Lettuce eat lettuce

I’m constantly shocked how poorly Windows 11 runs on brand new high end hardware.

My current job has expensive enterprise class HP laptops, brand new, Nvme drives, the newest CPUs, 32GB RAM, blah blah.

Nearly every day, my corporate VPN app just shits the bed. The tray window that pops up to connect just goes black and never shows anything. I have to open task manager, end the process, wait 30 seconds for it to autostart to then authenticate.

My WSL instance constantly fails to start and I have to run a Powershell command to fix it. Programs won’t maximize won’t open when I try to switch to them until I do it 4-5 times.

Everything is slow and clunky even when I have almost nothing running.

Meanwhile my 8 year old low end Thinkpad with 8 GB of slow DDR4 RAM and a 2.5inch cheapo SSD runs fine with Linux Mint thrown on it and I frequently go 4-6 months between updates.

Everything you described falls under the umbrella of Capitalism.

Capitalism will always result in this sort of devolution, because it rewards this sort of behavior.

Constant GDP growth fuels capitalist enterprises because valuations go up and Capital is expanded. That incentivizes governments to make access to Capital easier and regulations on growth looser, which the firms themselves favor in terms of lower taxes, cheaper loans, larger capital markets, etc.

How many business leaders lobby, vote, and push for higher general taxes, stronger labor rights, stricter regulations, and more expensive loans?

The only time you’ll see them doing any of those things, is when it directly hurts one of their major competitors.

This makes perfect sense within a Capitalist framework, because private ownership of the means of production and increasing profitability are literally the core of Capitalism. So of course Capitalists will always tend towards what makes the most money.

All the worst traits of modern Capitalism, (Everything is a subscription, planned obsolescence, shrinkflation, extreme litigiousness over patents and copyrights, ads in everything, predatory pricing & monetization) are the logical result of a Capitalist system.

Of course they are, same with undersea data centers (for different reasons).

But it doesn’t matter. In the late-stage capitalism we find ourselves in, you don’t need a real product, nor a promising prototype. You don’t even need a good idea, you just need the promise that you’ll come up with a good idea soon. That’s enough to get the investors drooling, the shareholders hyped, and the gullible idiots engaged.

And you only have to maintain that long enough to pay yourself and your insiders some fat checks. Then when inevitably, reality barges in and people start to realize it was all bullshit and pipe dreams, you’ve already cashed out. If your PR team is good, the media and your sycophantic fans will praise you as a visionary who was simply, “ahead of their time.” And you can go on to rip off more people.

It’s basically Patreon scams but with billions of dollars.