Politics 2025

[Geo]

Also on Joe - abruptly late last year, I finally got me some Medicaid - nothing we'd done led to that, I think.  We just got a letter out of the blue.

I don't know how Joe did it, but Joe did it.  -Not Bakrama, not Mrs. Clinton.  Joe Biden.

We have a saying here, the public gets what it wants or needs in an election year. Maybe someone, somewhere, was trying to sway your vote.
In my country its most visible one year-6 months before a community council election: lots of public road infrastructure works.

[Buster's Uncle]

It was post-election, but that might just be blown timing...

[Buster's Uncle]

Warren, no one took seriously.

Dr. Warren kneecapped Bloomberg.

You SHOULD take Professor Warren seriously, Green.  Earlier that day, I'd seen one of the Liberals Screaming On Twitter comment that if Bloomberg won the debate, we'd probably seen our last President who wasn't a billionaire.  -Chilling; I thought the point had weight.

She, as Jesse-The-Governor Ventura would probably put it, Ended His Career.  That's her signature piece, BTW, loudly and angrily slapping around Rich and Powerful Bossmen -for their proven crimes- in public - WELL.  We ALL owe her forever for Bloomberg alone.

Selah-amen.

[Elok]

Also on Joe - abruptly late last year, I finally got me some Medicaid - nothing we'd done led to that, I think.  We just got a letter out of the blue.

I don't know how Joe did it, but Joe did it.  -Not Bakrama, not Mrs. Clinton.  Joe Biden.

Without knowing more I couldn't say, and certainly I'm no expert, but isn't Medicaid administered at the state level, with only broad guidelines at the federal level?  I would be predisposed to credit some change in the local NC bureaucracy first.

Also, no, sorry, not taking Liz "Sandwich shop monopoly" Warren seriously.  Ain't gonna do it.

[Buster's Uncle]

I'll be ruder than I would to someone I didn't love - does that Kool aide taste good?

[Buster's Uncle]

I mean, googling that gives me an article by the Cato Institute on the first page, which is discredited by being the Cato Institute.  If they declared for chocolate ice cream and Baby Jesus in a Manger, I'd consider switching to vanilla and joining the Church of Satan.

Monopolies are BAD, son, and our government has failed us on fighting them your whole life.

Posted courtesy of a Microsoft computer.

[Elok]

You realize that, if Subway or any other chain acquired 100% market share for fast-food sub joints and used it to do unspecified terrible things--and for whatever reason nobody was able to break into the niche--Americans would be faced with the cruel inconvenience of buying bread, deli meat, and condiments, and putting them together themselves?  I mean, I can't picture what they would do with their terrible power; if they raised prices enough people would just buy their cold cuts premade from Wal-Mart, or get burgers, or something.  Subway, Jimmy Johns et al just don't have the leverage to be monsters, but she felt compelled to have the acquisition blocked anyway.  Liz Warren, AFAICT, runs on a set of simplistic assumptions, such as "big business is inherently bad," and follows them to absurd conclusions.

[Buster's Uncle]

Elizabeth Warren humiliates criminal bossmen, which is priceless, and not enough of that action going around.

-Still posted from a machine w/ operating system forced on me, and not for free.

[Elok]

Forced on you?  How?  I have Windows on this laptop, because it came with the device five or so years ago.  I assume I technically paid for it in the sense that it was bundled in the cost of the laptop, but it keeps trying to update to Windows 11 without charging me anything--I had to stop it by looking up how to disable the updater.  Microsoft has been continually updating security holes in the OS the whole time, gratis, and I will eventually have to update it when it stops supporting Windows 10 in ... soon.  Or, if I really disliked Windows, nothing is stopping me from getting a different OS for this device, that I know of.  They just don't annoy me enough to be worth the hassle that would be.

