- cross-posted to:
- memes@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- memes@lemmy.ml
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To be fair, they DO bare all the risk of violent deposition and decapitation. Let’s honor their sacrifice.
edit: and of course by “honor”, I mean ensure…
Oh, you didn’t hear? They do the most work of all, and have the hardest job.
That’s what they tell everyone constantly, anyway…
They are the easiest people to replace with AI. Come on society, do the thing. Make this bullshit end.
I get the sentiment but do you really want to spend your workday taking orders from an AI? maybe instead we can elect leaders in our companies who are real people and not exploitive monsters
do you really want to spend your workday taking orders from an AI?
Probably depends on the work I’m doing and the AI itself.
I’d have no problem implementing AI driven solutions as long as they made sense and were good - honestly I might even have more respect for the AI than the CEO. At least one of them isn’t pretending to be a morally upstanding member of society.
honestly I might even have more respect for the AI than the CEO.
That is a crazy stance to take. It’s like saying you prefer Beezelbub over Satan. I mean, you want to give your self-agency over to a machine? Really?
I didn’t say I have to listen to it anymore than I listen to a human.
I mean I’d rather not give my self agency away at all but almost all of us proletariat do on some level since we’re wage slaves. I don’t really care if it’s an AI or a human CEO when it comes down to it they’re interchangeable except one probably just is an intermediary between the AI and you at this rate where execs are slobbering over AI and eating up tech bro lies like candy. CEO probably just asking the AI anyways and saying what it says.
Yes it’s a wildly myopic view, and I’m being a little tongue in cheek, but in all reality I genuinely think executives are almost all dead weight once you get high enough in an org but your opinion may differ.
So yeah doesn’t really matter to me if the master is silicon or flesh if the result is all the same.
I genuinely think executives are almost all dead weight once you get high enough in an org but your opinion may differ.
Sure, I mean the wide array of shitty execs we have nowadays certainly. But a strong project leader with the backing of the organization they lead is a powerful combination and I don’t discount it when I think about how things should be run.
In other words, I do think it’s a good idea to have an especially qualified person “in charge” of getting shit done, but our current system of capitalist self-enrichment only works in a “broken clock is right twice a day” sorta way.
They control AI. So no, they won’t replace themselves sadly
They are the easiest people to replace with AI.
Why aren’t you doing it, then?
This argument against socialism has always made no sense, the only way it holds is as a critique of capitalism.
Money doesn’t disappear, either its circulation in a sustainable way…
Or someone is hoarding it… like a capitalist.
Yeah money actually does disappear. Banks don’t need to hold all of their deposits in reserves, they can lend them out. So 1 real dollar can act as multiples of that in the economy by people depositing and loaning it out in succession. This only works if there is confidence that borrowers can pay back their loans. When that confidence breaks down, as we saw in 2009, then businesses are unable to borrow for payroll and other expenses and the whole economy contracts. You can then try to print money to stimulate the economy, but that will lead to inflation.
This is sometimes called fountain pen money and it usually not disappears money but is how new money is created.
Banks can create new money with a proverbial stroke of a pen, lend it out and when the loan is paid destroy it again.
The bank of England has a pretty honest flyer about it.
A quote specifically about this misconception:
When households choose to save more money in bank accounts, those deposits come simply at th expense of deposits that would have otherwise gone to companies in payment for goods and services. Saving does not by itself increase the deposits or ‘funds available’ for banks to lend. Indeed, viewing banks simply as intermediaries ignores the fact that, in reality in the modern economy, commercial banks are the creators of deposit money.
The total absurdity of this situation, is that its very common for such loan to be paid off with a new loan, which is called “refinancing”
Yeah but it isn’t something new. When you lend friends or family money, you still count that as your money and expect it to be paid back (whether with interest or not). But the person you loaned that money to also counts it as their money and spends it as needed. Ideally, the borrower is able to make better use of it than the lender, and the arrangement leads to a net positive for both parties.
This is a failure of thinking known as “zero-sum bias”.
Because our planet famously has infinite resources…
I dont get it, why dont everyone start their own companies and rake 100% of the profit for oneself, then?
Pretending this is a good faith argument.
Because the market is already saturated, capitalism is not the freedom of business, it is the freedom for business.
No mom and pop can compete against walmart, they already have too much money, walmart is free to lower prices at locations around the mom and pop store until it runs out of business.
One example because like… If it’s in good faith you just straight up lack the prerequisite knowledge to discuss economics.
Or rather the average person doesn’t have the capitol to front the cost of making something expensive.
Because capitalists made it so that competing with them is extremely risky.
Money barrier/immediate life threat/limited market.
Because they’re mostly wrong about their premises and thus conclusions. It makes perfect sense that they keep being poor until they fix those.
