RE: JXTA, right around the turn of the century, it felt like there was an opportunity for a globe-spanning peer-to-peer application layer, based on content-addressable storage.
DHTs—Chord paper was 2001—started popping up. The big software vendors looked at the architectural (if not legal) success of Napster & the other P2P networks and were invested in finding legitimate applications. Open standards were seeing real adoption left and right.
But it didn’t happen. Maybe simultaneously too late in the Internet’s evolution and too early.
Too late because the big kids were involved. Especially Microsoft, who would never allow any standard they couldn’t EEE to emerge. Too early because the players like Google who later could muscle through core infrastructure standards weren’t there yet.
And now it’s likely too late, with mobile embedding a client-server model with the weight of 10B devices.
Citrix is still everywhere you need a client that can do things a web browser can’t—like run ancient VB4 software or talk to device hardware—deployed at scale.
Citrix was bought out by PE for $16.5B a few years ago, under the (sadly correct) assumption they hadn’t been charging their customers enough money for this essential tech.
That's easily circumvented with management service organizations. More broadly, it's a stupid idea, especially beyond a few areas like law. If you own a golf course, you shouldn't have to sell only to a golfer.
It should be more about making certain levels of consolidation and deep erosion of local ownership illegal.
We have run this country on an assumption that we must give businesses a high amount of freedom. An argument can be made that businesses have been given too much freedom in our system. We’ve allowed Amazon and Ticketmaster and Walmart to exist and they shouldn’t exist in their present form.
Healthcare practices that provide necessary care shouldn’t even really be allowed to be for-profit entities if you ask me. The incentives become too perverse as a result.
>Healthcare practices that provide necessary care shouldn’t even really be allowed to be for-profit entities if you ask me. The incentives become too perverse as a result.
Why stop at healthcare? Why not other essentials of life, like food or toilet paper?
You’re absolutely right. For example, we’ve seen the negative impacts from excessive agricultural consolidation.
Many of them already lack profitability without subsidy.
Many agricultural products all pass through the same mega-sized processors and entities. Driscoll’s, Tyson, etc.
We’ve already made things like water and sanitation non-profit/government owned so the idea of doing more of that for food and essentials isn’t that crazy.
>You’re absolutely right. For example, we’ve seen the negative impacts from excessive agricultural consolidation.
Like what?
>Many of them already lack profitability without subsidy.
That doesn't mean anything without context. How are the non-PE farms doing?
>We’ve already made things like water and sanitation non-profit/government owned so the idea of doing more of that for food and essentials isn’t that crazy.
>Google “taylor farms cyclospora” or “tyson beef prices shortage” for an example of the problems of highly consolidated processing.
I already addressed cyclospora in another comment, but how is consolidation or tyson beef supposed to be blamed for the shortage? Media reports blamed the shortage on droughts and/or screw worms, hardly a tyson issue. Not to mention tyson hasn't exactly been raking it in during all this shortage:
>Yet despite record beef prices, the “Big Processors”, as Mr Trump calls them, are not thriving. Shares in Tyson, the largest, have tumbled by 40% since 2021—and by 7% since it cut its earnings forecast on September 3rd. It now expects its beef business, which brings in 40% of revenue, to lose as much as $775m this year. Trouble in the division has dragged the company’s overall operating margin down from 8.5% in 2021 to 2.6%. JBS, which is Brazilian, has said its North American business lost $427m in the first half of 2026.
>it can't have a national foodborne illness outbreak.
Which is bad for PR and great for clicks, but it's entirely unclear whether we're better off on average. What about all the years where we didn't have a mass outbreak? Would it be better if every state/county had separate food supply chains, and they had the same rate of illness, but it's more randomly dispersed so it doesn't make it to national TV? Think the difference between airplane crash (maybe one incident per year, hundreds of deaths per incident) vs car crashes (40k/year)
Hmm yes. Two deaths, over a thousand hospitalizations, and not a single state in the US with zero cases, but those are just things that are real and happened which means they do not take into account things that didn’t happen or things you could imagine in your mind.
If we simply envision a nation without diarrhea have we not eradicated it in our hearts, where it matters mos
It’s absolutely relevant because a diversified food supply would result in smaller farms, other things held equal.
You have fewer single points of failure, but more opportunities for failure and a tougher time addressing it via inspection, and less capital available to implement compliance.
