Which is a dumb approach, since if you keep the price low enough, people will not cancel. If I'm paying say $10 a month for Netflix, I don't care if there are three months during which I watch nothing. It's cheap enough, paying $120 a year is value enough for the few shows and movies I want to watch. $10 is an insignificant amount in my monthly budget, it's something one spends in like 5 minutes at the convenience store...

If they want to stop people from cancelling and resubscribing all the time, they should incentivize longer term subscriptions (6, 12, 18, 24 months) with lower prices, and set the monthly (no set term) price such that they make money even with people subscribing for a month to binge and then cancelling.

You have a problem remembering the plot over the course of say 2-3 months? If so, then you have other things to worry about...

I actually like the one episode per week because for me binging can be destructive...either I waste 2 days watching a whole season of something since I'm hooked, or because say my girlfriend wants to 'cause she's hooked (while I'd rather pause and do something else). Also, you get left wanting when you binge an entire season in a day, and then have to wait a year or six months for the next one. That's a far more surewise way to forget the plot...

Note that in a streaming service, no one forces you to watch an episode at a particular time (like on TV) even with a one episode per week release schedule. Once it's out, you can watch it immediately, tomorrow, three days later...and then re-watch it at any time how many times you want.

I guess my perspective is different because for me TV is not "default entertainment" anymore, I will not watch whatever just because it is available, I only watch things that I like. So I watch maybe two to three shows over a year, and at any particular moment it might be just one show. So I prefer it to last, there is something to look forward to every week. Then when it's over, I watch something else, or there are a couple of months of weeks during which I watch nothing, which is also good.

Exactly, this and the GP post.

I have nothing against vegetarian or vegan food, as you've said there is plenty of it that's really tasty and/or nutritious.

However whenever I am given "fake meat" I am disappointed, even when the taste of the things itself is not that bad. Why? Well because I expect it to taste like meat, but it doesn't. I see a sausage, and I have some expectations of what a sausage should be. The "veggie sausage" never tastes like a real one. I feel fooled.

On the other hand, if I see a bean burger, I expect the taste of beans, and am not disappointed. I don't feel fooled. It could taste great, so-so, or awful, depending on the burger (just like with a meat burger in any case), but it tastes like beans.

I don't see "fake veggie meat" being a major thing long-term, it's just something to help people who want to became vegetarian or vegan transition away from meat. Like nicotine patches for those who want to quit smoking. So these products can potentially make a lot of money in the short to medium term, if a lot of people decide to switch to being veg(eteri)an. However, once that shift occurs, it will only be a niche market (there will always be some people transitioning their diet habits). If you're raising your kids to not eat meat, I don't see why you would feed them fake meat instead of real vegetables and such.

Go is not even 10 years old yet. Java on the other hand will be 23 years old in a few weeks.

Java is one of the most widely-used programming languages, both presently and historically...it is up there with the likes of C and C++. Go on the other hand has been deployed in a much, much more limited way thus far.

Java has been used for a wide variety of applications, and people keep finding new ones...I'm not a fan of its feature creep (e.g. lambda expressions being my current pet-peeve) but isn't that kind of inevitable in a relatively old and widely-applied general purpose language? I don't see how you can avoid that as a language ages and evolves unless you keep it contained to a specific niche application area that does not require new features. How many pages was the spec. when Java first appeared?

To me it just sounds like Uber is getting desperate. They are history's most money-burning startup, have never made a profit, and a couple of years ago basically said the only way they will ever make money is massive deployment of self-driving cars.

As self-driving cars are not going to be ubiquitous anytime soon (it's one thing to run over municipal taxi regulations, quite another to do so over state and national road safety regulations), now they are trying to say they'll grab a share of the public transit market. At some point, Uber is either going to massively downsize operations to a level where they can be profitable (I'm sure there are markets where they are profitable, and can be long-term), or they will just go bankrupt.

The problem with your suggestion is that while seemingly arguing for an evolutionary, trial-and-error approach, you are actually being ideologically dogmatic.

Just like a successful market-based system is a product of evolution and tinkering, so is a successful regulatory environment. States, governments, laws, and regulations also evolve. You state that people cooperate through a free market, which is true (not only by competition however, because they do actually a lot of very straightforward, non-competitive, er - cooperation), but people also cooperate through their political and other social institutions.

Thus, the parent poster is quite correct: instead of being dogmatic (the state must do X; the state must not do X; Y must always be left up to the market; Y should never be left up to the market; etc.) we should try different things, and see what works. A lot has already been tried and we have good track record of what has been successful and what has failed; but there are many more other things to try. Giving definitive statements like yours - "The most robust and humane way to shape society is Capitalism" is simply, wrongheaded (not to mention that "Capitalism" can be defined in a myriad of ways and has many forms in practice).

