Muhammed Tuncay on assortative mating; Dan Williams on the demand for bias; Razib Khan on immigrant assimilation; Ben Thompson on the ultimate cause of the Crowdstrike disaster
I am not sure that the distinction between “rationalizations” and “misinformation” can be sustained. I think some subset of rationalizations amount to misinformation.
---
This is why your commentators don't like Matt Yglesias.
How do you write a ten part essay on education reform without mentioning the Null Hypothesis, IQ, and oppose all school vouchers? Other examples can be found.
I'd say the same of many people in his mold. They try to figure out which truths are allowable within their branding and be as clever as they can within that box. If the box is big enough they can sound intelligent enough, but if that box excludes too much truth they really have to tie themselves in knots.
I think your blog post on "the toadie class" from a long time ago pretty much can't be improved upon.
It's very interesting to look at say Obama era posts, especially on politics and culture, and see how correct or off they are today. For instance Kling's post here was phenomenal. Steve Sailer has some real zingers too.
On the other hand Bryan Caplan has his old posts on non-economic matters from the early 2010s econolog from time to time and many are wildly inaccurate with hindsight.
Very apt, re the cleverness within allowable limits.
From the piece you linked: "Tyler says that in the long run mood-altering drugs may be a solution. Teles suggests that Tyler’s next book will be The Great Medication."
As this is the plot of one of the two great 20th-century dysopian novels, the flatness with which this suggestion is made/mentioned seems to me to be indistinguishable from the phenomenon you describe, on AK's part, or Cowen's.
In any case, it's all a battle of the glib. Yglesias is particularly glib.
"In the long term, a shriveling and ever more geriatric “Fortress Europe” doesn’t have a prayer of indefinitely turning away many-fold greater numbers of young Africans and Middle Easterners streaming across the Mediterranean."
This is totally wrong. On a technical level, controlling African/Middle Eastern immigrant is trivial; these aren't mighty conquerors breaking through European defenses, they're reaching Europe through visas and funding/assistance from (government-funded) NGOs. Stop giving out the visas and stop funding the NGOs, and most will stop coming. Even minor physical pushback (as Israel, for instance, has done very successfully) or something like a deputized militia would end Africa/Middle Eastern immigration to Europe completely. The only thing stopping this is internal European politics... and Razib is doing his best here to ensure that pro-Third World immigration politics in Europe continue by painting immigration inevitable rather than as something that can be easily stopped.
"Though the 19th century saw a period when the arrival of large numbers of Catholics worried America’s political class, in the end America did not change to suit Roman Catholicism, Roman Catholicism changed to suit America. Similarly, in due course, the vast numbers of Southern European Catholics and Eastern European Jews who arrived around 1900 assimilated to American norms and values, enriching American literature, music, intellectual life and cuisine and pushing society’s bounds of religious pluralism a little further. But not in the end fundamentally altering American values. "
This is also totally wrong. America changed a lot to accommodate the Ellis Islanders, and Ellis Islanders did fundamentally alter American values. The New Deal and especially the social revolution across all of life in the 1960s were both radical departures from historic American practices and values, and both were strongly driven by Ellis Islanders, both electorally and intellectually. Razib should know better, since he's familiar with both American history (which is totally at odds with his assertion here) and the broader literature on immigrant assimilation (that it mostly stops by the second generation and full convergence never happens; ie behavioral and outcome differences are persistent).
Ellis Islanders were a major part of the FDR coalition but most of his ideas had already become well-known by the early 1900s. And it is a cliche of that period's history how many sons and daughters of devout Protestants replaced their parent's faith with what today would be called concern about social justice.
Right, "don't have a prayer" is absurd. Easy way to test is to compare with similarly low birth-rate Northeast Asian countries which, while some are now quite wealthy and thus attractive to economic migrants, will likely somehow discover the right prayers to perform much better than Europe in this regard. Great Replacement there is their policy, not destiny.
Lol. Watch out, David Charles is going call you a jerk for saying someone is wrong.
