Wealth concentration is problematic.

Capitalism on its own doesn’t have any guaranteed and deliberate, measured, studied, tested and understood anti-concentrationist dynamics.

What we get from the cappies instead is a head fake like this: “Check out this example of a corporation losing wealth and its competitor gaining wealth. Now add the magical invisible hand. Therefore, capitalism magically balances itself out.”

But while there is always a rags to richies story to be found, and also an occasional redistribution from one cappie to the next, at the macro level we see a totally different picture.

At the macro level property/wealth holdings concentrate. Reliably. If left alone. More and more is owned by fewer and fewer hands.

And ownership isn’t just about the balance sheet. The owners tell nonowners how to live. It’s about power and dominance.

The landlord tells their tenants how to cut grass, how to aqcept and not accept guests and for how long, what to keep and not keep inside the appartment/flat. Etc. The employer tells the worker how to dress, when to show up and where, what to do, how to do it, and what you can and cannot do on your time off, and it doen’t stop there because there is no line where the cappie says to hirself, “ok, this is plenty of dominance for me, I am satisfied, I will stop making additional demands.” So the cappies tell their workers how to vote, how to organize or not organize, how to share or not share certain information (like about their own salary), etc. Doesn’t matter if it’s legal or if it is enforceable. It works often enough that it makes it worth it to cappies to keep pushing the line.

So not having the wealth is bad enough on its own, but when every aspect of life is tightly managed, including how to think and not to think, capitalism rapes your soul in addition to either keeping you poor, or forcing a neverending hassle, a neverending energy drain on you, unless and until you yourself become a cappie.

That is criminal.

And capitalism doesn’t value anything not denominated in currency. Thus the commons get raped, science is only OK if someone somewhere is profiting, etc.

You get cities that are dirty, dense with money making properties, and little to no space to kick back for free, etc. Anywhere it is not like that is because people pushed back! And not because the cappies prefer ample parks or open land.

Just the fact that the accounting books are almost always the most closely guarded secret of a cappie, that alone, if you are knowledgeable about how power works, should tell you everything about what kind of relationship exists between the various people under capitalism. Workers are roped by the system into projects the details of which they aren’t welcome to know. And the government is also not welcome to audit anything.

What matters is who controls the tech, not just the capabilities.

We should still benefit from China making good memory chips. Assuming the chips are fungible, China might buy fewer Samsung or Taiwanese chips and that’s more chips for us.

I use Organic Maps very often. It’s not perfect. It wrongly identifies a shop next to me. It also occasionally gives less than ideal for my taste directions. However, it is subjectively 99% good and right about the map objects and the directions. It is reliable, basically.

Google’s app has given me issues too in the past. It’s not like Google is without its chinks.

So I am happy with it and would recommend it at least for a spin. For me it’s a daily driver app.

But can you 3D print a guillotine?

Asking for a friend.

A plane should still be capable of unassisted taking off and landing for emergencies, imo.

They are already unpopular now. Wait till the pigs dive even deeper in popularity.

They might convince the general population that the first amendment is not worth exercising, and instead we all neet to contemplate military style resistance.

Nobody apparently wants to bring trouble to themselves as long as there is still anything left to hope for. However that calculus can change once the powers that be engineer a life even more glaringly worthless than it already is. Lots of people are quiet quitting or not having children already. That trend will accelerate even further.