Regulation is usually what you accept in exchange for a monopoly. I would argue a granted monopoly without any regulation is evidence of regulatory capture.
If you want to argue from first principles, and we accept for a moment that granted monopoly is the system we are working in (whether or not you feel it's the optimal regime) then I'd argue there's a clear gap in regulation, as flagrant abuse of the consumer has not been prevented.
Not really. Monopolies are an invitation to competition: Your margin is my opportunity, as it were. They are therefore hard to maintain absent some kind of external force to support it: Regulations (regulatory capture), licensing, explicit grant from the government, intellectual property laws, or some kind of collusion or market manipulation (more leading to oligopolies rather than monopolies).
This is how industrial barons of the early-mid 20th century operated, as an example, with collusion and price fixing type things. Or hospitals and medical facilities today with certificate-of-need laws enforced by the government.
This is inaccurate - natural monopolies are a thing.
Monopolies happen due to barriers to entry, and not all barriers to entry are government-created or illegal: network effects, big upfront costs, economies of scale, control of a scarce resource, etc.
Regulation can produce a monopoly, but lots of regulations also exist to keep natural monopolies in check.
True. Though I don't like the term 'natural monopoly'. Most natural monopolies aren't - or don't have to be.
Maybe a term like 'natural markets' captures it better? The property being that natural markets/monopolies provide some sort of substrate on which a market can exist.
Good regulations seem to be ones that force open protocol and interoperability of these platforms that get large. This creates a new marketplace abstraction layer that enables new innovation to thrive.
I'm certainly glad that I'm not on AOL's internet. And also glad that internet exists in part due to Bell's telephone system being forced open.
Bad regulations do not seem to have that characteristic. It's too bad we do not have vocabulary to tell them apart. Public good type regulations are more muddy and can be used as a weapon more often than not.
Most people, especially governments, aren't positioned to analyse monopolies.
>Regulation can produce a monopoly, but lots of regulations also exist to keep natural monopolies in check.
My favourite example of this is Australias NBNCo.
Every midwit on the street capable of reading a newspaper would tell you, theres a NATURAL MONOPOLY on internet services, which is why Australia needed NBNCo.
However, the enabling legislation also made it a federal crime to overbuild the NBN, because the internet isnt a natural monopoly. We have also had calls to nationalise other fibre networks, and lots of cases of NBN overbuilding other networks.
The truth of it, is that Natural Monopoly is just a thought terminating cliche. There are barriers to entry to markets, but the only kind of monopoly is regulatory. Unless you regulate some dipshit will find a way to sneak a fibre through your power duct or something. If there was enough of an interest, we could have multiple power or water hookups too. There's no reason why we cant have competitive garbage collection, and theres probably somewhere on the planet that does. Even pit and pipe isnt a monopoly, I have seen plenty of places with multiple pit providers.
Take garbage hauling. You have five haulers running the exact same routes through town, stopping at different houses. Government is unhappy with the tremendous added wear on the roads from the redundant trucks, and the extra traffic, so it strikes a deal and grants exclusivity to one hauler.
This is a granted monopoly. It has real positives, such as the same service at 5x less road wear. It should also be obvious that to be positive overall the deal needs to prevent abuse of the public.
Some part of Ohio functions as a granted monopoly for the power company.
They are given 5-year contracts, but an agency exists to tabulate complaints, reaction time to outages, and so on. If they don't impress the agency near the end of their contract, it will be opened up for market bidding.
Because of this pressure, the monopoly power company has even been known to reduce rates, proving a priori that they are indeed serving the public interest at a commendable level.
If there are 5x as many truck runs, the trash per truck is 1/5th.
The more likely result is that each of the providers runs far fewer trucks than a single provider would because trucks and drivers cost money. Unless the 5 companies figure out how to get the total revenue to 5x, they can't pay for that.
Let's do an example.
Suppose we have a street with 100 houses and it takes 5 houses to fill a truck. Therefore, it will take 20 truck runs to collect that street's trash.
If there is only one trash company, it will need 20 truck runs to service that street.
If there are five trash companies, each with an equal share of those 100 houses, each of those companies needs only 4 runs to service its 20 houses. Why would any of them do more runs?
Yes, the average distance per run may be higher for the 5 companies, but it won't be 5x.
> Yes, the average distance per run may be higher for the 5 companies, but it won't be 5x.
You contradict yourself at the end of the comment. Yes, it could be estimated a linear equation (mx + b) where m is the cost per house and b is the cost per route, roughly. And then you could have a system of which equations, where each row in the system’s matrix corresponds to an additional company.