Regarding your first point, you say Khan is wrong but I'd argue your on-target explanation clearly states why he is right and they don't have a prayer at stopping the immigration.
"The only thing stopping this is internal European politics."
On your second point, I would be a little surprised if that were more than a little true but IDK. It doesn't seem that is something that could be learned from a blog post. I'd also say even if true, the water of cause and effect are so muddy it would be hard to prove beyond a reasonable doubt.
Interesting discussion by Dan Williams, but he seems blind to his own bias. He calls questioning the integrity of the 2020 election the "Big Lie" and offers it as an example of misinformation and rationalization, though there is good reason to think that the result was affected by fraud, and in fact many members of the public believe that to be the case. I guess for Liberals that possibility is just unthinkable seeing that election results however dubious are their sole claim to legitimacy for doing all the grift-driven things most people clearly don't want (open borders, trans-gendering kids, endless pointless wars, facilitating open air drug markets, non-prosecution of criminals and violent demonstrators, defunding police, de-carceration, etc.)
I'm torn. If I said what I really think about Dan Williams, AK would regard me as having 'abused the comments section,' and my comment might be removed. On the other hand, his Monday night rant might be more entertaining (which would only matter if he ends up posting it, as I am not a paid subscriber). Seriously, I think Dan Williams is a typical liberal/left academic masquerading as a 'contrarian' by expressing his views in moderate tones. This is based not so much on this particular post, which is too long-winded and boring to bother ploughing through, but his earlier post on the Great Debate, where he asserts that 'Biden's contributions were generally more coherent and accurate on issues of substance and policy' but Trump came of better because he did not appear frail and forgetful. That's baloney. Just because some people spent a week prior to the debate trying to stuff a bunch of policy talking points into Biden's brain does not mean that the confused word salad that came out of Biden's mouth was 'more coherent and accurate on issues of substance and policy.' Returning to the theme of Soviet analogies covered on this Substack and elsewhere in recent weeks, anybody who is even vaguely familiar with history of the Soviet Union (and Communist China) and the American Communist Party would recognize, and be horrified by, the rapid shift in the 'party line' from "Biden is a sharp as a tack" to "Biden is a great American patriot for stepping aside" and "Kamala is the best thing since sliced bread in a pantsuit," all in the space of a couple of weeks. It is all Orwellian and Kafkaesque, and Dan Williams' moderate demeanor doesn't make it less so. And my 'go to' for understanding 'misinformation' and 'disinformation' is not Williams, but Schellenberger, another honest lefty. But we don't like him, because he's an 'activist,' rather than simply an armchair intellectual.
The kernel space point is tre but overstated. Linux needs third party kernel modules to run various bits of hardware. So does Windows for pragmatic reasons. Similarly security software means security people monkeying with the kernel.
Apple probably can walk off their garden better, but then we must ask the question of whether we really want the whole of computing to be a closed fortress like Apple-land. This is the kind of question the EU is tackling in it's cack-handed way.
Re: "I am not sure that the distinction between “rationalizations” and “misinformation” can be sustained. I think some subset of rationalizations amount to misinformation."
The distinction is analytical:
Rationalization is unconscious. A person unconsciously gravitates to reasons that seemingly justify a behavior or interpretation or stance that is caused by other unconscious beliefs or motivations.
Misinformation is deliberate. It involves an intention to deceive.
In a recent blogpost, Arnold noted that people often use an "intention heuristic":
Arnold explains: "Good intentions necessarily lead to good consequences. Bad consequences necessarily indicate that someone had bad intentions."
Because intention is what distinguishes rationalization and misinformation, the intention heuristic might lead people unconsciously to interpret rationalizations as misinformation.
My intuition is that the pundit mindset tends to involve a mix of (unconscious) rationalization and (deliberate) misinformation. Presumably, some pundits tend more towards rationalization, whilst others engage more deliberately in misinformation.
"Bad consequences necessarily indicate that someone had bad intentions."
