But the fact remains that paying to be the default option among a half dozen or more search engines for users to choose from is not "maintaining a monopoly" by any definition.
One prescription, although not a panacea, is profit-sharing, worker-owned co-ops of tech workers. Confederations of co-ops by tech trade or area could rival or supplant MAANGs but without the perverse incentives of publicly-traded companies and their defenestration of ethics or mercurial abandonment of valuable employees.