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andreassenrrkblalock · 2 years

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Coachella Valley Economic Approach - Does it Make Sense?

Can typically the Coachella Valley Financial Development plan definitely work? And wherever on Earth is the Coachella Valley anyway, and why have to I care? Nicely, I'm glad you asked because Coachella Valley is within California, and it is in Riverside County. An individual probably know the particular area because might heard metropolis Hands Springs California. You see, Palm Spring suspensions is located in one end regarding the Coachella Area, but do you know presently there are 500, 1000 people living within the Valley in the course of peak season?

Inside fact, a number of the metropolitan areas are very sophisticated resort communities. Urban centers like Palm leave, Rancho Mirage, Indian native Wells, and Una Quinta. check here offers farmland, and in addition some low income locations, and cities, which often helps provide just about all labor for that major hospitality industry throughout the winter a few months when everyone will come to stay and play. Indeed, right now there are 200 playing golf courses in typically the Valley.

Of course, as you recognize Riverside County California was one regarding the worst hit in the state following the big economic crisis and financial meltdown. As well as the being out of work in the off-season, in conjunction with the casing crash, and jobless recovery has obtained its toll about the area. Yet never fear they may have an economic strategy, and I'd just like to take the look at that will for a moment along with you.

Apparently, the powers that end up being, are determined which industries that the Coachella Valley is most suited in order to be centering on proceeding into the potential future. And, they came up up with a subscriber base in their new 106 page coloring brochure which seemed to be created with the local university, CVEP or the Coachella Valley Economic Partnership, plus Market Street a nearby marketing analytical massive research firm. They may have chosen the adhering to industries which consist of;

Health Care and even Life Sciences Offer Chain Management and Logistics Clean Technology and Energy Imaginative Arts and Design and style Do all 4 of those industries tends to make sense? Well given that this is a retirement community together with a hotel community, and right now there are a few of the top hospitals in the united states appropriate here. So, the first one makes a lot of sense. Healthcare and Life Savoir are perfect intended for that Valley, and even they have two major universities, along with a community college together with several campuses which have nursing programs, as well as graduate programs with the University.

Additionally, with the hospitals in the particular Valley, they include everything they must do research, case scientific studies, and get volunteers that have various conditions because of the age to participate. So, typically the first item produces a lot associated with sense to me personally.

Now, how about Present Chain Management plus Logistics? Would it create sense that the Valley should concentrate on that sector? The answer is usually absolutely because the particular Valley has Interstate 10 running right through it, together with a huge railroad trail that follows typically the freeway, and a great international airport of which happens to be part of a Federal Trade Zone or FTZ; not in order to mention an Enterprise Zone and a few truck stops. In addition, it has the Hydrogen Fuel lager too. And as a result, it is a new perfect location intended for that industry.

Up coming, the economic strategy calls for Clear Technology and Power, does that sector make sense for the Valley? Completely, you may not really know this yet Palm Springs has got more wind power generators than anywhere else in the United States. Also, one particular of the key universities has a graduate studies dealing with high-tech environmental innovations. And they have numerous research grants, and even they're always functioning on very awesome projects, that can easily bring about fresh entrepreneurial startup businesses.

Likewise, read more was once headquartered there. And the particular Valley is home to Sunlite Shuttle bus Company, that is usually the first inside the nation to operate and do tests on Hydrogen Mobile Buses, which actually are operating having passengers around, and even Sunlite also has some other fuel technologies these people are working, they have been written up inside of numerous magazines plus trade journals, quite a shining superstar indeed.

Not only that, just what about Creative Artistry and Design, is the fact a good industry for that Valley? It very well could always be, because the living costs is less there, along with the local community college or university is continually graduating electronic digital art students. Much of the movement these days is definitely being done in Mis Angeles, but a great bit of that has been outsourced to India.

