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Cake day: January 2nd, 2024

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  • Delta_V@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    24 days ago

    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.


  • Delta_V@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    25 days ago

    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.


  • Delta_V@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    25 days ago

    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.










  • There’s no room for insulation above the ceiling, no place to run ducts for central HVAC, and the rooms above the 2,000 sq ft garage will be extra hard to keep thermally regulated. This house is super expensive to keep comfortable, and I would bet the window AC units are not up to the task of regulating indoor humidity and the whole structure is a moldy biohazard.

    I agree with your partner. This structure looks like it was originally designed for agricultural use. Maps show there’s a farmers field a few lots up the road.




  • 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.