China has reduced its pollution massively since the 90s while aggressively expanding its industrial output. And they have done it without excessive bureaucracy and delays in construction. In the US environmental laws are not about the environment at all. They are there to enrich lawyers who profit from multi year permitting processes and lawsuits.

> China has reduced its pollution massively since the 90s while aggressively expanding its industrial output. And they have done it without excessive bureaucracy

China's system is authoritarian state-capitalism. It is precisely the bureaucracy that steered it's industries toward this outcome.

It helps you can buy an electric car in China for 1/4th the price as California. They also massively invested in every sort of energy (not just solar) where it's cheap and affordable to develop industry. Everyone obsesses about labour costs but almost everything is easier and cheaper to build in China because they allow stuff to be built there. Including the workers far lower housing, utilities, fuel, and food prices which lower the cost of living.

That's because the bureaucracy there is making stuff get built instead of making stuff not get built, and it planned all the externalities too.

Don't forget Insurance companies! They define and enforce a lot of the requirements too, it's also why all the new parks look the same.

It really helps when the government can just disappear someone when they don't play along with government edicts.

Don't worry, we in the US will get to enjoy that soon enough.

> In the US environmental laws are not about the environment at all.

that is literally nonsense .. lazy nonsense, ill-willed nonsense.. Ignorant nonsense.

literally four seconds to search " history of us environmental law"

But they can. Any Meta employee or shareholder is also free to go on Bluesky and tell lies about taxes.

There is no real concept of sources legitimately disagreeing here. There is tax law, which Meta uses to calculate its tax liability, and then there are lies.

Taxes are a subject of frequent liberal conspiracy theories. You will see all sorts of blatantly false claims like this because left wing misinformation spreaders like Robert Reich make up their own tax calculations that have no relation whatsoever to actual tax law.

No need to limit this to "liberal" conspiracy theories. Trump and his admin's statements on how tariffs and other taxes work and who pays them have been full of blatantly false claims.

"X does A" does not mean "only X does A."

It’s a fair retort here, though, where the grandparent comment was clearly trying to grandstand in opposition to his perceived enemy tribe, mostly unprovoked.

Edit: in other words, it’s a fair interpretation of the comment to be saying “We wouldn’t have to deal with all this misinformation about taxes if there wasn’t some giant liberal conspiracy”, given that they weren’t replying to any specific part of the parent post.

Well, no, that is not a reasonable interpretation at all. For one, the commenter did not proclaim existence of conspiracies, but the existence of conspiracy theories. People mix these up a lot. Secondly, the other interpretation you propose exhibits roughly the same form as "X does A", so it's worth repeating that it does not mean "only X does A" either!

Great idea! And then what if we went even further and made enough busses so we could all have one waiting at our houses at all times?

You couldn't afford the bus drivers. The convenience of the bus is that someone else drives for you. If you have to drive, it's not a bus. Maybe a wealthy tech investor could announce self-driving cars...

You might need to make the buses smaller. Maybe give some options on the number of seats. You could also tailor the bus; different colors and shapes. Heck, you could store and transfer things easier. Personal buses sound like a marketing win.

That sounds like a great idea! But what if you have to catch your bus when it's cold or raining? To solve this problem we can build mini indoor bus terminals and attach them to each house.

You'd have to invest so much money into putting roads everywhere, and then the personal busses need to have their own refueling depots everywhere, and getting the oil for those depots in the first place is going to be the cause of needless war and deaths. That's totally never gonna happen!

And then what if you owned the bus so it was super convenient. And maybe made it smaller so it was easier to drive and park.

Just like a little 4 seat bus you could just have all the time. I bet that would be popular!

If we had rules like that in the past we never would have had the industrial revolution.

Yes, it would probably have been better to have industrial evolution instead. Or are you arguing that all the countless deaths, maimings, child labor, 16-hour workdays, robber barons, black lung, radium jaws, and so on and so on were simply how it had to go? Or do you simply not care because all of that happened to other people?

Yeah, pretty much. A material emitting a previously unknown form of energy that turns out to be extremely harmful is really something you can only discover by trial and error. And what do you mean it's happening to other people? I am being exposed to all kinds of shit like PFAs and microplastics today. But it turns out that the technological progress outweighs all the environmental pollutants and accidents that it took to get here and we still live healthier and longer lives than we did before.

Not sure if that's true, what are your reasons for believing that? Are you saying we couldn't have invented the machines we used if we took safety measures along the way (e.g. having guards on machines that chopped of arms and legs)? Perhaps progress would have been slower -- since rather than just using the saw, you'd need a saw with a guard and emergency switch -- but it seems like if humans were more circumspect, we would have the industrial revolution, but more deliberate and controlled. Agreed it probably wouldn't have been "overnight factories in every city", but then again, you probably wouldn't have many of the externalities we're still learning about and paying for?

And progress being slower means people die. You ever had polio? Smallpox? When was the last famine you lived through?

The market realized that a used book in good condition is practically the same as a new one. The rest is just supply / demand.

It's an entirely different issue when it is retailers buying from suppliers and setting prices vs first party sellers selling through platforms and setting the price themselves.

Rules around pricing like that are standard retail practice since well before the internet even existed.

Many standard practices become illegal when you have the amount of market power that Amazon does.

I'm not convinced Amazon has any market power here. Online and physical retail competitors are alive and well, so Amazon has very little room to actually push up prices. It's margins in this area are under 5%. AWS has market power and has a 25% margin, and yet the complaints almost always focus on the retail side.

Here is the Complaint of the People of the State of California about Amazon - https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/attachments/press-docs/2022-...

Section V is on Amazon's market power.

Section VII is on the anti-competitive effects of Amazon's conduct.

You argue the market space includes physical retail competitors, which the complaint rejects. They describe their reasoning, point out how Jeff Bezos also doesn't see them as interchangeable, hence "physical stores and online stores are not reasonably interchangeable substitutes for one another from the standpoint of consumers".

Indeed,"most merchants—even those that sell through both channels—do not consider physical brick-and-mortar stores to be in the same market as online stores".

It also describes the effect on third-party sellers, like how Chewy.com, Wayfair.com, and Newegg.com charge lower fees, so the seller would like to set a lower price there, but Amazon's policies and market power inhibit the seller "because doing so would result in the suppression of the Buy Box for their Amazon listing."

There's a dozen or so examples of sellers raising their prices elsewhere in order to no lose the buy box, affecting also Amazon competitors:

> A major competing online marketplace to Amazon itself confirmed that it has heard from merchants that they would need to raise their prices on its marketplace or decline to participate in a discount/sale event because a lower price on its marketplace had disqualified or could disqualify their offers from the Amazon Buy Box. This rival marketplace operator reported that during a sales event, certain merchants contacted it to pull their items from the event or indicated that they would need to raise their prices because they reported that they had lost the Buy Box on Amazon, believed they would lose the Buy Box on Amazon, or believed that they would be delisted on Amazon because their item prices were lower on this competing website for the event. ...

> one Walmart manager reported to Bloomberg that “Walmart routinely fields requests from merchants to raise prices on its marketplace because they worry a lower price on Walmart will jeopardize their sales on Amazon.”

> Amazon’s coerced price parity agreements with Marketplace sellers constitute unlawful contracts and/or combinations in restraint of trade in violation of the Cartwright Act.

(The Cartwright Act is California's main antitrust law.)

Are you still not convinced, and if not, why not?

When has Amazon ever claimed that? And a price match policy makes no sense for a 3rd party platform like Amazon. That's up to the first party sellers.

Did you even bother to read the thread? The top-level comment, the Amazon employee defending the practice.