5 ms·

It's like the old aristocracy days except for instead of the elite owning physical property and renting it out to the peasants, the elite own intellectual prope

by umvi 7y ago

It's like the old aristocracy days except for instead of the elite owning physical property and renting it out to the peasants, the elite own intellectual property and rent it out to the peasants.

tomrod 7y ago
Feudalism is one of the standard memes of history, as per David Brin.[1] The essay is well worth reading, as well as the thesis that a new meme ("otherness") arose within Western Liberalism. In my mind Otherness is a saddle point, and worth investing in to protect.[2] [1] http://www.davidbrin.com/nonfiction/dogmaofotherness.html http://www.davidbrin.com/nonfiction/dogmaofotherness.html [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
- Orou 7y ago
  Great read, thanks for linking.
- jrs95 7y ago
  Western Liberalism increasingly seems to just be a system by which you establish global feudalism. I guess it's good for a few generations. Hard to argue it's even good now though because even though we're wealthier than ever we're increasingly unhappy and mentally ill.
  - narrator 7y ago
    If you have a billion dollars in the U.S you can park it in treasuries and make millions and outsource the income generation to the government's tax collectors. Meanwhile, in China, the government just prints money electronically when they need it and billionaires have to be clever about where to park their billions to earn a decent return. That need to be clever contributes to creating useful capital that increases the wealth of society generally instead of just adding to the interest bill on the national debt.
    - sigstoat 7y ago
      > instead of just adding to the interest bill on the national debt. the billionaires are lowering the interest bill as they compete to purchase treasuries. (the money is borrowed from whoever will accept the lowest interest for it. see https://www.treasurydirect.gov/instit/auctfund/work/work.htm https://www.treasurydirect.gov/instit/auctfund/work/work.htm under "Bidding".)
    - anticodon 7y ago
      > Meanwhile, in China, the government just prints money electronically when they need it The only country in the world that just prints money when they need it is USA. No other country can do it — it'll just cause hyperinflation. China is not an exception. They can't print US dollars. And if they would print more Yuan, it doesn't mean that China billionaires would be able to buy more houses in LA - the exchange rate of Yuan to dollar will simply drop and they will be able to buy exactly the same amount of goods in US as before. USA can print almost unlimited amount of money because they control almost all the world and bend most of the governments to buy US treasuries. This is why there're US military bases in many countries and if some country decide to stop accepting US dollar for foreign trade, the next day it's invaded by US military. Although many people predict that this uncontrollable printing of US dollar will cause US economy to collapse sooner or later. You simply can't do that forever.
  - mrmonkeyman 7y ago
    Speak for yourself.
  - pascalxus 7y ago
    That we're somehow wealthier than ever is a great misconception. GDP per capita and even GDP per capita adjusted for PPP is also misleading because it uses the wrong basket of goods: focusing on things that dont matter. People forget, wealth is not money. Wealth is the things you buy with money. Wealth is when you can afford the essentials of life: Shelter, food, water, medical insurance, education and transportation (with the costliest ones being Shelter and medical insurance). Consider the number of working hours the average person needs to expend to afford shelter and compare that to 500 years ago. I think you'll find that there hasn't been much improvement. In fact, in CA and bay area, I think you'll see that we're working even longer hours to afford basic shelter than 100s of years ago.
