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Is everything an MLM

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Re: Is everything an MLM

#191

Post by zdragnar »

cheerlessbog wrote: post #110
seibelj wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you suggesting it's better to ban individual choice because of the existence of landfills and climate change? The market could effectively and efficiently price those into products, if society would pass a law.

No. Did I say that? I like living in a predominantly capitalist society. I would like us to pay more attention to the consequences of consumption. One way to do that is to build it into prices (such as a carbon tax, or upstreaming disposal cost) or by regulation. Building cost into price is actually a very capitalist and arguably libertarian approach as it enables the market to reallocate resources to minimize what w…

Disposal already costs; either you pay directly, through taxes if your local municipality organizes it, or your rent if your property owner organizes it.

The cost of disposal varies by where it is disposed, not where it is purchased or made. It makes no sense to add an arbitrary cost to a product when the receiver of that money is not the one dealing with the externality in the first place.

The same goes for carbon emissions; a properly managed landfill that captures released methane is in fact a method of carbon sequestration. Adding a carbon tax would merely create a new slush fund or dump into an existing one.

Re: Is everything an MLM

#192

Post by varjag »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #175
sverige wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So far, all of the experiments to make everyone equal have resulted in soviet-style housing for the many and well-appointed dachas for the few -- and that's at best. I'm doubtful that future experiments will have a different result.

Kibbutz are pretty egalitarian. The New Testament describes the early Christians as living with everything in common ownership. Not every attempt to be equally valued has resulted in the disparities you suggest. The problem is top-down vs bottom-up ... eg https://www.quora.com/How-did-Karl-Marx-define-socialism/ans... . Genuine question, which bits of the Soviet projects were targetting making everyone equal -- all I…

> which bits of the Soviet projects were targetting making everyone equal

Private property of means of production and accumulation of capital were outlawed. It was the best attempt to follow Marx tenets.

> It strikes me that in all cases a portion of society wanted to impose communism, those who didn't want to give up their supremacy (of power or wealth) perverted that system.

No. The latter were massacred in 1918. Then the remaining ones executed and sent each other to GuLAGs in several waves. Separation of wealth (even if minuscule on the scale of developed capitalism) appears to be an emergent property.

Re: Is everything an MLM

#193

Post by qwerty456127 »

> The yoga teacher recruitment model is strikingly similar to an MLM (Multi Level Marketing scheme; think Avon and Amway

Whatever a business model there is, there is a difference: yoga is a real thing that actually improves your health, beauty and psyche you actually get with you wherever you go while the most of the other MLM projects are consumerist bullshit.

Re: Is everything an MLM

#194

Post by petra »

seibelj wrote: post #169
petra wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> A government bureaucrat managing the country’s only deodorant factory could never possibly match the range of options and preferences that the market has provided me. There aren't only two options - the free market, or soviet russia. there are many more.

I would argue that preventing an individual from creating a new deodorant (or any typical consumer product) because "there is already enough of them" is a defining philosophical difference - either you are for freedom, or you are for collective coercion. In my opinion, there are never enough deodorant brands. If a new entrant wants to make a new product, it will succeed or fail. It may compete on price or quality, it…

>> either you are for freedom, or you are for collective coercion.

Strong words. I'm somewhere in the middle. i'm not offering to send anybody to any Gulag. But taxing some useless products ? or structuring market competition towards real benefits and not bullshit ? sure.

Re: Is everything an MLM

#195

Post by AnthonyMouse »

sametmax wrote: post #186
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Suppose I'm a plumber and you're an electrician. You need your pipes fixed, so you pay me $100. I need my wires fixed, so I pay you $100. At the end we both have the same amount of money we started with, but now your pipes are fixed and my wires are fixed. You come out ahead as long as the value of the thing you paid for is worth more to you than what you paid for it. And if it isn't then why did you pay that much fo…

This is the regular economy, which is not the topic of this thread. We are talking about wealthy people becoming rich without contributing. Renting has diminushing return for the society. Some things like automatic trading have none.

But that's even better, right? If I pay you $500 for an iPhone, I get an iPhone. If you take that money and spend it, it's "the regular economy" again, and I have to provide whatever you bought. If you don't spend the money then I don't have to give you anything, but I still got an iPhone.

The real problem with this is that then I have to borrow money to buy the iPhone but there is no way for me to ever pay it back, because you never spend the money I borrowed so there is no way for me to end up with it again, meanwhile I'm paying interest on it. So everybody's got a mortgage payment when they should already own their homes.

But this isn't capitalism causing this, it's bad laws. Nobody wants to sell you an iPhone so that Apple will have more money -- they want dividends. Until you tell them that leaving the money inside the company (where it collects interest) results in no taxes but if it's given to the investor to spend or reinvest then the government will be having >40% of it up front. So they take their money as share price appreciation instead. Worse than dividends, but not 40% worse.

