This Note argues that the current framework in antitrust—specifically its pegging competition to “consumer welfare,” defined as short-term price effects—is unequipped to capture the architecture of market power in the modern economy
Ever since the disastrous law and economics movement took over in the 1970s, anti-trust has been about low consumer prices. Basically, and simplifying quite a bit, it didn’t matter how big a corporation got, whether they were part of an oligarchical or monopolistic market structure, as long as they could prove their prices weren’t extorting consumers, it was all good.
In Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox, she basically criticizes that economic perspective as permitting anti-competitive practices, consolidation of market power, and harm to consumers as a consequence.
Amazon, after all, rose to prominence by legitimately offering consumers lower prices on books, basically by reducing distribution costs and not owning any physical stores. It passed the savings onto consumers. So, there’s nothing inherently wrong with offering lower prices on stuff.
The problem, according to Khan, is that Amazon has continued to offer lower prices to consumers as it grew larger and larger and into the massive platform it is today…most of the time. Some of those lower prices may have been legitimately obtained…but the FTC is suing Amazon because it has employed its monopoly to price competitors and then shift to charging consumers more.
Under the old anti-trust paradigm, low consumer prices were all that mattered. Under Lina Khan, market structure and consumer prices matter. A monopoly that maintains low prices is as anti-competitive as any monopoly, and negatively impacts our economy.
So, it’s not so much that anti trust has been given teeth, but that, under Khan’s leadership, the FTC is much more likely to attempt the bite. And she started with Amazon, which is a bold move.
All my subreddits that I moderated went to shit after the protests. I stopped, the replacements stopped, the sudden influx of shitty posts and shady users drove off the normal communities.
Fuck em. I haven’t felt the urge to post on reddit in months and it’s lovely knowing the people I’m interacting with probably aren’t rabid fascists unless they’re Lemmy.world pissbabies.
/r/snackexchange/ - I made it a protest subreddit by embracing Spez’s call for user democracy. Every day every single thing about the subreddit would be reset and users would have to vote for every aspect. The only rules were that you couldn’t abolish democracy and you couldn’t abolish me as the caretaker. /u/Icxcnika was a weird little goober who took it seriously instead of seeing it as a protest meant to derail the subreddit. He voted to make himself mod for a day and then the admins did a mod coup to make him the head, even over the other two mods that had been there for a decade and built all of the third-party tools we relied on to make the subreddit work. He had only posted once, some 8 or 9 years before, and had never moderated. The users and other mods fucking hated him and activity in the subreddit fell off. Now he no longer posts, one of the other mods no longer posts, and the last remaining one is apparently now a bot that sells funko pops.
/r/fifthworldproblems/ - The other mods and I were all on board with the protest. They forced us back open so we refused to do anything. Now it’s restricted and the only link posted since the protest was a Lemmy instance that I didn’t have anything to do with.
/r/modernart - I started rebuilding this one after it was overtaken by spam from people who don’t know what “modern art” actually means. I want to keep the subreddit because there’s good radicalisation potential with it in the right hands, but I stopped posting and only remove the most obnoxious spam days after it’s reported to tank the quality of the subreddit. I’ll be replacing everything with a Lemmy instance link at some point but was always holding out for Hexbear to open up community creation.
I had a few others that I just left or let the admin bot take over.
i followed the snack exchange subreddit thing from day one, that little piece of shit was so utterly removedish in so many ways. First time i genuinely wanted to doxx someone because YOU KNOW that dork looks like so-true irl
He was weird. In addition to the posts on the daily election threads, he was sending me PMs that were flattering in a way Patrick Bateman would compliment someone. Everything was blatantly manipulative and worded in a way that was simultaneously an interrogation I knew he was feeding to the admins. Then the dog caught his car and had to drive it while everyone else on the road screamed at him. I think he lasted like three days before handing over control to one of the mods who was so offended that they quit the website.
Nothing irks me more than someone who can’t handle positive chaos or slight inconvenience. He was so determined to stop the protest which was only over us not being able to moderate the subreddit without those third-party tools, all to preserve the sanctity of a community he hadn’t interacted with in almost a decade. There’s something deeply pathological about a power grab like that. Like what the fuck.
It was fun at its high point. The problem was like you said, always the same map. Shipping costs run like $20-150+ and that’s a month’s wage in many of the countries that have interesting snacks we aren’t already over-saturated with. Scams were only ever like 5% of trades at most and we never had a poisoning though, so overall a successful prototype of the thing that would work.
I’ll be honest, even without Trump most Americans proved they were too stupid or stubborn to follow instructions, so he didn’t really need to do anything to slap the whole US with more infections.
