The money is nbd, but it's much more important to Google (same as it would be for any of the other tech giants) to keep a certain streak going - 42 years now and counting since the government forced a large or important company to do anything even resembling breaking up. A loss here would serve as precedent (either legally, or at minimum in people's emotions) that you CAN force a divestiture. If Google can be forced to divest this business, why not Chrome, YouTube, or Android? Why can't Apple be forced to divest the App Store business, or Amazon be forced to divest AWS?
Well they had their chance for "change" with Obama, just like the french PS had their chance for "changement" with Hollande. And both betrayed their electoral base and honest people by empowering multinational corporations against consumers and small businesses. Who could have predicted that noone would want to elect them again?
Please. If you’re an adult and you still believe anything any politician ever says, then you may still have some growing up to do.
Left. Right. Up. Down. Doesn’t matter. A politicians job description nowadays boils down to doing everything in their power benefit themselves and their partners and to hell with you unimportant people if it bothers you any.
Crazy to think there were no GOP presidents between Bush and Trump. I first interpreted this as the new record low is lower than the old record low. But no, Trump was the very next one.
I won’t lie, I asked Copilot (of all things) first, in order to be more confident I wasn’t forgetting even one breakup, and it also pointed out that “almost” one.
Hot take? But I think antitrust trials should not he subject to settlement. It only proves to reinforce the accusations when a company is big enough to pay off the government.
...then how do you maintain an adversarial proceeding?
Like, it's a pretty basic part of American law that courts only hear "cases and controversies" - that is to say, you need to have two parties who disagree before judges are allowed to do anything. If both parties no longer disagree, a settlement is how they call the lawsuit off. But if they're not allowed to settle... what happens? Are we going to force both parties into the court to argue positions they no longer hold? Like, what stops the government from just arguing the case really badly to intentionally lose? That would be worse: now, instead of a prosecution leading to a weak settlement, you have every weak case being carried to term, resulting in a miscarriage of justice as each judgment forms negative precedent against future antitrust action. This is a recipe for eroding antitrust faster.
What you're thinking is that government lawyers are just there to extract the settlement, ergo if we force them to go for the kill, they will get more kills. The reality is that the current social class of lawyers and judges hate antitrust. They successfully recast it from an argument about market power to an argument about price controls, and well, most monopolies don't actually raise prices[0], so building a case against them is very difficult.
Hell, in the Microsoft lawsuit, the reason why the government settled was because the initial judgement to break up Microsoft got thrown out, because the judge who issued it blabbed about it to the press. Keeping the case going would not have produced a better outcome than a negotiated settlement.
Furthermore, while the current "monopoly is about prices" argument is new, the judicial contempt for antitrust is not new. It took three tries and FDR threatening to pack the courts before we got judges consistently applying antitrust law as anything more than a mere ban on unions. While courts are ostensibly neutral arbiters of law, they bend to the fiscal interests of the nation and are inherently political entities, because courts have no inherent power but what they are given by the state.
Or, in other words, if you want more antitrust breakups you need Congress to start appointing more neo-Brandeis leaning judges.
[0] Strictly speaking, there are lots of businesses where monopolies are economically efficient. A monopolist that raises prices is
> If both parties no longer disagree, a settlement is how they call the lawsuit off. But if they're not allowed to settle... what happens?
As someone who's been in court quite a lot, personally involved, in the cases, etc, I can guarantee you that legislation fixes this. Just about your entire argument falls apart if legislation enforcing a spirit of "Antitrust against a party can only be settled by a division of the the party".
You wanna settle? Sure, but it means you gotta divide in a way that we agree to . You're claiming you're not guilty of antitrust? Okay, lets take it before a court.
This way there will never be a "settlement" whereby the monopolist gets to pay a cost of doing business and then continue doing business in the same way.
It's the government as a prosecutor. If current teams are compromised, they find a different team.
This isn't like some law firm with an interest to keep their own lights on. A government prosecution against a threat to labor and economic markets should be to close whatever loopholes lead up to this point.
>The reality is that the current social class of lawyers and judges hate antitrust. They successfully recast it from an argument about market power to an argument about price controls, and well, most monopolies don't actually raise prices[0], so building a case against them is very difficult.
Sounds like a compromised DoJ in that case. Which is definitely the case in the modern day.