Continue to, it is as well expensive in Mis Angeles, and the cost of living is so substantial for a lot of of these large corporations such as Pixar, DreamWorks, and Disney Broadcasters which are pressured to pay really high wages. In addition due to the particular capability to work in the Internet, they can easily put satellite television offices out in this article, and hire persons for a great deal less of your budget. The movement industry is raising strong, so is typically the video game market, virtual reality simulator sector, avatar great training for corporations sub-sector, and animated studying systems industry for our schools.

Not necessarily to mention the need for web site designs, and most another digital video art work that is usually needed inside our modern society and civilization. And even there is not really a significant amount of competitors for most of these strategic industry sub-niches. So, I would personally include to concur that every one of those chosen focus on industries above are incredibly wise choices. I am hoping you will make sure you consider this to be.

Lance Winslow can be a retired Originator of a Nationwide Franchise Chain, and now runs the Online Think Tank. Lance Winslow believes when a person need online monetary content for the city or area, then you definitely should get to http://www.bloggingcontent.com.

Take note: All of Pilum Winslow's articles are usually written by him or her, not by Automatic Software, any Pc Program, or Unnaturally Intelligent Software. Zero of his content are outsourced, PLR Content or created by ghost copy writers. Lance Winslow feels those who use these strategies shortage integrity and mislead the reader. Indeed, individuals who use this kind of cheating tools, crutches, and tricks of the trade may even be downloading copyrighted movies by misleading the customer and misrepresenting on their own in online marketing, which he discovers completely unacceptable.

#Computer Tech Reviews #click here #more info #website #get more info #check here #Additional hints

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techtimechronicles24 · 22 days

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🇯🇵 Unveiling the Toshiba T1100: A Journey into the Dawn of Portable Computing!

💻 In the early 1980s, a revolutionary device emerged, transforming the landscape of personal computing forever. The Toshiba T1100, released in 1985, marked a significant milestone in the history of portable computers. The Toshiba T1100 has subsequently been described by Toshiba as "the world's first mass-market laptop computer".

🌐 The Toshiba T1100 was among the first truly portable computers, designed for professionals and enthusiasts seeking computing power on the go. Weighing approximately 4.1 kilograms (9 pounds) with its lead-acid battery, this innovative machine provided users with unprecedented mobility.

⚙️ Equipped with an Intel 80C88 processor running at 4.77 MHz and boasting 256 KB of RAM, the Toshiba T1100 offered impressive computing capabilities for its time. Its 9.6-inch monochrome LCD screen provided a crisp display, while the detachable keyboard enhanced usability.

💾 The T1100 introduced several innovative features, including a built-in 3.5-inch floppy disk drive—a rarity at the time—which allowed for data storage and transfer with ease. This model also featured MS-DOS as its operating system, providing a familiar computing environment.

📈 The Toshiba T1100 set a new standard for portable computing, demonstrating the feasibility and practicality of laptops for business and personal use. Its success paved the way for subsequent generations of laptops, influencing the evolution of mobile computing worldwide.

👨‍💻 For professionals in various industries, the Toshiba T1100 represented a game-changer, enabling efficient data management, word processing, and spreadsheet tasks on the move. Its portability and functionality empowered users to work beyond traditional office environments.

🌟 Today, the legacy of the Toshiba T1100 lives on in the sleek, lightweight laptops and notebooks that have become indispensable tools for modern professionals and digital nomads. This groundbreaking device remains a testament to Toshiba's commitment to innovation and excellence in the field of computing. The Toshiba T1100 remains an iconic symbol of the dawn of portable computing—a chapter in the ongoing story of technological progress that continues to shape our digital world.

