If it's so easy to do this, then it should also be easy to not make addictive apps right? Why are multi billion dollar companies unable to make a compliant app? They clearly have no issues paying for labor and since this is software, the labor is the true cost for compliance. Are they unable to hire devs that are unethical or what?
Shesh, maybe we should start fining individual developers too if companies aren't able to do it themselves.
This forum is baked by a VC firm that relies on gambling with pension funds to make a billion dollars, are you honestly expecting real tech discussions here and not a bunch of smoke + mirrors?
They are talking to their users, it's not those that use Zed it's the VC firm that funds them. They seem to be implementing everything those users want.
If you only talk to the users you already have, you won't know what the users who don't use your product want. Many a project and company have peaked early for this very reason.
I'm sure if you asked the average tax payer they would prefer programs like these rather than corporate welfare nonsense. So yeah, seems alright to me. I'm a tax payer.
What's interesting is that you don't realize how much of that stuff from Walmart had artistic processes embedded into it along the production line.
Did those shower curtains have a design? Did your sweater have a color and style? Probably so, but you never pay attention to how the world of "fine art" refracts into your daily life.
If the products were cheap, it's likely someone unpaid is responsible for the design. See, for example, the lawsuit against Zara over theft of ideas from small-time designers [1].
In any case, cheap Chinese brands do the same thing as Zara en masse (copying designs – note the "external suppliers" bit in its defense PR), and those products then end up in Walmart/on Amazon. The artists starve but you have your shower curtains and are happy with the price.
I do. My aunt is a pattern designer for ... Shower curtains at Walmart. Yup she works for a supply house in NY that designs shower curtains and her main customer is walmart
Even when people are paid, it’s not necessarily fair nor driving the price paid - like clothing/purse manufacturing in low income countries for high income markets.
Yes and do billion dollar corporations really need that much government subsidies? Turns out yes they do, but sure enjoy your plastic trinkets from China I guess. Hopefully you thank a tax payer that pays for the welfare and medicaid of those Walmart workers, and the local town for cheaper property taxes and utility rates at Walmart.
God knows Walmart couldn't exist with all this rampant welfare.
walmart solves a major logistical problem: provide government subsidized goods to low income neighborhoods. the government should like to give walmart money, as it is plausibly a cost-effective way to provide these goods to people who need them. the administrators of walmart are well rewarded for providing this public good.
You can both be right. Walmart is a valuable corporation; there are useful idiots who choose not to see that. It’s also a profitable one, which means it doesn’t need subsidies; another set of useful idiots can’t seem to see that.
The only thing Walmart solves is destroying local ecosystems both biological and human. Acting like the executives paying themselves exorbitant salaries is a virtue is frankly odd and deeply disgusting as a human being, I'm sure the lowly workers wished they could vote themselves higher salaries too.
Maybe if workplace democracy was enforced upon Walmart it would be an entirely different entity, likely for the better too.
> Yes and do billion dollar corporations really need that much government subsidies? Turns out yes they do, but sure enjoy your plastic trinkets from China I guess. Hopefully you thank a tax payer that pays for the welfare and medicaid of those Walmart workers, and the local town for cheaper property taxes and utility rates at Walmart.
This is not the case.
Walmart doesn't have the lowest prices because they are efficient, yes conventional wisdom might dictate that but you are forgetting wholesalers exist from which conventional retailers buy from and the margin definitely tilts towards walmart but there was a time where they could easily compete against walmart and set their prices.
Now what's happening is that walmart has these special deals (in this case with pepsi) where pepsi would literally surveil all marts and see which is selling cheaper than walmart (FoodLion did that) and then what Pepsi did was cut off all the promotional money of FoodLion and increase their wholesaler prices.
Is this legal? Hell no. It's all completely illegal but the govt. stopped enforcing the law
Then when it was released by FTC, the whole document was almost redacted and Trump signed an executive order essentially trying to stop it from going out but some journalists dug/pressured for its release.
So walmart isn't the base because they are price competitive, hell-no. It's because they set the floor & have special deals with other companies to maintain that floor artificially.
Which actually leads to small retailers/chains shutting down because they can't compete on price and this essentially leads to a monopoly of walmart where it can dictate prices & increase them and the people are forced to STILL go to them.
