Any publicly traded corporation (save a small handful with a non-traditional governance model) are metric-driven companies.
Modern corporations are paperclip maximizer functions executing on a network general-purpose biological computational engines tied together with powerpoint and email and excel spreadsheets.
Want to know what the AI of the future will look like? It will be a lot like Comcast, because it will be built by Comcast and harnessed to the corporate goals of Comcast and thus will have the same value system as Comcast.
The only thing it will lack is Comcast's institutional incompetence, as it will be Comcast's goals executing on dedicated hardware and not semi-autonomous employees. And it will build a dedicated model of every man and woman on the planet, and use that information to build a personalized profile that will determine exactly how many illegitimate charges it can cram on your bill before you'll suffer through a customized cancellation service that is calibrated to your personality and mental state to be just painful enough to drive you to the brink of suicide. And the only reason it's merely to be brink, is because a dead customer is an unprofitable one. (and if you think that's hyperbole, you have a far brighter view of the future than I do)
If I may quote from the rulebook for Fantasy Flight Games's New Angeles board game (go play it, it's awesome!)
There’s something they used to call ‘the Myth of Shareholder Value.’ It goes, basically, like this: everything any corporate officer does, at any level, must be dedicated to only one thing, which is to increase shareholder value.
...
The Weyland Consortium are the high priests of the cult of Shareholder Value in today’s economy. The Consortium is less a corporation and more an algorithm, buying and selling corporations and extending its tendrils out through every sector of industry: research, transportation, you name it. The Consortium moves and acts like a living thing. No one executive or committee steers that ship. Shareholder Value is its only captain, and every decision made by its chief officers is pre-destined, an inevitable result of gears turning for decades, of market forces filtered through AIs running on corporate servers.
I don't expect it will go that far at all. Surely a company will test the idea of having an AI give executive-level guidance, but when it does so, it will be hastily dismantled. Companies do not structure themselves in the way they do and act the way they do timidly. The C-level executives are not worrying that they could be doing things better. You can see this clearly as essentially every single large company consciously and intentionally ignores research. There are over a thousand studies showing that open floor plan offices are abyssmal for productivity and actively reduce the profit a company earns. Any AI would tell the execs to have the majority of their workers work remotely, and give the few which remain in company facilities private offices. And the execs would summarily ignore it and cancel the project, declaring it a failure.
They have faith that they are doing the right thing. Research tells them they are not, and they either do not care, or, in my opinion, desperately guard their self image as a 'leader' over and above any concern for profit or long-term viability of the business. An AI would be permitted to take a strong role in making decisions for a company only insofar as it plays the role of toady, having been tweaked and misconfigured to ignore all facts which could result in it telling the executives that they are running 'their company' in the wrong way.
> I don't expect it will go that far at all. Surely a company will test the idea of having an AI give executive-level guidance, but when it does so, it will be hastily dismantled.
No, the AI won't be in charge. It won't set the overall goals. But it will be the truck drivers, the call center workers, the customer service specialists, the personal banking advisers.
When humans are told by the CEO of Wells Fargo, "you need to open 8 new banking accounts per day (because 8 rhymes with great) and we totally don't want you to cram unwanted products into existing customer portfolios, because that would be wrong wink-wink-nudge-nudge", most Wells Fargo employees are going understand what's being said (especially when they are disciplined for not acting illegally), and do the thing that their CEO tells them to do.
An AI given a fitness function to "open the maximum number of accounts, with a minimum probably of being caught performing illegal activity" is going to fuck over banking customers with a far more ruthless efficiency.
Only as far as efficiency can displace entrenched companies anywhere. That is, almost universally not, but it will happen in enough places to make some difference.
Why new companies run by competent people don't displace current companies today?
The code in the example isn't faulty. The goals are faulty in an non-obvious way, and drives the AI to optimize a solution to a fitness function in a way that humans might consider pathological behavior.
> to Comcast paving the future of the AI?
Comcast's goals are faulty in a non-obvious way. Comcast's goals are to maximize shareholder profit, and in doing so creates a culture of fraudulent billing and a horrifying gauntlet of a cancellation process that humans might consider pathological behavior. And AI is the next logical step to optimizing those corporate values.
I think the core point is that corporations are fairly general-purpose machines, designed to do things too "big" for individual people. (But smaller and easier to analyze than "civilization.")
