The "feudal" part implies the productive assets of the 21st century are monopolized and owned by Big Tech, and even the capital class has to pay rent for access to this.
It doesn't mean people are literally serfs on their lords manor growing substance crops. Are you serious?
This is completely false. The owners of big tech must pay capitalists like the owners of TSMC to produce the chips to power their services. Just because we don't produce the chips in the US does not mean that there isn't a distinct commodity producing class.
I guess they are, but that isn't material to the discussion, since they are selling goods not services, thus they don't extract "rents," unless anything that someone buys for some purpose is a "rent"; in that case, the super market is charging me "rents" to purchase their food so I can have it in my fridge.
I think your argument is just a bunch of pedantry but OK: Western Electric produced commodities for the Bell system. So did a lot of other companies, selling into a market that was functionally a monopsony.
Yet the fact that this was necessary is tangential, the Bell system didn't exist to sell switches or phones. The phone network monopoly was AT&T's fief, the rent was the phone bill everyone had to pay!
If you aren't AMD, nVidia, Google, or Apple how much luck do you think you'll have putting in an order to TSMC for 2nm? Or Samsung? Or Micron? Or Hynix?
Why is every service considered a “rent”? These services basically depend on commodity production—bell may have had a monopoly on phone service but not on the phones themselves. Or the copper used to manufacture their cables, or the housing which their employees slept in or the food they consumed. Service monopoly =! Neofeudalism, just because it is a more recent phenomenon does not mean its unique, JP Morgan had a rail monopoly, nobody considered his business “Neofeudalism.”
FWIW the M5 appears to be an actual large leap for LLM inference with the new GPU and Neural Accelerator. So id wait for the Pro/Max before jumping on M3 Ultra.
HPUX was without a doubt the worst UNIX imo. Solaris was great. IRIX was great. AIX was neat, if a little weird. But SSH'ing into an HPUX box felt like you had been transported back into 1979 or something lol
I think the weirdest I encountered was Apollo Domain/OS. But SPP-UX was close as a microkernel with an HP-UX compatible personality on top.
But in some sense, every high-performance platform back then was an abomination. Whether it was the variant of AIX on an SP2, the weirdly unique Irix versions that seemed to exist in each Origin system at each national lab, or the painfully slow fork/exec on a Cray T3E frontend system when compiling apps.
Still good enough to learn UNIX, that was my introduction back in 1993.
The system was still expensive enough that we had a single tower for the whole class, we would take turns into the system, having prepared our samples on MS-DOS using Turbo C, with mocks for the UNIX system calls and conditional makefiles.
I wouldn't encourage anyone to enlist myself, but the benefits are still pretty good even if the salary is crap. The GI Bill doesn't expire anymore and you can get a lot of credits easily while you're in. Subsidized housing, food, free healthcare, free college, etc. It's a pretty comfy life for someone out of high school with zero plans.
I enlisted during what turned out to be the absolute nadir of the Iraq war (2005-2010) so the risk today is also a lot less ominous IMO (for now lol...)
Id say even if you ignore the first amendment case, the federal government still has legitimate constitutional grounds to review these kinds of laws since it is definitely in the realm of interstate commerce.
Let's be real, they can do whatever they want. The question is, should they? I don't think this is a clear violation of free speech, restricting speech from the ears of children has always been a thing in every modern government. It was always possible to buy porn magazines for example, but states required id verification in stores to sell them. You can watch porn on cable channels, but only because they were paid and an adult consented to it.
Another way to look at it is, porn is a sexual encounter, minors can't consent. From Texas' point of view, they are simply prohibiting a non-consensual sexual encounter.
It is not interstate commerce, because commerce isn't regulated here, free porn sites are included. If states can tax websites, they can also regulate content.
OMG, what a blast from the past. I loved my Rio Karmas - I had several, because they kept breaking and Best Buy (extended warranty) kept replacing for me, until they could no longer replace with a Karma and let me switch to an equivalent iPod (but no further replacements after).
I remember that there was a technique where you could smack it at a certain angle and it would "fix" some of the hard drive issues for people.
It doesn't mean people are literally serfs on their lords manor growing substance crops. Are you serious?
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