hansolo
@hansolo@lemmy.today
- Comment on you have been defeated, you do not pass go, you do not collect your $200 19 hours ago:
I feel seen and humiliated.
- Comment on Can't have my glizzies 3 days ago:
Just looking for a woman with a cheese drawer…
- Comment on Why do companies always need to grow? 3 days ago:
OK, I will absolutely apologize for assuming you were American. I try not to creep on people’s post history unless necessary, and didn’t double check. That’s on me, and I’m genuinely sorry for that.
Though, I’m not defending capitalism, other then to try and find the minimal threshold necessary to fulfill it in the original comment. I respect you sticking to whatever politicial or economic stance you want, and I was being a dick yesterday and I’ll blame wine and sun for that. Mostly wine.
As a sorta-kinda economist, the point on which I have settled from seeing a lot of people on several continents live their lives, is that communal living and resource allocation is suitable for emergencies and basic survival in small and rudimentary settings. That is well documented in the anthropological record.
Beyond that, humans have a tendency towards transactionalism, often somewhat incorrectly termed capitalism, because transactions don’t require saving money for capital to be used later. There’s a great book called African Friends and Money Matters that is a frustrating look at a Westerner in Senegal trying to explain how the fundamentals of resource application work. It summarizes perfectly how most of African village level communities work, and I hope fascinating to someone who wants to start from a point of communal resource allocation.
But, my personal opinion is that we grow from that point outward to transactions while luxuriated and well-resourced, and capitalism past that in habitual abundance. So Marx proposing such limitation and hemming people in to a command economy seems counterintuitive simply from the perspective of trying to get people to participate willingly.
That’s not a defense of capitalism, but simply pointing to where it naturally crops up. I can’t abide Marx, so if there’s a third option other then radical agrarian anarcho-syndicate communes and basic cooperatives, that has seen success, I would be interested to hear it. But those, much like Yugoslavia, are also very personality dependent and so not likely to last longer than 60-80 years or so.
- Comment on Halloween ideas 3 days ago:
The redneck kid in my 8th grade that wore a skeleton kama sutra shirt under a Corona poncho his dad got from the liquor store would love this.
- Comment on Open Printer is a fully open-source inkjet with DRM-free ink and no subscriptions 3 days ago:
Not hooty owls, it’s a conferencing thing.
- Comment on Why do companies always need to grow? 3 days ago:
All I see here is whining about “uh, guys, no one did it perfectly right 100% the first time, so it doesnt count.” Like what a child says when playing a game.
Like how all y’all didn’t vote for the nice Black lady because of not being perfect enough to your peivledged liking on Gaza, then seem to not able to connect your actions to the repercussions which are what that one douche is enabling in Gaza.
Sorry, but it’s just a bunch of tankie apologist BS, and a perfect example of why no one takes full communism or socialism seriously in any country that isn’t already a single party state, corrupt to the maximal extent possible and unable to waiver from the party line. The Communist Manifesto might as well be some conceptual only scifi fictional government document, like the Star Trek reference to the Fundamental Declarations of the Martian Colonies or the United Federation of Planets Constition. Plot devices for the individual, wholly useless to society as a whole.
Which also does a huge disservice to anyone pushing for a blended system that is known to work well in limited circumstances.
- Comment on Why do companies always need to grow? 4 days ago:
what ideas exactly?
Well, let’s take 3 non-standard examples:
Yugoslavia nationalised industry and introduced worker self‑management after it broke away from Stalin and the USSR. Loads of collaboration with post-colonial Non-aligned Movement African nations that wanted to dabble in socialism but didn’t have a popular movement or resources or planning to back it. Taking refugee in capitalism, like China recently started to do as well, is what let thinks work for a time. Tito, however, was the only thing that held the county together, and once he was gone, the whole place collapsed slowly over a decade. There was no evidence that the “best” socialism in the region (best, as in least totally shit) was worth keeping on its own or valuable enough to try and keep.
Albania imposed strict state ownership, collectivised agriculture (the gulags are basically Woofing, yaay!), and a hard‑line Stalinist-style paranoia-fueled regime. It assigned jobs; no one not official given the job of “driver” by the state could operate a vehicle. And it fucking shows still to this day. Hoxha held the county together with fear alone because nothing of socialism was worth keeping on its own, or valuable enough to the average person to keep.