Their hardware stack is different, but lessons about their computational structure and design pitfalls may be applicable.
> How about a suggestion that can make both of use happy? We keep the FDA, they do everything the do now, only that other products can still be sold, but they need to have a reasonably BIG label on it, that they are not FDA approved. We put a tiny tax on all products actually approved by the FDA to fund the FDA.
Sure, with two small changes. One, we make the FDA tax progressive. Use whatever argument you like to justify this, like rich people's lives are more valuable, and therefore they can pay more to stay alive, but the key is that everyone will buy into the system in a way that they can both afford, AND be emotionally invested in.
Second, all non-FDA labeled products will have a MASSIVE tax applied, to pay for the externalized costs of bad food, such as emergency room visits, death, sickness, etc.
Of course we need a state to enforce this system, and it won't work any better than the existing one, but hey, it's a market solution!
A fixed tax is already progressive since rich people consume far more, but I don't really care. Also the tax would be so small that it really would not matter (as long as many produces have this stamp). Only if nobody cares about the FDA it will be expensive.
> Second, all non-FDA labeled products will have a MASSIVE tax applied, to pay for the externalized costs of bad food, such as emergency room visits, death, sickness, etc.
That's another problem with government. Once it does everything, everything has effect on everything else. You can force any health measure on the population with the argument that others have to pay for you if you don't do something. You might as well require that everybody does mandatory sports and eat the state approved diet.
If you as a state want to make a commitment to universal health care then you have to accept people being people and doing unhealthy things. If you as a state don't want to do that, you have two options, don't do it or put a totalitarian policy state in place so people follow your rules.
Even so, there is no way to prove that these MASSIV externalisiere exist. That's simply your assertion. It could also be that these people are exactly the same on avg. It could be that because they abuse products they die faster and thus cost less money to the state.
> Of course we need a state to enforce this system, and it won't work any better than the existing one, but hey, it's a market solution!
You are contradicting yourself. Its not a market solution, its a state run system either way.
What this idea is about is testing if products that are not FDA approve really are worse in the longer term. Because if it turns out that it is the case that they are not, then we can just all agree to drop the FDA.
As long as the FDA has monopoly we have know way of knowing what there actual effects. Seems to me more people should care about stuff like that.
> As long as the FDA has monopoly we have know way of knowing what there actual effects. Seems to me more people should care about stuff like that.
While we may not know exactly the actual effects of the FDA or any other governmental policy, we can have a pretty good idea. We do this via econometric analysis of countries with and without entities like the FDA. Ideally we can get time series data where a country created an FDA. We'd throw in a few control variables as well. Then we see the effects of the stuff like the FDA - and even if this isn't perfect, we'd know in general the likely effects of it.
The evidence shows that having an agency regulating drugs and food increases safety. For example, England had a massive issue with a drug which impacted their newborns. We didn't have the issue because the FDA rejected it for use.
>Even so, there is no way to prove that these MASSIV externalisiere exist
Well, actually we can prove externalities exist via various quasi-experiments and math. That's kind of what economists do in order to justify intervening in a market. There are measurable externalities in healthcare - which are at least a certain size and probably larger.
Healthcare in general is interesting because of stuff like the herd effect. If someone takes a bunch of sub-par antibiotics and the bacteria they have evolve around that pill all of society is negatively impacted. The disease is more resistant (kills more people) and society needs to pay for a new antibiotic to be researched and produced. And we don't know what these potential adverse effects are initially - what if we accidentally expose a bacteria to enough weak anti-bacterial agents that it becomes immune and kills millions of people? What if a sub-par untested drug turns all of it's users into homicidal maniacs? Or, like England, we could have years of birth defects.
The companies usually don't know the risks either - because before the FDA medical tests were usually very rushed.
So, as a society we have two options to fix these externalities.
One was listed above: charge producers/consumers of poor drugs a tax equal to the costs they impose on society. The government would then redistribute the tax to injured parties. The problem here is in pricing the externaities properly. Also, how do we know what a poor drug is without testing them? We can't, so we'd have to tax all drugs the same. As a result, if we tax too high we have fewer drugs produced and society suffers. If we tax too low then bad drugs slip in and possibly we didn't guess the cost of compensating people properly. So we don't have enough to pay the widow of a man who took a pill and then died four minutes later.