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theartofmany · 11 months

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"I tried over 40 keyboards last year to find out the best keyboard in 2023. Hope this helps you who want to know what keyboard do I buy in 2023?" From Youtube channel Hipyo Tech: I Tried Over 40 Keyboards Last Year... (So You Don't Have to.) If you are interested in buying a new keyboard, this video can give you a few options for that Enjoy... (Brands and links in the description of the video)

#Hipyo Tech #I Tried Over 40 Keyboards Last Year... (So You Don't Have to.)#keyboard #PC #computer #tech #technology #review #tech review #technology review #mechanical keyboard #budget keyboard #ASMR #unintentional ASMR #keyboard ASMR #cool tech #Youtube

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bullseyereview2it · 4 days

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Ultimate Cooling Showdown: 5 Top CPU Coolers for Ryzen 7 7800X3D

This blog is an Amazon affiliate, which means that if you click on a paid link from this website that takes you to Amazon and you purchase a product, I will receive a small commission. You can find links to Amazon in the highlighted words. AMD’s latest Ryzen 7000 series with 3D-V Cache promises a significant leap in performance, but keeping that power tamed requires a top-notch CPU cooler. This…

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#3D V-Cache #AIO liquid coolers #air coolers #AMD Ryzen 7000 series #budget CPU coolers #computer hardware #cooling solutions #CPU coolers #gaming PC #High-performance cooling #overclocking #PC components #pc cooling #performance cooling #RGB lighting #Ryzen 7 7800X3D #silent coolers #tech reviews

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mysticalbelieverprincess · 3 months

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Battery Types For Bluetooth Headphones

Watching TV without disturbing others is a big problem for our company. I like to watch out TV before going to sleep and my wife always complains about security alarm and we end up having arguments over the idea. This is why I started looking doing this occurs headphones to use while television. I identified these wireless headphones that are very affordable and now I don't watch TV with anything other than the usual pair of Sennheiser RS 130 Wireless Surround Sound Headphones. An individual are someone really likes having a brilliant acoustic experience while watching TV, may really actually check out this model.

youtube

Before the what, you'll need to answer the so just why. What is goal in purchasing set of headphones exactly where there is will you be with them? Will you buy headphones and put them on just to while away the time at school, doing the grocery possibly in your bed room? If you choose them on your own way to school or work, will you be walking or crossing streets? If so, maybe earphones may very well be the more sensible choice because tend not to drown out the noise of the environment as many as headphones, which may incapacitate industry to hear onrushing atv's.

Sony seems to have a great set of Bluetooth Sleeping Headphones known as the MDR-NC500. These headphones use digital noise canceling that can the whole ANC anywhere up to another step. It uses the digital system to select a filter sound for outside noise so it truly is more good at blocking out sounds. Are cheaper . a monitor switch so you don't require take away from the headphones means positivity . have to pay attention to external sound. This model has gotten rave reviews on comfort as well as top quality of sound.

My only criticism of this occurence otherwise brilliant product reality that you cannot charge it via a USB link. However, you can expect up to 32 hours listening time on one single charge if not more to 600 hours standby time. They weigh buying.academy/ under 11 oz of. The suggested retail expense is $250, but shop headphones around and obtain probably fare best.

Have a wonderful bowl of mashed potatoes -the natural sleeping prescription. Have some kind of food that generally forces you to be tired. And so go rest about half-hour or hour later. Do not drink liquids as much more wake you out of trouble of a sleep.

These are something which use on a nightly framework. I only wish that I had started with him or her sooner. During our childhood I lived near a busy street and also the noises would always keep me up. Some people find the noises regarding your city comforting, but I did so not at all.

Everybody loves gifts. And, top ideas for gifts for sweet sixteen birthday are all over. The gift does not always have in order to an objective. Just being together with friends and family and having a wonderful time is a gift alone.

