101 points | by toomuchtodo1 天前
The penalties for monopolies need to be RUINOUS. The sword of Damocles should be hanging over every company and every individual with decision-making power at every company.
States used to pull corporate charters if you weren't operating for the common good.
That needs to come back.
I mean ... all those Ticketmaster fees.
(I'm not arguing with you politically btw—just trying to avoid what predictably leads to repetitive and generic, and therefore bad, HN threads.)
(I realize you weren't arguing for that)
In the end it doesn't matter all that much. Getting trump and musk in power was the most significant project you've ever contributed to, and you're going to be hearing about it for the rest of your life.
The only people "ordering" me are HN users with strong feelings. Some even say things that feel like threats.
p.s. I'm not sure why, but your comment got me thinking about the lines "everything is political" and "neutrality is not possible"—lines I mostly agree with and (believe it or not) keep in mind while moderating HN—yet which somehow push people to a place where the only thing they feel they can do is destroy each other.
It must be possible to recognize how (nearly) everything has a political valence and (nearly) nothing is neutral, while still finding some option other than banding with one tribe to destroy another. Yet that is the pressure we all seem to end up feeling. To that my answer is no—I don't believe it is the only choice, political though everything may be.
You haven't found a hidden middle ground that no one else was competent enough to navigate to or courageous enough to stand on. You are simply doing useful things for a tech fascist movement, and it's to their benefit that you keep doing them.
Calling that out isn't "tribalism", and you boiling it down to that, and other generalities, as if it's people being "mad" that other people have a different flavor of ice cream, while there's by now been (at least) FIVE people doing Hitler salutes during speeches means you're not up to speed or not treating this as seriously as you probably think you do.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhJdH63d6zM
https://cdapress.com/news/2025/feb/22/town-hall-security-det...
> The identities of the men who dragged a woman out of a legislative town hall in the Coeur d’Alene High School auditorium on Saturday remain a mystery, with event organizers claiming no knowledge of who arranged the security detail or which company was used.
^ that's how you get that. Everybody is just "doing their part", looking the other way.
That's also how you get people posting endless walls of text about the topic they insist should not be discussed on HN, or doing mental gymnastics every single time the Nazi salute is mentioned, ignoring once again what dozens of people have told them in reply to it the first of the dozens of times they did that.
Of course, but if we did that then HN would be a completely different place—it would become a current affairs site. That's not the mandate of this place.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Does a site dedicated to intellectual curiosity have a right to exist on the internet? Your argument implies that it does not. I think it does. HN isn't trying to be all things—it's trying to be one thing. You can't play a game if you keep importing rules from other games. You certainly can't play, I don't know, checkers, if you let people treat the checkerboard like a rugby pitch.
HN has been through many swings of political fire burning hotter than average. At such moments there is always a vocal subset of users demanding that we suspend HN's rules and submit it to the flames. Current events are much too important not to! they argue. Well, of course current events are more important than nearly everything on HN's frontpage—that's always the case.
We haven't done that, for the simple reason that it would destroy this place for its intended purpose.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
I think time has shown that we made the right call on those occasions. Not only that, but this pattern is so recognizable that it's hard not to interpret it as a perennial side-effect of social swings.
I may be wrong and you may be right, of course, but if civilization really is coming to an end, HN won't matter anyway, so the risk calculation here isn't particularly subtle.
If, on the other hand, you really believe that this time is different and civilization is about to be destroyed, shouldn't you be doing something more impactful than spending this much time on an internet forum, breaking its rules and arguing with its petty bourgeois janitor?
A lot of flip floppers often quote “both sides” talking points but both-sides-arguments only really apply in the context of what has happened historically and lack of willingness to set new precedents (I need all the flaws to also win mentality). Those arguments aren’t helpful in the actual solution to the problem. Even though the arguer isn’t exactly incorrect.
IMO, the only revenge that will work is by making laws forcing both sides to legislate. Idk what that looks like but not legislating has led to interpreting the law as acceptable behavior for the team to win, not interpreting the law as applied against the acting individual. However something like a legislation quota sounds messy and easily abused in a country of lobbyists.
The only other solution is getting non-term limited people to agree to term limits.
