331–340 of 368 posts
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> Zen doublethink facepalm
Doublethink being the act of simultaneously knowing something to be false while believing it to be true, and "Zen" here being a state of inner piece. So "Zen doublethink" would be choosing to believe something that you know isn't true for the sake of inner peace.
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I used to think that, but over the years, in my cohort, the same group of people oppose any measures at wealth redistribution or anything that helps people who sell their labor. Removing tax advantages of healthcare from employers? Oppose. Removing exempt status or even raising the minimum salary under which an employer has to pay overtime? Oppose. Lowering the cost of education? Oppose. Parental or sick leave? Oppos…
The examples you gave originally (UBI, healthcare for all, etc.) are totally different than the ones you listed here, which are much more tightly scoped. Edit: I'm not supportive of the first group because the policies as stated are wishes, not actual policies. For example, any real healthcare for all solution has to have a plan for dealing with the millions of people who are employed by the current healthcare system…
The big ideas seem like wishes, but I think it’s completely doable. But a sizeable portion of the population opposes even the baby steps I listed, and I can’t deduce any reason other than they like to imagine themselves in the owner class and want to keep down labor.
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> And now the socialists are saying that I won't own that. Dude, the cold war is over, the communists are gone, noone is coming for your code. Every half-sensible discussion of modern socialism is not about taking away all of your stuff. I am really tired of this bait and switch social democracy for communism. Einstein, Heinzenberg and many other scientists have advanced the whole human race, but you can't have IP on…
> Dude, the cold war is over, the communists are gone Correct, that is kind of my point. Socialists and communists are becoming more and more irrelevant in the modern era. That does not change the definition of what "The means of production" are though. I am not too worried about socialists taking over. They lost, and aren't going to take back the means of production from anyone. > is not about taking away all of you…
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All things automation. Really a chainsaw is automation, and so is a compressor. Automation is a pen. They all remove work and increase efficiency. There are lots of examples which don't really count though, such as self-checkout, which have exactly the same amount of work left, only who works it is a different person.
A chainsaw, compressor or pen are examples of mechanisation, not automation. They replace part of the human effort needed for a job, making the remaining human effort even more valuable. Automation fully replaces human work for a given job. It's a difference in kind. However, automation may replace only some jobs in a value chain, making the remaining ones even more productive and valuable. A fully automated value ch…
See here for a discussion: https://economics.stackexchange.com/questions/18079/labour-s...
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> I want an economy where we can celebrate automation and distribute the profits evenly. In such an economy there's no incentive to work on further automation. In particular if there's a part of world where profits aren't distributed evenly - the innovation and manufacturing will move there.
You'll eventually get someone that improves it for its own sake and wants to learn for the sake of learning.
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"I'd have spent that time working on some of the ideas I had for software projects instead." Then this takes off, makes you money, and you are higher class than those who keep their skills "for fun" EDIT: Not sure if this was understood, this was meant on a commentary on how capitalism and class can find its why back into such a system
Given the idea I had at the time, probably not. But I'd like to think it would have enriched the lives of myself and others, all the same. In broad strokes, I'm more capitalist than communist, so I don't really disagree with the whole "greed is good" thing. Where I part ways is the unstated - often, I suspect, un-recognized - premise that it's the only good. Money's only useful for what it can buy, and its value has…
That's a good point. And makes me think of videogames analogy, particularly MMORPG.
In a typical MMO, you need to labor to earn money (known as "grinding") to buy all the stuff you'll need to make progress easier (and/or possible). But at any time, you can just stop, take time off, go explore the places you've been to (i.e. not containing enemies stronger than you can beat), or even just log out and leave your character be for a week. You lose nothing except time and perhaps your rank in some completely optional competition with other players. But your character won't go hungry, won't starve or freeze to death, won't be evicted for not paying taxes.
That illustrates the difference between money being useful, versus being necessary. And even if it's only useful and not necessary, that doesn't mean you won't be motivated to earn it - you will want more money if the things you can buy with it are interesting enough.
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Unearned income is unfulfilling and the people who think they earned it resent it being taken from them, even if it's only particularly large because there's a big market to sell into and a big winner effect in the market structure. I don't know the answers here but they don't look like free market capitalism or redistributive socialist utopia, and actually I think this axis or spectrum is an actively harmful frame f…
Tangential note - I've always found the idiom "job creation" weird and illogical. It seems to be US specific AFAIK. You don't create anything when you decide to exchange money for labor.
