181–190 of 236 posts
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Why do that?
Nobody can hold you to account for what you said in the past if you wipe the evidence.
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Too early to call. At least initially, her FTC was incompetent to the point that M&A lawyers were urging companies to attempt mergers because shit that wouldn’t usually get through would get bungled in court. She was aggressive but incompetent. She appears to be improving. But the FTC chair isn’t an internship.
Richard Feynman was brought onto what would become the Manhattan project at age 24. He had not yet earned a graduate degree. Lina Khan was 32 when she started as FTC chair. Prior to that, she had researched anti-trust at the New America Foundation, received a JD from Yale, worked as a legal director at the Open Markets Institute, worked as a legal fellow at the FTC, and served as counsel to the House Judiciary Commit…
More and more, antitrust is a means for people who dislike big, successful companies for no particular reason to attack them. On some level, the government is just throwing its weight around. The message is "don't forget who's really in charge." Consider all the "Lina Khan fans" you see on HN and elsewhere. They rarely articulate why the government should be suing these companies, which laws that company broke, or if…
On the charge of just wanting to break up big companies because they're big, I plead not guilty on the virtue of this not being a crime. The whole point of breaking up large companies is because their size renders them unaccountable quazi-governments. To properly regulate them requires making the government even bigger with ever-more-complicated regulatory apparatus, compliance departments, administrative rulemaking,…
Unaccountable to who? I can think of plenty “almost monopolies” that no longer exist or are former shells which would infer they were accountable - at least to the customer.
But the more important question is - how big is too big? Is it the same for every company? If not, who decides? How do you measure it?
If it’s not objective criteria, it becomes a “I know it when I see it” where subjective variables result in a company in the crosshairs. So in the end, the government picking winners and losers.
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The Financial Times is also good about this.
Every FT article is paywalled
I don't care who wins the election next month, Lina Khan needs to be kept as FTC chair. The FTC has been on a roll the past while.
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On the charge of just wanting to break up big companies because they're big, I plead not guilty on the virtue of this not being a crime. The whole point of breaking up large companies is because their size renders them unaccountable quazi-governments. To properly regulate them requires making the government even bigger with ever-more-complicated regulatory apparatus, compliance departments, administrative rulemaking,…
The whole point of breaking up large companies is because their size renders them unaccountable quazi-governments. Unaccountable to who? I can think of plenty “almost monopolies” that no longer exist or are former shells which would infer they were accountable - at least to the customer. But the more important question is - how big is too big? Is it the same for every company? If not, who decides? How do you measure…
I'm not a US citizen but I understand that it comes down to the FTC and the courts rather than the government.
More and more, antitrust is a means for people who dislike big, successful companies for no particular reason to attack them. On some level, the government is just throwing its weight around. The message is "don't forget who's really in charge." Consider all the "Lina Khan fans" you see on HN and elsewhere. They rarely articulate why the government should be suing these companies, which laws that company broke, or if…
Point taken about the level of discourse on the internet and the mainstream media, no argument there. It is painful, but just because the discourse around the topic is smooth brained doesn't mean that the position is wrong. This is something that I struggle with. Sometimes the discourse is so unimaginably stupid that it pushes you to default to the other side's point of view, but that doesn't actually mean you got to…
Absolutely. Isn't the recent Crowdstrike incident sort of a testament to this? In terms of efficiency it's great for a bunch of systems to all rely on the same tool. But when something goes wrong, it goes wrong for everyone.
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It's in violation of the sacred law of the attention economy: Never link outside your garden.
Good old metric hacking. People seem to frequently forget that your measurement is always a proxy. A proxy for what? That's for you to decide. But you can't ever measure anything directly. It's sadly common even in data science but the biggest offenders I see are business people. You can't use metrics without understanding what they're for otherwise you'll just enshitify your product. Be that number of clicks, time o…
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Not GP. I would say that her effectiveness is both in Fire and Motion [1], while one wants more Fire, before the status quo was not only no fire, but also no motion. Even the motion is a good starting point that businesses are having management adapt their strategies and plans to account for the motion, just out self-interested risk mitigation in case there is more fire than there currently is today, and that fire ge…
That seems really bad for the government to be doing this. If she is losing, then using the resources of the government to harass businesses that are acting lawfully seems like fascism.