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Better products don’t necessarily make the world better. They often make the world worse. I don’t have a particular chip on my shoulder about Apple, or Microsof

Better products don’t necessarily make the world better. They often make the world worse. I don’t have a particular chip on my shoulder about Apple, or Microsoft, or free software. There are things I appreciate that all of them produce, and good in the world because of some of those efforts by each. But yes, making the world better and making money are inherently in conflict. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a way to reconcile them acceptably for this endeavor, I even addressed that. Ugh I have half a mind to post a Wikipedia link, but it’s going to be really upsetting if I play a part in dialectics becoming another inscrutable topic on HN like monads.

unityByFreedom 5y ago
> Better products don’t necessarily make the world better. It depends who you ask. Someone is buying those products. We use money and public opinion to proxy for what we value. Without freedom to use those someone would need to dictate what's valuable.
ironmagma 5y ago
If money disappeared overnight, a lot of people would die (almost all of them). So, money allows the survival of people. If you are not a misanthropist, then, the world is better with money, since it allows people to live. Therefore, making money is simply something that must be done to allow the existence of human life. This is not in conflict of making the world better, it's in service of it.
- eyelidlessness 5y ago
  > If money disappeared overnight, a lot of people would die If asbestos disappeared overnight lot of people would die. I almost made this a list but it would detract from the point. Making something disappear overnight is almost always harmful in any systemic context. There are a lot of things I want to eradicate from existence, and I don’t think I could name one which I would want eradicated overnight. But I wasn’t even advocating for eliminating money. I was acknowledging a tension between incentives. Please don’t make me elaborate about dialectics. No one will enjoy it.
  - ironmagma 5y ago
    Let's make this simpler: If money disappeared, a lot of people would die. I don't care how long you make the transition period; even if it's a change spread across 20 years, without a database of resources and how many belong to each person (which is what money is), you aren't going to be able to coordinate people well enough to feed billions of people each day. How would the deletion of the database serve anyone?
    - eyelidlessness 5y ago
      Let’s make this simpler still: > But I wasn’t even advocating for eliminating money.
      - ironmagma 5y ago
        You claim that "making the world better and making money are inherently in conflict." My understanding of this sentence is that one cannot make money while making the world better. It follows then that it is bad to be making money, since it makes the world worse. If it is bad to be making money, it would be better to not be doing so. If money is not being made, this is the same as money being eliminated, as it ceases to serve its purpose. Please tell me where you disagree.
        eyelidlessness 5y ago
        Fine I’ll link the damn Wikipedia page. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic Things can be in conflict without being in combat. Acknowledging that one thing conflicts with another doesn’t mean one must extinguish the other. My whole point was to identify how the two could be reconciled for the purpose of the endeavor, even while still being in conflict. Please tell me where you still don’t understand why I’m not arguing with a strawman argument you keep trying to assign to me.
        unityByFreedom 5y ago
- encryptluks2 5y ago
  Money doesn't allow people to live, shelter, food, water and friends are what allows people to live. Do you think that you plant dollar bills in the ground and they grow food?
  - ironmagma 5y ago
    You can't grow enough food for everyone, house everyone's friends, and keep them alive without money. You could maybe do one of those without money, but at the expense of the other two. The money is a critical part of keeping track of how much of each thing you can do without running out of resources. There are too many resources in the world to keep track of them all in your head.
    - just_steve_h 5y ago
      Money doesn't "keep track of resources." If it did, the Fed would not have been able to create $2 trillion in "Quantitative Easing." It's an imperfect analogy, but I think dollars are more like inches - useful to measure and compare things, and subject to redefinition at the whims of power. (Imagine a carpenter telling you he can't finish building your bookcase because he's "run out of inches." They are not the things they measure.)
      - ironmagma 5y ago
        The fact that the underlying number of resources changes dynamically is not related to whether money keeps track of those resources. The quantitative easing is akin to when an OS overcommits memory and starts doling out more memory than actually exists in response to malloc() calls. This works because people (programs) aren't going to start using the money/memory right away, or even necessarily at all. Yet, it prevents the system from locking up (or crashing). The fact that not that much memory exists doesn't mean that your malloc() call doesn't let you keep track of how much memory you are allocated. You can't just start writing to memory that hasn't been allocated to you, in essence. The memory (and money) put a bounds on what kind of behavior you can do, what kind of resources you can use.
    - 5y ago

unityByFreedom 5y ago

> Better products don’t necessarily make the world better. It depends who you ask. Someone is buying those products. We use money and public opinion to proxy for what we value. Without freedom to use those someone would need to dictate what's valuable.

