Shoring up the US economy is in everyone's interest up to a certain point ofcourse everyone is exposed to US debt- but when the US starts imposing tariffs to keep out other countries expect criticism.
KPN does al government telco stuff because it used to be semi-public. As such, they have a lot of institutional knowledge behind this kind of thing.
I would not trust any other telco to do this better. It seems to me the issue is the commercialization/privatization of KPN. Instead, we should go back to a more semi-public KPN that is assigned to cover this form of critical infrastructure.
Or alternatively, we should not have any telco be a single point of failure.
This might be your first instinct, but a new contractor would have to gain the knowledge KPN did on preventing these outages, there is no guarantee any other company would have better uptime.
Reminds me of the quote or story that someone rather hired an ops engineer that accidentally dropped a database than someone who didn't. As the first one would go at more length preventing to do it again.
Shipping. The US is huge and many parts are sparsely populated. You can free deliver in 12 hours in New York and make a profit. But you can't do that in North Dakota.
Amazon has the infrastructure to deliver anywhere in the US in a reasonable time and their size allows them to offset that guy in the Oregon woods ordering a pair of socks with a Manhattanite hipster ordering a $1500 coffeemaker.
Indeed. Stores are not your friend. And its not like it was better before Amazon. In fact with online shopping I learned how those brick and mortar retailers were scamming me for decades with their middleman rent seeking.
Yeah Amazon will likely be beaten by a Chinese company at some point.
There is no domination in capitalism. A new competitor always shows up. Consumers are not loyal to Amazon- they will shop anywhere. If you don't believe me look at the airline industry.
There is plenty of domination in capitalism, monopolies, cartels, oligopolies, political influence. Once you get to a certain size you become too big to fail and the government is then in your pocket.
The current trade war with China is probably being fought in the interests of big business rather than the consumer
Allow me to say: in a well regulated capitalism. We all know Standard Oil.
Don't blame Amazon if you can't be bothered to use another store. But I am Dutch, I would walk 10 kilometres just to save 50 cents as a matter of principle.
Capitalism is inherently self-destructive because it tends towards a monopoly and unregulated monopolies make competition impossible (especially if they're "vertically integrated", i.e. monopolies at every level of the value chain). Regulation solves this by restraining capitalism and actively working against it. But companies like Amazon and other US megacorps have been lobbying against regulation for decades and in the US they have been extremely effective.
"Don't blame Amazon" is a position from privilege. I make enough money to be able to waste hours clicking through various websites to find the best deal. Whether or not I shop local is largely a question of laziness. But assuming this holds true for everyone is absurd.
There simply is no direct competitor to Amazon. Sure, there are specialised shops and some of them may have put in the effort to gain their target audience's trust and brand recognition, but everyone already has an Amazon account and if you are already paying every month for Prime shipping (now included in your VOD package!) why not just shop Amazon -- you'll likely order something from them anyway, so just throw it in and maybe you pay enough to hit the threshold for that "plus" product that's been collecting dust in your shopping card.
What makes you think I'm "angry with Amazon"? Amazon isn't a person. How I feel about Amazon doesn't matter. It's like being angry at the wind for blowing over a tree.
Amazon is a profit-driven corporation. Amazon drives down prices to gain market share and starve competitors. Then it repeats that process with different markets so customers come to rely on them for most of their online shopping (ideally also reinforced via products like Alexa, Kindle or Fire). Then they ramp up prices or lower costs (i.e. quality controls) as customers are too heavily invested to switch to a competitor for any given niche and their service range is too broad for any competitor to meaningfully offer an alternative. That's how you succeed as a corporation under capitalism at this point.
I'm not angry with Amazon because Amazon is winning at the game of capitalism. I'm just saying that maybe we shouldn't be forced to play the game because the way its rules work mean it will invariably end -- and that's something we generally don't want for our society as a whole.
It doesn't even matter whether we right now are experiencing "late game" (i.e. late stage capitalism) or not: the rules are already causing harm and literally killing people, so that's enough of a reason to want to stop.
That said, you can't just decide to stop playing if you're deeply entangled in the system. If everyone around you pretends private ownership is a thing and you don't happen to already "own" everything you need to sustain yourself without interacting with them, "not playing" means giving up access to things you need to survive.
Jeff Bezos could probably buy a private island, gather a group of likeminded people and form a commune and not have to worry about the basic necessities of life for the rest of his days. But a wage employee living from paycheck to paycheck doesn't have that luxury. Being able to exit the game without losing everything is only possible if you're already winning.
TL;DR: Regulation is good because it changes the rules of the game of capitalism, not because it enforces them.
> I don't know if the US has air quality norms? If so it could force strong measures that impact the economy.
They have rather strong ones, a lot of people are completely ignorant of how this stuff works. The U.S. tracks air quality across the country with a rather high resolution[0][1]; here in Canada we don't seem to have anywhere near the quality of reporting[2], and the air quality seems similar.
