I wouldn’t say the OS is Linux any more than the OS of an Apple computer is XNU. Linux is just the kernel. Similarly the other OS isn’t “Windows NT kernel,” but Windows 10 or Windows 11.

Yeah but also this is only for their EU profit, so it’s really an even higher percentage.

It doesn’t really make sense to talk about money they made in other countries when talking about these fines, as if they make 5 billion in profit in country X and get fined 6 billion, they would still have lost money for operating in the country regardless of how much money they made other places. Since they lost money in the country, that fine would be high enough for them to want to fix their law breaking or totally pull out of the country, and so the fine accomplishes its purpose.

To be fair the glorified babysitter wouldn’t require 4+ years of education on educating children, so they probably couldn’t just be “simply teaching.” This is still an awful idea, they seem to be trying to save money by paying a glorified babysitter a lower wage than a teacher. Private schools can be for profit in some place, I wonder if that applies here.

I’m pretty sure that it’s true that citing sources isn’t really relevant to copyright violation, either you are violating or not. Saying where you copied from doesn’t change anything, but if you are using some ideas with your own analysis and words it isn’t a violation either way.

That’s not right, it’s generative pre-trained transformer.

I agree that there’s no problem now, and also that the percentage they are trying to pay is overly low. I think they should be paying somewhere in the vicinity of 50-70% of the buy price, so that is a terrible rate.

I didn’t say net metering isn’t useful now, I said it wouldn’t work if a large majority of people did it. I don’t see how what you said contradicts that.

No, the burden of providing free energy storage.

Sure, but if everyone does it then it wouldn’t work (no one would be drawing excess when the solar is at peak), so that makes it not very sustainable. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, just that it can’t continue to work if adoption becomes near-universal (it doesn’t seem to be for now). I guess these non-bypassable charges will fix that, but that sounds a lot like what they are talking about (only getting paid some large percentage of the price for energy sent to the grid).

It doesn’t really seem like net metering is sustainable. Say for example someone generates the same amount of electricity they use, in that case they pay $0 for electricity even though the grid has to take the burden of storing the electricity until they use it later in the day.

I don’t disagree that it is used, I just don’t think it really has an advantage in the modern day. However switching would be extremely difficult so the historically dominant AC continues.

But, take note of how many DC voltages you use in your house. Devices in mine range from 3v to 25v and some weird one like 19v for a laptop. You’d still have adapters all over the place.

This is probably true, but every single one could lose the rectifier part, and instead of having to convert from pulsating DC (the output of mains rectification), you get clean DC from the wall instead, which should allow for using smaller capacitors in many places.

A lot of power blocks rectify the AC and then shift the DC voltage anyway, because transformers are bulky and heavy. This is why power bricks are so much smaller now than they used to be. See the modes section of the Wikipedia page about AC adapters for a longer explanation.

How does AC have an advantage in long-distance transmission? Arguably they can be more efficient.

I think that’s mostly driven by regulatory capture and the fact that lobbyists can drive regulation. If our government actually worked for the people, we could actually enforce monopoly laws, and the SEC (or equivalent in countries besides the US) would actually prevent mergers that threaten competition. The government is supposed to prevent this kind of behavior, but they have basically been bought out.

As for how to stop that from happening, I’m not sure. I think it would require at least getting rid of the two party system, because that stifles competition in the governance space. That means that even though there are probably lots of voters who would vote for a real candidate who would break monopolies, there is no such candidate available. But in order for that to work we would have to switch to a different voting method, like ranked-choice (or one of the even more fair ones).

I think a free market in a given sector can encourage innovation. That’s not to say all sectors need innovation, there’s not a lot of innovation to be had in many sectors, like providing water, or housing, and those probably don’t need to be a free market. They could be provided by the government for example.

Yeah this is exactly what free market lunatics on the right don’t understand. Monopoly isn’t a free market. Free markets simply cannot exist without regulation to prevent unfair business practices.

Also any reasonable economist can tell you that the free market does not solve issues like the tragedy of the commons, because negative externalities are not factored in. It is also the government’s job to ‘internalize’ externalities so companies actually see the costs of, for example, polluting our air and water.

TLDR: free market != unregulated market

Yeah, I agree, I think a true free market is basically impossible because there will always be winners and those companies will certainly use their power to stifle competition. Also it is difficult for the consumer to evaluate every product they buy even if there is a number of competitors, so issues like what @Telorand@reddthat.com mentioned (sawdust in food) come up because consumers just don’t have the measurement equipment to check.

I like the free market too, but having a small number of companies control a necessary resource definitely isn’t a free market.

I prefer not to buy games on steam, and when a game is available from another channel (for example Factorio is available on the devs’ website) I will buy it there. And yet, most games are only on steam, so the devs really don’t seem to care about trying to avoid that 30% cut when they can.