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You could lay out a relatively small amount of capital, hire a software engineering team, and build a wildly successful business that challenged existing industry titans in relatively short order. That expectation still forms the foundation for much of our industry. The decade of low interest rates and cheap money allowed us to put off critical reexamining those narratives.
Software and Its Discontents, Part 3: Rising Cost and Elusive Success
laughingmeme.org
The introduction of fiber optics in the 1980s would advance the industry to a new level of transmission capacity, allowing us to carry more channels more cheaply. Fiber optics are glass wires the thickness of a strand of human hair, with hundreds of times the capacity of coaxial cable, less susceptible to interference, and the signals—light vs. electricity—can travel faster, longer, up to fifty miles or more before they begin to degrade. Fiber optics could eliminate signal interference and the need for amplifiers and filters.
Born to Be Wired
John Malone
Marx understood the dangers of a capitalist Serrata—indeed he was counting on it. “The capitalist system carries within itself the seeds of its own destruction,” he famously argued. Marx predicted that the rising capitalist class, like the shortsighted Venetian elite, would overreach itself and create a system that so effectively consolidated its supremacy that it would eventually choke off economic growth and become politically unsustainable.
Plutocrats
Chrystia Freeland
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