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elmer2 | on: OpenAI and Anthropic cut their LLM prices by up to 80% within a few months. Why?
This is the goal of all government regulations and it's always resulted in higher prices and near monopolies dominating the market.

Yet, so many Democrats support it.

smallmancontrov | parent | next
In the hands of 4th party system Progressive Republicans and 5th party system New Deal Democrats, government was an extremely powerful force for trust-busting.

In the hands of 6th party system Republicans, namely Ronald Reagan and Robert Bork, the government worked hard to usher in a a new era of Robber Barons. We live in the culmination of this project.

History says the result depends on the hands, not the tool. 6th party system Democrats have largely failed to undo the Reagan/Bork policies, but that's an act of omission not comission and even then Lina Khan was a big step in the right direction. This issue was on the ballot in 2024 and will be again in 2028. Hopefully we make better choices in 2028.

dragonwriter | root | parent | next
If you are going to limit the 5th Party system to the first half of the long 1930s-1990s period of overlapping realignments (which is pretty reasonable), then the 6th Party system should be the second half of that period, and the period from about the end of the Clinton Administration on should be the 7th Party system; you can call now the 6th Party system if you call the entire long realignment period the 5th (which makes some sense, too, though there is a pretty significant difference between the New Deal dominant period and the Civil Rights dominant period of the realignment), but to split it somewhere in the middle but then lump the period after with it makes little sense.
smallmancontrov | root | parent
If you want to call Obama and Biden 7th party system, I don't really agree but I also don't think it matters for my argument: we can just re-label them and move on.
sophrosyne42 | root | parent
It is pretty funny you refer to these periods because they are the quintessential example of big business pushing for regulations to push out their competitors and become monopolies. And the "progressives" enthusiastically supported such monopolization.
tovej | root | parent
Regulated monopolies are much better than unregulated ones. Free markets generate the latter, and they have created most of the big issues we have today: inequality, climate change, the military industrial complex.
dabinat | parent | next
If you take away all regulation you’d probably end up with a monopoly anyway, as companies would no longer be prevented from merging with their competitors or using underhand tactics to gain market share.
smallmancontrov | root | parent
It's wild how businessmen will pitch you the 10 ways they will abuse the rules of the game to obtain a monopoly and extract rent, then they will turn around and say that the game rules are perfect and our only failing is not following them hard enough.
solyin | root | parent
Goomba fallacy
smallmancontrov | root | parent
Nope, same guy. Seen it a dozen times. Unenlightened self interest is a helluva drug.
cman1444 | parent | next
This is the goal of some, but very few overall, government regulations. Not even close to "all".
gamblor956 | parent | next
That's wrong, but why let reality get in the way of a pithy ideology?

Government regulations exist to regulate activity, to prevent, punish, and/or remediate harms.

Environmental regulations exist because businesses wouldn't clean up their own messes. Financial regulations exist almost exclusively because of harms and abuses committed by members of the financial industry. Building codes are updated to reflect lessons learned about people died, to prevent more people from dying the same way.

If AI regulations are passed, it will be because the AI industry decided not to self-regulate itself and stop illegally hacking computer systems, generating CSAM, or various other illegal activities that should easily be preventable if their systems were actually intelligent.

api | parent
“All” is doing a lot of work there.

Also there are real trade offs. Food would be cheaper if, for instance, it were legal to cut it with any old cheap substance regardless of health effects.

But I totally agree that some regulations are dumb or are regulatory capture monopoly schemes.

Unfortunately like many other things there is no absolute simple rule to save us from thinking. Each case must be evaluated in depth hopefully with domain expertise.