This question is redundant. Evil people choose the evil option, normal people choose the other.

You could make the same argument about almost anything that is created under our present economic system, it’s void of content. I paid my gas bill so now I can tell my friends that I’m responsible for North Sea gas extraction. People imbibe Joe Rogan’s billionaire koolaid and forget where all this stuff we take for granted comes from.

Capitalism has lifted billions of people out of poverty and that is a minor miracle. Now it is eating itself like an ouroboros. People are upset and it’s not a good time to defend big capital, ask TPUSA and United Health.

You could make the argument that nothing can be achieved without being able to dedicate the time required. That was the miracle of the agricultural revolution, we could do something with our time other than gather food. If you said ‘we got the internet thanks to farmers’ that would be indisputable, everything flowed from that. I don’t see why an internet couldn’t emerge in other economic contexts because internet technology depends on physics and those laws transcend any and all economic systems. We already know this because almost every jurisdiction has the internet.

The influence of capitalism on the internet has been a mixed bag. e-commerce: good. App ecosystem: ranging from good to addiction health crisis. Walled gardens and enshitification: bad. Misinformation and radicalisation of political groups: dire, potentially an existential threat.

We got internet thanks to scientists and engineers. No amount of capitalists, politicians, managers or business people can create an internet. They say ‘here’s some money to make stuff’ and that’s the limit of their involvement.

This was my situation exactly. I knew that antidepressants only treated the symptoms but the underlying condition isn’t addressed. I was buying ADHD medication on the dark web and that stuff actually worked. Ended up going to a psychiatrist and paying for a diagnosis. Honestly amongst the best decisions I have ever made. Many of my life outcomes made sense when viewed through the lens of ADHD. The project for the remainder of my life is undoing the damage that was done in the first 47 years.

It’s an unusual gift and would make most people incredibly awkward but there’s nothing sinister in the act itself, absent of the context. People gift things like guns and alcohol and I would argue those do more harm.

The obfuscated nature of compiled code does an incredible amount of heavy lifting on behalf of shareholders. Imagine a world where x-ray specs suddenly revealed source code. The flight to open solutions would be irresistible. Windows is hot garbage but it clings to its market share like a limpet, through the magic of closed source, occupying space like a flabby tumour. It doesn’t care if it kills the host because the top priority is growth and an unassailable market share. That’s the magic of capitalism.

Alternative name, Eigen Values

Because white guys.

The consequences so far have been a warm feeling on hearing the news but I’m starting to doubt that feeling. Shawty, are they playing me like a fiddle?

It’s the business model that shareholders love and seems to be fairly ubiquitous. Eventually these corporations undergo trial by anti trust as their influence becomes increasingly toxic e.g. Google. The concentration of power into the hands of a few people is a problem with large hierarchies generally, ordinary people end up doing whacky stuff on the whim of someone that you never meet or know in any meaningful way.

That’s the spirit

Feeling concern for the welfare of a corporation is a lot like caring for a lion or some other large predator. You don’t want to see it suffer but you know that it could turn on you at any moment, when it’s convenient for them.

Who gives a fuck about the travails of corporations on the internet?

Is this mostly a ADHD thing? They tried to make me learn times tables at school but that never stuck. Recently had to solve a problem with a CRC and part of that was manually calculating a long division in binary. At some point realised I didn’t even know how to do that in decimal so wound the clock back 35 years and learnt it from scratch. Badda bing badda boom, working CRC 🤓

Jokes on you, I already watch them at 0.5x speed

I would not argue against that. Two steps forward and one back is usually how it goes with technology. Reliability is the problem that has only been achieved relatively recently. I remember a time when the hard shoulder was full of stalled vehicles. Japanese cars from the 70s and 80s were notably inferior to their competitors. We’ve come a long way in making this technology polished and affordable to the masses. Now the science shows us it is contributing to climate change and we have a new challenge. So it goes.

Car companies hate this one trick.

I would argue that it is already the case that cheap cars look and perform excellently, compared with cars produced fifty years ago. They are more reliable, economical, comfortable, higher performance, superior in virtually every respect.

The other factor to consider is the use case. Something like a Ferrari is not reliable compared to a VW Golf, it sucks at carrying passengers and cargo, terrible fuel economy, it is horrible value for money and inferior in most ways apart from one - compensating for a small penis. That is its chief purpose and it is supremely well crafted for this use case.

Source: automotive engineer of 25 years.

You horny bastards