> Healthcare practices that provide necessary care shouldn’t even really be allowed to be for-profit entities if you ask me. The incentives become too perverse as a result.
You don't need to disallow them for necessary care to be provided. You can just have public healthcare programs. That can look like publicly-owned hospitals or regulation that private hospitals must provide certain services under certain conditions if they want to keep operating. Private healthcare then works to provide more than that basic service that fulfills necessary care, to the benefit of the public that can afford more.
Can you define profit? Would a doctor be allowed to earn more than $200 per hour? $300 per hour? $400 per hour? Is a doctor allowed to be paid per procedure or time?
How much would you want to sacrifice your 20s and early 30s? How much would you need to work in the middle of nowhere where your kids won’t have the best opportunities?
"We’ve allowed Amazon and Ticketmaster and Walmart to exist and they shouldn’t exist in their present form."
Do you realize that when Walmart moves into a community, prices charged for everyday things overall drop significantly, both at Walmart and their competition, which means that poor families are able to buy more with every dollar.
They then get to skim the other side of those subsidies, too, since they sell so many items that qualify for SNAP and WIC, as well as being one of the largest if not the largest prescription supplier in the country.
And what happens if walmart closed up shop? Do those employees magically evaporate and not need benefits? Why are we putting the blame on the employee's best employment option?
>What competition? When Walmart comes to town, the competition closes.
Why? Because they're sending goon squads to trash all the existing businesses? If walmart replacing "the competition" because they're offering lower prices and consumers are switching, why is this bad?
Everything explodes and people die in the streets.... No, other businesses move in to fill the economic needs because there is a profit to be made and provide jobs in doing so.
>Because they're sending goon squads to trash
You have a horrifically simplistic world view and can't imagine where goon squads actually are.
There was an article around 2 decades ago on how Walmart manipulates prices at an unimaginable scale via their suppliers. If you supply Walmart they automatically become your biggest customer. Walmart knows this, and has you by the proverbial balls. If you don't meet their demands they drop you in a heartbeat which is a death sentence for any business who's capitalization is not in the 10s of billions. There was a saying in this article I can no longer find but to summarize.
"To compete against Walmart is to invite death. To work with Walmart is to embrace it".
Simply put they are so large they have near monopoly power over a good chunk of manufacturing.
>There was an article around 2 decades ago on how Walmart manipulates prices at an unimaginable scale via their suppliers. If you supply Walmart they automatically become your biggest customer. Walmart knows this, and has you by the proverbial balls. If you don't meet their demands they drop you in a heartbeat which is a death sentence for any business who's capitalization is not in the 10s of billions. There was a saying in this article I can no longer find but to summarize.
So what's the complaint here, that walmart negotiates aggressively, passing those better prices to buyers, and that's... bad? Given we're in a thread complaining about healthcare, should walmart do the opposite, instead using the insurance company strategy of encouraging their suppliers to pad their margins, so they can offer "modest" (in % terms, high in absolute terms) markups?
Around the turn of the century, my grandmother lamented how Wal-Mart had ruined the shopping experience in her small town. When the local hardware store and other stores closed, she ended up only with Wal-Mart where she said the employees didn't know anything and couldn't really help you. Anecdotal, I know, but this is a common refrain throughout the country, that by using their monopoly power they're able to undercut local businesses until they go bankrupt. The assumption is that we're left with is a net win due to lower prices for the consumer, but let me tell you another story.
An older relative had a very successful small conglomerate of businesses. One of them manufactured something costing close to $100 that Wal-Mart was interested in selling in its stores. After extensive negotiations, my relative told the Wal-Mart VP no because Wal-Mart was pressuring them to use cheaper parts that would make the product wear out more quickly. Wal-Mart didn't care because they'd be able to make the sales and then consumers would come back to buy again sooner, but my relative felt that was dishonorable. The VP said it was the first time a potential supplier ever walked away from him. They are notorious for their abuse of suppliers, and the ethical concerns are often very palpable. You might suggest this is simply market forces playing out, but we decided long ago that monopoly power often leads to a market we don't want to see in this country.
