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On December 04 2017 11:37 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On December 04 2017 11:32 Nevuk wrote:
“I think not having the estate tax recognizes the people that are investing,” Grassley said, “as opposed to those that are just spending every darn penny they have, whether it’s on booze or women or movies.”
www.desmoinesregister.com lol. Because if there is one thing that people who inherit eight figure estates are known for then it's how much they struggle with the ladies. Whereas the working men of the world, they're drowning in gold diggers.
Man, that quote really encapsulates everything wrong with how Republican economic theory conceives of poor people.
"Oh, if they'd just scrimp and save and accept that poor people don't get enjoy anything in life and instead invest a few thousand dollars over the course of their life into something that will return a few hundred dollars over that same period, their lives would be so much better."
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On December 04 2017 11:59 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On December 04 2017 11:45 Sermokala wrote:On December 04 2017 11:39 KwarK wrote:On December 04 2017 11:35 Sermokala wrote:On December 04 2017 11:23 Uldridge wrote:On December 04 2017 11:10 Sermokala wrote:
We have the resources to feed and house everyone because of the system that made it profitable to be able to feed and house as many people as we have today. You're acting as if the situation we're in now being inherent to the system we've followed up until now wasn't created inherently by the system we've been following up until now. You can advocate for urban homesteading and public welfare but you can't complain at the same time about the system that gives you the capability to fix it in the same way. The system is inefficient. It's brought us to where we're now, but for me personally it doesn't cut it. I'll never deny the system we've created didn't put us in present day situation; and I understand that we've definitely come a long way. But what I'm saying is that the situation as it is now won't change for the better. The divide between rich and poor will only grow larger and current society can't keep up with newer technologies. Rich people will soon be able to genetically engineer their babies (if it hasn't been done already) and poor people, well, they'll just have to get cancer and die or deal with their "inferior genes" or something. I don't like the fact that supermarkets need to throw out food I don't like the fact that we export our locally produced potatoes to some random ass country on the other side of the globe because it's cheaper I don't like the fact that people break their backs to barely get by I don't like the fact that stuff takes ages before they get done (infrastructural, administration systems, ...) I don't like the fact that insurance companies can leverage health care coverage or a potential for livelihood for money or human behavior I don't like the fact that pharma companies leverage desperate people who want to prolong their lives with a few weeks or months for a few extra bucks I don't like the fact that potential world changing technologies get shelved because there's no market for it I don't like the fact that we're killing off our biodiversity because we're advancing our comfort I don't like the fact we're dumping massive amounts of waste in third world countries because when we can't see it, it doesn't exist I don't like the fact that there are more cars than people in the world This is just a snapshot of a "working system" that completely sickens me to the core and which can be solved by automation and the absolving of the system we've built. Oh fuck the system that no one created and no one is responsible for is inefficient? Do you understand in the slightest what even the concept of capitalism is? No one up and went one day to say "capitalism begins now" and everyone just started doing capitalist things. Capitalism is little different then farming being better then hunting and gathering so people started farming more then hunting and gathering. Man the system worked for us now but lets just scrap the system entirely and replace it with nothing because I don't like its faults and replace it with nothing because no one has any idea what to replace nothing with when there wasn't anything to replace in the first place with nothing because nothing was what we had before the nothing after nothing nothing. That last paragraph is the summary of what you're arguing. You're just bitching about bad things because they're bad and complaining about inefficient things because they're inefficient. You're lacking in any sort of purpose that you're advocating for a divine robot to take over everything. You watched Terminator and thought the robots were the good guys and Schwarzenegger was a capitalist pig trying to oppress the people. Er, firstly that's a really stupid rant responding to basically no part of what he wrote. And secondly, Schwarzenegger was the titular terminator in the movie Terminator. But he was inefficient and failed at his task and in the end informed the humans more on how to delay Armageddon then he did to help the machines win or bring it closer to happening. His post was complaining capitalism isn't good enough for him anymore and then listed a bunch of things he didn't like about it. He didn't provide an alternative or anything to make it better hes just trying to support the robot god alternative to capitalism. I dunno, your post read an awful lot like you thought that Arnold was the capitalist human opposing the robotic terminators. Either way, capitalism isn't a switch so attacking him as if he's suggesting we switch it off and switch on robots is absurd. It's not binary. Hunting whales to extinction would be capitalist, but the fact that we created international agreements to not do that doesn't mean that capitalism has been turned off. Today the average chocolate bar in an American store has a very good chance of being made with slave labour, child labour, or both. The reason is because within a capitalist system it is not economically rational for the chocolate manufacturers to not use slave labour. Instead they simply use a system of brokers to remove themselves from the plantations and have the brokers promise them that no slave labour was used while simultaneously paying the brokers an amount so low that they know the workers are not getting paid. That gives them deniability and whenever there is an expose they insist that they are horrified to learn about all the slaves and will be reviewing their supply chain, before doing nothing at all. Technology advancements have the potential to resolve that shit by making supply chains part of a blockchain that can be audited by an AI. That won't be the end of capitalism, but it would be the end of slave labour within your candy bars. That's what is being discussed here. Saying "what shitty outcomes does capitalism produce and how can we leverage technology to correct them?" Capitalism isn't going to be switched off, but it is entirely possible that we can use computers to limit the excesses of it in the exact same way that we've limited the excesses of capitalism countless times before.
