To further stretch the analogy: the main street is now full of potholes, sinkholes, and even landmines. The root problem is that, in exchange for convenience, we as a society have ceded too much power to these large businesses and we are now paying the price for it. We have bought the proverbial monorail [1] and now we are stuck with it.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taJ4MFCxiuo

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lapcat 3 days ago | parent [-]

> The root problem is that, in exchange for convenience, we as a society have ceded too much power to these large businesses and we are now paying the price for it.

I don't know why some people have made "convenience" into a dirty word. Almost everything we do is for convenience. You could live in a remote log cabin with no electricity and grow/hunt your own food, separating yourself from most of society, but that wouldn't be convenient or pleasant.

Individual consumers have very little power over the market. There's a collective action problem, which is why governments and regulation exist... or should exist. The way I see it, the root problem is a massive failure by (corrupt) governments to protect consumer rights.

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chongli 3 days ago | parent [-]

How do governments become corrupt in the first place though, if they don't start that way? It's collective action problems all the way down.

Perhaps the root problem is that we've blown too far past Dunbar's number to be able to deal with the societies we live in. All of these systems we've contrived to mitigate the trust problem are full of holes.

As for convenience, that carries a tradeoff. All of the technology and all of the revolutions we've had (agricultural, industrial, information technology) have come with these tradeoffs. Even the log cabin has downsides compared to the nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

	▲	lapcat 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		> How do governments become corrupt in the first place though, if they don't start that way? I think the US government did start that way. Maybe not "corrupt" as such, but the United States was founded by plutocrats and was clearly designed to protect the minority of plutocrats against mass democracy. > Even the log cabin has downsides compared to the nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Yes, but I'd say the nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle has even greater downsides, and our current state of convenience is in many ways a vast improvement over the precarious existence of our distant ancestors.