I really don't like this style of article. It tries to imply something greater than Tim Burton's experience of the internet, but it is more like hot sauce gives me heartburn. Know what you should do when hot sauce gives you heartburn, stop eating hot sauce.
Part of the problem is that it's become very difficult to avoid the internet. To use your analogy, it's like you know that hot sauce gives you heartburn, but the world has decided to start putting hot sauce on as much of the available food as possible.
Those original sellers mainly just look like drop-shippers to me. So Amazon just going straight to the source and selling at lower margin is better for me as a buyer.
I don't know if I accept Khan's framing of, even though I haven't won any cases I have scared off potential mergers and that is a win. I think the US already leans too heavily on tying everything up in courts forever.
>I think the US already leans too heavily on tying everything up in courts forever.
yes, because companies have decided to consider courts as a cost to do business instead of a regulator they must not piss off at any cost. the courts in that capacity will simply be abused, especially as these fast moving tech companies can make billions beofore a case shuts it all down.
Definitely needs to be some reform to how punishment works, especially retroactive costs.
Don't fall for the Silicon Valley propaganda that things are on the downswing because the FTC is not allowing mergers or acquisitions. Plenty of both of those have happened this year. DirectTV is in the process of acquiring Dish Network and SlingTV which is one of the largest acquisitions of the year and should alone perish the thought that mergers aren't happening.
The claim that there are less mergers happening is from Khan not Silcon Valley.
“Sometimes, you know, the companies decide that they’re going to abandon the merger,” Khan said. Stahl asked if abandoning a merger amid the FTC’s scrutiny was a win, to which Khan said, “That’s right.”
https://legal-mag.com/ftcs-lina-khan-defends-merger-and-acqu...
Yes, because some mergers are bad. Like really really bad. For you and me, consumers.
If adobe merged with figma that would be catastrophic for that domain. Prices would skyrocket, quality would invariably fall off, and innovation would stagnate due to lack of competition.
Part of having a free market is maintaining it. You can't have a free market if it's constantly consolidating into a monopoly or pseudo-monopoly. This is bad for the products, for the market, and for the consumer.
The keyword in that last sentence is market. Plenty of people will argue what the FTC is doing is stifling economic growth - but it's the opposite. Anti-competitive behavior stifles economic growth in the long run, so preventing it allows smaller companies to grow and innovate. Keeping slow moving giants on life support and de-facto welfare is not good for the economy.
I don't disagree with some of the aims of Lina Khan, mostly just the strategy. Scaring away potential mergers is much, much less valuable than establishing case law or getting legislation passed. It is kinda parallel to overreliance on executive orders over legislative wins.
> Scaring away potential mergers is much, much less valuable than establishing case law or getting legislation passed
There're a few problems with this:
1. Our lawmakers are incredibly inefficient, and many dedicated their lives to ensuring new laws don't get passed. Doesn't matter what the law is, they're career "blockers"
2. Our courts are not unpartisan, and many are conservative-leaning, and they'll simply continually strike down laws until they make it up and up and then the extremely conservative supreme court blocks it. This has been Texas' strategy.
You can't establish case law if you don't take cases. Companies not wanting to go through with mergers because they are afraid of the FTC investigating them sounds like a side effect and not the intent.
It's a mix of both. Some mergers fall through under regulation fear. Others fall through because aquisitions are expensive and it'd take years to make up for the cost (like the activision/blizzard one that was announced when money was cheap and went through when money became expensive).
>DirectTV is in the process of acquiring Dish Network and SlingTV which is one of the largest acquisitions of the year
What's wrong with that? Who still watches TV (either OTA or from satellite) in this age, except for elderly people who haven't figured out how to use the internet? This seems like people complaining about the consolidation of companies in the landline telephone market. It's a dying market, so of course the companies still hanging on are going to merge so they can save costs and squeeze the few remaining customers more.
Yes, Khan has been a disaster for the FTC. Grossly overreaching, media grandstanding and then quickly losing in court in not-even-close rulings is not some kind of win.
I don't use Rails, but those Solid Adapters look cool. I think people would be surprised how long a RDBMS good enough before moving to more specialized solutions. Just jumping to best of class solutions for cache, pub/sub, full-text search, vector search, document storage, etc. adds too much operational complexity if you can get by just using a single database.
Years ago I was working on a large Drupal site hosted on AWS with RDS MySQL and ElastiCache for caching. We noticed that ElastiCache was slower than we expected and switched the caching backend over to use the MySQL implementation in a simple KV table, and it was quite a bit faster than ElastiCache for most operations.
People really underestimate how good modern RDBMS are, especially when they have their query cache tuned properly, there's no reason to be slower than Memcache or Redis.
Evaporative cooling (and the water required) is cheaper than the electricity for traditional cooling. If the economics changed or there really wasn't enough water, they could change how the data center is cooled. This is mostly a fake problem.
Solar has been cheap for a while now. I think what is changed now is that financial markets have become comfortable with financing solar projects. In the beginning it is hard to grade the risk of a project where cloudy weather or unproven degradation estimates can substantially change how much power is being generated and sold. To get a lot of projects financed, you had to come with a 10-year purchase agreement. The are only so many datacenters and industrial customers willing to do that.
Yes. Killing more of theirs in response to an attack on yours is fruitless. It just perpetuates the situation. And also, every time you kill one civilian there, their kids become terrorists for life (or at least have a good chance to). Hitting military targets is ok, but just lobbing a few missiles that way in retaliation because they fired some on you last week is really not going to help in any way. It only perpetuates the death and destruction.
Netanyahu seems to be very much against negotiations and keeps blowing the situation up because he doesn't want to 'look weak'. But this does nothing to actually help the Israeli people get safer. The only way they can actually be safe is to sit down and make peace. And of course not to keep taking more and more territory as Israel has been doing (and was even condemned by the UN).
Seriously, this shit has been going on since the founding of Israel. If they keep it up they will never feel safe. Neither side will ever be fully bombed into submission. Remember both Russia and the US tried that in Afghanistan, it didn't work there and it won't work here. All it does is keep the military industrial complex fed and wrecking lives in the process.
Someone has to take the first step and stop retaliating. And make some agreements which are fair to both parties. Then they can both build up a society and have less reason to upset things because they have a thriving society to lose.
I'm not defending Hamas nor Hezbollah. But this has to stop and 'responding' or 'retaliating' isn't going to help.
Only the Gazans charge that Israel kills civilians. The Lebanese understand exactly that Israeli targets Hezbollah. Read any Lebanese newspaper - they blame Hezbollah.
There's disagreement on how carefully they try to avoid doing it, but even their closest geopolitical ally the US has urged them to do more to prevent civilian casualties.
Nestjs has no real ecosystem compared to Django, Rails, Laravel, ASP.NET or Spring. Prisma has some nice typing but it is not even half as capable as the Django ORM.