    - mr_toad 7y ago
      What passed for shelter 500 years ago wouldn’t attract any tenants these days, even if it was legal. No heating, plumbing, sewage, not to mention the fire code violations.
    - anonytrary 7y ago
      > That we're somehow wealthier than ever is a great misconception... I think you'll find that there hasn't been much improvement. Of course we're wealthier. The shelter you get to enjoy today is leagues better than the shelter you got to "enjoy" hundreds of years ago. The net worth of humanity has gone up. Significantly. We have more advanced technology than ever before. Whatever GDP is measuring probably doesn't consider the fact that we have compounded knowledge and given ourselves things our 100 year old ancestors could not even imagine. I'm so glad I'm alive at a time further into the future. I may not know how glad I am, because I may not be able to fully comprehend the loss of all of the things that I have today that were simply non-existent back then.
      - speedplane 7y ago
        > Of course we're wealthier. The shelter you get to enjoy today is leagues better than the shelter you got to "enjoy" hundreds of years ago. Those that argue we're no better off than we were 200 years ago are pretty unpersuasive these days. I'm more worried about the next 200 years though. It took several thousand years of civilization to create the industrial revolution, and that was quickly followed by the information revolution. Both dramatically improved quality of life. But what if this is the end of the exponential? What if Moore's law is dead, and breakthrough technologies like quantum computers or new propulsion systems aren't just "5 to 10 years away", but decades or centuries away? There is a lot of evidence today suggesting that the industrial and communication revolution was a blip, closer to a step function in human development, preceded by slow linear growth and possibly followed by slow linear growth. I'm not certain that this will indeed happen, but if it does, our entire society and world is in for a complete shock.
netcan 7y ago
In a basic sense, that's what all wealth is. Income generating property. Debt produces interest. Company shares produce dividends Real estate earns rent. Capital produces revenue. It's all quite interchangeable. The most famous rant on this is Marx & Engel's manifesto. Chapter one explains how history works, making similar comparisons from their day to older days. The second chapter describes communism's aims. It's also (largely) a rant about the bourgeois. Anyway, like most Marx, it's hard to translate to concrete terms. One unambiguous line stands out though. "..the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property." - Communist Manifesto In the very next paragraph, ambiguity re-enters. Even in theory, it's very hard to flesh this out. ...It's especially hard in the context he's most interested in: urban industry/society. Replacing all property with a "commons" is easier to imagine in a rural/village context. Rural commons exist. I think Marx got the idea from a rural context. Formal and informal privatisations of agricultural commons were part of his stated inspiration, iirc. Anyway, I think the basics are trivial. Property is effectively income generating by definition. If aristocracy is immoral, then property owning is immoral. To me, this is a reductio ad absurdum for fundamentalist thinking... kind of like the monty python witch trial.
- lifeisstillgood 7y ago
  I genuinely googled Mark Engels to see who he was - I was guessing a friend of Brian Eno. Now I get it. And yes, the commons may well be becoming more of the world than the private world. interesting idea
  - netcan 7y ago
    Ha! (fixed, thanks)
- umvi 7y ago
  Intellectual property didn't used to be rent seeking. It's a relatively recent phenomenon where you can no longer buy-to-own, you can only subscribe-to-use. Virtually every company is moving toward this model - Microsoft, Adobe, Disney, etc. That's my main complaint.

