You are trying waaaaaay too hard on this topic today. Your HN account is already bombed out and likely rate limited. Go take a break from posting and go outside. Maybe wave to a flock camera. After all, you have nothing to hide.
> The proposed deal drew opposition from lawmakers and activists because Solvinity provides infrastructure for DigiD, the digital ID system Dutch citizens use to access sensitive medical, pension and tax information.
Understandable that the Netherlands wouldn't trust the USA with its citizans' data.
I've never had the pleasure of encountering that situation.
But at what point do we call a spade a spade and say it's just them secretly inflating their prices? "everything is a penny but we charge a 1000000% service charge"
I used to wait tables once upon a time and it was standard practice to add a fixed service charge for any large party in lieu of a tip. Have you really never encountered that?
I've encountered large party service charges and that makes sense because it usually requires staff to do stuff they wouldn't normally do for smaller parties.
I'm talking about restaurants that just add service charge to everyone.
I think the lesson from the airline industry is that while consumers will get angry about surcharges, pricing transparency is what really gets punished in the marketplace. There are enough consumers who will always buy the deceptively priced item that it's suicidal to tell the truth (absent government regulation forcing the issue for all purveyors).
There are a fair number of well-meaning restaurateurs who have tried no-tip policies for ethical reasons. But the mass marketplace has not changed.
Kinda reminds me of when Burger King had a 1/3 lb burger and a 1/4 lb burger and more people bought the 1/4 lb because they thought it was more burger than the (rightfully) more expensive 1/3 lb burger.
Companies who wish for more casual subscribers should support services (such as Apple App Store subscriptions) and anti-dark-pattern laws which reassure the public that unsubscribing will be easy.
Then the complacency and other psychological effects that this article seeks to inoculate users against will be maximized.
I prefer the term "software developer" and that's what I use when I don't need the prestige of the term "software engineer". It's disadvantageous for organizations to do that with actual job titles, though.
Absent US government intervention to codify the term "engineer", probably the only way out of the "engineer" trap is through further title inflation, where the developers all become "vice presidents". :)
Yeah, it's 100% the better term. We've got rules against using engineer here in Canada though several companies I've worked for have called me an engineer. Apparently Professional Engineers Ontario sometimes goes after people for calling themselves engineers but I've never heard of it actually happening, and I don't know that they have any real teeth given that the places I worked that called me an engineer were Canadian-owned. (In fact, the only place where they checked if I could use the title was the one multi-national. Go figure.)
The idea that being "bad for business" is a sufficient disincentive to dissuade commercial entities in a free market from harming and killing people is risible.
Even if you eliminated the immunity shield for corporate leadership so they couldn't skate after their company goes bankrupt, there would still be innumerable risk-takers willing to gamble with human lives to make more money.
I expect the argument you want to make is that having people harmed and killed is an acceptable sacrifice for greater economic efficiency, but you're aware that it doesn't play well — especially when the benefits of economic efficiency tend to flow to the people doing the killing rather than the people being killed.
Don't put words in my mouth. I have never said that people being harmed and killed is acceptable. My disagreement is about whether government regulations, on net, actually result in fewer people being harmed and killed, or more. That's a factual disagreement, not a disagreement about values. If I believed, factually, that government regulations actually did result in fewer people being harmed, on net, I would be in favor of them, no matter what libertarian beliefs I might have in the abstract. But my factual belief is the opposite.
To the extent it's true that being "bad for business" is no longer enough of a disincentive for corporations, as I've already said, one key reason is that the corporations have bought regulations that favor them and disfavor potential competitors.
It's true that that's not the only factor involved. Corporate governance is broken. A big part of that is also government regulation, which does to some extent prevent outright fraud (for example, the S&L debacle in the 1980s), but is perfectly fine with other practices, like golden parachutes for executives and corporate takeovers in which the buyer gets the assets but offloads the liabilities on the taxpayers, that do just as much damage, if not more. All of these things are regulated--but the regulations don't stop harm from being done.
There is one other factor that works against corporate governance which is not, in itself, a product of government regulation: the fact that most share ownership now is not individual stockholders but mutual funds. That means most people don't even know what corporations they own even small pieces of. But mutual funds are a big advantage for most people investing for their retirement, because they're an obvious hedge against risk, so they would exist even in a true free market without any government regulation. The problem is that, as far as the individual corporations are concerned, their time horizon is now much shorter. The mutual fund has to care about providing returns over a long time horizon, because it's holding people's retirement accounts, which might not be drawn on for decades. But the corporations only see short term trades being made, many of them by those same mutual funds, trying to increase their returns. So corporations have to focus much more on short term returns instead of long term planning.
That would be one area where a government ought to be able to improve things, because a government's time horizon ought to be long-term. But it isn't. Government's time horizon is the next election. So even in this area, governments are actually worse than corporations.
This argument is on the level of anti vaxxers questioning vaccines when they dont see those diseases anymore. One can only make such an argument by being offensively ignorant of history.
> This argument is on the level of anti vaxxers questioning vaccines when they dont see those diseases anymore.
I have no idea where you're getting this from; the argument I'm making is nothing at all like this. Indeed, I have pointed out many bad things that still exist even in the presence of massive government regulation, and are not stopped by such regulation even though they are exactly the kinds of things the regulation was supposed to stop. That is the opposite of what you are claiming my argument is.
> One can only make such an argument by being offensively ignorant of history.
I pointed out elsewhere in the thread who I think is ignorant of history, and it isn't me.
I think "BigCo abusing the courts" — or alternately, "courts are designed to facilitate abuse by the wealthy" — is the essence of this story.
The case is dicey at best on the legal merits. It also offends community sentiments because it's a rugpull against businesses who wouldn't be copying if the design had been defended from the start.
But none of that matters because Fender can exhaust the resources of the companies it's targeting. All that matters is who can pay their lawyers the longest in a war of attrition.
Rock 'n' Roll has died many deaths. I suppose this is just one more, but it still hurts.
The happiness of the aristocracy depends on the spectacle of miserable workers performing humiliating tasks.
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