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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • They don’t command them, but they call them in like you call the police.

    Fun fact: From time to time, a pilot forgets to change frequency when entering a new area. This means the plane looks like it is not communicating. This is the most common reason why jets are sent to intercept an airliner. Of course, I would pay to see a recording of the pilots as they see the jet in front of them and realize they messed up.










  • anticompetitive and anti labor practices are fundamental to capitalism - you can regulate them all you want, companies will always find ways around it. wage theft (overtime violations, unpaid or underpaid wages, off the clock violations, etc) significantly outweigh all other forms of theft (larceny, robbery, vehicle theft, etc) combined.

    In my experience, these anti labor practices are almost not a thing where I live. Seems regulation works in this regard.

    in addition, something like planned obsolescence (companies intentionally making their products less long-lived so you have to buy more of them) cannot be completely prevented with regulation, since companies can always choose not to make their product better in a particular way, or no better than the absolute minimum requirement

    Funnily enough, the corp I work for is quite obsessed with making products last longer. How is that possible? Simple. We provide service contracts together with purchases, so customers pay monthly service fee and we have to keep the products functional. So it saves us money (and increases profit) to make repair costs low. You just need to think a bit outside the box.

    profit measures value extracted, not value generated. providing a service to people (postal service, healthcare) produces a measurable amount of value which is not directly profit. you can always increase profit by paying workers less and charging more for your product,

    Profit is a function of the value created vs resources consumed to produce the value. As long as there are worker protections legislated, that is just efficiency.

    and these both get more effective the more you have cornered the market.

    Yes, monopolies are bad.

    a high amount of profit tends to mean a huge amount of money being extracted from communities and working individuals

    Sure. But unless you are talking about a monopoly, unusually high profits leave room for competition to sell the goods cheaper. So outside of monopolies, the profit you can extract is limited. And making goods cheaper is the same as increasing wages, it benefits the public.

    capitalism is competitive, and competitions have winners. you can make all the regulations you want, but even when everyone “plays fair” someone will eventually emerge on top

    What are you even talking about? Yes, the most efficient companies emerge on top which is exactly what we want.

    competition is massively inefficient; you have no incentive to share anything, so huge amounts of redundant research and work gets done without public benefit.

    That is true.

    an economy which is based on and rewards collaboration rather than competition would be better able to provide for everyone’s needs and ensure nobody is left behind.

    The issue is building such an economy. Most people will always pursue their selfish gains. Capitalism channels this by making “creating valuable things we can sell to people for minimal cost” result in large profits. Where the selfishness would show up in a cooperation based system you describe would be much more difficult to predict since it depends on the details of your system. But the results are likely to be worse exactly because it is hard to predict and therefore regulate or otherwise deal with.

    I mean, the most obvious question is, without competition, what drives companies to be efficient?


  • co-ops get outcompeted by corporations. this is a capitalist economy we have, and so it’s very geared towards competitive profit seeking.

    Remember that profit and created value go hand in hand, or at least, our legislation should make sure it does.

    co-ops provide better worker protections, better working conditions, better stability and resilience, and better products. corporations are better at being single-mindedly profit driven, which is what our economic structure rewards.

    True, but corporations have to generate profit for shareholders. This is the profit that should be used for improving worker conditions etc. by co-ops. Also, some worker protections should be legislated leveling the playing field even more to the point where reasonably efficient co-op should outcompete a corp.

    communism is not a vague concept

    At least here on Lemmy it seems to be. Kinda makes no difference to me if someone has the secrets to successful communism if I can’t see them.

    it’s important to remember that under capitalism a company is very much motivated to curtail workers’ rights and anything that would threaten the status quo.

    Within the company, sure. Outside, it has motivation to hinder any competition and this has to be prevented by govt. regardless of whether the competition is a co-op or a corp.

    the system is rigged against it, which is why they tend to fail.

    I am not accepting this claim without concrete examples. How is it rigged?

    capitalism is not markets, nor is it free trade. capitalism is the specific system where there is an owning class that dictates how the economy is run (CEOs / shareholders), thereby holding that power away from the working class, whose lives are dictated by their decisions.

    That is a misconception. Any individual CEO/shareholder have very little control over how the economy is run. And while they may cooperate in some areas and situations, they are ultimately competitors most of the time. If you make the simple assumption that they chase profit, than they have even less control. I think they are far closer to just another cog in the machine then to any dictators. That is the appeal of capitalism, as long as you align your goals with profit for corporations, they will fulfill your goals with ruthless efficiency.

    if you’re genuinely interested in finding a system better than what we have, I don’t think arguing with strangers on the Internet will accomplish what you want. I think Second Thought makes some very good videos on these topics, though he seems to have some authoritarian leanings I don’t agree with.