Bulgaria did a decent job replicating Soviet central planning, collectivisation, and political control. It all sucked and the Yugoslavs loved to leverage economic disparity over them because it was so fucking bleak in Bulgaria for theor entire stint as socialists. Which is part of why Bulgaria is shitting on their neighbors now about EU accession, they finally have the advantage and a grudge that survived 40 years because of socialists caused economic disparity. They happily joined the EU a generation after realizing that nothing of socialism was worth keeping on its own, or valuable enough to the average person to keep. But they have decent freeways now.
Despite three very different attempts to try socialism as a means to the end of communism, only Belgrade and it’s immediate suburbs really had a decent quality of life. Everyone else had a well-documented traumatizingly bad time.
And while I’ll happily admit that I haven’t needed a more than cursory remembrance of Marx since 2002, that literally billions of people have proven time and again that Marx’s ideas are pure fantasy, and that 19th century ideals about economies that have just stated industrialization are not needed in the 20th century any more than Adam Smith has been relevant once advertising manipulated simple supply and demand, because humans are not rational actors.
- Comment on Why do companies always need to grow? 4 days ago:
Well, I doubt we were ever going to agree, even to disagree.
I will say that Marx’s ideas have been tried and tested and have never held up to real world application. Bemoan capitalism all you like, then explain how the Holodomor happened.
Anyways, have a pleasant day.
- Comment on Why do companies always need to grow? 4 days ago:
I understand Marx fine. He was an academic who grew up the privileged son of a lawyer, and never spent a day of his life worrying about how he was going to feed his family by working on a farm or in a factory.
His ideas about land alone being enough to be considered “means of production” are informed by 19th century feudalist-cum-post-feudaliast Europe, and the transition point between the Prussian Kingdom and a unified and nascent German state as it industrialized.
His view of industrialization is like that of Upston Sinclair: “Holy shit, WTF? This is terrible.” Trauma and secondary trauma informed by other people. But as an academic his understanding of how the economy works at the level of what was a rapidly changing factory scene. 21st century economics don’t fit 19th century ideals.
And you as a lumberjack is the perfect example. You might own a saw and live near a forest. Cut all the trees you want. Who will buy them without access? So now you need a road. But your 19th century horse cart can’t drag a 400kg log anywhere to sell it, so you now need to buy a truck and loading system. Only now too you have an actual logging setup that gets your product of raw timber to a mill for sale. Marx calls all these things the means of production, which is cute, but he assumes that the social whole is different.
The road needs to be graded and maintained, your saw oiled and sharpened, your truck maintained. Which all also needs labor to happen. As was the cries of trucking unions when the Teamsters formed, you are just part of the machine. Which means that when you get down to it and nitpick, everything and everyone is a part of the means of production of something else. There are no gaps and no bourgeoisie locking up every critical aspect of the social whole, and small businesses as the largest employer in the US mean that Marx’s theory doesn’t stand up to reality anymore. The end user and end consumer provides demand, which is as necessary as the road and truck and mill for you as a faux lumberjack. Demand is a human non-labor aspect of the social whole we all have, which is more important than the means of production. Just ask the bourgeoisie board of Blockbuster Video, or a small local newspaper.
- Comment on Why do companies always need to grow? 4 days ago:
Marx’s definition of “the means of production” is both not in tune with how anything has ever worked, and ignores that Marx basically used real estate as the definition because he was closer to European feudalism than us. Marx grew up and spent his uni years as a subject of the Prussian Kingdom, and industrialization and land ownership were entirely different in his time.
Context matters. And apologies for being condescending, but it pisses me off to no end when people wax poetic about some pastrolaist socialist agrarian sunshine butterfly state when if you’ve never experienced it, actually sucked and everyone hated it who was in it, even in the modern era.
- Comment on Why do companies always need to grow? 4 days ago:
You don’t need to argue anything, because there is no universal definition of capitalism. Were not trying to define it.
But the term itself requires capital to be involved, and for a business to exist, that capital needs to be reinvested in the business. That doesn’t require growth. The absolute minimal state simply requires pricing a good sold at a net profit. That’s all. Growth isn’t a requirement.
- Comment on Why do companies always need to grow? 4 days ago:
- Because you’re leaning on Marx for definitions, who was famously out of touch with reality as well, 2) because ALL small business owners need inputs, and labor of only one of them, so inventing the vendor as now a farmer to attempt a workaround is disingenuous, 3) you also had made the tomato vendor into a farmer in hopes of having a point that fits into a poorly crafted 19th century framework, and don’t know enough about how farms anywhere on earth to realize how blatantly wrong you are, 4) your definition of capitalist is factually incorrect, 5) read my edited comment above, which I edited while you wrote this, 6) a farmer is no different, functionally in a minimalist sense, from a person making jam as a cottage industry, who buys fruit and processes it at home, making a farmer’s field not magic but simply a location where work is done, 7) I said tomato seller, which is someone that spends their labor time buying tomatoes from farms as a risk and selling them in the market. They own means of logistics, which for anyone not stuck in 1862, would consider essentially a means of production as well, as it takes an input and renders is viable to trade for a medium of exchange. Does a fisherman owning a boat mean she owns the means of production when it’s fish spawning grounds that make fish? It’s a stupid argument to cling to one you’ve already written your first PoliSci paper about it and get it.
