Paying someone to break a window, and then someone else to fix it, will also stimulate the economy. But it's clearly not a rational use of our time here on earth.
I presume you just mean the farcical "break a perfectly working thing" idea. But, demolition is a thing. Similarly, turning a usable vehicle in for scrap is also a thing.
But still, are you saying that I'd better consume things I actually don't need because that's the only way to avoid war ? I'm not saying that you should stop buying things. We need objects in our life.
But are Apple Watches, Airpods or VR headsets or foldable phones protecting us from war ? I hope not because that sounds depressing.
(Asking genuine qestion, I'm not doing virtue signaling here, I do own a VR headset, a pair of airpods and an Apple Watch and none of those objects are making me happy actually)
The price of peace historically explains how most war is faught over resources or local status games. Both of those behaviors were mostly captured by world trade and consumerism which replaced each respectively.
But then what emerged is that the largest consumer engines of production and consumptions could control the global trade and resources in a way that would suppress warfare globally by creating an economic MAD game alongside the nuclear one.
People don’t understand how much violence this likely saved us. However it is of course not without consequences. I'm just saying so far the side effects have FAR FAR outweighed the sickness (world war)
No, I don't get 'this', because you have not actually said anything. Across this post and the ones above it you have pretty much only insulted me witouth saying anything I can either understand or misunderstand, because there is no content.
In a sibling I see that you actually drop the name of a book, as if you expect the world to read a book to respond to you.
I propose you formulate your argument, if you actually have something to say. Even if it is a summary of a book, summarise it into a argument which is relevant for this conversation. Who knows, maybe even I manage to understand you then.
My guy, the fundamentals of Neoliberalism are like newtonian physics at this point, if it's not my job to explain them for you from first principles. Born out of WW2 and specifically thrived from 'fixing the broken window of Europe and Japan.'
But basically speaking, games of destruction can be obviously extremely economical incentivized regardless of what humans call 'productive.' And economies and markets have never ever promised to be narrowly productive for a specific moral world view. Quite the opposite actually.
Please don't claim insult where basic knowledge is simply lacking.
It would be possible to make a website which proxies other sites, but strips this header, right (maybe with some added ads)?
If so I would expect such sites to appear, and the only way to secure a child device is to have a whitelist of webpages (to avoid the proxies), putting us back close to where we are today.
Such sites would be illegal if not sharing the header back from the source website and be banned as much as adult websites incorrectly setting this header. It’s not a real problem.
Making them illegal does not fix it. There will be a indefinite whack-a-mole game which is very hard to solve without draconian control over the Internet.
The problem is that it's easy to make, easy to deploy, easy to make money on, and a single site opens up the whole Internet. It will happen even if it's illegal.
Compare this to adult webpages setting the header. They will probably be quite willing to do so, since they want to make their money legally, and there is probably little money in serving to kids anyway. And even if a single out of thousand adult webpages refuses, it still only opens that single site.
It's actually hard to understand on "which" side you're on, but a charitable interpretation is that you're arguing that there are no perfect solutions, hence a simple and minimal non-invasive method will probably have the same effect as a complex and invasive method. That is, both methods will add enough friction that children who don't know what they're missing won't bother and the ones who can't do without, will choose every conceivable method to get around the restrictions.
Worrying about the latter makes no sense, because they are sort of like organized crime. People still take drugs even though they are illegal.
you probably don't go all in, but try to find real assets that are not _too_ strongly correlated and are likely to have durable long term value. The most compelling answers I've heard are things like desirable real estate, commodities, or futures/contracts like water rights. Even then its not no equities, just a much lower allocation to minimize down side while still capturing some of the exuberant growth
For Europe it paints a picture of significant political meddling, says among other things:
- Over the long term, it is more than plausible that within a few decades at the latest,
certain NATO members will become majority non-European
- Many of these nations are currently doubling down on their present path. We want Europe to remain European, to regain its civilizational self-confidence, and to abandon its failed focus on regulatory suffocation.