Economies to scale is a hell of a thing
Well 15% of bigger paycheck vs 100% of everything one accomplishes on own, I think economy of scale works in worker’s benefit here
Some things that workers make are impossible without large groups and lots of Capitol. Basically any motor vehicle (planes, trains, trucks, cars) fit that.
Meanwhile, biggest cooperatively owned businesses around the world usually switched to that form of ownership due to withdrawal of state subsidies, like New Zealand’s farmer cooperative, or Argentinian businesses where workers just all chimed in to buy out their “bankrupt” workplaces and set them back on feet.
Silly rabbit, welfare is for the rich.
Clearly this is wrong.
The last frame should say 95%.
Sounds more like crapitalism to me tut tut tut
If the company owners aren’t making money they’ll shut down and we’ll all be out of a job so we should be happy they’re only charging eighty-five percent.
They seem to shut down companies if they can save a cent per hour opening another one in another state/country. So they do not only shut down if they aren’t making money, but also if they could make marginally more somewhere else.
Hmm, the biggest problem I have with socialism is that you end up with government committees deciding who gets access to basic needs like food, water and medical care, when, where and how much. Attempts to plan out fair distribution for an entire country become brittle and inflexible, and result in scarcity and waste because human life is not static. Well-intentioned socialist governments become authoritarian out of the desire to control the behavior of the population in order to stabilize the plan, but the efforts to control inevitably create more instability.
I mean free health care for all, everyone gets it, and gets what they need. Or our social Car Insurance with one single insurer. We all pay about the same, and discount brackets for safe years of driving. And rebates if they took in more premium then they paid out in claims.
Where is the problem?
That is literally happening under capitalism. You buy health insurance, and a private Healthcare group motivated by profit decides if you get medical care.
Hmm, and yet the US is not the only example of a capitalist nation with a health care system. The problem has more to do with regulatory capture. You can say that this is a consequence of capitalism, but then how do you explain other capitalist nations which do not have similar issues with their healthcare systems? There must be some aspect which is specific to the US, and personally I think it traces back to the degradation of antitrust enforcement under the Reagan administration, which allowed massive conglomerates to form.
Blaming this specifically on capitalism is too narrow, it ignores the broader sociocultural issues that lead to the current situation. Capitalism as it is realized in the US is more a symptom of underlying issues than it is the core of the problem. Attempting to replace capitalism with a different economic system will not resolve the problem.
I’d argue it’s because the other countries have tempered capitalism with socialism to create strong social nets to protect people.
USA has one of the worst examples of health care: 17% GDP spending on health care. It’s not just the most expensive private health care system, it’s the most expensive health care system.
But it’s also not a fully privatized health care system, or even the most privatized one. Roughly half of the insurance spending is public via Medicare, Medicaid, military, etc.
Switzerland’s and Netherland’s systems can be viewed as more privatized (100% of insurances are via private sector, NL almost all hospitals are private), and are way more efficient than the US system.
Looks like privatized health care + private insurance works the best, but it does seem to require some guardrails (which you might call socialism, I guess). But also devil’s in the details and it’s possible to do everything badly. I also wouldn’t be too amazed if somebody managed to do fully socialized healthcare well. But I would be amazed if such a system stayed good longer than a few decades.
Feel like you’re missing a ton of context for the system in the NL which I think is the most likely model for folks in the USA to accept if we were picking another healthcare model out.
Things like: there’s a public fund that’s paid into that covers end of life care and old age care. There’s a ton of regulation and laws around how insurance companies operate and what they’re allowed to bill for. There is a minimum standard of care and price ceiling all insurance companies must meet. There is a lot of oversight via the government ombudsman. There are subsidies for folks that have under x dollars to help them afford the basic plan (which all insurance companies have to follow).
Basically the competition in the private insurance marketplace in the NL is driven by trying to undercut each other’s prices since there is a price ceiling for services. Other ways they can compete are better network integration, apps, ease of use, etc etc. It’s also driven by the hospitals themselves and what they can offer.
Very much different than the USA.
Very much different than the USA.
Yeah, exactly. Point being that there isn’t just one way to do private healthcare, which means that just because one way of doing it is bad doesn’t mean that others must be as well.
Only sycophants use Grok.
Well, that problem is exactly the same in capitalism, except the committee is composed of people called executives instead of people called politicians. Executives have even less accountability than politicians.
Civil service bureaucracy can indeed become brittle and static, but at least it begins with the intention to serve the public rather than to make money. It works well in most democratic countries.
Why doesn’t it tend to happen in free market capitalist societies, then?
It does. Private health insurance is but one example.
Your one step away from reinventing communism and 2 from discovering decentralised anarchism as the real answer.
Controlling a nation is power. The people who control the nation have more power than other citizens, they form a political class.