#gifts #shopping and product reviews #electronics #personal tech #computers and technology #self improvement #arts and entertainment #music #travel and leisure #ears hearing #health and fitness #sleep snoring #hardware #mobile cell phone #communications #gaming #audio video #home improvement #Youtube

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robryebeach · 4 months

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Computer Part Review. #pc #computer #technology

#youtube #COMPUTER PART REVIEW #TECH #PC #PC TECH #COMPUTERS #COMPUTER TECH #PC PARTS

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onecutreviewsdotcom · 6 months

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The Definitive iPhone 15 Series Case Guide

In a world where smartphones are sleek, slim, and oh-so-sexy, you might wonder why on Earth anyone would want to encase their precious gadget in a clunky, cumbersome contraption. Well, my tech-savvy comrades, the answer is simple: “To case, or not to case?” is not just a question, it’s a Shakespearean tragedy in the making. From perilous drops to sticky-fingered foes, the smartphone is a fragile…

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#apple #computers #iphone #iphonecase #phone #photography #review #smartphone #smartphonecases #tech #technology

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dealtmoss · 9 months

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Hello! This is my pinned post for this blog:

All products are purchased by me unless stated otherwise, If a company supplies a product It will be marked as such.

I test a myriad of things! from tech, to tools, I will give initial impressions and then long term usage over the course of up to a thousand hours, this can take a while.

My main focus is to share what I find as I use these things and if they will hold up to the test of time and regular usage, since a lot of things these days are built with less than great quality and can be hard to figure out sometimes, especially with the rise of fake e-commerce reviews.

Right now this blog is pretty sparse, but should be filled out with reviews in the coming weeks.

Thanks for viewing and have a nice day!

#Tech #review #tools #computers

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prodpitch · 1 year

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Prodpitch | Tech Product Reviews, Top Picks, And How To

Discover the latest tech news, reviews, and deals at Prodpitch. Find the best picks and expert opinions on laptops, phones, and more.

#prodpitch #tech products #technology #review #news #tech news #how to guides #laptops #phones #tablets #computer

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nuhakhaled · 1 year

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Lenovo IdeaPad 3: The Budget Laptop You Need

Hey guys, just wanted to share my thoughts on the Lenovo Ideapad 3. This budget-friendly laptop has impressed me with its sleek design, decent display and sound quality, and enough power for everyday use. It's lightweight, easy to carry around and the build quality is solid.

The 15.6-inch HD touchscreen display is bright and the colors are vibrant, making it perfect for watching movies and browsing the web. Under the hood, it's powered by an 11th Gen Intel Core i3-1115G4 Processor, 8GB DDR4 RAM, and 256GB PCIe NVMe SSD. It's not the best option for gaming, but it should be fine for basic games.

The battery life is around 7 hours and is currently priced at $373.00 on Amazon (https://amzn.to/3wsiv64) which is a great value for the price. It's worth checking out if you're in the market for a budget-friendly laptop.

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mostlysignssomeportents · 9 months

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Autoenshittification

Forget F1: the only car race that matters now is the race to turn your car into a digital extraction machine, a high-speed inkjet printer on wheels, stealing your private data as it picks your pocket. Your car’s digital infrastructure is a costly, dangerous nightmare — but for automakers in pursuit of postcapitalist utopia, it’s a dream they can’t give up on.

Your car is stuffed full of microchips, a fact the world came to appreciate after the pandemic struck and auto production ground to a halt due to chip shortages. Of course, that wasn’t the whole story: when the pandemic started, the automakers panicked and canceled their chip orders, only to immediately regret that decision and place new orders.

But it was too late: semiconductor production had taken a serious body-blow, and when Big Car placed its new chip orders, it went to the back of a long, slow-moving line. It was a catastrophic bungle: microchips are so integral to car production that a car is basically a computer network on wheels that you stick your fragile human body into and pray.

The car manufacturers got so desperate for chips that they started buying up washing machines for the microchips in them, extracting the chips and discarding the washing machines like some absurdo-dystopian cyberpunk walnut-shelling machine:

https://www.autoevolution.com/news/desperate-times-companies-buy-washing-machines-just-to-rip-out-the-chips-187033.html

These digital systems are a huge problem for the car companies. They are the underlying cause of a precipitous decline in car quality. From touch-based digital door-locks to networked sensors and cameras, every digital system in your car is a source of endless repair nightmares, costly recalls and cybersecurity vulnerabilities:

