If they hate Lina Khan, it's because she's liable to make demands on them without knowing anything about their business. In the worst case, her office turns outright extortionist, as the current administration is bent on demonstrating.
None of that conflicts with the observation that large, well-financed, entrenched players better at navigating regulatory obstacles than small upstarts.
They don't have anything against regulators and they certainly don't have anything against dumb regulators.
They've got a little red laser dot on the forehead of regulators who don't want a payday after a term of "public service".
"Because we poor public servants are always looking for some fat, private sectors payoff down the road. But I'm not looking, and by the time they can pull the strings to force me out, they'll be ruined."
> I am so happy not to live in an American small town. Because whenever I'm shown some small town in the States it is populated with all kinds of monsters among whom flesh hungry zombies, evil aliens and sinister ghosts are most harmless.
Mocking irony, in the context of a negative review.
Sarcasm is saying one thing and meaning the opposite. If monsters are most harmless, then also not wanting to live there makes logical sense and isn't backwards. So that's straightforward mockery, not sarcastic.
> Sarcasm is saying one thing and meaning the opposite.
What I find fascinating here is how generative AI has inverted all our sci-fi tropes. I mean, sure: you're right! That's the way "sarcasm" is defined in most dictionaries. But you and I both know that as the language is actually used, the term means a whole host of techniques used to convey negative emotional content in language that is not directly negative. Your (correct!) dictionary pedantry isn't interesting to me. We've been here before.
But GPT-4 wasn't trained on dictionary rules. It was trained on actual language. And it's actually better at inferring this stuff than the pedants are. Our introvert brains have trouble teasing meaning like this and have to hide behind rules and structure. The computer doesn't.
But I'm not being a pedant, we're measuring sarcasm. Someone has to clearly define it to judge the AI. If everyone in these threads thinks sarcasm is anything "negative" then they are wrong. That would be a negative sentiment classification. You have to be clear with what you're measuring.
> I mean, look at it this way: when you ask a crew to paint your house, you specify the colors upfront. You don't iterate with them on after every room, or every wall.
This isn't a useful analogy - more often, it's like asking a crew how much it would cost and how long it would take to paint your house, except the house isn't built yet, you're not sure what you're going to use it for (or whether you'll actually use it as a house rather than a B&B), plus you reserve the right to change colors at any point in the process.
The standard you've laid out proposes that any statement about a man's experience in a relationship is by definition misogynistic, because it's centers the man (and, of course, erases women). Do you stand by that?
Additionally, consider that you are the one bringing the nagging wife trope into this: it's merely one of many possibile explanations and unhappy marriage.
The difference is the original statement was not about a specific man's experience; it was a generalization about married men's experiences as a whole.
Saying "I was in an unhappy marriage and it made me a great philosopher" would be fine. It's the generalization which is an issue here.
I don't mean this as a gotcha question: I really don't understand what people are claiming when they say this.
All three of those companies are now large conglomerates with a lot of power (perhaps too much), but calling them "monopolies" is counter-productive (except Google search), especially in the context of regulatory or legal framework, where the facts have to fit a very precise pattern to take action.
They own a dominant platform for consumer shopping and use it to promote their own products. Meanwhile established competitors like Walmart cannot be featured on the same platform without submitting to rules that Amazon itself doesn't have to abide to. It's called a tie-in arrangement in antitrust law, and it's not legal.
I'd agree that they are "dominant", and that legal authorities should watch Amazon closely for specific violations, but they only control 35-40% of the online consumer retail market (by most estimates circa 2022).
Physical retail stores are not a natural monopoly platform like a shopping site is. There's nothing stopping Amazon from building a physical store next door to a Walmart and selling its products there.
How is a shopping site a “natural monopoly” when there is an existence proof that there are other large shopping sites - like Walmart.com?
If you go on Facebook or Instagram you can find thousands of small merchants who advertise there and ship directly to consumers.
> There's nothing stopping Amazon from building a physical store next door to a Walmart and selling its products there.
And there is nothing stopping you from building a website and doing targeted advertising that is reachable by anyone. Wouldn’t you say it’s a lot easier creating a website than building a physical store?
What you say is true, but these companies aren't successful because their products are usable. They succeeded because of their first-mover advantage, lack of alternatives, and compliance requirements that raise the cost of competition. We don't owe them any respect when it comes to UX.
I can see how it gets tiresome reading repetitive arguments, but a solid theory undergirds all the criticism: that one way to beat SAP, oracle, Microsoft, etc. Is to provide a better user experience.
User experience is fleeting. I like the user experience of manual transmission cars but >80% of new drivers today would scream user experience if you gave them one. Perhaps the complaint here comes from these types of users who expect novelty to their liking.
There was a comical reference to Tesla. If you’ve only experienced the user experience headache that Tesla forces on you every time they have a major software update (at least 2x a year). The muscle memory has to adapt.
Nefore better UI and UX help you beat SAP and co, you need compliant, and industry specific ERP functions on par with them. And then you need to sway all those existing customers away from them. In market that doesn't value UI half as much as you seem to think.
I agree that the enterprise market does not value usability very much, and I would even agree that the enterprise vendors made the right choice to deliver anything at all, in the early stages of ERP (even the first two decades).
None of that means the software is good: we can recognize the smart business choices those companies made and also abhor their products.
They provide what Alan Cooper calls "Dancing bearware" - it doesn't matter how badly the bear dances, they're just grateful to have a bear that can do it at all.
Orwell, from "Politics and the English Language" [0]:
> Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different. Statements like Marshal Petain was a true patriot, The Soviet press is the freest in the world, The Catholic Church is opposed to persecution, are almost always made with intent to deceive.
None of that conflicts with the observation that large, well-financed, entrenched players better at navigating regulatory obstacles than small upstarts.