• @UnderpantsWeevil
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    110 months ago

    Rent seeking is just the latest in a long line of buzz words invented by MBAs

    Its definitely a term that’s been co-opted by MBAs, but the process of enclosure is centuries old and foundational to the process of capitalist profit-taking.

    You seem to not like this.

    I’m not a huge fan of negative externalities in business. And profiteering generates enormous externalities.

    I would recommend putting down the phone that are using to browse this website, since it exists due to the aforementioned capitalistic system.

    Oh no, buddy. I’ve got some terrible news for you. Cellular mobile telephones are a soviet technology. And the entire backbone of the modern domestic telecommunications service was created with public lands, materials, and labor.

    The modern cell carriers are simply gatekeepers, charging exorbitant fees to access public works. When the western states copied the USSR’s homework back in the 70s and 80s, no single private business could afford to front the enormous costs associated with the infrastructure. So the Federal Government issued block grants and unleashed (literal) armies of engineers, surveyors, and construction teams to lay the original main arteries. They then tasked a handful of private companies to operate as retail brokers for consumer access and use.

    every human on this Earth is already partaking in it to some degree.

    The bulk of international digital infrastructure is public works. Always has been. And the cost of accessing these public works varies enormously by state, entirely due to who is tasked with gatekeeping access to the service. US telecomm costs are astronomical, compared to Mexico or Germany or India or South Africa, entirely because the American domestic retailers charge a higher toll.

    Incidentally, that’s also why we have some of the slowest and least reliable networks in the post-industrial world. Once we gave up investing in public broadband, public wifi, and public satellite services, the gatekeeping private telecom firms failed to maintain pace with peer nations like Japan and Germany and China and India. Now you can buy a cell phone off the street in New Delhi with a plan that charges pennies and get higher speeds and better coverage than anything T-mobile or AT&T can provide stateside for $100/mo.

      • @UnderpantsWeevil
        link
        010 months ago

        the hilariously fake Soviet propaganda

        the first handset was born in 1973 weighing in at two kilos.

        You’re citing the first retail model sold in a western market, built on technology from 20 years prior.

          • @UnderpantsWeevil
            link
            110 months ago

            Technically the transistor was invented at Bell labs in 1947

            We’ve understood electric diodes since 1874.

            Bell labs secured the first US patent for a silicon point-contact transistor in 1948 two years after Soviet scientists proved out bipolar diffusion in silicon. Two ahem German scientists, Herbert Mataré and Heinrich Welker, developed crystal rectifiers from silicon and germanium during WW2. They extended their discovery into a modern working transistor in 1947, at the Compagnie des Freins et Signaux, a Westinghouse subsidiary in Paris. Tadashi Sasaki pioneered the first Japanese transistor at Kobe Kogyo that same year.

            American history loves to casually ignore the global race towards modern machinery, assuming anything that wasn’t filed at the US Patent Office simply didn’t exist.