by umvi 7y ago

It's like the old aristocracy days except for instead of the elite owning physical property and renting it out to the peasants, the elite own intellectual property and rent it out to the peasants.

tomrod 7y ago

Feudalism is one of the standard memes of history, as per David Brin.[1] The essay is well worth reading, as well as the thesis that a new meme ("otherness") arose within Western Liberalism. In my mind Otherness is a saddle point, and worth investing in to protect.[2] [1] http://www.davidbrin.com/nonfiction/dogmaofotherness.html http://www.davidbrin.com/nonfiction/dogmaofotherness.html [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

Orou 7y ago
Great read, thanks for linking.
jrs95 7y ago
Western Liberalism increasingly seems to just be a system by which you establish global feudalism. I guess it's good for a few generations. Hard to argue it's even good now though because even though we're wealthier than ever we're increasingly unhappy and mentally ill.
- narrator 7y ago
  If you have a billion dollars in the U.S you can park it in treasuries and make millions and outsource the income generation to the government's tax collectors. Meanwhile, in China, the government just prints money electronically when they need it and billionaires have to be clever about where to park their billions to earn a decent return. That need to be clever contributes to creating useful capital that increases the wealth of society generally instead of just adding to the interest bill on the national debt.
  - sigstoat 7y ago
    > instead of just adding to the interest bill on the national debt. the billionaires are lowering the interest bill as they compete to purchase treasuries. (the money is borrowed from whoever will accept the lowest interest for it. see https://www.treasurydirect.gov/instit/auctfund/work/work.htm https://www.treasurydirect.gov/instit/auctfund/work/work.htm under "Bidding".)
  - anticodon 7y ago
    > Meanwhile, in China, the government just prints money electronically when they need it The only country in the world that just prints money when they need it is USA. No other country can do it — it'll just cause hyperinflation. China is not an exception. They can't print US dollars. And if they would print more Yuan, it doesn't mean that China billionaires would be able to buy more houses in LA - the exchange rate of Yuan to dollar will simply drop and they will be able to buy exactly the same amount of goods in US as before. USA can print almost unlimited amount of money because they control almost all the world and bend most of the governments to buy US treasuries. This is why there're US military bases in many countries and if some country decide to stop accepting US dollar for foreign trade, the next day it's invaded by US military. Although many people predict that this uncontrollable printing of US dollar will cause US economy to collapse sooner or later. You simply can't do that forever.
- mrmonkeyman 7y ago
  Speak for yourself.
- pascalxus 7y ago
  That we're somehow wealthier than ever is a great misconception. GDP per capita and even GDP per capita adjusted for PPP is also misleading because it uses the wrong basket of goods: focusing on things that dont matter. People forget, wealth is not money. Wealth is the things you buy with money. Wealth is when you can afford the essentials of life: Shelter, food, water, medical insurance, education and transportation (with the costliest ones being Shelter and medical insurance). Consider the number of working hours the average person needs to expend to afford shelter and compare that to 500 years ago. I think you'll find that there hasn't been much improvement. In fact, in CA and bay area, I think you'll see that we're working even longer hours to afford basic shelter than 100s of years ago.
  - mr_toad 7y ago
    What passed for shelter 500 years ago wouldn’t attract any tenants these days, even if it was legal. No heating, plumbing, sewage, not to mention the fire code violations.
  - anonytrary 7y ago
    > That we're somehow wealthier than ever is a great misconception... I think you'll find that there hasn't been much improvement. Of course we're wealthier. The shelter you get to enjoy today is leagues better than the shelter you got to "enjoy" hundreds of years ago. The net worth of humanity has gone up. Significantly. We have more advanced technology than ever before. Whatever GDP is measuring probably doesn't consider the fact that we have compounded knowledge and given ourselves things our 100 year old ancestors could not even imagine. I'm so glad I'm alive at a time further into the future. I may not know how glad I am, because I may not be able to fully comprehend the loss of all of the things that I have today that were simply non-existent back then.
    - speedplane 7y ago
      > Of course we're wealthier. The shelter you get to enjoy today is leagues better than the shelter you got to "enjoy" hundreds of years ago. Those that argue we're no better off than we were 200 years ago are pretty unpersuasive these days. I'm more worried about the next 200 years though. It took several thousand years of civilization to create the industrial revolution, and that was quickly followed by the information revolution. Both dramatically improved quality of life. But what if this is the end of the exponential? What if Moore's law is dead, and breakthrough technologies like quantum computers or new propulsion systems aren't just "5 to 10 years away", but decades or centuries away? There is a lot of evidence today suggesting that the industrial and communication revolution was a blip, closer to a step function in human development, preceded by slow linear growth and possibly followed by slow linear growth. I'm not certain that this will indeed happen, but if it does, our entire society and world is in for a complete shock.

netcan 7y ago

In a basic sense, that's what all wealth is. Income generating property. Debt produces interest. Company shares produce dividends Real estate earns rent. Capital produces revenue. It's all quite interchangeable. The most famous rant on this is Marx & Engel's manifesto. Chapter one explains how history works, making similar comparisons from their day to older days. The second chapter describes communism's aims. It's also (largely) a rant about the bourgeois. Anyway, like most Marx, it's hard to translate to concrete terms. One unambiguous line stands out though. "..the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property." - Communist Manifesto In the very next paragraph, ambiguity re-enters. Even in theory, it's very hard to flesh this out. ...It's especially hard in the context he's most interested in: urban industry/society. Replacing all property with a "commons" is easier to imagine in a rural/village context. Rural commons exist. I think Marx got the idea from a rural context. Formal and informal privatisations of agricultural commons were part of his stated inspiration, iirc. Anyway, I think the basics are trivial. Property is effectively income generating by definition. If aristocracy is immoral, then property owning is immoral. To me, this is a reductio ad absurdum for fundamentalist thinking... kind of like the monty python witch trial.

lifeisstillgood 7y ago
I genuinely googled Mark Engels to see who he was - I was guessing a friend of Brian Eno. Now I get it. And yes, the commons may well be becoming more of the world than the private world. interesting idea
- netcan 7y ago
  Ha! (fixed, thanks)
umvi 7y ago
Intellectual property didn't used to be rent seeking. It's a relatively recent phenomenon where you can no longer buy-to-own, you can only subscribe-to-use. Virtually every company is moving toward this model - Microsoft, Adobe, Disney, etc. That's my main complaint.