nickpp

Your clients and your competitors' clients did benefit from this overall faster coding output though.

Eventually your employer benefitted too, from more & happier paying customers.

Finally you indirectly befitted as well - through continued employment, salary and bonuses and stock (if you own any).

There are other reasons though. Whole house backup is a game changer. Battery always holding about twice our daily usage (or thrice a reduced, emergency usage) means I don’t really care about blackouts or midnight electrical company maintenance power cuts.

Direct to EV DC charging means I don’t buy gas, either. Planning for induction range and heat pump someday too. Not paying for energy about 3/4 of the year feels awesome.

Panels are cheap. Cheap to replace too. The newer ones have even better efficiency. My whole (unsubsidized) sistem cost around $15k here in Eastern Europe and amortization was never a consideration. Money well spent.

Finally, giving the finger to another crappy government-granted monopoly and proving once again that there is no such thing as a “natural” monopoly: priceless.

Software running modern farming runs in datacenters. For example, AI checking images from drones monitoring health of crops, then directing drones with treatment.

Software ate the world, now the world eats software.

Sure, I totally get you. Then higher costs, lower availability and crappier services (all due to less competition and more bureaucratic hoops) is a price you should be happily willing to pay.

Not a hobby, but a duty. I lived under both systems and I do not wish the horrors I’ve seen in my youth onto my children. Although at this point, it’s probably unavoidable. It seems that some lessons can only be learned by experiencing them, no warning is ever enough: Russia, communism.

> Must be all that nationalization.

No, it’s the regulations. In less regulated, freer markets like vision correction eye surgery the costs went down and quality up. Even in health care.

State run (or heavily regulated) services around here in Eastern Europe: health care, education and housing. All incredibly bad and expensive, I pay huge chunks of my monthly salary for them and I try to avoid them at all costs. They get worse and more expensive with time too.

All the other services and products I use in my life, from the car I drive to the clothes on my back, the food I eat and the device I write this on are provided by private enterprise and they have become much better and cheaper in my life time.

Capitalism is the only known system that aligns natural, normal individual greed with the benefit and advancement of the society.

> help humans instead of replacing us or squeezing us as hard as possible in the name of productivity

Increasing their productivity is helping humans.

These days it’s forbidden to deny the horrors of nazism but quite fashionable to glorify the murders and confiscations of communism and to even justify Marxist murderers like Mangione.

It still doesn't bother me as a consumer in the slightest. On the contrary, I am happy that laundromat exists in the first place.

Every year, the government comes around, reassesses my house value (always up, never down) and ask me to pay a percentage (always increasing) or they will take away my house which shelters my kids and family.

So, no, I am not too worried about Amazon removing my $9.99 book.

PCs are also made by corporations, together with PC parts. The reason computing became so cheap during the last 50 years was competition between said corporations. Competition that is also pushing the AI token price down and also encouraging - corporations - to come up with models that can run on user hardware.

So what are you ranting against?!

> Own nothing and be happy.

Ah, here it is. Only governments can confiscate our property and force us into that. Governments and politicians that keep telling us how evil corporations are…

> This is ignoring the people who capture the rent.

So my grandma shouldn't have been be deliriously happy with the new washing machine that saved her hands from bleeding weekly because the evil capitalist laundromat owners charged a few quarters per load?!

> My $200 Moto G3 in 2016 had a removable back cover (admittedly not battery). It was also waterproof (and had a headphone jack.)

It also did diddly squat in the market place and the company producing it ran out of business.

Again, a product is a set of tradeoffs. Those tradeoff include functionality, cost, logistics to build, even marketing and sales. Maximizing a feature to serve a loud minority (headphone jack!) but thus ignoring other features will simply make a product fail in the market place in time...

> I hate when a technocrat at a multi-billion dollar company makes those decisions

Really?! So instead of the person hired and paid specifically to select and decide what the product should cost, look and work like, the person whose very pay depends on how well she chooses those product features for you - instead you'd rather have a faceless nameless bureaucrat who never pays the cost of his wrong decisions, who instead gets more power and money the more he panders to the vocal minorities that push populist agendas completely detached from the market place.

> not giving a fuck about any other criteria

That is simply not true, such a company would go out of business fast. As I said before, any product is a set of tradeoffs. Cost (and profit) is just one of the factors. Ignoring the others does not make successful products.

> profit

I love it when a company I buy from is successful. That means it's gonna be around to create more stuff for me to enjoy. It also means the awesome people working there get paid and are successful themselves. Finally, it means that its investors will back up more of this kind of companies that create useful products and services. Profit is great!

> it can technically be done

At what cost though?! And no, I am not talking about money. Any device (and any product really) is a set of tradeoffs.

