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Personally, I think it is blatantly unfair. It's like if we had a big bad of skittles and every time I took 1 skittle, you took 10 skittles.

by dvdhnt 9y ago

logicchains 9y ago
More like, if we had a big patch of strawberries and every day I picked 100 and you picked 1000, why should I get to take yours?
- js8 9y ago
  Because you're cheating - I saw some Mexicans picking them for you.
  - dsacco 9y ago
    Why is that cheating?
  - logicchains 9y ago
    Why are the Mexicans picking them for me, not for you or for themselves? Assuming I didn't enslave them, I must be offering them something that makes it worth their while. Maybe I spent some time building better tools for berry picking, so using those tools they can take home more berries overall than they could without my help even if they're giving some to me. Maybe I saved some berries, traded them for supplies with someone else, and built some kind of shelter over the berry bush. Maybe I've got a spear to scare off the men who threaten them when they try to pick berries in Mexico. I think this is particularly relevant to software developers. It's often fairly easy for us to go into contracting, or start our own business, but many developers with those opportunities (myself included) still choose to work for others. Perhaps we prefer the stability of not having to manage our own business, perhaps we like the projects a particular company is working on and lack the resources to attempt them ourselves, perhaps we want to acquire more savings before starting out on our own, perhaps we want to learn from a particular company. And even when we do start our own businesses, for some reason we still tend to prefer traditional structures over more equal structures like cooperatives, prefer structures in which people work for others.
    - js8 9y ago
      Maybe.. I can completely change a reasonable answer to any moral problem just by adding another maybe. But it doesn't really matter. The analogy is flawed, that's the point, because it's not how it works in the real world. In the real world, people are not getting 1000000x higher income just because they do 1000000x more of the same work. The main problem is in how we value things that are collectively produced (via cooperation of different people, especially in different points in time). There are basically two main solutions to the problem, both of them wrong. One is the neoclassical solution, which is to deny that we cooperate. Then there is Marx's solution, which is labor theory of value. I don't believe it has a good solution.
      - logicchains 9y ago
        >In the real world, people are not getting 1000000x higher income just because they do 1000000x more of the same work. You could argue that they get 1000x (1000000x is disingenuous; 1000000x the minimum wage is around $15,000,000,000 per year, practically nobody makes that) higher income because they do something that people value 1000x more. If we assume people pay others for doing this they value, if a developer can't find somebody who values what they provide enough to pay them more than $80,000, while a fund manager can find someone to pay them $80,000,000, some people must value what the fund manager is doing a lot more or else they wouldn't pay him/her. >One is the neoclassical solution, which is to deny that we cooperate. How does it deny we cooperate? I have an apple and I want an orange, you have an orange and you want an apple, we exchange those things, how is that not cooperation?
        js8 9y ago
        > If we assume people pay others for doing this they value That's a strong assumption and as a matter of fact, they don't. For example, when I go to cinema, I pay to the ticket seller. I don't pay to the people who actually produced the movie. I rely on some (unknown to me) mechanism according to which those people get paid, but I don't pay them. > How does it deny we cooperate? So you can see that in the above example. I don't pay individuals for doing things for me that I value. Instead, I pay to some organization which then redistributes the money. Neoclassical solution denies an existence of such organization. (Which is not quite wrong - I have no idea how to define this organization correctly for all edge cases - as I already mentioned, I don't see a solution. But it is also not correct.) And it gets even worse! Some people cannot be paid for what valuable they are doing for me, because they are already dead. For example, I am not paying to Beethoven. There are even things that produce things of value without any human intervention; who do I pay then? So yeah, maybe it kinda works for apples and oranges, and picking strawberries, but not in general.
- jly 9y ago
