I bought an LG commercial display at the exorbitant $1k price point a few years ago and every single time I walk past it I feel good about the money I spent. Does it look worse? Probably?
Did I plug in a FireTV stick that is also spying on me? Yes.
But I still consider it to have been preferable to just have a (relatively) dumb display that does not know when I play a dvd or blu ray and can’t tattle on me if I connect the TV to my Game console and play something embarrassing like Train Simulator 17 Nerd Edition.
(Wish Apple had an incredible response to every single question, but while I’m still a fan, not going to use this comment as a plug… A little disappointed)
I had to work with a funeral home this year and what I found was that private equity has taken over the funeral industry. Don’t assume that a funeral home that seems local actually is.
I have a friend whose family owned a funeral home, but due to unfortunate circumstances were forced to sell it. Now it belongs to an investment company who threw out any sense of respect and slathered it in gaudy baby-blue paint and a sans-serif logo, still keeping the old family name of course. I grimace every time I drive by.
And where it isn't PE actually buying up local plumbing, heating, HVAC companies, it's "CRM lead generators" using automation tools to build plausible looking websites/phone number presences that look like a real company, fooling people who are searching for plumbing services in $city into calling them, then funnelling the lead to some local company in exchange for a percentage. Worst offender in this category is probably locksmiths.
Yelp has made a resurgence in my opinion. So far I have found a good garage door guy and painter guy. Everything negotiated via texting (phone call first). Make sure when they show up they don’t have an iPad.
Not many things are actually inevitable. We could provide smaller companies some regulatory/tax advantages compared to larger ones, making them more competitive. If that's what society values, it can easily be done.
Yes, you're both right. An important role of government is to use regulation to prevent the inevitable.
Long ago it was understood that monopolies are bad for us, but it looks like we're destined to learn these lessons again the hard way. I don't think it was ever imagined the people would vote monopolists into the position of regulator.
That seems like it goes without saying that yes the rules would need to change for results to change. Its just not a hard law or even some sort of natural state of humans.
That is why there were laws against monopolies. But some far-right activists proposed the idea of "if it is a monopoly is because is so good that people wants it". And they run with it. It makes no sense as all these monopolies are created by buying competitors not by being better. But as it helps the new aristocracy to accumulate power many sellouts are in favor of it.
This is exactly what made the feudal system so unhealthy and hostile towards innovation. Wealth concentration means power concentration that makes a few people so powerful that new and different ideas are violently attack from positions of power. Kings do not want better farming or better fabrics if it means that they lose the control over it. Kings value control over anything else, and we are entering a new era of kings, concentrated wealth and stagnation. We can change that, break all monopolies, redistribute power and let a dynamic healthy diverse economy rise again and bring its fruits to society.
I was a REST purist for a while and the purer I got the more unhappy I was. Hypermedia standards like Siren and HAL just made things miserable no matter how hard I tried to make them work.
I think the REST Architectural Pattern is great but I don't use it anymore. Instead I create ROUSED services.
Resource Oriented because the very best thing about REST is the tendency to focus on resources and collections of resources and how you can interact with them sensibly.
Unconstrained because I don't let some specification control how I work.
Sensible because things still need to be internaly consistent and well thought out.
Enterprise because the fact is I'm always making these services for some 'boring' business use case.
Services that provide some specific set of bounded capabilities within the usual messy ecosystem present at a SaaS software company.
I think we owe a lot to Roy Fielding for the potent ideas but as others have argued eloquently, reality sets in and you have to adapt to circumstances.
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