Thats hardly whats being discussed although I agree with the rest of the post. The issue I'm having and others are riffing on is the idea that there should be an end to capitalism and that the "system" itself should be ended in favor of robot communism. That Idea that somehow robots can make communism work this time and that we can totally create said robot and should surrender to said robot is what I was ranting on.
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United States42021 Posts
On December 04 2017 12:05 Sermokala wrote:Show nested quote +On December 04 2017 11:59 KwarK wrote:On December 04 2017 11:45 Sermokala wrote:On December 04 2017 11:39 KwarK wrote:On December 04 2017 11:35 Sermokala wrote:On December 04 2017 11:23 Uldridge wrote:On December 04 2017 11:10 Sermokala wrote:
We have the resources to feed and house everyone because of the system that made it profitable to be able to feed and house as many people as we have today. You're acting as if the situation we're in now being inherent to the system we've followed up until now wasn't created inherently by the system we've been following up until now. You can advocate for urban homesteading and public welfare but you can't complain at the same time about the system that gives you the capability to fix it in the same way. The system is inefficient. It's brought us to where we're now, but for me personally it doesn't cut it. I'll never deny the system we've created didn't put us in present day situation; and I understand that we've definitely come a long way. But what I'm saying is that the situation as it is now won't change for the better. The divide between rich and poor will only grow larger and current society can't keep up with newer technologies. Rich people will soon be able to genetically engineer their babies (if it hasn't been done already) and poor people, well, they'll just have to get cancer and die or deal with their "inferior genes" or something. I don't like the fact that supermarkets need to throw out food I don't like the fact that we export our locally produced potatoes to some random ass country on the other side of the globe because it's cheaper I don't like the fact that people break their backs to barely get by I don't like the fact that stuff takes ages before they get done (infrastructural, administration systems, ...) I don't like the fact that insurance companies can leverage health care coverage or a potential for livelihood for money or human behavior I don't like the fact that pharma companies leverage desperate people who want to prolong their lives with a few weeks or months for a few extra bucks I don't like the fact that potential world changing technologies get shelved because there's no market for it I don't like the fact that we're killing off our biodiversity because we're advancing our comfort I don't like the fact we're dumping massive amounts of waste in third world countries because when we can't see it, it doesn't exist I don't like the fact that there are more cars than people in the world This is just a snapshot of a "working system" that completely sickens me to the core and which can be solved by automation and the absolving of the system we've built. Oh fuck the system that no one created and no one is responsible for is inefficient? Do you understand in the slightest what even the concept of capitalism is? No one up and went one day to say "capitalism begins now" and everyone just started doing capitalist things. Capitalism is little different then farming being better then hunting and gathering so people started farming more then hunting and gathering. Man the system worked for us now but lets just scrap the system entirely and replace it with nothing because I don't like its faults and replace it with nothing because no one has any idea what to replace nothing with when there wasn't anything to replace in the first place with nothing because nothing was what we had before the nothing after nothing nothing. That last paragraph is the summary of what you're arguing. You're just bitching about bad things because they're bad and complaining about inefficient things because they're inefficient. You're lacking in any sort of purpose that you're advocating for a divine robot to take over everything. You watched Terminator and thought the robots were the good guys and Schwarzenegger was a capitalist pig trying to oppress the people. Er, firstly that's a really stupid rant responding to basically no part of what he wrote. And secondly, Schwarzenegger was the titular terminator in the movie Terminator. But he was inefficient and failed at his task and in the end informed the humans more on how to delay Armageddon then he did to help the machines win or bring it closer to happening. His post was complaining capitalism isn't good enough for him anymore and then listed a bunch of things he didn't like about it. He didn't provide an alternative or anything to make it better hes just trying to support the robot god alternative to capitalism. I dunno, your post read an awful lot like you thought that Arnold was the capitalist human opposing the robotic terminators. Either way, capitalism isn't a switch so attacking him as if he's suggesting we switch it off and switch on robots is absurd. It's not binary. Hunting whales to extinction would be capitalist, but the fact that we created international agreements to not do that doesn't mean that capitalism has been turned off. Today the average chocolate bar in an American store has a very good chance of being made with slave labour, child labour, or both. The reason is because within a capitalist system it is not economically rational for the chocolate manufacturers to not use slave labour. Instead they simply use a system of brokers to remove themselves from the plantations and have the brokers promise them that no slave labour was used while simultaneously paying the brokers an amount so low that they know the workers are not getting paid. That gives them deniability and whenever there is an expose they insist that they are horrified to learn about all the slaves and will be reviewing their supply chain, before doing nothing at all. Technology advancements have the potential to resolve that shit by making supply chains part of a blockchain that can be audited by an AI. That won't be the end of capitalism, but it would be the end of slave labour within your candy bars. That's what is being discussed here. Saying "what shitty outcomes does capitalism produce and how can we leverage technology to correct them?" Capitalism isn't going to be switched off, but it is entirely possible that we can use computers to limit the excesses of it in the exact same way that we've limited the excesses of capitalism countless times before. Thats hardly whats being discussed although I agree with the rest of the post. The issue I'm having and others are riffing on is the idea that there should be an end to capitalism and that the "system" itself should be ended in favor of robot communism. That Idea that somehow robots can make communism work this time and that we can totally create said robot and should surrender to said robot is what I was ranting on.
