Brian Gongol
Podcast: Updated weekly in the wee hours of Sunday night/Monday morning. Subscribe on Stitcher, Spreaker, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or iHeartRadio
Our studio lights were brighter than ever tonight, which was a dramatic change from the recent past. Somehow, that discussion got us wondering why a local grocery chain doesn't make sure their male employees have ties that are long enough.
The grocery discussion carried over into segment two, when we discussed the magical properties of Zingers and the Wendy's Baconator. But Brian Dean's latest Baconator lacked bacon, which seems to defeat the purpose.
Having gotten the silliness out of our systems, by the third segment, we were discussing one Senator's plans for an antitrust investigation of Google. It's utterly unnecessary at this stage. First off, if there's a legitimate case to be made, it should be made in the courts, not through Congress. But in the long term, it's meaningless anyway. Google has no better chance of maintaining its massive market power over Internet search engines than Montgomery Wards had of maintaining its one-time lead in catalog retailing (the predecessor to Internet retailing today), or the power Western Union once had over interstate communications. Creative destruction is a hallmark of a dynamic free-market economy, and monopolies (and even near-monopolies) rarely last for very long, unless they're specifically protected by the government.
Finally, we discussed the correct-but-incomplete argument that building codes saved lives in the Japanese earthquake. It's true that the codes undoubtedly did save a lot of lives, but those codes would have been meaningless if Japan weren't wealthy enough to pay for the technologies and techniques required to meet strict building codes. Wealth saves lives, even when natural disasters try to take them.