TheUnusuallySpecific

According to some perceptions of "popular opinion", the US economy is becoming more integrated and more dominated by "near monopoly" corporate entities than any time since the break-up of the Bell System. Most of the Bell children have re-merged, tech companies have a stranglehold on many digital goods and services, and the barriers to entry for smaller business to break into critical industries like infrastructure and healthcare have risen rapidly. While most industries are still defined by some amount of competition within their oligopoly, the number of major player seems to be shrinking

Given this, my question has two parts:

1.) Is the above truly an accurate assessment of the current nature of the US economy, or are there less apparent factors at play that are mitigating these monopolistic trends?

2.) Are the actions of the Biden administration going to push the US towards more monopolistic business practices, are we returning to an era of trust-busting, or somewhere in between?

Hancock is a storyteller, not a strong foundation for actual research. As they requested, you'd be better served asking about a specific example of degrading levels of technology. Though in most ancient cultures the answer for why technology seems to get worse over some eras is "they started losing crops/wars and they lost stability and everything went to hell from there". Hard to maintain specialized knowledge when your educated population are dying/leaving and repositories of written works are lost.

Fair point, but when trying to help someone suffering from anxiety and/or depression, you want to provide an immediate option for help. Not one more task on an endless to-do list. "Hey man, I think you should talk to this Dr. Podman, he seems like he could really help you talk through some of this" is good, straightforward, actionable advice that only requires one step of input from the person- calling that therapist. "Hey man, I think you should look up some therapists or something" is just telling them you think something is wrong with them and dumping the entirety of the solution-finding process in their lap. The extra step of doing research and finding a potential therapist off the bat demonstrates a willingness to commit time and energy for the sake of this other person, which is the essence of being a true friend.

Real talk, back in the day relatively little was written down / documented in a permanent way. The vast majority of knowledge died with the person that figured it out. At best they might train a handful of apprentices who carried on the art and maybe passed it on for another generation or two. The Apollo program was really just a return to form in that context.