That causes capital to accumulate inside corporations, which they then use to buy each other, because what else are they going to do with it? So we get megacorps, which then destroy small businesses and corrupt governments and do evil. Because we tax investing the profits of an existing corporation in a new one, when that's the thing that we need to happen to reduce wealth inequality.

Re: Is everything an MLM

#196

Post by jfk13 »

seibelj wrote: post #68
bluetomcat wrote: post #53

Most of the economy in the so called "developed countries" is nowadays a zero-sum game between winners and losers. Seen from a macro perspective, it resembles a multi-agent system where independent agents compete to provide inessential products and services in exchange for being able to afford basic necessities like housing, food and child care. The finite resource that such companies are fighting for is people's att…

I’m sorry that this is your world view, because it is deeply flawed and focusing on such cynicism leads to depression. Most of HN lives in a tech bubble where everyone is focused on building semi-useless software like you describe. However the majority of society still does “normal” things like construction, manufacturing, sales, etc. and some sort of fundamental reorganizing of society on non-market principles doesn…

> the better it is for everyone as more money moves around

It's not obvious (to me, at least) that more money moving around is inherently a good thing. Money may be moving around in relation to activities that make the world a worse place overall.

Re: Is everything an MLM

#197

Post by atoav »

throwawaytoday5 wrote: post #145
njepa wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is less "real-world markets" and just markets. Markets are one dollar one vote.

If one dollar equal one vote, you can't honestly say markets are free because by design they favor those with wealth and power. There is nothing "free" about a system that favors the wealthy.

Except if you are wealthy, or at least a momentarily embarrassed bilionaire that soon expecta wealth and fortune

Re: Is everything an MLM

#198

Post by jacobwilliamroy »

tomc1985 wrote: post #189
seibelj wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m sorry that this is your world view, because it is deeply flawed and focusing on such cynicism leads to depression. Most of HN lives in a tech bubble where everyone is focused on building semi-useless software like you describe. However the majority of society still does “normal” things like construction, manufacturing, sales, etc. and some sort of fundamental reorganizing of society on non-market principles doesn…

> It’s not on someone else to tell me what I should and should not want. If I desire it and a company provides it for a price, it doesn’t matter that the smart refrigerator is a waste in your vision. The market demands, and entrepreneurs provide. There needs to be a middle ground between; "the market demands and enterpreneurs provide" means that things society needs don't get done, because there is only incentive to…

I think the hardest part of doing democratic socialism is measuring labor. I think that time is a fine unit of measure but I have no data to back that thought up.

Everything else about democratic socialism is much easier now in the 21st century. Chile had a computer planned economy in the 1970s that was literally just a bunch of telex machines in factories around the nation talking to a central mainframe in the capital.

Also, I think democratic socialism can work on levels other than the national one. Like, neighborhood or town scale. To be embedded in the U.S., such a community would need a to produce some kind of surplus which could entice the neighbors to integrate into the democratic socialist system.

Re: Is everything an MLM

#199

Post by ci5er »

tomc1985 wrote: post #189
seibelj wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m sorry that this is your world view, because it is deeply flawed and focusing on such cynicism leads to depression. Most of HN lives in a tech bubble where everyone is focused on building semi-useless software like you describe. However the majority of society still does “normal” things like construction, manufacturing, sales, etc. and some sort of fundamental reorganizing of society on non-market principles doesn…

> It’s not on someone else to tell me what I should and should not want. If I desire it and a company provides it for a price, it doesn’t matter that the smart refrigerator is a waste in your vision. The market demands, and entrepreneurs provide. There needs to be a middle ground between; "the market demands and enterpreneurs provide" means that things society needs don't get done, because there is only incentive to…

If that's what people (that are not you) wanted, then it would happen.

You could, of course, use political means to force people to fund your preferences, but that kind of a sucky move, don't you think?

Re: Is everything an MLM

#200

Post by teucris »

zdragnar wrote: post #191
cheerlessbog wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Did I say that? I like living in a predominantly capitalist society. I would like us to pay more attention to the consequences of consumption. One way to do that is to build it into prices (such as a carbon tax, or upstreaming disposal cost) or by regulation. Building cost into price is actually a very capitalist and arguably libertarian approach as it enables the market to reallocate resources to minimize what w…

Disposal already costs; either you pay directly, through taxes if your local municipality organizes it, or your rent if your property owner organizes it. The cost of disposal varies by where it is disposed, not where it is purchased or made. It makes no sense to add an arbitrary cost to a product when the receiver of that money is not the one dealing with the externality in the first place. The same goes for carbon e…

Except that disposal costs are highly distorted - depending on where you are, it’s much cheaper than it should be because of cheap land for landfills, cheap shipping to shift the problem away, etc.

Proposals to add cost to disposal are meant to correct for these distortions - to really represent the collective cost to the world. This absolutely should not be done arbitrarily - massive, ongoing research should be done to ensure its correcting for these distortions appropriately. Rinse and repeat for fossil fuels.

BTW, a methane-capturing landfill is, at best, carbon neutral, not sequestering.

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