And all of this while being immensely govt subsidized as you say too while paying their employees peanuts.
Actually Walmart when it was launched in germany was sued quite a lot for such practices that iirc they had to take an exit. No country wants a walmart because they know that they might use their american profits (which we discovered how come from shady practices themselves) and then use it to run marts at losses until the competition dies which is still immensely bad long term for the average consumer of whole world but particularly the americans in my opinion as all other govts are more protective of such industries for this good reason and walmart fails to measure up to those standards in other countries.
A lot of my points were heavily influenced by this video so I would recommend you to watch it to help understand more as well about what I am talking.
The deception of walmart actually fools a lot of people but the economical margin is actually quite low. It's the artifical floor that they set which gets unnoticed by many and this is why other retailers aren't able to compete, all of which is highly illegal but once again, the govt. stopped enforcing this law.
A) The government building an entire logistical supply and warehousing chain across the country for groceries to support food welfare. Cold food, meat, spoilage & waste, a bunch of federal jobs.
or
B) The government gives citizens a bit of money, which they then spend at existing warehouses (with existing logistical supply chains) to buy food. Some existing warehouses will accumulate larger shares of this money, as it has more customers.
The existing warehouses in example B are called grocery stores, like Walmart.
Seems like the it IS cheaper for the government to do it, odd how much better prices can be when you don't have to worry about making sure the fat cats stay fat.
if walmart unfairly used its monopolistic position to steal from consumers, then of course i support serving justice.
is the point of this conversation just to proclaim you don't like some guys? what is your claim here? what action do you desire the collective to take? what is the rule that society should follow?
why do you expect that rule to lead to a more prosperous, thriving society?
I wish more intellectuals had their "brain on capitalism".
It is dismaying to find out how many American academicians take Marxism seriously - unless they stem from countries like Cuba that had the misfortune to actually let Marxist ideas rule them. It is mental fentanyl for certain kind of collectivist mind.
It's possible to criticize one thing without endorsing another. Your comment reads like a response to someone criticizing what the current US administration is doing by saying "yeah but the Democrats..."
Binary thinking is analogous to quantizing an LLM to 2 bits (worse, actually). You're not going to get good results.
Most countries that tried experimenting with various systems settled on a combination of a relatively free market with a welfare system supported by taxation of the resulting economic surplus. Which indicates that this is what the population at large finds most acceptable.
In theory? The most obvious is labor theory of value, plus false consciousness and the division of the society into exploitative class and exploited class.
In practice? For example, nationalization of businesses and collectivization in rural areas, including suppression of "kulaks".
Walmart is an insanely profitable business that pays most of its employees well under a living wage.
Maybe we should have a structure in place that taxes companies based on how many benefits their employees claim, say five times the total amount of money claimed.
Rather have the government tax these entities (great way to have the public support a VAT in this instance) than rely on their "benefactors" that have shown zero remorse in the societal destruction against the planet and humanity, but okay.
Utilities do charge infrastructure projects for their interconnection costs. Maybe there was some hypothetical situation where some costs would have gone into a general budget, but utilities aren’t usually in the habit of doing large interconnection projects for free and sending the bills to consumers.
So the interconnect costs cover the infrastructure buildout to generate the additional power demands, or that’s spread across all consumers in perpetuity? Because the interconnect itself is the cheap part afaik. And all of our rates go up to cover the costs of the additional generation whether it’s another solar farm or another ng plant.
They don’t generally just have GW of power sitting idle for a rainy day (I’m not talking about the capacity they reserve for hot july days).
It's like how we "can't" stop spam callers when telecoms know exactly who is calling who, they just don't want to implement any protocols that benefit society because they rather make money while fucking over everyone.
I do agree it is a spending issue, for far too long corporate welfare has flourished in America. None of these rich people would exist with out the federal teat they suckle from, truly pathetic. Remove their bloat, take their money, and fund programs that will enable REAL economic value like medicare for all, universal childcare, free school lunches, public jobs programs, and universal education.
And where will we get the money to fund this fantasy land in 8 months after the government runs out of money and we’ve already stolen all the billionaires assets?