How many rules do we need to put into the system before capitalism is over?
Let's say we have the technology to properly trace labour and costs that go into an item available for sale. We'll use a car for example because cars have probably had more cost accounting done to them than anything else and we actually do already have the technology. Someone sufficiently high up in Toyota could tell you the number of manhours of different individuals that went into every part of it, from the people mining the iron ore to the amount of engine grease on the robot assembly line allocated to each car.
It's certainly not science fiction that we use that information to require that the payment for the car include a "fair" reimbursement to every part of the production chain, from the people who make the steel to a community fund compensating an area for environmental damage due to ore extraction. With today's technology you could split the payment from one payment to Toyota into a hundred thousand, each directed to the appropriate contributor to the vehicle in accordance to their contribution.
Would that still be capitalism? Toyota could still profit by producing cars for less than others, investing in more efficient factories, making more desirable cars etc. That's capitalism. But by using a smart pricing model that directly allocates reimbursement to the parties involved it could be made far more equitable. Is that more of a divergence than minimum wage laws are? Or is it simply a smarter execution for the same concept as minimum wage laws?
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Your proposals are always a tad more nuanced and elegant, KwarK. Of course you also have a lot more insight in aspects of the economy than me. I'm just painting with a broad brush over what I see as things that ultimately need to be eradicated if we want to get to a society that's truly equal in opportunity, from east to west and north to south.
@Sermokala
We can create a self learning program that is able to understand what basic human necessities are. The first one being food, because that can be pipelined to get to from where it's produced to where the customers get it out. It controls the growing, harvesting, preparation and deliverance of the produce the warehouses where people can go to. The machines are controlled automatically (trucks/trains/preparationbots/whatever) so nothing needs to be interfered with and this can all run as smooth as possible.
This program keeps account of and updates the demographic of each warehouse so it can evenly produce and distribute to where food is needed. This absolves the need to transport shit all over the globe because it's cheaper to do so. It can be grown locally; there's no more value attached to it. This could be something that gradually replaces everyone involved, with farmers and packers and whatnot getting living wages because now they've become obsolete. You gradually do this with every sector that can be automatized.
Redistribution is possible based on sudden increases in needs (global monitoring is already happening) and with the self learning aspect it can smoothline everything even further (e.g. less pollution, better technology, less noise, ...).
The food industry doesn't need to be dynamic or needs to plan years ahead because food is always in demand. The program can think of new combinations of prepared food (I mean, basic ingredients will still be available, sure, people love to cook!) to see what is liked and what is not, so it will be able to experiment.
This is the gist of how I see an automated world changing our society for the better. It'll bascially cut out all the shit people don't like doing and replace it with shit that doesn't care if it's doing that task because it's designed to do that task.
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A more or less planned economy is what will happen eventually I think,at least for certain sectors. But probably not in the next 200-300 years.
People always point to the ussr and how it failed,but they never mention china. And while china is not a communist economy it is planned to a certain degree.
Capitalism and competition (or rather technological progress and oil) have produced an enormous amount of wealth,but it has done so in a rather inefficient way. Lots of products are being made and then have to compete against eachoter so that the best product survives. But all the products that didn't make it are more or less wasted in the end. The resources spend to develop them did not pay off. You can say that this is a necessary evil because we can not know in advance what the best product will be and we just have to test a few things to see what works and what the market wants but maybe in the far future there will be better solutions.
In the west we don't have full capitalism either,the lobbys of the big industries have acquired such an amount of political influence that they can rig the markets in their favor. The banks didn't have to go bankrupt during the crisis but got bailed out. Their bad product didn't get punished. And there are many more bad products like tobacco that didn't get punished by the market. The private usa healthcare system is the most expensive in the world but it is not better then the healthcare in other first world countrys that have a partially or full collective/state healthcare.
The bigger the inequality becomes,the more inefficient and static the capitalist system itself becomes. Power and influence is becoming more and more concentrated by the people who have a lot of wealth,who then use that power to implement policys that are good for their personal situation and investments,regardless if those policys and investments are objectively the best solution for a certain problem. They will simply become the best solution and product because of the policys.
