Here is a version that used floppy drives, hard drives, and flatbed scanners:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

The robots are coming. I'm not talking about the toys, I'm talking about the real robots that can do everything a human can do, but better, and cheaper. And I do mean everything. From mining coal, to taking tickets at the movie theater, from fighting wars to flipping burgers, from building houses to building more robots, from doing your taxes to running your business enterprises. Literally every job from janitor to CEO is in jeopardy. NEAR TERM jeopardy. Like as in the next two to three decades, at most. The technology to create human-capable robots is no longer a pipe dream, it's now become a pure function of time, training and money, a.k.a. inevitable, and soon. Once the transition begins, short of a Butlerian jihad, it doesn't end. The entire concept of "an economy" is nearing it's conclusion. So everything we can do now to begin softening the blow on society, the more successful we're going to be moving into this new world which nobody seems to be planning for.

I would say "Mein Leben!", but in this case, it should be "Sein Leben!"

ISTM that the perps are most often social conservatives, such as leaders of regressive religions.

If that's the case, I shudder to think what it was like in the Middle Ages. Or in certain countries today.

"No money exchanged hands in the making of this contract."

Rather than guillotining anyone, the solution ought to be regulating the growth-rate of data centers so that they don't eat the economy. There's no reason to allow them to grow "as fast as possible" when it's not even clear how useful they'll be long-term. Unregulated capitalism leads to violent boom/bust cycles which cause economic pain.

Every computer manufacturer would love to have margins like Apples', and would raise their prices in a heartbeat to get them, if they could. You can call that corporate greed if you want, but it's also standard capitalism.

The more pertinent question to ask is: why is Apple able to command a premium, without losing sales, while other computer manufacturers cannot do the same?

The standard Slashdot answer will be "because Mac purchasers are idiots", but I don't think that is the reason. I think it's because Apple is able to sufficiently differentiate its products from those of its competition, such that customers don't make their purchasing decisions based on a dollars-per-megabyte analysis. If Macs were sold with Windows and featured a consumer-gaming video card (like most every other PC in the world), it would be different, but Apple is the only (legal) source for a MacOS-running computer, and its one of the few providers of a unified-memory architecture for local AI execution. Until it gets some direct competitors, that gives it the ability to name its price.

Fleeing with hoarded money isn't likely to hurt the state.

IIRC, moderately high wages are taxed at a higher rate than capital gains.

Actually, we need to roll back decades of tax cuts so we can afford our civilization.

Can you support that claim?

Also, more productive for whom?

The restrictions are a mix of reasonable nuisance management and paranoia about who is flying drones, what they can do, and chain of custody.

Beijing proper is a city with a population density of over 21,000 / km^2 -- so you can imagine the chaos if any tech enthusiast resident could fly a drone without a permit. Except for a couple of free zones in the outer boroughs, New York City restricts drone launcing and landings within the city to flights with a permit and flight plan, because otherwise the sky would be black with drones. Many cities -- both red and blue -- have zone restrictions for drone flights, and those currently hosting World Cup matches have tightened them for the duration of the tournament.

And if they did, the Party of Personal Responsibility would just blame it on Biden.

My personal favorite example of this is OpenAI's stated plan to have $1T per year in infrastructure spending. If you do the math, you will have to replace approximately 1/3rd of the entire productive US workforce and charge their former employers about $30k a year per displaced employee to break even. On the infrastructure. OPEX not included.

The math doesn't math.

Peak capitalism should at least succeed commercially. This looks more like a bad idea that will sell maybe a dozen units and then be forgotten. So it remains faithful to the spirit of Commodore's business model at least :)