You can even get a literal tiger into a carrier, even though it can kill you easily. You just drug its food and wait till it passes out. This is because you are smarter than it, and know that tranquilizers exist and how to obtain them, which is a strategy that cats of any size are not even able to conceive of, and probably can't understand what happened after it's been done to them.

But my point is that you need to recognize that in so doing, you are taking away the option of having other things, such as waterproofing, larger batteries, smaller/lighter phones, etc. There is no free lunch.

But you could be right. I guess this will be an experiment to watch: If EU consumers show a strong preference for replaceable batteries once they become more widely available, we can expect manufacturers to start offering it in other markets as well.

It's okay to have idiosyncratic preferences (I certainly do), but people should recognize that this law will make phones _worse_ for most people, because this law will force phone manufacturers to compromise the things that most people want in order to provide something that most people don't want.

I suppose someone will say that this law is necessary for environmental reasons, regardless of people's preferences. But that's nonsense, because the law doesn't actually require people to replace batteries rather than replacing their phone, and by the time batteries wear out, most people are going to want a new a phone. At the very least we'd need to see some data that shows that most people replace batteries when it is possible to do so.

That backpack is currently at college with my son, who used it all through high school as well. It is by far the oldest and most durable daily-use object I’ve ever owned.

Open societies, in contrast, must balance many competing interests and voting factions, meaning that free market supporters have limited power to enact their preferred policies, meaning they rarely can be implemented in a “pure” form.

If you publish a cookbook, you should get a portion of the sales of the cookbook itself, and no one should be allowed to distribute copies of it for free to undermine your sales.

What you don't get is a portion of the revenues of restaurants that use your recipes!

When people say “selling at a loss” they mean negative unit economics. No one ever means this much more expansive definition you’ve invented.

Importantly, people who either thought they had better information (and were sadly wrong) or people who were simply gambling. It’s not like prediction markets are taking money from orphanages.

Yes, that's what I said, but you're missing the point: Uber provided them with a better alternative than they would have had otherwise. It made them better off, not worse off!

> This is extremely realistic. This is already real. In particular, this is the gig economy. For example, if you consider how Uber works: in practical terms, the Uber drivers work for an algorithm, and the algorithm works for the executives who run Uber.

There seems to be a tacit agreement in polite society that when people say things like the above, you don't point out that, in fact, Uber drivers choose to drive for Uber, can choose to do something else instead, and, if Uber were shut down tomorrow, would in fact be forced to choose some other form of employment which they _evidently do not prefer over their current arrangement_!

Do I think that exploitation of workers is a completely nonsensical idea? No. But there is a burden of proof you have to meet when claiming that people are exploited. You can't just take it as given that everyone who is in a situation that you personally would not choose for yourself is being somehow wronged.

To put it more bluntly: Driving for Uber is not in fact the same thing as being uploaded into a computer and tortured for the equivalent of thousands of years!

So yeah, take my $13.99/month