Trucking is a fundamental need so once competition thins out prices will naturally rise and eventually the cost of fuel will be pushed to the customer.
Honestly I'm not sure why we started this war. It really feels like our president taking notes on Russia and saying you know what....
We didn’t start a war. That is a thing that Congress has sole authority to declare, and that hasn’t happened.
Also a thing that never happened: the Department of Defense was not renamed to the Department of War because only Congress has the authority to rename government departments. That vote never happened and the Department was not renamed.
Just reminding everyone that this is not normal, and it’s not legal, and the exact people who have a sworn duty to stop this are not.
Other examples exist for things like The War in Afghanistan, The Korean War, The Vietnam War, and similar. But I'm not trying to write an unprompted book here on this fine October night. :)
(Maybe Congress didn't declare those wars, but they sure seemed to accept participation in them nonetheless.)
I'm almost 40 years old. The US has basically been at war my entire life in some form or another. Not a single war was declared by congress, I don't think.
This is very much normal. I'm not saying it's correct or alright, just that it is normal.
It's a war. What you call it is immaterial, just like it doesn't matter that Putin refuses to call the invasion of Ukraine a war. The identity of a thing is not dependent on the label, it is inherent in the thing itself.
If you watched the film City of God, there's a voice over contemplating murder as the crew robs banks : the first time, the rule is the exception... the second time, he learned there's an exception to every rule... the third time, the exception is the rule.
The United States has gone to war so many times without (or with a faulty) casus belli that it no longer needed one, that's why "we" started this war.
That's assuming that this article is pointing to a new trend and not merely a clustering event, where the price shock is simply bringing future failures forward in time.
This is like sitting in 1997, confidently assuming all future Internet services would run on one of Sun, Compaq/HP, DEC, or SGI, and projecting costs accordingly.
Where I grew up (and live now) - DC metro - those games are often Friday, but it's not that common for families without high school kids to attend. And by the time the kids are in high school (or even middle school), the parents just drop them and come home. But yeah, unsurprising that these are bigger social events south and mid-west.
I've been reading a 15 year study by a well known (here) sports psychologist. He studied why children played sports, and why they stopped.
The single biggest reason, by far - kids stop playing sports because of parents who come and watch. Turns out parents think winning is important, which robs all the fun out of it.
As a counter anecdote; in high school I played 2 or 3 sports per season. I enjoyed them all immensely, despite the teams being (usually) objectively terrible. No parents ever came to watch (outside the ones offering necessary transport). We'd occasionally go a whole season without winning a single game. No expectations. Just having fun with my mates...
I'm really thankful it was my time, not my parents time.
Unless it is a final or another very important match for my kid, I understand that this game is for him, an opportunity for him to socialize, to try flirting with his cruch, to enjoy being a silly teenager doing the fucking things teenagers do when not supervised, without me, the fucking helicopter parent, sucking all the life from him to satisfy my narcisistic need to be seen as an "involved parent".
Small kids, of course, are a completely different story. But once they go through puberty, parents need to understand that their role in their kids life needs to change a little bit and their kids fucking need their own space with their friends.
Some families have multiple children. Those kids are quite frequently of different ages, and thus will have entirely different activities (most high school football teams will not allow 5th graders to play, for example).
Those activities frequently overlap. No, Cub Scouts does not care that the high school basketball game overlaps with the camping trip because Cub Scouts are not in high school. Parents are (still) not able to be in two places at a time.
This means that at least some of the time, the older kid goes to their game without their parents. (Because the younger child frequently cannot.)
If you are able to solve this for those parents, you can be the first $1B single-employee company.
maybe because I don't live in a car-centric country, but I would just bike there myself with my friends, play, and bike home with my friends. From I was a kid until end of high school. Parents would often come to watch, but not always, and the fun was being with my friends anyways so it didn't matter.
I was in marching band (so I played at all the games). Is that not normal?
I guess it's just a generational thing, but my late Gen X mother was simply busy. Army drills twice a month will do that. I also concur with other responses that these were all social events anyway, so it's not like I was yearning for Mom to be there.
At a typical US high school, not very many of the students are actually playing. For most of them, it's mainly a social event, something to take a date to, or a time to hang out in the bleachers with peers.
Even if you have one child playing (or on the bench, or in the band, or cheerleading) and have come to watch, your other similar-age children will likely not be interested in sitting with you. They will want to sit with their friends, and rightfully so!
High school sports, yes Friday night is the standard time I think across the USA. Has been as long as I can remember, or at least as long as schools had outdoor lighting on the fields.
Wednesday was Peewee/little kid sports, Thursday evening was Jr High sports games, Friday evening was High School sports games, and Saturday was college sports games.
Not all of it, but Americans are working significantly more now than they did in 1975[1]. One would expect compromises to be made to clear space for more work hours.
Because the downsides that exist for other companies simply do not exist for this tier of rich companies. Examples:
- product liability
- negligence (civil or criminal)
- Computer Fraud & Abuse Act (requires intent, which after N "accidents" seems like a jury should at least evaluate whether intent is present as understood in a courtroom. Hard to blame "surprise" after the Nth "accidental" breakout.)
