I am of the opinion that markets and prices, not EU regulators, should tell us where scarcity is. We're bad at optimizing manually for the same reason we're bad at guessing where program hotspots are. The market is a profiler.
Do you honestly believe this? Where did you study economics? This regulation is not about scarcity. It is about over abundance.
Overproduction is a failure mode in capitalist systems. The market can’t correct for this because negative externalities do not feed back into supply or demand.
Actors in a capitalist system have an incentive to maximize profit. How is it profit-maximizing to pay to produce an item and throw it away unsold?
> negative externalities do not feed back into supply or demand.
What is the unaccounted externality? Clothing makers pay for material inputs and labor inputs. They pay for transportation. If they discard goods, they pay for more transportation and for the landfill. What specific externality is unaccounted?
And you presume to know better than they do what to do with that energy? Do you think you have a general right to override people's resource allocation decisions when you believe they're being wasteful?
1. In this case, not using the energy at all would have been better.
2. The legislature of a sovereign polity would have, and be able to delegate, that right. If and when the legislature should make use of that right is a political question.
This is why the ultra rich have been building out heavily fortified, private, self sustaining compounds. They know the potential consequences of their choices, and are fine with them as long as they can leverage technology to insulate themselves from them. It's basically Fallout mindset.
Societal collapse doesn’t necessarily mean all-out nuclear catastrophe, and can also mean transitioning from one set of norms or rules establishing the status quo to another. People shouldn’t labor under the false impression that they will have guaranteed success when such transitions happen. What are they modeling this on, exactly? Countries where mafias are de facto rulers, or there’s some level of dictatorship, are only held up due to external pressures put on by democratic world orders. As mentioned, guns and bombs can guarantee protection up to a point, and the rest of that necessary work is done by ideas and ideals.
Secondly, I am afraid a lot of the people who believe they’ll have some sort of success in scenarios with lesser law and order than they grew up with will find out it wasn’t their winning personalities which guaranteed them anything. There will always be someone more brutal ready to just take yours and dispose of you. To put it more plainly, if all they like is your money then you’re just standing in the way of that.
We don't need "more" government, we need the government to do its job. We need the regulators who have been legally appointed to oversee these areas to actually respond to these behaviors. Regulatory capture is the issue, but the solution isn't less government. It's getting corporate money and lobbying out of the government (Citizens United is to blame for most of our woes), increase the enforcement of anti-corruption laws, and get antitrust back on the table.
I want big corporations to be scared. I want them to fear for their own survival, and to tread lightly lest the sword of damocles fall upon them.
I'm with you, I like your answer, especially the last bit.
But how to get there we may disagree.
The existing avenues have proven unfruitful.
Regulating more has just lead to more control in the hands of the elites and those with resources, who know how to game the system, and more draconianism for us smaller folks. "Rules for thee, but not for me"
Anarchy/Libertarianism isn't the answer either, its too impractical, unrealistic.
I won't pretend I'm smart enough to know what the answer is, but I am experienced enough to know whats laid before us hasn't worked and isn't working. Consumer protection regulatory bodies have been made toothless over the course of decades, I don't think I can trust them again anyways after what has happened in recent years. Financial regulatory bodies only purpose is to make life as difficult for the smaller guys.
We have non-existent data and tech regulation. You know what would happen if we actually got some? It would be written by the same tech oligarchs. We would just have a new revolving door. Like how the Verizon CEO become the FCC chair. We will get Larry and Sundar passing our regulation. Elon and Mark funding the think tanks that write the legislation.
If you had tried Ubuntu, KDE Neon, CachyOS, ElementsryOS, or really any other distro, this would not have been your experience.
Arch is a Manual experience designed for power users. It is not a good choice for even your average Linux user, let alone a first time Windows convert dipping their toes.
Being a 503c, they're required to disclose their expenditures, among other things. CN gives them a perfect score, and the expense ratio section puts their program spend at 77.4% of the budget
https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/200049703#overall-ratin...
Worth mentioning that Wikipedia gets an order of magnitude more traffic than the Internet archive.
In their latest available annual report, the Wikimedia Foundation reported that in 2024 they brought in $185M in revenue/donations, of which they spent $178M. Of that $178M, $106M was spent on salaries and benefits, and $26M on awards and grants. So, that accounts for 75% of their spending. "Internet hosting" is listed at only $3M though there are other line items such as "Professional service expenses" at $13M that probably relate to running Wikipedia too.
Scroll down to the "Statement of activities (audited)" section:
If you look at the audited financial report of last year.
$3,474,785 was spent on hosting. Which makes sense its basically a static site.
This is out of expenses of $190,938,007
Thats about 1.8%. This is not new. Its been the case for years. Wikipedia has never had very high hosting costs. Its always been going into their grants or whatever else.
Despite the nonsense about AI overloading their servers even if it doubled the load it would barely affect the budget.
That figure will also be hugely unreliable, because as we've seen, there is tremendous incentive for insiders to leverage their information immediately before it's relevant.
If the odds sit at 97% NO for weeks or months, then 3 hours before the invasion an insider makes their play, you would have to be constantly monitoring this market, interpret that spike correctly as an insider trade, and be able to, in that very short amount of time, take actions that change the outcome for you, personally.
I think this take highlights one of the core problems our democracy faces - winning elections and governing effectively are entirely different skill sets. These things may even be, in part, antithetical.
I merely intended it as a reasonably general proxy for relevant experience whose ruleset would be difficult to weaponize. I agree that in theory there almost certainly must be better methods than elections by which to select legislators, leaders, and other official positions. However I'm not aware of any in practice, particularly when the inevitability of bad faith attempts to abuse the system are taken into account.
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