I think most people play #monopoly wrong. When you land on a property you have the chance to buy. If you don't the property is auctioned to all players. This makes the game move a lot faster.
Also, when you land a property, you should buy it because the winner is the one with the most assets (not money) and owning the property gives you, not your opponent, control over it.
Then only sell or swap if you will gain something that will help you win.
"#Corruption arises out of #monopoly, so we know what our marching orders should be…
…we are living at a historically unprecedented moment in which there is interest in #publicservice provision, good #governance, good public administration and returning power over the structure of your daily life from corporate boardrooms into publicly accountable meetings held by publicly accountable agencies."
Google is taking pay-to-play to the next level. Recent court testimony shows that Google paid $21 Billion USD to remain the Internet's dominant search engine. 😱
We don't have basic cellular services to the end of Halifax, I'll believe this when I see it. 10 towers would make a difference at 1 million a tower or less.
I just uploaded a video to YouTube and in classic #monopoly fashion, #Google will not let me view my own video without my disabling my ad-blocker.
That's what happens when your nation state doesn't enforce any of its anti-trust laws, folks!
It is a direct reduction of user freedom and consumer choice, but Google gets away with it. Not to mention that their entire business model is grounded in intellectual property theft.
Witnessed a family of four pull out a Monopoly box and set it up on an insanely crowded train from London to Bristol. Properties, utilities, Chance, Community Chest, money poking out every which way off the side of the table. Even looking at it gave me anxiety. It was simultaneously so basic, yet so fearless. I didn't know there were ride or die Monopoly people.
Supposedly the reason #Monopoly takes so long is because most everyone plays by the house rule that landing on Free Parking gives you all the fees collected so far. Treating it just as a blank space speeds things up dramatically.
Americans buy a lot of stuff from Amazon. But Americans also just buy a lot of stuff. This presents a problem for anyone contending that #Amazon acts as a #monopoly: The company is huge, but depending on how you measure its place in the vastness of American retail, its presence isn’t necessarily overwhelming, let alone clearly illegally monopolistic.
only about 15 to 20 percent of retail sales in the US are made online.
The Federal Trade Commission thinks Amazon is an illegal monopoly, and it’s suing the company to stop it — which could mean breaking up the e-commerce giant.
Some days the duopoly on supermarkets really depresses me!
We used to have lovely health food shops in the district... no more
We used to have continental delicatessens... no more
We used to have a local Asian grocer... no more!
Yah, we still have butchers, & fruit and vege shops. (Though they have only really flourished since the supermarkets put the F&V prices up)
All I wanted was some sago, tapioca & some other specialised gluten free alternatives... I'm going to have to drive 16km to get to the closest shop that sells them, thanks to the duopoly undercutting & then deciding that stocking the items was not economical!
This Casey Muratori quote below is spot on for most other "creative software", incl. generative art/design tools/frameworks... In this context, it also doesn't matter if these are #OpenSource or not, since 99% of people are engaging with these offerings purely as consumers and will be left stranded/struggling once the day of reckoning will arrive (nothing lasts forever, regardless of enshittification)...
Many subfields of digital art/design/engineering currently have one (or a couple) incumbent monopolistic tools/frameworks consuming/sucking the attention of most practicioners in those fields. Each time, the main issue (for users) should be learning, developing, extracting, abstracting reusable skills, underlying metaphors/terminologies, techniques and thought patterns which are more general and independent from those tools, actively exercising the breaking of mental (and practical) dependencies to free & shape one's own creative practice/process.
Artists too (rather: them especially) should own and keep control of their means of production, or at the very least understand them (in some detail)!
Yet, in the bigger picture, the appetite for exactly these things seems to be continuously waning and the "AI" hype theatre is just accelerating & strengthening production dependencies and the strict separation between infrastructure owners & practioners... These are choices each one of us has to and does make, but how many of us are doing so consciously/intently and how many are even just willing and/or able to support others working towards such goals (e.g. by embracing anti-framework and anti-monopolistic design philosophies)...
Another related quote here by Gualter Barbas Babtista (already shared previously):
“If you don’t develop your own technology, you will need to adapt to the language and patterns of the technology someone else developed – maybe in contradiction to your cultural values.”