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/quality-new-vehicles-us-declining-more-tech-use-study-shows-2023-06-22/

What’s more, drivers hate all the digital bullshit, from the janky touchscreens to the shitty, wildly insecure apps. Digital systems are drivers’ most significant point of dissatisfaction with the automakers’ products:

https://www.theverge.com/23801545/car-infotainment-customer-satisifaction-survey-jd-power

Even the automakers sorta-kinda admit that this is a problem. Back in 2020 when Massachusetts was having a Right-to-Repair ballot initiative, Big Car ran these unfuckingbelievable scare ads that basically said, “Your car spies on you so comprehensively that giving anyone else access to its systems will let murderers stalk you to your home and kill you:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#rolling-surveillance-platforms

But even amid all the complaining about cars getting stuck in the Internet of Shit, there’s still not much discussion of why the car-makers are making their products less attractive, less reliable, less safe, and less resilient by stuffing them full of microchips. Are car execs just the latest generation of rubes who’ve been suckered by Silicon Valley bullshit and convinced that apps are a magic path to profitability?

Nope. Car execs are sophisticated businesspeople, and they’re surfing capitalism’s latest — and last — hot trend: dismantling capitalism itself.

Now, leftists have been predicting the death of capitalism since The Communist Manifesto, but even Marx and Engels warned us not to get too frisky: capitalism, they wrote, is endlessly creative, constantly reinventing itself, re-emerging from each crisis in a new form that is perfectly adapted to the post-crisis reality:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/31/books/review/a-spectre-haunting-china-mieville.html

But capitalism has finally run out of gas. In his forthcoming book, Techno Feudalism: What Killed Capitalism, Yanis Varoufakis proposes that capitalism has died — but it wasn’t replaced by socialism. Rather, capitalism has given way to feudalism:

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/451795/technofeudalism-by-varoufakis-yanis/9781847927279

Under capitalism, capital is the prime mover. The people who own and mobilize capital — the capitalists — organize the economy and take the lion’s share of its returns. But it wasn’t always this way: for hundreds of years, European civilization was dominated by rents, not markets.

A “rent” is income that you get from owning something that other people need to produce value. Think of renting out a house you own: not only do you get paid when someone pays you to live there, you also get the benefit of rising property values, which are the result of the work that all the other homeowners, business owners, and residents do to make the neighborhood more valuable.

The first capitalists hated rent. They wanted to replace the “passive income” that landowners got from taxing their serfs’ harvest with active income from enclosing those lands and grazing sheep in order to get wool to feed to the new textile mills. They wanted active income — and lots of it.

Capitalist philosophers railed against rent. The “free market” of Adam Smith wasn’t a market that was free from regulation — it was a market free from rents. The reason Smith railed against monopolists is because he (correctly) understood that once a monopoly emerged, it would become a chokepoint through which a rentier could cream off the profits he considered the capitalist’s due:

https://locusmag.com/2021/03/cory-doctorow-free-markets/

Today, we live in a rentier’s paradise. People don’t aspire to create value — they aspire to capture it. In Survival of the Richest, Doug Rushkoff calls this “going meta”: don’t provide a service, just figure out a way to interpose yourself between the provider and the customer:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/13/collapse-porn/#collapse-porn

Don’t drive a cab, create Uber and extract value from every driver and rider. Better still: don’t found Uber, invest in Uber options and extract value from the people who invest in Uber. Even better, invest in derivatives of Uber options and extract value from people extracting value from people investing in Uber, who extract value from drivers and riders. Go meta.

This is your brain on the four-hour-work-week, passive income mind-virus. In Techno Feudalism, Varoufakis deftly describes how the new “Cloud Capital” has created a new generation of rentiers, and how they have become the richest, most powerful people in human history.