Other isues with capitalism,like not fully taking environmental costs into account can in theory be solved,but not in reality due to the accumulation of power and influence.
Another issue with capitalism is that is does not reward properly. Many technicians who do the bulk of the work they will make a good wage,but its a fraction of what the investors and owners make. Sure their presence is very important but their reward has become/is becoming disproportional which goes at the expense of other people in the end.
These days many smart people they go work in finance or law and not in engineering, because finance has way better rewards. But finance and law don,t create anything in the end,its a drain. Or if you want to phrase it positively:the oil needed to make the system run smooth.
All the above might seem like a complaint which it certainly is not. I am very happy with the capitalist system but that does not mean that it is flawless. For now there seems to be no good alternative and there is still a lot of room to "waste" resources on inefficient products before the market has weeded them out. But in the far future,maybe that room wont be there anymore and maybe there will be a good alternative if a "god" computer will be made. But I think we are still very very far away from that point, centurys before ai will be at that level.
And even then,vested interests who have a lot of power will try prevent any change because it will take away from their power and influence,which will also have financial consequences.
Maybe in the end there is no other option,humans are not ants. We work for ourselves and our direct relatives and that is our main motivation,not the collective. That is how we have evolved and that is the behavior that we reward the most.
I do hope at least energy,transportation,healthcare will become collective but for now the trend is in the opposite direction. Maybe we will get like a MOM corp from futurama in the end,one or a few companys that run an enormous part of the economy. Then competition is also gone to a large degree.a sort of communist system but privately owned.
anyway,not something any of us will have to worry about but its fun to think about it now and then.
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Nobody is saying that capitalism is flawless, just that it is better than the rapture for the nerds which is apparently catching on
And China is decentralised and capitalised to a degree that is hardly imaginable in the west. It's not a state controlled country at all in contrast to the public image. Since Deng they've been following the Singaporean model of hypercapitalism combined with a fairly oppressive state in all other sectors that aren't the economy. For some reason as it turns out communists make even better capitalists than actual capitalists.
So if you don't like capitalism that is a sector of the map I'd stay away from
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Looks like Trump has found a way around the daycare staff.
President Donald Trump is reportedly giving his staffers secret assignments by calling them to his private residence in the evening and telling them to hide his orders from chief-of-staff John Kelly.
After assigning his aides tasks in his living quarters, he tells them to keep his demands from Kelly, several people with knowledge of the interactions told the Wall Street Journal in a new report published on Sunday. But staffers not wanting to “run afoul of” Kelly have ignored the president’s requests to stay quiet, according to the report.
www.yahoo.com
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I don't see how providing for a population through a means that doesn't necessarily want to grow bigger and doesn't make people break their back for a living is "rapture for nerds".
I still don't understand what the appeal of capitalism is by the way. It's a success story to a degree, onto which all these inherent human traits are coupled. Humans are inherently competitive and innovative. Just because we happened to use this way of shaping our economy, doesn't mean something better can't or shouldn't exist.
Why not improve when we can?
Let's say a startup buys a piece of land, fixes all the robots in place to sow, grows, harvest, mill wheat into flour and makes bread and provides all the bread to a local small town. When will you be convinced? When would the tipping point be for us to slowly roll into another system?
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On December 04 2017 12:15 KwarK wrote:
It's certainly not science fiction that we use that information to require that the payment for the car include a "fair" reimbursement to every part of the production chain, from the people who make the steel to a community fund compensating an area for environmental damage due to ore extraction. With today's technology you could split the payment from one payment to Toyota into a hundred thousand, each directed to the appropriate contributor to the vehicle in accordance to their contribution.
Would that still be capitalism? Toyota could still profit by producing cars for less than others, investing in more efficient factories, making more desirable cars etc. That's capitalism. But by using a smart pricing model that directly allocates reimbursement to the parties involved it could be made far more equitable. Is that more of a divergence than minimum wage laws are? Or is it simply a smarter execution for the same concept as minimum wage laws?
I don't think such a payment system fundamentally changes anything, or even matters at all really. The entire question depends on how one defines "fair." If "fair" is defined by communists (i.e. something like profits redistributed to a central planner), then it's going to be communist (and fail for the same reasons). If "fair" is defined to be market value, it's capitalism. If you add a bunch of regulations but otherwise use market value, it's fairly similar to what developed nations are currently doing.
On December 04 2017 12:40 Nyxisto wrote:
And China is decentralised and capitalised to a degree that is hardly imaginable in the west. It's not a state controlled country at all in contrast to the public image. Since Deng they've been following the Singaporean model of hypercapitalism combined with a fairly oppressive state in all other sectors that aren't the economy. For some reason as it turns out communists make even better capitalists than actual capitalists.
