Seems the answer is “no” to the first part of your question. From the filing:
> For example, one initial bid requested certain customer list information; however, by the first round of the Auction, the most competitive bidders had agreed to bid on an asset schedule that expressly excluded PII.
It’s also geographically distributed. Substantially all congressional districts count a healthcare system as a top-5 employer. Those 70k/yr butts-in-seats admin jobs are occupied by voters, making them difficult to eliminate nationally. You’d have to go down to the state level at least to get anything done.
I think it’s because Americans been taught that were democracy, not a federal system, but that’s exactly where we expect to do these kinds of reforms. The federal government could reasonably set certain regulatory requirements. The states would need to make sure that any provider within it conforms to the federal levels, you know like auto manufacturing and exhaust emissions. Seems doable. Unfortunately we’re gonna have to wait for the boomers to die because they’re the ones that have gotten theirs and they’ve screw everyone else. Also, unfortunately, the millennials are gonna have to take it on the chin like we have for so much else and realize there is going to be some lost jobs.
Wow, that explains why my order number mysteriously disappeared from their “now serving” screen even though I went at a time when the restaurant was empty.
What’s come next for me has been much better. I use ChatGPT cranked to Pro with “extended” thinking to one-shot whatever I would’ve spent time looking into with Google. It’ll plan the whole sunset bike ride or promposal or whatever from TFA.
I think we should refrain extending “negative externality” to mean “things people don’t like that might affect them.” Non-pecuniary externalities, in the Pigouvian sense, are really something you analyze to achieve efficiency. In this case, following a 5-year permitting process and plopping the industrial activity on industrial land is basically a form of bargaining and is probably acceptable from a social efficiency standpoint. Amazon’s hardly mining cobalt next to a daycare here.
> I think we should refrain extending “negative externality” to mean “things people don’t like that might affect them.”
But that's pretty much the definition of the term. It's a negative impact on a third party. If I'm living next to a data center, and it's noisy, or my electricity costs more, those are negative externalities.
There are real reasons not to want data centers next door, unlike 5G towers.
In the South Valley, the pre-data center nemesis were distribution hubs, lambasted for the traffic they caused. Ironically also a key component of Amazon’s physical infrastructure.
I'd say you're trying to define some ambiguous criteria to keep harms illegible to the analysis and thus deny that they exist. Noise pollution is very much pollution, certainly causes real problems, and falls right into the externality paradigm wherein a party unilaterally causes harm while making others suffer it.
That the effects of noise pollution are hard to formally describe (and extra hard to quantify in monetary terms) does not mean we can just throw up our hands and pretend they don't exist. In fact, I'd say this is exactly why we stake out lofty non-economic ideals like human rights etc - markets have friction (ie are not efficient), and this combined with your reasoning means we could justify anything that produces negative outcomes for humans by simply writing it off as non-economically-legible. But the entire human-value justification for letting markets do their thing rests on the positive benefits they bring to us humans, so that is absurd. And so we always need to look at the larger picture and judge the real-world effects on humans.
Who knows. I wish ant harshly penalized speaking litotically because it’s essentially reward hacking as it can often be read multiple ways.
It’s also annoying as a human because Claude et al rate their own writing very highly, putting human<>LLM interactions at a disadvantage to human->LLM<>LLM interactions.
> Perhaps this is a modern replacement for religious fundamentalism for some people
I would say it’s narrower, loosely a sort of heresiology. It would be motivated by a strong internal sense of insiders vs. outsiders. Which isn’t saying much, but I think that’s that.
