> a) The motivation under capitalism is maximizing profits, not revenue.

Profits and revenue are functionally the same for the purpose of most discussions, however yes it's a valid and often employed tactic to charge the same price while providing less value, which increases profits at the same level of revenue.

> Consider the scenario where you capture all of your customers' surplus...

From John Deere's perspective, the optimal strategy is to corner the market on farm equipment that are strictly necessary for society as we know it to continue to exist, locking out all competition from all related revenue streams. From supplying the machines, to supplying the parts, to making sure they get a cut of any money to be made servicing the machines. They are not trying to minimize the profits of others, that's just the natural consequence of elbowing everyone else out of the market.

> Enlightened self-interest drives you to keep your customers and suppliers profitable.

This logic breaks down when demand is highly inelastic. If your customers need what you are selling, then there is less incentive to keep them profitable and really only the incentive to allow them to continue to exist. Oh, can't afford my fees? Well too bad, go into debt or die. Turns out most people will choose debt before death.
=Smidge=

While true, that's like saying dirt can't exist without gravity.

Capitalism existed long before markets existed, and markets existed before people did. Fish cleaners staking out a site for their business in the ocean is a market. An amoeba storing resources for later use is capitalism in action. (I.e. it's getting stuff now for later use, accumulating capital.)

Most of the things that people attribute to capitalism are only the property of one "dialect" of capitalism. And corporate capitalism is itself a cluster of dialects, that exist under specific legal constraints, which vary with time and place.

So, yes, markets cannot exist without capitalism, as markets are about exchanging stuff, and capitalism is, basically, "the way one handles stuff". I suppose one could rephrase that as "the belief in the way one handles stuff", which would eliminate amoebas, etc., because they don't practice belief, but the way it's commonly used doesn't seem to imply belief.

While money != capital, capitalism isn't basically about improving anything. It's about using the capital you have (i.e. stuff that's under your control, which includes money) to increase the amount of capital you have. This often improves things for at least some subset of the people, but that's a side effect, and if it's missing, what is described is still capitalism.

> Capitalism is all about the free market.

This is a lie that Capitalists tell to make Capitalism sound less evil.

Capitalism is about making money. It's right there in the name. The idea is that a free market would enable those who are best at making money to make the most money, but you know what's even more effective at making money than investing in a better product for a better price? Investing in kneecapping your competition and creating a captured market where people are functionally *forced* to buy your product because there's no alternative.

Monopolies and regulatory capture are the natural conclusion of a capitalist system, unless the "free market" is enforced by actively preventing these things through force of law... oh, oops! Guess that's not a free market any more either! Turns out a free market economy is a fucking fairy tale!

> are not a capitalist. You are at best a plutocrat.

These are not mutually exclusive, and in fact the natural conclusion of capitalism is the creation of a plutocracy. To suggest otherwise is paradoxical; capitalism is about increasing wealth and plutocracy is about leveraging wealth.... to make even more money.

=Smidge=

If you are using signed and end-to-end encrypted emails, let me tell you:

You're merely using email as a transport mechanism, where ANY OTHER SUCH MECHANISM would suffice and be just as secure.

Including things like Jabber, etc.

Email is utterly monopolised because if you want to send/receive email to the major players... you MUST abide by whatever ridiculous restrictions they put on things (e.g. 10 DNS lookups for SPF, blacklists, domain verification, spam categorisation, etc.) regardless. Even if you're only using it as a communications medium for encrypted, signed comms, you still have to comply.

Email as a protocol needs to die. The stuff we do by email can be done PROPERLY AND BETTER by just basing the same top layers on something else that actually works and does the end-to-end encryption, domain verification, signing, authnetication etc. for you anway).

Bolting shit onto email to make it "work" is no different to how bolting shit onto FTP to make it "secure" was. You still have to deal with NAT traversal, packet-rewriting, etc. and all kinds of other nonsense that come FROM that use of a terrible, inefficient, outdated protocol as the base of your communications.

Email just needs to die.

That's all there is too it.

It was designed for a different era, and makes many, many terrible assumptions, and throws most of them out of the window in the worst possible way at the worst possible time.

