Kapitalism
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In a classic example you have a village with 2 bakeries, one of the bakers came up with a machine to kneed the bread, so he can make more bread and sell it cheaper. This is sort of the story people tell to show how great capitalism is.
But we have reached a point where that one bakery now owns a chain of bakers, adds ingredients to the bread to make it more addictive, skips on actual ingredients needed for bread and replaces them with sawdust, made donations to the current political party so any competition has to jump through hoops to get a bakery license, etc.
And then uses his immense wealth and contacts to make frivolous lawsuits against smaller bakers trying to make their own machine, knowing full well they will not win in court but will financially ruin the smaller baker and tie them up in litigation for years, then forcing them to an unfair arbitration where they make a shit offer to buy out the competition
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It's not exclusive. You can meet everyones needs and then say, "hey if you make some cool fucking shit we'll give you a little extra." Why insist on people doing good solely because they feel like it. Why not push people to be better.
We know what people do when their needs are met, they're called retirees. They don't provide a net gain of almost anything btw. Yes people will pick up rubbish off a beach out of the goodness of their hearts. But the amount of litter collected from philanthropy is not greater than the amount made. And it's a rounding error when compared to the amount of rubbish managed by garbage collectors.
IP laws are good precisely because they encourage people to create and discover even if all their needs are met. They compliment the selfless and persuade the selfish.
I am not sure this logic holds well.
People who are rich are still involved in society to the point i wish they would stop exploiting to chase more profit and just retire already with their near infinite wealth.
And the actual retirees your refer towards that don’t do anything are usually old people who slaved an entire career for a total less then some rich “earn” in a single day.
I do think people who build cool stuff deserve to be rewarded though, we could give them a cool artwork, trow them a party or just continue to respect and thank them for their accomplishments.
Currently the reward is “here are the means that someone else could use to not starve that you can now use to go on a holiday with.”
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But wait, I arranged atoms in this order before you did! Now you're not allowed to arrange atoms in this order unless you pay me!!
oooops I think my brain did it by itself. Wait who is my brain?
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Oh yeah I forgot about that. One of the banks here refunds ATM fees if you have a minimum balance of $2500 (and waives the monthly fee if you have $25,000). Like, my guys, the people who don't have money need that fee waived a lot more. But the bank just wants to make money and that means appealing to rich people.
Fortunately it's not hard to find banks who have no fees for those, in the US at least.
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Copyright and inheritance can’t exist in a capitalist society
Under true capitalism, everyone starts at 0 regardless of their birth and the only way to make more money than someone else is to work more hours regardless of profession. Over saturation of a given market is fixed by the invisible hand where people just move onto something that gives more hours
A society where no one has capital and the only way to get ahead is to provide more labour? And you call them steamed hams despite the fact they're obviously grilled?
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I am not sure this logic holds well.
People who are rich are still involved in society to the point i wish they would stop exploiting to chase more profit and just retire already with their near infinite wealth.
And the actual retirees your refer towards that don’t do anything are usually old people who slaved an entire career for a total less then some rich “earn” in a single day.
I do think people who build cool stuff deserve to be rewarded though, we could give them a cool artwork, trow them a party or just continue to respect and thank them for their accomplishments.
Currently the reward is “here are the means that someone else could use to not starve that you can now use to go on a holiday with.”
wrote last edited by [email protected]Society doesn't run on good vibes my guy
Also. You don't think the logic holds up well? That is literally how it works and how most countries do it.
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Fortunately it's not hard to find banks who have no fees for those, in the US at least.
This one is appealing in that they refund the fee even if it's from some other bank. So you can go to the ATM at the corner shop that charges $3 to withdraw, and get that refunded at the end of the quarter. Most banks don't have fees at their own ATM, but this is no fees anywhere. For rich people.
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My former boss was in a gulag for most of his teens. He was not paid and to this day he has no idea what crime he was convicted of. He just knows he served time and was targeted by guards because he was Jewish and the Soviets were very bigoted.
Maybe take a second to ask yourself what your real life experience is with the USSR.
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And it went pretty well, until they bought enough politicians to change it.
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In a form of a piece of lead
You could literally open up a book someday and check your info, gulag inmates were paid. Wages were lower than those of a free worker, but nothing like the modern slavery that the USA uses in its prison system for example.