Look, everything is connected, and there is no terminal point of anything from which anarcho-socialist magic can magically arise and flow down to make some post-consumption utopia. It’s a circle with no beginning and no end. You can’t force economic change to change human behavior, and Marx’s ideas have famously failed hard. Over and over. Spectacularly.
You’re taking about a 30 generation cultural change that you won’t ever see.
- Comment on Why do companies always need to grow? 4 days ago:
And publicly traded companies are the also the minority of the total number of companies in the US. So this is a niche issue with outsized effects, meaning a policy solution is out there that
- Comment on Why do companies always need to grow? 4 days ago:
If you want to nitpick, I never said farmer. Also, farmers have inputs, so your comparison is wholly removed from reality.
- Comment on Why do companies always need to grow? 4 days ago:
In the strictest definition, they don’t.
Capitalism is minimally fulfilled when a business sells something for a profit and reinvests the profit (now capital) in the business. Hence the term. It doesn’t have to grow the business, make new products, or do anything beyond maintenance of its processes, be that fixing or updating machinery or training employees. A single person selling tomatoes in a market in Madagascar that fixes of their tomato table with profits is perfectly capitalist.
Expecting constant growth is not a requirement of anything.
- Comment on Ants Trapped For Years in a Soviet Nuclear Bunker Survived in The Most Horrifying Way 5 days ago:
Came here to confirm “…well, probably just cannibalism, right?”
- Comment on 1 week ago:
Oh, I’m absolutely not criticizing your comment at all. Far from it. It’s fully bonkers that you made a joke that was a good joke, and I can’t take as joke because it hits too close to reality for me.
Life is tragic, not us.
- Comment on The 0% discount 1 week ago:
What’s the male equivalent of a Karen?
- Comment on 1 week ago:
I do a lot of privacy and cyber advocacy and research. Selling lists is what already happens, so this is more real-sounding than I expect Damage@feddit.it knew when saying it.
- Comment on Its all bots, isn't it? 1 week ago:
This is the one place where it’s not all bots.
Except for me, I eat wires for breakfast, and batteries for lunch. And then for dinner I’ll make spaghetti because sometimes bots just love a good plate of pasta.
- Comment on 1 week ago:
Streaming services are very sensitive to the ups and downs of anything that’s a standard deviation of from normal. They’re too new to have 10+ years of data to fall back on, so the same overreactions that canceled Kimmel also uncanceled him because of panicky reactions to repercussions.
- Comment on 1 week ago:
Wooooah, there, buckaroo. Gonna need a citation for that.
- Comment on There is a limit how much power the pedal assist of an e-Bike is allowed to provide (at least in many countries). There is no limit though on how strong the exoskeletton is that you use on a regular b 1 week ago:
I was about to tell OP that this would only work if they use a real exoskeleton and have a bike wheel on each hand/foot like a rolling bug.
- Comment on WHAT DO THEY NOT WANT YOU TO KNOW 1 week ago:
I would guess yes
- Comment on Donald Trump and Peter Thiel are using AI to supercharge the surveillance state 1 week ago:
When it’s the db being used to persecute Americans as some nebulous “the enemy,” they will have as much shit data as they please and still scoop you up until you or a Republican donor come to collect you.
When TF have these people ever cared about accuracy?
- Comment on OK what is your Roman name? 1 week ago:
In Latin that would be Panisius.
- Comment on What's your favourite kind of restaurant? 2 weeks ago:
I only like a good fusion restaurant of they cut the atoms diagonally like a PB&J
- Comment on Republican senator targets overseas facial recognition site(PimeEyes) over ICE doxing 2 weeks ago:
Sounds like one of her aides should just be collecting data on ICE agents and using the PimEyes Opt Out page.
But that would require reading and knowing one’s ass from a hole in the ground.
- Comment on deep words. 2 weeks ago:
Three eyes?
gasp you stole one of Stevie’s eyes?!?!
- Comment on deep words. 2 weeks ago:
But…he’s never seen me.
^Am^I^even^real?^