The second option is to regulate away the possibility of poor drugs as much as is plausible. Here we don't need to guess at how much money the externalities would cost. We also don't need to figure out optimal tax rates to get new drugs produced. In the case of healthcare clearly regulation is the best way to deal with possible negative risks.
> diamonds being "non-negotiable" seems like a huge, glowing, neon warning sign
It's deeply ingrained in Western culture. Think about it like eating dogs. There's no rational reason not to use dogs for meat, but most Westerners would throw a hissy fit rather than eat dog meat.
So don't assume the prospective bride is unreasonable. In fact, assume the opposite, as she was able to read a rational explanation of the issues with diamonds, and change her mind.
OT aside: I sometimes like to play automatic reading (ala dada) with google. So at this moment a google search for "It's all nonsense. None of it makes sense." brings up your comment at the top of the page and a few items below this link [1] which has a section entitled "Making sense of nonsense. Conant and Diamond read Wittgenstein's Tractacus".
Now I wonder if that Diamond is a chance event ("nonsense") or correlation artifact from the search algorithm ("sense").
Culture just tends to be arbitrary, in the details. If you don't care about potential social consequences, then feel free to ignore the parts that you find absurd.
I can't reply to stouset for some stupid reason, but why is it "absurd" to not want to eat horse for texture reasons? My understanding is that horse meat generally does not taste that good and is very tough, because those animals get a lot of exercise; it's like deer meat. Some people like venison, and there's no stigma attached to eating it, but it's hard to buy because demand is low (and they're not raised as livestock), and the meat is generally considered "gamey" and difficult to cook properly so it's tender instead of tough and nasty. Cow and especially chicken is popular meat because it's both relatively cheap and rather easy (and fast) to cook. It's really hard to screw up cooking chicken in fact.
On deeply nested comments, if it hasn't been long since the post was made you have to click the "permalink" ("XX minutes ago" or "XX hours ago") link to reply. I think the extra step is to help slow down flamewars ("do I really need to reply to this comment, right now?".
If this is the intention, it seems like it'd make more sense to throw up roadblocks to only someone else who's in the comment chain, rather than to someone who hasn't been involved at all and is just chiming in. Usually, those flamewars are long chains of comments between two people.
Deer meet is hard to buy, at least in the US, partly because the US has ridiculous laws prohibiting transportation of venison from US deer across state lines in various ways.
In fact, in my experience you're more likely to see New Zealand venison in a US store than US venison, because of the above laws prohibiting transportation.
> There's no rational reason not to use dogs for meat...
Yes there is, unless you would make the same argument for having sex with relatives - which philosophers have rationalized against for thousands of years (way before the genetic consequences were understood). Morality is a rationalization. Dogs are genetically predisposed to be man's best friend - friends don't get eaten.
Diamonds don't even come close, there is no positive moral argument - just a fairly recent PR campaign.
All those animals were domesticated for very different reasons. I've spent a lot of time with horses, my family had three, and they're great animals - but they don't come anywhere close to dogs when it comes to trust and the ability to read people. I've seen dogs trained with nothing more than praise - the desire to please is that strong for them. That doesn't work for horses.
I've owned horses too. It depends on what you want them to do. If you want to jump on their back and ride them around, sure. I don't do that personally, and while they don't read you like a dog can I've taken unsocialized "mean" horses and turned them into friendly companion horses with nothing but patience and the occasional cookie or carrot.
Unless your children keep having sex with their siblings as well, just pair of incest marriage doesn't actually have significant risk of genetic consequences.
Good to know. Although it does raise the question of how a line is drawn. I'm imagining a "I smoked pot when I was your age but..." sort of conversation - just infinitely more uncomfortable for everyone involved.
This basically glorifies being a white programmer in California. It's just going to push up rents as people give up on being a black salesman in Wisconsin or a latina nurse in Texas to move to California.
> selling service contracts, [...] The price is still $0 and there are still no regulations on it.
I assume at this point that you're being paid to shill some political viewpoint on the internet, because you just explained that the price of software isn't actually zero, because it's unusable (to the customers that buy a service contract) without a service contract, and creating a company that employs the developers that wrote the software to support that software has a high barrier to entry. (because those developers are already employed)
To pick at company at random, HortonWorks. I pick on them because I recently saw an invoice. $20,000 for 16 hours of training. So by your argument, there must be some kind of regulation there, right?
