a liberal democracy that doesn’t treat its public like mere rats seeking cheese would make of itself that shining city on the hill.
@ouguoc @Zamfr Good point. They clearly have market power, but perhaps it’s less due to what we call “lock-in” than simple monopoly. My understanding is you just can’t live and transact normally in China without WeChat. It’s not that once stuck, you can’t jump to alternatives, but that there really aren’t alternatives that can do what they do.
Perhaps on the road to totality there was a period of successful lock-in helping make it possible. But there might have been political support too. 1/
@ouguoc @Zamfr But WeChat, at least, is an everything app. I think (from my 10-years-dated experience of visiting) there’s no alternative to WeChat as a kind of cash substitute for small transactions. But China does seem to have a much more diverse chat / social media scene than WeChat. So maybe where there are alternatives it’s not so sticky?
I sure don’t know enough to say! /fin
sometimes the iresome gets tiresome.
have you ever experienced vendor lock-in from a Chinese product? how often from a product not sold by an American firm? is vendor lock-in an usually American business model?
not uniquely. spotify has obviously gone for lock-in via two-sided marketplace network effects.
who else?
Text: I have good news for you, though: assholes are a minority. People of conscience, people with good will and good intentions have always outnumbered psychopaths and sycophants. It might not feel that way but that's because psychopaths have a structural advantage: normal people aren't obsessed with climbing hierarchies and dominating others. Look around you. The world runs on kindness and empathy. Hardly anything in our daily life would function at all if complete assholes were anything more than a tiny minority of the population. It actually takes a vast machinery to suppress this fact, and to reward evil behaviour.
people say Trump has really coarsened our politics, but pretty much everyone who interacts with him says “pardon me”.
the relationship between how many units of CPI a person can buy — as reckoned (inevitably differently) by any of various statistical agencies which are doing the best they can — and economic welfare is extremely weak except over very short periods of time.
[tech notebook] Sysadminning in Scala, documenting in Claude https://tech.interfluidity.com/2025/11/08/sysadminning-in-scala-documenting-in-claude/index.html
The LLM is so positive, but that's why it's not predictive. Just because it seems to really like what you are doing (and offers such apparently perceptive compliments!) doesn't mean that anyone else will.
the richest people in the world want to make the rest of us feel so poor.
@delong i’m not sure it’s my favorite verse.
Enshittification as a macro phenomenon, @pluralistic riffing on #PavlinaTcherneva https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/07/postwar-social-contract/#a-defense-of-social-contracts ht @carolannie
@artlung it’s rough. you look at those further along the path and it is rarely reassuring.
@artlung (i’ve been very itinerant as an adult, within the US and abroad. i feel very similar, although recently — due to the times, but i think also my aging — am more sensitive to threat than excited by possibility. “home is no place” is very well put. i don’t think i’ve quite felt at home since my parents moved us from the house i grew up in, when i was 12 or 13.)
hate the post, not the poster.
@delong i am a cretin on these things, but reading the Tiberius Gracchus Wikipedia page, it is remarkable how current and parallel the crisis of his assassination seems.
the conflict between plutocrats and land reformers outstrips the willingness of partisans to work within republican norms and is ultimately resolved through murder. the republic, then, is doomed.
[tech notebook] Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah https://tech.interfluidity.com/2025/11/06/zip-a-dee-doo-dah/index.html
one of the difficult mercies of existence is that no matter how profoundly you fail, not only are you permitted another chance, it is obligatory that you take it, the alternative is justly forbidden.
@delong it works until it doesn’t, i suppose!
i think part of the worldview of the moderate Republican is it’ll be okay because the Democrats will clean up after our guys’ excesses.
i’m not sure they’ve cottoned to just what a degree of catastrophic success they’re now, um, enjoying.