it’s one of those things where people conflate high infant mortality with the idea that people didn’t live to old age previously. pretty common.
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Yea I almost mentioned govt funding earlier since a ton of our tech advances come from that, I just think it’s just hard to say that capitalism is responsible for the growth of tech which results in where we are today
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Yes, we’re a mixed economy on a capitalist base, like almost every other country. The question is where to turn the nobs to have the best form of mixed system. I’d like more socialism but we live in a country with at least medicare, social security, free education until 18. In human history nothing similar could be imagined.
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Yea I’m aware of this and article he posted dove into that claiming that’s not all the change is which I think most would agree that’s obviously not all of it, tech and medicine etc, I just think it’s hard to be like oh that’s because of capitalism only and that’s why it’s great and good
Part of the problem also is that in a largely unchecked capitalistic system you end up with failsons owning all the means of production eventually. Elon and Trump are two of many examples.
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I’m fine with the argument that we should have 65% more socialism (in the European sense). I just don’t think it’s meaningful to blame the lack of human perfection on capitalism. Too much historical criticism of “capitalism” has been cover for eventually murdering people to get back against an invisible enemy.
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I think we all mostly agree more socialism in various areas is better for sure, and sure in the past that probably is true about getting back at people but I think actual policy critiques of capitalism are valid and I don’t have any faith in the market or unbridled capitalism to lead to some utopia whereas I think we could move much closer now with socialist changes
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I think we have everything needed now to make this world into a pretty good place, maybe that’s dumb to say but I think it’s true, but capitalism stands in the way of that in a pretty huge way and I think the stupidity of people that you blame is more of a feature of capitalism, not a bug, and aligned with its incentives
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Let’s look at Rawls. He seems to be OK with capitalism as an economic system insofar as we just take that to mean private ownership of the means of production. But he insisted that a just society would have a very high social safety net (making things as good as possible for the least fortunate groups in society) and thought that inequality was only permissible to the extent that it improved things for the least fortunate. It’s hard to imagine how you get those types of outcomes without policies that the man on the street would call socialism.
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I feel attacked.
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Great. And one world government will help in the endeavor bigly. I’ll go make some signs. “One world government where everyone works (but not too hard) for the common good of all!”
However, pretty sure it’s not capitalism getting in the way of one world government. It’s humanity. Thankfully AI will come and set us straight.
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Reminds me of people in the past talking about why productivity increases in the future would have humans working only small amounts and tons of leisure etc, but that’s never happening because capitalism doesn’t have any interest in that, sure tech will be better and people will live longer and whatever small leisure time people have will be full of VR and whatever other cool shit but life will still be “shitty” no?
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Assume AI does basically all the work. We’re still stuck with the human condition and scarcity. Still, can’t complain. It could be and always has been worse.
Generally agree with Rawls on political philosophy but don’t recall if he discussed such things. The stoics did.
I think AI gonna do all the work to make the rich richer, not sure it’s gonna let working people not work, they gonna work a lot still or either not work and be homeless/starving
Good convo tho, I need to do some work so gonna bow out
Last thing edit:
We can complain cuz it could be better and the answers are there now imo
Was slouching towards utopia good? I thought someone bashed it here but maybe it was elsewhere, something turned me off to it
It’s a bit dry but it’s very good.
I remember when Blu-ray was about to drop the people in the industry talked about how much more content you could put on a Blu-ray vs. a DVD. They forgot that everything gets dramatically bigger in size in HD and that there wasn’t really any additional content space. Everything in this world is smoke and mirrors about advancements. Each advancement has a cost and that cost is usually in data storage and reliability of that data storage.
I remember when a 1TB hard drive cost $5000 and when we got one at the company I worked at in 2002, we all thought we’d have enough space to basically last forever. This was back when project file sizes for sound had 4GB limits, so it was a ton of data available at the time. Audio project file sizes are now basically unlimited and 1TB wouldn’t last a year in most places, especially ones with a lot of work. Now 1TB drives cost next to nothing, and I wouldn’t dream of trying to get a hard drive below 10TB now, which still costs way less than the 1TB drive back then, lol.
Data Points:
- I just finished a ‘small’ project and all related material was 87GB.
- A moderate size project all related material was 205GB.
- A big project last year all related material was 387GB.
I dream of the Silicon Valley algorithm becoming reality.
/randomthoughtsfromarandomperson
what is your scale? 0-100? name some examples at the extremes. where do you put US2024? where would you put US2000? US1950?
ostensibly, north korea is further towards socialism and south korea is further towards capitalism. yet, north koreans as a people have become shorter than their south koreans due to a shortage of calories.
this is a fascinating debate to have, once you establish a scale
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