Now first-past-the-post made some sense in the 1700s, but with the vastly improved communication of the 1900s and 2000s it's just a bad voting system. Basically anything else is better.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/03/10/the-polar...
TL;DR: there's no "radicalization" taking place in the Democratic party. It's the Republicans that are driving it.
You can reform voting all you want but if a significant portion of people still aren't voting then it's not going to do much for the country.
Perhaps the Democratic base should stop "reaching across the aisle" the way they are because it clearly isn't working. On any given issue, Republicans generally understand the Democratic position on things and reject it. Democrats rarely understand the Republican position. That makes it sound like "reaching across the aisle" is a bit more of "preaching across the aisle" than truly attempting collaboration.
> And revenge means a D Potus coming in and doing things like firing every Republican they can, attempting to redirect funds.
This already generally happens, and more power to the Democrats who want to swing the pendulum hard on the Republicans after this one. The fact remains that for the last several administrations, if you were high up in one of these organizations, you would have to expect to get fired or demoted when the other party gets into power. If you want to see the history of this, the EPA has some of the most visible examples. The situation that's new is the wholesale gutting of entire agencies at the direction of a third party (Elon Musk).
> IMO, the only revenge that will work is by making laws forcing both sides to legislate. Idk what that looks like but not legislating has led to interpreting the law as acceptable behavior for the team to win, not interpreting the law as applied against the acting individual. However something like a legislation quota sounds messy and easily abused in a country of lobbyists.
I completely agree with you here. The administrative bloat of the executive branch is largely because the legislature has abdicated the power to write the rules on all but the broadest basis to the executive branch. The executive branch is run by only one elected person who has the power to change quite a bit about its operations.
The Republican position cannot be understood if all they ever do is reject any legislation from the opposing party as opposed to collaborating.
Reaching across the aisle doesn't mean "preaching across the aisle". That's a pretty bad faith argument.
Democrats don't have radically different ideals. Most are moderates as are most Republicans. To reach across the aisle refers to picking popular issues amongst both parties and attempting to negotiate on legislation, exactly how a functioning country should operate. Republicans have instead slapped the hands of anyone attempting to create legislation out of bad faith that they are not the side generating the good will.
This tracks consistently with the other side of the Republican party that wants to regress the country not create new legislation.
The Republican position is fully understood, that is no mystery. Why they choose to not fix bad legislation or not modernize legislation is entirely based in avoiding any idea of bipartisanship so they can point fingers and shrug off blame.
But, if we survive Trump, I would expect trials for treason.
This is an extremely shallow and incorrect take.
You mean, like the Democrats have been doing since the Obama administration? The ACA was not a bipartisan bill, it was a jam-down, and that attitude only continued. Pendulum-swing indeed.
The solution is the same one Lincoln pointed out. The people aren't fooled anymore, so if you really want to do something, you can't just shuffle the problem around for campaign donations and not actually fix it. You have to make an honest attempt to support the good of the people. At the moment, President Trump is seen as the one doing it, because the Democrats have so clearly been acting against the interests of the majority of their constituents in favor of ideological luxuries. We're done with that for a while.
No, it wasn't. It was watered down substantially.
It was “jammed-in” because Democrats got tired of Republicans opposing everything. A bipartisan effort was risky that it would be altered to be undesirable. Even so it was altered to be pretty moderate overall. Either way it was jammed because of revenge tactics I’m discussing.
It would be nice if either of them would actually do the thing they say they're going to do.
Its all a game to these clowns who have been in power for 40+ years. Chuck Schumer & Mitch McConnell are different sides of the same coin and that coin ain’t in our pockets. That coin belongs to the multinational billionaire class.
It would be nice if voters voted. It would be nice if voters actually gave the Democrats enough power in Congress (and POTUS) to enact the legislation they want instead of being obstructed by Republicans at every single turn.
Mitch McConnel famously obstructed Obama and prevented him from seating a SCOTUS judge because "it's too close to an election" that was a year away.
So when you call out Democrats as doing nothing, please realize it isn't for lack of trying, it's for lack of power that the people didn't give them.
Obama had control over the House and Senate during his first term. Republicans filibuster things that Republican constituencies have strong objections to, but they're not going to put up a strong defense of Hollywood or Facebook etc., so why didn't they go after the villains in their own house?