Should we move on to anyone with a net worth over $1M and start stealing their assets too?
Probably the same way that the republicans are able to generate funds out of thin air to pay for tax cuts. If MMT is good enough for them, it's good enough for everything else.
> And where will we get the money to fund this fantasy land ...
What are you talking about? Current administration is doing exactly that. Cutting taxes for the wealthy and adding all those loses to national debt at record level increments. No fiscal responsibility at all.
Total fantasy and essentially poor and middle-class funds the rich through their taxes (and government money printer), not to mention how mega companies like Walmart constantly underpays workers that those workers then need to survive on government subsidies, yet another funding for the rich.
This is happening with every USA government (AFAIK especially/only republican ones) since Reagan.
EDIT: also as sibling comment said - poor people spend money instantly, returning it back to economy. America was already taxing wealthy through the teeth years ago - that helped fund incredible amounts of infrastructure and let built strongest middle class (probably in history) for decades. Now all that wealth is just accumulating in someones back accounts. Trickling any day now...
> America was already taxing wealthy through the teeth years ago
Except they weren’t. Those lovely 90% tax rates from the 1950s everyone on Reddit loves to bring up weren’t really paid by anyone. The effective tax rate paid after the loopholes and deductions was much lower, closer to 40%
Nah billionaires need to be punished, they have raped the Earth for profit and caused mass misery/death upon her people. In fact a good way for the US to rebuild credibility is to probably send a few billionaires to the Hague and have them tried for crimes against humanity in the ICJ.
Lots of billionaires should probably be at the hague. But we should be glad if people can become billionaires because they are generating that much value of both parties being better off, without imposing externalities on others. Yvonne Chouinard came close to this ideal, I think.
If someone can genuinely generate billions in value, not just by imposing externalities on others that they then reallocate to themselves, I will be damn glad that they exist and be damn glad that the hope of getting richer keeps them at it.
No we shouldn't be "glad that people can become billionaire".
We should be glad that people can get reasonable wealthy, say, $100M net worth would be more than plenty, and would ensure that: people who worked hard got a lot ($100M!!), but nobody alone or in very small numbers can try to destroy the fabric of society
Is that hard for you to understand?
The fact that at your age you're still mistaking "generating billions in value" (this doesn't mean anything) with "extracting money from the system and selfishly refusing to give some of it back in a meaningful way" means that you still have to learn about how the world really works
I'm not glad they can become billionaires for their sake. I'm glad they can become billionaires for your and my sake, under the ideal I proposed, which is that billionaires can become that way only by entering into transactions where all sides are better off for doing so.
Because you fail to understand how economy and the world works. No, they don't "only do so by entering into transactions where all sides are better off", that's just a convenient fiction for people like you who never thought about the economic realities
The truth is they are abusing a system and rigging the laws, in order to keep extracting as much as they can. If it was really a "better for everyone", why don't you think all Starbuck's barista would be "overjoyed" of going to work every day? Think for yourself one minute instead of repeating talking points from FoxNews that you never even considered for one minute
Oh I understand how it works. That's why I agreed many of them deserve to be at the Hague.
Remember, I said, ideal I proposed -- the ideal of the free market, where they can only become billionaires by entering voluntary transactions without externality to others. Under such ideal, if someone is a billionaire, it's because everyone is better off.
There have been varying shades of gray for how these play out in reality, the least shaded ones I'm generally grateful for and the most shaded ones are outright criminals that should have their fortune seized and put behind bars.
No, this is truly a pathetic mindset. There is more to the world than making "value." No one dies thinking "I wish I made more value." Absolutely pathetic, much like them.
Exactly. Also it's not the "billionaires" who are "making value". They are lousy at making anything. It's the workers (engineers, farmers, factory workers) that "make".
The billionaires are just good at "capturing" value, and not giving back the rightfully owned share by the people.
"engineers, farmers, factory workers" can just enter a co-op and sell the goods cheaper while still enjoying a slightly higher wage if the billionaires really aren't contributing anything. Seems like if what you say is true, in a free market billionaires would be forced out of business because they could not compete.
Shesh, maybe we should start fining individual developers too if companies aren't able to do it themselves.
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