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Comment by ClumsyPilot | Hacker News Reader

This has nothing to do with politics, it's market segmentations and it's the job of MBA's and business leaders to do it coreectly.

The current situation demonstrates that the customer has no ability to negotiate product quality.

It's debatable if that's due to ignorance or the game is just so syacked against consumers

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To be pedant - this is HN after all - market segmentation is a business policy and relates to how a business is run. The word politics is used correctly here but in a somewhat old fashioned way. Policies would probably be more usual. Linus indeed bemoans that the industry is using ECC as a differentiating factor.

MBA culture is more group think than logical business strategies. They'll happily run businesses into the ground

market segmentation is entirely political

i.e. capitalism pays vendors extra to corrupt data and price discriminate for those who need protection from the protection racket

The market is always downstream from politics. Karl Marx famously used the term political economy to reference both political and economic forces, because neither is coherent without the other.

The term political economy far predates Marx. I've not heard of Marx famously using it, but I don't doubt he did use it since it was an established field of inquiry at the time--the predecessor to the modern field of economics.

“In the 21st century, Karl Marx is probably the most famous critic of political economy, with his three volume magnum opus Capital: A Critique of Political Economy as one of his most famous books.”

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Critique_of_political_economy

I'm not sure what this is supposed to show. Marx being famous for his critiques of political economy is not the same as Marx famously using the term political economy in a certain way.

Political economy as an area of inquiry took off in the late 18th century--in no small part due to Adam Smith--and was already very well established before Marx was born [1]. Absent evidence to the contrary it seems questionable to assert that Marx's use of the term was anything other than the common use of the time.

[1] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=political+econ...

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