aesc
@aesc@lemmy.sdf.org
- Comment on Please Stop 8 months ago:
Well, if those licenses are entries on the blockchain, they could be transferred on the blockchain. You could sell your game used when you’re bored of playing it. You can’t play it after you sell it but someone else can. Publishers hate resale markets though, when people buy used games they don’t make any money. So they’ll probably never go for this.
- Comment on Looking to build my first PC in almost 30 years; What should I be on the look out for? 8 months ago:
Compared to those pain points building a modern PC should be a breeze. CPUs go in Zero Insertion Force sockets so as long as you remember to lift the little lever you won’t bend any pins. People don’t even wear static discharge wrist bands anymore (all though it couldn’t hurt) or worry about shorting things out. And power connectors only fit one way unlike the AT power connector.
Speaking of breeze your only pain point might be making sure you have enough air circulation for cooling all that gear.
- Comment on Schools in America apparently have their own army recruiter 8 months ago:
When I was in high school our home phone number was published in the phone book and military recruiters called it a few times when I was getting close to finishing high school.
I’m not giving my kid a cell phone if I think them having it would endanger them. If unsolicited phone calls endanger them they shouldn’t have a cell phone. They should know what information shouldn’t be given out to strangers over the phone, on a call or via message. They should know how to block numbers and recognize calls that are best left to voicemail, &c.
- Comment on Schools in America apparently have their own army recruiter 8 months ago:
At least you can’t get drafted before you’re old enough to vote anymore.
- Comment on Schools in America apparently have their own army recruiter 8 months ago:
I guess they probably do now because like 90% of high school grads have or did something that makes them ineligible to join and if they want more recruits they need to get students to not do things that make them ineligible and that might mean reaching out more than six months before they’re old enough to join.
- Comment on Schools in America apparently have their own army recruiter 8 months ago:
Spent 14 years in the Navy, and they don’t care much for their people either, just in a different way from the Army and the Marines. Imagine the Air Force but like 1/3rd as much money to spend on its people because they spent the rest on ships.
- Comment on Schools in America apparently have their own army recruiter 8 months ago:
So they’re old enough to decide to join the military but not old enough to handle receiving an unsolicited message on social media?
- Comment on Why do some languages use gendered nouns? 8 months ago:
We don’t have a lot of records of what speakers of the Proto-Indo-European language were thinking because they lived c. 4500-2500 BC and didn’t have their own writing. I think the for the earliest writing we have of an Indo-European language gendered nouns had already been invented.
- Comment on Probably better than me in this one. 9 months ago:
Some of them are, some are not. Probably most are not, I think the overall probability of “doing OK” is less than 50%.
- Comment on We live in a post scarcity information society and we still haven't moved on from capitalism. 9 months ago:
Is someone with the power to grant promotions or dock pay not a representative of the owner, who has all those powers? Sure if the workers all own shares then they are also owners, but hiring and firing are actions performed by owners or their representatives. Workers perform labor.
- Comment on We live in a post scarcity information society and we still haven't moved on from capitalism. 9 months ago:
It’s a socialist model of organization, but if it’s operating in a capitalist economy, it benefits capitalism as a model to run an economy, not socialism.
Also no, not everyone is a worker. Not everyone is equal. Someone (or a group of someones) has the power to hire/fire, or dock pay to discourage poor performance, or grant promotions to incentivize superior performance. Someone has the power to alter the distribution of resources, because once a group of humans reaches over 150 or so they form hierarchies because it’s just too difficult to keep peer relationships with more than about 150 people. So someone is given power to speak for more than oneself, they speak for the group, and therefore have more power than a person who speaks for only oneself. That person is not a worker, now they are a politician, or a bureaucrat, or a manager, or a chieftain, or something, they are not like the others, they have more power.
- Comment on We live in a post scarcity information society and we still haven't moved on from capitalism. 9 months ago:
No, I completely acknowledge capitalists largely care about their investments in capital and don’t really care so much about workers as long as they are working. But at least I know where their incentives are, what they’re trying to do. It’s difficult to predict how people are going to act if you don’t know what their incentives are, and if you can’t predict how people are going to act then your life is less stable.
And “direct ownership” meaning like a co-op or whatever, nothing wrong with that. Collective ownership of a business is totally fine within a capitalist economy. There’s still a concept of ownership. I wish more businesses were run that way. Well, a lot of start-ups kinda are now that I think about it. People get some pay in stock options and the like. I think unions should own more shares in a company so the incentives of both the union and management are aligned to make the company money, but it’s hard to get the right balance.
- Comment on We live in a post scarcity information society and we still haven't moved on from capitalism. 9 months ago:
Yes, tools don’t make things, people using tools produce things. And capitalism as a tool has been used to produce a lot of things, a lot more than socialism. But like any tool, you don’t want to use the same one all the time for everything. Economics is about incentives, and different systems put the incentives in different places. You don’t want to run a prison on capitalism because it incentivizes imprisoning people. But if you’re running a country on a planned economy it’s difficult to incentivize people to work harder just because the government said so, even if it was a democratic decision that people should work harder.