I would agree bad intentions correlates well with (causes) bad outcomes but not reverse as stated here. First, however misguided they might be, I believe liberals and progressives generally have good intentions but sometimes ignore and more generally don't understand the unintended consequences. Maybe the intent of conservatives is more of a mixed bag, I'm not sure, but I don't think bad outcomes correlates well with bad intentions there either.
Another consideration is that we all lie different places on Haidt's Moral Foundations scale so even saying what is bad intentions and bad consequences becomes a matter of opinion that varies greatly from person to person. To give but one example, is a woman's right to chose good or is protecting the unborn baby? Are right to lifers trying to control women or abortion rights proponents trying to kill black babies?
As French & other EU Muslims flout French & EU laws & norms, more countries will follow the Hungarian example & reduce migration to protect culture.
Denmark has already been deporting more illegals, and making it tougher to be legal, with anti-invasive immigration increasing nationalism in Germany, Sweden, and France.
The liberals supported Jew hate & immigration rather than nationalism in the recent French election. More voters will leave liberal parties than refuse to Fight fight fight against cultural surrender.
The kernel space point is tre but overstated. Linux needs third party kernel modules to run various bits of hardware. So does Windows for pragmatic reasons. Similarly security software means security people monkeying with the kernel.
Apple probably can walk off their garden better, but then we must ask the question of whether we really want the whole of computing to be a closed fortress like Apple-land. This is the kind of question the EU is tackling in it's cack-handed way.
"But when marriage is delayed, as around 1990, the sorting becomes stronger as individuals are more able to predict their likely future incomes."
Once you here it, that sounds like an obvious and simple causation. But what happened to the stereotype of bosses marrying their secretaries? Could it be even simpler that there is a more equal number of men and women of similar salaries/incomes and similar professions?
Europe needs to get better at selecting for and helping immigrants become the fellow citizens they want to live with.
The US could do better, too, but we already have plenty of prospective fellow citizens if we would just let them in even if this means excluding a lot of marginally positive people. In passing Shruti Rajagopalan mentions
It's an open secret that Microsoft is not merely some ordinary big company but has become as "government adjacent" - symbiotic with and with a lot of its quasi-monopoly surplus profits dependent on the discretionary good graces of the most important western states - as any bank or pharmaceutical company or manufacturer of large jet aircraft.
Governments treat Microsoft Office and Enterprise as if it might as well be the only game in town for the indefinite future, and pay enormous license fees for what is, let's face it, kind of a crappy and stagnant suite of products which should have been commoditized decades ago, indeed, they kind of were by Google and others. Additionally, many functions of national security are either executed via some "understanding" with Microsoft or could not be accomplished at all without Microsoft's support and assistance, and Microsoft is very keen on and strategic about keeping things that way.
A related, perhaps only slightly-less-open secret, is that Microsoft does not and will not make an OS or other product secure enough to prevent the government from performing certain intelligence collection and other cyber functions, or to stop other organization customers from being able to intercept and monitor employee and other network activity at any level of detail, and this almost inevitably perpetuates the existence of vulnerabilities it might be possible for some actor to exploit should they figure out how to get the keys to the backdoors.
Given all this, when a major government comes to an "understanding" with Microsoft, it might as well be 'law', though having very little to do with the ideals of "rule of law".
It’s another way of saying a settlement agreement. It’s a contract. If MS breached, they would be sued in the European clown system. This is a major issue in the US as well with settlements and consent decrees acting as shadow regulation without normal due process.
Right. I understand that, but I am questioning the wisdom of preemptively surrendering vs actually forcing due process to play out.
Apple seems more novel in their approach. They release things for the EU only to comply. Or just pay fines.
Suppose MS just said no. Or, hey, we’ll release an insecure “Windows 11 Hackable EU Edition”.
Point is, MS and their lawyers bear a lot of responsibility for not protecting their rights but abjectly submitting to such a plan. Same for other consent decrees.
