What?

What projections are you looking at? It is a few cherry picked ones? Generally the projections going back to the 80s are in line with what’s actually happening, if anything they were optimistic.

Even if you don’t agree with projection or that we’re actually in-line with them, the correlation between carbon in the atmosphere and global temperature isn’t disputable anymore.

I thought I listed a bunch of cases where there were options (and not monopolies). But yes, 100% inside many ecosystems are monopolies, and those ecosystems/walled gardens have been slowly expanding every chance these companies have.

I’m saying the competition can only exist because products that actually fill the same need.

If you decide that you need product A, and have multiple options on where to get that, you have competition.

So if you’re looking for a Cola, you have options.

If you’re looking to play StardewValley, you have options where you want to buy it and which platform you want to play it on, you don’t need to buy a new game system to play it.

If you’re looking to play the latest Zelda game, you don’t have options, you need to buy a Switch.

If you’re looking to watch Ozarks, you don’t have options, you can only watch Netflix.

If you’re looking to just have something playing on TV and don’t really care what it is, you have options.

If you’re looking to listen to music, you have options, most of the steaming services have most of the music.

If you’re looking to be able to text friends, you have options, any phone will work.

If you’re looking to be able to iMessage friends and for your case only iMessage will work, iPhone is your only option.

Competition is complex and is more dependent on a consumer needs than just classification of what a product is. In your earlier point you used Apple as an example of a company that can increase prices despite competition, but really Apple is a prime example of a company putting up walls to an ecosystem making it really hard to leave once you’re in.

Generally in the current tech landscape there barely is any competition outside openish platforms. But with tech, you often can’t look at competition as product A vs Product B. Like while we can say that Window competes with OSx, it’s harder to say that a Mac laptop competes with a given Dell laptop (because what you can do with each OS is different to different people).

This is why I like to think of all the tv streaming services as different types of food stores. There is no supermarket that supplies everything, you’re forced to have memberships to the single butcher, the single milk man, the single bakery, etc. if you want a particular food, there is currently no (or very little) competition. You can certainly survive on just bread, and people are happy to do that, but that bakery can and will increase prices whenever because they aren’t really competing with the butcher.

I still think you’re looking at competition slightly wrong.

Coke and Pepsi do compete with eachother, along with the rest of the drink market. And overall prices in that industry are pretty low, some people will buy other competitors (the store brand Cola’s). But overall competition is working.

Apple only kinda competes. Sure a phone is a phone and a laptop is a laptop. But unless someone is entering the market for the first time. They already have applications they are looking to use, so if you need an iPhone, you need an iPhone, and same for a Mac. But if you’re an android or Windows user, suddenly you have a lot more choice because there is lots of competition!

The reason companies setup walled gardens, or pay for exclusive access to a piece of media is to erode competition. If a user wants that thing, they can only get it from that one place.

It’s only competition if they provide similar products.

The current landscape is like farmers markets and butchers. Sure they both provide food, but they don’t really directly compete with eachother.

The data doesn’t seem to support the title of the article.

Am I misreading the data they are sharing in the article?

It shows data that suggests that number of immigrants leaving now is similar to how it’s been for the last decade. And the overall rate now is lower than it’s been most of the last decade, it’s only increased slightly this year for the first time in 4ish years.

I don’t disagree that that may help, it’s hard to draw a direct link between the two with the data I can see.

I guess we’ll have to wait for more data to come out.

The data I can find shows no improvement to union rates over Biden’s term https://www.statista.com/statistics/195349/union-membership-rate-of-employees-in-the-us-since-2000/

Are they stronger due to changes by the current government? Or are they stronger because the economy is weaking and more and more people are rembering that forming/joining unions can help improve their working conditions?