But the monopoly argument doesn't hold weight. Some aspects of life are best run as monopolies. But such businesses are highly, highly regulated to prevent the downsides of unbridled capitalism. Big tech is not regulated at all in terms of pricings. And thus we're seeing the results of that in real time.
>While courts are ostensibly neutral arbiters of law, they bend to the fiscal interests of the nation and are inherently political entities, because courts have no inherent power but what they are given by the state.
Sounds like a fancy way to say "big companies always bribed the courts". It's in economic best interest to have a free flow of competition. But it's in individuals' best interests to have good relationships with the biggest winners. The claim of 'interests of the nation' contradicts the fact that being soft on anti-trust betrays such interests.
I apologize - I know that the "Citation needed" meme is mostly a way to say "I disagree" but in this case you literally left out your citation :)
You make a claim ("most monopolies don't actually raise prices") you use the end-note citation format ( "[0]" ), but then the end-note is a parenthetical comment that starts to restart your claim and then trails off.
In all seriousness: If you or anyone else can list examples of efficient monopolies I'd be curious to know.
Off the top of my head: local utilities are often given local monopolies. Telecom seems to often be a local monopoly (I've got one option for Internet access, and that's reasonably common here in the US, especially outside of metro areas). I feel like the utilities are reasonably efficient but the telecoms aren't, but I don't have any specific data to back that up.
Privacy experts are raising concerns after a Winnipeg bar flagged a woman as a nationwide public safety concern through its ID scanning system, which led to her being denied entry to a Calgary Stampede venue in July.
Alexandra, a Montreal-based lawyer, went to the Riverside bar in St. Vital on June 6, where a person working security scanned her driver's licence at the door using a Patronscan ID scanner.
Alexandra soon learned the Winnipeg bar is part of Patronscan's flag network, a system the Calgary-based platform uses to alert other venues about problematic people.
99% of bike fatalities involve car crashes. There is no styrofoam helmet which will protect against that, and the VaTech test notably does not model that type of crash.
To my knowledge, the only group that tried to test bike helmets against a car is Volvo -- and all helmets failed.
The key service performed by a cycling helmet is not turning a death situation into a permanently maimed situation (they do that, but that's a very rare occurrence), it's turning a life changing injury situation into a situation of some fractured bones that will be almost forgotten two months later. The life and death part is overrated.
I guess one reason people are so focused on that is because it's easy to quantify.
Yeah, there are clavicle fractures that clearly don't need any surgery, but when in doubt, always slap on some titanium. Just try to get rid of the plate before the next fracture opportunity, because then you'll get an AC joint separation instead of a fracture and that stuff won't grow back. Ask me how I know, I had surgery to swap a fracture plate for an AC plate (those AC plates really, really suck)
Helmets reduce the risk of head injury by 48%, traumatic brain injury by 53%, facial injury by 23%, and fatal injury by 34%.2 Pediatric non-helmeted bikers have a 3-fold higher risk of serious head injury compared to helmeted bikers;3 one study suggests that helmet use may reduce the risk of head injury by 83%.4
Bicycle-related head injuries and deaths have decreased in states that have enacted bicycle helmet laws.5
Larger effects are found when legislation applies to all cyclists than when it applies to children only. 6
Yeah some random blog from keen bikers is really debunking it all globally, including common sense.
I don't get this fanatical defense of no-helmet-at-all-fucking-cost stance many here often express. I personally know a person who died in bike accident helmet-less, she went head first due to slamming front brake too hard, straight on the head on tarmac, no complex situation, it was more than enough.
I had similar situation - new xc bike bought cca 2007, for the first time buying helmet, spent whole childhood and adulthood without one. Within 3 weeks, I had to slam brakes on narrow winding forest path due to my GF stopping abruptly behind the corner. Don't have memory of that situation, remember opening eyes while laying on the ground, looking at crumpled helmet and visor, and seeing how my forehead went perfectly into a sharp stone sticking out of the ground, not much cca 5cm. More than enough to kill me, and GF told me I hit the ground with quite a bit of force.
I have friends with broken collar bones, shoulders, wrists, scars on heads, from various common bike situations, mostly in the city. Many were skeptics, all of them wear helmets now (sometimes due to hard push from their SO). Most of our friends are doctors due to my wife being one, every single one of them had to do some time in emergency in biggest Swiss hospital, and every single one of them had seen rough head injuries including death from all those folks who swore to never wear helmet, it limits their view (bullshit), their senses (huh?) and so on.
