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It's not your imagination: Companies are more willing to raise their prices now — and it's because we let them
  • Collectively agreeing to raising prices is anti-competitive collusion and illegal.

    Collectively raising prices is anti-competitive coordination and legal.

    Pandemic and supply shocks is a perfect excuse to do the latter.

    Good luck to whoever is trying to solve this.

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    How a Big Pharma Company Stalled a Potentially Lifesaving Vaccine in Pursuit of Bigger Profits
  • The patent story reveals a lot.

    Government:

    • creates and enforces a patent system

    Also government:

    • does essential research and doesn't patent their own discoveries

    Donate to propublica.org - they produce a lot of great journalism.

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    Your big brain conservtive/capitalist takes will be laughed at
  • Most statements I don't have qualms with, but from my understanding, "liberals embrace ID politics" seems way off. I could see an argument that there's some kind of split across people who'd identify as or match a typical understanding of a liberal, along the ID politics line, given that it's so divisive. Id say liberal as a concept existed way before ID politics, do when that became prominent, a lot of people got split along that line. I.e. Far right probably split 90:10, Conservatives probably split 75:25, Liberals probably split closer to 50:50, while social left split 25:75, far left split 10:90 and libertarians split 1:99.

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    Your big brain conservtive/capitalist takes will be laughed at
  • Hey, at least your average, retarded, left take seems to be (at least from my limited experience here) somewhat more palatable than your average, retarded, right take.

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    Any time you're told that the weak and vulnerable are responsible for how bad things are, rather than the rich and powerful, you're being lied to
  • Yes, but expecting corporations to do it on their own is silly. They operate in a competitive environment so game theory should tell us what's going to usually happen. The laws and regulations exist, and a lot more are needed, but it's also not as simple because costs of enforcement also range from inexpensive to infeasible. In the end, it's people making self-interested decisions, whether on behalf of themselves or on behalf of corporations. I don't know of any easy solutions - my feeling is that those don't exist - so the best bet is to steer society towards better and more effective politics. More distributed and less concentrated power structures, checks and balances, enforcement, novel, effective, and efficient systems through science based analysis, as well as lots of trials and errors and fast iterative improvements based on rapid feedback loops. In short, the world nowadays moves faster than the current government systems and it's a losing battle until governing adaptability can increase in speed.

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    The dreaded ring (by Pedro Arizpe)
  • Same reason people at home just come up to each other and start talking (which actually requires immediate response) even when the topic is non-urgent whatsoever, instead of leaving notes around the house.

    It's all based on differing conventions among people, so saying a call "demands immediate response" is putting your convention above others as the only true one.

    In my family the convention is a bit different. A single call does not signal any urgency and so no one is expected nor obliged to answer if they don't feel like it. A second call after the first one wasn't answered implies importance. Third and more calls imply urgency and then emergency. If something is important or urgent and calls aren't getting answered, a message is sent.

    I like my convention. I also have slightly different conventions with some friends. I am also aware different people may have different conventions and I don't hold mine to be superior or theirs inferior.

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