(With Copilot)

Doctorow's writings are good, and this book summary is excellent.

One of his recommendations is unlikely to go far: tech worker unions. Most comments on HN underscore the extent to which techies have bought into capitalist propaganda, which we slavishly repeat. We dream of becoming the next multimillionaire, but it's far more likely we'll get laid off at some point(s) in our career by the enshittification machine. A worker's union isn't communism, it represents the workers who build the systems. Germany, a social democracy, provides for a worker's representative on company boards. This isn't communism!

BTW, it's the reviewer who suggested abolishing companies, not Doctorow. Now that is communism. What we do need is some regulation of companies that have become information utilities. Same as regulations for the water company or the power company.

No, digital payments didn’t do it, lack of laws did. Courts can’t keep up with the pace of innovation to protect us from greed.

I’m ok with an app charging an install fee if it’s worth it. I’m ok with games selling micro transaction cosmetics. I’m not ok with features being behind yet another paywall or subscription.

It’s plain old false advertising. If I buy a car and it has a turbo, I expect it to go turbo. If I buy an app and it’s supposed to make things pretty, it better make things pretty. If I buy a cheeseburger, I don’t want to be charged extra for the condiments put on it or the onions, pickles, lettuce. I expected that comes included as part of Cogs.

Those MB diesels made it to the States too, and they were equally well respected here in my experience. Although, there's long been a diesel aversion among some part of the population here, so it was maybe a narrower subset of the population familiar with the legend of the MB diesels.

I drove one for years, acquired when they were available as a quite cheap ~15 year old car. I've since switched to a Toyota and been quite happy with that. I don't know how long the current Toyotas will last, but the golden era Toyotas I think probably last about as well as the legendary MB diesels (with the bonus of not having to track down vacuum leaks).

Get a financial advisor that you trust.

An important part that could have been beneficial would have been to add, "today".

I had a class where the teacher did something similar, but she showed that if you started a ROTH today and contributed only the 4 years you were in college and then stopped forever. You would have nearly the same amount of money as someone who started 1 year after they completed college and invested every year until retirement.

Ultimately she was encouraging us to take out student loans and invest it or use any excess scholarship money to max out a ROTH IRA. She even advocated for investing all student loan money and opening credit cards tp actually pay for college, making minimum payments until graduation. Then moving away to a LCOL country and learn the language for 8-9 years while remaining in school taking 1 online class a year and travelling the world on student loans and not to worry about starting a career until 30 and start paying once you are back and start a job.

Like the Cosmo Communicator?

https://www.www3.planetcom.co.uk/cosmo-communicator

You are great with analogies.

Can you tell me which car is Python, so I can add it to my shopping list?

I sincerely doubt it, because that technology also invades life. It invades the world with more information, not less. More business...when has technology ever slowed things down? AI just seems to make certain tasks more efficient, but I haven't seen anything slow down.