Why didn't either of them pardon Snowden?
Why didn't they make deals to do things that are good? There are reasonable things Republicans want that it's the Democrats who strongly oppose, like school choice, or loser-pays for civil court cases against non-megacorps. If you're not willing to give any of that stuff up and you want them to give up things that their constituents oppose, of course they fight you tooth and nail. But if you could find a way to be objective for a moment, some of the things your side wants are bad or at least not great and you only want them because their interest groups are in your tent. Instead of finding a compromise where the public gets screwed to benefit the interest groups on both sides, you could find a compromise where the interest groups on both sides get screwed to benefit the public. Yet they don't.
Not for the full term, only 2 years, where he got ACA enacted. So don't act like he had completely free reign for 8 years, or that he didn't get anything done.
>Why didn't either of them pardon Snowden?
Nobody would pardon Snowden, he ran. Obama let Manning off pretty easily because she came to justice, and he said if Snowden wanted to face justice, he'd likely be free in the U.S. right now.
>Why didn't they make deals to do things that are good?
ACA was good for millions of people. Republicans are set to erase that. No, both sides are not the same.
>There are reasonable things Republicans want
Like what? Ending birthright citizenship? Ending gay marriage? Ending a lot of things vulnerable people depend on? The damage Repulbicans are doing is a very long list. No, the Democrats do not have an equally long list.
I'm going to go any further than this with you, it's pointless.
The US still has about the highest healthcare costs in the world. If that's supposed to be what success looks like, it's not great.
> Nobody would pardon Snowden, he ran.
That's just an excuse. Demanding that he face a trial is conceding that he would be prosecuted, which only proves that he was right to run. Justice for what he did is a pardon.
> ACA was good for millions of people. Republicans are set to erase that.
ACA was incremental progress that barely made a dent, and could easily have been a bipartisan bill if bipartisanship was still a thing. Half the reason Republicans are always talking about repealing it is that it was full of their ideas and they want to "repeal and replace" it by making some minor tweaks so they can claim the credit for the modest benefits because neither party can be bothered to address the bigger problems with the US healthcare system.
> No, the Democrats do not have an equally long list.
The Democrats play coy. When they pass laws to enrich the megacorps or special interests, they tell you they're defending the little guy, as if simply claiming that conveys the right to be indignant if someone wants to subject their proposals to an analysis of qui bono.
Even Trump is against Big Tech. We're seeing right now how much of that brown nosing is making him look the other way. It's not a certainty
Also, the government isn't in entire lock step with trump just yet. People are still trying to do some good while they can.
It's an odd situation where more aggressive anti-trust posture is actually rather popular with Trump's base. Anecdotally, I know several 2024 Trump voters who cite Khan's FTC as the thing they liked the most (or only) under Biden.
I tend to agree with you otherwise, but this issue does have a bipartisan consensus forming and it's unwise to seek conflict where you share values.
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/trump-enforcers-affirm-li...
At least those of us that did live through the turmoil in these countries can see what is going on.
That has been the goal of their immigration policy since the 1960s.
And frankly, given his public comments about and noted vitriol towards Lina Khan and the FTC (and his own tendencies towards seeking monopolies) I assume at some point he'll try.
Further, purely speculating: it may be he already has tried. It's indicative that we didn't immediately see him go for the FTC. He's too small of a man to not have wanted to for personal reasons, and too greedy to not have wanted to for long-term business reasons. I have to wonder if he was restrained from doing so on account of (correctly) predicted blowback from such an action.
Seeming to come down on the side of John Deere and DuPont subsidiaries and spinoffs is not a smart move. These are hot issues for the populist wing of the party who want to purge what they label as the "Con(servative) Inc" wing and routinely make hobbyhorses of issues affecting farmers in flyover states.
Pure speculation. It could just as easily be frog boiling. I guess we'll all find out soon.
> the Trump administration ratified that the merger guidelines from the Biden administration are a fair reading of the law.
It's completely absurd that it has been handed over for "administration" to a private organisation with operating margins of roughly 70% on $1.5 billion in revenue.
This is essentially money that belongs to the public (and should go back to public infrastructure). Instead, legislation ensures that this doesn't happen.
Which law?
More policy than law