Finally, your idea that "the only way for their to be an objective measure between 2 individuals is for those individuals to agree in advance about the rules of their future interaction" is also wrong. The only thing which defines "good parts" and "bad parts" of a social system is success of failure in the real world. Theory and abstraction in this case count for almost nothing. Empirical data is all that matters. The conclusion is that, in order to promote evolution that will eventually produce successful modes of social organization, we should have a social, political, and economic environment that grants a large degree of individual freedom, giving people the ability to tinker and try things out. However, we should also have a democratic-type organization which allows people to rotate different groups in government with different ideas, to see which kind of government policies work. You will find that the world's most successful countries (e.g. Switzerland) follow this approach. Incidentally, Switzerland is both an efficient low-tax state with much individual economic freedom, while also being a quite regulated society in many aspects (with those regulations, due to extreme decentralization and the use of referenda, usually being based on a wide social consensus).

The reason that market-based systems (as opposed to centrally planned economies) and democracies or similar politically-decentralized states (as opposed to centralized dictatorships) have been in the long run the most successful is precisely due to the tinkering and evolution that is inherent in them, and not due to grand theories of economists. Even the rules which you cite were never derived in reality by being agreed to in advance, but rather evolved as people tried different ways of interacting with each other.

Also, China's blatant disregard for individual well-being will help with the roll out. If a few people get killed during testing, no biggie.

Windows dominates because of technological lock-in. At one point it managed to grab by far the largest slice of the desktop market when it was young. The Linux desktop wasn't that much of a thing back then, it was too young and undeveloped to offer serious competition. Now everybody is used to Windows, and often has software that works only under Windows, hardware that works only under Windows, etc. It's a positive feedback loop, the fact that Linux desktops exist and actually work quite well on a variety of hardware (typing from a Linux distro right now) is a testament to the platform's resilience and capability.

The only OS seriously taking on Windows and thriving is one whose roots go further back than Windows, and which is made by a hardware manufacturer. Even that is a niche market and tied to only one hardware platform.

Meanwhile Linux has, via Android, become the Windows of the smartphone world. Due to the consistency of the user interface? Well, no, look at the differences between stock Android and the various manufacturer's flavours (Samsung, Xiaomi, Huawei LG, etc.), as well as the differences between Android versions (my phone recently upgraded to a new Android version and I flipped after realizing they moved around really important stuff, like where some settings I check and change often are, etc.). It's because Android grabbed the market while it was young. Windows too has changed its interface, Office at one point changed everything, yet Microsoft still dominates these markets...due to lock-in.

Look, I come from (and lived in) a country where at one point "under the table" was the only way to buy pretty much anything at all. I am well-versed in how black markets work.

However, in advanced and rich Western societies (like the one I'm typing this from now), such things are marginal. Where I am right now booze and cigarettes are heavily taxed (booze is a government monopoly, 80 cents out of each dollar spent by the consumer on legal alcohol purchases goes to the government one way or another). Does a black market for alcohol exist? I'm sure it does, but it's a marginal phenomenon. I've never bought black-market booze, no one I know has either, and I buy booze frequently. Everyone complains about the prices, yet very few people do something about (because they can, ultimately, afford them).

A tiny black market in plastic bags (which, based on the price of a plastic bag, would be very tiny indeed) is tolerable if the use of plastic bags in society at large is extremely reduced (which is what plastic bag bans, or mandatory charges to plastic bags, do achieve).

For flimsy plastic bags? Lolz. It's not booze, or cigarettes. Also, charging 5-10 cents per bag is not "excessive", and even if it were, there are inexcessively priced substitutes.

Just like all your posts on this topic. Empty sophistry.

Nobody "demands" you bring your own bags, but if you want bags at the cashier, you have to purchase them, they are not free. Hence, people buy sturdy reusable bags and sacs and bring them with them when they shop, in order to avoid having to purchase new (often flimsy and easily breakable) bags each time. It's quite normal.

You know how they say - "it's not the end of the world, it's just the end of you". The planet doesn't care but we should.

Government has been empirically shown to be the best way to organize a large society. It's probably and usually not necessary in a relatively isolated society of a few hundred people, where everybody knows everybody. Maybe also for a few thousand, where even when you don't know a person, you know someone else who does. Beyond that, you need some form of government.

A government-less or state-less large society is not some libertarian paradise, it is an oppressive nightmare. Without a government or a state authority of some kind, you get anarchy at first, but since anarchy is not good for most people, order gets imposed "organically" by people who use violence to do it. So you get either some flavour of feudalism (big land owners, rich people, using their wealth to take control and lay down the rules), clan-based society, or organized crime (mafia-type) structure. Go visit a failed state and you will see one or more of these mechanisms at work. After spending a few months in Somalia or Afghanistan, I'm sure you'll yearn for Sweden or Switzerland.

There are many flavours of government, to be sure. Some are terribly oppressive and awful. Others allow an individual to be far more free than he would be in a clan-based system (let alone a feudal of mafia-style one).

Now, government works best when the laws are simple: simple to follow, simple to enforce, and simple to evaluate. If something is bad, it's easier to just ban it than to devise complex regulations about it. How do you propose the government should "make it easier to use plastic bags responsibly"? Start by defining "responsible use of plastic bags", proceed to defining "easier to use" (first figure out what makes them hard to use responsibly today?), and then try to figure out how to put in place the proper laws and regulations to do what you want. You'd find that banning them is just way easier, and way cheaper.