I’m forever fated to receive unsolicited junk mail for this feature that I have to unceremoniously dump in the recycling bin every couple weeks.

Imagining a future in which I have to tell my YouTube integrated car company that I don’t want to sign up for their music service every time I start my car.

Nobody likes these

Shareholders love them

Adding anyone reading this to the Victims of Communism memorial.

24 downvotes telling me actually this never happened.

Also, nobody talk about Grenada in 1983. Or Iran Air Flight 655. Or the MOVE bombing in 1985. Or the police response to the LA Riots. Or the police response to the Iraq War protests. Or the police response to OWS protests. Or the police response to BLM protests. Or the police response to the campus protests in defense of Palestine.

That’s Whataboutism.

You can’t just talk about ACAB or discuss the broad problems of a heavily armed carceral state looking for heads to crack. Only Foreign Countries are Bad.

based and property tax should be illegal pillec

Fix’d

First, no normal human is blaming the Biden admin for the strength of hurricanes these days.

glances at Biden’s Senatorial record on climate change

patents should expire

They do. It’s just that they can be renewed under various circumstances, typically as an incentive to increase production.

Is there some reason why previous-generation technology, like the tech being used for MRIs in the 90s, can’t be used to manufacture more competitively-priced machines?

You need a certain amount of industrial capital geared towards making these machines and GE is the only one that really does (excepting manufacturers overseas). A big part of the problem is that we don’t have a good mechanism for introducing new small businesses to the market. You really need to know someone that needs a steady number of MRI machines on a regular basis to make a new MRI factory worth it, and unless you have that business connection you have no buyers.

A big part of the “Cheney family endorses Harris” push has been corporate flacks racking up favors with the Dem side of the aisle so Harris can replace her cabinet with people who are more business-friendly in the next term.

They’re playing both sides. This isn’t just “Trump Wins: Things Get Worse” / “Harris Wins: Things Stay The Same Amount of Bad”.

Considering

Investigating

Discussing

Will put forward a possibility of

Listen, its this government or we go with the GOP version where its just the MOVE bombing every couple of weeks, while the DOJ issues briefs about busting open a child’s testicles to get information out of his father.

Do Nothing or Do Something Awful. Those are your choices.

as marketed by Spike TV

Right. It’s just a place to stick your cheap plastic collectibles, as romanticized by the man-equivalent of the home shopping channel. You see it on home improvement shows all the time, as well, typically themed to some hobby or consumer franchise. And back in the '00s, sitcoms got in on the racket, with every Family Dad having an episode or three that involved renovating a basement or spare bedroom.

Side note, remember when houses had a room called the “den”?

I’ve also heard it called the TV Room, the playroom, and the family room. Most houses still have it, typically adjoining the kitchen/dining room. My house has a second-story flat that’s kitchen, dining room, and den laid out in a single open rectangle. We have the TV on the back wall and you can see it from the other side of the house. But all the entertainment - the record player, the video games, the little rolling dry bar I have in the corner - is on the “den” side of the house.

Can the UK even support the 67M people they currently have?

Shouldn’t that patent have expired by now?

It’s an evolving technology. We get new patents with every iteration.

A market where only one entity is allowed to build MRI machines, or license the tech to others to build, is not a free market.

If you spend a few years in Business School getting your MBA, you get an earful about how and why patent law exists. The core argument is that private investment is predicated on returns and we can’t have nice things unless we have men with guns come for the property and freedom of anyone who “steals an idea”.

But more practically, this shit is just a racket. Lots of lobbyist money changes hands to make sure the decks at the casino are properly stacked. Medical treatment is just another opportunity to apply leverage through debt to control other people.

cough single payer fixes all this cough

I’d go one further and say a National Health System fixes all this. Rather than paying a guy to pay a guy, you just have publicly financed clinics and hospitals. This is the traditional way of building up medical infrastructure, btw. City hospitals used to be the norm. We only entered the era of corporate consolidation when we sold off our public infrastructure for a song during the neoliberal turn of the 70s and 80s.