Thought this over on my morning walk, and really MS is a very poor example of an abusive monopoly.  I mean, they used to sort of be a monopoly when I was in high school and dial-up internet was huge.  Microsoft was everywhere in tech, thanks to insidious practices such as ... okay, I can't remember what they did besides give lots of computers to schools so everybody grew up using Microsoft stuff.  Even then, Mac and Linux were always an option, but the former was for artsy nerds with too much money and the latter was for plain old nerd nerds with too much free time.  But then, virtually every time a challenger appeared in a new sector of the tech industry, MS lost ground.

--The partial exception: console games.  They saw Nintendo, Sony, and (sort of) Sega making big bucks with game platforms, so they created the XBox.  And it did okay.  It might have helped that (I noted this at the time) the commercials did not mention it was a Microsoft product.  Didn't really dominate the market at any point, but did okay, and you can still buy an XBox Something (is it the "XBbox One" now?) if you don't want a PS5 or a Switch.  My uninformed opinion (last console I owned was a refurbed Gamecube c. 2010) is that XBox appears from a distance to be something of an also-ran.  When I hear people excited about a new game, it usually seems to be on one of the other two.  And the XBox is pretty much Microsoft's success story in terms of new market entry in the current millennium.

-Everybody used to use Internet Explorer.  Then Firefox came along, followed by Chrome, Brave, and a bunch of other browsers.  Internet Explorer doesn't even exist anymore, now it's called "Microsoft Edge," and nobody uses that either.  When I downloaded Firefox to this laptop, the OS actually said, "hey, you already have Edge, the coolest and best browser ever!" and I laughed and continued using Firefox.  Like millions of other people.

--A scrappy start-up named Google shook up the late nineties with a search engine that actually worked.  Microsoft said, "who, there!  We own all this online stuff!" and launched a competitor named Bing.  Do you use Bing?  No, you do not.  Had you thought of Bing in the past six months, prior to my mentioning it just now?  Probably not.  Does Bing still exist?  I'm not sure.

--Everybody used Microsoft Office.  Until they didn't.  Personally, I grew up using Corel WordPerfect, and kept using it because Word had an annoying tendency to try to guess what you wanted and do something stupid to your formatting.  I now use LibreOffice, which is a mutated open-source descendant of WordPerfect.  Nobody has ever tried to stop me from using it.  Many others prefer Google Docs.

--IDK if anybody uses Outlook except for work.  I have free yahoo e-mail.  Others have gmail.  I interact with Outlook roughly once or twice a workday to see if the CEO is talking about giving us another raise or something.  There's two versions of Outlook on our work computers, and generally when one is working to access e-mail the other isn't.  Not sure why, or if this is somehow MS's fault or if we just have bad sysadmin or what.  My work computer also has Microsoft Teams.  I don't know what that does, it just pops up when I login sometimes, and I have to X it out to get it out of my way, and sometimes people on Facebook make fun of it.

--EDIT: I seem to recall they briefly tried to compete with the ipod, and it was some kind of hilarious failure?  Was it called Zune?  That sounds right.

--I don't remember if MS even tried to compete on smartphones, but if so they got whooped there too.  Android is Google and their big competitor is Apple.  They have no presence on social media that I know of; do they own anything like Instagram?  Or Amazon?

Basically, AFAICT, in the past twenty-five years Microsoft has gone from an industry-dominating titan to a sort of boring, stodgy, but respectable utility company that makes most of its money selling group licenses to corporations.  There's a competitor, frequently an open-source competitor or two, for everything it does or makes.  People are starting to worry about Google being too powerful instead, and now I mostly search with DuckDuckGo unless I really really need the superior results Google provides.  Though lately AI seems to be infecting everybody's search results with useless crap, so which engine you use is much less important, but I digress.

The closest I can recall to Microsoft abusing its purported monopoly power over me is when I bought this laptop.  It came with some lame version of Windows that wouldn't let you download non-Microsoft software for "safety" reasons.  I had not known this when I bought it, and got very angry for about an hour.  Then I looked around online and found you could permanently disable the "safety" feature by digging in some menu.  I did this.  It begged me not to, but I did it anyway, and they didn't try to stop me further.  No issues since.

