Æsc @ aesc @lemmy.sdf.org

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2 yr. 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?

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.

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.

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.

Guest payments? Like a PayPal payment without a PayPal account?

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?

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.

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.

So a post-information-scarcity society. It means something else with different word-order.

PayPal’s been around for like 25 years now. SDF is the sort of organization that sticks to solutions that meet their needs, not switch to whatever new thing is becoming trendy. If you’re feeling all anti-corporate and PayPal offends your sensibilities, they’ve been accepting payments by check for even longer than they’ve accepted PayPal.

But literally any PC that’s within your budget. OK maybe that’s not true, there might still be some crap WiFi cards out there with weird firmware that don’t support Linux very well. Find an older name-brand PC within your budget. Before buying it Google “[make and model] Linux WiFi” and see whether there’s tons of complaints about the WiFi. If not, go ahead and get it, put Ubuntu or Linux Mint on there, start banging out JavaScript projects, profit.

Yes, ha ha, but Arabic Numerals, with a capital N, refers to ٠ ١ ٢ ٣ ٤ ٥ ٦ ٧ ٨ ٩ that’s 9 through 0 read left-to-right because Arabic is written right-to-left. While you can see how the West adopted numerals based on Arabic ones eight hundred years ago (thanks to Fibonacci), we only call them Arabic numerals, with a lowercase n, to distinguish them from the Roman numerals we were historically using. Today they aren’t really Arabic anymore, and I don’t know why you’d learn Arabic Numerals unless you were learning to read and write Arabic.

Also found this on bboard:

In the past, SDF has been rate-limited by Let's Encrypt due to requesting a large number of certificates, which means renewals sometimes take a day or two or more. It's not ideal, but it is what it is.

Maybe they need to start staggering their renewals so all the fediverse servers don't expire at once.

There's also going to https://sdf.org/?subscribe, scrolling to the 2nd from the bottom row "Support SDF's efforts in the fediverse", and use that form to send them money specifically to support the fediverse services. If they get more money for the fediverse, they'll pay more attention to the needs of the fediverse. Right now they're more focused on migrating to a new array for their MetaARPA subscribers.

Does Western Governors University have biology classes?

Regarding wealth, it doesn’t have to with a heavy enough estate tax, AKA anti-aristocracy tax.

Yeah, I got a Windows laptop and couldn’t do that as easily anymore and like, it really bothered me that this service that I’d only been using for a few years that everyone else gets along without was suddenly unavailable. It’s like parking at a parking meter and needing quarters now.

Sure it will, just get Kali for ARM. https://www.kali.org/docs/arm/

Framework hasn’t been around that long, and is more likely to go out of business than Google or Apple. Even if the design of its parts is open-source (I’m not sure whether they are), you’d have to find someplace to make the parts for you. Also how many businesses have started with open-source stuff then taken over by people who in order to make them profitable make them go proprietary?

Oh, you want to study cybersecurity? Yeah forget what I said before, get a Framework, and if you don’t put Linux on it at least put WSL on it. Learn all you can.