Plus, it's built on "honesty", and everything security, or authentication, or even just claiming who you actually are as an email sender are all bolt-ons that don't work to their full extent.

Even with DNSSEC+SPF+TLS+DKIM+greylisting+limiting.... there's still no way to reliably know who can see your email, and that it's secured end-to-end and that people are who they APPEAR to be, and no way to reliably discard email that you don't want to receive or people have no place sending in the first place.

We need to just bin the whole thing. POP3, IMAP, SMTP, the lot.

Macs... Macintosh laptops are basically the only laptops with enough RAM, memory bandwidth, and processors.

I'm not generalizing at all. There are real grid stability reasons why you don't want someone drawing that much power to charge their car fully in four hours. If your use case requires fast charging, you need to have grid batteries to spread your impact out over time, or else you are causing significant problems. A few people doing that isn't a big deal, but if everybody did it, it would be apocalyptic. That's why the target for automakers should be fully charging the car overnight, or 10+ hours.

Additionally:

• You're dragging around the extra weight of additional/larger charger hardware, which wastes energy.
• Everyone who doesn't have the three-phase connection and high-amperage breaker setup will be using the charging hardware at a fraction of its rated capacity, which is likely to be less efficient.
• Compared with a dedicated HVDC charger, you're drawing power at a higher amperage and lower voltage for a longer distance, which wastes even more energy.
• It probably involves an entire additional charging board, which means one more set of components that can fail and require service.
• Most of the the locations where you would charge likely do not support such fast AC charging speeds, so chances are you'll mostly benefit from it at home anyway.

And while the folks who take advantage of that extra charging speed might save a little money in the manufacturing cost compared with installing an external HVDC charger, it still adds up to far less than the amount of money wasted on bigger hardware by everyone who got that hardware but doesn't need it.

It's not even close to being a reasonable engineering tradeoff, IMO. You're far better off focusing on making HVDC chargers cheap. And for the amount of effort required to keep the unnecessarily complex hardware going long-term (manufacturing replacement parts, stocking them, etc.), the manufacturer would probably be better off just buying HVDC chargers wholesale and giving them to customers who complain. A HVDC charger with 22kW output costs only about $3k.

It couldn't go worse. . . right? https://www.jeffgeerling.com/b...

It may even be true. But the article I read didn't say how many qbits they had on the chip, or what the error rate was.

There are already commercial quantum computers from DWave https://www.dwavequantum.com/ . They're rather limited, but they exist. But I don't expect them to be general purpose turing complete by 2029 with very many qbits. Possibly by 2035. And I don't expect them to be personal computers until they stop needing to be cooled with liquid gasses (i.e. supercooled). But I wouldn't bet that this will never be possible.

I don't get the hate for him. He posts perfectly fine replies.

If this was an Apple thing the program wouldn't run at all after the cutoff, in this case it runs but you just can't create documents.

Also, the MacOS controls for digitally signed executables can be bypassed rather easily, so if that were the cause, users could just bypass it and run it anyway, which appears to not be the case here.

Trump is the one who tore up the deal that put inspectors into Iran to ensure that they didn't get nukes. If Iran gets nukes, it is because Trump gave them nukes on a silver platter in a misguided effort to "own the libs" who put that agreement in place.

And the things he has done regarding oil — disrupting Venezuela, creating a situation where Iran can mine the Strait of Hormuz, massively inflating the cost of oil, eliminating world sanctions on buying oil from Iran, etc. — are also effectively giving massive aid to a state sponsor of terrorism.

It's hard not to see the direct consequences of many of his actions as commander in chief as anything less than supporting terrorism. The only question is whether it was done intentionally or merely because of utter incompetence.

What I don't understand is this: Did Congress authorize this spending? No? Where's the budget for this coming from, and why has no one already filed a permanent restraining order to prevent the illegal misappropriation of federal funds?

I ask because to do this, they have to steal — yes, steal — money away from something Congress DID authorize. And this isn't a tiny amount of money we're talking about here. There are probably some other major efforts that Congress authorized that won't happen because our idiot-in-chief is stealing the funds to do something else.