A lot of the people who comment here are techie provincials who literally have no understanding that the things they believe, or at least the things they recite as their beliefs, are ideas that might be analyzed and judged against reality.
it's not meaningless, it has several direct implications about the nature of reality.
consider that subjective experience - to put it in the weakest and most general statement - clearly has a physical component. I'm being careful to not say that it is a physical phenomenon, is caused by physical phenomena, and so on, because while I think that's a reasonable assumption, we technically have no evidence for it.
but we do have plenty of evidence that, even if it is some supernaturally created magical process, subjective experience interacts with the physical world. for one, it clearly exchanges information with basic physical systems in your body - if it did not have some way to exchange information about what your eyes are seeing, you wouldn't be able to experience sight.
subjective experience is also easily altered with simple physical phenomena like chemical substances in your brain. so either these physics directly modify your subjective experience, or the subjective experience you have is mostly a physical product of your brain and the subjective experience part is only the end point of the process that receives all the information.
it's interesting because in physics, any exchange of information implies the existence of some directly measurable physical process. anything that is the product of such a process, you can generally speaking measure. all the things you can measure in an experiment are the things we eventually call the fundamental components of nature - like the charge, spin and so on of particles, as well as their place in time and space.
so subjective experience is either already some part we haven't observed of those fundamental components - which would in some way imply that everything is subjectively experiencing all the time - or it's an extra element we have not yet observed, but may be able to directly observe in experiment in the future.
"You essentially outline why it should be broken up."
No, they didn't. They explained why breaking Google up would kill all of those "free" services.
"Google is a monopoly, they exert monopoly power and enjoy monopoly pricing."
No, they aren't. There are a multitude of other ad platforms available for anyone to use. Google has no power to stop them. "Most desirable service" does not constitute a monopoly in an open market. Monopolies can only be created by government dictate, like old AT&T or modern cable companies.
> Monopolies can only be created by government dictate, like old AT&T or modern cable companies.
By virtually every definition I can find, a monopoly is a an entity that functions as the sole, or effectively the primary, provider of a good or service in some market. That seems to perfectly describe Google’s position wrt web-based advertising. Do other ad-platforms exist? Absolutely. Do they exhibit the kind of market dominance or control that Google does? Nowhere close.
> Google has no power to stop them.
Fact? I’d argue that Google’s sheer size and dominance means they don’t need to stop them. Potential competitors simply don’t stand a chance given Google’s size, number of resources, and reach. Explain how that’s not a significant factor into Google “power to stop” a potential rival?
Monopoly does not mean what you apparently think it means. It doesn't matter that competition ostensibly exists. What matters is that anticompetitive behavior is stifling that competition.
It's not a binary. By distilling the entire concept to a dualist perspective, you have evaporated most of the concept itself.
Sorry but you’re starting with a very poor definition of monopoly. If you define things incorrectly, you can make any point logical but the definition (and point) are still wrong.
We don't need new regulations. This is probably covered by commercial fraud statutes, as they represented the sale of the device as a sale of tangible personal property. There is no condition required to complete that purchase - the offer is of the physical device and the implied ability to use that device for its obvious purpose.
we need new regulations - the solution currently would be following what you say and suing the company in I guess small claims court or a class action suit for lots of people mad about the same thing against a single company that they make drag out for years while making money doing the same scam and then the payout will just be the cost of doing business.
The small claims courts solution of course not everybody has the time or resources to do that, so the company wins that way.
We need new regulations that stops it before it gets to the point where you have to go to small claims court or class action to redress the wrong.
No, you need a government that enforces it’s laws.
When people are speeding, you don’t need individuals to sue them in small claims court to enforce the speed limit. Having that requirement for consumer goods is bizarre.
New regulation i.e. more civil law. Which require you to sue in a small claims court to be enforced. How does this change anything, when as GP said there are already civil laws?
many regulations are enforced by government agencies that prevent the product from being sold if they do not match the regulations, the civil laws the GP pointed to are contract laws which means that the buyer if they feel ripped off has to sue.
Omitting a regulator makes enforcement a civil matter and the entire burden is placed on the consumer, which is to say, the legal scales are tipped throughly in favour of rogue manufacturers. Good luck suing DJI; you’ll obtain neither satisfaction nor restitution, and it’ll take years of being strung along by lawyers to realise it.
The even worse outcome of failing to protect the consumer at the point of sale is you’ve tacitly swallowed the tenets of an authoritarian surveillance state.
We need new regulations and they have to bite so bad the surveillance capitalism companys go bankrupt. If its working , the prices for devices go up because the thirsty road between oasis is priced in. We also would get real innovations as the companies would have to develop real USP again .
That's not entirely their fault. Those programs were designed and instituted to make as many people as possible dependent on them so they would become a captured voting bloc.
You can derive morality from observation if you aren't looking for ontological "ought statements". Hume's position assumes that the religious approach to morality is the only one possible - that morality consists of these detached and universal "ought statements" that must be observable in the Universe somehow and take on the same form as Commandments from a God.
That's not how the Objectivist ethics works, at all. There are no "ought statements" because ethics, in Objectivism, is a system of judgement and reasoning. It's applied epistemology.
So, no, you won't find a mythological ethics in reality. But you can learn how to identify the nature of things and judge how they relate, positively or negatively, to human life. And that's the essence of Objectivist morality.
But a system of morality requires the ability to make "ought" statements. Merely saying what exists is not enough information to inform correct decisions, because whether or not something exists is unrelated to whether or not it is good.
When the objectivists try to define "human life" as their yardstick for moral good, again, they smuggle in those preexisting preferences. There is no real principle that means "human life" should be condensed down to individual hedonistic comfort. It is very easy to argue that human life is better served by collective comfort, and thus the best actions are the ones that are self-sacrificing in service of the community, because these are the ones that do the most service to human life.
She didn't "feel like she needed Social Security".
In fact, she instructed her fiduciary to not apply for it on her behalf because she didn't need it, and her detractors would use her participation to smear her.
Her fiduciary convinced her to be enrolled by citing her own "restitution" argument and the fact that, as a fiduciary, she had an obligation to pursue all of her client's financial interests to the extent of her ability under the law.
That's what you just cited above. At Rand's death, her estate was estimated to be worth somewhere between $500,000 to $2 million dollars. Rand didn't feel she needed it. Her fiduciary did risk management for her.
The NixOS team is an order of magnitude more unstable than their software. The most surprising thing here is that anyone who needs their systems to actually work would rely on it, given the history of the project and the maintainers' psychotic behavior.
