Two points: > The article is kind of all over the place. Just mentioning this because I've seen previous HN comments that are confused by Matt Levine's articl

Two points: > The article is kind of all over the place. Just mentioning this because I've seen previous HN comments that are confused by Matt Levine's article style, but his posts are basically "newsletter" format, where each section is essentially an entirely different article. Not sure if you were just referring to the first section being all over the place, but the fact that the other sections are on totally different topics is just the format. As to the rest of your comment, I wholeheartedly agree, but over the past ~25 years I've had a very strong re-evaluation that this pursuit of "optimization" over all else has some severe negative societal consequences that most people really don't like. This massive consolidation has gone on across many, many industries that the Internet has affected, and it has decimated many parts of society. E.g. it's totally valid IMO to say that before craigslist and Google that lots of small, regional newspapers charged exorbitant rates for classifieds, but now that the internet has sucked up all that money, you're left with basically no "real" local newspapers in most smaller cities, and all the money that would have stayed in that community has been vacuumed up to the Bay Area or NYC. Again, to emphasize, not saying either way is totally "right" or "wrong", but I think Levine's point is that the inefficiency of local banking brought measurable benefits to local communities.