Perfect symmetry in bargaining power is systematically impossible. Not having perfect symmetry does not mean its anti-competitive.

The facts are, most people don't mind software in their car an like live-updates.

And nothing about software in cars or cars is monopolistic in any way.

"It's not a complaint about water. It's a complaint about the wetness."

If capitalism requires constant vigilant government intervention to prevent monopolistic practices, anti-competitive markets, and asymmetric bargaining power, then it seems to me that this is absolutely a complaint about capitalism. If anything, your comment just makes the indictment more damning.

> The failure is in gov't making sure there's sufficient regulation to prevent monopolistic practises.

This may not be a problem inherent to capitalism, but it certainly is a problem caused by the capitalism we currently have (by which I'm specifically referring to the US, but it may apply more broadly elsewhere).

And the government's failure to adequately regulate the market is due to the right. The party that claims government doesn't work has repeatedly - for generations - run on this as their platform, and when in power, they ensure it doesn't work by continued regulatory capture and gutting of consumer protections.

> Criticising our entire economic system tends to have very little effect.

I think its actively counterproductive. Criticising the entire economic system doesn't do anything. Complaining in broad strokes about stuff you can't change reduces your sense of agency over the world.

Also, if people believe that businesses must be sociopathic, they will make sociopathic choices in business. The belief reinforces the problem.

I don't want my vehicle connected at all. It's an open invitation to privacy reducing tech and exploits.

I want OTA updates in my car, but I want just benign ones, which add features for free as the software improves.

This kind of attitude is like saying "I don't want software that updates on my PC" when you are actually complaining about SaaS products.

When you're fighting the same enemy on a dozen battlefields, you won't stand a chance of winning until you understand that fact and go after the root cause.

Then don't frame the argument as "over-the-air updates are bad because of capitalism".

I love the over the air updates of my car!

There is no such thing as a communist economy.

The economies of all countries that claimed to be socialist or communist were the extreme form of monopolistic capitalism.

Because nowadays the economy of USA resembles more and more every year to that of the socialist countries from the past, a non-negligible risk has appeared for the personal computer to become an endangered species.

The prices of personal computers and of their components have been increasing steadily during the last decade, long before the current wave of extreme price increases.

There is a steadily increasing pressure from big companies and from the governments controlled by them to eliminate true ownership of computers and of many other electronic devices, by introducing more and more restrictions for what owners can do with their PC/smartphone and by introducing more and more opportunities for others to control those devices remotely.

Many kinds of computing devices have eliminated their low-price models and they are offered now only in models so expensive as to be affordable only for big businesses, not for individuals or SMEs.

Ten years ago, I could still buy various kinds of professional GPUs with high FP64 throughput and any model of Intel Xeon server CPUs.

Nowadays I can choose to buy only high-end desktop CPUs for my servers, because the state-of-the-art server CPUs and datacenter GPUs now have 5-digit prices. NVIDIA, Intel and AMD see only big businesses as customers for such products, and they no longer offer any smaller SKUs in these categories (Intel nominally offers a few cheap Xeons, but those are so crippled that they are not worth for anything else but for enabling the testing of some server systems).

So in the kind of unregulated capitalism that exists today in USA, PCs would not have appeared and there is a risk for them to disappear, because they have become a relict of the past.