• 0 Posts
  • 143 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: October 6th, 2023

help-circle
  • That is a completely legitimate concern. It’s important to note that even if prisons are publicly run, there’s still a bunch of private actors in the prison system in the form of the people who work in it. Prison worker unions and police unions lobby for more laws already to protect their jobs. Private prisons might make that aspect worse, but it’s not like it’s perfect now.


  • Neither is obviously more efficient than the other overall, it depends on the structure and the incentives. People worry about private prisons for example. If you make it so the government sends people to prisons and you pay the prison a fixed rate per prisoner, of course you’re gonna get skimping on services by the prisons. If you instead give the prisoner a voucher for a prison and make them pick where they go and prisons get money per voucher they get from prisoners, you’re gonna get competition on quality so you’ll get high quality prisons. Opposite outcomes with just a change to incentives.








  • Maybe I can illustrate better. Imagine your boss goes to pay you your paycheck and gives you and your coworkers 75% of what you’re supposed to be paid instead of 100%. You say, “Hey, where’s my other 25%” and they respond, “I don’t have any more, we ran out of money to pay you. We had to adjust to stay sustainable. You’ll only get 75% until our finances change.” Would you say, “well, since there’s still savings maybe, and there’s gonna be a bunch of new money the next time you go to pay out, just not enough, you technically didn’t run out. That’s technically something else?” I don’t know, maybe you would. I’d call that running out, though.








  • Thanks for your question.

    I see food preparation and dining rooms as separate industries, even if they don’t appear that way at first. The most we can see this in practice is probably mall food courts. Web content like YouTube is the food and the web browser is the place or mechanism by which we consume “food”.

    Is being allowed to take tacos into McDonald’s a hill I’m going to die on? No, of course not, it’s just the first illustration I thought of. Lol. I could probably come up with a better example, that one was just easier and more visual.

    To be clear, I’m not saying there’s no anticompetitiveness happening, I’m saying that all vertical integration is basically this same amount of anticompetitiveness, and vertical integration is often very good, which is why we tolerate it all the time.

    I agree the comparison to MS and Internet Explorer is somewhat similar. I also think that case was not decided particularly well, and it’s not as revealing as it could have been since it ended up settling out of court, and IE ended up getting crushed by Chrome just a few years later.

    I wonder, if Google made a new app called YouTube that could only watch YouTube and made it the only app that could watch YouTube, sort of like Quibi, would that be more competitive or less competitive? No one is asserting that Quibi was anticompetitive at all, correct? That would be even worse for Firefox users, they’d completely lose access to YouTube unless they downloaded a 2nd app, this time YouTube instead of Chrome, but like Quibi it would seem to dodge all these competition concerns completely. I think that shows how these concerns can be selective and kind of nonsensical.



  • Public services aren’t efficient, but they can surely change themselves more efficiently than they can force a multi billion dollar company to change its ways.

    I’m surprised you’re not more worried about the government outsourcing its functions to a company you seem very suspicious of.

    If the government decided to have vital public meetings only in a private venue you have to be a member of or something, the proper fix is not to force the club to accept everyone, it’s to have the government stop having vital meetings in private places.

    I also don’t see a problem because everything of value these video streaming services offer is replaceable by one of the many other streaming services. The fact that YouTube is the biggest or most recognized does not change anything for me. The fact that there is some content that is only on YouTube doesn’t, either. That’s a normal thing that happens in an economy. Ford dealers only sell Ford cars, Coca Cola doesn’t sell Pepsi, etc.