We the people get to decide what kind of society we want to live in. Their monopoly power means that in so many of the rural areas where they are, they might be one of the few viable employers. When people are poor, it's not so easy to just tell them to relocate to another geographical area, so it's easier for the entities benefiting from that to maintain the status quo at the expense of others. If we decide that for Wal-Mart to stay in business in the USA they need to pay employees more, with health insurance, then so be it. If they can't, then they can just go out of business and be replaced by a company that is able to navigate that balance better, offering pretty low prices while paying a bit more in wages.
Walmart is able to offer lower prices because it does not pay its employees enough. The people being hurt is the society at large that has to allocate taxes towards SNAP and other social benefits so that Walmart can continue to underpay people. Those resources could go to other programs. That is why Walmart is bad.
Walmart is paying what people are willing to work for. The "greeter" standing at the door is not creating $25 an hour in economic value. The biggest issue is we as a society have overextended SNAP and social benefits, trying to equalize outcomes, rather than recognize that entitlements should be a last resort and a safety net against things like starvation. Someone should not weigh 275 on SNAP.
Does SNAP need a better system to provide healthy food? yes.
Should employers be required to provide sufficient earnings such that employees do not require SNAP? Also, yes.
Is blaming employees who are on SNAP due to Walmart overhiring and cutting hours of at the threshold where the earnings would cross into full time with federally regulated benefits in order to pass the cost of operations to the public acceptable via absurd reductive reasoning a bald case of blaming the victims? Yes.
I'm not sure whether you are pretending that Walmart's practices are acceptable, due to a willful disregard for the complexity of the larger systemic failures that permit corporate abuse, or due to simple ignorance.
I'm not sure which looks worse, but neither makes you seem compassionate. Though the fat shaming does make you look like an ass.
>Does SNAP need a better system to provide healthy food? yes.
Yes, SNAP absolutely should not enable unhealthy consumption, especially because the majority of those diseases of affluence just hit taxpayers again via Medicaid spending.
>Should employers be required to provide sufficient earnings such that employees do not require SNAP? Also, yes.
The thrifty food plan from the USDA puts weekly food costs at about $75 for a man and about $60 for a woman. Walmart's company wide minimum pay is $14 per hour. Minus a bit for taxes, add a bit back for EITC/other tax credits, and you are covering a week of food in less than 8 hours of work. They have sufficient earnings. They choose to spend the earnings elsewhere because taxpayers are subsidizing their food.
>Is blaming employees who are on SNAP due to Walmart overhiring and cutting hours of at the threshold where the earnings would cross into full time with federally regulated benefits in order to pass the cost of operations to the public acceptable via absurd reductive reasoning a bald case of blaming the victims? Yes.
Walmart is under no obligation to hire them as full time employees. They are free to accept a different job, negotiate a contract for full time employment, etc. They aren't a "victim" because the job they accepted doesn't meet every one of your standards. They are assumably mentally competent adults who made their own decisions and are free to make different decisions at any time.
>I'm not sure whether you are pretending that Walmart's practices are acceptable, due to a willful disregard for the complexity of the larger systemic failures that permit corporate abuse, or due to simple ignorance.
Walmart's practices are acceptable. It's incredible to think that a job offering double the federal minimum wage (or more), in a reasonably safe, air conditioned environment, along with retirement matching, employee discounts, and even paid tuition/books is somehow corporate abuse.
How much do you think stocking a shelf is worth?
>I'm not sure which looks worse, but neither makes you seem compassionate. Though the fat shaming does make you look like an ass.
It’s wild to blame Walmart for government subsidies when it’s the government not Walmart who decides who gets benefits.
Is Walmart to blame they hired a single mother of 3 for $20/hr? Would this women be better off if Walmart never existed and she was unemployed?
And then turn around and blame Walmart for selling essential food items for low prices because SNAP can be used to pay for them. Would you rather SNAP beneficiaries pay more for groceries so they have less to eat?
Prices may drop, but wages drop even further and the compound effect of local government subsidies and loses when competition dies means everyone loses because everything in the local area dies.
> We’ve allowed Amazon and Ticketmaster and Walmart to exist and they shouldn’t exist in their present form.
Unpopular knowledge is that these businesses are generally illegal in their current forms under existing US law. The relevant laws are still in effect, they are just rarely enforced. The scale of the lawbreaking runs to the trillions of dollars annually, and it directly harms every US consumer.
The illegal conduct is so pervasive that even explaining the existing federal law makes one sound ridiculous, because companies have been explicitly advertising illegal behavior for decades. Because there is no sanction.