  You shouldn't, but this example is not the way the existing capitalist economies of the world work. In your example, a shared resource has labor applied to meet a clear human need, and those that physically do more of it reap more rewards. In the real world, someone owns the field, does no work, pays individuals (potentially) far less than the value of their labor to do the picking, and reaps most of the rewards. Then that field gets passed down to their offspring who continue to gain the rewards without doing any work. Why should they get to do that?
  - wonder_er 9y ago
    Buying land and establishing a farm is not "no work". Passing physical goods to offspring goes in the same bucket as passing monetary units to offspring, goes in the same bucket as passing valuable ideas to offspring. In other words, parents should be able to pass whatever they want to their offspring. To inject the state in that process and break it... you're making (basically) a god of the state. It's all powerful, benevolent, and able to do anything in any capacity in any situation.
- mcguire 9y ago
  Because you are surviving by eating your strawberries while I'm loading my excess into my catapult so that I can raid your house and take all of your coffee mugs.
danharaj 9y ago
It's worse then that. It's as if every day you got to take 1 skittle, but the rich take 2^n skittles on the nth day. That is, until the skittle system breaks down.
spo81rty 9y ago
Except when it comes to wealth there is no limit. Ones success does not mean another's demise. If I mine for Bitcoin and make millions, who did I steal wealth from to get mine? Your Skittles analogy does not work.
- elsewhen 9y ago
  To be pedantic, is not the "skittles" part that is the problem but ratherthe "bag" part of the analogy, since it implies a fixed amount. If the OP somehow weaved a skittles factory into the analogy, the analogy could be spared.
  - AstralStorm 9y ago
    There are no truly open systems in the whole universe if physicists are correct. Much less on Earth alone. Entropy is a thing. About three only abundant energy resource we have is the Sun and it is quite hard to extract it's output. Then there are certain biological restrictions like having to eat - a chemical input. Arable land is worth quite a lot, fertile much more still. It is not evenly distributed over Earth. (Similar with fertile paths of the oceans and seas.) Dense energy sources are yet more scarce.
- dvdhnt 9y ago
  That's not true at all. For one, you're talking about a digit currency derived from a (currently) finite resource: electricity. While you suck up electricity mining BTC, you add to the demand for said electricity. Higher demand means higher prices, meaning those with money can afford more electricity and mine more BTC, while those who can't afford more electricity to mine cannot. Additionally, those who could afford just enough power for non-BTC mining now struggle to afford power at all; and even if they do, they now must save less, growing the gap. I didn't say the word "steal"; that's something you derived from my analogy because my analogy is obvious. Resources, and wealth, are all finite; so more for one literally means less or none for another if that one takes as much as they please. Otherwise, I could walk into any bank in the world and just take out as much money as I wanted to. I was once told that if I were in the middle of a discussion with my wife and she completely refocused the discussion onto something else, I should be happy internally that I was right, but externally I should take the loss. You're talking about BTC now, so I guess I'll take that L.
dsacco 9y ago
But the economy is not zero sum, like that bag. If I have a process that increases the total number of skittles in the bag, is it still unfair for me to take more skittles from it?
- dvdhnt 9y ago
  So, you're right - the economy is not zero sum, but the resources are. The economy is about moving them here or there. It depends on where you got those skittles? If you are increasing the skittle count by just taking from other peoples' bags of skittles then you're literally the mortgage/banking industry and there are probably lots of empty skittle bags out there propping up our never-ending-skittle-bag.
  - dsacco 9y ago
    Is it a problem for me to do what you say if the skittles themselves become effectively cheaper for everyone else to enjoy? What if systemic issues only happen every 10 years? Or 5 years?
- mattmanser 9y ago
  Depends on your view point. You could argue that the process was never really "yours" in the first place. Society, our laws, our armies and natural resources, our roads, bridges, power lines, telecoms structure, are 99% of that process and you added 1%. You simply took advantage of a lot of luck, a little bit of hard work and probably a bunch of your parents' money to end up owning it. Maybe you should get a chunk of the rewards, but all of it?
  - dsacco 9y ago
    How would you propose we make a more meritocratic system that doesn't allow for as much luck-based success?
    - AstralStorm 9y ago
      I suppose you want some incorruptible and relatively unbiased jury to manage it as well?

