I just tested my favourite cloudflare-blocked site and it still hangs on "verifying the security of your connection" in my figerprinting-resistant browser profile.
It appears that the other guy didn't call you a fanboy. He implied that you might be a troll, before you'd listed that software and after you'd called him a fanboy.
But yeah, it'll probably be a while before there's a Linux version of Adobe Illustrator, and the alternatives are different enough that it'd be a lot of work to switch even if it's otherwise practicable.
Is this perhaps part of the reason for some big price increases in recent months? They were preparing to "freeze" the price there for a while so that the government can claim victory?
Professor Geist is basically right about such things as usual, but I hope for the sake of us all that he does save some of his strength for honest reporting on whatever happens next in this story and doesn't burn himself out picking fights on fucking twitter.
I'm not saying it doesn't get a lot of shout outs, but it could always do with one more. I think the last time I used it was to automate the editing of config files on some antiquated telephony system by piping ed commands through netcat. There remains a chance that I might live long enough to find some excuse to use it again.
Indeed, I am convinced of it. Thanks to everyone who took the trouble to help fill in my ignorance there. It was a pleasure being your crazy person on the internet for the day.
I dunno, maybe they changed the terminology since I took it. Seems to me "free market" was not previously imbued with all that meaning you guys are reading into it. I'm not convinced it isn't just an Americanism. To me a "free market" is simply one that's substantially free of distortion, resembling to a notable extent a perfect market. But I'll certainly avoid the phrase in future.
You do have to figure though, that it’s only the most active users who will opt to pay $14/month
I'd say it's more likely to be the most wealthy users who will pay the $14, and it seems plausible that the most devoted facebook users might care less about avoiding the ads than people who are there only reluctantly. So maybe slightly closer to the middle of that 11% to 342% range.
If it involves "an oligopoly, a cartel, or a monopoly" then it is not a "free market" according to what they taught me in econ 101, everything convincing that I've heard since, and what Adam Smith explicitly wrote down when he first described the idea. Wikipedia cites Karl Popper in saying that in classical economics a free market is one that's "free from all forms of economic privilege, monopolies and artificial scarcities," and that it's a market in which economic rents are minimised. A monopoly is by definition antithetical to a free market. Any neoliberal suggestions that attacking the whole concept of public regulation of markets will always make them more free are simply lies, and should not be accepted.
That there is at present little or nothing preventing any imperfectly but approximately free markets that might otherwise exist devolving into less free ones dominated by monopolies, cartels, corrupt and captured regulators, out-of-control rent seeking, frauds that rely on information asymmetry, and other such perversions is (obviously, I thought) the reason why I've been consistently saying that "free" markets are not something we see much of in reality. Perhaps that's not exactly congruent with Marxism, but I don't think it's inconsistent with it either.
The free market is an abstract concept, one which rarely exists in anything like its ideal form due to its instability under current conditions of capitalist development. The original definition given by classical economics is still the prevalent one. Despite what slogans from some proponents of capitalism would have you believe, not only are free markets not identical with it, but capitalism tends to take markets further and further from anything resembling their theoretically ideal state of freedom.
A "free market" as the term is usually understood is a well-defined thing, which of course has many problems and failure modes, but is not well-represented by a market dominated by a large cartel routinely controlling prices. It is also not the same thing as capitalism.
I just tested my favourite cloudflare-blocked site and it still hangs on "verifying the security of your connection" in my figerprinting-resistant browser profile.