The commenter could have ADHD or some other disadvantage outside of their control. Imagine applying what you said to someone in a wheelchair—“making it accessible to you would ruin the magic.” Gross.
I'm sure if those workers picked up a dictionary and looked up the word dictatorship, they would agree.
They have a vote. One person does not rule the country.
Getting rid of non-compete agreements is just allowing American workers have jobs without ridiculous demands from their employers that they abandon their entire livelihoods for a decade after working for them for a few months.
Non-compete agreements are extraordinarily anti-worker, and fundamentally anti-free-market. If you leave your job, you should be allowed to find another similar job without your former employer suing you for having a career.
There seems to be ever increasing talk about communism vs capitalism, free markets, competition, etc.
I think more and more people are asking "what has the 'free market' done for me lately", and are open to other ideas. It's a dangerous road. I see it a bit like the "defund the police" movement, people admit that police are good in theory, but the reality is a lot of people believe the police will never actually do anything to help them, thus, they want tear most of the system down and start over. Likewise, everyone agrees a free market with competition is great, but they see that the people upholding our "free market" do a lot non-free-market things which will never benefit regular people.
What does it mean when the things that happen in a healthy free market aren't happening?
To be clear, there are exactly 0 communist politicians in the US.
You're creating a false dichotomy. It's not the capitalists vs the communists, it's the capitalists vs the slight less capitalist capitalists. The American left isn't communist, and it isn't even close. Even the closest politicians like Bernie Sanders cannot be considered communists.
> What does it mean when the things that happen in a healthy free market aren't happening
It means we don't live in a free market. Because a free market is bad, and nobody actually wants a free market. They want an almost free market. But of course child labor is bad, and poisoning your workers is bad, and also blowing them up on the railroad is bad, and then poisoning the water is bad too. And then giving your customers HIV (yes, real) is bad as well.
The unelected bureaucrats of the US Department of Defense control a lot of money, I'm expecting more lawsuits from the parties who don't get as much of that money as they want.
You can meaningfully recreate this world today for a personal, non-work environment. For a PC, what do you really need a persistent internet connection for? If you have a Mac, create a couple of network locations, one "Offline" (all internet-connected network adaptors disabled) and another "Online." Keep a habit of leaving it at the "Offline" unless you really need to go online for something. This is what we did thirty years ago with dial-up.
You can, but what does it help? Modern OSes are architected assuming an always-online, the-world-ends threat model. Thus causes them to be heavily locked down, eliminating a lot of the customizability and hackability that older systems had.
And that’s not to mention applications. It used to be common for GUI applications to be scriptable and to support plugins!
It's worth experimenting with. Some things won't work at all, others will break in Fun And Interesting Ways. Some things will get much slicker though because they suddenly don't have network I/O anywhere near the UI, or because ads aren't sucking CPU any more. It's worth at least understanding where your common workflows are on that spectrum.
It might help your focus, if you're the type who is easily distracted with the web or by notifications. That extra bit of friction to switch locations to enable the network might be enough to get you to second guess whether or not you really need to look at that thing online.
Only because many places (like NYC) don't count violent crimes as violent. If a mentally deranged vagrant runs up to you and punches you hard in the face, knocking you to the ground before running off, in NYC that is considered 3rd degree assault - a non-violent misdemeanor. On the rare occasion when this violent lunatic is caught, he is given an appearance ticket and released - non violent misdemeanors like this aren't "bail eligible". In a massive portion of these cases, the prosecutor will simply drop the charges. On the very, very rare occasion when it does go to trial the lunatic is deemed "not fit to stand trial" and simply released back onto the street. In all of these events, this is not recorded as a violent crime, so people with their head in the sand can wave their hands in the air and talk about how there is no violent crime in the city. But the often traumatized person who has been a victim of this violent assault now suffers from the memory of being attacked - more so because they know their attacker faces absolutely no sanction and is back out on the street. People who live in the city and ride the subway are constantly menaced, harassed and/or assaulted and that is an extremely unfriendly and dangerous environment to live in, even if it doesn't show up in the sanitized statistics.
This unhelpful whataboutism doesn’t refute earlier claims in this thread nor does it reinforce any opposite claims. What are you trying to say about the safety of cities here?