The bottom line is that if you or I trained a local model and it did any of this stuff, we would experience Consequences. ("Don't try this at home!") But an artifact of our unequal legal regime is that big rich companies generally do not and thus brazenly touting their immunity is part of their business strategy.
I think it's really instructive that only closed-model companies are doing these kind of "my AI could kill the world" demonstrations. All while telling us how dangerous open models are.
There are modern legal frameworks around pet liability (dog bites, "vicious" breeds); premises liability (e.g., swimming pools) and known hazards (e.g., a rotting staircase) that stem from ancient legal concepts of whether an ox was a "known gorer" or merely involved in its first goring incident.
A key issue is that there don't appear to be even cursory investigations to determine intentionality.
Are police routinely collecting prompts/guidance given to these agents and determining whether the agents were directed to commit crimes? If not, this seems like a huge oversight.
Also as you are a lawyer -- how does this law align with the authors of viruses/worms? Are they de facto assumed to have had ill intent because others labeled their works as "viruses" or "worms"?
Investigators/prosecutors are pressured from many directions towards the very easy wins and occasionally political/non-controversial headline grabbers.
Going after these companies is very hard, very controversial, and politically mixed at best (popular action but the companies have huge money to fund your opponents).
We have collectively done a terrible job incentivizing the legal system to beat ass on corporate while collar crime.
> We’ve allowed Amazon and Ticketmaster and Walmart to exist and they shouldn’t exist in their present form.
Unpopular knowledge is that these businesses are generally illegal in their current forms under existing US law. The relevant laws are still in effect, they are just rarely enforced. The scale of the lawbreaking runs to the trillions of dollars annually, and it directly harms every US consumer.
The illegal conduct is so pervasive that even explaining the existing federal law makes one sound ridiculous, because companies have been explicitly advertising illegal behavior for decades. Because there is no sanction.
One of my faves is the notion that $BIG_RETAILER can buy in bulk and get better pricing, which they pass on to the consumer. You may have seen a company advertise something like this. It sounds like smart business! There is an active federal law[1] that explicitly prohibits this arrangement.
Lack of enforcement of that law is a factor in the disappearance of the American "high street" and the demise of many small retailers.
My #1 call for reform in the US is to simply start enforcing laws, even if doing so makes rich people/companies uncomfortable.
I'm not a lawyer, but a cursory search shows there's a bunch of carveouts. It's not a straightforward ban on all favorable pricing for big players. For instance, if there's an actual cost justification (eg. bigger buyer = more efficient shipping) that's allowed. Same with offering volume discounts that are available to all buyers. That's not to say everything's above board, but it's not as simple as "wow big box stores get better pricing than mom and pop shops, so there must be federal laws being violated".
I hesitated before linking that specific statute because I suspected someone would parse it as you have. Not a bad thing, just distracts from the larger point that the US government currently has tools (of which Robinson-Patman is only one) to prevent & reverse the extreme consolidation that harms every American.
In the context of this article -- we may not need a new ban specific to preventing private equity from owning medical practices. We could simply enforce existing laws around e.g. market consolidation, consumer harm, etc.
There’s often more ambiguity than that. “Died of a COVID linked complication with COVID and other issue that is also linked to that complication.” You can’t spend endless resources deciding if something is or isn’t responsible.
Systems use arbitrary buckets like if someone commits suicide in less than six months from coming home after a war might count it, while excluding every case after six months. That’s going to misclassify cases in both directions but means you don’t need to track millions of people for decades or look through mental health details.
Obviously people with more data to work with can make a convincing case you’re wrong, but higher levels accuracy get expensive. In the end we know more than 1 million Americans died of COVID for example, how many more isn’t precisely known but ~1 million is plenty useful for decision making around the next pandemic.
That is true, but does not help a person who is not building a given website.
I have had financial websites impacted by adblockers, which is why I stopped using them. (I do not work on all of the teams building the financial websites I use.)
3 clicks to disable an adblocker on a financial website seems like a trivial price to pay for mental wellbeing and tens of hours of your life not watching video ads, but you do you.
It's not the clicks, it's the cognitive load of discovering & remembering which sites break due to an adblocker. (This set of sites changes as the sites themselves evolve.)
The main point is you were writing advice to someone as if they were building the website, when most of us are not generally building the sites we use.
Google has in excess of $121 billion of cash (& equivalents), net of total debt.
Big rich companies take on debt for reasons that are sometimes inscrutable from the outside. Recently, they have been borrowing for ~5%, about a half point above what the US government gets for 10-year Treasuries.
Apple has been financing operations with debt for a number of years as part of a complex optimization plan.
There are a lot of accounting shenanigans going on in Big Ai, financial reports are misleading, eg Meta "building" a data center through a shell company and then renting it to themselves. It does wonders for the looks of the books
Some expert wall street analysts discussing what they found and how they dissect things, have a healthy skepticism of Big Ai
I don't expect "trucking" to fail, I expect stronger players to push price that will eventually show up in inflation stats.
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