bloup @ bloup @lemmy.sdf.org

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2 yr. ago

I’m just curious what you think utility is and also who do you think is being exploited in economic institution that literally has to internalize all of the external cost? Also believe it or not I didn’t actually express any political beliefs here so I would appreciate it if you didn’t just assume that because I’m challenging you on your conception of things, it means that I disagree with your politics

Have you ever considered that the model of free market under perfect competition in neoclassical economics doesn’t actually say that the market needs to be powered by the financial profit motive, just that the firms need to maximize their own utility? It’s just that in capitalism these get conflated because it’s almost always one and the same thing. But it doesn’t necessarily have to be the case. If you have an economy composed entirely of mission-oriented nonprofit organizations for example that compulsively reinvest all their excesses and internalize all of their external cost, you can still analyze it as a free market under perfect competition, and ironically, it works even better than it does for capitalism.

I need you to give me a rigorous definition of what a “firm” is. Because I think to a lot of people, “firm” just means “distinct agent participating in an economy” and so the idea that this is something that can or even should be avoided on principle (even if basically all firms organized under capitalism are socially harmful) I think makes people imagine a bunch of hermits that never interact with each.

I’m just curious, but what makes you think it’s a definition that “sprung up recently”?

This isn’t about people not wanting to use Windows 11 this is about people not wanting to purchase a new computer

Tesla is the Fyre Festival of automotive manufacturers, except in this case Billy has managed to keep the kite in the air for an astonishingly long time.

I think it’s really funny how in proprietary software, if you download stuff without asking, you’re presumed to have economically harmed a business. But in free and open source software, if you download stuff without asking, you’re presumed to have economically benefited the random individual that made the project.

No it’s a tactics game where you and your opponent each command a bunch of combat units on a grid. Each of you has some kind of combat objective and you take turns moving your units around and engaging with each other. There is a little bit of a Pokémon/rock-paper-scissors element in that unit will be more effective against certain units than others but once a unit engages, the outcome is basically just RNG weighted according to where the engagement is happening, and which units are engaging

Nobody said it’s a conspiracy. It’s practically a natural phenomenon. Why would anybody be afraid that their child would look different from the other boys? Because they don’t want the other boys to bully him. Why do we all know that the other boys would bully him? Well, the good news is there’s a lot of research on this topic but the unfortunate thing is if you wanna learn more, you’ll have to engage with a word you don’t seem to like for some reason.

Men do it because of a fear of being different.

I think a lot of people make a very reasonable argument that a huge reason this anxiety even exists is because of patriarchy

It’s really outrageous that it’s illegal to sell snap benefits, but Tesla can make like half of its income off of doing nothing but selling regulatory credits to other auto makers, and it’s also the only thing that is allowing them to stay afloat right now it seems like.

to me “sea” doesn’t mean anything except for “general water region, smaller than an ocean”. I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with considering those three to be “gulfs”, but I think that people don’t usually think of them that way because unless you study the geography carefully, you might not even notice that they actually are connected to the rest of the ocean.

by the way, fun fact: there is actually a sea that isn’t connected to the ocean and why we don’t call it a lake, I really don’t understand. but that’s the Caspian Sea.

I read a lot of technical material that has lots of diagrams and it’s difficult with an E reader paging back-and-forth between the text and the diagram that I’m trying to understand

I never understood why nobody made an E reader that you could read “like a book” that just had two screens and a hinge

The idea that the velocity of a person walking forward on a train is simply the velocity of the train plus the velocity of the person walking with respect to the train is called “Galilean relativity”.

Einstein realized that Galilean relativity has a big problem if you take for granted the idea that the speed of light is the same for all observers, regardless of reference frame, and people had a lot of reasons at the time to suspect this to be true.

In particular, he imagined something like watching a train passing by him, but on board the train is a special clock which works by shooting a pulse of light at a mirror directly overhead which reflects back down and hits a sensor. Every time the light pulse hits the sensor, the clock ticks up by one and another light pulse is sent out. People usually call this the “light clock thought experiment” if you want to learn more about it.

Anyway, Einstein realized if he was watching the light clock as the train passed by him while he’s standing on the station, the path the light beam traces out will take the form of a zigzag. Meanwhile, for a person standing on the train, it will just be going straight up and down. If you know anything about triangles, you will realize that the zigzag path is longer than the straight up and down path. So if everyone observes the speed of light to be the same exact thing, it must be the case that it will take the light a longer amount of time to traverse the zigzag path. And so the person standing on the platform will see that clock ticking slower than the person on the train will. This phenomenon is called “time dilation”.

From this point, you can apply some simple trigonometry to figure out just how much slower things would be appearing to move on the train. And it turns out that the velocity the person watching the train observes the person walking on the train to have is not the velocity of the train plus the velocity of the person walking on the train. But rather, it’s something like that velocity, but divided by 1 + (train velocity)•(walking velocity)/c^2, where c is the speed of light (and this is called “Lorentzian relativity” if you want to read more about it).

It’s important to notice that since trains and walking come nowhere close to the speed of light, the value you’re adding to one is very small in these kinds of situations, and so what you’re left with is almost exactly the same thing you would get with Galilean relativity, which is why it still is useful and works. But when you want to consider the physics of objects that are moving much much faster, all of this is extremely important to take into account.

And lastly if you wanna read more about this stuff in general, this is all part of “the theory of special relativity” and there’s probably helpful YouTube videos covering every single thing that I’ve put in quotation marks.

The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

-Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

The irony is, I like proton because I don’t think you should trust literally any business to behave altruistically, including proton. By structuring the business in the manner that they have, I don’t just have to trust them. I just have to trust that the people in charge don’t want to go to jail or get fined, which is literally not true for any business owned by private individuals.

First of all, I did not say that proton is opposing capitalism. I said that to oppose capitalism does not mean you have to be opposed to free enterprise. As in, you can be opposed to an economy comprised primarily of capitalist institutions without being opposed to the concept of free enterprise. Proton is simply an example of such a business, which can be used as evidence for the fact that it is entirely possible to start businesses in a free market economy which are actually interested in solving problems as opposed to using the existence of problems as a vehicle to enrich a class of shareholders.

Second of all, “it’s filling a niche created by other companies’ poor privacy policies” is essentially nothing more than a restatement of the second sentence I wrote, which I will repeat here: “I pointed out that as long as it’s a for-profit corporation, it would have not have any financial or legal incentive to continue pursuing its mission if it ever achieved a certain level of market share.”. You’re right that them adopting a nonprofit structure doesn’t change that, but it does change their ability to sell out their customers at the discretion of a class of shareholders, unlike any business which is owned by private individuals.

I remember one time I criticized proton for positioning itself as community oriented while still being a for-profit corporation. I pointed out that as long as it’s a for-profit corporation, it would have not have any financial or legal incentive to continue pursuing its mission if it ever achieved a certain level of market share. But then several months later, they actually announced that they were going to put their money where their mouth is, and transition to a nonprofit structure.

I think that proton is perhaps the greatest example at the moment that to oppose capitalism does not mean you have to be opposed to free enterprise, and people should always think about this sort of thing when they listen to any kind of business leader try to convince them that it’s actually really important that they be allowed to cash out whenever they want.

I can’t imagine that their set up is perfect, but I definitely am going to have to give this offer serious consideration.

I think it’s wild how much job security professors often have and yet they let themselves get dicked around like this constantly