If you have significant financial interest in a product or service you're not going to bring on someone who will meaningfully oppose that product or service. Therefore anyone who goes onto that podcast, or whatever media, would be selected for.
It's a podcast. They're only useful for entertainment. If you take advice from them in a meaningful way you're effectively rolling the dice on tabloid grade slop factories.
That is obviously too reductive. I liked to think of myself as a YIMBY. When they wanted to build two 17 story apartment buildings in my neighbourhood I thought it sounded like a great idea, even though they would be much taller than any existing buildings there. Whenever anybody suggests tearing down some old buildings in a certain 'historic' (or dilapidated as some might say) part of my town and building actually useful housing there, I'm all for it. But when I found out that the city had plans to bulldoze this one park and playground I took my daughter to almost every day, and build student housing there, I quickly realised that I was also quite the NIMBY when things are happening in my actual back yard.
The city had to bulldoze the park, because it was probably the only piece of public property it could acquire. It is a response to NIMBYs leaving them no option. If the city could buy 4 adjacent SFH lots and build a tower on it, then parks wouldn't need to be destroyed.
YIMBYism doesn't mean bad urban design. It means more options. Manhattan has plenty of walkable parks. Clearly density and parks aren't at odds with each other.
The fact that the city had to build a massive out-of-proportion tower for students means there was long term unmet demand in the neighborhood.
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make (metaphorically) violent revolution inevitable." -jfk
I can't get a few of my clients to adopt password managers and they get logged out of their accounts constantly because an employee will change some password to an account the business depends on. These people want to suffer and roll around in fetid filth.
Suburbs and rural areas are economic death but they happen. Single family homes cost more and lead to perverse incentives like not wanting housing prices to crater which prevents affordable housing to be built which leads to homelessness. There's no reason a city needs to be a parking lot but while rural and suburban areas persist they all but have to be to accommodate the micro plastic noise and air pollution death machines we call automobiles.
We shouldn't want suburbs (white flight) or rural (incestuous wide beating) areas to exist. Nor should we design cities for cars.
> As soon as the general public cares and forces the issues.
That is not how oligopoly and antitrust work. If producers don't actually make products that have the features available, there is no actual market for those products, and market pressure is the only means by which the general public has in order to force responsiveness.
The general public can never force the issue. Government granted subsidies, and regulation make this a captive market, where the costs are too deep for new market entrants, and only the people currently sitting at the table of each company will have a say; the same as happened during the time of robber barons.
There is a reason over the past 30 years business has become so concentrated, and that cycle will continue until it cannot.
Its not that no one cares about privacy. Its that no can do anything about it, they've been stripped of their agency because law wasn't enforced in a timely fashion, and elected representatives violated their oaths by largely ceding authority to their political party, and failing to be responsive to their constituents and slow moving crises. In other words, failing to act as a whole (paralysis).
This shows a broader issue that unfortunately follows the same failure modes as what happened with the Roman Republic.
Here is a side-by-side lineup.
You have two caste groups, the haves and the have nots (patrician's and plebeians),the middle class largely is gone now. Growing economic inequality (through money-printing as opposed to expansion), land reform issues (farmers losing their farms and being unable to economically compete as a function of government regulation/subsidy), corruption (at all levels), the erosion of separation of powers (stacking courts, kingmaking via superpac), infighting among the house of representatives and senate (political parties that abstain or veto solely on party lines); create political paralysis, and for roughly the past 70 years there has been groups made up of government and private business funded indirectly by government, seeking empire (through debt/money-printing), where they do so largely through private armies. The latter most was written about by Perkins in his Economic Hitman series.
How would that apply in the case of, say, Peter Jackson's 2003, $281 million "The Lord of the Rings" film series?
Does Jackson own the IP? Do actors own part of the IP for every scene they're in? What does Jackson offer to investors, to get the backing he needs to hire loads of horse riders or whatever? Do we do it Star Citizen style, giving Jackson a few hundred million upfront with no obligation to deliver anything?
You make an excellent point. Companies could eg. have 25yrs to make a profit.
On the other hand: if an artist produces something that slumbers in anonymity for decades before it suddenly explodes into popularity and becomes part of the cultural canon, then I'd want the artist to reap whatever benefits possible. That is: if anyone is making big bucks off of that, it first and foremost should be the artist, for as long as they're alive.
On what basis would that form of explosion actually happen? In my understanding of the history of art, what often happens when something "slumbers in anonymity then explodes" it is quite popular in a subculture but then eventually gets mainstreamed when the mainstream culture comes around and people start to explore that subculture. In other words, it is a commercially successful product from day one.
To add it's only Steamboat Willie Mickey that is public domain. The actual character as we think of him isn't. The creator has been dead for nearly 80 years. It's absolutely insane that any of those creations are still privately owned.
Public transit doesn't exist for most folks (in the US), walking isn't feasible (for most in the US), and driving less is not feasible (in the US).
The only options to buy smaller cars which means you're now at eye level with a giant truck that doesn't give a single fuck about anyone on the road.
We need robust public transit and pedestrian focused infrastructure with samn multi-purpose zoning. None of these are happening in the next five years at least so it's on manufacturers to eat the cost which they won't do. This means we all get even more micro plastics in our testicles, ovaries, and/or brains.
