These days it’s forbidden to deny the horrors of nazism but quite fashionable to glorify the murders and confiscations of communism and to even justify Marxist murderers like Mangione.
PCs are also made by corporations, together with PC parts. The reason computing became so cheap during the last 50 years was competition between said corporations. Competition that is also pushing the AI token price down and also encouraging - corporations - to come up with models that can run on user hardware.
So what are you ranting against?!
> Own nothing and be happy.
Ah, here it is. Only governments can confiscate our property and force us into that. Governments and politicians that keep telling us how evil corporations are…
In the digital age corporations can and do confiscate things we thought we owned. Amazon removing paid-for kindle books, devices getting bricked, paying a recurring fee to use some features in your car.
Every year, the government comes around, reassesses my house value (always up, never down) and ask me to pay a percentage (always increasing) or they will take away my house which shelters my kids and family.
So, no, I am not too worried about Amazon removing my $9.99 book.
The “own nothing and be happy” quote is from a blog post made by the World Economic Forum. I find meta-governmental organisations even more troublesome, and you can’t vote them out.
It isn’t only conspiracy theorists who should be disturbed by whatever politico-corporate freemasonry that goes on in Davos.
> This is ignoring the people who capture the rent.
So my grandma shouldn't have been be deliriously happy with the new washing machine that saved her hands from bleeding weekly because the evil capitalist laundromat owners charged a few quarters per load?!
At what cost though?! And no, I am not talking about money. Any device (and any product really) is a set of tradeoffs.
I like it when different producers select a different subset of priorities for their offer. Competition at work. One of the reasons we witnessed such an awesome evolution in the smartphone market.
I hate it when a bureaucrat dictates a set of demands with absolutely zero regard to the cost or the tradeoffs involved in product decisions and market competition.
> At what cost though?! And no, I am not talking about money. Any device (and any product really) is a set of tradeoffs.
My $200 Moto G3 in 2016 had a removable back cover (admittedly not battery). It was also waterproof (and had a headphone jack.)
The engineering of making things waterproof is in the realm of "A bit more annoying but easily doable if anyone's interested in doing it", not "Doable at the cost of everything else".
> My $200 Moto G3 in 2016 had a removable back cover (admittedly not battery). It was also waterproof (and had a headphone jack.)
It also did diddly squat in the market place and the company producing it ran out of business.
Again, a product is a set of tradeoffs. Those tradeoff include functionality, cost, logistics to build, even marketing and sales. Maximizing a feature to serve a loud minority (headphone jack!) but thus ignoring other features will simply make a product fail in the market place in time...
Not sure what the context or background of that is, but here in India, the G3 sold out shortly after launch.
Per this [1] stat by a Motorola exec too, it did very well.
> Motorola’s General Manager for India, Amit Boni stated at the Moto X Play launch event that the Moto G (3rd Gen) that was launched in July is among the fastest selling smartphones on Flipkart. Its sales mark grossed 140% higher than the Moto G (1st Gen and 2nd Gen).
(And I know that's legitimate because a lot of peers, friends and family, folks on the streets etc had Motorolas.)
> and the company producing it ran out of business.
Unfortunate, yes, but I don't think it was because they made and sold phones that didn't sell. I don't know if it was business mismanagement or what, but it's an unfortunate legacy of one of the most promising brands. Fortunately Lenovo isn't killing the brand, so there's that.
> I hate when a technocrat at a multi-billion dollar company makes those decisions
Really?! So instead of the person hired and paid specifically to select and decide what the product should cost, look and work like, the person whose very pay depends on how well she chooses those product features for you - instead you'd rather have a faceless nameless bureaucrat who never pays the cost of his wrong decisions, who instead gets more power and money the more he panders to the vocal minorities that push populist agendas completely detached from the market place.
> not giving a fuck about any other criteria
That is simply not true, such a company would go out of business fast. As I said before, any product is a set of tradeoffs. Cost (and profit) is just one of the factors. Ignoring the others does not make successful products.
> profit
I love it when a company I buy from is successful. That means it's gonna be around to create more stuff for me to enjoy. It also means the awesome people working there get paid and are successful themselves. Finally, it means that its investors will back up more of this kind of companies that create useful products and services. Profit is great!
Everything you've written can be turned around, swapping companies and authorities. Those working in a public administration are serving the public while those working in a private company are serving themselves (and the shareholders).
>I hate it when a bureaucrat dictates a set of demands with absolutely zero regard to the cost or the tradeoffs involved in product decisions and market competition.
It's because of those "bureaucrats", that car manufacturers were forced to implement catalytic converters and ECUs for emissions controls, and why the air in your city isn't a smog cloud like in the 70s.
I hate it when people assume the environmental and societal problems caused the unregulated free market, are gonna be fixed by the same unregulated free market which only optimizes for profit.
> I like it when different producers select a different subset of priorities for their offer. Competition at work. One of the reasons we witnessed such an awesome evolution in the smartphone market.
>
> I hate it when a bureaucrat dictates a set of demands with absolutely zero regard to the cost or the tradeoffs involved in product decisions and market competition.
I generally agree with that sentiment, except we don't have a vibrant market of many options with many different trade offs. Finding headphone jack, solid reparability, user swappable battery, easily replaceable USB port, and all the other things that one might want is basically impossible. The vast majority of phones are highly unrepairable, have no headphone jack, have everything soldered to a tiny number of internal boards, and are full of anti repair dark patterns.
I know a few categories falling under this "richest 1% of the world’s people": entrepreneurs, highly paid professionals and politicians.
The entrepreneurs invested in or built from scratch organizations able to deliver an incredible amount of value to our society in the form of products, services and jobs. These organizations, called businesses, are the unsung heroes that differentiate our lands of plenty from the hunger and cold of countries suffering under communism.
The professionals (doctors, lawyers, programmers) worked in such organizations and added significant value ensuring their success in the market place.
Finally, politicians managed to convince a sufficient number people that only they can solve their problems and thus got themselves elected into positions where they control significant flows of money and/or influence.
> Safeway won’t starve and die if I decide to buy from Fred Meyer.
Ironically, you (along with a significant number of others) deciding to buy from a competitor will eventually lead to financial trouble for Safeway and thus to layoffs and losses for their investors (pension funds among them).
So, do you find your decision to buy from Fred Meyer "absolutely immoral"?!
I don’t think there’s any point in having a conversation with you if you don’t see any difference between employment, community, civic duty and market. If you treat people as a market product, then we have even less to discuss.
Ignoring market realities and proclaiming to care about noble but unrealistic ideological goals is how the communist regime I grew up under managed to fail to even feed its population.
It seems like you have an unfalsifiable belief. If one side raises more money and wins, it because of the money. If one side raises more money and loses, it is still the money because the other side spend it more effectively.
And the fact that a 3rd party supports an opponent does not kill any politician's career. Biden retired by himself, following his own party's pressure. And Harris is still around, I believe.
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