The joke in the refrigeration industry is that "it's not bad for the environment until DuPont's patent expires".
Now obviously they were bad for the environment all along, but I don't think it's a coincidence that nothing was done about CFCs until the 3rd world got good at making them cheap.
The joke is getting a little out of date though since the new stuff is hydrocarbons and CO2 (and you can't patent those).
>When are they going to trivally stop breaking traffic laws?
When the general public does.
Autonomous cars that abide by the law at the expense of violating the norms of expected traffic behavior like a 16yo in a driver's ed car (which is plastered in signs for exactly that reason) are not a scalable way of sharing roads with the general public.
As an aside, the venn diagram between people who complain about normal traffic behavior being unlawful and people who resist tweaking the law to make what is normal also lawful is far too close to a circle for my taste.
The state reduced regulation around vehicle registration so farmers can drive their SxSs and ATVs on the street (with some restrictions, obviously they don't go on the interstate) and then people in town registering their golf carts or whatever as second cars for around town stuff.
The state claims jurisdiction on pretty much all the "seriously heavy" industry people like to trot out as though it would be in your back yard if not for zoning. The local towns don't get much of a say and even when they do the projects are high dollar enough that if the town won't grant it then they'll win on appeal and it'll be no big deal.
Aaaand, the real kicker is that the towns typically can't fight too hard because a lot of zoning provisions they'd use are not up to the legal standard it takes to do battle with a megacorp and they'd rather keep them on the books as they are than have the megacorp's lawyers pick them apart.
So you can still have Chernoybl in your back yard with zoning.
It's environmental as much as it is zoning that drives the development you see.
You literally can't build the kind of "concrete jungle" that you used to be able to because of environmental.
Like a store with a few parking spaces up front, the building and an alley around the back to one parking space (for the staff) and the dumpster is literally illegal without a multimillion dollar stormwater treatment system or a bunch of extra land (i.e. suburban sprawl).
This is also why you only ever see <low number> family houses on 1/16th to 1/8 acre (depending on the sqft of the house + parking) and the it jumps right to N-over-Y megacorp apartment blocks (maybe with retail on the bottom).
>This isn't really accurate. It actually takes a decent amount of work and capital input to get a set of retail buildings into usable shape and keep them that way. The internet caricature of landlords is that the buildings just popped into existence one day and the landlords rent them out, but there's obviously more to it. I know several attempts at retail real estate development that flopped and lost investors a lot of money.
Nobody develops the sort of organic small scale anything anymore because the caricature informs the local government who then sink their teeth in at every turn and the end result is that the only people doing new development or refreshing stuff at great expense are corporations capable of fending off the government or rich enough to play along.
I think big players also have significant risk exposure during black swan events and the timeline of their operations makes those incidents not entirely unlikely to occur. It's sort of like insurance - most of the time they just get to extort rent, but sometimes they get crushed, too.
Check the 5-year on Hudson Pacific. They're down 96% and dropping. They own a significant number of downtown commercial properties in SF and LA. They're completely underwater, their spaces are barely half full, and they can't lower rents without violating their bank loan covenants.
Of course, if the commercial landscape hadn't shifted in a way nobody could predict then, yes, they'd likely have continued to print money for the foreseeable future. Instead, they're left holding a very heavy bag and will take it to the grave.
Facebook was doing tracking pixels in the 00s. It probably worked even better then because stuff that's currently in apps was on the web back then and fewer people ran adblockers.
Every party in the advertising ecosystem should be assumed to be doing this (and your adblocker should be trying its best to block it).
>More that this administration views institution as fundamentally unimportant
Politicians and their lackeys prioritize what makes them popular with the electorate. "Institutions" are not exactly something the electorate holds in high (relative to the recent past decades) esteem these days. And it's only gonna get worse as the boomers croak and are replaced by younger people who've seen institutions do a lot less good in their lifetimes.
The problem is that these institutions are still doing massively useful things. They've been doing them so long that they are invisible. People think the gains that we've made in air quality, consumer rights, labor rights, etc to infinity are natural features of the universe. They are not. They are hard fought and require focused, driven people to keep them. Institutions serve a useful function.
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