Ed Zitron must be salivating right now

In 2002, the United States Department of Justice began a probe into the activities of dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) manufacturers in response to complaints by US computer makers, including Dell and Gateway. The computer makers said that inflated DRAM pricing was causing them lost profits and hindering their effectiveness in the marketplace, in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act.

To date, five manufacturers have pleaded guilty to their involvement in an international price-fixing conspiracy between July 1, 1998, and June 15, 2002, including Hynix, Infineon, Micron Technology, Samsung, and Elpida.

They have also plead guilty to price fixing. Device information

Consent has been dead on the internet and in tech for a long time. We have only recently begun clawing it back piecemeal through laws like GDPR.

However, anything and everything that is not bolted down will be tracked/captured/abused and sold to pad margins. As we have seen with the recent LG tv scandal, data protection laws don’t even make a dent, because these companies don’t care about informed consent at all. They will lie omit, steal borrow and cheat bend the rules to maximize profit from the minimum of consent required by law.

To me it always sounded like victim blaming TBH. Some poor people don’t deserve to be helped, so us effective altruists (who do things to make people poorer) will weigh their souls and help those who want to be helped.

Menace in the middle

IMO this should be the case for everything developed using public money, looking at you, pharmaceutical companies…