I like it when different producers select a different subset of priorities for their offer. Competition at work. One of the reasons we witnessed such an awesome evolution in the smartphone market.

I hate it when a bureaucrat dictates a set of demands with absolutely zero regard to the cost or the tradeoffs involved in product decisions and market competition.

I know a few categories falling under this "richest 1% of the world’s people": entrepreneurs, highly paid professionals and politicians.

The entrepreneurs invested in or built from scratch organizations able to deliver an incredible amount of value to our society in the form of products, services and jobs. These organizations, called businesses, are the unsung heroes that differentiate our lands of plenty from the hunger and cold of countries suffering under communism.

The professionals (doctors, lawyers, programmers) worked in such organizations and added significant value ensuring their success in the market place.

Finally, politicians managed to convince a sufficient number people that only they can solve their problems and thus got themselves elected into positions where they control significant flows of money and/or influence.

> Locally made stuff was bound to be a lot cheaper.

Lots of stuff under communism was cheaper on paper. It was also extremely crappy and/or unavailable.

So black markets were thriving, even though, as you rightly point out, used hard to get, expensive currency.

Paul Grahams's latest public statement on the issue:

https://x.com/paulg/status/2041363640499200353

Ignoring market realities and proclaiming to care about noble but unrealistic ideological goals is how the communist regime I grew up under managed to fail to even feed its population.

> Safeway won’t starve and die if I decide to buy from Fred Meyer.

Ironically, you (along with a significant number of others) deciding to buy from a competitor will eventually lead to financial trouble for Safeway and thus to layoffs and losses for their investors (pension funds among them).

So, do you find your decision to buy from Fred Meyer "absolutely immoral"?!

> once you have a dominant player they just buy or undercut the occasional competing startup

If they buy startups, a thousand more will spring up hoping to be bought. Investors love this game.

And if you think undercutting works, read up on the story of Dow and how they broke the German bromine monopoly [1].

There is no such thing as a natural monopoly. Only governments can create monopolies, usually through regulation.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Henry_Dow#Breaking_a_m...

So no, they didn't "bought Trump the election".

And the fact that a 3rd party supports an opponent does not kill any politician's career. Biden retired by himself, following his own party's pressure. And Harris is still around, I believe.

> went MAGA and bought Trump the election

Didn’t Harris actually raise and spend more than Trump on that election?

> to make any attempt to enforce antitrust a carrier killer for a politician

Any example of a politician carrier killed by an attempt to enforce antitrust?

I (and most of the people I know) are happily paying for ChatGPT (or one of its competitors) every month. The value I get from it dwarfs the tiny fee.

> i guess you're on benefits?

Actually I've been lucky to practice what I preach all my life. Early in my career I realized that salaried employment is a rip-off: you pay through your nose for an illusion of safety and stability you don't want nor need. So I embraced risk and switched to contracting.

Having leftover income this way, I looked into investing. That's when I realized that being financially prudent, saving and investing was actually punished in the USA, taxwise, while borrowing and spending was encouraged. So I left the USA and returned to Eastern Europe.

Understanding that selling your time is much worse than selling a product drove me to entrepreneurship. Luck threw a little success my way and turned me financially independent.

Now I am semi-retired living from investments and small gigs and spending time with my family. My tax rate (income only, not consumption or VAT) is well under 20% on most of my income. I didn't do any effort to optimize it further, but I could if I must. I actually do not mind paying taxes, but I do respond to incentives and I am not afraid to relocate.

> If you manage to get rich enough to be able to optimize your taxation

Actually I did a little research and you don't need to be rich, you can do that with very little money. But then the gains for a few percent reduction aren't that great anyway so...

> you pay more taxes overall than people holding a few companies

I probably do, but I don't mind it. I think the rich are a net positive to our society because capitalism ensures they contribute to the society orders of magnitude more than they manage to keep. Also I lived under communism pre-1990 in a world without rich and I've seen how bad it is.

I don't know, are your opinions about life and reality made up or you're just so credulous you are repeating whatever you see on social media?

Is it so hard to believe in today's day and age that somebody tries to learn and understand how the world around works using observation, published facts and deduction from as close to first principles as possible?

That's a common misconception. Although the top tax rates were indeed high, they kicked in at such high income levels and included so many deductions and loopholes that the effective tax rate were much closer to 50%.

And it makes sense, considering human nature and motivation: how much would you work considering the taxation? Me:

0-20%: I work as hard, want to excel and advance; I will take risks and invest in entrepreneurial endeavors

20-40%: I will do my duty, 9-5 then hit the door to spend time with the family; actively seek low-responsibility low risk high stability and lots of benefits government jobs

>40%: f that s, I will take my welfare payments and do various cash jobs without declaring that income; stay in my parents basement playing Xbox, smoking weed and jerking off