• 6 Posts
  • 107 Comments
Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: January 2nd, 2024

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  • +1 for BeamNG.drive + Automation

    Recreating production cars and racing them is fun.

    Optimizing track cars for different locations is a LOT of fun. More power doesn’t always mean faster lap times - what matters is power to weight ratio, paired with getting the suspension, tires, brakes, and downforce just right.

    The most fun build I’ve discovered so far is throwing a 2L, naturally aspirated V8 that makes 521 HP, into a Pontiac Fiero with racing slicks. The whole thing weighs just 1159 lbs, and can pull 3 G’s around corners.









  • Delta_V@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    1 month ago

    The market didn’t need regulations to maintain its freeness back then because the vast majority of transactions were made with small businesses. The limited technological capabilities in transport and communication also decreased the need for government regulation by decreasing the ability of the largest concentrations of capital to succeed at implementing global anti-competitive strategies.

    To achieve the same degree of market freedom today, in the era of omni-national mega-corporations wielding monopoly influence, requires utilizing levers of power outside of the market those mega-corps dominate. The intervention of democratic governments to enforce anti-monopoly laws and prohibit other kinds of anti-competitive behavior is a necessary component of any plan to transform today’s marketplace into one that looks more similar to the market of Adam Smith’s day.


  • Delta_V@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    1 month ago

    It is though - this is what capitalism invariably becomes. Musky Twitter is a symptom of late stage capitalism. This is why so many people say capitalism is bad and doesn’t work as advertised.

    The golden age of classical liberalism, when capitalism actually worked, the 1700-1800’s, more closely resembles what we would today call market socialism.

    Once the agglomerations of capital became large enough to impose irresistible anti-competitive force, the days of capitalism’s beneficial functionality ended. They say “the freer the market the freer the people”, but an unregulated market isn’t free - it invariably trends toward monopoly and irrationally assigned concentrations of wealth and power, eg Musk, Bezos, DuPont, Sackler, etc…

    Capitalism supports, rather than resists, the anti-competitive influence of capital. A truly free market requires the intervention of powers other than capital - eg, democratic governance imposing something akin to Market Socialism against the wishes of those anti-competitive agglomerations of capital.


  • Delta_V@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    1 month ago

    fund it exclusively out of his own pocket

    That’s how newspapers got started - they were propaganda organs of the rich and existed exclusively to manipulate public opinion. Things really haven’t changed that much, but somewhere along the way people were tricked into paying for them.



  • Its framed as being done to “strengthen their financial resilience”, but I suspect the motive is to slow down the rate at which banks are creating new money, driving up inflation. If these bank regulations pass, we can lower taxes without blowing up the inflation rate. Or, the Federal Government can spend more without increasing taxes, keeping the inflation rate the same.

    The banks hate it because they would issue fewer loans, and therefore make less money. Its takes money out of the pockets of bankers and puts it into the hands of the Federal Government.

    I’m generally in favor of markets deciding what gets produced, i.e. letting the banks judge which businesses asking for loans have the best chance of paying them back. However, the market has some blind spots where we’re all better off if the government steps in - for example, defense spending, infrastructure, and R&D (investing in NASA has historically provided incredible RoI).

    That the Fed is even considering this new approach suggests to me that there is a perceived need for a rush of government spending in the near future, and the current geopolitical landscape suggests it will be spent on weapons.