Posted by loughnane 7 hours ago
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.
All companies are rent-seeking. Selling something is no longer a goal.
Prices go up up up up up.
Oligopolies and price fixing is normal.
Monopolies are normal with little/no controls.
People are getting paid a pittance to the work done.
Unions are their weakest in a century.
NLRB is basically frozen due to no quorum on the head board.
Companies routinely scam and lie at multiple places in hiring pipeline. FTC does nothing.
Neither party (Republicans or Democrats), save the DSA, fights for the American people.
Its all coming to a head, and baskets, and guillotines. Anybody who studies history knows what kind of powderkeg this situation is. Its also the reason the Ancient Romans made panem et circunses (bread and circus) cheap or free. You get riots and revolts otherwise.
So its obviously suboptimal, only question if there is a more optimal system.
> central planner who somehow has all the information
Every developed country is balancing that with free markets and its the mainstream view that a balanced system is optimal (the exact ratio is of course something’s that not quite settled).
> Assuming that the allocation of capital is somehow aligned with what’s optimal for the economy/society seems naive
The empirical facts are that the disposable real wages have gone up by more than 50% over the last 20 years. People are way richer now than before and the growth in USA is much higher than any other developed nation other than small edge cases.
The big picture here is increasing wealth inequality and that has been on steroids since the pandemic.
The only shocking part to me is how people continually and intentionally don't see it or, worse, think they'll be unaffected by it so don't care. You see this on HN where so many people seem to think they'll be Jeff Bezos one day.
But even if that's true, don't you want to live in a society where you don't need armed guards at your house and you don't need armed escorts to go anywhere? Because that's what we're heading towards. One of the problems with American society (in particular) being so car-centric is that it lets people insulate themselves from the rest of society more easily. In cities like NYC you're forced to see and deal with the less fortunate. You can't hide from it so easily.
We don't need trillionaires. We need to raise basic living standards so people have food and shelter and we don't need to separate society into slums and armored compounds.
Software engineers are a special kind of stupid: the kind that thinks they're smarter than everyone else.
Boomers created everything you like about this world, including youth culture itself, "don't trust anybody over 30".
Their predecessor generations, their parents and grandparents, believed comprehensively in things you despise.
I know this because I hated the boomers when they were young, and you all sound just like them.
Such a lame attempt to defend them by you lol--what makes you think money has anything to do with it? That's Boomer logic; IME, Boomers and right-wingers believe everyone is as self-centered as they are.