The problem is Trump is both the cause and the symptom of a very broken Republican party. He definitely brings out the worst in his supporters, but they also bring out the worst in him. You saw when he tried to encourage vaccines and his supporters turned on him instantly, so he had to quickly back track.
I think, like you said, the only way he can attempt to steer the MAGA-ship at this point is to offer solutions that blatantly look like he’s doing it to own the libs. He can’t say “get the vaccine because it’ll prevent you from dying.” He’d have to say, “Biden is trying to take away the beautiful vaccine I created. He wants to give it to illegal immigrants instead of hard working people like you! The deep state is trying to trick you to believe that the vaccine is poison so they can give it to their pedophile leaders so they can be safe, while you good, Christian patriots are dying.”
Unfortunately his strategy was much more cartoonishly evil. By making it so taking the pandemic seriously was a partisan issue, he could make it so people voting in person were disproportionately likely to be his base. Then set up some regulations to prevent states from counting mail in votes until in person voting is done to manufacture a narrative that they’re less legitimate and try to stop the count.
This would make so much more sense tbh, federating communities would also help bring the people who don’t quite ‘get’ the fediverse yet into coming onboard instead of being lost.
Floaters in the vitreous of the eyeball (aka clumps of your vitreous that got stuck together as your vitreous gel started to liquify, which happens naturally with age for everyone).
They’re normal if they appear gradually as you age. Most common in people with myopia. Can be caused by a variety of things including hits to the eyes or head, possibly by steroid eye drops, anything that increases the pressure in your eye, or just plain old aging.
They never go away but if you’re lucky they might “settle” or get stuck to the side. Never happens for a lot of people though, and they can be quite distressing for many people - especially for people who have many large and moving floaters.
Most mentally healthy people will neuro-adapt and they’ll become less noticeable over time. It can take about six months before this happens though and it does suck at first. I got some new ones after LASIK and I was pretty upset. Now I only notice them on light backdrops like snow or my shower. But even then I just notice them briefly and my thoughts quickly move elsewhere. No stress.
For people who are absolutely driven insane by a large number of them, there is a risky surgery to remove them, but if it goes wrong you can be looking at blindness so you definitely need to weigh your options.
The non-surgical laser treatment for floaters doesn’t work. It seems to maybe work for some people in the short term but most people report that it doesn’t help in the long term. It can even create more floaters or break up your big ones into many smaller ones that move more. The laser is also dangerous for younger patients because the floaters are closer to your retina when you’re younger. The laser can cause damage to the retina and it’s hard to avoid doing that when the floaters are close to it.
There are currently a couple groups researching how to get rid of them non-invasively. Last bit of news I saw said a group had been using gold flakes and a new type of laser to successfully and safely break them down. Personally, I will get mine treated if there is a non-invasive way to do so, but I’m not too bothered by them so I can wait for that.
Worth noting that if you suddenly get a lot of floaters and are feeling pain in your eyes or seeing bright flashes that look like a camera flash, you need to go seek medical attention immediately as these are signs of a retinal tear. Retinal tears are treatable but only if you go take care of them immediately. The consequences are not taking care of them quickly can be severe.
For most people, these are harmless and just a part of getting older. You’ll get used to them.
For most people, these are harmless and just a part of getting older. You’ll get used to them.
I’ve had these since I was in preschool.
They’re far less pronounced (almost entirely absent, really) now in my 40’s than they were throughout my single digit years, but I still see them once in a great while
I think your brain learns to ignore them better at a certain point in life. So though you have fewer of them at a very young age, you notice them more because you haven’t filtered them out of your vision yet.
This part bears repeating, as you CAN lose vision in one eye (partial or ALL) due to this.
“ if you suddenly get a lot of floaters and are feeling pain in your eyes or seeing bright flashes that look like a camera flash, you need to go seek medical attention immediately as these are signs of a retinal tear. Retinal tears are treatable but only if you go take care of them immediately”.
If the outlook account is only tied to the minecraft account and Microsoft doesn’t know who made the outlook account, isn’t that pretty safely private? Ofc microsoft can read the emails, but they won’t contain any personal info of OP.
Sure, the spouse that has to create a reward system so that the other person does their chores is the one in the wrong, not the spouse that apparently needs parenting. Also, marriage is a favor to the former, not something both want and benefit from (/sarcasm).
I would say the creepiest part is that this man needs a childish chart like this just to take care of his children. She’s not his mom and honestly they should talk separation instead of having to come up with incentive charts just to get him to be a father.
lemm.ee
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