- Comment on We live in a post scarcity information society and we still haven't moved on from capitalism. 9 months ago:
Workers do have a say. They own their labor. If they are educated and organized enough they can bring a corporation to its knees, because corporations can’t do anything with their capital without labor. Just because I’m arguing capitalism has merits doesn’t mean I don’t think there should be strong unions, or shared ownership of companies, or regulation of markets.
I don’t want to do a job I don’t want to do just because the majority voted that I should do it either, really. I can count on people to vote for their own self-interest, but I can’t count on them to vote for mine.
- Comment on We live in a post scarcity information society and we still haven't moved on from capitalism. 9 months ago:
In order for things to be a product of capitalism, you have to show they can’t be made outside of it.
OK then, what has socialism produced? Remember you have to show what it produced can’t be made under capitalism, or any other economic system.
Anyone can tell someone they’re wrong, but if you can’t explain why, why should they believe you?
- Comment on We live in a post scarcity information society and we still haven't moved on from capitalism. 9 months ago:
I’m not saying it gets you the job you want, I’m saying no one can make you do a job you don’t want to do. People can incentivize you, with money. And I think collective organizing and bargaining is important to make things fair. I hear German firms have a union representative on the board, that seems pretty smart.
And it needs to be regulated. The government needs to force firms to pay to mitigate harmful externalities as well as incentivize positive externalities. And there should be social programs to take some of the edge off market fluctuations, like free or cheap training, help finding employment, cushioning some of the effects of market fluctuations for the average person.
- Comment on We live in a post scarcity information society and we still haven't moved on from capitalism. 9 months ago:
Well, the device you are reading this on is a product of capitalism. Whether it’s a phone or a computer, it has hundreds of chips made at hundreds of factories in at least half a dozen countries, all the parts had to be brought to a place and assembled, then brought to another place and sold to you. And you likely didn’t even have to pay for it in advance before it was assembled and ready for you to use!
Did you eat food today that wasn’t grown near where you live? “That’s just trade” you might say, but it took a significant investment of capital to set up the system of trade that got it to you, at the very least the ship or the train it was transported on, if not the equipment used to grow and harvest it. If you ate a banana or chocolate and you don’t live in the tropics then you only ate those things thanks to capitalism.
Are you wearing shoes? Are they completely hand-made by an artisan, did you commission them to be made and come back in a year to pick them up, or did someone invest in capital so you could buy them in a store?
Did you go to college? Did you pay to have the school built and the teachers hired to teach you, or did someone raise and donate a bunch of capital to create it? Did it own a farm you had to work to pay for its operation, or does it have an endowment it can invest as capital to raise money to pay for some of your education? Just because it’s (hopefully) a non-profit institution doesn’t mean it would exist without capitalism.
Just look at the improvements in the living conditions of a huge portion of the planet over the last 200 years when we had capitalism, then look at the improvements for the 200 years before that. Haven’t there been more improvements in more people’s lives since capitalism than before it?
Look I know it’s not a perfect system, it needs regulation, and it’s not the right tool for every situation but generally it blows mercantilism and feudalism out of the water, and it’s done better than every planned economy so far.
- Comment on We live in a post scarcity information society and we still haven't moved on from capitalism. 9 months ago:
I’m quite sure we’ve outlawed the direct ownership of people so, yeah, in capitalism no one tells you where to work, they pay you to work. There is a job market. In planned economies, someone tells you where to work. Planned economies are an expression of socialism. On the scale of individual firms, capitalism doesn’t require them to be organized in any particular way. If you want to run a business as a cooperative, where the workers own the company, you can certainly do that in the United States if you want. But if a collective tells you where to work, then someone is still telling you where to work. Please explain how you’d do socialism without anyone telling anyone else where to work.
- Comment on We live in a post scarcity information society and we still haven't moved on from capitalism. 9 months ago:
Unregulated agriculture also destroys land. Just because something has negative effects over long-term unregulated use doesn’t mean it should be abolished despite the positive effects. Just because a system is older than another doesn’t mean it’s superior. Or do you yearn for serfdom?
- Comment on We live in a post scarcity information society and we still haven't moved on from capitalism. 9 months ago:
Fine. Factories are capital. If you want manufactured goods and the freedom to get a job you want more than you want to work in a factory then you want capitalism.
- Comment on We live in a post scarcity information society and we still haven't moved on from capitalism. 9 months ago:
We don’t just use capitalism to distribute information. There are free libraries all over the U.S. It’s possible to learn most of what knowledge-workers need to know for free. Then you can seek employment for using what you know and not your physical labor.
But also, economists consider humans to have infinite wants. Certainly society as a whole has infinite wants. So no matter what resources we extract from the environment, society always wants more, which creates scarcity, which creates markets, which, in a free society, creates capitalism.
- Comment on We live in a post scarcity information society and we still haven't moved on from capitalism. 9 months ago:
So a post-information-scarcity society. It means something else with different word-order.