Shopping at Amazon is like visiting a bustling city center full of stores — but each of those stores’ owners has to pay the majority of every sale to a feudal landlord, Emperor Jeff Bezos, who also decides which goods they can sell and where they must appear on the shelves. Amazon is full of capitalists, but it is not a capitalist enterprise. It’s a feudal one:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola

This is the reason that automakers are willing to enshittify their products so comprehensively: they were one of the first industries to decouple rents from profits. Recall that the reason that Big Car needed billions in bailouts in 2008 is that they’d reinvented themselves as loan-sharks who incidentally made cars, lending money to car-buyers and then “securitizing” the loans so they could be traded in the capital markets.

Even though this strategy brought the car companies to the brink of ruin, it paid off in the long run. The car makers got billions in public money, paid their execs massive bonuses, gave billions to shareholders in buybacks and dividends, smashed their unions, fucked their pensioned workers, and shipped jobs anywhere they could pollute and murder their workforce with impunity.

Car companies are on the forefront of postcapitalism, and they understand that digital is the key to rent-extraction. Remember when BMW announced that it was going to rent you the seatwarmer in your own fucking car?

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/02/big-river/#beemers

Not to be outdone, Mercedes announced that they were going to rent you your car’s accelerator pedal, charging an extra $1200/year to unlock a fully functional acceleration curve:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/23/23474969/mercedes-car-subscription-faster-acceleration-feature-price

This is the urinary tract infection business model: without digitization, all your car’s value flowed in a healthy stream. But once the car-makers add semiconductors, each one of those features comes out in a painful, burning dribble, with every button on that fakakta touchscreen wired directly into your credit-card.

But it’s just for starters. Computers are malleable. The only computer we know how to make is the Turing Complete Von Neumann Machine, which can run every program we know how to write. Once they add networked computers to your car, the Car Lords can endlessly twiddle the knobs on the back end, finding new ways to extract value from you:

https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6

That means that your car can track your every movement, and sell your location data to anyone and everyone, from marketers to bounty-hunters looking to collect fees for tracking down people who travel out of state for abortions to cops to foreign spies:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7enex/tool-shows-if-car-selling-data-privacy4cars-vehicle-privacy-report

Digitization supercharges financialization. It lets car-makers offer subprime auto-loans to desperate, poor people and then killswitch their cars if they miss a payment:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4U2eDJnwz_s

Subprime lending for cars would be a terrible business without computers, but digitization makes it a great source of feudal rents. Car dealers can originate loans to people with teaser rates that quickly blow up into payments the dealer knows their customer can’t afford. Then they repo the car and sell it to another desperate person, and another, and another:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/27/boricua/#looking-for-the-joke-with-a-microscope

Digitization also opens up more exotic options. Some subprime cars have secondary control systems wired into their entertainment system: miss a payment and your car radio flips to full volume and bellows an unstoppable, unmutable stream of threats. Tesla does one better: your car will lock and immobilize itself, then blare its horn and back out of its parking spot when the repo man arrives:

https://tiremeetsroad.com/2021/03/18/tesla-allegedly-remotely-unlocks-model-3-owners-car-uses-smart-summon-to-help-repo-agent/

Digital feudalism hasn’t stopped innovating — it’s just stopped innovating good things. The digital device is an endless source of sadistic novelties, like the cellphones that disable your most-used app the first day you’re late on a payment, then work their way down the other apps you rely on for every day you’re late:

https://restofworld.org/2021/loans-that-hijack-your-phone-are-coming-to-india/

Usurers have always relied on this kind of imaginative intimidation. The loan-shark’s arm-breaker knows you’re never going to get off the hook; his goal is in intimidating you into paying his boss first, liquidating your house and your kid’s college fund and your wedding ring before you default and he throws you off a building.

Thanks to the malleability of computerized systems, digital arm-breakers have an endless array of options they can deploy to motivate you into paying them first, no matter what it costs you:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/02/innovation-unlocks-markets/#digital-arm-breakers

Car-makers are trailblazers in imaginative rent-extraction. Take VIN-locking: this is the practice of adding cheap microchips to engine components that communicate with the car’s overall network. After a new part is installed in your car, your car’s computer does a complex cryptographic handshake with the part that requires an unlock code provided by an authorized technician. If the code isn’t entered, the car refuses to use that part.