I assume at this point that you're being paid to shill some political viewpoint on the internet, because you just explained that the price of software isn't actually zero, because it's unusable (to the customers that buy a service contract) without a service contract
Yet here I am, using self-hosted Gitlab without having paid for a service contract, to write code for Odoo without having to pay for a service contract, using Nginx as a frontend proxy without having paid for a service contract and deploying it with Ansible without having paid for a service contract, on Ubuntu without having paid for a service contract.
You're making quite a vast assumption that service contracts mean the software is unusable without them. Red Hat Linux is just one counterexample.
A further vast assumption is that your arguments are so compelling that anyone not convinced must be a paid shill.
There are many software consultants who charge over $10,000/day for doing training. Many companies find them worthwhile when amortized over a roomful of engineers. Those consultants aren't suckering anyone in by giving them free software, in fact, they don't provide any software whatsoever.
>> it's unusable (to the customers that buy a service contract) without a service contract
> You're making quite a vast assumption that service contracts mean the software is unusable without them. Red Hat Linux is just one counterexample.
No. I'm not. I'm basing that on the tautology that consumers of "free" software who purchase expensive service contracts spend their money purchasing expensive service contracts.
Software is free in the same way that air conditioning at the mall is free, the hugs handed out by the "free hugs" guy are free, the way that the privilege of watching advertisements on TV are free. Somebody is spending time and money making this software, because they think they are going to get more out of it than they put into it (either tangibly or intangibly (except for that TempleOS guy, who does it for the voices in his head))
And this still doesn't change anything about the EpiPen. There's a consumer surplus, and the price is increased to maximize capture of consumer surplus regardless of the cost in human lives. I don't care how free software is, the price on EpiPens is going up to maximize profit.
To frame this as a simple dichotomy, would you rather live in a world where people die to maximize profit, or a world where regulation is applied to reduce human suffering and death?
Except it's not so simple. Peltzman showed with statistics in "Regulation of Pharmaceutical Innovation" that the 1962 FDA amendments resulted in an increase in human suffering and death. (The 1962 amendments added "and effective" to the FDA's mandate.)
While some ineffective drugs were prevented from reaching the market, this was overshadowed by good drugs being delayed, and a sharp reduction in new drugs being developed due to huge cost increases from the regulations.
Markets are very dynamic systems, and unintended side effects always happen even with regulations that have the best of intentions.
> I assume at this point that you're being paid to shill some political viewpoint on the internet
I don't agree with Walter on this issue, but a cursory Google of who you're talking to should indicate how ridiculous this statement is. You are profoundly out of line and you owe him an apology. (You'd owe anyone an apology, but this is particularly silly of you.)
Right, there's more than one person on the planet with that name, and surely the actual inventor of the D language has better things to do with his time than go all Liberatard on the Internet arguing economics with strangers.
You've been an HN user for a few years, so we won't ban you for this, but the way you've behaved in this thread is bannably offensive, so please don't do it again—to anybody.
Specifically: no accusations of shillage to score points in an argument; no name-calling; and respect toward your fellow users, please, from now on.
> The price hikes would immediately attract lower-cost competitors if this were truly a free market.
Any participants in a free market for a product with inelastic demand (e.g. something you need to stay alive) and non-trivial entry costs immediately implements price fixing in the absence of regulation.
When life-saving devices that require a significant supply chain to manufacture capture the bulk of consumer surplus from the majority of potential customers (and the poorest are left to die), the free market is working as intended, efficiently allocating resources to maximize profits.
The non-trivial entry costs are there because of regulations and the legal environment regarding liability.
You can view the high price as the free-market finding the intersection of supply and demand given the regulatory and legal constraints but that seems like a less than useful way of understanding 'free-market'.
> You can view the high price as the free-market finding the intersection of supply and demand given the regulatory and legal constraints but that seems like a less than useful way of understanding 'free-market'.
Stop using regulation as a stalking horse for your argument. Everything you need to know about the price of epi pens you can derive from inelastic demand (people don't want to die), and barriers to entry (copyrighted brand, network of doctors writing prescriptions, and yes, FDA approval so these things don't kill people).