[Lorizael]

...Microsoft has famously faced multiple antitrust investigations and judgments in the US and EU (and probably other places) over the last ~30 years. There's a reason we didn't see successful competing web browsers until the late 2000s, for example.

[Buster's Uncle]

Thanks, Lori.


It was basically no choice when my old machine died last fall - absolutely everything in my price range and so on was W11.  I could do like you mention, Elok, but don't want to and shouldn't have to.  Yes, Microsoft is basically IBM these days, but still a virtual monopoly - that's why lefties have a strong hatred of Walmart, too, that you may not find rational, but should.

Monopolies are BAD, m'kay?

-This is such a self-evident thing that I have trouble even putting it into words.  Warren is about the only effective monopoly fighter in the government -along w/ Bernie- that I know of off the top of my head.  The reactionaries HATE her for that.

I only did the most cursory research into this, admittedly, it being a new one by me.  It's not like she called for ABOLISHING Subway that I saw, just a look into it by the appropriate authorities.  Your remarks on her -including the disrespectful "Liz"- look like reactionary talking points, and I wouldn't respect you so if you did that much.  Please do not follow up calling her "Pocahontas", thanks.

[Elok]

I mean, I haven't done tons of research, obviously, since I spent most of the late nineties and early aughts thinking about sex.  I'm just saying that Microsoft, far from being a dominating monopoly, has spent the last generation losing nearly every battle it fought, and not apparently due to state action but from market forces.  A quick lookup: at stake in one major case was that MS bundled Internet Explorer with Windows.  It still bundles Edge with Windows.  Nobody cares.  We use Edge to download a browser we actually want.  Apparently it also attempted to block third-party software installation on Windows, which sounds like it would have bit them in the arse pretty hard even without federal intervention (obviously that's a counterfactual so nobody knows).  I would further argue that MS's reputation for domineering was a big factor in its decline/failure to expand in new markets.  Everybody despised them, back in the day.  I remember writing a college paper half-seriously comparing Bill Gates to Genghis Khan ... who the hell wanted a Zune?  Who's going to try Bing?

Wal-Mart is not a monopoly in my neck of the woods, can't speak to yours.  There's an Aldi right down the street which offers comparable prices but inferior selection; it's easier to get in and out of so I go there when I don't want to bother with Wal-Mart because I only want a couple of things.  If I were feeling poorer than I am, there's also Grocery Outlet (which frankly scares me), and the DG Market down the street (a Dollar General project which seems to exist to milk EBT, been in there once).  Also down the street from me--both are closer than the nearest Wal-Mart--is a Publix.  Publix is employee-owned and rather froo-froo, don't know if their reach extends up to NC but they're a Southern institution.  I go there only when I want something fancy, because that's their weird market niche and most of their stuff is simply too expensive.  I wish we had a Piggly-Wiggly (also iconic!) in this city, but sadly we don't.  The P-W where I went to RT school was great; they bought up miscuts from butcher schools and sold them cheap.

A third Southern institution is Winn-Dixie, but they were recently bought out by Aldi and it's unclear what Aldi is going to do with them.  I greeted this as good news, because I spent half my pharmacy years working for Winn-Dixie and frankly they were a grocery chain struggling to find a reason to exist.  Basically they weren't as nice as Publix or as crappy as Wal-Mart so if you didn't want to hang out with the grubby peons at the latter but didn't feel rich enough for the former, you went to Winn-Dixie.  Their being bought out will allow a bunch of WD locations to be converted to Aldis.  If Aldi were bigger, I'm sure somebody would be talking about blocking the merger.

