371–380 of 582 posts
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If they're literally at the point of starvation, maybe true - though famines often happen when people simply can't get access to food, even if they have the resources to buy it. So, bringing food to a starving area is unlikely to be bad for business. However, the more important point is that you can surely make money off of people by becoming their only source of food/money - i.e. they would starve without you, so th…
> the more important point is that you can surely make money off of people by becoming their only source of food/money If you the only source, there is a reason for that, usually because you are shooting people who try to leave. I'll cite a counter for you. The US was the first country in the world to eliminate the specter of famine (around 1800). Free labor was the distinguishing ingredient, not slave labor. (The sl…
You've reduced slavery to a parenthetical. Where do you think the cotton and tobacco went? Where do you think the money came from? Where do you think it got spent?
https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/8/16/20806069/slavery-ec...
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The neato thing about free markets is in order to make more money you have to please other people so those people will freely give you their money.
That works until you capture the market. That's the entire phenomenon aroind the poorly named "enshittification". Companies have in fact figured you can be too big to fail and wait until they get their to no longer "please other people" and squeeze them. Or at least, get away with otherwise company killing moves for years longer than they should.
Yet it faded away into irrelevance.
Plenty of other examples.
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Why should we turn information into a "product", introducing scarcity where none is required? It's just a misguided attempted to force every part of society into a capitalist system, regardless of whether it makes any sense. It will probably fail in the long run anyway, since who wants to pay for something that they can get for free, even it involves circumventing the rules. How many here would pay $30 to take a casu…
All information is freely available somewhere in /dev/random. It is worth some value to share the more interesting offsets. Now I'm not saying that capitalism is the best way to distribute this value, but at least some effort is required in curating all knowledge.
That's like saying f(x)=x is a random function, if x is random.
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> If Star Trek Replicators were invented today, we're so stupid we'd outlaw them. You're so optimistic to think the law would even be this fair. More like limit access to corporations as "the only custodians responsible enough to wield them", while still allowing the developing world to starve and further increasing their profit margins simultaneously to decreasing working wages and employment levels.
You cannot make money off of people who are starving.
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Spotify has a free tier where you can listen to any song for free. YouTube lets you watch almost anything for free. Both of these also pay the creators . There are many more services peddling free content and even covering hosting costs. Libraries are free . We have plenty of completely non-hypothetical non-society-overhauling ways to access information for free. Lots of information is free, lots of it is accessible.…
You're comparing to the free tiers of Spotify and Youtube, which in effect is saying that we should put ads into our books.
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Why should we turn information into a "product", introducing scarcity where none is required? It's just a misguided attempted to force every part of society into a capitalist system, regardless of whether it makes any sense. It will probably fail in the long run anyway, since who wants to pay for something that they can get for free, even it involves circumventing the rules. How many here would pay $30 to take a casu…
>Why should we turn information into a "product", introducing scarcity where none is required Because expert information comes from experts who are paid a lot to do stuff not involving the authoring of their ideas. And we need to incentivize them to get said valuable information. How many people here have some novel expertise in their fields? How many would help produce technical articles pro Bono? Or for pay but end…
Are we sure about this? It seems to me that a lot of those experts become experts despite the incentive structures that they are in. And, there are those to-be experts who had to quit, because they didn't have enough resources to fight the established “incentive” structures. Maybe if we could let people do what they could become an expert in, we would all be better off.
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> the more important point is that you can surely make money off of people by becoming their only source of food/money If you the only source, there is a reason for that, usually because you are shooting people who try to leave. I'll cite a counter for you. The US was the first country in the world to eliminate the specter of famine (around 1800). Free labor was the distinguishing ingredient, not slave labor. (The sl…
Slavery created the wealth that made industrialization in the north possible, and was the basis of the economic machine that you speak of. You've reduced slavery to a parenthetical. Where do you think the cotton and tobacco went? Where do you think the money came from? Where do you think it got spent? https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/8/16/20806069/slavery-ec...
The Rebel army was barefoot, because Southern industry could not even make shoes. The reason that Lee was in Gettysburg was to loot the shoe factory at nearby Harrisburg.
Where were the industries in the South? Where were the industries in South America? Why did the South secede to protect their economy from the North?
> was the basis of the economic machine that you speak of
The Civil War destroyed what there was of the Southern wealth, literally burning it to the ground.
"made the South its most prosperous region"
That's just nonsense. Take a look at contemporary photos and paintings of the North and South before 1865, and you'll see the stark difference in prosperity. Railroads latticed the North, far outstripping mileage in the South.
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The majority of the Chinese immigrants were male, many having left wives, mothers, sisters, daughters, and future spouses at home in China. Foreign miner taxes in California, often aimed squarely at Chinese immigrants, prevented them from staking mining claims, which in turn forced them to look for opportunities elsewhere. The CPRR hired an initial group of 50 Chinese workers that in short time dispelled the negative…
http://libraryweb.uchastings.edu/library/research/special-co...
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But it's not hectoring (and was not intended to be rude). Authors build things. Just like people who build companies, houses, inventions, etc. There are a lot of theories of how ownership happen, but many (at least in the US and Europe) come from some for of the labor theory of ownership. We own the things we put labor into and create. Unless you have a competing theory of ownership that explains why other assets can…
If I build a house and you build a house and we exchange houses, both of us end up with exactly one house each. If I have an idea and you have an idea and we exchange ideas, both of us end up with two ideas each. There may be labour in both but there's a fundamental difference between physical property and intellectual property.