- The current administration wants to "Cultivate resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European
nations"
- "We want to work with aligned countries that want to restore their former greatness"
There is less about China, and one can guess that the following quote is aimed at them:
"We seek good relations and peaceful commercial relations with the nations of the world without imposing on them democratic or other social change that differs widely from their traditions and histories."
Does anyone else think that the government should do something like this? Either enforce that vendors sends their offers to a central database which is publicly accessible, or at least make it available so the vendors can choose to send data there (maybe enforce it for big vendors, to get it started).
In general I think it makes sense for the government to be responsible for the market place, and the infrastructure around the market. The data should be avaliable publicly through a API so one could build different frontends and analysis services on it.
Example markets are electricity, deposits, mortgages, housing.
No. I can be envious of people who are independently wealthy, and control their own time.
But that is not the same feeling I have for Bezos, Musk, and other billionaires. That feeling is fear. Fear for the power they have, both politically and over the economy. Fear that the rise of the oligarchie and the extreme wealth differences will be the death of democracy.
No, these are orders of magnitude. It's like a short man who is 5 foot tall, standing next to a 6 foot man and feeling envy. But standing next to a 50 foot tall creature would be abjectly terrifying for any human of any height.
But as I said, I have no problem facing my envy. I can be envious of independently wealthy people, and the feeling I have for billionaires is not the same. I don't know why my psyche would accept the envy for some but not for others.
I also really don't feel the shame you seem to project to me regarding envy, I tvink it is a complicated emotion with good and bad sides, certainly nothing to feel ashamed of.
But before I continue, is there any point continuing? From the comments so far you seem pretty settled in your believes about my emotions, and if you have decided apriori that whatever I say it's my mind defending itself, there is not much point continuing.
Your armchair psychoanalysis is extremely distasteful. Can you engage with the other side without straw manning them?
It is perfectly explainable for someone to fear Musk, pouring billions into influencing elections to prop up an anti-workers candidate, who runs on hate of minorities and ends up severely impoverishing the country through huge tax cuts to the wealthy and the destruction of all remaining social nets.
No, I do not envy Musk. Frankly, he looks rather miserable on his own. A healthy man does not send 50 tweets a day, cheat at videogames on stream to boost his fragile ego, or consume 10 different drugs.
We’ve had ten years of this cloaking of disgraceful sin in the language of vulnerability. It hasn’t yielded anything of value and now with hindsight we can affirmatively declare that it was an abuse of people’s desire to care for the vulnerable.
I couldn’t care less for this deceit.
Besides, the rest of your comment is some random screed that reveals your political inclinations as the primary motivation for your comments. This /r/MurderedByWords content is a telltale.
By all means, spend half of your comment replies on dunking on some guy who isn't here as a way to flash your tribal colours.
I don't know what to tell you. You have decided that the entirety of the left is actually just envious of Musk and Trump, and that there's nothing else to it. That's frankly insane. I don't know what to tell you besides: no, that's not the case.
What you said is impossible to argue against. "I said you were envious, so you are. Anything else is just you trying to cloak your envy." You already decided that everyone must secretly want to become a billionaire above all else, and the sole and exhaustive reason why all of them spew hatred towards that class of people is "they hate us cuz they aint us".
Money is not like mana in a game, it does not create things by itself. It is more similar to votes, each dollar is a vote into the economy for what should be created, and where the goods and services should go. And the more money you have the more votes you have.
So yes, he payes for the apple, and that's good. But the apple existed, and would be sold to someone else if he had not bought it. The accumulation of wealth does centralise power over the economy, what gets produced, and how it gets consumed.
Yeah, there's an economist comment on "We can afford everything that we produced".
Like when the Apple is produced it's not because a dollar bill was sowen into the ground. The actual inputs of production are not money but money is the lubricant that allows the goods and services to flow around in the economy. We always run into the situation where goods and services are produced and not demanded and that causes them to no longer be produced but the lack of money didn't cause their existence no more than money produced them in the first place.
