The Telecommunications Act of 1996.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996

It passed with support from both parties in both the House and Senate.

> (And if you’re left-leaning, you can’t pin this mess on the “corporation-friendly” Republican Party because it was Bill Clinton who put his signature on this mess!)

I would argue Clinton's presidency moved the Democrats from a center-left party to a center-right party, given its platform of welfare reform and free trade at the expense of labor rights and the social safety net.

Yeah, we've only had 3 dem presidents in 30 years and they all collectively moved the dial a certain way. That's an entire generational upbringing of leadership that's a dim shadow of what Carter, FDR, and the ghost of JFK managed to do for its people.

Neoliberal ideals are really good at keeping a machine running in the direction it's already going. And we arguably needed that with Biden for a short spell. It's never going to change the direction of the machine, though. And we're heading off a cliff

And then there was Bill Atkinson.

https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html

Microsoft moved to a subscription service because they botched the launch of the Xbox One, with users accumulating digital libraries on the PlayStation, and that failure is something that has continued to drag them further and further down.

Also, it's something of a pragmatic choice -- Valve did put major effort into native Linux games around 2013, but the effort fell flat for a number of reasons.

Proton is them trying a different path towards severing or lessening the Windows dependence, in my opinion.

I'm shocked that Tops earned #1 -- they did a remodel a few years ago and started taking reservations (and turning people away during busy periods if they didn't have one), and it's much less of a diner and much more of a restaurant nowadays.

Also, the Bendix Diner is closed, likely permanently, because of fire code violations.

> Chicken and egg problem, if no-one buys it, no-one will develop any killer apps.

Disagree on this. Going back as far as VisiCalc, it's about a device making space for a killer app, and that killer app selling devices. Apple has torched so much developer good-will that even a lower price wouldn't make the space for a killer app.

When was the last time a new, mobile-first killer app came out?

Costco requires a membership, and they do store credit back at higher tiers. They absolutely know what every member buys.

I suspect they're looking at the cost of implementing a one time refund/credit vs. reducing prices without the need to implement anything special.

Yes, I'm being charitable but not having to spend part of the refund on an extra program could benefit their customers more in the long run.

(We're Costco members.)

My point was that the other stores do, too. Or 90-ish %.

I remember a story on Walmart's data analysis capacity being something like 2 years of line item data for a customer. I've read numbers that suggest 10PB / day ingested from their ecommerce operations and 2-3 PB/hr data processing. Pretty incredible.

For modern ecommerce, figurative recording every twitch of your mouse in their store, I'd believe that.

But to save only the "SKU, qty., unit price, date" receipt info - which you would need to process tariff refunds - that'd be maybe 16 bytes per receipt line? To hit even 1TB/day, you'd need a billion customers, each buying 64 items. On that one day.

More to the point: having a monopoly isn't de facto illegal (just look up natural monopolies), it's using the monopoly power in an anti-competitive way that's illegal. Microsoft wasn't charged with having a monopoly, they were charged because they used that monopoly to exclude Netscape Navigator and force bundling of IE.

The exclusivity deals they struck early on are an albatross that still drags them down. I think the audience would have been much more receptive to deals like Alan Wake 2, where that money spigot got turned into something totally unique that wouldn't have existed without that capital investment.