You're more accurate than the guy you're talking to, but I'm not sure I agree that it's less state-controlled than the West. Xi Jinpeng is much less of a market enthusiast than his predecessors have been, and has been moving the economy in a less capitalistic direction the past few years. It's still mostly a market economy to be sure, but I'm not sure I'd go so far to say it is moreso than Western economies.
That said, China's growth has nothing to do with communism like the guy you're responding is trying to imply. They only started growing when they abandoned communism in favor of markets.
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On December 04 2017 12:15 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On December 04 2017 12:05 Sermokala wrote:On December 04 2017 11:59 KwarK wrote:On December 04 2017 11:45 Sermokala wrote:On December 04 2017 11:39 KwarK wrote:On December 04 2017 11:35 Sermokala wrote:On December 04 2017 11:23 Uldridge wrote:On December 04 2017 11:10 Sermokala wrote:
We have the resources to feed and house everyone because of the system that made it profitable to be able to feed and house as many people as we have today. You're acting as if the situation we're in now being inherent to the system we've followed up until now wasn't created inherently by the system we've been following up until now. You can advocate for urban homesteading and public welfare but you can't complain at the same time about the system that gives you the capability to fix it in the same way. The system is inefficient. It's brought us to where we're now, but for me personally it doesn't cut it. I'll never deny the system we've created didn't put us in present day situation; and I understand that we've definitely come a long way. But what I'm saying is that the situation as it is now won't change for the better. The divide between rich and poor will only grow larger and current society can't keep up with newer technologies. Rich people will soon be able to genetically engineer their babies (if it hasn't been done already) and poor people, well, they'll just have to get cancer and die or deal with their "inferior genes" or something. I don't like the fact that supermarkets need to throw out food I don't like the fact that we export our locally produced potatoes to some random ass country on the other side of the globe because it's cheaper I don't like the fact that people break their backs to barely get by I don't like the fact that stuff takes ages before they get done (infrastructural, administration systems, ...) I don't like the fact that insurance companies can leverage health care coverage or a potential for livelihood for money or human behavior I don't like the fact that pharma companies leverage desperate people who want to prolong their lives with a few weeks or months for a few extra bucks I don't like the fact that potential world changing technologies get shelved because there's no market for it I don't like the fact that we're killing off our biodiversity because we're advancing our comfort I don't like the fact we're dumping massive amounts of waste in third world countries because when we can't see it, it doesn't exist I don't like the fact that there are more cars than people in the world This is just a snapshot of a "working system" that completely sickens me to the core and which can be solved by automation and the absolving of the system we've built. Oh fuck the system that no one created and no one is responsible for is inefficient? Do you understand in the slightest what even the concept of capitalism is? No one up and went one day to say "capitalism begins now" and everyone just started doing capitalist things. Capitalism is little different then farming being better then hunting and gathering so people started farming more then hunting and gathering. Man the system worked for us now but lets just scrap the system entirely and replace it with nothing because I don't like its faults and replace it with nothing because no one has any idea what to replace nothing with when there wasn't anything to replace in the first place with nothing because nothing was what we had before the nothing after nothing nothing. That last paragraph is the summary of what you're arguing. You're just bitching about bad things because they're bad and complaining about inefficient things because they're inefficient. You're lacking in any sort of purpose that you're advocating for a divine robot to take over everything. You watched Terminator and thought the robots were the good guys and Schwarzenegger was a capitalist pig trying to oppress the people. Er, firstly that's a really stupid rant responding to basically no part of what he wrote. And secondly, Schwarzenegger was the titular terminator in the movie Terminator. But he was inefficient and failed at his task and in the end informed the humans more on how to delay Armageddon then he did to help the machines win or bring it closer to happening. His post was complaining capitalism isn't good enough for him anymore and then listed a bunch of things he didn't like about it. He didn't provide an alternative or anything to make it better hes just trying to support the robot god alternative to capitalism. I dunno, your post read an awful lot like you thought that Arnold was the capitalist human opposing the robotic terminators. Either way, capitalism isn't a switch so attacking him as if he's suggesting we switch it off and switch on robots is absurd. It's not binary. Hunting whales to extinction would be capitalist, but the fact that we created international agreements to not do that doesn't mean that capitalism has been turned off. Today the average chocolate bar in an American store has a very good chance of being made with slave labour, child labour, or both. The reason is because within a capitalist system it is not economically rational for the chocolate manufacturers to not use slave labour. Instead they simply use a system of brokers to remove themselves from the plantations and have the brokers promise them that no slave labour was used while simultaneously paying the brokers an amount so low that they know the workers are not getting paid. That gives them deniability and whenever there is an expose they insist that they are horrified to learn about all the slaves and will be reviewing their supply chain, before doing nothing at all. Technology advancements have the potential to resolve that shit by making supply chains part of a blockchain that can be audited by an AI. That won't be the end of capitalism, but it would be the end of slave labour within your candy bars. That's what is being discussed here. Saying "what shitty outcomes does capitalism produce and how can we leverage technology to correct them?" Capitalism isn't going to be switched off, but it