Fining companies that commit a crime a small portion of the money they gained by committing that crime is not progress, that is the problem here. Meta still made more money, after the fine, than if they had not perpetrated the crime. This is more of the status quo, which is why people are complaining about this the same as they had about the previous million times this same thing happened.

I call BS! I have it on good authority that Bilbo Baggins is at least eleventy-one.

They still do claim that, but every federal republican administration since I have been born has spent more than it brought in, and has a less fiscally conservative record than every administration from the other major party, whom they tarred as fiscally irresponsible the entire time. I am almost 50.

Trident was such a cooler name than WebKit, too. A rare instance of Microsoft giving something a name that was neither confusing nor lame.

I mean, those ActiveX controls were a little… well… Trident was a cool name!

There is never anything fundamentally bad about more choices, but that doesn’t mean that some of the choices are not fundamentally bad.

While that’s true for some of those, you never know when there will be a paradigm shift, and neither do they. Also, off the top of my head, I know that Yahoo! and IBM caused their own undoing through long periods of mismanagement. The world was in their hands and they couldn’t stay out of their own way. Standard Oil was broken up in direct response to the establishment and enforcement of federal anti-monopoly regulation.

So, again, don’t give up hope! If the pendulum does not swing back the other way, it will the defy the sum of all human history. If you think about it, believing otherwise doesn’t even make sense, like believing if I keep throwing a ball on the air, eventually it will stay up there.

Try not to give up hope! People said similar things about IBM, Yahoo!, AltaVista, AOL, Blockbuster Video, Standard Oil, The Dutch East India Company, and more! All of those are either in the dustbin of history or ghosts of their former selves.

The reckoning will come to these companies that continue to seem successful in spite of providing objectively bad and worsening products; nothing has ever stopped the pendulum from swinging. When you see your chance to help, give it a push.

Unlike Pandora’s box, though, a lot of the dumber applications of this stuff will go back in when the VC money dries up.