The market didn’t need regulations to maintain its freeness back then because the vast majority of transactions were made with small businesses. The limited technological capabilities in transport and communication also decreased the need for government regulation by decreasing the ability of the largest concentrations of capital to succeed at implementing global anti-competitive strategies.

To achieve the same degree of market freedom today, in the era of omni-national mega-corporations wielding monopoly influence, requires utilizing levers of power outside of the market those mega-corps dominate. The intervention of democratic governments to enforce anti-monopoly laws and prohibit other kinds of anti-competitive behavior is a necessary component of any plan to transform today’s marketplace into one that looks more similar to the market of Adam Smith’s day.

It is though - this is what capitalism invariably becomes. Musky Twitter is a symptom of late stage capitalism. This is why so many people say capitalism is bad and doesn’t work as advertised.

The golden age of classical liberalism, when capitalism actually worked, the 1700-1800’s, more closely resembles what we would today call market socialism.

Once the agglomerations of capital became large enough to impose irresistible anti-competitive force, the days of capitalism’s beneficial functionality ended. They say “the freer the market the freer the people”, but an unregulated market isn’t free - it invariably trends toward monopoly and irrationally assigned concentrations of wealth and power, eg Musk, Bezos, DuPont, Sackler, etc…

Capitalism supports, rather than resists, the anti-competitive influence of capital. A truly free market requires the intervention of powers other than capital - eg, democratic governance imposing something akin to Market Socialism against the wishes of those anti-competitive agglomerations of capital.

fund it exclusively out of his own pocket

That’s how newspapers got started - they were propaganda organs of the rich and existed exclusively to manipulate public opinion. Things really haven’t changed that much, but somewhere along the way people were tricked into paying for them.

I think its more likely that YouTube will shut down and be replaced by nothing. Its existence has never made sense as anything but an act of charity from an organization with tech resources to burn.

Yeah, creating a venue for sex work is the only plausible use case.

surely producing a lower volume of lower quality products will improve the bottom line, right?

some of their higher end mice let you call specific functions of popular productivity software, like using the scroll wheel to change the brush size in Photoshop for example

Not too long ago, a lot of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software ran on MS SQL Server. Businesses made significant investments in software and training, and some of them don’t have the technical, financial, or logistical resources to adapt - momentum keeps them using Windows Server.

For example, small businesses that are physically located in rural areas can’t use cloud based services because rural internet is too slow and unreliable. Its not quite the case that there’s no amount of money you can pay for a good internet connection in rural America, but last time I looked into it, Verizon wanted to charge me $20,000 per mile to run a fiber optic cable from the nearest town to my client’s farm.

Yeah, if you’ve got a short commute, and some way to charge it at home, that’s the way to go. I’ve heard second hand about people needing to add fuel stabilizer to their plug-in hybrid because they use so little gas.

The market for hybrid vehicles has lately been growing even faster than for fully electric vehicles; hybrids, which do not have to be plugged in, allow consumers to avoid a patchy national public charging network.

Not to mention the lack of chargers at rented residences, and the inability for most of us to afford to buy our own house.

That extra weight will also mean that more force is required to accelerate and change directions.

The nimbleness of a vehicle can be expressed as the ratio:

(Tire Contact Area * Tire Stickiness) / Vehicle Mass

Increasing the vehicle’s mass while making the tires harder will lead to longer breaking distances and will cause a vehicle to understeer at lower speeds.

So this big breakthrough in tire technology is . . . making them harder and reducing their grip?

There’s no reason EVs have to be heavier forever

That’s a bit of a stretch, unfortunately. The energy density of batteries is nowhere close to that of gasoline - joule for joule, gasoline weighs about 100 times less than batteries. Also, a fuel tank big enough to give its vehicle a 400 mile range will get lighter over the course of the trip, as the liquid fuel gets converted into polluting gas and exhausted into the atmosphere - batteries don’t get appreciably lighter as you discharge them.

Agree that 400 miles range with charging stations as ubiquitous as today’s gas stations would help EV adoption. I do worry about the rollout of charging stations being slowed down by competition with expensive and fragile hydrogen tech (keep the hydrogen on boats and trains pls).

why the hell would Mozilla be obliged to acknowledge this request?

That’s what I’ve been scratching my head about too. What leverage does Russia have to force them to do this? What consequences could they impose for non-compliance?

Does Mozilla own property in Russia? Sell it or write it off, then ignore the censorship request.

Do they have employees who live or have family in Russia? Either fire them or help them move, then ignore the censorship request.

None of the above? Perhaps it is we who need to fire Mozilla then.

Also, its probably safe to assume the producers will lie about how much they’re allowing to leak into the air.

There’s an app installed on your phone and a separate bluetooth device you keep in your car.

By default, it assumes you’re the driver of your car, but you can use the app to claim someone else was driving your car during a particular trip.

If you’re in someone else’s car, the app assumes you’re not driving because the bluetooth device in your car isn’t nearby.

This article is easily falsifiable bullshit. Just ask google a question and you’ll get the same kind of search results as you always have.

congratulations. you’ve just sent a linux newb down a 12 hour rabbit hole that doesn’t actually solve their problem.

not seen in this comic: the linux file isn’t where the comic/manual/internet nerds says it should be, and there’s no realistic way to find it

!remindme 1 fiscal quarter