I've run copilot/gemini/pi/opencode/etc for a long time, against all major providers. Don't get me wrong, I get good productivity out of it or I wouldn't use it, but it's very different from intelligence.

After searching through codebase, git history, etc it spat out a surface level reasonable ADR, with the customary bloated text.

I started reading through it asking "Is this sentence needed?: ''", whereby it acknowledges that no, it adds nothing and changes nothing not already served by other statements. I ask it to go through each sentence one by one asking the same question. It claims to do so, and give me two suggestions to remove in the entire document.

I then spend a few more minutes giving 10 additional sentences manually that it happily acknowledges are redundant.

I ask why those weren't removed in my previous prompt, and frankly I can't remember specifically what rationalization it gave, I assume because it's not memorable because there can be none, because it very obviously is not reasoning.

How much employment and localized value/tax revenue is created by the pharma plant compared to the data center to offset the environmental effect?

This is regulation, and it's only as good as enforcement. Meaning it requires government inspections and labs. Again, we've already proven this in history.

> sue them if your house burns down

Sure, if you only care about compensation and not prevention. Also I don't think you've considered the practicalities of your example, in that no regular person will 1. determine the battery cause. 2. prove it. 3. bring a successful suit against a corporation.

> Consider it this way: Why doesn't US customs exclude unsafe products from being imported from other countries? Consider what they would have to do to actually accomplish that.

Well... they do seize millions of products yearly. It's generally sub-$800 packages getting through. Your original point of incumbents targetting upstarts and thus forcing "burner" companies is the wrong causality. Burner companies are incentivized to specifically skirt liability and reputation. Regulating the frontend incentivizes self-policing against sub-companies designed to be dissolved.

Fedex has (almost) no idea what they're shipping.

These are not even apples and oranges.

The incentives in the market has never changed. That's what regulation is for, shifting market incentives/forces to favor consumers/society.

[0] https://www.kptv.com/2026/05/28/woman-sentenced-conspiring-d...

Of course Temu is responsible for things I buy in the Temu app, and pay Temu for, which then Temu ships to me.

Milk was filled with borax and formaldehyde, coffee was cut with sawdust/charred bone/lead, spices were often 100% counterfeit.

The market (heavily) incentivized fraud.

In New York, in one year (1857), 8000 infants died to "swill milk" [0].

The second option (FDA and regulation) wasn't lobbied for, and the Food Bill of 1902 actually failed through heavy (counter)lobbying initially [1], until the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 [2] passed.

[0] https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1858/05/13/785...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_Washington_Wiley

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pure_Food_and_Drug_Act

I actually think it is the only argument.

As Churchill mused:

"Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…"

Company towns, communism, etc are bad specifically because of their ease of abuse, which is why our best (least worst) systems of governing are focused on transparency, accountability and minimizing abuse. It sucks that all that friction makes it less efficient, but alas we need to plan for the/humanities worst, because it continually crops up.

I think that's okay. The need for regulation is incentivizing capitalism in its amoralism to favor your regulated morality.

Corporations very much like targetting impressionable kids with content to sell stuff. If that adds a liability cost to moderate and make sure that content is "safe" (whatever that means in your jurisdiction), then isn't that what you would want?

I've never let my kids out on youtube, or the internet without either of us parents (yet at least). I hear you can now whitelist channels on youtube premium for child accounts, which sounds exactly like I want, but of course that doesn't scale. While I'd want to curate the entire internet for them until we've instilled enough judgment/their brains have developed enough to do it themselves, it's obviously impossible. Adding a liability risk or moderation cost to target kids seems like a fairly aligned incentive.

In general, I think debates (the school competition kind/internet spectacle kind) focuses entirely to much on perception, and very little on content, in that whoever wins is completely disjoint from who if any is actually right. Though I suppose it's easier to police/moderate the presentation than the veracity.

TL;DR: I agree with you in general, all else being equal, but that's not always the case.

Or one I prefer, though unattributed: "If the only lens through which you can view life is value in currency, that which is priceless becomes worthless."