Posted by loughnane 5 hours ago
How much of the trend is due to employment trends vs. printing money for the wealthy to get their hands on it first(and profit) post recession?
Why would you own them, instead of some well capitalized billionaire?
To the extent that you do have capital, why do you assume that your 'minimal direction and guidance' would outcompete a full time specialist working for that billionaire?
And in this world of abundant agents, what advantage does the billionaire have exactly over the non-billionaire? Their employees are less motivated than owner-operators, and they no longer have the scale advantage that large corporations used to have. Each individual can effectively operate like a large corporation, because each individual can have their own large synthetic workforce at very low cost. The scarce resource here then becomes uniquely human insights and real motivation, which entrepreneurs are always going to have more of than employees.
One would assume the difficulty of building housing has gone down with the general progress of technology - and if all else fails, you can just do what they did 50, 100 years ago where affordability was far less a struggle - people, who had less income in real terms spent proportionally less on it.
So did society devolve that an unit of industrial output has become more expensive? Or did money and resources just go into a parallel 'rich people economy', that has created a constant drain on the resources of average people?
I'm not sure if this addresses the point you're trying to make though. If not, please clarify your argument for me.
There is a need for proper pricing for the rich, i.e. Elon can pay a million dollars per meal. Someone is leaving money on the table.
A king goes hunting but fails to catch anything. Hungry, he goes to a nearby village. He enters the inn and orders some quail eggs. After finishing the meal, he goes to pay. The innkeeper tells him that the meal costs ten gold coins.
"I did not know quail eggs were so rare in these parts," says the king.
"They are not," replies the innkeeper, "but kings are."
Parking and speeding tickets should have income brackets, at least.
In the early Internet I saw this thing, no idea if it’s true but it sounds good (someone can math check it), goes something like:
A person pays $2 to play basketball on a public court.
Michael Jordan gets paid $2k to play on the same one.
A person pays $100 for basketball shoes.
Michael Jordan gets paid $100k to wear the same ones.
A person pays $40 to go see a basketball game.
Jordan gets paid $400k to attend the same game.
Michael Jordan makes about $5 per second.
If Michael Jordan saved all his money without spending a penny for 250 years…
He wouldn’t even have half as much as Bill Gates!
It made me think differently about money and consumer spending.
AFAIK in some countries this exist but my case is more capitalist oriented. Rich people obviously can pay more since they keep accumulating wealth. It is an obvious sub optimal pricing since the low and even middle class rent/mortgage and other services quickly approaching the most they can pay so they can’t actually save and make wealth.
Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk, please leave a downvote to indicate I caused you emotional distress.
How deeply puerile.
capitalism will always seek to reduce labor cost. during the epoch of neoliberalism it achieved great strides in this by reducing labor power through union busting by both thatcher and reagan in the UK and US respectively. it has also effectively curtailed any increase in the minimum wage for nearly 20 years as well as reduced protections, regulation and prosecution for wage theft and overtime pay violations which it maintains as exclusively as civil matters while ensuring theft itself from a merchant in turn is always a criminal matter through the primacy of private property.
to learn more i recommend reading Marx's "Das Kapital," albeit its rather academic. Engels "wage labor" is also a good read to understand why housing is so persistently unaffortable but helps to understand why any other good or service slowly becomes so as well.
So basically you are squeezed between the public demanding lower prices and the investors demanding record returns. If you are not a monopoly, that is an impossible ask
Basically the only truly profitable businesses left out there is selling hopes and dreams to investors, and shovels to those who build them, which just about describes tech & AI, with companies who regularly manage to 10x their valuations (and P/E ratios)
His worldview is primarily that capitalists 'steal' the valuable labor. However it doesn't seem that that is actually the world we are in. Instead the intrinsic value of human labor seems to be slowly trending towards zero.
And it kind of makes sense, same has happened with oxen labor, horse labor, etc.
Sounds like we should start imagining a world where we don't treat people like literal livestock, and then figure out how to get there fast
We tend to have a pretty human-centric worldview so if there's a single human working to keep a hotel running, our default is to attribute all the generated value to them when it really isn't the case. You can imagine that hotel at some point in the near future goes from requiring 1 worker to keep it running to zero.
Because he is? I do not expect for some sort of universal “AGI” to emerge within my lifetime which would supplant humans in every area (of course what do I know.. but still there is no real indication we are even remotely close to that currently)
> default is to attribute all the generated value to them when it really isn't the case
Certainly, you should attribute a significant proportion to the people who installed the automated system and even more to those who designed it.
Indeed, but what happens if/when they choose to sell the system and someone else buys it? Now the owner is who is generating the value. Even if he hires some maintenance worker to come by once and awhile and check up on it, it is the system (aka the capital), not the worker that is generating the vast majority of the value.
If you landscaper had one like the plumbers do he'd have his own yacht.
Or he wouldn't exist because you'd buy about as much of his services as you do a plumber's.
Marxism was an idea formulated especially as a reaction against a world where labor has lost almost all of its value. Which is precisely the origin of capitalism - the idea that money itself can be productive, and thus people who have lots of money can be expected to get more of it.
This was an untrue idea for most of human history, outside of the circles of moneylending and banking.
What's changing is how much of that surplus value is captured by the workers doing the labor.
Labour theory of value is useless. Falling rate of profit is not empirical. Capitalism didn’t go away as he predicted.
Workers enjoy highest living standards of any time in history.
It's entirely possible for someone to be paid a lot in absolute terms, while at the same time paid very little relative to the value that they produce which is monetarily captured by their organization. The truth of the first does not invalidate the injustice of the second.
This is why I think the billionaire oligarchs are literally mentally ill. They've won the entire game. They control everything. They live like gods, they twitch a pinky and millions dance.
But their response to all of this power is to seek even more of it, destabilizing the very system that has them on top. You would think self-preservation would kick in. The fact that it is not and that their greed knows apparently no bounds is going to lead to their extinction.
For a long time I thought it was hyperbolic to say so, but no longer -- the billionaires are mentally ill.
There will be a few who brand themselves as such. But actually seizing the means of production and handing them over to the people? -- The oligarchs will burn this country to the ground before they permit that to happen.