My current pet peeve is when it said like that, but the "yes but" its contradicting is from its own talking-to-itself phase, not anything I ever said or implied.
I know X can't do Y, that's why I never told it to have X do Y, I don't know why it feels the need to "correct" me that having X do Y is the wrong approach.
Yeah this is something thats bothered me a lot recently. I'll ask "How did team A beat team B by so much?" and Claude will tell me "Actually, team B didn't win; team A won that game." I don't know how they got this thing to solve open math problems when it can't solve basic sports talk.
During the industrial revolution, people thought that all these new machines and factories and electricity meant that everyone would only have to work 4 hours a week since it made everyone so much more productive.
That's not what happened, though. Everyone worked the same amount for the same pay, just in more miserable repetitive working conditions, while the factory owners kept all profits from the gains in productivity.
Those factories were not producing luxury goods. They produced everyday items for the masses. Things like knives, spoons, tools, textiles, ketchup bottles, shoes, furniture, nails, bicycles, etc.
Standard Oil, for example, improved efficiency and reduced the consumer price of kerosene 70%.
Defending standard oil is an all-timer hot take. They only had 90% market share? In a commodity?
SpaceX isn't a monopoly because they have domestic and international competition. Before they showed up, ULA was a deliberately constructed monopoly because Boeing and Lockheed didn't want to compete.
Numbers aside, SpaceX has a technological lead. They're not strangling competitors in a commodity business with monopoly practices. I wouldn't call ASMR or TSMC monopolies either, anyone can compete with them in theory. Standard oil, by contrast, would cut their competitors off from rail transit and selectively dump to drive them out of business.
The other reason they're not a monopoly is that they may do 90% of total launches, but most are for themselves to support starlink (another "nonopoly" with no competitors). They have 60% of the US government launch contracts, a small percentage of ESA when Ariane is flaky, amd of course 0% of China and Russia.
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The central argument of Capital is that the motivating force of capitalism is in the exploitation of labour, whose unpaid work is the ultimate source of surplus value and profit.
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Marx's labour theory of value is only a theory of where profits come from and is largely rejected. Return on captial investment is not restricted to factory owners. All workers get a share of the surplus value and have the option to increase that by investing.
"Capital stands as one of the most influential and controversial books ever written. Its legacy is multifaceted, shaping intellectual discourse, political movements, and the historical trajectory of the 20th and 21st centuries."
My hypothesis is that if you go full socialism, you get stagnation, because no one is motivated to change anything. If you go full capitalism, you get Gilded Age, where wealth and political power is concentrated in the hands of few individuals, followed by Great Depression.
I learned to hate corpo jobs less by thinking of them as "farming gold out of a megacorp". Of course I'm losing my ability to do even that, as sloppotrons beat half-century-old grognards every damn time.
"while the factory owners kept all profits from the gains in productivity."
Because this is what drives continual risk-capital.. very few countries are willing to upset this. Get over it man - I hate hardended capitalists but stop crying. This is the system we have. Wanna beat it? Go ahead and start a firm. Then you'll find out how tough it is.
The thing I cant get over is enough software engineering folks collectively hold immense power. Whats wrong with you lot (im not a software engineer)? Get your sht together.
P.s. Im starting a firm who's central mission is to attack capitalists (ofc I won't say it out loud in that way). I will find out for myself how much of a backbone software engineers etc have when I employ them.
Being an employer means you will find out. Employees are not weak and feeble. They quit all the time for more money elsewhere, or just don't want to work. And there's NOTHING you, as employer, can do about it.
One "side" is actively and intentionally destroying the country, the other is letting them. It's not that both sides are bad, it's that both sides are the same side, working for the same people.
You'll find people on both sides of the aisle who agree with this sentiment, they just disagree with what side is destroying the country and what side is letting it happen
The first one passed with a lot of regular people losing their homes, their jobs, and even their lives. I wish just for once we could have the wealthy elites get their comeuppance without it also screwing over everyone else.
there were substantial crashes and booms during the gilded age as well, it wasn't uncommon to go bust and lose a house before the great depression. The panic of `73 is pretty comparable with the great depression, for example
The problem is, if the government is small, then corporations are more powerful and can run over it and do whatever they want. If government is large, then its a much juicier target for corporations to lobby and bribe to get what they want.
It comes down to culture and society. A democratically elected government should ideally be there to represent the interests of the masses as a way to counteract the inevitable power of the wealthy elite. But when those same wealthy elite spend decades and billions of dollars to brainwash the masses by owning all the media companies and influencing school curriculums and so on, I don't see how the masses stand a chance over the long term.
If that's all it was ever used for, then nobody would give a shit. Instead those examples you gave just end up being an _excuse_, so that you as a business owner can fire or deny a promotion to someone you don't like because you can now prove they stopped at the 7/11 for 5 minutes to pee.
If this country had good unions and real worker protection laws, like you can't punish drivers for taking a break, then we wouldn't feel as much a need for broader sledgehammer laws banning GPS tracking. (that, lets be honest, will never happen anyways)
> Instead those examples you gave just end up being an _excuse_
How is an insurance company provision an excuse? Do you propose self-insurance? If so, would that be advisable from a fiduciary responsibility standpoint for most small companies?
Who ultimately bears the increased insurance premiums and deleterious effects emerging from legislatively banning GPS on company assets and dashcams? (Hint: not the business)
“If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.”
> Higher concentration of wealth is not new, it's happened many times and dissipated many times.
That's a very clinical way to put it. Usually when its "dissipated", its through war or economic depression or both, and a great many people who never had any wealth suffer needlessly, while the wealthy rarely do.
It would be nice if we could like, _not_ do that, and try something different for once, instead of throwing up our hands and saying "well that's just how its always been!"
You're forgetting anti-trust. Standard Oil controlled 90% of the oil production in the U.S. until it was splintered into numerous companies. We're not really at the point where this needs to be done for tech.
Also, dynastic wealth itself doesn't sustain itself well, and dwindles in a generation. See: the aforementioned Rockefeller, whose grandchildren are nowhere near as rich. Notwithstanding that many of the wealthy (in particular, Bill Gates) are donating the majority of their wealth when they die.
I know X can't do Y, that's why I never told it to have X do Y, I don't know why it feels the need to "correct" me that having X do Y is the wrong approach.
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