4 ms·

Capitalism, n. A machine for CEOs to transform money from VCs into money for luxury yacht builders. Maybe we should just cut out the middle man and stop creati

Capitalism, n. A machine for CEOs to transform money from VCs into money for luxury yacht builders. Maybe we should just cut out the middle man and stop creating businesses. Have a CEO pitch an idea, the VC can hand them a check, they can buy a yacht, and the VC can keep the rest of the money that would have been wasted on jobs that created no value, avoiding the "externalities" of destroying small pizza shops. Or better yet, give that non-yacht money straight to the government to pay for health care, housing, job training, infrastructure, the homeless, veterans, education, social security, regulatory enforcement, thus creating an environment where American citizens can create more real businesses, more people are eligible for good jobs, and the overall quality of life skyrockets. While I'm dreaming I'd also like a unicorn and a garden robot that zaps snails.

treme 4y ago
or a machine that lifted humans out of zero sum game of war & conquer which brought about the biggest increase in quality of life to biggest proportion of people in the world since dawn of time.
- sli 4y ago
  It is frankly just delusional to act like there aren't solvable problems with the capitalist mode of production and the problems it's caused in, esp., the past two decades. Current wars enrich already massive corporations at the expense of what they see as disposable lives on all sides of those wars. It's very easy to claim people have been lifted out of poverty when we define the poverty line as an absurdly low number. Just looking at the US, the poverty line is $13,590/yr for a single person, and $4,720 for each additional person. You cannot afford to live anywhere on that income. The global poverty line is $1.90/day, not even $700/yr. That is still poverty no matter how much we pretend it's not, as you cannot just define poverty away, ignore the actual material conditions that these income levels experience, and call it success. That's simply lying on paper and has predictably produced this very persistent and dubious claim.
  - treme 4y ago
    Much like democracy, capitalism has its own issues but so far it appears to be the system with least problematic issues compared to all other economic systems we've discovered & tried. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/world-gdp-over-the-last-two-millennia https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/world-gdp-over-the-last-t... Fact is, vast majority of people were lucky to not starve on regular basis for most of human existence. this is no longer the case for at least half of human population which is a significant noteworthy improvement.
    - 0xbadcafebee 4y ago
      > vast majority of people were lucky to not starve on regular basis for most of human existence This is not likely. It seems hunter-gatherers spent less time and energy on getting food, had it more reliably, and it was more nutritious. They were taller and healthier, and there were much fewer of them. Granted, infant mortality was high, which makes sense (it's kind of insane how human reproduction/growth works). Studies of modern hunter-gatherers show they work less, have more leisure time. Modern humans have been around (at least) 100,000 years, and agriculture only 12,000 years. Most of modern human existence, people were eating well, until agriculture simultaneously made it harder and enabled the population to scale up past what the natural environment supported. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24402714/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24402714/ https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/05/190520115646.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/05/190520115646.h... https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/10/01/551018759/are-hunter-gatherers-the-happiest-humans-to-inhabit-earth https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/10/01/5510187... http://www.ditext.com/diamond/mistake.html http://www.ditext.com/diamond/mistake.html

treme 4y ago

or a machine that lifted humans out of zero sum game of war & conquer which brought about the biggest increase in quality of life to biggest proportion of people in the world since dawn of time.

sli 4y ago
It is frankly just delusional to act like there aren't solvable problems with the capitalist mode of production and the problems it's caused in, esp., the past two decades. Current wars enrich already massive corporations at the expense of what they see as disposable lives on all sides of those wars. It's very easy to claim people have been lifted out of poverty when we define the poverty line as an absurdly low number. Just looking at the US, the poverty line is $13,590/yr for a single person, and $4,720 for each additional person. You cannot afford to live anywhere on that income. The global poverty line is $1.90/day, not even $700/yr. That is still poverty no matter how much we pretend it's not, as you cannot just define poverty away, ignore the actual material conditions that these income levels experience, and call it success. That's simply lying on paper and has predictably produced this very persistent and dubious claim.
- treme 4y ago
  Much like democracy, capitalism has its own issues but so far it appears to be the system with least problematic issues compared to all other economic systems we've discovered & tried. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/world-gdp-over-the-last-two-millennia https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/world-gdp-over-the-last-t... Fact is, vast majority of people were lucky to not starve on regular basis for most of human existence. this is no longer the case for at least half of human population which is a significant noteworthy improvement.
  - 0xbadcafebee 4y ago
    > vast majority of people were lucky to not starve on regular basis for most of human existence This is not likely. It seems hunter-gatherers spent less time and energy on getting food, had it more reliably, and it was more nutritious. They were taller and healthier, and there were much fewer of them. Granted, infant mortality was high, which makes sense (it's kind of insane how human reproduction/growth works). Studies of modern hunter-gatherers show they work less, have more leisure time. Modern humans have been around (at least) 100,000 years, and agriculture only 12,000 years. Most of modern human existence, people were eating well, until agriculture simultaneously made it harder and enabled the population to scale up past what the natural environment supported. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24402714/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24402714/ https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/05/190520115646.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/05/190520115646.h... https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/10/01/551018759/are-hunter-gatherers-the-happiest-humans-to-inhabit-earth https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/10/01/5510187... http://www.ditext.com/diamond/mistake.html http://www.ditext.com/diamond/mistake.html