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  • 46 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: July 8th, 2023
  • oo1@kbin.socialtoTechnology@lemmy.world•Free-Market Advocate, Elon Musk, Asks for U.S. Government to Put Tariffs on Chinese EV Imports
    2·
    6 months ago

    Yep, capitalism is at direct odds with competetive markets almost by definition.
    “free” is the non-specific term tht they use rhetorically. “Competition” is the market feature that might theoretically benefit consumers in some circumstances - and they don’t often include that word in their rhetoric.

    It’s always been about acquisition of market power, this is sort of opposite of a free market.
    If any threat of consumer rights / anti-trust / labour rights or balancing of market power arises, their incentive is to acquire political power and influence to defend their power.

    It was the same story in western Europe before industry and “capitalism”, just the landed class monopolising land vs peasantry (and/or enslaved/indentured labour). Landowners monopolised all the votes and even when suffrage expanded it was usually top down. Until maybe 1789 when something else happened to the top.

    Unfortunately I think many of the major progressive changes of the past (that benefit people in general rather than the elites - again in “the West”) have mostly followed catastrophic events or political upheaval, or martyrdom.
    Peasants revolts, black death, aftermath/stress of major wars, civil war, workers uprisings, race riots, 1929, ww2.

    I guess the 1929 and all the FDR stuff and strengthened social policies in western Europe was all widely democratically backed (honourable mention to the banks’ major incompetence , to hitler for being such a massive c*nt and a decent 50-or-so years of European imperial decline) .

    So maybe there’s some hope for the democratic or the MLK/Gandhi type approach - not that it worked out too well for those two individuals.

  • oo1@kbin.socialtoTechnology@lemmy.world•Windows 10 reaches 70% market share as Windows 11 keeps declining
    4·
    7 months ago

    widdows 2000 was the pinnacle for me, beat XP until i wanted to go to 64 bit.

    Apart from having 64-bit, XP was a step back; even if I don’t count the fucking dog thing.
    XP was a fair bit harder to de-bloat than win 2000 and they were hell-bent on forcing internet exploder on the world.

    XP was also at a time when Linux was becoming pretty easily usable and mac osx was impressive too - I remember using those imac coloured egg things at university in 2000. They were good apart from the mouse, and ran MS office pretty well.
    StarOffice was already better than MS-Word at dealing with .doc format across versions.
    and ancient version of Wordperfect were miles better for WP anyway (“reveal codes”).

    windows XP was already down to gaming, adobe and CAD/other specialist apps, plus maybe MS Excel that just weren’t as good or not available on linux.