The price is high because people will pay almost anything to not die. This drives the price point up to capture consumer surplus. It's easy to understand.
The Free Market isn't a magic bullet that will drive down these prices. For one simple reason. Rational actors don't compete on price. I'm going to repeat this, because so many people don't get it.
Rational actors don't compete on price. Rational actors will spend up to their expected monopoly profits to create a Nash Equilibrium where new entrants into a market will be unprofitable. The simplest way to do this is through dumping. (see "competition" in the generic drug market for example) Why doesn't this happen in every market? Regulation.
Maybe you don't like that in unregulated markets, people starve, are poisoned, are denied treatment, and worked like slaves. Because that's how you maximize profit, by minimizing your own costs by maximizing externalized costs. So you'll think anything to avoid that realization. Like blame 'regulation' for what's obviously rationally maximizing profits.
And if you want to know how exactly the 'free-market' for medical supplies would work without regulation, just look at the 1800s. Demand was still inelastic, so prices were high, quality was low (for obvious reasons), and competition was still stupid, because price fixing and dumping were still more profitable than competing on price.
Let me see if I can be a bit clearer. A market with high barriers to entry that are defined by regulations and legislative constraints is not a free market. It is a market, just not a free market.
Blaming high prices in this situation on a failure of the market mechanism is simply inaccurate. The high prices are a result of the constraints that prevent competition and the emergence of a free market.
I'm not sure what to say about your assertion that price isn't a component of a competitive market. Certainly competitors try to compete on 'value' of which price is a component among many others (ease of use, features, reputation, availability, etc.).
I don't know what you are defining as 'unregulated markets', but I'm not advocating for the removal of legal frameworks that prevent fraud, negligence, collusion, and so on.
I have a PhD in economics, and your claims about monopolies and competition aren't accurate.
Economic theory doesn't state that monopolies always arise, at least not under the circumstances you are describing. If you can buy your competitors, or make a legally binding contract to compete, the yes, monopolies are inevitable. And as you say, inelastic demand does make monopolies more likely, though your intuition that medical goods have inelastic demand may be wrong, e.g. see the RAND health care study where they randomly assign people insurance types, and find the high deductible group consume less healthcare even in emergency situations.
In the general situation, no theory guarantees that monopolies arise in the absence of regulation (apart from the above to cases which aren't the regulation you're discussing).
>Rational actors will spend up to their expected monopoly profits to create a Nash Equilibrium where new entrants into a market will be unprofitable.
In economics, anything that relies solely on Nash Equilibrium is doubtful. In most situations, Nash Equilbria are not unique, and therefore it's hard to say what will actually happen. If the Nash Equilibrium is unique, usually some stronger equilibrium concept applies like dominant strategy equilibrium.
In your case it would be more accurate to say that committing to drive out potential competitors can be a Nash Equilibrium for some parameters.
> Medical costs started angling up steeply in the 1960s with the advent of heavy regulation
Broadly, to a first approximation: Medical costs, real-estate, and education have increased in price to capture the consumer surplus created by the decline in food. clothing, and fuel costs.
> Isn't dumping competing on price?
Nope, dumping is used to drive new entrants out of a market. It also acts as a signal to prevent new market entrants.
If I sell 2 million widgets per year at a price of $10 over a cost of $1, after $4 million in capital costs, I can maintain a monopoly if I'm willing to drop my sale price to 50 cents every time someone enters my market, and I raise the price when they exit it.
This creates a Nash Equilibrium were no rational actor will spend $4 million to build a factory to compete with me.
> have increased in price to capture the consumer surplus
It is quite a remarkable coincidence that medical costs angled steeply upward immediately after heavy regulation and government involvement in it began.
> I can maintain a monopoly
It'll be pretty hard to swallow $1 million/year in losses to do so. You'd have to maintain those losses to beat back even a small competitor, who would have proportionally smaller losses. A small competitor would have the capability to ruin your business with a small investment on their part. I bet they could finance it by shorting your stock.
The US government has been heavily involved in regulating medicine since 1906. The only reason why "medical costs angled steeply upward immediately after heavy regulation and government involvement in it began" is because "heavy regulation" is a weasel-word; you could pick almost any point after 1900 or so and claim that's when it started in order to justify that argument. Take a look at the list of milestones here for example: http://www.fda.gov/AboutFDA/WhatWeDo/History/Milestones/ucm1...