Personally, I think it is blatantly unfair. It's like if we had a big bad of skittles and every time I took 1 skittle, you took 10 skittles.

by dvdhnt 9y ago

Personally, I think it is blatantly unfair. It's like if we had a big bad of skittles and every time I took 1 skittle, you took 10 skittles.

logicchains 9y ago

More like, if we had a big patch of strawberries and every day I picked 100 and you picked 1000, why should I get to take yours?

js8 9y ago
Because you're cheating - I saw some Mexicans picking them for you.
- dsacco 9y ago
  Why is that cheating?
- logicchains 9y ago
  Why are the Mexicans picking them for me, not for you or for themselves? Assuming I didn't enslave them, I must be offering them something that makes it worth their while. Maybe I spent some time building better tools for berry picking, so using those tools they can take home more berries overall than they could without my help even if they're giving some to me. Maybe I saved some berries, traded them for supplies with someone else, and built some kind of shelter over the berry bush. Maybe I've got a spear to scare off the men who threaten them when they try to pick berries in Mexico. I think this is particularly relevant to software developers. It's often fairly easy for us to go into contracting, or start our own business, but many developers with those opportunities (myself included) still choose to work for others. Perhaps we prefer the stability of not having to manage our own business, perhaps we like the projects a particular company is working on and lack the resources to attempt them ourselves, perhaps we want to acquire more savings before starting out on our own, perhaps we want to learn from a particular company. And even when we do start our own businesses, for some reason we still tend to prefer traditional structures over more equal structures like cooperatives, prefer structures in which people work for others.
  - js8 9y ago
    Maybe.. I can completely change a reasonable answer to any moral problem just by adding another maybe. But it doesn't really matter. The analogy is flawed, that's the point, because it's not how it works in the real world. In the real world, people are not getting 1000000x higher income just because they do 1000000x more of the same work. The main problem is in how we value things that are collectively produced (via cooperation of different people, especially in different points in time). There are basically two main solutions to the problem, both of them wrong. One is the neoclassical solution, which is to deny that we cooperate. Then there is Marx's solution, which is labor theory of value. I don't believe it has a good solution.
    - logicchains 9y ago
      >In the real world, people are not getting 1000000x higher income just because they do 1000000x more of the same work. You could argue that they get 1000x (1000000x is disingenuous; 1000000x the minimum wage is around $15,000,000,000 per year, practically nobody makes that) higher income because they do something that people value 1000x more. If we assume people pay others for doing this they value, if a developer can't find somebody who values what they provide enough to pay them more than $80,000, while a fund manager can find someone to pay them $80,000,000, some people must value what the fund manager is doing a lot more or else they wouldn't pay him/her. >One is the neoclassical solution, which is to deny that we cooperate. How does it deny we cooperate? I have an apple and I want an orange, you have an orange and you want an apple, we exchange those things, how is that not cooperation?
      - js8 9y ago
        > If we assume people pay others for doing this they value That's a strong assumption and as a matter of fact, they don't. For example, when I go to cinema, I pay to the ticket seller. I don't pay to the people who actually produced the movie. I rely on some (unknown to me) mechanism according to which those people get paid, but I don't pay them. > How does it deny we cooperate? So you can see that in the above example. I don't pay individuals for doing things for me that I value. Instead, I pay to some organization which then redistributes the money. Neoclassical solution denies an existence of such organization. (Which is not quite wrong - I have no idea how to define this organization correctly for all edge cases - as I already mentioned, I don't see a solution. But it is also not correct.) And it gets even worse! Some people cannot be paid for what valuable they are doing for me, because they are already dead. For example, I am not paying to Beethoven. There are even things that produce things of value without any human intervention; who do I pay then? So yeah, maybe it kinda works for apples and oranges, and picking strawberries, but not in general.
jly 9y ago
You shouldn't, but this example is not the way the existing capitalist economies of the world work. In your example, a shared resource has labor applied to meet a clear human need, and those that physically do more of it reap more rewards. In the real world, someone owns the field, does no work, pays individuals (potentially) far less than the value of their labor to do the picking, and reaps most of the rewards. Then that field gets passed down to their offspring who continue to gain the rewards without doing any work. Why should they get to do that?
- wonder_er 9y ago
  Buying land and establishing a farm is not "no work". Passing physical goods to offspring goes in the same bucket as passing monetary units to offspring, goes in the same bucket as passing valuable ideas to offspring. In other words, parents should be able to pass whatever they want to their offspring. To inject the state in that process and break it... you're making (basically) a god of the state. It's all powerful, benevolent, and able to do anything in any capacity in any situation.
mcguire 9y ago
Because you are surviving by eating your strawberries while I'm loading my excess into my catapult so that I can raid your house and take all of your coffee mugs.