VIN-locking has exploded in popularity. It’s in your iPhone, preventing you from using refurb or third-party replacement parts:

https://doctorow.medium.com/apples-cement-overshoes-329856288d13

It’s in fuckin’ ventilators, which was a nightmare during lockdown as hospital techs nursed their precious ventilators along by swapping parts from dead systems into serviceable ones:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/3azv9b/why-repair-techs-are-hacking-ventilators-with-diy-dongles-from-poland

And of course, it’s in tractors, along with other forms of remote killswitch. Remember that feelgood story about John Deere bricking the looted Ukrainian tractors whose snitch-chips showed they’d been relocated to Russia?

https://doctorow.medium.com/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors-bc93f471b9c8

That wasn’t a happy story — it was a cautionary tale. After all, John Deere now controls the majority of the world’s agricultural future, and they’ve boobytrapped those ubiquitous tractors with killswitches that can be activated by anyone who hacks, takes over, or suborns Deere or its dealerships.

Control over repair isn’t limited to gouging customers on parts and service. When a company gets to decide whether your device can be fixed, it can fuck you over in all kinds of ways. Back in 2019, Tim Apple told his shareholders to expect lower revenues because people were opting to fix their phones rather than replace them:

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/01/letter-from-tim-cook-to-apple-investors/

By usurping your right to decide who fixes your phone, Apple gets to decide whether you can fix it, or whether you must replace it. Problem solved — and not just for Apple, but for car makers, tractor makers, ventilator makers and more. Apple leads on this, even ahead of Big Car, pioneering a “recycling” program that sees trade-in phones shredded so they can’t possibly be diverted from an e-waste dump and mined for parts:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/yp73jw/apple-recycling-iphones-macbooks

John Deere isn’t sleeping on this. They’ve come up with a valuable treasure they extract when they win the Right-to-Repair: Deere singles out farmers who complain about its policies and refuses to repair their tractors, stranding them with six-figure, two-ton paperweight:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/31/dealers-choice/#be-a-shame-if-something-were-to-happen-to-it

The repair wars are just a skirmish in a vast, invisible fight that’s been waged for decades: the War On General-Purpose Computing, where tech companies use the law to make it illegal for you to reconfigure your devices so they serve you, rather than their shareholders:

https://memex.craphound.com/2012/01/10/lockdown-the-coming-war-on-general-purpose-computing/

The force behind this army is vast and grows larger every day. General purpose computers are antithetical to technofeudalism — all the rents extracted by technofeudalists would go away if others (tinkereres, co-ops, even capitalists!) were allowed to reconfigure our devices so they serve us.

You’ve probably noticed the skirmishes with inkjet printer makers, who can only force you to buy their ink at 20,000% markups if they can stop you from deciding how your printer is configured:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/07/inky-wretches/#epson-salty But we’re also fighting against insulin pump makers, who want to turn people with diabetes into walking inkjet printers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/10/loopers/#hp-ification

And companies that make powered wheelchairs:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/08/chair-ish/#r2r

These companies start with people who have the least agency and social power and wreck their lives, then work their way up the privilege gradient, coming for everyone else. It’s called the “shitty technology adoption curve”:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/21/great-taylors-ghost/#solidarity-or-bust

Technofeudalism is the public-private-partnership from hell, emerging from a combination of state and private action. On the one hand, bailing out bankers and big business (rather than workers) after the 2008 crash and the covid lockdown decoupled income from profits. Companies spent billions more than they earned were still wildly profitable, thanks to those public funds.