is entirely possible that we can use computers to limit the excesses of it in the exact same way that we've limited the excesses of capitalism countless times before. Thats hardly whats being discussed although I agree with the rest of the post. The issue I'm having and others are riffing on is the idea that there should be an end to capitalism and that the "system" itself should be ended in favor of robot communism. That Idea that somehow robots can make communism work this time and that we can totally create said robot and should surrender to said robot is what I was ranting on. How many rules do we need to put into the system before capitalism is over? Let's say we have the technology to properly trace labour and costs that go into an item available for sale. We'll use a car for example because cars have probably had more cost accounting done to them than anything else and we actually do already have the technology. Someone sufficiently high up in Toyota could tell you the number of manhours of different individuals that went into every part of it, from the people mining the iron ore to the amount of engine grease on the robot assembly line allocated to each car. It's certainly not science fiction that we use that information to require that the payment for the car include a "fair" reimbursement to every part of the production chain, from the people who make the steel to a community fund compensating an area for environmental damage due to ore extraction. With today's technology you could split the payment from one payment to Toyota into a hundred thousand, each directed to the appropriate contributor to the vehicle in accordance to their contribution. Would that still be capitalism? Toyota could still profit by producing cars for less than others, investing in more efficient factories, making more desirable cars etc. That's capitalism. But by using a smart pricing model that directly allocates reimbursement to the parties involved it could be made far more equitable. Is that more of a divergence than minimum wage laws are? Or is it simply a smarter execution for the same concept as minimum wage laws?
I'm not arguing on the basis of capitalism being a specific set of rules or a dogma that needs to be followed I'm arguing on the opposite and that its being described as a set of rules that need to be flipped. You're making good arguments but I'm not arguing with what you're saying. You should be quoting the belgate over there and asking him these questions.
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On December 04 2017 13:02 mozoku wrote:Show nested quote +On December 04 2017 12:15 KwarK wrote:
It's certainly not science fiction that we use that information to require that the payment for the car include a "fair" reimbursement to every part of the production chain, from the people who make the steel to a community fund compensating an area for environmental damage due to ore extraction. With today's technology you could split the payment from one payment to Toyota into a hundred thousand, each directed to the appropriate contributor to the vehicle in accordance to their contribution.
Would that still be capitalism? Toyota could still profit by producing cars for less than others, investing in more efficient factories, making more desirable cars etc. That's capitalism. But by using a smart pricing model that directly allocates reimbursement to the parties involved it could be made far more equitable. Is that more of a divergence than minimum wage laws are? Or is it simply a smarter execution for the same concept as minimum wage laws? I don't think such a payment system fundamentally changes anything, or even matters at all really. The entire question depends on how one defines "fair." If "fair" is defined by communists (i.e. something like profits redistributed to a central planner), then it's going to be communist (and fail for the same reasons). If "fair" is defined to be market value, it's capitalism. If you add a bunch of regulations but otherwise use market value, it's fairly similar to what developed nations are currently doing.
Is beheading wealthy people capitalism working or failing? Asking for a friend
User was warned for this post
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On December 04 2017 12:51 Uldridge wrote:
I don't see how providing for a population through a means that doesn't necessarily want to grow bigger and doesn't make people break their back for a living is "rapture for nerds".
I still don't understand what the appeal of capitalism is by the way. It's a success story to a degree, onto which all these inherent human traits are coupled. Humans are inherently competitive and innovative. Just because we happened to use this way of shaping our economy, doesn't mean something better can't or shouldn't exist.
Why not improve when we can?
Let's say a startup buys a piece of land, fixes all the robots in place to sow, grows, harvest, mill wheat into flour and makes bread and provides all the bread to a local small town. When will you be convinced? When would the tipping point be for us to slowly roll into another system?
You are trying to argue against population growth as an argument to escape the inflation trap of consumerism? Thats an interesting tack I've never seen before and its not that bad.
You're still missing the point of the argument. Capitalism isn't a system stop making it a symbol for the man like you're a hippie. Its an abstract concept to label the absence of central control over the economy. The issue isn't about rolling into another system the issue is about what this next system is and how it works.
The thing about your argument is that I know enough of automation to explain how thats possible to do right now except for trying to get insurance for when stuff happens.The answer would be to try to explain how the robots get built and maintained in a way that makes it any more efficient then what we do now. Automation isn't self sustaining and is worlds away from it being possibly self sustaining. The largest issues with Autonomous automation is insurance and maintenance.
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On December 04 2017 13:16 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On December 04 2017 13:02 mozoku wrote:On December 04 2017 12:15 KwarK wrote:
It's certainly not science fiction that we use that information to require that the payment for the car include a "fair" reimbursement to every part of the production chain, from the people who make the steel to a community fund compensating an area for environmental damage due to ore extraction. With today's technology you could split the payment from one payment to Toyota into a hundred thousand, each directed to the appropriate contributor to the vehicle in accordance to their contribution.
