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Comment Re:Right to repair for everyone (Score 1) 42

Capitalism is NOT about the rights of the wealthy.

Capitalism inherently means literally only one thing, capital controls the means of production. Who has the capital? The wealthy. Who therefore has the right to control? Yeah. That's right, the wealthy. Capitalism IS about the rights of the wealthy.

If I buy something, I OWN IT. Not you. As I own it you do not have the legal ability to put ANY contracts on it. Your belief that you can sell it but still somehow prevent me from doing with it what I want is anti-capitalist plutocrat philosophy.

Capitalism is about control of PRODUCTION, not about control of stuff you bought. That is orthogonal to capitalism. You have to have the right to own property for capitalism to exist but that doesn't give you the right to do whatever you want with it.

Rental agreements are different

Rent seeking is orthogonal to capitalism as well, because it's not about production. Hell, it's barely even about ownership, since you can sublet.

TL;DR: All the stuff you think is capitalism is really about a specific form of capitalism with other things added on. Capitalism is NOT inherently about free MARKETS. You can have mods on capitalism to try to make it make the freest possible markets, but they aren't the soul of capitalism. Rich people controlling stuff is.

Comment Re: Right to repair for everyone (Score 1) 42

If capitalists want to produce a product that's hard to repair, then consumers can choose not to purchase from them.

This is ignorant. There are lots of reasons why consumers would have to buy a product which is hard to repair. For example there's no credible alternative, use of a specific product is all that's supported, it's mandated by an employer, the manufacturer has driven competing manufacturers out of business, etc. This is why we have antitrust and warranty laws.

The very essence of capitalism is that those who control the capital control the means of production. Everything else you think is necessarily part of capitalism isn't except for private property ownership, as you can't have capitalism without that. The right to purchase a competing product means absolutely nothing when there is no competing product, when a specific product can be mandated, when the alternate products cannot reasonably be maintained or there are deliberate incompatibilities, etc etc. It's really truly sad how few people around here know what capitalism is, means, and does.

Comment Re:Are people this ignorant of basic online securi (Score 1) 54

as a sponsored Google result

This is the problem right here. Why is Google not considered an accessory? Google received consideration to disseminate it and the either employed no or insufficient oversight. This is not simply user-provided content which was posted without their cooperation.

Comment Re:Of course... (Score 1) 105

Of course, American car makers would never be subject to this kind of government intervention, investment or market distortion

In the US it primarily works the other way around, the automakers intervene in the government by having their lawyers write legislation and then paying congresscreeps to sponsor it. That's how we got the regulatory landscape we have with e.g. the chicken tax, and the differing standards for light trucks.

Government intervention in the USA is kind to the big 3 automakers and primarily fucks over consumers, like how California is now making owners of heavy diesel RVs get smog tests every year even though their contribution to emissions is barely measurable. It costs each owner $250 to get the test and another $35 or so in filing fees to accomplish... fuck all. Plus it creates an additional trip which starts with idling for at least fifteen minutes (or up to half an hour, depending on the ambient temperature) so the wet sleeved diesel engine can come up to temp before I set off. My neighbors must really enjoy that. Also then there's the fact that DPFs reduce soot but a) increase the production of PM2.5 soot and b) increase CO2 emissions. DEF+SCR good (except that the DEF injection systems are typically pathetically fragile) but DPF is bad but still mandated.

Comment Re: Isn't this the idea? (Score 2) 100

Nobody's asking anybody anything. Submitting bug reports (if they're valid and good) isn't asking, it's helping: knowing if and where your software fails is bettet than not knowing, regardless of whether you decide to fix it or not.

Though if Google is setting "ninety-day countdown to full disclosure regardless", then they are essentially pressuring a group og volunteers to change focus and deal with that problem. That's the spiteful part. If Google cared about the open source it benefits from, they could set aside some devs or even provide some financial help to deal with this,

Comment Re:Uncanny (Score 1) 54

Apple created the different OSes for different use cases that, Apple thought, required different user interfaces.

There is no reason why applications which choose to implement both types of interfaces can't do so. There's also no reason why users should be limited to one type of interface or the other. Both things coexist completely peacefully on Android. You can connect a mouse to your tablet (or even phone) and treat it like a desktop system with shitty storage (practically all phones, it takes a lot of power to have fast storage.)

People forget that tablet computers existed a decade before the iPad, it's good for certain things but creation is NOT one of them.

The primary use case for tablet computers in olden times was data entry and acquisition, for example the military used their magnesium-case gridpads to do inventory.

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