A bunch of "economists" from companies with vested financial interest in convincing everyone their products are world-changing all agree that their products are world-changing ... ... that isn't news, it's the definition of industry propaganda.

Do you have any non-propaganda, unbiased evidence whatsoever that consolidating into fewer companies will in any way result in greater production of creative works?

Because if not, perhaps you should consider the possibility that the statement you quoted isn't actually propaganda (it's just a statement of fact).

Can we add "surprise and delight" to that list of firing reasons?

America is a democratic society, and its rich are just ordinary citizens. They may have more $$$, but they are otherwise equal to others, not a separate noble caste.

In other words, they're "just like us" ... but they should never have to mingle with the peasant caste when they travel! That would be un-American!

Probably some of

E) Users are purposefully using privacy blockers that don't leak details of their computer

  as well. Why should a website know my OS? It's serving HTML, it shouldn't make a difference to it.

I feel like people who make comments like this have no concept of American history. Naked graft like this has happened, just as bad if not worse, many times in US history!

Now, should we be concerned that we're moving backwards instead of forwards on corruption? Absolutely!

But it's just flat out ignorant and counterproductive to pretend this level of government corruption has never occurred ... when US history is full of it. Please people, read some history, or else we really all are doomed to repeat it.

There's a fundamental difference you're missing: all the businesses you listed want to keep you as a customer. Broadcom *does not*.

For their model to work, customers just have to pay their (wildly) increased rates long enough for Broadcom to make back the $$$ they spent to acquire VMWare (they'd like to make a tidy profit too, but with all the VMWare assets they acquire that's guaranteed ... as long as they cover the acquisition cost).

Google, Amazon and Microsoft may all be shitty companies with shitty plans to keep their customers while doing a shitty job of serving them ... but their business model still fundamentally revolves around keeping customers, not screwing them over so badly they leave.

This made me laugh ... then cry.

Broardcom's entire business model with these acquisitions (they did the same thing with others before VMWare) is to acquire something everyone depends on AND can't easily switch off ... and then jack up the prices by an insane amount.

It doesn't matter if most customers eventually leave: they will stick with what they have, no matter the cost, long enough for Broadcom to cover the entire cost of acquisition. At the end of the day they have more money than they started with, a small fraction of customers still paying, and some significant IP.

They win all around, and everyone else (including the acquired company and its now-fired employees) loses.

/plan is not how you loop in Claude: you use /loop or /goal.

goal solves your concern: the model doesn't stop when the code compiles, it stops when a second (independent) Claude evaluates a condition you setup to be true.

e.g. /goal Ensure all unit tests in /tests pass, then verify the build exits with code 0. Stop only when there are zero failing tests.

Central banks do a lot of useful things, but they don't give currency a value (they can, however manipulate the value others give it by printing it, destroying it, changing interest rates, changing the amount of reserve banks need and the multiple they can lend, etc). What gives a currency value is supply and demand- the fact other people want that currency. Which is also what sets international exchange rates.

There's also the fact you need it to pay taxes, which sets a base amount of demand. But beyond that it's all supply and demand when deciding how much value it has against other currencies or physical objects.

WHich is different from crypto how? You print it from doing large amounts of useless work on a computer that provides no value and is immediately thrown out. Or the new proof of stake algorithms, in which you print it by having previously printed it. I'll take cash, thanks.

I predict that this poster A) said the exact same thing about smartphones and B) now owns the latest, priciest iPhone.

Why would you do that? If you're using it for non-strings, you'd never have used strncpy, you'd have used memcpy. Which is the same thing without the null termination rules of strncpy. You'd never use the str versions unless actually working on strings.

What BS: just be born as rich as Musk and with a little work you too can be just like him!