The problem described isn't companies buying goods and services. It's buying from an entity they partially own and then profiting as that entity becomes more valuable because of the purchase.

It’s still very tenuous you can’t prevent companies that own 5% of other companies from buying services from the that company

We can prevent anything we want. If there's a major AI crash analogous to the Depression, we'll probably institute a lot of new regulations.

If the parent comment is true, it seems the problematic aspect is the leverage created by the P/E ratio more than the percentage of ownership. What a weird situation.

Oh yeah, these are definitely circular financial games but you have to be wary about putting in insane regulations that will break growth.

I doubt VCs have different distribution of personal character from other professional groups.

In my experience, a more interesting friction is that VCs are pursuing a diversification strategy while founders are pursing a singleton strategy.

It used to be that VCs wanted founders to pursue a singleton strategy, because they wanted the diversification to occur at the level of their portfolio - on the grounds that at the level of an individual startup, diversification would less likely to succeed. The catchphrase was that they wanted "pure play" investments. So it would be interesting to know why it's now a cause of friction. (The "pure play" thing was actually from before YC took off and gave founders a bit more agency; and before the "pivot" was popularised; I get the impression that VCs back then were not too happy for a founder to change direction and confuse their portfolio)

VCs are the shotgun cartridge and startups are the shot.

This situation is changing in the US but isn't well reported, in my opinion.

We haven't regained traditional apprenticeship roles (perhaps because we so weakened unions?) but 30 (of 50) States have free or heavily subsidized two-year community / vocational college programs. Affordable and accessible vocational education opportunities are increasingly present. I also think (very subjectively) that we are seeing a renewed respect for the trades.

However, there are structural headwinds outside of education - no national health insurance plan being a major one. Farming, fishing, forestry, construction and similar trades still have a 20-30% uninsured rate in the US. (The uninsured rate in white collar "professional" work is around 2.5%.)

> We haven't regained traditional apprenticeship roles (perhaps because we so weakened unions?)

The reason for the traditional apprenticeship roles is not unions, but rather capitalistic:

- If potential employees are well-trained the employer doesn't have to invest resources for training them.

- The certificate of the vocational training means that the employer knows that an applicant has an established standard, and can save time testing whether he is qualified.

- Because the trainee needs practical experience, employers can invoice this additional worker to the customer. Because the trainee needs explanations and thus works slower, more hours can be invoiced to a customer.

The administration has attacked, as they promised when running for election, all of the perceived power centers of its opposition: the arts, individuals, educational institutions, selected law firms, science and researchers, civil servants, selected broadcasters, immigrants (legal and illegal), election systems (through both the legal system and political gerrymandering), selected industry projects - especially renewables - and has even made disaster relief partisan. There's nothing unique about the attack on research; it is consistent with the stated intent of the republican majority.

Also from the outside, and as first generation out of Salazar's dictorship, all the signs of an authoritarian administration, yet plenty of people are behaving as it will go away with elections or something.

I prefer an alternate measure - great developers write code with a long half life relative to the rest of the product. (An idea I learned from a hiring reference check ... of all places.)

This is in all likelihood an improvement on just measuring lines of code output, but not at all a silver bullet. I'd imagine this skews heavily towards developers who were around first in large projects. Also skews towards developers who pick certain tasks over others - there's always circumstances where the library you are building on passes breaking changes, etc. but that I feel might be more minor in comparison to the first concern.

I didn't mean to imply there's a single all-encompassing metric or silver bullet, but re-reading, I did kinda write it that way. When you find someone whose code persists a long time, that's often a strong signal of quality contributions. There are of course myriad other ways to contribute critically - ops, culture, finding and fixing hard defects, unusually good understanding of the customer, industry expertise, mentorship, ...

Counterpoint - Businesses are generally liable in the physical world for harms caused on their premises by a foreseeable hazard. Whether as simple as a pothole in a parking lot that causes injury or an unstable shelf that collapses, …

The major social media sites know absolutely that their products expose customers and users to predictable harm and cause real damages. They should bear an analogous liability burden as a business operating a physical location.

> They should bear an analogous liability burden as a business operating a physical location.

Sounds great. Last I checked, most businesses don't have a legal obligation to police the conversations that happen on or around their premises.

In the case of Meta, X, et. al., the conversation is an integral part of the product. It isn't incidental "around their premises".

You're also wrong though - a corporation is absolutely liable for threats and various types of verbal harassment that occurs within their walls. Thus the endless liability-offsetting mandatory training videos... Duty of care is well established.

> ...a corporation is absolutely liable for threats and various types of verbal harassment that occurs within their walls.

From its employees or contractors, possibly. From customers or visitors? Absolutely not.

> ...the conversation is an integral part of the product.

For telephone, text messaging, and mail [0] the conversation is an integral part of the product. And yet, somehow they don't have this "liability burden" you're asserting is borne by everyone who provides a service or a space where people could plausibly speak with each other.

[0] ...both e- and snail- variants...

If you care to read about this, google/search/internet for "torts section 344". Here's an example:

https://www.mbm-law.net/insights/premises-liability-for-thir...

Here's a more nuanced example discussing liability to foreseeable harm by a third party on a business's premises:

https://www.supremecourt.ohio.gov/rod/docs/pdf/0/1995/1995-O...

It is of course differently illegal to use the mail (in the US at least) for criminal activity.

Another way to think about this is, if this liability didn't generally exist, why do platform providers require a special protection?

This assumes that the legislators and regulators who approve projects like this are motivated by economic benefit and not by campaign donations and other favors.

Same. Having aging eyes has increased my empathy. When I can't read restaurant menus, or dosage information on a bottle, or see which direction the battery is supposed to go, or the right button on some tiny remote (and then inevitably fumble and guess when glasses aren't hand), ... I've learned a lot about what navigating the world might be like for others.

I recently learned about a related data structure designed for scrabble style word searches: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GADDAG.