“‘This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing Government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.’ Abraham Lincoln”

This makes logical sense, but I don’t buy it in practice. Most of the heavy data reads are handled by databases, which do optimize for this stuff. I just doubt that, in most software, a significant amount of software performance issues are a result of poor memory alignment of data structures.

We’re moving to a world where every program is containerized or sandboxed. There is no more real “sharing” of libraries, everything gets “statically linked” in a Docker image anyway.

You can glean information about your competitors’ usage and advertising, which can help you optimize your own app’s advertising spend.

Many utilities give an 8-9% interest rate on bonds, with very little risk (Comcast isn't going bankrupt soon). That said, there's no such thing as zero-risk arbitrage.

Inequality leads to power centers. Power centers lead to systemic corruption. Systemic corruption is a problem.

So yes, extreme inequality is itself a problem.

The situation is clearly far worse than what you suggest. Back in the 1990s and early 2000s, apparent computer performance was doubling roughly every two years. Your shiny new desktop was obsolete in 24 months.

Today, we're lucky to get a 15% gain in two years. The "one-trick ponies" help narrow the "apparent performance" gap, but by definition, are implemented out of desperation. They aren't enough to keep Moore's law alive (it's already dead), and their very existence is evidence of the death of Moore's law.

Before we thank ourselves for all the lives we "saved", we should remember all of those that died in the name of an unnecessary exercise in human greed and cruelty.

The performance gains from Moore's law have typically come from shrinking die size. That has ended, you can't juice more performance from general purpose CPUs. If general purpose processors no longer advance quickly enough, the only way to get performance gains is to build custom chips for common specific tasks. That's what we're seeing now with the M1. The M1 buys us a few more years of exponential-appearing performance gains, but it's a one-trick pony. You can turn code into an ASIC once, but after that, your performance is at the mercy of the foundry and physics.

The death of Moore's law has many consequences, the rise of ASICs and custom co-processor chips is just one of them.