Verse ancap Brazilian doomer

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 28th, 2023

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  • Brazilian here. This a controversial topic, so take what I say as an opinion.

    Although Musk is a man child and a scumbag, he is right on this. He is not refusing to comply with local laws, he is refusing to comply with illegal, monocratic decisions from the supreme court.

    It is not news that the supreme court had given themselves dictator-like powers. In this case, there is no law that mandates that a social network has to have legal representatives in the country, and there is no law that a social network has to censor specific person, unless they are commiting a crime, which of course require a investigation and the due legal process, all steps that the supreme court had ignored. Moreover, the supreme court is not persecution, so they can’t just make this decision without being summoned.

    They’ve been doing that for a while now, in the name of fighting “anti-democratic acts”, which is just a faceless ghost. This is, again, based on no law whatsoever, so the supreme court had taken for themselves persecution and legislative powers, gravely hurting the separation of powers.

    Disclaimer: I’m not right leaning, but I’m as libertarian as one can be










  • I don’t like to argue semantics on the internet so I won’t answer further than this

    US Department of Justice alleges Apple to be a monopoly

    With all due respect, I really don’t care what the US government calls a monopoly. It doesn’t make it a monopoly just because some county government said so.

    Single seller: In a monopoly, there is one seller of the good, who produces all the output.[6] Therefore, the whole market is being served by a single company, and for practical purposes, the company is the same as the industry.

    That’s the most important thing. We agree on that one. A monopoly is the singular provider of a good in the market. Github is not the only provider of git hosting (think Gitlab and Bitbucket). Apple is not the singular provider of smartphones (Sansung, Motorola, Xiaomi, etc), nor it’s the singular provider of laptops (Lenovo, Samsung, Alienware, Framework). All of the other points are things that monopolies do, but alone doesn’t make a monopoly.

    This difference is important, because creating a true monopoly is impossibly hard. So hard in fact, that they are usually caused by interference of the government (like Petrobrás here), not the other way around.



  • I don’t think there’s a precise name for that, since it can be a lot of complex things. A monopoly is a very defined thing, that was my point.

    A company can be prominent because it is just better at giving what the consumers want. That’s the case of Google (as a search engine). I use Duck Duck Go, but very often I have to fallback to Google because DDG’s results are just not quite right.

    It can be prominent because what it does is very expensive and so only a few can even try it. That’s again the case with Google. Creating a good search engine is hard, and Google just got more money to throw at it. That’s also the case of Apple. What they are selling (premium products with very high quality and stability) is inherently expensive, and such they don’t face a lot of competition (Sansung I guess). Many big corp will lobby the government to artificially make the market more expensive so they can rule out small fish (don’t quote me on that, I’ll not elaborate further).

    A company can also turn itself into a conglomerate, merging, buying and assimilating other companies. That’s the case with AbInbev here in Brazil. They assimilated most of the beer companies. It is very hard (in my opinion impossible) for this to turn into a monopoly, because there will be other big fish trying to play the same game (Petrópolis and Heineken in this case, for example), and there will always be those companies that will not accept being bought, hoping they will be the next big fish.

    I’m not making any judgement of value here, I hate big corporations, but I think we should put blame where blame is due, and not attack straw men and use water down terms, because that’s pretty weak.