Where did I say ALL gulags were in Siberia
By using the cliche of "forced labor to the cold Siberia", you're propagating misinformation about the system, willingly or not. The fact that the majority of Gulags were in fact not in Siberia is kind of a strong statement in that it shows that the intent of gulags was not that of mass-murder of dissidents (which is the claim anticommunists like you normally do). The vast majority of gulag inmates were actually not political dissidents, but normal criminals. The gulag system was the prison system of the USSR for all crimes. Why would you send your average criminal who stole from another person to a death camp instead of trying to reform them? Why did most of the deaths in gulags coincide with a famine that affected the entire Soviet Union during a war and not before or after that? Why did the Gulag system, at its peak during the mass hysteria against nazism, have a number of prisoners similar to that of the modern USA? Maybe if you weren't a propagandized misinformation spreader you could answer any of those questions. But no, you can't, because you haven't lifted the cover of one book in your entire life.
Stalin was alive in 60s?
I brought up the 60s because the Soviet Union was essentially industrialised by then. In 1917, when the Bolsheviks get to power, the former Russian Empire was a predominantly agrarian country where 80+% of people worked the land and the life expectancy was <30 years, there was no industry to speak of. The civil war which the fascists started, and in which England, France and the USA invaded Soviet Russia for the sin of being communist and gave material aid and troops to the pro-tsarist fascists, and which came right after WW1, left the country in a state of utter destruction, and the economy didn't recover to pre-WW1 levels until 1929, the year when the first 5-year-plan was adopted. Industrialization of the Soviet Union was FAST as lightning, with GDP growths above 10% per year, the fastest industrialization process in history up to that point (and only surpassed by China to this day). But in 1941, as you may know, the Nazis invaded the country, and murdered about 27 million Soviet Citizens and essentially leveled the entire country west of Stalingrad. After 1945, the industrialization progress continued to its previous speed together with the reconstruction of the country, but it isn't until at least the 60s when you can say the country was properly industrialized. This is why I said the 60s, because comparing a predominantly feudal country in terms of food security to our modern standards is an exercise of either ignorance of bad faith. So tell me, are you arguing from ignorance or from bad faith?
wrote last edited by [email protected]You could literally open up a book someday
That's what you should start with.
check your info, gulag inmates were paid.
Check, you i.. Tankie. Or just check another response to your moronic post.
cliche of "forced labor to the cold Siberia
Listen, you moron: millions of people died in Siberia, murdered by your beloved Stalin. Denying this is like denying holocaust. Go and fuck yourself you genocide denier.
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Wow. You're showing very civilized behavior. Maybe i should rethink my stance.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Maybe i should rethink my stance.
Don't bother, you tankies are incapable of logical thinking.
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Society doesn't run on good vibes my guy
Also. You don't think the logic holds up well? That is literally how it works and how most countries do it.
Of course not, it runs on people wanting to live in and improve society.
Money is a system we invented long after society was already a thing, it’s not a required part of it.
Of course you are correct to think of me as an idealist but my general stance is that while perfection can never be archived you should strive for perfection to get closest to it.
Combined with a lifelong pursuit of growth and improvement you keep getting closer to that perfection and the fact you cant archive it means there is always something else to improve and not get bored.
That is my real life work attitude, how i can jump from “high level” complex tasks to “dumb” repetitive labor tasks while still having job satisfaction because even those repetitive labor tasks have a non perfect structure i love to keep improving with every repetition.
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A society where no one has capital and the only way to get ahead is to provide more labour? And you call them steamed hams despite the fact they're obviously grilled?
wrote last edited by [email protected]The ideals of capitalism were to punish the rich land owners/nobles who were wealthy without ever working and empower the workers who were poor despite working for their whole lives
It’s a good lesson to teach that the wealthy would rather rebrand their image than give up wealth
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I think i meant smart phone. Apparently cell phone adoption was in the 60%+ range in 2005
As low as that, eh? I got my first mobile (Nokia 3310) in 2003, and I felt like I was the last of my peers to get one (my classmates had mobiles around 1999, I remember Snake being big during my GCSE years). I expect at that time they were just more common among millennials than the older generations? I'm sure I was the only one in my year group from Year 11 to the end of Year 13 to not have a mobile.
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The Game Boy alone proves this whole capitalist rhetoric wrong. It was the most successful hand held game system for two reasons, it was cheaper than the rest and it went through batteries slower, otherwise it was objectively the worst handheld game system on the market at the time. Look at the food you are able to eat, the clothes you are able to wear, and the place you are able to live and try to tell me the driving force on those decisions was quality. Capitalism is not concerned with improving anything, that is not the goal of the system.
