The thing is they tend to only do that when they can get a technological competitive advantage. The priority access gives them a locked in competitive edge, for a while. It’s not clear there is an opportunity like that in memory.

What's usually happening here is that property is being misinterpreted as meaning something like object, but it just refers to a right of ownership which can be of objects.

Siri is basically unchanged, it looks like they have had serious problems getting LLMs, or generative AI in general to be reliable and 'safe' enough to put their own name on it. By 'safe' I mean thinks like not generating emails based on Mein Kampf, or doodles of genitals, or hallucinating false 'facts'.

Not a concern for many of the frontier AI providers with no reputation to burn, but not exactly on-brand for Apple. I very much doubt Jobs would have viewed that differently.

Things that are paid for by economic surpluses. No profits, no investment, no taxes.

It's very much a matter of balance, you're not wrong that those services you mention are vital as are many others generally provided by governments. However it's all funded by a dynamic efficient economy.

The question of private wealth is the hardest, but private wealth by itself isn't a problem. The question there is, who should own and run productive economic activity. If it's not the state, it's private individuals. The wealth of billionaire industrialists doesn't consist of one big pile of money they wallow in, like Scrooge McDuck. It consists of their ownership and control of companies that do things in the economy.

Taking away that wealth means taking away those companies, and doing what with them? if you sell them to other private individuals, now they own and run those companies. If you can just take companies away from people like that, why would anyone build or buy them? If you take the companies into public ownership, now they're run by civil servants and politicians, but you'd have to pay for the companies, right? If you just seize assets, nobody is going to invest in anything that can be seized.

I do think inequality is a growing problem, but there are no easy answers.

The solution to threats to global economic integration is to address the threats to global economic integration. It's not to cannibalise our own full-employment high value economies, by diverting enormous capital and labour into duplicating vast swathes of lower value jobs we don't actually have the work force for anyway, just so we can pay unaffordable prices for the resulting goods.

We probably both agree it's an absurd fantasy, and the people trying to make stuff like this happen are implementing policies that ensure that it won't, such as putting tariffs on the inputs they need to build out this domestic manufacturing capacity in the first place.

Vila was the most relatable character though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pick_operating_system

My first actual job was working for a local health authority here in the UK, and they had a Pick computer running some database application thing, I think to do with accounting. I had to run the backups. Sorry to be a whinger, I don't mean to belittle the monumental amount of work.