The Who Cares Era

This perfectly illustrates why I've always preferred working at startups over major corps including FAANG / MANGA.

There is a top down culture of not embracing mediocrity that genuinely makes me thrive at work. My current company has a good work life balance and if I make a point that some part of the system needs improvement, my voice actually gets heard. Only place I've seen where sprint retros actually made impact. Most of my friends have no work life balance and also don't have a voice when they see half-assed work.

The numbers showcase the effect of this as well. The startup has thrived even when VC's have tightened their purses.

> Yeas, that is exactly what I am saying. People with these qualities still receive certain advantages, but selection selection by these qualities does not happening as in other social systems.

Oh, well, I disagree, and the evidence supports my position. The people who capitalism has most rewarded are billionaires. Billionaires became as rich as they are through cynicism, cruelty, unscrupulousness, and deceitfulness. I challenge you to find me a billionaire without these qualities in spades.

I'm happy to hear arguments that other modes of economic organization may also reward these values if it makes you feel better, but I maintain my point that capitalism rewards them also. In comparison, gift economies reward the opposite values.

> Not universlly, and that's the problem.

I do agree that it's worth a hedge, however, it appears these values are as near-universal as is possible for humans. Every religion I've ever learned about teaches these lessons, Confucianism for the most part as well, we can read about these values in Plato, Aristotle, ancient Greek myths, ancient native american myths... certainly there are outlier cultures, but for these values to be an underlying current in so many cultures... what else could we call universal?

> . And you can ignore this fact and fall into slavery to the most cruel, deceitful and selfish people, or you can effectively protect yourself from such people with the help of capitalism.

But, under capitalism, the majority of people are wage enslaved. Certainly an improvement over chattel slavery, no arguments from me! However given that many forms of slavery persist in the capitalist world, including wage slavery, I don't agree that capitalism stops slavery. In fact totally unfettered capitalism would select for it. We saw this with factory towns. Why do you think capitalism prevents slavery?

> It's just that without capitalism, people with such qualities get everything, including other people as slaves.

I don't understand, are you talking about feudalism or something? I agree with you that feudal lords had many of these features, but feudalism even more than capitalism selected for orifice origin, so I don't think it really selected for much other than how long you could keep enemy states at bay and how long you could keep the peasants from revolting.

> The people who made the decisions to treat the workers poorly will not receive a single worker.

Why do Amazon warehouse workers work in such terrible conditions?

> Because there is competition for labor and because the worker has the freedom to decide where and how to work. This is why workers under capitalism get the best conditions among all social systems.

You genuinely believe working class people have freedom to decide where to work? Geographical limitations, background limitations, whether or not someone has any criminal record, there's so many reasons that many people are trapped in their jobs and can't really move. This is like the fundamental reason wages are allowed to be as low as they are today. It's flagrantly obvious there's today almost no worker freedom today.

> That is, through other non-capitalist mechanisms. The obvious problem of the lack of capitalism

Oh, an anarcho capitalist. https://c4ss.org/content/4043 Anarcho capitalism won't work.

I try not to think about it, but HZD (game) had the most believable take on the future.

AI war machines apocalypse - War machines that consume earth's sources to build drones and other war machines. There are autonomous supply chain of these to the war front, all managed by the AI.

They're unhackable, with the newest encryption that would take years to decrypt. Unfortunately, there is a bug in the production code that causes the AI to start targeting everything. AI starts killing all humans instead of the filters it was given.

How do you defeat an autonomous self-replenishing robot army that consumes the earth for energy and grows in size each day? You can't.

You're asking the right question but the answer isn't the Fed's money printer, it's the real economy's ability to back that money with actual productivity. Yes, an iPhone or Google search creates value but not all value is equal in monetary terms. The dollar's legitimacy hinges on scarcity and trust, not just raw economic output. If you could print money every time someone coded an app or assembled a gadget, Venezuela would be an economic superpower.

In a gold system you get rich by innovating, building, and trading. Not gaming financial systems. No Fed to bail out failed banks or corrupt hedge funds. Modern "hoarders" thrive because JP Morgan can lose billions, then get free Fed loans. Tech CEOs pump stock prices with buybacks, not R&D. Politicians borrow trillions, stick taxpayers with the bill. Under gold, these parasites starve. Gold forces all wealth to prove its worth in the free market.

The #1 driver of modern wealth inequality is fiat-fueled asset inflation. The rich own stocks, real estate, and hard assets, which soar as money is printed. The poor own cash and labor, which get crushed.

Hard money (gold) forces productive capitalism. Easy money (fiat) breeds crony oligarchy. The fear that gold leads to wealth hoarding is a myth. In reality, gold has built-in discipline mechanisms that punish idle capital and force productive use of wealth. The exact opposite of today's fiat-driven oligarchy.

Unlike fiat currency (which rots at 2-10% yearly inflation), gold appreciates in purchasing power over time as the economy grows (real deflation). Hoarding cash results in wealth growth, so saving is rewarded. But unproductive hoarding carries an opportunity cost because gold doesn't pay interest or dividends.

The wealthy can't just sit on mountains of gold. They must invest it to earn returns, fueling productive enterprise. In 19th-century Britain, capital flooded into railroads, factories, and infrastructure, not Wall Street derivatives.

Compare that to today's fiat hellscape where the rich park wealth in low-yield bonds, speculative bubbles, or offshore tax havens and central banks bail out hoarders (2008 bank rescues, 2020 PPP "loans" for billionaires).

Under fiat regimes, the politically connected get new money first (banks, corporations, government contractors) before inflation hits the working class. Gold eliminates this. No central bank can create gold out of thin air to enrich cronies. All wealth accumulation must come from actual production. No Fed-backed stock buybacks or real estate bubbles. No "passive income aristocracy" living off monetary inflation. Capital flows to useful ventures (factories, tech, agriculture), not unproductive asset-stripping.

Under gold, interest rates are set by real savings, not central planners. This means that reckless spending gets punished and long-term investing gets rewarded. If the rich hoard gold without investing, interest rates naturally rise (less gold available for loans), forcing them to deploy capital or lose out. Contrast this with yesterday's Fed-set near-zero rates, which allowed billionaires to borrow cheaply and speculate endlessly without real productivity. In the 1800s, Vanderbilt couldn't just borrow free money from the Fed to buy up railroads. He had to convince investors with real profits.

Unlike feudal systems (where land means power) or modern equities (where BlackRock/Vanguard dominate), gold's physical nature prevents monopoly hoarding. No "too big to fail" banks because gold can't be bailed out. No endless financialization because hard money kills derivatives casinos. And it's easily tradable because unlike real estate or fine art, gold circulates freely. The wealthy can't lock up the system. Gold moves to where it's most useful, not where it's politically protected. Bring back hard money. Watch the rentier class collapse.

Lack of resources, burn-out, lack of good relationships, overall bad relationship with the world, bad economic state and probably many other things I can’t remember at the moment.