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It’s still free on Windows. Your argument doesn’t have legs to walk on.

Even more than that, they still have to maintain the software to work on Linux, because they have a paid on Linux.

So if they have to keep maintaining it and offer the basic tier for free on Linux... just why? It doesn't make any sense to me.

Maybe they receive "too many" bug reports from Linux users?


And not because Linux is more buggy but because Linux is populated with people that tend to know how to make bug reports ?

What argument?

Bullshit. Ignorant people (which correlates to poor) don’t think about the long term responsibilities of having children and just fuck unprotected on a Friday night. Oops

Sound like “the beatings will continue until morale improves”

I’m not sure US academia is mediocre. It’s more like… normal?

But America being what it is, it attracts those with most potential creating and sustaining a network effect.

But there’s nothing intrinsically good or bad of the US, and it’s quite easy to mess up the equilibrium and go back to the mediocrity you mentioned


It’s a numbers game. Taking the best from the world talent pool is going to provide better results than from the much smaller American talent pool. Unless your country has more than a billion people, you need to look at world talent.

The US has to especially encourage immigration since we have gone out of our way to make the education system systemically broken. Our funnel is broken on purpose. Look at countries with strong showings in things like chess or running. Why is that? They encourage large populations of kids to participate, the larger the pool the more top performers.

Perhaps it’s not capitalism that’s the problem but the unboundedness of the greed of a few, with respect to the other needs of humanity.

Also Adam Smith implied that unbounded avarice is irrational and disruptive to society.

The assumption is that morality survives grotesque wealth accumulation, we see many examples proving otherwise


"unboundedness of the greed of a few"

Lots of people claim "greed", but the stereotypical Tech billionaire doesn't simply roll around in gold like Scrooge McDuck, doing nothing and demanding more. They invest and reinvest it into new enterprises.

Of all the ways of dealing with massive wealth, this is probably the second least disruptive one. (The first one would be just giving it to honorable causes.)


They claim greed because they always choose the path that makes them more money even if it has clear, evidence-based proof of societal harm.

Ya know, just like the Sacklers and pushing oxycontin.


You don't know in advance what is going to make you money. Investments are risky.

In 2026, we know that SpaceX is a huge success. In 2002, it was just one of very many space startups, the vast majority of which ended up bankrupt, and before the last Falcon 1 flight, it was already on the brink of bankruptcy. They were incredibly lucky that the last rocket they had money for actually reached orbit.

During the same time, John Carmack invested into Armadillo Aerospace, and lost money.

Was he less "greedy" than Musk only because in retrospect we know that one didn't pan out and the other did? Or were they both simply risk takers in an uncertain field, motivated by a mix of incentives?


That is a complete distraction from Meta in particular selling social media hard to kids even knowing that their work explicitly caused mental harm.

This is not a I own stock am I culpable issue, it is a company knowing their product is dangerous and ignoring the issues because it doesn't make them more money.

Same shit as the tobacco industry. People do banally evil shit for money.


"Capitalism is the problem" by itself is like saying "unix operating systems are a problem". There are so many flavours, so many parameters (laws, tax, etc.) that I do not see value in generalizations.

I think morality is quite hard to define and any system should take into account unboundedness of some human attributes (being greed, stupidy or other) in some humans.


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

Well, isn’t Musk doing something similar with his new solar panels fab?

Frankly it’s ridiculous how we (the West) dropped renewables like a hot potato because it became synonymous with subsidizing China’s dominance in the field.


Now that I look into it, it looks like he is, which is a good thing. For some reason I thought Terafab was like a pie-in-the-sky idea where he was going to do compute in space on satellites or something, but it isn’t that. It’s actually a real fab in the United States and I fully support that even if Elon is a piece of shit.

That’s an entirely different framework, one that doesn’t concern investment decisions of Apple or Google.

I do agree that USA and EU could foot the bill and subsidize a couple billions in such industrial infrastructure, perhaps taking back a cut of the profit rather than privatizing all of it.

But they’re not doing it, or are making pitiful efforts at that


It's just an insane amount of money to invest with the long-term effect of you oversaturating the chip market.

Throwing 20B into a chip fab in the EU would be politically a very unpopular move, if it's done as a public company or worse directly state owned, you'll royally piss of Taiwan, South Korea and China and it's likely they'd retaliate by e.g. subsidising their auto industry more in order to give the death blow to the EU auto industry.


They'd more likely split themselves laughing.

The solution to threats to global economic integration is to address the threats to global economic integration. It's not to cannibalise our own full-employment high value economies, by diverting enormous capital and labour into duplicating vast swathes of lower value jobs we don't actually have the work force for anyway, just so we can pay unaffordable prices for the resulting goods.

We probably both agree it's an absurd fantasy, and the people trying to make stuff like this happen are implementing policies that ensure that it won't, such as putting tariffs on the inputs they need to build out this domestic manufacturing capacity in the first place.


> The solution to threats to global economic integration is to address the threats to global economic integration.

So permanent world peace. That sounds much easier.


Amd it isn't only geopolitical threats we have to worry about. The world's hard disk supply disappeared with a tsunami in Thailand. Taiwan is vulnerable to those and earthquakes. Efficiency and robustness are at odds and we are leaning too far towards efficiency. Even if China hadn't been so large it could absorb the costs of capturing the world's entire manufacturing base with subsidies, centralizing that much has risks completely apart from politics.

Thailand was flooding, not tsunamis.

It’s one thing when toys, pots, furniture etc. is made somewhere else. It’s a completely different thing when your high tech is manufactured there.

The issue with national investment in the EU is that it might be attacked as state sponsored activity where one can complain that public money are used for market moves or if it is EU wide initiative, then the governments will squabble whose economy will get the money. The framework is not mature enough to allow for delegating to someone to solve the problem for everyone and to balance the beneficiaries in the long term.

It shouldn't be a politically unpopular move. Other countries can get pissed off, but those other countries also cannot guarantee that Europe will get chips when times are tough. If you want to build modern drones and missiles you need access to a large amount of computer chips. In a crisis will those still be available to Europe?

It is unfortunately still common practice among irregular agricultural workers in many parts of the world (I’m Italian so I definitely remember news about busts in southern Italy)

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