The optimal result is probably not 1 company, but it’s probably not 1 company per house either
I question whether that's the dominant assumption. I know there's hoarders, but there's also loads of "stuff" associated with day-to-day life. Live in one place and you'll have boxes of bandages and aspirin, tools for fixing the lawn mower, a small compressor for blowing out your sprinklers, board games, extra coffee mugs, shoes that are ok but you don't like very much, on and on. None of that "junk", even if you might use it rarely and certainly won't perish without it.
There's little nobility in throwing out your fourth set of perfectly serviceable bed sheets or the nicked pair of nail clippers in the guest bathroom. Which leads to accumulation, like moss on a tree.
I agree a lot with this. Some folks really do hoard pointless things, but for most people a lot of their stuff really consists of things you'd expect to be in a household, but rarely use. It doesn't usually make sense to get rid of these things pre-emptively because you're still likely to use them as long as you're in that living situation, even if it's infrequent.
Then when you pass away and other people have to go through it all, they don't need those items because their household already has those items. I don't need 3 more flashlights and a kitchen table because I already have my own!
We can dream that every human should be self reliant enough to personally inspect a used car, test knife steel for ductility and carbon content, inspect the stitching in a pair of pants, on and on.
But if you need vast expertise and extensive product testing just to make a trip to the grocery store, that’s not a fluid market. You are requiring a system with a heavy reliance on unpaid labors by all parties.
There’s always a place for expertise, but trusted brands support market efficiency. The simplest is “I bought one of these before and I liked it; I trust that the brand & vendor will sell me an identical copy” without needing to interrogate their supply chain to confirm it’s the same good. Another is “if I buy this and the product has a defect, they will help set it straight”.
Trust in the seller is not far away in importance from transparent pricing, and arguably if the product hides a flaw (like a knockoff) the pricing is ipso facto not transparent.
From an economic perspective I think (more) informed consumers will just accelerate competition and innovation to obtain better results. Would be curious though to see some (academic) analysis on what is the influence on consumer expertise and brand impact over efficiency.
I feel that people "trust" too easy these days. Being it brands, politicians, artists, ideas, online videos, phone calls from a Nigerian prince, etc. I am not naive to think the majority will change tomorrow but I would advocate for the need of change. To make a far fetched comparison maybe 1000 years ago people would have said "learning to read is unpaid labors that does not benefit peasants", but I think more knowledge (and critical thinking) benefits everyone.
The dark part is you, as a consumer who is willing to pay to not watch ads, are worth considerably more than a few cents to advertise to. In fact, the more you are willing to pay to have no ads, the more valuable showing ads to you is…
That's an interesting point, reminds me of the dark pattern of donation options at checkout used to check for disposable income which the store could have captured.
A large fraction of the innovation in CPUs is driven by working around the memory wall. I anticipate AI inference will follow the same trend, and innovations that work around the autoregressive nature will be enormously impactful.
Speculative decoding is an example. An accurate draft model can reduce the number of times you stream through memory by a factor of 4x.
How do you work around the memory wall when you're going to have to stream all weights, no matter what? Latency-hiding tricks don't matter when you're bandwidth constrained.
I've got bad news for you jsrozner, John down in accounting at <your employer> did something very unethical last week. So you, jsrozner, a first level manager in customer support who has never even met John, are going to jail for a decade and all lifetime compensation will be clawed back.
In many environments it ends up acting like a generic "don't build things" mandate. Such a mandate's wins are by accident more often than by target, and it does more harm than good.
With what? It’s not prima facie bad to have limits or bounds. I’d agree it’s good to be able to be goofy, but there’s plenty of actually-illegal activities teenagers used to “experiment” with (and skate by under the radar) that doesn't feel like a loss if it’s gone.
With stuff that you're be free to do as an adult with minimal to no restrictions.
Teens should have opportunities to experiment with these activities in safe spaces so that they have direct life experience to reflect on when they're in a less safe or unsafe environment.
Absolute case in point, in Germany drinking age is 16, but if you’re drunk and goofy and on social media rest assured you’ll be an outcast for a long while
Clearly the point of this paper was not to flag a specific lake as being a specific problem. It seems pretty clear it's a case study meant to provide generalizable information and principals for remediation, and while they didn't predict the exact glacial lake that would collapse first, they were flagging danger in exactly the right region.
If you want to argue from first principles, and we accept for a moment that granted monopoly is the system we are working in (whether or not you feel it's the optimal regime) then I'd argue there's a clear gap in regulation, as flagrant abuse of the consumer has not been prevented.
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