Would that still be capitalism? Toyota could still profit by producing cars for less than others, investing in more efficient factories, making more desirable cars etc. That's capitalism. But by using a smart pricing model that directly allocates reimbursement to the parties involved it could be made far more equitable. Is that more of a divergence than minimum wage laws are? Or is it simply a smarter execution for the same concept as minimum wage laws? I don't think such a payment system fundamentally changes anything, or even matters at all really. The entire question depends on how one defines "fair." If "fair" is defined by communists (i.e. something like profits redistributed to a central planner), then it's going to be communist (and fail for the same reasons). If "fair" is defined to be market value, it's capitalism. If you add a bunch of regulations but otherwise use market value, it's fairly similar to what developed nations are currently doing. Is beheading wealthy people capitalism working or failing? Asking for a friend
Depends on how you define the terms and what assumptions you make.
For practical purposes, I'd say failing imo though.
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Squeezing every penny out of your production line and maximizing profit because you can, simply because you slightly edge out your competitors thus being able to put down more establishments for the sake of it is more what I meant. If you reach a steady state, if you can pay your workers, why plant yourself where you're essentially not needed? Why does the reach of something that becomes too big to fail become so big? It doesn't have to be that way, but with every quasi monopoly you see this happen. You could, theoretically, provide just enough for a certain demographic to come by. No excess -> no waste -> no pollution. I get that this is very difficult to do. Too many choices, too much comfort we've grown accustomed to. I don't mind it either by the way, fuck going back to 100 years ago.
Population is still growing and I don't know when it'll stop so I can't give any prophetic insights on that. Don't think it's interesting to tell people to stop breeding.
I understand that capitalism isn't a set in stone, rulebook kind of thing. I know it's an economic philosophy almost the entirety of the world prescribed to, but I can still call it out for the bad sides it presents. The glaring flaws are enough for me to say that I want to abolish it ultimately, or at the very least certain sectors that partake in it (health care, food and public infrastructure).
I don't fully grasp your last paragraph. What haven't I provided to you albeit very conceptually on what this next system is and how it works?
Edit: I see, you've clarified. Now it makes more sense to me. Yeah, I haven't thought that through completely, of course maintenance is important. What do you mean exactly with insurance, though? Insurance in the sense that the people will get their product on time and in enough quantities and with decent quality?
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On December 04 2017 12:51 Uldridge wrote:
I don't see how providing for a population through a means that doesn't necessarily want to grow bigger and doesn't make people break their back for a living is "rapture for nerds".
I still don't understand what the appeal of capitalism is by the way. It's a success story to a degree, onto which all these inherent human traits are coupled. Humans are inherently competitive and innovative. Just because we happened to use this way of shaping our economy, doesn't mean something better can't or shouldn't exist.
Why not improve when we can?
Let's say a startup buys a piece of land, fixes all the robots in place to sow, grows, harvest, mill wheat into flour and makes bread and provides all the bread to a local small town. When will you be convinced? When would the tipping point be for us to slowly roll into another system?
I have no problem with being convinced and I don't have a inherent attachement to capitalism, I am just saying that you are trying to sell me a false utopia. A utopia isn't a steady state in which all tension has been resolved and we all live on organic farms and the replicator produces all our stuff and whatnot, the future is always uncertain. That's why capitalism stubbornly refuses to die, you bolt something else onto it and it's still capitalism. Capitalism is the only system ever to be able to handle uncertainty. If you upset the politburo one day you could throw the whole nation into disarray.
It's not radical at all to, like Greenhorizons, call for the proletarian revolution. We already had the proletarian revolution, there's museums you can visit. There are probably hollywood celebrities and successful capitalists calling for it, nothing is easier. It would be much more radical to genuinely come up with an improvement to capitalism that does not rely on calling in the end-times or the revolution. I remember that article from Igne a while ago which said that the Hurriane hitting Florida produced great acts of soidarity. If you have to outsource your revolution to a natural disaster or an AI you're not in good shape.
On December 04 2017 13:16 GreenHorizons wrote:
Is beheading wealthy people capitalism working or failing? Asking for a friend
It's capitalism working. After all capitalist heads were chopped of in great numbers, followed by some of the most disastrous decades of human history just to go back to capitalism!
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On December 04 2017 12:21 Uldridge wrote:
@Sermokala
We can create a self learning program that is able to understand what basic human necessities are. The first one being food, because that can be pipelined to get to from where it's produced to where the customers get it out. It controls the growing, harvesting, preparation and deliverance of the produce the warehouses where people can go to. The machines are controlled automatically (trucks/trains/preparationbots/whatever) so nothing needs to be interfered with and this can all run as smooth as possible.
This program keeps account of and updates the demographic of each warehouse so it can evenly produce and distribute to where food is needed. This absolves the need to transport shit all over the globe because it's cheaper to do so. It can be grown locally; there's no more value attached to it. This could be something that gradually replaces everyone involved, with farmers and packers and whatnot getting living wages because now they've become obsolete. You gradually do this with every sector that can be automatized.