There’s two sides to this coin. On the one end, you have insurance companies refusing to pay for anything because the modern industry is just six scams in a trench coat.

But on the other, you have doctor’s offices where the physician literally leases an MRI machine to the tune of several million dollars and then has to run a certain number of patients through the scanner every year or lose money. That’s because the MRI patent is held by GE and they can charge 10-100x markups on hardware that is fundamental to modern medicine.

Its the same with diabetes treatments. Insurance companies will try and refuse service or kick people off their policies if they are at risk. But then pharmacy companies will sell $3 of insulin for $75, then kickback a chunk of the balance to judicial/congressional bribes in order to guarantee the cash flow.

At some level, the only insurance companies that can survive in such a market are the ones that say “No!” to everything. The even-remotely-ethical firms just get fleeced by the for-profit industry until they get bought out or go bankrupt. That, or you’re Medicare/Medicaid and you have an infinite wallet backstopped by the US Treasury. You don’t care if you’re paying multiples of whatever any other clinic anywhere else in the world would charge on an enormous population of poor and elderly patients, because you have an unlimited money cannon to mow it all down with.

Obviously, the traditional conception of a ‘man cave’ isn’t great

It’s not the “traditional concept”, it’s the juiced up consumerist fantasy. The traditional man-cave is literally just the garage or the basement, where you keep your power tools.

Well, its that or they might end up with a family who holds freakish anti-social views like “Love is Love” and “Let kids play dress up, they’re not hurting anyone”.

The mainland Chinese SMIC is doing everything they can without access to ASML’s EUV machines, and have gotten further than anyone else has on DUV.

You can’t say that, though, because it implies Chinese engineers and information technology scientists are trailblazers rather than plagarists and IP thieves.

Intel did introduce both technologies in its 20A process (supposedly 2nm class), but then canceled it due to low yield. So they’re basically betting the company on their 18A process, and hoping they can get that to market before TSMC and Samsung hit their stride on 2nm.

And I’ve got a few shares in my retirement account riding on that success. But its more a hedge against my own cynicism than a sincere expectation. Intel, like Boeing, seems far more interested in rewarding investors in the short term than maintaining a foothold in the market long term.

Should have waited until he was in the billionaire class before breaking the law.

Wouldn’t be surprised if they’re just cashing out while TikTok is still public in the US. One last desperate grab at value-add for the parent company before the shut down.

Also a great way to burn the infrastructure for subsequent use. After this, you can guarantee every data security company is going to add the TikTok servers to their firewalls and blacklists. So the American company that tries to harvest the property is going to be tripping over these legacy bullwarks for years after.

Debt, both on-the-books and anticipated.

Intel’s investments in the Titanium chipset have effectively dead-ended. They can’t get below 7nm efficiently. Meanwhile, you’ve got companies in Taiwan, Korea, China, and Japan breaking into the 3nm and 2nm scales. To catch up, they’re looking at hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars in technical debt.

Yes, they can keep churning out existing processors at huge profits in the moment. But the face value of these processors plummets with every new step in Moore’s Law. This amounts to asset depreciation, which means Intel’s value is heavily overstated on the basis of asset cost alone.

I won’t argue that NVIDIA is overvalued. But I think the degree to which they are overvalued is often misattributed to speculation and avoids the real specter haunting the company… competition. NVIDIA’s market dominance and the escalating demand for their technology means the sky really should be the limit for their growth. Demand for AI processing is at the forefront of these expectations. But a rival manufacturer capable of cutting into demand for their units would dramatically undermine their profitability.

Its the same with firms like Microsoft and Facebook and Boeing. So much of their dominance is predicated on the theory that people will never leave these walled gardens and their margins being enormous purely because they controlled a critical commodity/patch of technical real estate.

There was - incidentally - another enormous company that seemed to have the market cornered in its industry and got complacent with its R&D and long-term investment strategies… Intel.