The alternative is government standards. You have power outlets you can interchangeably plug different appliances into. Why? Standards. Let there be a standard for color-controllable light sources that ensures interoperability of components, and then there will be competition to hit price-vs-shittiness balances suiting multiple parties.
Before concluding that the NHS health record is the only option, you should consider industry standards like USB, which in some cases have worked well. We must have a failure-and-improvement cycle in case the standard is bad and fundamentally doesn’t work. We forgo that cycle when the government takes up the cause, even worse yet when the regulators are captured by some collusive fiend.
USB is now a pile of incompatible standards in a trench coat, holding hands with a menagerie of incompatible connectors in another trench coat, all wrapped in a third larger trench coat and claiming to be a single universal standard.
Power delivery is the worst, but for a long time it was super random whether you'd get USB2 or USB3 speed, wait sorry USB3 High Speed or USB3 Full Speed or whatever they renamed it to. And then there's the confusion between USB 1/2/3/etc. and A/B/mini-A/mini-B/micro-A/micro-B/C connectors, and the fact that it requires a half-page infographic to just sum up the latter (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB#Connector_type_quick_refer...). Overall I feel that the USB Working Group, wait the USB Promoter Group, wait- who even are they? should take a vow of penance and refer to themselves as the SB Group until they sort this out.
Apple’s Lightning has some of the worst connectors ever. I have about 5 USB-C cables and about 10 Lightning cables in my home. Each Lightning cable cost me more than 2x rhe most expensive USB-C cable bought from a convenience store and yet 4/5 of the Lightning cables have their wiring inside exposed while the USB-C ones could pass off as new.
The only issue I’ve ever had with a device on the USB-C side is 1 cable that is incapable of charging my wife’s macbook.
Guess how many of my Apple made Lightning cables are capable of charging my wife’s MacBook.
> USB is not the poster child for successful industry-led standards.
Every day billions of devices use USB for charging and data transfer and work just fine.. was there some government intervention that jumped in to make that work that I am unfamiliar with?
However the sausage was made.. and is still being made... may be imperfect and ugly but USB seems pretty darn successful!
No, you be that guy. As many gripes as I have with USB, the EU forcing all phone manufacturers to use a common charging standard was huge. This is the kind of thing where government action really can improve on a Nash equilibrium.
It would be regulatory capture. The same companies that are enshitifying these products would send lobbyists to law makers to build a larger moat around their shitty products.
I was excited for Matter for all it promises... but companies seem to be explicitly holding back support for it because they recognize that it will bring less control for them, less differentiation, and far fewer opportunities to force these money-squeezing ideas onto consumers. I hope to be proven wrong but I'm not feeling very optimistic about its long-term future right now.
The national electrical code is a private standard. Many local laws directly reference it, but it's not created nor maintained by the government in any way. These standards often come about by simply recognizing the most popular solution and then codifying it.
The government is not better at this than the market.
Of course it is. Try buying insurance on a house that didn't get a building permit. Try reselling it. And how, exactly, does the government "enforce" the code? Are you put in jail for not following it?
You can be, quite easily - see Title 8, 3321b2 (a PA law that lets PA municipalities punish building ordinance violations via criminal process) - most states have some version of this.
This isn't always a state level issue. It's often established county by county. There are lots of counties in the US where there is no zoning law. The only state business you need to do there is report any improvements to the appraiser for tax purposes.
Some of these districts _do_ have inspectors anyways, and they will issue permits, but the county itself does not require you to do this. As I said though, you will certainly be unable to insure anything you've built without a permit in these places. Aside from that, you can build what you want however you want.
And the same government makes sure that the code, in addition to including things that are actually necessary for your safety, also includes a lot of other things that aren't, but that are beneficial for the friends and relatives of government officials who run construction companies and don't want to have to innovate. As Robert Heinlein once said, "We have never seen a modern house."
In the US, it can definitely reach the point where they will tear it down and send you the bill for the demolition. And if you don’t pay that bill, they’ll then auction off your land to get paid.
The alternative could be investors investing their capital responsibly, in companies with competent C-suites. That would be a nice trend to see. And I have some hope we might.
Actual reputable engineers leading engineering companies, doctors leading medical start-ups, career drivers leading car manufacturers, and so on. That is sustainable. I don’t get the infatuation investors have with the business class where even the most incompetent CEO with experience is often preferred to real competence of a specialist. That experience is available (and much cheaper!) through consulting contracts.
Investing in enshittification schemes is known in some circles as “shitting where you eat”, pardon the strong idiom. It harms the industry they’re trying to exploit for profit. It’s not only parasitic, but self-destructive.
> The alternative could be investors investing their capital responsibly, in companies with competent C-suites
That will never happen, the influence of money is always corrupting. There is no free market solution, these are things that have to be enforced by law.
I don’t disagree with what you’re saying, but it’s not money that’s corrupting.
I find the moralizing of these actions quite frustrating because they seem to indicate people don’t actually understand why things work the way do.
The C-suite aren’t corrupt. They have a job to do and they’re doing their job. Their job is to maximize returns on the investors’ investments. That’s it. It’s absolutely moral for them to do that job.
One might complain that their actions focus too much on the short term rather than the long term, and that would be a legitimate complaint. But only if it means they’re losing money in the long term. Enshittification usually makes money both in the short and long terms.
Once we recognize that people aren’t being “corrupt” but actually doing the job they’re being paid to do by maximizing their profits, one can focus on how to provide incentives to maximize profits without making things worse. And profit maximization inevitably leads to making things worse because it requires minimizing what you’re giving the customer and maximizing what you’re getting from them.
The free market check on this is competition. But competition only works if it’s a genuinely competitive market, and there are clear signals to the customer who is educated in understanding and valuing those signals, regarding the quality of products.
This used to be much easier earlier where products were simpler, but it’s much harder now. The vast majority of the market will have no ability to evaluate the risk of needing an online account to switch on your light bulb. And so a company which provides the no login option will be less competitive because it won’t be able to make money off your data and it will have to support an additional workflow.
In the absence of customer knowledge and visibility we only really have standards.
Ideally you start with standards provided by industry trade bodies. However, those are ripe for corruption and as a result there’s hardly any such successful standards.
Which leads you to the final option which is govt standards that are either highly encouraged by the threat of possibly instituting firmer regulations or just plain and simple regulated with the threat of fines and jail.
No need to be so cynical. Regular people are investing in publicly traded companies and they do care. Activist investing is on the rise. Private investors in the tech sector now do much more rigorous vetting of companies (especially after series B) than a decade ago, many people are already talking about the end of cheap money. Also, the phenomenon called techlash affects investors as well.
It might not be happening at a large scale, but we are moving in that direction in recent years.
?? Driving around a lot doesn’t mean you know anything about manufacturing cars. You may have good inputs on what the interior design should be, but getting a team to build a million mile engine requires a different skill set.