danharaj 9y ago

It's worse then that. It's as if every day you got to take 1 skittle, but the rich take 2^n skittles on the nth day. That is, until the skittle system breaks down.

spo81rty 9y ago

Except when it comes to wealth there is no limit. Ones success does not mean another's demise. If I mine for Bitcoin and make millions, who did I steal wealth from to get mine? Your Skittles analogy does not work.

elsewhen 9y ago
To be pedantic, is not the "skittles" part that is the problem but ratherthe "bag" part of the analogy, since it implies a fixed amount. If the OP somehow weaved a skittles factory into the analogy, the analogy could be spared.
- AstralStorm 9y ago
  There are no truly open systems in the whole universe if physicists are correct. Much less on Earth alone. Entropy is a thing. About three only abundant energy resource we have is the Sun and it is quite hard to extract it's output. Then there are certain biological restrictions like having to eat - a chemical input. Arable land is worth quite a lot, fertile much more still. It is not evenly distributed over Earth. (Similar with fertile paths of the oceans and seas.) Dense energy sources are yet more scarce.
dvdhnt 9y ago
That's not true at all. For one, you're talking about a digit currency derived from a (currently) finite resource: electricity. While you suck up electricity mining BTC, you add to the demand for said electricity. Higher demand means higher prices, meaning those with money can afford more electricity and mine more BTC, while those who can't afford more electricity to mine cannot. Additionally, those who could afford just enough power for non-BTC mining now struggle to afford power at all; and even if they do, they now must save less, growing the gap. I didn't say the word "steal"; that's something you derived from my analogy because my analogy is obvious. Resources, and wealth, are all finite; so more for one literally means less or none for another if that one takes as much as they please. Otherwise, I could walk into any bank in the world and just take out as much money as I wanted to. I was once told that if I were in the middle of a discussion with my wife and she completely refocused the discussion onto something else, I should be happy internally that I was right, but externally I should take the loss. You're talking about BTC now, so I guess I'll take that L.

dsacco 9y ago

But the economy is not zero sum, like that bag. If I have a process that increases the total number of skittles in the bag, is it still unfair for me to take more skittles from it?

dvdhnt 9y ago
So, you're right - the economy is not zero sum, but the resources are. The economy is about moving them here or there. It depends on where you got those skittles? If you are increasing the skittle count by just taking from other peoples' bags of skittles then you're literally the mortgage/banking industry and there are probably lots of empty skittle bags out there propping up our never-ending-skittle-bag.
- dsacco 9y ago
  Is it a problem for me to do what you say if the skittles themselves become effectively cheaper for everyone else to enjoy? What if systemic issues only happen every 10 years? Or 5 years?
mattmanser 9y ago
Depends on your view point. You could argue that the process was never really "yours" in the first place. Society, our laws, our armies and natural resources, our roads, bridges, power lines, telecoms structure, are 99% of that process and you added 1%. You simply took advantage of a lot of luck, a little bit of hard work and probably a bunch of your parents' money to end up owning it. Maybe you should get a chunk of the rewards, but all of it?
- dsacco 9y ago
  How would you propose we make a more meritocratic system that doesn't allow for as much luck-based success?
  - AstralStorm 9y ago
    I suppose you want some incorruptible and relatively unbiased jury to manage it as well?