oo1

Schroedinger’s polecat

Yep, capitalism is at direct odds with competetive markets almost by definition.
“free” is the non-specific term tht they use rhetorically. “Competition” is the market feature that might theoretically benefit consumers in some circumstances - and they don’t often include that word in their rhetoric.

It’s always been about acquisition of market power, this is sort of opposite of a free market.
If any threat of consumer rights / anti-trust / labour rights or balancing of market power arises, their incentive is to acquire political power and influence to defend their power.

It was the same story in western Europe before industry and “capitalism”, just the landed class monopolising land vs peasantry (and/or enslaved/indentured labour). Landowners monopolised all the votes and even when suffrage expanded it was usually top down. Until maybe 1789 when something else happened to the top.

Unfortunately I think many of the major progressive changes of the past (that benefit people in general rather than the elites - again in “the West”) have mostly followed catastrophic events or political upheaval, or martyrdom.
Peasants revolts, black death, aftermath/stress of major wars, civil war, workers uprisings, race riots, 1929, ww2.

I guess the 1929 and all the FDR stuff and strengthened social policies in western Europe was all widely democratically backed (honourable mention to the banks’ major incompetence , to hitler for being such a massive c*nt and a decent 50-or-so years of European imperial decline) .

So maybe there’s some hope for the democratic or the MLK/Gandhi type approach - not that it worked out too well for those two individuals.

“micro soft pp”

widdows 2000 was the pinnacle for me, beat XP until i wanted to go to 64 bit.

Apart from having 64-bit, XP was a step back; even if I don’t count the fucking dog thing.
XP was a fair bit harder to de-bloat than win 2000 and they were hell-bent on forcing internet exploder on the world.

XP was also at a time when Linux was becoming pretty easily usable and mac osx was impressive too - I remember using those imac coloured egg things at university in 2000. They were good apart from the mouse, and ran MS office pretty well.
StarOffice was already better than MS-Word at dealing with .doc format across versions.
and ancient version of Wordperfect were miles better for WP anyway (“reveal codes”).

windows XP was already down to gaming, adobe and CAD/other specialist apps, plus maybe MS Excel that just weren’t as good or not available on linux.

I wonder about raspberry pi - it’s the image you download that has the known user and password.
It might mean that you can’t sell one with a pre-imaged, pre-installed sdcard unless you customised the image.

I use “4cab”.
They’ll never guess that.

I’m not sure i rate this particular article.
They seem to sort of hint at the importance of power and energy efficiency
But why did they then “ask about TDP” ? Surely they they need to know the actual input power(or energy) to achieve the benchmark, not TDP which is itself a wierd thing for chips that self regulate temperature by throttling.

I’m not inclined to pay attention to this journo.

“are you still watching?”

5,4,3,2,1 Auto-pause

“MONEY ME MONEY NOW.
ME A MONEY NEEDING A LOT NOW”

do google also provide all the data on clickthroughs thorough which the success of campaigns might be measured?
And i mean “Measured” by extremely dumb people whose best hope in life is probably to bullshit their way into becoming a director of sales and ma . . .

That’s what the win XP search dog was for.
They’d send it out hunting for frogs so that they can boil them all.

Bill Gates first programme was a reverse frogger game, he’d get to drive the cars and score get points for squishing frogs.
I think it was called Grand Theft Amphibian or something. The dude just really hates frogs.

Develop own software or support indepndent sw development however you can.

If you really need something, think about your personal dependencies and try to build some resilience / backups , one way or another.
Whatever your craft, a pathway towards ownership and control of tools and maintenance should be a traditional part of mastering the craft.
So that you can eventually do things like extend the toolset, or adapt tools to niche circumstances and advance things along.

If you don’t have that pathway, then you might end up trapped as an apprentice or journeyperson and will continue to be exploited by those who control the things you depend on.
If there’s no freedom and no way to develop competition in the supply chain, then you probably would benefit from - collective organisations such as trades-guilds, or professional associations or trade-unions to counter the power imbalance, and represent your needs - but they can also get captured/bribed so those probably need a bit of effective democracy / transparency/accountability or something. I’m not going to suggest govt regulation, becasuse that’s super easy to capture and national-election democracy is a weak control, but you might get some progressive govts like some European ones that’d think about doing something suppoting foss projects, maybe.

It might not be easy, but you have to look for and support those types of features for the good of your industry.
Corps will eat their industry for a quick $, it’s the workers, tradespeople and masters of the craft and some small businesses who care about the long term. And maybe any enlightened customers if you’re lucky enough to have them.

As an example, for physical 3d cad, personally I don’t like freecad much it’s complex and not very intuitive; but it lets me do all the maths I want in python, with my own made up data structures / object model. So i’ll use and support freecad 100% over all the other more user friendly CAD that i’ve seen - it really is the freedom, and not being so dependant.

careful now.

For toothbrushes, are they worried repair won’t re-seal it effectively so make it unsuitable for use in the wet environment?

tl/dr, yes it can(i mean it does today). moreover OSHW seems like it might help limit some of the bad parts. but that may cause tension viz. some current powerful people.

I reckon the benefits of open source arise from contestability in the supply chain - basically market competition.
As a buyer I can more easily switch my purchases from one supplier to another (including in-house) and that competetive tension gives me a better deal.

That competition erodes market power - and it drives down ‘super normal profits’ (economic sense of the term) closer down to the normal level (long run cost of borrowing ).

Free capitalism is about driving up profits. Restricting competition helps that by acquiring and perserving market power . Sometimes the political/market power route is easier than innovating a new or better product or production process - i.e a genuine competetive edge).

Basically it might be cheaper to bribe one market regulator (gain market power), vs employ a team of r+d engineers (try to gain competetive edge).

Society benefits when businesses do the latter (more engineering and science, less lawyers and politicians), but the shareholders don’t necessarily care which method gives them profits (let’s not mention ‘animal’ spirits) - so capitalists do a mix of both. OSHW reduces options on the market power side. Executive board remuneration becomes an imortant incentive at this point.

Capialism ans oshw can work together if the forces of free markets effectively mitigate any excess power caused by concentrations of control over capital. banks have to want to lend to small less profitable businesses who cmply with compatible standards (oshw being basically a version of this).

But I think capitslism and free and competetive markets are not the same thing. Incumbent capitalists seem to like to (ab)use free market rhetoric to try to gain political power that they then use to preserve market power and work against competition.

And I don’t think capitalism can be “torn down”, because any moderate density of human activity will beget a temptation for someone to try to get some disporportionate share of some type of power; ‘market’ power or otherwise.

But excesses of market (and other types of ) power can be reduced or regulated - which usually seems like a good idea. Unfortunately that does bring the politicians and lawyers back into the frame.