TFYS · HackerTrans

TFYS

445 karmajoined 11 tahun yang lalu

comments

3 hari yang laludiscuss

A transition away from competition could also be implemented by capping the standard of living to what it currently is in the richest countries and then waiting for others to catch up. After that production would slow down yes, and that's the point. People could spend more of their time on things that really matter to them instead of things they're forced to do by competition.

4 hari yang laludiscuss

This is how it will be until we figure out how to organize human life without competition. Too many of our systems are based on us competing against each other (markets, nation states), so we always have to maximize production or risk falling behind our competitors and getting devoured. We need to co-operate more instead of competing if we want to get out of this loop.

10 hari yang laludiscuss

For capitalism to exist we must have a system in place to protect private property, e.g. a government. That government must be the most powerful entity to be able to protect property. The capitalist system is competitive, and controlling the decision-making of the most powerful entity is an enormous competitive advantage. Once you control that entity you'll naturally want to expand its powers. Hence capitalism will always lead to a growing government that capitalists will use to get a competitive advantage in their market. This is what capitalism will always lead to.

11 hari yang laludiscuss

> Being wealthy and having to live among really wealthy people sounds better than being poor and living among equals.

Why? Once you pass a level of wealth where basic needs like, food, housing and healthcare are met your happiness probably depends more on how you perceive your position to be compared to people around you. Even your post suggests that, as you're comparing your position to people wealthier than you, even though you likely have your basic needs met. Once you get the US median salary, you'll just switch to comparing yourself against the really wealthy people. It's easier to be happy with what you have in a more equal society.

18 hari yang laludiscuss

The issue is concentration of power. Wealth inequality is just one way destructive levels of power concentration can happen. We need low wealth inequality along with truly democratic government.

bulan laludiscuss

But the preferences might be changing not because people like the new way more, but because the economic system forces people to choose the most efficient way of doing things. Someone who plays games at home can do it cheaper or in less time than someone going to a cafe, and because we are constantly competing against each other in this system, the less efficient choices become unaffordable over time. Efficient people hold most of the economic power and therefore the economy will mostly serve them.

Also people, especially kids, are not always good at understanding the consequences of their choices. The convenience of playing games at home is easy to see, but few kids understand how that choice will affect their social skills over the long term. Allowing individual preferences to dominate society might not give us the best result.

2 bulan yang laludiscuss

Maybe they aren't and never will be capable enough to do this, but if there's even a 1% chance that they are, then it's very important to consider the consequences and take the necessary precautions before it's too late.

2 bulan yang laludiscuss

> In other words, the economic surplus did not go exclusively or primarily to the richest.

That was in large part due of strong leftist movements and states that forced the capitalists to share the increasing wealth. WW2 and the resulting labor shortage and other special circumstances contributed as well. Currently no such movements and circumstances exist. Globalization and the resulting free movent of capital has put capitalists in a better position to direct the extra wealth for themselves than ever before. A global movement is required to get a meaningful share of the increased surplus to the workers now, and that is very hard to do. The market will not do it on its own, as the demand for human labor eventually decreases due to automation.

2 bulan yang laludiscuss

The new people voted in are likely to be corporate stooges as well, as they have good and well funded infrastructure behind them for getting elected.

3 bulan yang laludiscuss

> You may hate it but you don't matter. We all do it no matter what.

I've seen you say "you don't matter" in many of your comments. Why do you think like this? Sure, we don't matter much most of the time, but this kind of elitist thinking and decision-making is clearly leading to growing discontent, which can then be used against "people who matter". Perhaps the tools for controlling the masses are now powerful enough to make what you say true, but there's a chance your "let them eat cake" attitude will lead to the downfall of the people who currently matter.

3 bulan yang laludiscuss

Bezos didn't create that wealth alone. He had help from thousands upon thousands of people. It's impossible to calculate how much of the value of Amazon was actually created by the work Bezos did, how much by other people in the company, and how much was just natural evolution brought about by technological and societal change. Bezos gets billions because he is in a position of power where he gets to take it, not because he created that much value.

But even if Bezos actually creates billions of value on his own, it doesn't mean that he should get those billions. The reward for such high value work should be high enough that Bezos chooses to do it instead of something else, but it doesn't need to be higher than that. In a world where the highest paid position would reward a few million instead of a few billion, I'm sure Bezos and people like him would still gravitate towards that work since it'd still be work with the best rewards.

People who have some revolutionary ideas wouldn't abandon them if the potential highest reward was millions instead of billions. Or do you believe that there are people with good ideas right now that abandon them because they can't earn trillions with the idea? What people expect as a reward for their work is what decides whether they do it or not. If we can lower the expectation, we can get the high value work without creating dangerous levels of power concentration.

4 bulan yang laludiscuss

This will be the reality until we come up with a way to make good decisions using direct democracy, and make that decision-making process so fast and easy that it can be used for any kind of group decision.

Concentration of power stems from our inability to make good decisions as a group of equals. We have to choose someone to make decisions for the group because there is currently no other working way to make them. Current technology might enable us to find some form of true democracy, but I'm not sure if anyone is looking for it.

4 bulan yang laludiscuss

There's value in that only if assessments made by people using the prediction for something aren't better than crowd wisdom. I would guess that a large part of prediction market participants are simple gamblers whose assessment is worse than the prediction of someone doing it because they need the information for something.

So if people who need predictions for decision-making start relying on prediction markets with a lot of low value gambler predictions and opinion manipulators (wealthy participants can use the platform to mislead people as well) the value of these things might be negative.

4 bulan yang laludiscuss

There will be no point, and the stuff that normal people use will become more expensive as resources are more and more directed to megaprojects that the capital class is interested in. More modern equivalents of pyramids and extravagant castles and less consumers goods.

4 bulan yang laludiscuss

Why couldn't China be better? It can't get much worse than what the US is currently doing. It's getting dangerously close to 30s Germany levels of madness. China at least at the moment seems like a better run country, and much less interested in forcing its will on other countries.

5 bulan yang laludiscuss

Yes. The bigger the gap becomes, the more the economy will be geared towards serving the needs of the wealthy instead of regular people. If a trillionaire wants a mansion on Pluto or an AI to serve him, a large workforce and a lot of resources will be put towards that goal, making those resources and work more expensive to use for other goals. Your healthcare and shelter has to compete for resources and their prices will rise as the demand for overlapping resources goes up due to the huge purchasing power of the wealthy.

What we produce in this economic system is decided by money. If 90% of all money is in the hands of the wealthy, then 90% of all we make with out limited workforce and resources will be decided by them.

5 bulan yang laludiscuss

Those meals would most likely help a lot of kids become healthy productive members of society. That money would be saved by the families of those kids and used in other parts of the economy. A lot of the cost would therefore be returned. The money spent of this war is producing only destruction.

5 bulan yang laludiscuss

> The diversity of perspective and opinion

I don't think this is what social media provides. With social media people are able to choose one perspective and seem to just immerse themselves in a bubble so that they only get exposed to the view of their choice.

5 bulan yang laludiscuss

What they do there is not enough. All decisions should be made using some form of direct democracy, otherwise you leave an opening for power concentration again, which will lead to the same problems we're now facing. We can't make all decisions using referendums.

5 bulan yang laludiscuss

Could be, if we can come up with efficient ways to govern using direct democracy that lead to better decisions than what we now have. I don't see much work being done to come up with such a system, though.