> Whatever policy you implement, end result must be that stuff costs more and people live with less: virtually no personal cars, no for-fun-flights (vacation), force people to wear same pants for years and repair them when they get damaged.
> That is hard pill to swallow for many, even for somewhat environmentally-aware beings.
You’re not wrong but I think adding some context would be helpful here.
That appears to be the situation now but it didn’t necessarily have to be this way. If effort in earnest was started earlier to develop the technologies necessary for transitioning off hydrocarbons, develop renewable energy generation, and so on the transition may not necessarily be so severe. And the policy which enabled this delay did cost consumers any way due to the active funding of a pro hydrocarbon influence campaign. Though I would guess the total cost of that policy is still much lower than actually trying to transition.
I think transitioning is a much easier pill to swallow if you realize that the decision will be made one way or another eventually and that it’s better to be proactive rather than reactive when trying to solve such an existential issue. That is, if one believes the science and cares about the future beyond just one’s self. Unfortunately that influence campaign I was mentioning earlier did a good job of denying the issue, used bad science to deceive, delayed climate action, degraded efforts of those fighting against it, etc. However I do acknowledge the ability to care beyond just one’s self is, to a certain extent, a financial privilege.
Incentivizing having less children is also another long term approach to limit emissions as technology becomes more efficient. Though it seems this has already been accomplished unintentionally in many places.
I’ve gone on kind of a rant but my point is yes the necessary policy decisions are more severe today but it absolutely did not have to be this way. And that is important to keep in mind because that campaign is still actively at play today.
Documents and testimony show that this “man-in-the-middle” approach—which relied on technology known as a server-side SSL bump performed on Facebook’s Onavo servers—was in fact implemented, at scale, between June 2016 and early 2019.
Facebook’s SSL bump technology was deployed against Snapchat starting in 2016, then against YouTube in 2017-2018, and eventually against Amazon in 2018.
The goal of Facebook’s SSL bump technology was the company’s acquisition, decryption, transfer, and use in competitive decision making of private, encrypted in-app analytics from the Snapchat, YouTube, and Amazon apps, which were supposed to be transmitted over a secure connection between those respective apps and secure servers (sc-analytics.appspot.com for Snapchat, s.youtube.com and youtubei.googleapis.com for YouTube, and *.amazon.com for Amazon).
This code, which included a client-side “kit” that installed a “root” certificate on Snapchat users’ (and later, YouTube and Amazon users’) mobile devices, see PX 414 at 6, PX 26 (PALM-011683732)(“we install a root CA on the device and MITM all SSL traffic”), also included custom server-side code based on “squid” (an open-source web proxy) through which Facebook’s servers created fake digital certificates to impersonate trusted Snapchat, YouTube, and Amazon analytics servers to redirect and decrypt secure traffic from those apps for Facebook’s strategic analysis, see PX 26 at 3-4 (Sep. 12, 2018: “Today we are using the Onavo vpn-proxy stack to deploy squid with ssl bump the stack runs in edge on our own hosts (onavopp and onavolb) with a really old version of squid (3.1).”); see generally http://wiki.squid-cache.org/Features/SslBump
I still think some services are more prone to being naturally competitive while others are more prone to being naturally centralized. Everything is on a spectrum. Good government regulation tries to balance these natural tendencies.
I’d be curious to hear more about your thoughts on “natural monopolies”. I’ll have to look up the fiber deployment as I am not familiar with that.
> If consumers were smarter they could break monopolies without government intervention necessary.
True but that is the nature of being human. We have evolved to use heuristics and biases due to fundamental time and energy budgets with bounded computational abilities. If one looks at the assumptions made in the efficient market hypothesis it’s pretty easy to see that many of those assumptions are simply not fully true. Though they are useful simplifications for modeling at times.
> Interesting to think about what would happen if you hired two people to do one job and made them compete against each other on every task.
Oh man I’d hate to think what office politics/drama would turn into. Still would be an interesting experiment.
Just speculating here but isn’t jumping out a window in Russia usually an implication it was ordered by the Russian state (ex: FSB) while in the US a framed suicides are assumed to be done by numerous non-associated actors. So in one place a single entity is responsible and in another it’s multiple entities.
It doesn’t seem surprising to me that there would be an affinity towards a particular method within entities.
However there are lots of services which are in-fact inherent monopolies.
Take electricity transmission or your ISP for example. They have a common set of infrastructure which is hard to share among many competing interests. Who gets to decide what should be upgraded, to what, and when? How does one divvy up costs infrastructure changes which did not benefit a significant set of participants because they are individually in the minority and unable to cooperate? If you prioritize minority participants then what about the majority participant? What about a super majority participant?
Lots of times cities will try to regulate these services tightly because past behavior has necessitated it. Though ISPs are perhaps a bad example here.
I read an article somewhere talking about a study where privatized healthcare resulted in increased profits but patient services suffered. Is profit above all else a good objective for government services?
- https://bounties.fulu.org/
- https://consumerrights.wiki/w/How_to_help