The two seminal events in the 1960s are the FDA 1962 "effective" mandate, with subsequent sustained price spikes is well documented in Peltzman's "Regulation of Pharmaceutical Information".
The other one is the enactment of Medicare/Medicaid in 1966/1965. From the graphs I've seen, that corresponded with the knee in the curve.
> It is quite a remarkable coincidence that medical costs angled steeply upward immediately after heavy regulation and government involvement in it began.
Regulation didn't give people more money to spend on medicine. Offshoring jobs to China drive down prices of consumer goods to make more money available as a consumer surplus that could be captured by healthcare.
If the price of food increased, the price of housing, education, and medical care would decrease. Because the demand curve would change.
> A small competitor would have the capability to ruin your business with a small investment on their part. I bet they could finance it by shorting your stock.
That's a nice hypothetical that completely ignores all of financial theory AND history. If you ever start a company, let me know so I can short YOUR stock.
Why wouldn't it be captured by farmers? or carmakers?
> all of financial theory AND history
Can you give case history of a company that maintained a monopoly via periodic dumping to bankrupt any competitors? I'm not aware of one, and no, Standard Oil is not one (see the book "Titan" about it). I've read many econ/history books, and none them put forward your dumping theory. Do you have a book reading list?
> The non-trivial entry costs are there because of regulations and the legal environment regarding liability
I think that misplaces the cause. The requirement for safety and the high cost of failure is what creates those regulations and liabilities.
Theoretically, we could eliminate the regulations and liabilities and just let people die, but 1) that's a really bad idea, and 2) it would be excluding from the market mechanism (i.e., externalizing) the most important aspect of the product, its safety.
Suppose there were no regulations and no liability for manufacturers. Would you really trust your life or your kid's life to some unregulated clone of the EpiPen that may or may not actually work properly when needed, knowing that if it went wrong the manufacturer wouldn't even have to pay one cent of your medical bills and didn't have to worry about liability for screwing up? I suspect not.
You would if you literally didn't have $600 for the brand name version.
Maybe $600 is an amount that everyone can get with some sacrifice but there are other drugs/devices/procedures that cost $10,000s or more where people just have to go without because they're not allowed to take a chance on an unregulated alternative.
I can think of many products which are life-saving which are readily available from countless producers for relatively cheap. The difference here is just as gwright has pointed out and you have a corpus of regulation which makes this particular product more expensive and/or chokes out competition.
The only sectors of the economy where significant, lasting shortages occur are the ones most heavily regulated.
> The only sectors of the economy where significant, lasting shortages occur are the ones most heavily regulated.
So you're saying that Petroleum Exporting Countries would never say... create an Organization intended to increase the price of oil?
Or the DeBeers wouldn't collude with diamond producers to limit the availability of diamonds to increase the price?
Or that manufacturers and distributors of light bulbs, lysine, copper, cleaning powder, vitamins, glass, milk and machinery would never, ever engage in price fixing?
I want to live on your planet, where capitalism is so nice and perfect that companies rush to give away all their profit by competing the marginal cost down to zero without any of those pesky regulations.
> In the software business, with pretty much zero regulations, competition has run the price literally to $0 for broad swaths of products.
That's like saying that price competition is alive and well because banks will give you a free toaster when they charge fees to loan your money back to you.
But to address the specifics of the software industry, software is a complementary good.
I know many software companies with essentially a single product, which they give away. They make money selling service contracts, which enough customers buy to make it worthwhile.
The price is still $0 and there are still no regulations on it.
Most (all?) commercial products have complementary products. This is hardly unique to software. I seriously doubt the theory that medical products have no complementary sales.
> The only sectors of the economy where significant, lasting shortages occur are the ones most heavily regulated
That's not what economic theory (and practice) say, I'm pretty sure. For example, unregulated electrical, communication (including Internet service) and transportation markets have resulted in shortages in rural areas. Unregulated food and housing markets (and many other markets, including Internet service) result in shortages for poor people. Unregulated fishing creates shortages of fish - a 'tragedy of the commons'. Monopolies and oligopolies eliminate whole categories of products.
The free market is very good for some purposes, but it's not a benevolent God that finds solutions to all our problems. It's just a very useful tool in the toolkit.