Redistribution is possible based on sudden increases in needs (global monitoring is already happening) and with the self learning aspect it can smoothline everything even further (e.g. less pollution, better technology, less noise, ...).
This is the gist of how I see an automated world changing our society for the better. It'll bascially cut out all the shit people don't like doing and replace it with shit that doesn't care if it's doing that task because it's designed to do that task.
I think we could implement this today. We wouldn't even need to do much to make it work.
The self-learning component is sort of a backup for the existing inventory control systems. When something sells, send a new one to the store. If it runs out, stock more next time. If it expires on the shelf, stock less next time. That takes care of 90+% of the situations.
The self-learning component itself is implemented with a human manager. Similarly, the trucks, preparation etc. is implemented with self-learning humans.
For huge distribution problems too large for a person to plan, we could distribute the work to a cluster of self-learning humans. Really big problems take some programmers and a data center to accomplish, which basically all large retail chains already have.
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Regardless of the technical feasibility of replacing humans with machines everywhere, it's wasteful to pay for both a human and a machine when just the human could do the job.
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On December 04 2017 13:31 mozoku wrote:Show nested quote +On December 04 2017 13:16 GreenHorizons wrote:On December 04 2017 13:02 mozoku wrote:On December 04 2017 12:15 KwarK wrote:
It's certainly not science fiction that we use that information to require that the payment for the car include a "fair" reimbursement to every part of the production chain, from the people who make the steel to a community fund compensating an area for environmental damage due to ore extraction. With today's technology you could split the payment from one payment to Toyota into a hundred thousand, each directed to the appropriate contributor to the vehicle in accordance to their contribution.
Would that still be capitalism? Toyota could still profit by producing cars for less than others, investing in more efficient factories, making more desirable cars etc. That's capitalism. But by using a smart pricing model that directly allocates reimbursement to the parties involved it could be made far more equitable. Is that more of a divergence than minimum wage laws are? Or is it simply a smarter execution for the same concept as minimum wage laws? I don't think such a payment system fundamentally changes anything, or even matters at all really. The entire question depends on how one defines "fair." If "fair" is defined by communists (i.e. something like profits redistributed to a central planner), then it's going to be communist (and fail for the same reasons). If "fair" is defined to be market value, it's capitalism. If you add a bunch of regulations but otherwise use market value, it's fairly similar to what developed nations are currently doing. Is beheading wealthy people capitalism working or failing? Asking for a friend Depends on how you define the terms and what assumptions you make. For practical purposes, I'd say failing imo though.
Well, if nothing else, the developing market in guillotine manufacturing should be a sign that a record dow and profits is a bad time to give wealthy people more money and is dangerously close to an epic failure in capitalism.
Probably a good idea to do a better job voluntarily redistributing the surplus value created by labor before people opt for the less efficient methods that have forced the hands of ruthless capitalists throughout history.
I would call that voluntary redistribution socialist leaning policies like single payer, and universal public education. Which would still give capitalist a healthier and more intelligent workforce and is better than the "my bunker is better than my neighbors" strategy they are going with now.
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A steady state accounts for possible perturbations, but I can see your view point a bit better. You view it more as an organic entity that grows and gets hurt, but ultimately heals back up to full strength?
My AI proposal isn't a revolution, by the way, it's an end state. I don't have issues with changing our economic philosophy gradually (because, we're humans and we're slow at changing ultimately), but it does need to happen. And that's what I initially said, we need to start thinking on how we can change our economy (which I believe will be grounded in AI and automation) into some equilibrium that can satisfy all people.
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On December 04 2017 13:39 Buckyman wrote:I think we could implement this today. We wouldn't even need to do much to make it work. + Show Spoiler +The self-learning component is sort of a backup for the existing inventory control systems. When something sells, send a new one to the store. If it runs out, stock more next time. If it expires on the shelf, stock less next time. That takes care of 90+% of the situations.
The self-learning component itself is implemented with a human manager. Similarly, the trucks, preparation etc. is implemented with self-learning humans.
For huge distribution problems too large for a person to plan, we could distribute the work to a cluster of self-learning humans. Really big problems take some programmers and a data center to accomplish, which basically all large retail chains already have.
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Regardless of the technical feasibility of replacing humans with machines everywhere, it's wasteful to pay for both a human and a machine when just the human could do the job.
Gee, I didn't know you needed sarcasm to miss the point. I'm sure every person working that job is working that job because they want to do that job and not because they have a crippling fear (and rightfully so) of providing for themselves because otherwise they'd be on the street, ultimately unable to build a comfortable life.
That basic philosophy is not something I want to advocate, guy. I don't want people being born into a society that blackmails them from the very beginning.
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all this talk of socialism and economic systems and i sit here simply wishing for this tax bill to not be signed into law
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EPT