Communism seeks to create a classless society but its main flaw (which is actually a reasonable perspective in historical context and the technology of then) is that it still held on to the idea of having a state, a centralised leadership.
But technology has evolved, anyone can interact with any group through digital means. Anyone can share knowledge or document and publish problematic events in their local area.
Building a network of decentralised neighbourhoods where all citizens are welcome to join the local political debates (and multi local joined sittings) is possible.
There is no need why a few chosen people have to have all the power.
Your one step away from reinventing communism and 2 from discovering decentralised anarchism as the real answer.
Please learn to be less condescending. Stop assuming that people who have different opinions from your own are necessarily ignorant.
With that out of the way, isn’t “decentralized anarchism” redundant? what would centralized anarchism even be, other than a contradiction?
But technology has evolved, anyone can interact with any group through digital means. Anyone can share knowledge or document and publish problematic events in their local area.
OK, for the sake of argument let’s assume that this works the way you believe, in a technical sense. Reality is more complicated than that, but we’ll overlook that for the moment.
- Just because a person can share/publish doesn’t mean that anyone else will bother giving them any attention. It’s good that more voices are heard in the present, but there is also a lot more background noise. How much time do you spend reading comments on Facebook? Nextdoor? DeviantArt? Usenet? Webrings? There are 8 billion people on the planet, and ~8 billion active mobile phones. Ain’t nobody got time for that.
- More importantly, you can’t solve social problems with technical means.
Building a network of decentralised neighbourhoods where all citizens are welcome to join the local political debates (and multi local joined sittings) is possible.
I would like to ask you to watch the Adam Curtis documentary All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace. Curtis is highly opinionated and his documentaries are built to drive specific conclusions. What he presents is true, but not necessarily the whole truth, so please keep that in mind. Even so this is particularly relevant, especially episode 2, which describes various attempts to analyze and manage biology, ecology and society with computer systems.
People have been trying such things since the 60s. They are misguided.
There is no need why a few chosen people have to have all the power.
All the power, no. However, it is also not possible to spread power out amongst every individual equally. For instance, where do you draw the age line of inclusion? Will 6-month-old infants be part of the discourse? 12-year-olds? What about 90-year-old dementia patients?
Even if we can make some practical exclusions, it is still not effective to get everyone’s opinion on everything. Task specialization and division of labor are more efficient in every context. In practice, if everyone is responsible for completing a particular task then no one is.
Please learn to be less condescending. Stop assuming that people who have different opinions from your own are necessarily ignorant.
I wasn’t trying to be condescending, i ment that quite literally. Ironically, i feel like you’re being a little condescending here by quoting and dissecting my input like this. Sorry if i made you feel like i was attacking your input on the meme.
I mean it more informational, not just for you but also for context to other people who are reading these comments. I am not trying to have an actual debate which for this topic is quite impossible in forum like thread format. Wed need a much bigger debate with many more people if we want to take this matter seriously, that’s kinda what i hope to inspire. Not a solution but a direction to have people work on a solution long term rather then idling in the status quo.
In the same vein you are correct that if you understand that anarchism is not simply “lawless chaos” that “Decentralized” is redundant, but many people still don’t know this so i add it as emphasis. Makes people who don’t know think twice about what is meant.
I am not going to overlook that reality is more complicated than what a 5 minute comment can express. I am not solving this alone, neither is anyone. But you do seem to think about this topic in a level headed/intelligent way and i do appreciate your input and documentary recommendation. If we ever have these bigger debates irl i wish for you to be involved.
A few people will always end up with all of the power, it’s how its always been because that’s how our species works. Having mechanisms for choosing these people peacefully is better than a free for all power grab.
Saying concentrated power is human nature is weird. Humans are creative and social enough to do better.
I approve of the optimism that we can do better, with effort. However, that optimism cannot be blind if it is to be successful. The historical record demonstrates an overwhelming tendency for power to concentrate in the hands of individuals and small groups. Even with the best of intentions, people in positions of authority inevitably work to protect their authority, at everyone else’s expense if necessary. They will convince themselves that they are right to do so, because no one else understands their work.
We only need to look at human history, and animals in general. The power of an individual is very limited, so those with shared interests group together for protection. The bigger and more powerful groups dominate the smaller and weaker ones and power naturally concentrates into the modern nation state, political party, corporation, etc. And whoever controls those groups holds the most power.
Your perspective requires that all humans be willing and able to come to mutually acceptable compromises for any disagreement. But that’s obviously not possible, there are many disagreements where humans can’t just split the difference or are simply unwilling to make any compromise for whatever reason. And so power becomes the deciding factor.
But bears roaming the streets…
That wasn’t a community coming together to share the burden of governance. It was a group of selfish assholes who didn’t want to be told what to do.
Then I think they just reinvented democracy. It would be nice to start over with a clean slate though.