    Its not as much finding it. I think I have an idea what it looks like, but I also know how easy it is to be wrong about issues as complex as these. So I am more taking a pause and looking at differing opinions to see, if some don’t show me wrong.


  • You are the one who said the description of communism was not vague. And I was careful not to include you with the violent revolutionaries part.

    If you don’t want communism, but just social policies in capitalism, then I am on board with that. Of course again, the devil is in the details, but I am generally on board with UBI (or something similar), universal healthcare, etc.

    Idk about co-ops, feels like if those worked, we would see a lot of them already. There shouldn’t be anything blocking their creation as to post says. I am all for removing any barriers for their creation if I missed some but I don’t think they should be forced.


  • You’re making claims about a subject you are not an expert in, and refusing to read any literature on the subject.

    I unfortunately don’t have unlimited time, so I am forced to refuse to read books that are unlikely to be relevant.

    But also Capital is written that way to preempt arguments; it’s an academic work. His other works only suffer from 3 page long sentences that require significant contextual and historical knowledge of mid 1800s europe. Lenin is an easier place to start.

    Then maybe can you point to a work that does not assume an 1800s economy? Also, Marxism was tried already by the Bolsheviks. It failed horribly. If there were no improvements made since, what is the point? While I like the scientific method, I am certainly not willing to try the same thing again and see if just as many people die a second time.

    I am not interested in being expert on communist history, I am interested in examining any modern plan to see if I can see issues in it or if it looks like it could work and is worth supporting.


  • But those are the things you are leaving out. How is this public funding collected, who decides where it goes, how are these people elected?

    These are the kind of things you need to figure out for your communist system to work. My belief is you can’t, because it does not work. You will not be able to create a system that works for the greater good while humans follow their selfish interests.

    But maybe I am wrong. Prove me wrong. Show me a detailed plan. “Some committee that is somehow elected will distribute some funding” is so vague there is no way to debate over it.

    IMO you and so many others use this kind of vagueness to mask the massive issues communism has, that prevent it from being viable in the real world.

    The infuriating thing is that so many people are supporting a violent revolution, that could easily result in hundreds of thousands of deaths while seemingly having no real plan of what to do once they win.


  • The size of a nation doesn’t inherently determine the success of socialism. There have been historical examples of relatively small nations with socialist-inspired policies and economic structures that achieved positive outcomes.

    Ok, so its not size that is the issue.

    I was moreso making the point that nations are different from communes existing within capitalist nations on a variety of levels.

    Yes, I get that is the point you want to make but I am inclined to not believe you, since it sounds way too convenient. “I can’t show you a small scale proof of concepts because evil capitalism exists.” So my question is, what exactly are the issues? Concrete examples.

    For taxes, while infrastructure and services are vital, a truly communist system wouldn’t depend on taxation in the traditional sense. The idea is for the community to directly produce the goods and services it needs. Again, this runs into conflict when a commune needs to exist in a capitalist framework.

    Ok sure, but that does not prevent a commune from existing. If it can produce enough economic value, it does not matter if it builds infrastructure itself or pays taxes. Just treat the commune like a micro-nation that can’t produce firetrucks and bulldozers and has to obtain them from abroad by bartering using money as the medium.

    The challenge lies in managing the complexity of large-scale bartering or exchange systems on an international level, but it’s not necessarily impossible. For a small commune in a capitalist nation, though, I can’t see that ever happening.

    Why? International trade is already pretty much barter facilitated by money. Why couldn’t a commune treat the surrounding system the same as a foreign nation from trade perspective?

    Trade and international exchange would likely be based on cooperation and needs fulfillment instead of pure profit motives.

    So a communist nation can’t peacefully coexist and cooperate with any other system? Doesn’t sound very robust.

    For the legal stuff: you’re right! Legal structures exist to support collective ownership (co-ops, land trusts, etc.). The issue is how those structures interact with a dominant capitalist system and its legal frameworks.

    What exactly? What laws would we need to change to make this possible?

    For anticommunist interference, yes it is illegal but when has that ever stopped anyone from harassing their political opponents?

    Sure, it can’t stop it but it can limit it. Again, if your system falls apart due to little push back, its not a very robust system.




  • No, I will readily admit I don’t even know what communism would be in practice beyond the vague nonsense people say like “collective ownership”. I have been trying to ask here for a few days now and didn’t really get anywhere.

    That is exactly my criticism. From what I have seen, communism is not an implementable plan, it is a “politicians promise” of things being better without the rich with nothing backing that claim up.

    Of course, feel free to prove me wrong by providing a link or an explanation. Or even better, by implementing it in reality on a smaller scale as the posts challenges the readers