That's an interesting legal question I've never looked into and which I'll try to research now. To what extent to normal theories of agency, public reporting, transparency, duties to shareholders, etc. apply or not when a lot of what constitutes a substantial fraction of the value of a company derives from information or work which is non-public either privately in terms of closely-held propietary trade secrets or actually classified and protected from disclosure by national security law? So, when you say that's something for a shareholder to ask, I think the effective answer is "We don't have to tell you the real answers, and if you don't like that then you are welcome to sell your shares."
It just seems impossible to actually do normal analysis of the liklihood some new businesses policy will mean more profit or loss in a highly regulated / goverment-adjacent sector without being in the loop on whether that decision was informed by a nudge by the goverment that the business knows it has to not only keep quiet about but publicly pretend it made for its own reasons and not due to the. government dangling carrots and sticks. In such circumstances, the only rational trading is insider trading.
Re: "A Microsoft spokesman said it cannot legally wall off its operating system in the same way Apple does because of an understanding it reached with the European Commission following a complaint. In 2009, Microsoft agreed it would give makers of security software the same level of access to Windows that Microsoft gets." — WSJ
There isn't a feedback loop to hold the European Commission accountable for the harm done to Microsoft and Microsoft's end users.
And look at how they are about to lock themselves out of all the AI advances by making laws forbidding stuff before we even know how it’s going to work and which technology or method will work best.
On MSFT & EU regulators: Let us restate this more bluntly. Lawyers, who don't understand technology, made a bad decision which enabled Crowdstrike to take down millions of computers. As ever, lawyers remain ignorant of second order effects: they are not systems thinkers. Abjure and avoid them.
It's not just lawyers; would that it were. Ignoring second order effects seems to be characteristic of regulation. Some ill-defined and poorly understood "problem" gets public attention, politicians and regulators rush to pass a law or adopt a regulation so as to be seen as effective, and when negative consequences ensue, it is taken as showing more such intervention is needed.
I am not sure that the distinction between “rationalizations” and “misinformation” can be sustained. I think some subset of rationalizations amount to misinformation.
---
This is why your commentators don't like Matt Yglesias.
How do you write a ten part essay on education reform without mentioning the Null Hypothesis, IQ, and oppose all school vouchers? Other examples can be found.
I'd say the same of many people in his mold. They try to figure out which truths are allowable within their branding and be as clever as they can within that box. If the box is big enough they can sound intelligent enough, but if that box excludes too much truth they really have to tie themselves in knots.
I think your blog post on "the toadie class" from a long time ago pretty much can't be improved upon.
https://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/the-toady-class-on-average-is-over/
You have a great memory- that old Kling essay was great and reads well in light of the last 11 years.
It's very interesting to look at say Obama era posts, especially on politics and culture, and see how correct or off they are today. For instance Kling's post here was phenomenal. Steve Sailer has some real zingers too.
On the other hand Bryan Caplan has his old posts on non-economic matters from the early 2010s econolog from time to time and many are wildly inaccurate with hindsight.
Very apt, re the cleverness within allowable limits.
From the piece you linked: "Tyler says that in the long run mood-altering drugs may be a solution. Teles suggests that Tyler’s next book will be The Great Medication."
As this is the plot of one of the two great 20th-century dysopian novels, the flatness with which this suggestion is made/mentioned seems to me to be indistinguishable from the phenomenon you describe, on AK's part, or Cowen's.
In any case, it's all a battle of the glib. Yglesias is particularly glib.
"In the long term, a shriveling and ever more geriatric “Fortress Europe” doesn’t have a prayer of indefinitely turning away many-fold greater numbers of young Africans and Middle Easterners streaming across the Mediterranean."
This is totally wrong. On a technical level, controlling African/Middle Eastern immigrant is trivial; these aren't mighty conquerors breaking through European defenses, they're reaching Europe through visas and funding/assistance from (government-funded) NGOs. Stop giving out the visas and stop funding the NGOs, and most will stop coming. Even minor physical pushback (as Israel, for instance, has done very successfully) or something like a deputized militia would end Africa/Middle Eastern immigration to Europe completely. The only thing stopping this is internal European politics... and Razib is doing his best here to ensure that pro-Third World immigration politics in Europe continue by painting immigration inevitable rather than as something that can be easily stopped.