Outside my area, I understand Wal-Mart's biggest competitor is Target, which follows a similar business model.  Progressives like Liz Warren don't, as far as I know, hate Target.  I don't know if we have one in this city but if they do it's nowhere near me--yep, looked it up, they're in nicer parts of town.  I never went to Target in other cities because they were too bloody pricey and offered hoity-toity wares I wasn't interested in.  I go to Wal-Mart regularly, and while I'm there I see a lot of fairly obviously poor people there, shopping with me, because Wal-Mart works aggressively to control costs to maintain market share.  Part of that is controlling labor costs, which is part of why progressives don't like them.  Those same progressives, if they had their druthers, would rather have it so that all grocery stores must offer very good wages (for largely unskilled labor), and allow unions, and follow XYZ environmental regulations, and in general do all these expensive things that drive up prices and are worse for actual consumers (I don't know if that's what Target does).  Meh.  I don't think Wal-Mart are heroes, but capitalism doesn't create heroes.  It just forces selfish people to compete so their selfishness works out better for everyone in the long run.  I like capitalism.  It's worked out fine for me and a lot of other people.  I don't think the market should be allowed to decide everything, but when it works, it works pretty well.

I mentioned the sandwich shop thing because it was the last thing I recalled hearing about Liz Warren, and it was ridiculous.  She actually used the words "sandwich shop monopoly," like this is something the Federal government needs to be concerned with.  I would never call her Pocahontas, that's not even clever.  My impression of her is of a rather tedious Don Quixote who thinks the government needs to protect everyone from everything all the time.  But our government is going bankrupt and frankly can't afford to continue most of the services it currently offers.

I am aware that "everyone knows" monopolies are bad, but aside from the fact that you haven't cited an actual monopoly yet, that's one of the things everyone knows because they learned it in history class, and when I ask them they struggle to mention real-world examples.  Everybody just remembers some stuff about Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Teddy Roosevelt.  I was actually there myself, years ago.  I posted this whole theory about how, from an individual business's perspective, the end-goal of competition is to defeat the rest so it doesn't have to cut prices or do R&D anymore.  Somebody asked me if I could cite an example of this actually happening.  I couldn't.  I changed my mind.  Without government collusion, it's very hard for a company to get so big they can actually abuse their customers.  It's much easier for the government to get so big it can abuse its citizens.  Not that I expect Warren and Sanders to do that.  Mostly they just waste everyone's time.

[Buster's Uncle]

You don't understand a thing I've said, clearly.  That there's pure motivated reasoning.

[Elok]

Well, what are you saying?  What's a "virtual" monopoly?  MS has the default OS for most large private-consumer computing devices (desktops/laptops), plus corporate networks and thin clients and all that.  There are, and always have been, other options, including stable Linux builds.  I just looked it up, and yes, I could download an Android OS for this laptop if I wanted to.  Most people, including me, don't bother with this stuff because (it seems to me) MS is struggling mightily not to be quite so annoying that they lose that too.  They were on top of the world once; now they have one niche of software, and much larger companies (like Google and Amazon, which both started quite small when MS was dominant) are king in their place.

What makes something a "virtual monopoly"?  Is it size alone?  Wal-Mart is big, no question, but it has plenty of competitors even in my one not-that-metropolitan city, and I didn't mention Amazon (with whom it is also attempting to compete, in a totally different way) in my last post.  Monopoly, to me, summons up an image of a bloated, lazy company taking its customers for granted.  Wal-Mart doesn't strike me as complacent.  They're perpetually changing up inventory and trying new approaches.  In the past few years I've noticed a growing trend towards grocery delivery, and I share the aisles with Wal-Mart employees loading up giant carts full of bins for delivery.  Not something I want myself, but it doesn't get in my way.  Why do I need protection from Wal-Mart?

[Buster's Uncle]

Because 40 years ago, you could buy A LOT of batteries there for four dollars, to use an old King of the Hill joke.  Now K-Mart's gone, Sky City is gone, local non-chain competition anywhere you'd remember is long gone.  AND now you can't buy all that many batteries at Wallmart for whatever the current equivalent price is to four dollars.

Target continues to exist, frankly, by not being Wallmart, not because Target is much good.