White collar crimes (like this should be) are all about making value calculations. Take the famous Ford Pinto memo. They decided the risk to their customers' lives was smaller (in terms of pure dollar amount, after potential litigation) than fixing the gas tank issue. If you penalize reckless security practices that lead to data breaches companies will be far more inclined to look after their customers. We already issue fines like this with COPPA, so it's not a new concept.
Street crimes have a far different cause and should be treated differently. I'm surprised I even have to type that, it seems obvious.
It's the implication you and the headline are making. I have yet to see any evidence that Uber and Lyft are against public transport. They are competing with it, which is their right. That's massively different from attempting regulatory capture like the Kochs have done.
But Uber/Lyft are not lobbying against public transit. In fact, in Denver, you can buy RTD tickets through the Uber app. There are plenty of reasons from a labor perspective to dislike rideshare companies but this ain't it.
Don't know why you're comment is grayed, we absolutely need heavy monetary penalties for the worst kinds of data breaches. The abstract idea of a class action lawsuit isn't enough, even after the Equifax breach.
It seems like an ok reading of the history on first glance but it is the Marxist perspective. I suppose necessary to understand the heterodox viewpoint.
> So central to
capitalist reality is this motor of growth that it lies behind both imperialist conquest and the
launching of those periodic prolonged booms of which the Belle Époque and the post-war
Golden Age are the most recent examples.
This is a pretty ridiculous conclusion that is demonstrably false.
> I don't see this OS succeeding beyond China though.
I wouldn't be so sure. Obviously it would be an uphill battle for the OS to compete in the US or Europe, but anywhere that doesn't have clear smartphone dominance yet (ie most of India or Africa) is fair game. Huawei already has a strong foothold in both of those places, and the Chinese government is not opposed to strong-arming them into sticking with Huawei infrastructure.
Scalability is a big problem, but it's not the only problem. Money accomplishes 3 things:
1) Store of value
2) Unit of account
3) Medium of exchange
It's not really very good at any these 3 things. The scalability significantly hurts #3, but even if you fix it it's super volatile, which are bad for 1 and 2. Not only that, but it's inherently deflationary, which is quite bad in the long term, but I guess that's really a secondary concern.
In the US at least, press freedom is greater than simply freedom of speech (according to case law), and this is by design. Information of significant public interest shouldn't be censored.
That's not entirely true. The US is good at capital intensive or high skilled manufacturing like most other countries aren't. That's why it's viable for a lot of car companies to open plants in the US. It's just that most of the supply chain requires more labor and less capital, which the US economy is not suited towards.
Having a multinational agreement between several economies that the Chinese economy is hugely dependent on would have been a great trade chip for getting China on board with Western IP laws. That was the whole point of the deal in the first place.
Maybe I don't get your point but a tariff is a tax, and US consumers pay for a lot of that tax. So this is effectively a super inefficient redistribution of wealth to farmers from everyone else in the country.
Presumably Google still has a massive Bay Area presence because it's more profitable for them to stay there than move, at least that's what is implied. Maybe they should be pushing hard for the city to build more housing. But it seems like the current residents in that area are holding their hands to their ears, closing their eyes and shouting away any evidence that more people require more housing, or things will get worse. I can see your point that Google should probably move if that's the case, but the costs involved probably make it super unrealistic for that to happen, at least in the near future.
Where would you move Google, at this point, if you were in charge? There's not a single city -- in the US, at least -- that I can think of that would be prepared, with the right infrastructure or ready to build out a lot more. That probably factors into Google's decision making process as well.
Maybe we should be going back to the idea of company towns. Or possibly have urban planners building new cities from the ground up with proper infrastructure, housing, transportation, etc. that have the ability to expand for new residents and companies. Certainly the big cities in the US don't have that capability due to our car based infrastructure and our attraction to 30 year mortgages on suburban houses.
It looks like the main problems were problems with HVAC (which wouldn't be a problem in California and probably could be more easily solved with modern building materials) and the ugliness of it. Everybody in the Bay Area would surely hate a version of the Skyrise Terrace in their city but it could be a good idea if someone could buy a large parking structure and retrofit it for mobile home utilities.