"Though the 19th century saw a period when the arrival of large numbers of Catholics worried America’s political class, in the end America did not change to suit Roman Catholicism, Roman Catholicism changed to suit America. Similarly, in due course, the vast numbers of Southern European Catholics and Eastern European Jews who arrived around 1900 assimilated to American norms and values, enriching American literature, music, intellectual life and cuisine and pushing society’s bounds of religious pluralism a little further. But not in the end fundamentally altering American values. "
This is also totally wrong. America changed a lot to accommodate the Ellis Islanders, and Ellis Islanders did fundamentally alter American values. The New Deal and especially the social revolution across all of life in the 1960s were both radical departures from historic American practices and values, and both were strongly driven by Ellis Islanders, both electorally and intellectually. Razib should know better, since he's familiar with both American history (which is totally at odds with his assertion here) and the broader literature on immigrant assimilation (that it mostly stops by the second generation and full convergence never happens; ie behavioral and outcome differences are persistent).
Ellis Islanders were a major part of the FDR coalition but most of his ideas had already become well-known by the early 1900s. And it is a cliche of that period's history how many sons and daughters of devout Protestants replaced their parent's faith with what today would be called concern about social justice.
Right, "don't have a prayer" is absurd. Easy way to test is to compare with similarly low birth-rate Northeast Asian countries which, while some are now quite wealthy and thus attractive to economic migrants, will likely somehow discover the right prayers to perform much better than Europe in this regard. Great Replacement there is their policy, not destiny.
Lol. Watch out, David Charles is going call you a jerk for saying someone is wrong.
Regarding your first point, you say Khan is wrong but I'd argue your on-target explanation clearly states why he is right and they don't have a prayer at stopping the immigration.
"The only thing stopping this is internal European politics."
On your second point, I would be a little surprised if that were more than a little true but IDK. It doesn't seem that is something that could be learned from a blog post. I'd also say even if true, the water of cause and effect are so muddy it would be hard to prove beyond a reasonable doubt.
Interesting discussion by Dan Williams, but he seems blind to his own bias. He calls questioning the integrity of the 2020 election the "Big Lie" and offers it as an example of misinformation and rationalization, though there is good reason to think that the result was affected by fraud, and in fact many members of the public believe that to be the case. I guess for Liberals that possibility is just unthinkable seeing that election results however dubious are their sole claim to legitimacy for doing all the grift-driven things most people clearly don't want (open borders, trans-gendering kids, endless pointless wars, facilitating open air drug markets, non-prosecution of criminals and violent demonstrators, defunding police, de-carceration, etc.)
I'm torn. If I said what I really think about Dan Williams, AK would regard me as having 'abused the comments section,' and my comment might be removed. On the other hand, his Monday night rant might be more entertaining (which would only matter if he ends up posting it, as I am not a paid subscriber). Seriously, I think Dan Williams is a typical liberal/left academic masquerading as a 'contrarian' by expressing his views in moderate tones. This is based not so much on this particular post, which is too long-winded and boring to bother ploughing through, but his earlier post on the Great Debate, where he asserts that 'Biden's contributions were generally more coherent and accurate on issues of substance and policy' but Trump came of better because he did not appear frail and forgetful. That's baloney. Just because some people spent a week prior to the debate trying to stuff a bunch of policy talking points into Biden's brain does not mean that the confused word salad that came out of Biden's mouth was 'more coherent and accurate on issues of substance and policy.' Returning to the theme of Soviet analogies covered on this Substack and elsewhere in recent weeks, anybody who is even vaguely familiar with history of the Soviet Union (and Communist China) and the American Communist Party would recognize, and be horrified by, the rapid shift in the 'party line' from "Biden is a sharp as a tack" to "Biden is a great American patriot for stepping aside" and "Kamala is the best thing since sliced bread in a pantsuit," all in the space of a couple of weeks. It is all Orwellian and Kafkaesque, and Dan Williams' moderate demeanor doesn't make it less so. And my 'go to' for understanding 'misinformation' and 'disinformation' is not Williams, but Schellenberger, another honest lefty. But we don't like him, because he's an 'activist,' rather than simply an armchair intellectual.
