581–590 of 682 posts
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You think Chinese businesses aren’t in it for the profits?
In China the desire for profits serves the society. In the US the society serves the desire for profits.
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It's a cycle. The zeitgeist moves from communism to capitalism and vice-versa every 30 years or so.
The zeitgeist yes, but in terms of actual politics socialism nowadays is really a vague aspiration rather than any actual policies. Certainly here in the UK our Labour governments since the 90s have confined themselves to just tweaking the settings on the economy Maggie built in the 80s. I'm just about old enough to remember what actual socialist economic policies looked like.
It's impressive that somehow, as if by coincidence, we're seeing the biggest inflationary drivers for decades, perhaps for centuries, all happening simultaneously. The Iran war is spiking the price of oil and will likely cause shortages of pretty much everything if it isn't ended. The Ukraine war is helping with that by destroying Russian refining capacity. The memory shortage is set to do the same to consumer electr…
Amused by all the comments about optimisation. If anything the vibe coding era will lead to the opposite
I have a friend who is VP at a major telecom company. He has no technical experience but has been using Claude to create data analysis apps. He was complaining that it took three hours to process certain datasets, so I took a look. He had Claude essentially create a 300MB json file and was doing all of the data processing on that data directly. It never occurred to him, or Claude, that there were other ways to operat…
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> It's not, but if the existence of billionaires correlates strongly with an increase in the median standard of living, I'm all for it. Great, but it doesn't. The gap between the poor and the wealthy has only grown in the US, especially since Reagan's "trickle down" economics. https://www.statista.com/chart/35953/inequality-wealth-gap-u... The accusations against the working poor of "envy" are a barbaric slur. People…
But, again, the gap between the poor and the wealthy is irrelevant. Income inequality doesn't describe what's best for the most. If more income inequality produces a better outcome for the majority, it becomes very difficult to argue income inequality is, itself, bad. While the GINI index has certainly increased over the last fifty years in the US, real median household income and real personal consumption expenditur…
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And yet many in capitalist society lived and still live in abject poverty, despite the fact that there are enough resources so that no one should be left wanting. Nevertheless, you've somehow convinced yourself that those people either (a) don't matter, (b) deserve it, or (c) can't be helped. If the goal is to reduce poverty, I fail to see how the existence of billionaires is a positive outcome, either now, in the fo…
But not all "capitalist" societies have the same percentage in "abject poverty". So that makes me think that capitalism by itself is not the only major determinant of some of the bad things that we see, but rather the lack of interest and of focus to fix actual issues. Many societies can learn from others and improve their situation. Note: and many, if not most actually do, check : https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/…
You're so close. The only missing connection is the realization that billionaires exercise outsize influence, and will affect government policy to help themselves, not the poor. The only way for the poor to not have their voice silenced by the rich is to reduce the rich.
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Every socialist tries to make this distinction and falls to their own guillotine. You do realize that "substitute with" is merely a synonym for "exchange"? The exchange of labor, to be sure, has existed nearly as long as civilization itself, perhaps longer, as all people cooperate by exchange through the division of labor right down to the family, and it is exchange whether the articles to be exchanged are money or p…
This argument does not make any sense. I have no problem with the concept of money. Commerce always the exchange of good and services, including on a symbolic level: as you point out, affection, money, etc. "Money" is not the distinguishing factor between commerce and capitalism. At the risk of repeating myself: the distinction is how wealth is acquired. Capitalism allows one to acquire wealth merely by possessing ca…
The distinction between capitalism and earlier forms of production is that money provides a means to index the yield of assets by capitalizing the value of those assets. The ability to quantitatively track the yield provides the ability to determine whether you are able to replace the asset or if you are consuming it. Accumulation can be planned by resolving to consume less than the yield of the asset. Capital and capital accounting, too, has existed nearly as long as civilization has existed. But the cause of the yield is in principle no different from the yield of resources in pre-history, which is refraining from consuming more than you produce. What is unique is the ability to determine the economic yield of things quantitatively, not procedure by which wealth accumulates.
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Ah yes, the famous "trickle down" economy of Reaganomics. If only we had more billionaires, then I'm sure I'd be able to afford to get my car fixed. Unfortunately, this economic model has been proven to be wrong. If it were true, then we would have seen a decreasing gap between the rich and the poor. We didn't. https://www.statista.com/chart/35953/inequality-wealth-gap-u... https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2…
> Unfortunately, this economic model has been proven to be wrong. As I've mentioned several times now, the growth of the wealthy in the 19th century corresponded with the movement of the poor into the middle class. > If it were true, then we would have seen a decreasing gap between the rich and the poor. What matters is the state of the poor, not the gap between rich and poor. Musk's wealth, for example, has no effec…
Yes you keep on mentioning that, but I don't know why. Correlation is not causation. You haven't even proposed a mechanism of causality.
> What matters is the state of the poor, not the gap between rich and poor.
You keep on repeating that, and you keep on being wrong. You are parroting billionaire propaganda in the hopes of making people ignore injustice. In reality, in the US, living standards are falling for most people, while Elon Musk has no rational reason for possessing so much wealth.
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Elon Musk is a great example. These days, he mostly writes racist tweets, pretends to play video games, consolidates his own businesses to increase his own apparent net worth, and undermines the federal government.
May I remind you of your post I was replying to: > He provides literally no service to anyone at all, but makes more money than any employee. He then uses his profits to buy homes in the area, so his employees can pay back half of their paycheck to him in the form of rent.
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Why should society care about people making profits? Society would greatly benefit from cheap abundant ram than FAANG shares going up. I'm kinda sick about only caring that some billionaire makes more money and would rather you know... actually improve conditions to better society. This is why China is eating the West. Quite easy to start an electronics company when you have such an abundance of suppliers, compare th…
I own FAANG stock because I own the S&P 500 in my retirement accounts, and so do managed pension funds. There's a lot more than billionaires who benefit from FAANG shares going up in value.
What a great economic system with great morals that create moral societies.