They really aren’t. They package benefits to try to hit different price points. Obamacare accelerated consolidation of providers and most regions have a cartel of 2-4 health networks.
The US is building out the infrastructure for a police state. The people who control the consolidated tech platforms are either spearheading or collaborating with that process. Privacy as a concept isn't even in the cards.
You need to be prepared to avoid saying naughty things on the internet. Otherwise, perhaps someone will figure out that you great-great grandfather didn't sign in the right spot in 1897 and you're presence in the United States is void, retroactive to your birth. Off to El Salvador with you, enemy of the people.
A lot of our current privacy and liberty woes were exacerbated by 9/11. Can you imagine a Church Committee in 2026? Me neither.
Three letter agencies have way too much power and they've shaped our culture+laws for the worse. Osama Bin Laden has done way more damage to American citizens' lives than he could've ever dreamed of.
Just like the KGB and Putin's minions, Bin Laden correctly saw fault lines and weaknesses in the US an exploited them. He did what he did with a long-range context in mind. The "three letter agencies" were neutered in the 90s as part of the peace dividend which is why he was successful. The Russians used "active measures" with intelligence in the US 2016 among other times and Bin Laden chose terrorist violence. The Russian misinformation strategy is tried and true and corporate actors now use it successfully as well.
The whole thing sucks. This Iran adventure lays the vulnerability of the US military machine pretty bare. More, escalated conflict is probably in the world's future for decades to come.
This wasn't by design. Obama had options. He campaigned against mass surveillance but flip-flopped once in office, installing the very surveillance levers he criticized. “No more secrecy,” he said. “That is a commitment that I make to you.”[1] If his only option was to install these surveillance levers, then I guess American democracy is just a lost cause.
Someone pointed out something to me and it's really struck a chord with me.
In the USA, we hate the government collecting information on us, but shrug our shoulders when corporations do it.
In Europe, it's the exact opposite. They created GDPR to restrict how corporations collect and share data about you, but they shrug their shoulders at government doing it.
Obviously, this is incredibly reductive and over-simplified, but the general idea of it feels pretty true.
Sure, but I think the point of this thread was (or should be) what can be done in the US to resist this. There's a lot of things the US resists doing because voters who never traveled outside of it can be convinced that what it is as implemented elsewhere is somehow flawed or worse than the status quo.
You see this exact pattern with real health care, common sense gun laws, investment in mass transportation, probably more that I'm not thinking of.
> Sure, but I think the point of this thread was (or should be) what can be done in the US to resist this.
I read that as "we're not going to sit with the uncomfortable implication that the places being held up as policy exemplars are also the places criminalizing speech."
You’re confused because you are treating free-market and capitalism as the same thing.
Capitalism is about who owns the assets, free markets are about how they are transferred. They don’t require each other. State owned enterprises can participate in the free market, an example are municipal utility companies. Private enterprises can operate without a free market, an example would be Lockheed Martin, whose defense business is mostly cost plus contracts.
The US hobbled the free market with deregulation since the 1980s. We encourage monopolies with strange reactionary legal precedent, use tax and other policy to establish price floors on residential units and health procedures.
The behavior that these firms are able to carry on with in veterinary, dental, dermatology, hvac and plumbing is anti-competitive and predatory.
When I worked for the government, we had a requirement to get a certification for every model of device Dell had on our contract. This excluded consumer devices. They had >350 SKUs, with probably millions of configurations.
Apple a decade ago had like 10. Now probably 20-30 Mac configurations, and even those probably share alot of components.
I expressed that poorly. I mean the internal components.
The MacBook Neo has 2 configuations. The MacBook Pro has several, but the SOC funnels those configurations into a few paths and segments the market. You can't get a "base" MacBook Pro with 128GB of ram or a large SSD. Dell will sell whatever the components allow you to do, usually only limited by the hardware.
It’s really about bypassing the existing power structure of the company. Competence of the work itself is a secondary objective. Most in-house initiatives can be slow rolled by management.
The fresh faced consultant with 2-3 steps to access the CEO neutralizes that. It seems grifty but is really exploiting bugs in corporate governance.
The current fad of firing the managers is a riff on this. Every jackass C-level is coming up with the novel idea of flattening.
No, you misunderstood. It is not about their output, it almost never is.
Most of the times, the business decision has already been made long before McK is hired. It’s all about legitimizing that decision and making it happen.
You can also wield them as a weapon against internal competitors or opponents. Look up how they were used to kill off Cariad for example.
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