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Copyright and inheritance can’t exist in a capitalist society
Under true capitalism, everyone starts at 0 regardless of their birth and the only way to make more money than someone else is to work more hours regardless of profession. Over saturation of a given market is fixed by the invisible hand where people just move onto something that gives more hours
the only way to make more money than someone else is to work more hours regardless of profession
Workers aren't capitalists. The whole point of Capitalism is to ensure the ruling class never has to do the actual work. Capitalists make their money by exploiting workers, not working themselves.
Capitalists are people who own the means of production. Working in a capitalist system you will never earn enough to buy the factory. Inheritance is one of the main ways to become a capitalist. Sure some people get lucky but with few exceptions if you are rich the way you got rich was by exploiting other people .
Copyright was a halfway decent idea when it first came out. Give a chance for an artist or inventor to profit from their work for a few years and then it becomes public property. Thanks to corporations like Disney, that has all been twisted, and now it's used as a cudgel to keep others from competing and it takes almost 100 years for something to go out of copyright now (thanks congress).
A system where you do the work and get paid for your value is closer to Socialism than capitalism.
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The ideals of capitalism were to punish the rich land owners/nobles who were wealthy without ever working and empower the workers who were poor despite working for their whole lives
It’s a good lesson to teach that the wealthy would rather rebrand their image than give up wealth
The ideals of capitalism were to punish the rich land owners/nobles who were wealthy without ever working and empower the workers who were poor despite working for their whole lives
Where are you getting this from?
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I think their point was that in a way, patents are supposed to be more equitable because it allows the inventor to meet their basic needs by being the one to invent the patent.
There's also the argument that while innovation skyrockets after a parent opens up, there would be less incentive to invent new things if Walmart could just copy it for cheaper the day after you show how you make it.
Or people would be super secretive with instructions for how to make their products that innovations could die with their creators since they have no incentive to release it.
wrote last edited by [email protected]I think we need to differentiate between the potential of something versus the reality of something. We see people being super secretive of innovations right now and because they're patented they cannot even be reverse engineered. Innovations do die all of the time because the thing that is patented is a black box and even people who would reverse engineered it would get copyright trolled to hell.
My favourite example is spare parts for trains. Because the parts themselves are encumbered, it is illegal to repair trains yourself, thank you Siemens and Bombardier. Because if you get caught manufacturing spare parts, which are the intellectual property of someone else, you'll get into big trouble. How exactly does this behaviour help with innovation?
Another example are video codecs. AV1 was specifically engineered to avoid any sort of patent trolling. How much better would AV1 be if all of that engineering time could have been spent on innovation instead of trying to avoid encumbrance?
Also in your example, if there was a small invention and Walmart would just copy it, would the small inventor really have the resources to pursue Walmart in court for years on end? Best example is Amazon. They steal innovations all of the time and because they're doing it with small inventors, they face zero consequences because they do not have the resources to compete with a megacorporation.
But the biggest problem I have with patents is that it's not even internally consistent with capitalism. Example being, capitalism says competition is an objective good, while a monopoly is an objective bad. So why grant an unlimited monopoly for something if competition is good? Because if people were competing, then everyone would try to make the best version of something.
I mean, the theory may be pretty neat from some perspective, but the reality is we get the worst of both worlds. Innovations get killed off because everything is super proprietary and reverse engineering is prohibited and megacorporations can do whatever they want because, well, it's a free country. If you don't like it, just sue the megacorporation for years on end and just maybe get recourse for their transgression.
Corporations will do whatever is most profitable for them. If the strategy to patent something and then copyright troll the world to hell and back is the most efficient thing, that will be done. If the strategy to make the best product possible and get the most customers possible is the most efficient thing, that will be done instead. This would be internally consistent with the ideology of capitalism. " Why should the big government intervene with the free innovation of the free market? Let the invisible hand guide the innovation and may the best innovation win."
Edit: Also about trains. Train companies with the resources repair them all of the time, luckily. Because try to piss off someone who holds the power to just annihilate hundreds of millions worth in contracts overnight if they wanted.
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And it went pretty well, until they bought enough politicians to change it.
wrote last edited by [email protected]So taxing the rich is an unstable temporary solution, and more fundamental changes are required.
