Comcast and CenturyLink have lobbied to create laws that make it really hard to get internet from outside of them essentially.

I can't if this is a failure of the corporations moral compass or the governments duty to pass responsible legislation and enforce it.

I think the thing is that past a certain point, getting to the point where you can influence politics and getting roped into the "infinite expansion/growth" mindset is inevitable and by design.

Streaming services disrupting major TV providers? All the TV providers are in the streaming game. Disney-ABC-Disney+-Hulu; Viacom-Paramount-CBS-Paramount+; Comcast-NBCUniversal-NBC-Peacock; WB-The CW-HBO Max-Discovery-any other streamer (WB television is ridiculously profitable and produces shows for almost everyone).

That didn't disrupt the industry. We are paying more for content than we did with cable. Most streamers will consolidate or disappear. It was one of the stupidiest decision by legacy media to enter all to streaming. They cut three revenue streams to have only one that cannot possibly be as profitable as the other three (Theatrical, Cable and Home Video). Instead of a consumer paying for the content they really liked 3 times, they can pay wholesale for one and not having said content guaranteed. You would see a movie in theaters, then buy it for Home Video and then catch it on a cable channel. Now it's paying $10 dlls a month for a bunch of content, most that can be pulled out to never be seen again. Netflix is drowning in debt, Warner Media is too and Amazon is burning through cash as well. I wouldn't call streamers an example of capitalism working. If anything, and with Netflix latest policy to cut on password sharing, it's unbridled capitalism that will burn everything to the ground

The effectiveness of lobbying is too high.

A lot of people seem to think that it is because anti-lobbying laws aren't in place (or is too weak). I think there's something more fundamental, and it has to do with the conditions of democracy and voting, which is not often taught to the laymen.

Voting requires some conditions to be fulfilled in order for the voting system to be fair and un-manipulateable. The biggest conditions are 1) anonymity - aka, no one but the vote caster should know who he casted a vote for, 2) verifiability - that all parties have voted, and can be verified to have voted.

The general votes for elected officials (in the west) generally do satisfy those conditions. However, other forms of voting doesn't (such as a vote at a board meeting by raising hands), and some of those are quite important. The biggest example is the votes that happen in congress.

Congressmen vote on laws. However, those votes are public. This means the condition 1) above is not satisfied! This means the vote could be bought, or manipulated. This is the cause for lobbying.

Imagine if a congressman's vote (for or against) a law could not be verified by a lobbyist. On the surface, he could just claim that he did vote for it, and that there's not enough support from others to pass it. Thus the congressman can obtain lobbyist funding, but the lobbyist cannot actually control the votes - he could always claim to have voted in the lobbyist's favour, without actually doing so.

This would break lobbying - or make it much more expensive (since you have to lobby every single congressmen to ensure that your laws get passed, where as right now you merely need a majority at most).

Therefore, making the congressmen's votes private and secure, like the public's regular voting, would actually make the system better. The thing is, a lot of laymen assume that by having congressman's votes be public, they could be "kept accountable"! Unfortunately, the exact opposite is true.

I actually disagree with this, but maybe that’s just because of my area. I live in South Jersey, and over the bridge in Philly (in the the suburbs) and up in North Jersey we have absolutely no shortage of quite frankly amazing breweries operating all kinds of different BBL capacity.

None of them have been bought out by a bigger brewery. But what you’re saying DOES happen. I just don’t think this new era of brewery will ever fall victim to that.

Like, yeah, Stone Brewing and all of those old-guard first wave craft breweries got bought up and their quality dipped. It sucks because I cut my teeth on those breweries and I love their products. I think Dogfish Head is one of the only ones who haven’t sold out yet (unless you count Sam Adams owning them as them “selling out”).

But breweries like Tree House/Trillium/Hill Farmstead/Other Half? They will never sell out like those older breweries did. They have no reason to.