In the end, the number of actual jobs available is very limited, and it's not so illogical to call the act of making such money/labor exchange possible as "job creation".
Yet automation equipment has boomed in the last 20 years. Factory floors are largely devoid of human beings. The US factory employment figures are down by more than half in that time, and that with a population that's doubled (so per-capita, factory occupations down to 25% or less or what it was). Companies move to India or China, then some move back but with none of the assembly jobs, because they don't move back un…
Exactly. Its impact has been limited to areas where there is repetitive work on standardised, clean objects[1], in standardised environments, in product lines where volumes are sufficient to justify the investment in machinery.
> Yet automation equipment has boomed in the last 20 years.
Yes it has. The size of the needed investment has gone down a lot in activities where automation is feasible.
But manufacturing has been a minor part of the US economy for more than 30 years, and its share is getting smaller. "Services" is over 80 percent. Advertising, making movies, sports, construction... zillions of different things.
[1] If any manufacturing work should be automated, it's meat packing. Unpleasant, boring work that gives you carpal tunnel syndrome and other joint and tendon injuries. Plants are always short of workers and absenteeism is rife because of the nature of the job.
But automation is impossible, because animals are not standardised enough. Putting that another way: because machine vision is still so ludicrously bad. And so is the state of robotics.
An independent line of evidence looks at the formation of new occupations over time. If automation were taking over jobs, or jobs were being refactored because some tasks are automated, then we'd expect to see new job titles appearing in employment advertising and classifications such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics's. This does happen, as it has happened since the start of the Industrial Revolution. "Social Media…
> then we'd expect to see new job titles appearing Not at all! If we replaced all accountants with software, no new jobs title would appear. If anything, they would Dissapear!
You'd need to automate Early Childhood teaching through to post-grad university student supervision to eliminate those jobs. Humans trust (make decisions based on) stories.
And in fact the most important part of what an accountant does is to convey stories. Software does all the rule-based stuff.
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> Or, as the socialists would call it, when they take control of "the means of production". > Which is just another way of saying that private businesses are illegal. No, it's not. Private businesses executed through private labor applied to public capital which the business rents from the state are perfectly compatible with socialism in which private ownership of the means of production is prohibited. It's true that…
> private ownership of the means of production is prohibited. This is a borderline semantic argument. There is very little difference between banning almost all private businesses, and banning all owenership of private capital. Everything that everyone does, relates to capital. If I write code, I just produced capital. And now the socialists are saying that I won't own that. Yes, code is capital. The value of almost…
There's no borderline, once the issue was raised of, to paraphrase “what does the term ‘socialism’ encompass”, the discussion was inherently one of semantics.
But that hardly invalidates a response once the term of the discussion are set.
> There is very little difference between banning almost all private businesses, and banning all owenership of private capital.
There's a very big difference, especially in the way socialists (who established the term) define “capital” (the definition is used in finance within capitalist societies is broader, expanding the original by metaphor, and useful for its purpose within capitalist societies, but it's not what socialists seek to abolisg. The socialist use is strictly limited to the physical, non-financial means of production.)
> Everything that everyone does, relates to capital. If I write code, I just produced capital.
No, you didn't, as socialists define the term (whether or not private ownership of IP is recognized—on which socialist preferences may vary—IP is not capital in the socialist sense, being decidedly non-physical.)
> As far as I am concerned, banning all private ownership of capital, is only very slightly different than banning private enterprise, given that the main function of many private enterprises is to create capital.
Again, no, what in capitalists societies are called “capital goods” are not capital in the socialist sense until and except as they are used as means of production. Socialism doesn't mean you can't own capital goods, it means you can't own those goods while renting labor to apply to them in the course of production (and many schools of socialism have a principled carve out for means of production to which the owners own labor exclusively is applied, the prohibition is most centrally about the separated relationship between labor and capital, which does not exist in that case.)
And this is all strict-sense socialism, which much modern developed-world socialism is decidedly not, being largely instead mixed economy ideology with a preference for more restraints on the power of capital owners over others in society than the dominant status quo in modern mixed economies. Your precious code and capital goods are even more safe there.