Nah. The enclosure of the commons and the proletarianization of the masses was bigger, but you're working on a solid second place.

Why would a fridge ever need firmware?

Only gets done once the recycling is cheaper than the mining and processing

HOA x FLOCK - The American Dream.

When you bought a music record I'm pretty sure you bought the record, not a license. "You are granted a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, and personal license to play or use the Software for your private, non-commercial use on the system or device it was intended for." I'm pretty sure that's not what you got when you bought a record. When you buy a record you have to abide by copyright law, yes, but beyond that, you can do whatever you want. Sell it, rent it out, lend it out fo free, give it away. You could make a personal copy to play on a tape machine. And the record company couldn't come take it away or alter it later.

There is no way around needing helium, but China will boost their own production in time and they have access to helium from Russia as well. Meanwhile, the reason they can move so fast is due to having a centrally planned system the west rejects. It's the same reason Russia is now outproducing all of NATO in terms of weapons and ammunition. The west is in no position to recreate the necessary supply chains. Rare earths alone is a perfect example. I wrote about the problem in detail here if you're interested. Even under the most aggressive diversification scenarios, China is expected to retain 80% of global refining capacity by 2040. And that's just one example. The west has very little leverage at this point. Also, as she correctly points out, China doesn't need to get to ASML levels to make these fabs useful. As long as they're better than the current ones, that already means China will be producing better domestic chips. And they're also innovating with architecture as well such as Huawei's tau law design which folds the chip and dramatically improves performance. All these things work together. Finally, China is aggressively pursuing alternative computing substrates and some are already starting to come online. This is a recent example. These kinds of things have the potential to leapfrog silicon chips entirely. There's nothing comparable happening in the west because you can't do these kinds of projects without massive amount of state funding and direction to sustain them until they become profitable on their own.