Without it, societies had to have informal debts where you knew you helped your neighbor harvest crops so they would later do something for you (or perhaps you helped them harvest their crops because they provided shelter). That whole barter shit is made up.
There would not be so many orchards or apple farmers growing apples if they could not exchange those apples for goods and services they wanted effectively.
At the level of a large scale apple orchard, money is the only thing that works effectively for that.
If people only grew enough apples that they wanted to eat, most people would be unable to get apples, and most apple lovers would be spending a lot of time they could be doing something else trying to grow apples. Overall edible apples would be dramatically lower, even non-existent at some places/times.
For example, imagine the shitshow if people had to refine their own gas, or barter/trade for it directly. Zero chance 99% of society would be able to do that.
Same with miners and raw materials, machine manufacturers and machines, solar panel manufacturers and solar panels, etc. etc.
Money itself isn’t a good/service, but it makes the act of making/exchanging/selling/etc. easy and possible at scale. Which is valuable on its own. And since it provides a generic ‘value’ proxy for all goods/services within the economy, if anything it is the most consistently valuable thing in a functioning economy - it’s a wildcard for value.
This does have a limit of course - too much money in too short/concentrated an area causes all sorts of crazy things to happen, as the induced effort/incentive to produce something outstrips the realistic ability to do so, causing escalating ‘money fights’ for the same goods, as the value of the goods starts to dwarf the perceived value of the money itself. (Inflation)
Just like too little money in too concentrated an area/time causes crazy things to happen because the perceived value of the money itself starts to outweigh the actual value of the transacted goods, and transactions can start to grind to a halt in an effort to conserve the increasingly valuable money itself. (Deflation)
All you say is true. I never argued for the irrelevance of money. The voting power into the economy is extremely important, and it plays a vital role in the orchestration of the real economy (the part actually producing stuff and services).
But it is not such that billionaires provide some value with their consumption (they can provide value in other ways though). Yes, for the individual Yatch-producer (or farmer) is it nice that they get to sell their product, but for the economy at large all it does is move production-resourced from other things which could otherwise be produced to the production of yatches(or whatever the billionaire wants).
So yes, the billionaire does not take from the farmer. But he does take from the economy at large (in the same way as my consumption does, but to an extremely different degree).
Billionaires don’t generally become billionaires by spending a lot of money on watches or apples or the like.
They become billionaires (generally) by owning things and making those things more valuable in other people’s eyes.
The vast majority of Elon Musks wealth, for instance, is in stock of Tesla, SpaceX, X, etc.
It’s an entirely different kind of situation, because the wealth is generally due to other people’s estimates of the productive output/wealth generation of those assets increasing over time.
In the musk example, it would be like if someone bought and then came in and funded the expansion of a big apple orchard that previously no one had ever heard of, and then made it internationally famous so that everyone wanted to be a part of it - and sold shares in that orchard to people.
Now people are eating more of that orchards apples, everyone values that orchard more, and now what previously he owned but was cheap is now worth a lot.
That is legitimate value creation, as much as you might hate him or the process.
If he did it by burning down other orchards, he would be a criminal. But like in the spacex case (or Tesla case), it’s pretty hard to argue that is what happened. Maybe some light fraud here and there, at most.
It mostly came from a lot of salesmanship and light/moderate gaslighting, but they are legitimately valuable companies - albeit maybe shouldn’t rationally be at the P/Es they are. But he is making the irrational happen.
And that is making a lot of people money that otherwise wouldn’t, and making something happen that otherwise wouldn’t. Those people are very happy he is doing what he is doing.
For the alternative, see the USSR. I’ve known people who lived in that system, and it was terrible.
I dont want the USSR, and I don't see the relevance. For me this is a discussion about the role of money and wealth in our economic system, I am not arguing for plan-economy. The dynamic allocation of resources provided by a market based economy is great. But there are many ways to run a capitalist society, I certainly don't belive we are at the end of history here.
