But rent seeking implies some sort of external party enforcing a non-competitive environment that benefits you. Like tariffs or aggressive zoning laws.
Raising the price of your product isn't rent seeking.
You're right, but software does find itself in a non-competitive environment thanks to a sea of intellectual property laws that benefit incumbents. That external party is ever-present, and no doubt implied in discussions here.
Unless you mean copyright / trade-secrets specifically, then IP laws don't really help SaaS that much.
For example take Google Workspace - email, calendar, docs. Google has no particular patents for those, and I've never heard about startups in this area not getting traction because of IP troubles.
Same goes with Jira, or Github, or Slack, or AWS S3 - all of those don't have particularly many patents and in fact there are plenty of alternatives, self-hosted or otherwise. People still pay for them happily.
Nah, rent seeking happens when the customer is faced with little choice (ie: constrained market, can only live there, can't build more, etc...). This is not the case for most of SaaS where you can just signup to another service.
I have noticed that a lot of people I follow on instagram who use tiktok all adopt the exact same opinion of $CONTROVERSIAL_TOPIC at roughly the same time.
I have had the exact opposite experience. Do you remember how used to take a second for replies to load under a tweet? Now it’s instantaneous. My suggested feed is a lot better too.
To add another data point from someone who used to use the site regularly but still occasionally checks in once and a while, I have noticed a significant degradation in quality for the main feed and random outages/errors seem to crop up a lot more frequently. But aside from our respective pieces of anecdotal evidence, we’ve seen how pathetically they’ve been recently handling scaling and technical issues with high traffic events like the Desantis campaign announcement.
My suggested feed is absolutely useless, I'm not interested in what Musk has to say and I'm especially not interested in the unfiltered mouth diarrhea from MAGA morons like MTG. I don't even live in the US, why would I be interested in seeing it?
It's working perfectly afaict. "What is a woman?" for example was streamed a gajillion times just fine. The 700k stream of DeSantis or whatever took twitter down though, I doubt it will next time..
Honestly, no, I don’t remember, but my mental model of replying/threading on that site has been broken for a very long time. I’ve never been very sure how it works, or if it’s working properly, so I’m probably not the right person to ask about that aspect!
It depends on how you define the boat. I think you can argue that in both cases continued servitude is the only way either of them can get food and a place to sleep indoors. There’s a big gulf of experience beyond that. But you can only form a coalition with someone on the basis of common ground. So while you’re both right, it’s not going to help either the cleaner or the engineer get better treatment if they don’t acknowledge similarities where they exist.
> I think you can argue that in both cases continued servitude is the only way either of them can get food and a place to sleep indoors.
No you can’t argue that because it’s stupid. A typical google software engineer will have made enough that in their early 30s they can quit/retire and live the rest of their life at at least the same standard of living as that cleaning lady (almost none of them find that an acceptable standard but that’s far beyond food and a place to sleep)
So what do you want then, a world where the engineer has the same standard of living as the cleaner or where the cleaner has the same standard of living as the engineer?
No one's saying they have exactly the same struggle to deal with. The cleaning lady definitely has more struggles, but this does not change the fundamental point that both the Google Staff engineer and the cleaning lady primarily derive their wealth by selling their labour, as opposed to deriving their wealth from their capital.
They both have the surplus value created by their labor stolen by the capitalist class.
Of course, that affects the cleaning lady more, but the core theft and the exploitative power dynamics they both are affected by are the same.
One of the tricks capital uses to keep control is to pit us against each other. Only through solidarity throughout the entire working class we can affect real change.
I just want an OS where; out of the box, I can play any game made in the last 20 years, change my mouse scroll speed, or set my background to a solid color.
You can do all of those in Linux. For example, here's how to set the background to a solid color. Open a terminal and type the following four commands:
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.background picture-options 'none'
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.background primary-color '#004000'
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.background secondary-color '#306030'
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.background color-shading-type 'vertical'
Exactly. Where everything I need to do requires a cryptic command to pull off. What args do I need? Where? Oh shit a capital letter. Try again. I don't want to have to Google everything I need to do. Maybe voice enabled GPT-4 will help.
Sure, and I'm personally fine with it. I'm one of those kooks at work who requested a Linux workstation, much to the chagrin of the IT department.
But as long as there is a conversation between Windows and Linux that includes using the terminal, you've lost the "normie" segment of the population, which is going to preclude most people from even considering it.
This fact is invariably met with much wailing and gnashing of teeth by Linux bros who think that there's no problem at all with it.
I did this on Windows too. Why even bother giving someone "click here then here the look for this menu on the right" when I can just send them a PowerShell script.
I am 4 days away from finishing comp sci. To get a credit out of the way, I signed up for some BS course on “tech and society”. Humanities types were happy to complain about how tech is destroying society, but mot a single one could define “algorithm”.
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