I would first like to point out that in the context of this conversation the definition for shortage I am using is that there is a shortage of a good or service where it once was readily available. Sure I could, say, take a rocket ship, to mars and denounce the absence of internet connectivity, but that's not what I'm referring to here.
>unregulated electrical, communication (including Internet service) and transportation markets have resulted in shortages in rural areas
Again, according to my above definition this is a slightly different topic, but it seems highly dubious that a lack of regulation is what has resulted in shortages of internet service is some podunk town.
>Unregulated food and housing markets (and many other markets, including Internet service) result in shortages for poor people
The most significant factor limiting the availability of low cost housing is municipal regulation, not the absence of it. I'm not aware of any place in a developed nation which has a shortage of food. It seems what you are getting at is the options may not be affordable for some, but that is a different concept from a shortage. Furthermore, it is a bit of a stretch to refer to the food and housing markets as "unregulated". If there are any shortages in these markets it's certainly not due to a lack of regulation.
>Unregulated fishing creates shortages of fish - a 'tragedy of the commons'
I have commented on the idea of "tragedy of the commons" many times. It generally leads to quite a tangent in the conversation, but if you're truly interested I'd be happy to discuss why the problem does not lie with a lack of regulation.
>Monopolies and oligopolies eliminate whole categories of products.
A true, lasting monopoly is only possible through market regulation which strangles out competition. All the textbook examples of "monopolies" (Standard Oil) were not monopolies at all. In fact in the early days of electricity there was so much competition in the big cities that the big guys lobbied hard to get their monopoly privilege.
You make many claims in strong langauge, but that's not itself meaningful. They are at odds with what I learned from economists, and from what I believe is the very widely accepted consensus in the field (though I might have a few details wrong). Regulation is a normal, effective response to market failures, which sometimes result in shortages.
Of course, I'm not providing any citations myself!
Would you rather the city had to pay $22 million in damages, and take active steps to prevent their city police from engaging in kidnapping, assault, and false imprisonment?
Or, would you rather the city paid only $220k, and it became the new normal?
> On the other hand, there should be criminal charges against the cops.
In this country, the judicial system cannot police itself. Asking police to police police is an exercise in futility, and civilian oversight is nearly always subject to regulatory capture, as the oversight boards will eventually be composed of people who have a strong incentive to side with the police rather than "criminals".
That's an opinion that is perfectly valid for an individual to have.
However, when you express this opinion in an expressly negative way, it makes it sound like you are attempting to invalidate the opinions of people who might hold contrasting beliefs. And history has shown this to be one of the top 10 causes for conflict and wars.
Perhaps you might find a more positive way to express your personal beliefs? Perhaps you could say, "I wish we lived in a world without pain or terminal illness, so nobody would have to make the choice between pointless suffering and death".
If you find some way to contribute to the conversation without calling a man dying of cancer "revolting", you would have a better chance of finding common ground and reaching consensus.
To disagree is to try to invalidate contrasting beliefs. They aren't saying "people who commit suicide are revolting", nor "I wish we never had to make tough choices that tested our moral constitution" (like you suggest). They're saying "saccharine suicide-endorsement is revolting".
There's no consensus arising from softening and "adjusting" each other's views. We're better off describing things clearly.
What is euthanasia, except killing yourself because you have no hope for your remaining life, like every other suicide? Is it justified because you had your family and your doctor agree with you?
Any publicly traded corporation (save a small handful with a non-traditional governance model) are metric-driven companies.
Modern corporations are paperclip maximizer functions executing on a network general-purpose biological computational engines tied together with powerpoint and email and excel spreadsheets.
Want to know what the AI of the future will look like? It will be a lot like Comcast, because it will be built by Comcast and harnessed to the corporate goals of Comcast and thus will have the same value system as Comcast.
The only thing it will lack is Comcast's institutional incompetence, as it will be Comcast's goals executing on dedicated hardware and not semi-autonomous employees. And it will build a dedicated model of every man and woman on the planet, and use that information to build a personalized profile that will determine exactly how many illegitimate charges it can cram on your bill before you'll suffer through a customized cancellation service that is calibrated to your personality and mental state to be just painful enough to drive you to the brink of suicide. And the only reason it's merely to be brink, is because a dead customer is an unprofitable one. (and if you think that's hyperbole, you have a far brighter view of the future than I do)