Billionaires certainly CAN get more wealthy by a process as you describe. They can also get more wealthy by just owning stocks and do absolutely nothing. Last 20 years the S&P 500 has increased 8-fold. That means 64 times over 40 years, 512 times over 60, 4096 times over 80 years. With the s&p average since 1926 of 9.8%, the numbers are 42-fold after 40 years, 272 after 60 and 1770 after 80. Salaries has certainly not risen at the same rate.
My views are probably shaped by coming from a place with more old money, where more people are rich from inheritance than their own creation. And their share of the totalt wealth of the society increases even when they are just passive owners. For me this is a reinvention of Feudslism, where the owner class controls the economy because they inherited it.
Now, this is a bit of a tangent to the original discussion though. What I had been trying to say is that independently of the reason for why the billionaire has the money, the spending on that apple is not providing value to the economy. In your original post I read you to mean that, and that the billionaire provided value by buying that apple. Of course he did on the micro scale for the farmer, but not at the macro scale. All he is doing is slightly shaping the economy to provide what he wants, using money as the lube.
So billionaires can be so for a lot of reasons. They can have stolen the money, passively gained them, gained them on the back of others creating value, or they could have created the value themselves. Independently of the source, they now have power over the economic machine. They might use it to improve the machine (good) or they can make it create things the billionaire wants in place of things other people wants (less good).
The original comment I replied too was how a billionaire buying an Apple was destroying/taking things from the system - when the reality is that the billionaire traded a bit of value, and so it’s just changing ‘columns’ in the system, not being destroyed in the process, but rather now the farmers/retailers/middlemen now have some cash instead of too many apples, etc.
What is the better alternative?
Because it’s actually in their interest to buy fewer real goods, and more ownership - assuming the ownership is of productive assets. That’s how they became billionaires in the first place. By using their Capital (literally excess assets/buying power) to acquire more assets/buying power, or grow the value of their assets/buying power. Yes, that includes the orchard example above.
In the USSR, you could only buy things approved by bureaucrats who ensured the ‘right things’ were available for sale, and people didn’t get jealous, and ownership of most classes of assets was restricted to the state.
There were no private billionaires in the USSR, but a lot of administrators that had to play political games - with those on the bottom being stuck with the leftovers.
Notably, for those complaining about the US military industrial complex - military spending in the USSR as a percent of GDP dwarfed even the US. (Albeit much lower in actual value, because the USSR’s economy was relatively tiny)
One could easily argue that the biggest priority of the USSR was in fact military spending - far more so than the US even at its peak, and they happily threw everyone else but the elites under the bus to afford it.
History rhymes for a reason, and people are similar all over.
But the focus on their personal consumption is not the most important. There is a limit to how much ice-cream a person can eat, and at some point the money is no longer used for direct personal consumption. But rather to influence the world in whatever direction they want.
It reminds me of how Sam Altman recently said: "I'd rather hear from candidates about how they are going to make everyone have the stuff billionaires have instead of how they are going to eliminate billionaires." But the hyper-wealthy don't just have _stuff_, they also have power to make decisions affecting society -- to buy elections, to buy social networks, to influence which countries we do AI chip deals with, to start new cities, and so forth. A world in which everyone has the same amount of this decision-making power is probably not a world in which billionaires exist.
Yes, "don't look at wealth inequality" boils down to an argument for shifting political power to the wealthy — which I'm sure its proponents genuinely believe is for the best.
Of course Sam Altman doesn’t want to hear about eliminating billionaires, because he’s a fucking billionaire.
Not everyone can be a billionaire, when it’s based fundamentally upon having exploited the have-nots. You’re always going to need a wage-slave class, if not a class of slaves proper. That money doesn’t come from nowhere - it’s drawn from those least able to afford it, and therefore least able to resist exploitation.
If anything, that should be all the more reason to do it.
Give the poorest more money. It’s the complete opposite of our current approach.
Capitalism ties decision power to how good you are at accumulating wealth. Other systems give decision power through birth, status, or bureaucracy. But so far none have matched capitalism at growing total wealth over time- just look at “communist” China adopting capitalist tools to get rich, and now struggling with the inequality that comes with it.
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