ironmagma 5y ago

If money disappeared overnight, a lot of people would die (almost all of them). So, money allows the survival of people. If you are not a misanthropist, then, the world is better with money, since it allows people to live. Therefore, making money is simply something that must be done to allow the existence of human life. This is not in conflict of making the world better, it's in service of it.

eyelidlessness 5y ago
> If money disappeared overnight, a lot of people would die If asbestos disappeared overnight lot of people would die. I almost made this a list but it would detract from the point. Making something disappear overnight is almost always harmful in any systemic context. There are a lot of things I want to eradicate from existence, and I don’t think I could name one which I would want eradicated overnight. But I wasn’t even advocating for eliminating money. I was acknowledging a tension between incentives. Please don’t make me elaborate about dialectics. No one will enjoy it.
- ironmagma 5y ago
  Let's make this simpler: If money disappeared, a lot of people would die. I don't care how long you make the transition period; even if it's a change spread across 20 years, without a database of resources and how many belong to each person (which is what money is), you aren't going to be able to coordinate people well enough to feed billions of people each day. How would the deletion of the database serve anyone?
  - eyelidlessness 5y ago
    Let’s make this simpler still: > But I wasn’t even advocating for eliminating money.
    - ironmagma 5y ago
      You claim that "making the world better and making money are inherently in conflict." My understanding of this sentence is that one cannot make money while making the world better. It follows then that it is bad to be making money, since it makes the world worse. If it is bad to be making money, it would be better to not be doing so. If money is not being made, this is the same as money being eliminated, as it ceases to serve its purpose. Please tell me where you disagree.
      - eyelidlessness 5y ago
        Fine I’ll link the damn Wikipedia page. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic Things can be in conflict without being in combat. Acknowledging that one thing conflicts with another doesn’t mean one must extinguish the other. My whole point was to identify how the two could be reconciled for the purpose of the endeavor, even while still being in conflict. Please tell me where you still don’t understand why I’m not arguing with a strawman argument you keep trying to assign to me.
        unityByFreedom 5y ago
encryptluks2 5y ago
Money doesn't allow people to live, shelter, food, water and friends are what allows people to live. Do you think that you plant dollar bills in the ground and they grow food?
- ironmagma 5y ago
  You can't grow enough food for everyone, house everyone's friends, and keep them alive without money. You could maybe do one of those without money, but at the expense of the other two. The money is a critical part of keeping track of how much of each thing you can do without running out of resources. There are too many resources in the world to keep track of them all in your head.
  - just_steve_h 5y ago
    Money doesn't "keep track of resources." If it did, the Fed would not have been able to create $2 trillion in "Quantitative Easing." It's an imperfect analogy, but I think dollars are more like inches - useful to measure and compare things, and subject to redefinition at the whims of power. (Imagine a carpenter telling you he can't finish building your bookcase because he's "run out of inches." They are not the things they measure.)
    - ironmagma 5y ago
      The fact that the underlying number of resources changes dynamically is not related to whether money keeps track of those resources. The quantitative easing is akin to when an OS overcommits memory and starts doling out more memory than actually exists in response to malloc() calls. This works because people (programs) aren't going to start using the money/memory right away, or even necessarily at all. Yet, it prevents the system from locking up (or crashing). The fact that not that much memory exists doesn't mean that your malloc() call doesn't let you keep track of how much memory you are allocated. You can't just start writing to memory that hasn't been allocated to you, in essence. The memory (and money) put a bounds on what kind of behavior you can do, what kind of resources you can use.
  - 5y ago