But there’s also a policy dimension here. Some of those rentiers’ billions were mobilized to both deconstruct antitrust law (allowing bigger and bigger companies and cartels) and to expand “IP” law, turning “IP” into a toolsuite for controlling the conduct of a firm’s competitors, critics and customers:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

IP is key to understanding the rise of technofeudalism. The same malleability that allows companies to “twiddle” the knobs on their services and keep us on the hook as they reel us in would hypothetically allow us to countertwiddle, seizing the means of computation:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

The thing that stands between you and an alternative app store, an interoperable social media network that you can escape to while continuing to message the friends you left behind, or a car that anyone can fix or unlock features for is IP, not technology. Under capitalism, that technology would already exist, because capitalists have no loyalty to one another and view each other’s margins as their own opportunities.

But under technofeudalism, control comes from rents (owning things), not profits (selling things). The capitalist who wants to participate in your iPhone’s “ecosystem” has to make apps and submit them to Apple, along with 30% of their lifetime revenues — they don’t get to sell you jailbreaking kit that lets you choose their app store.

Rent-seeking technology has a holy grail: control over “ring zero” — the ability to compel you to configure your computer to a feudalist’s specifications, and to verify that you haven’t altered your computer after it came into your possession:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/30/ring-minus-one/#drm-political-economy

For more than two decades, various would-be feudal lords and their court sorcerers have been pitching ways of doing this, of varying degrees of outlandishness.

At core, here’s what they envision: inside your computer, they will nest another computer, one that is designed to run a very simple set of programs, none of which can be altered once it leaves the factory. This computer — either a whole separate chip called a “Trusted Platform Module” or a region of your main processor called a secure enclave — can tally observations about your computer: which operating system, modules and programs it’s running.

Then it can cryptographically “sign” these observations, proving that they were made by a secure chip and not by something you could have modified. Then you can send this signed “attestation” to someone else, who can use it to determine how your computer is configured and thus whether to trust it. This is called “remote attestation.”

There are some cool things you can do with remote attestation: for example, two strangers playing a networked video game together can use attestations to make sure neither is running any cheat modules. Or you could require your cloud computing provider to use attestations that they aren’t stealing your data from the server you’re renting. Or if you suspect that your computer has been infected with malware, you can connect to someone else and send them an attestation that they can use to figure out whether you should trust it.

Today, there’s a cool remote attestation technology called “PrivacyPass” that replaces CAPTCHAs by having you prove to your own device that you are a human. When a server wants to make sure you’re a person, it sends a random number to your device, which signs that number along with its promise that it is acting on behalf of a human being, and sends it back. CAPTCHAs are all kinds of bad — bad for accessibility and privacy — and this is really great.

But the billions that have been thrown at remote attestation over the decades is only incidentally about solving CAPTCHAs or verifying your cloud server. The holy grail here is being able to make sure that you’re not running an ad-blocker. It’s being able to remotely verify that you haven’t disabled the bossware your employer requires. It’s the power to block someone from opening an Office365 doc with LibreOffice. It’s your boss’s ability to ensure that you haven’t modified your messaging client to disable disappearing messages before he sends you an auto-destructing memo ordering you to break the law.

And there’s a new remote attestation technology making the rounds: Google’s Web Environment Integrity, which will leverage Google’s dominance over browsers to allow websites to block users who run ad-blockers:

https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity

There’s plenty else WEI can do (it would make detecting ad-fraud much easier), but for every legitimate use, there are a hundred ways this could be abused. It’s a technology purpose-built to allow rent extraction by stripping us of our right to technological self-determination.

Releasing a technology like this into a world where companies are willing to make their products less reliable, less attractive, less safe and less resilient in pursuit of rents is incredibly reckless and shortsighted. You want unauthorized bread? This is how you get Unauthorized Bread:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/amp/

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

[Image ID: The interior of a luxury car. There is a dagger protruding from the steering wheel. The entertainment console has been replaced by the text 'You wouldn't download a car,' in MPAA scare-ad font. Outside of the windscreen looms the Matrix waterfall effect. Visible in the rear- and side-view mirror is the driver: the figure from Munch's 'Scream.' The screen behind the steering-wheel has been replaced by the menacing red eye of HAL9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.']

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

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