I recommend you read the HN thread when Ulbricht was sentenced [0] first, then come here and read all the "Honest, genuine question, why?"s
Then start practicing not letting politics influence your thought process
I guess since then, the fentanyl crisis has happened and shown that drugs also have more negative impacts
The way I inform myself about politicians is by typing "<name> interview" into YouTube and listen to a few hours of interviews with them.
With Harris, nothing stuck except that she is pro taxing the rich.
With Trump, what stuck is that he is pro border, pro Bitcoin, pro tariffs and pro Tesla.
These trillion dollar companies were often able to invest into big money-losing moonshot projects that benefited consumers massively - in Google's case, GMail and Google Maps - which were truly unimaginable at the time even though they're taken for granted today, so there's clearly some benefit in the form of innovation. Who else can afford to build things like that?
The questions to ask are, can startups and venture capital take on the role of innovating that these big corps have done? I'm doubtful, since there's been no startup in the past ten years that put out anything nearly as genuinely innovative and helpful as Google Maps was for me, mainly because the risk/profit ratio is so bad without the network effects that these big companies have.
Do the benefits outweigh the costs? Ten years ago, when the big companies were innovating so much to the benefit of consumers, I'd answer unequivocally yes. Now it's much less clear.
And finally, is there any way to rein in the negative effects of these big companies while bringing out the positive effects to the benefit of consumers?
Maps was created because it allowed google to be more competitive, not because they were already on top of their game and could just pour billions into any product.
Does that feel very slow to anyone else?