One of my faves is the notion that $BIG_RETAILER can buy in bulk and get better pricing, which they pass on to the consumer. You may have seen a company advertise something like this. It sounds like smart business! There is an active federal law[1] that explicitly prohibits this arrangement.
Lack of enforcement of that law is a factor in the disappearance of the American "high street" and the demise of many small retailers.
My #1 call for reform in the US is to simply start enforcing laws, even if doing so makes rich people/companies uncomfortable.
I'm not a lawyer, but a cursory search shows there's a bunch of carveouts. It's not a straightforward ban on all favorable pricing for big players. For instance, if there's an actual cost justification (eg. bigger buyer = more efficient shipping) that's allowed. Same with offering volume discounts that are available to all buyers. That's not to say everything's above board, but it's not as simple as "wow big box stores get better pricing than mom and pop shops, so there must be federal laws being violated".
I hesitated before linking that specific statute because I suspected someone would parse it as you have. Not a bad thing, just distracts from the larger point that the US government currently has tools (of which Robinson-Patman is only one) to prevent & reverse the extreme consolidation that harms every American.
In the context of this article -- we may not need a new ban specific to preventing private equity from owning medical practices. We could simply enforce existing laws around e.g. market consolidation, consumer harm, etc.
That’s a good expansion of the premise, I’d support your idea wholeheartedly. Let PE raid chain restaurants and toy stores, not essential services where they add no value and only extract wealth.
It’s been a very long time since I watched Survivor, but in the early seasons at least it was obvious that the producers were also manipulating the game as it went along to increase the drama.
Tribe shakeups, double/no immunity, second chances… usually just when a particular alliance seemed set on a strategy that was going to make the next few tribal councils predictable.
Rather than a myth, it’s more of a meme in the sense of “naturally selected, self-replicating idea”.
Hits all the right buttons for the motivated reasoner: An eco-disaster that our brains aren’t climate-change numb to. A threat to the most precious fundamental substance in the service of a high-tech fad. An evocative symbol of corporate recklessness in the service of greed.
That it’s not really a big deal compared to, say, almond cultivation is no match for that brain-niche fit.
Keep telling yourself that you are richer because the number is bigger. If you want to be even richer move to Zimbabwe where everyone is a zillionaire.
We are all poorer than 20 or 30 years ago. Most cities are filled with people chained to work, very few people are actually enjoying time off.
Roads, parks, beaches, rivers, the nice places people should be enjoying with family and friends are mostly empty but the roads and workplaces are overflowing.
I dunno, do you really want to bet that if you took a deliberately unaligned frontier model and asked it to permanently disable the US power grid, it would do a poor job of it?
If we focus too much on the world domination fiction, we really might, in a moment of lapsed attention, end up plugging essential infrastructure into the public internet, hoping some dream of global alignment might save us.
That's like giving a gun to a monkey and hoping the monkey is trained well. ..a frontier monkey though.
No. And no alignment, guardrails or slowdowns will ever secure our insecure infrastructure. Bad infrastructure decisions are a risk independent from AI.
The only way to secure infrastructure is to actually do the work needed to secure it. Our waste water treatment facility might not actually need to be able to tweet its status.
Cybersecurity is such an important topic for a country, dreaming about global alignment just to avoid fixing insecure infrastructure cannot be serious.
A Russian state backed hacker will not ask Dario for permission or argue with his LLM about ethics. That train departed long ago.
The nuclear arsenal is absolutely air-gapped from the public Internet today. And launching ICBMs is a key plot detail in many AI apocalypse fantasy scenarios.
There will be a big confab at the White House by the end of the month, announcing a voluntary pacing regime roughly along these lines, codified by executive order to avoid antitrust issues.
DHTs—Chord paper was 2001—started popping up. The big software vendors looked at the architectural (if not legal) success of Napster & the other P2P networks and were invested in finding legitimate applications. Open standards were seeing real adoption left and right.
But it didn’t happen. Maybe simultaneously too late in the Internet’s evolution and too early.
Too late because the big kids were involved. Especially Microsoft, who would never allow any standard they couldn’t EEE to emerge. Too early because the players like Google who later could muscle through core infrastructure standards weren’t there yet.
And now it’s likely too late, with mobile embedding a client-server model with the weight of 10B devices.
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