The kernel space point is tre but overstated. Linux needs third party kernel modules to run various bits of hardware. So does Windows for pragmatic reasons. Similarly security software means security people monkeying with the kernel.
Apple probably can walk off their garden better, but then we must ask the question of whether we really want the whole of computing to be a closed fortress like Apple-land. This is the kind of question the EU is tackling in it's cack-handed way.
Re: "I am not sure that the distinction between “rationalizations” and “misinformation” can be sustained. I think some subset of rationalizations amount to misinformation."
The distinction is analytical:
Rationalization is unconscious. A person unconsciously gravitates to reasons that seemingly justify a behavior or interpretation or stance that is caused by other unconscious beliefs or motivations.
Misinformation is deliberate. It involves an intention to deceive.
In a recent blogpost, Arnold noted that people often use an "intention heuristic":
https://arnoldkling.substack.com/p/the-intention-heuristic
Arnold explains: "Good intentions necessarily lead to good consequences. Bad consequences necessarily indicate that someone had bad intentions."
Because intention is what distinguishes rationalization and misinformation, the intention heuristic might lead people unconsciously to interpret rationalizations as misinformation.
My intuition is that the pundit mindset tends to involve a mix of (unconscious) rationalization and (deliberate) misinformation. Presumably, some pundits tend more towards rationalization, whilst others engage more deliberately in misinformation.
"Bad consequences necessarily indicate that someone had bad intentions."
I would agree bad intentions correlates well with (causes) bad outcomes but not reverse as stated here. First, however misguided they might be, I believe liberals and progressives generally have good intentions but sometimes ignore and more generally don't understand the unintended consequences. Maybe the intent of conservatives is more of a mixed bag, I'm not sure, but I don't think bad outcomes correlates well with bad intentions there either.
Another consideration is that we all lie different places on Haidt's Moral Foundations scale so even saying what is bad intentions and bad consequences becomes a matter of opinion that varies greatly from person to person. To give but one example, is a woman's right to chose good or is protecting the unborn baby? Are right to lifers trying to control women or abortion rights proponents trying to kill black babies?
As French & other EU Muslims flout French & EU laws & norms, more countries will follow the Hungarian example & reduce migration to protect culture.
Denmark has already been deporting more illegals, and making it tougher to be legal, with anti-invasive immigration increasing nationalism in Germany, Sweden, and France.
The liberals supported Jew hate & immigration rather than nationalism in the recent French election. More voters will leave liberal parties than refuse to Fight fight fight against cultural surrender.
The kernel space point is tre but overstated. Linux needs third party kernel modules to run various bits of hardware. So does Windows for pragmatic reasons. Similarly security software means security people monkeying with the kernel.
Apple probably can walk off their garden better, but then we must ask the question of whether we really want the whole of computing to be a closed fortress like Apple-land. This is the kind of question the EU is tackling in it's cack-handed way.
"But when marriage is delayed, as around 1990, the sorting becomes stronger as individuals are more able to predict their likely future incomes."
Once you here it, that sounds like an obvious and simple causation. But what happened to the stereotype of bosses marrying their secretaries? Could it be even simpler that there is a more equal number of men and women of similar salaries/incomes and similar professions?
Europe needs to get better at selecting for and helping immigrants become the fellow citizens they want to live with.
The US could do better, too, but we already have plenty of prospective fellow citizens if we would just let them in even if this means excluding a lot of marginally positive people. In passing Shruti Rajagopalan mentions
https://srajagopalan.substack.com/p/kamala-harris-usha-vance-and-the?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1181507&post_id=146694964&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=3o9&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
some of the crazy restrictions on immigration of Indians.
Why does Microsoft feel legally bound to to abide by this “understanding”. Especially now?
An understanding is a not a law. Even in Europe I think. If they don’t abide, the EU would still have to go through the legal process to compel them.