Every single sport facing death risk is maximizing their survival chances by smart behavior and better equipment, which often include helmets. But somehow these folks feel like (since this is hard emotional debate, not factual one) they are outside normal risk envelope thats valid for every single living thing on Earth.
But sure, don't wear the helmet, but lets agree you will cover full lifetime costs of any injury treatment to head/neck/shoulders, including all after care due to permanent disabilities. And don't whine when your kids die because daddy was a bit fanatic and picked up wrong hill to wage their insecurities/arrogance battle on.
Yeah, it's funny that some guy who baselessly claims that "99% of bike fatalities involve car crashes" (when people say "99%", odds are that they are pulling it out of their nether regions) then says that a study cited by the American College of Surgeons (which only says that "one study suggests") "has been thoroughly debunked", offering a citation that doesn't say that. What it does say is that the number from the study hasn't been replicated and other studies consistently show lower numbers. How much lower? It doesn't say. But one thing that is clear is that our drunken correspondent is himself highly prone to exaggeration.
And he notably has nothing to say about any of the other numbers and consequences mentioned by the ACS.
P.S. The 1989 "debunked" study isn't even what ACS cited! Their citation was an overview paper that used a broad range of studies: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10796827/
The helmet business is amazing, and proof that one is born every minute. It deserves to be shown how many logical fallacies there are. Top of the list is anecdotal evidence, everyone with a mouth can tell you about someone that had their life saved by magic styrofoam.
There is a grain of truth to the anecdotal claims. But, even then, this is very much an imagined grain of truth. What makes it fun is if you work for a specialist bicycle shop or up the chain, distributing thousands of helmets. With customer interaction at the showroom level, fitting hundreds of helmets, then selling gazillions at B2B, the question has to be asked, where are the broken ones, the one sent back for money off, as a replacement discount?
Indoctrination into the polystyrene club is also very easy. Customer buys new bicycle, customer gets upsold a helmet, as an easy win. The far more practical high vis jacket costs $5 and you make no profit on that, whereas the $50+ polystyrene is just money for the taking.
The testing was originally to a SNELL standard, but the helmets were too heavy. So manufacturers switched to the lame self-test consumer testing, 'trust us bro'. This became the new benchmark, anything aiming at SNELL or other meaningful test just did not survive the market.
Hence I keep it simple. If cycling for conspicuous leisure purposes (fitness, racing, stunts) then get the helmet and make sure the straps are tight. You will need it for organised events so you might as well get used to wearing it.
If not cycling for conspicuous leisure purposes, but merely for transport, whether that be the commute or errands, then you don't need a helmet. Get the lights, mudguards and high vis instead.
I am learning the counter-logical-fallacies, so I can counter the life saved anecdote with quality nonsense that has the same logical fallacies. For example, "I know a true Scotsman that has been cycling every day for fifty years without a helmet. Once he got hit by a car and his life was saved because he was not wearing an ill-fitting helmet, he would have been strangled by the straps had he been wearing a helmet, plus the driver would have given him less room, so the accident would have been far worse."
I digress, as for the article, the helmet is excellent for conspicuous leisure cycling. Now give me your money!
Of course, wearing a helmet is a choice and many get on just fine without it. I've come off my bike enough times where my helmet prevented a nasty bump to the head to wear one, but I suspect I'd have survived just fine without it. I view my helmet as insurance against my own incompetence - slipping on a wet manhole cover for example. For context I ride thousands of km a year for transport, but have done much riding as a conspicuous leisure activity too. I just wear a helmet and I'm not really bothered by it.
My son took CS10 a couple years ago, and even I (Masters in EECS from UCB) struggled with some really obtuse multiple-guess questions he showed me on the homeworks. Much of the classwork is done in Snap, a weird and stupid graphical "programming" language. If 1/3 of the students are failing, that may have more to do with the professor.
The alternative it a strict zero trust network design with very internet access only via RDP or similar protocols. Not many companies are willing to do this.
Enterprise Mac is a bit of a contradiction because Apple doesn't really make enterprise tools, you still end up joining them to a windows network and using windows file sharing and printing.
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