Comment by metaphor
5 days ago
That's all motherhood and apple pie, but I'm sorry: the reality that we live in and incentives at play are such that if a capability can be exploited, then it will be exploited to the detriment of the consumer. Full stop.
It's interesting how many complaints I see on HN that are framed as if they're complaints about a specific piece of technology when they are really complaints about capitalism. I'm all ears if you want to criticize our entire economic system, but I think it's silly to have that conversation specifically in the context of car software rather than at a societal level.
> when they are really complaints about capitalism
it's not a complaint about capitalism. It's a complaint about asymmetric bargaining power in the seller/buyer relationship.
That's not inherent in capitalism. It's inherent in an anti-competitive market. The failure is in gov't making sure there's sufficient regulation to prevent monopolistic practises.
"It's not a complaint about water. It's a complaint about the wetness."
If capitalism requires constant vigilant government intervention to prevent monopolistic practices, anti-competitive markets, and asymmetric bargaining power, then it seems to me that this is absolutely a complaint about capitalism. If anything, your comment just makes the indictment more damning.
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Perfect symmetry in bargaining power is systematically impossible. Not having perfect symmetry does not mean its anti-competitive.
The facts are, most people don't mind software in their car an like live-updates.
And nothing about software in cars or cars is monopolistic in any way.
> The failure is in gov't making sure there's sufficient regulation to prevent monopolistic practises.
This may not be a problem inherent to capitalism, but it certainly is a problem caused by the capitalism we currently have (by which I'm specifically referring to the US, but it may apply more broadly elsewhere).
And the government's failure to adequately regulate the market is due to the right. The party that claims government doesn't work has repeatedly - for generations - run on this as their platform, and when in power, they ensure it doesn't work by continued regulatory capture and gutting of consumer protections.
I'll raise the flag of "Don't nickel and dime me" in every battlefield.
The world we live in is capitalistic. We can imagine another world that isn't, but when we're considering specific pieces of technology, it's worthwhile to judge it by how it will perform or be exploited in the world we live in.
Because we don't care about capitalism, we don't want over the air updates to our cars.
I don't want my vehicle connected at all. It's an open invitation to privacy reducing tech and exploits.
When you're fighting the same enemy on a dozen battlefields, you won't stand a chance of winning until you understand that fact and go after the root cause.
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I want OTA updates in my car, but I want just benign ones, which add features for free as the software improves.
This kind of attitude is like saying "I don't want software that updates on my PC" when you are actually complaining about SaaS products.
Then don't frame the argument as "over-the-air updates are bad because of capitalism".
I love the over the air updates of my car!
If it's silly and it works, it's not silly.
Criticising our entire economic system tends to have very little effect. Criticising specific poor business practices and/or technologies that enable them has a much better chance of improving people's lives.
> Criticising our entire economic system tends to have very little effect.
I think its actively counterproductive. Criticising the entire economic system doesn't do anything. Complaining in broad strokes about stuff you can't change reduces your sense of agency over the world.
Also, if people believe that businesses must be sociopathic, they will make sociopathic choices in business. The belief reinforces the problem.
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Do personal computers even really emerge under communism? it is yet to be seen. But this specific technology seems to only evolve under capitalism to suit the needs of a certain type of buisness against the consumer.
If it emerged under communism, it probably would be equally as bad. I imagine if it emerged under communism or socialism it would be designed to solve a similar problems: securing the needs of the state against the citizen.
There is no such thing as a communist economy.
The economies of all countries that claimed to be socialist or communist were the extreme form of monopolistic capitalism.
Because nowadays the economy of USA resembles more and more every year to that of the socialist countries from the past, a non-negligible risk has appeared for the personal computer to become an endangered species.
The prices of personal computers and of their components have been increasing steadily during the last decade, long before the current wave of extreme price increases.
There is a steadily increasing pressure from big companies and from the governments controlled by them to eliminate true ownership of computers and of many other electronic devices, by introducing more and more restrictions for what owners can do with their PC/smartphone and by introducing more and more opportunities for others to control those devices remotely.
Many kinds of computing devices have eliminated their low-price models and they are offered now only in models so expensive as to be affordable only for big businesses, not for individuals or SMEs.
Ten years ago, I could still buy various kinds of professional GPUs with high FP64 throughput and any model of Intel Xeon server CPUs.
Nowadays I can choose to buy only high-end desktop CPUs for my servers, because the state-of-the-art server CPUs and datacenter GPUs now have 5-digit prices. NVIDIA, Intel and AMD see only big businesses as customers for such products, and they no longer offer any smaller SKUs in these categories (Intel nominally offers a few cheap Xeons, but those are so crippled that they are not worth for anything else but for enabling the testing of some server systems).
So in the kind of unregulated capitalism that exists today in USA, PCs would not have appeared and there is a risk for them to disappear, because they have become a relict of the past.
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Those against capitalism are going to speak out against what capitalism will lead to be exploited. I don't consider it "silly" to be against something that will lead to disaster, even if the disaster is systemic. Like, so what? Honestly. You can be against giving bad actors new tools without the tools having to be bad themselves. That's the premise of gun control for example.
It is fair to discuss new inroads of the capitalist devil such as this one
As another poster already said, the complaints are not about capitalism, even if sometimes they are worded in such a way, but they are about monopolistic capitalism.
For "capitalism" without other qualifications, there are no alternatives. The so-called socialist or communist economies have always lied by pretending that they are not capitalist. In fact all such economies were the extreme form of monopolistic capitalism.
Towards the end of the nineties of the previous century, a huge wave of acquisitions and mergers has started and it has never stopped since then.
Because of this, to my dismay, because I have grown in a country occupied by communists so I know first hand how such an economy works, the economies of USA and of all the other western countries have begun to resemble more and more every year with the socialist/communist economies that were criticized and ridiculed here in the past.
While the lack of competition and its consequences are very similar, in some respect the current US and western economies are even worse than the former socialist/communist economies. At least those had long-term plans. While those plans were frequently not as successful as claimed, they at least realized from time to time useful big infrastructure projects.
The main role of the laws and of the state must be the protection of the weak from the powerful, for various definitions of weakness and power, to prevent the alternative of attempting to solve such inequalities by violent means, when everybody loses.
Therefore there must be a balance between the economic freedom of the private companies and the regulation of their activities.
It is obvious that in USA such a balance has stopped existing long ago and the power of the big companies is unchecked, to the detriment of individuals and small/medium companies.
The US legislators spend most of their time fighting for the introduction of more and more ridiculous laws, which are harmful for the majority of the citizens, while nobody makes the slightest attempt to conceive laws that would really protect the consumers against the abusive practices that have now spread to all big companies.
This is a classic example of slippery slope fallacy, and not in the spirit of intellectual curiosity for which this forum exists
But it's true? How does an automaker that doesn't engage in those tactics compete when the rest of the market does?
Like sugar-free, gluten-free, dairy-free, nut-free food, where the lack of something is sold as something positive.
I'd love to buy an ad-free, subscription-free, tracking-free, touchscreen-free car.
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