It's an open secret that Microsoft is not merely some ordinary big company but has become as "government adjacent" - symbiotic with and with a lot of its quasi-monopoly surplus profits dependent on the discretionary good graces of the most important western states - as any bank or pharmaceutical company or manufacturer of large jet aircraft.
Governments treat Microsoft Office and Enterprise as if it might as well be the only game in town for the indefinite future, and pay enormous license fees for what is, let's face it, kind of a crappy and stagnant suite of products which should have been commoditized decades ago, indeed, they kind of were by Google and others. Additionally, many functions of national security are either executed via some "understanding" with Microsoft or could not be accomplished at all without Microsoft's support and assistance, and Microsoft is very keen on and strategic about keeping things that way.
A related, perhaps only slightly-less-open secret, is that Microsoft does not and will not make an OS or other product secure enough to prevent the government from performing certain intelligence collection and other cyber functions, or to stop other organization customers from being able to intercept and monitor employee and other network activity at any level of detail, and this almost inevitably perpetuates the existence of vulnerabilities it might be possible for some actor to exploit should they figure out how to get the keys to the backdoors.
Given all this, when a major government comes to an "understanding" with Microsoft, it might as well be 'law', though having very little to do with the ideals of "rule of law".
It’s another way of saying a settlement agreement. It’s a contract. If MS breached, they would be sued in the European clown system. This is a major issue in the US as well with settlements and consent decrees acting as shadow regulation without normal due process.
Right. I understand that, but I am questioning the wisdom of preemptively surrendering vs actually forcing due process to play out.
Apple seems more novel in their approach. They release things for the EU only to comply. Or just pay fines.
Suppose MS just said no. Or, hey, we’ll release an insecure “Windows 11 Hackable EU Edition”.
Point is, MS and their lawyers bear a lot of responsibility for not protecting their rights but abjectly submitting to such a plan. Same for other consent decrees.
Great questions for a shareholder to ask.
That's an interesting legal question I've never looked into and which I'll try to research now. To what extent to normal theories of agency, public reporting, transparency, duties to shareholders, etc. apply or not when a lot of what constitutes a substantial fraction of the value of a company derives from information or work which is non-public either privately in terms of closely-held propietary trade secrets or actually classified and protected from disclosure by national security law? So, when you say that's something for a shareholder to ask, I think the effective answer is "We don't have to tell you the real answers, and if you don't like that then you are welcome to sell your shares."
It just seems impossible to actually do normal analysis of the liklihood some new businesses policy will mean more profit or loss in a highly regulated / goverment-adjacent sector without being in the loop on whether that decision was informed by a nudge by the goverment that the business knows it has to not only keep quiet about but publicly pretend it made for its own reasons and not due to the. government dangling carrots and sticks. In such circumstances, the only rational trading is insider trading.
I tried a couple of natural language searches and came up with bupkis. Maybe a good place to start would be a treatise on national security law.
Re: "A Microsoft spokesman said it cannot legally wall off its operating system in the same way Apple does because of an understanding it reached with the European Commission following a complaint. In 2009, Microsoft agreed it would give makers of security software the same level of access to Windows that Microsoft gets." — WSJ
There isn't a feedback loop to hold the European Commission accountable for the harm done to Microsoft and Microsoft's end users.
"Heckuva job, European tech regulators."
Love it!
And look at how they are about to lock themselves out of all the AI advances by making laws forbidding stuff before we even know how it’s going to work and which technology or method will work best.
On MSFT & EU regulators: Let us restate this more bluntly. Lawyers, who don't understand technology, made a bad decision which enabled Crowdstrike to take down millions of computers. As ever, lawyers remain ignorant of second order effects: they are not systems thinkers. Abjure and avoid them.
It's not just lawyers; would that it were. Ignoring second order effects seems to be characteristic of regulation. Some ill-defined and poorly understood "problem" gets public attention, politicians and regulators rush to pass a law or adopt a regulation so as to be seen as effective, and when negative consequences ensue, it is taken as showing more such intervention is needed.
Sure but it is lawyers who staff these regulatory positions.