3 ms·

You’ve missed my point. Internet commenters love to group opinions into a camp and then call them hypocritical. (Ex: capitalists love rent market manipulation

You’ve missed my point. Internet commenters love to group opinions into a camp and then call them hypocritical. (Ex: capitalists love rent market manipulation but hate unions, those hypocrites!) Of course, that’s not true, most capitalists would not want price fixing - something generally done under centralized planned economies.

giraffe_lady 4y ago
I still don't get your point then but that's ok.
MarkSweep 4y ago
I think I see what your saying. It’s common to see statements like “group A believes X but group A also believes Y, that’s hypocritical”, where not everyone said to be in group A universally believes X and Y. It is especially bad with large “us vs then” groups, like left versus right politics or capital versus labor.
- blowski 4y ago
  I do see this a lot. e.g. “Hacker News readers hate Elon Musk yet own Tesla cars”
topaz0 4y ago
Capitalists in the world have consistently shown that they love market manipulation as long as it is good for them.
- wankle 4y ago
  Most people don't want people to take advantage of or bully people, regardless whether it's capitalists or unionists.
  - wwweston 4y ago
    I used to think this too, since I tend to value interactions that range between autonomy and cooperation. Even where I like competition, it tends to exist within cooperative meta-boundaries. I assumed most people probably weren't too different from me, which is a very cooperative thing to assume. Over time I've come to realize that while of course there's some common nature to human beings, there's also a varying distribution of personality and outlook, including how agreeable / disagreeable people are as well as how assertive. And it turns out on parts of that distribution there are people who enjoy not finding situations that benefit them but winning benefit and status from others. I don't know whether that's "most" people. I'd guess not and that the distribution gets thinner the farther from the average disagreeableness and assertiveness you go. But it's enough people that I no longer discard adversarial values as a potential motive.
  - topaz0 4y ago
    Most people -- even capitalists -- like to think they aren't taking advantage of people, but most capitalists are willing to overlook the ways that they are taking advantage of people, so the impulse doesn't do much good.
  - jdiff 4y ago
    Most people will find another way to frame it. The training screenshots in the article are full of examples.
  - munificent 4y ago
    Perhaps a better way to say the parent point is: It is an emergent property of capitalist systems that people who love market manipulation will outcompete those who don't and thus end up in positions of such power that they effectively determine the characteristics and behavior of the system. There are lots of people playing the capitalism game who don't want to cheat. But the system rewards cheaters who then use their power to produce the world we are all forced to live in.
    - xp84 4y ago
      This is one of the most insightful explanations of our present capitalist "system" that I've read in a long time. Well put.
    - wankle 4y ago
      It remains a world in which anyone can compete, regardless your dystopian, Hollywood writeresque style prose. It's a world I and most people prefer to one run by the mafia: https://www.justice.gov/criminal-ocgs/infiltrated-labor-unions#:~:text=Historically%2C%20organized%20criminal%20groups%20such,threats%20and%20acts%20of%20violence https://www.justice.gov/criminal-ocgs/infiltrated-labor-unio....
      - wwweston 4y ago
        If organized crime infiltrating particular institutions invalidates them by itself... then you're obligated to disdain or even eliminate large chunks of capitalism. Certainly casinos and night clubs. Lots of restaurants. Probably construction and real estate, definitely certain kinds of banking. Oh yeah -- law enforcement too. That's the thing about crime: it's pretty much everywhere people are. Churches have cooperated with it. But that association doesn't define what churches are, it doesn't define what law enforcement is, it doesn't define any of the other businesses. In any walk of life, in any kind of organization, there can be people who will organize force and influence for private benefit rather than cooperating for the ideals an institution was created for. Unions are subject to that too? Well no kidding. Also "dystopian, Hollywood writeresque prose" -- WTF? The comment you're replying to contains a credible model of how market systems become non-competitive. It's useful whether you like market systems or not (if you like them, you can use it to inform improvements). And what's comes out of creative media production is such a wide variety of content that the only thing that's certain is that you can't keep it all under one umbrella, much less one as tattered as the one you just unfolded. But even if we could imagine some representative-middle it sure wouldn't have a lot of dialogue in it resembling the comment you're responding to. The whole thing just smacks of name-calling driven by unreflective associations.
try_the_bass 4y ago
> most capitalists would not want price fixing I would strongly challenge this. Capitalism is generally oriented around maximizing profit. Any time you can sell a good for more than its cost of production, you make a profit. Competitors, when not prevented by things like IP laws, can undercut prices within that gap and take your market share, provided they have a similar cost of production. The "profit gap" can be exploited. Price fixing "fixes" that bug, and is a net positive over the alternative of racing to the bottom. Better yet, you can use price fixing to arbitrarily increase that gap, which is exactly what TFA is about.
BoiledCabbage 4y ago
> Of course, that’s not true, most capitalists would not want price fixing - something generally done under centralized planned economies. This is an incredibly weak and misguided argument. You're saying "Capitalists don't like X when it harms them, therefore they never like X". Yeah, but they like X when it benefits them... You can't extrapolate from a single data point to make a generalization about a whole. Especially when there are enormous differences.

giraffe_lady 4y ago

I still don't get your point then but that's ok.

MarkSweep 4y ago

I think I see what your saying. It’s common to see statements like “group A believes X but group A also believes Y, that’s hypocritical”, where not everyone said to be in group A universally believes X and Y. It is especially bad with large “us vs then” groups, like left versus right politics or capital versus labor.

blowski 4y ago
I do see this a lot. e.g. “Hacker News readers hate Elon Musk yet own Tesla cars”

topaz0 4y ago

Capitalists in the world have consistently shown that they love market manipulation as long as it is good for them.

wankle 4y ago
Most people don't want people to take advantage of or bully people, regardless whether it's capitalists or unionists.
- wwweston 4y ago
  I used to think this too, since I tend to value interactions that range between autonomy and cooperation. Even where I like competition, it tends to exist within cooperative meta-boundaries. I assumed most people probably weren't too different from me, which is a very cooperative thing to assume. Over time I've come to realize that while of course there's some common nature to human beings, there's also a varying distribution of personality and outlook, including how agreeable / disagreeable people are as well as how assertive. And it turns out on parts of that distribution there are people who enjoy not finding situations that benefit them but winning benefit and status from others. I don't know whether that's "most" people. I'd guess not and that the distribution gets thinner the farther from the average disagreeableness and assertiveness you go. But it's enough people that I no longer discard adversarial values as a potential motive.
- topaz0 4y ago
  Most people -- even capitalists -- like to think they aren't taking advantage of people, but most capitalists are willing to overlook the ways that they are taking advantage of people, so the impulse doesn't do much good.
- jdiff 4y ago
  Most people will find another way to frame it. The training screenshots in the article are full of examples.
- munificent 4y ago
  Perhaps a better way to say the parent point is: It is an emergent property of capitalist systems that people who love market manipulation will outcompete those who don't and thus end up in positions of such power that they effectively determine the characteristics and behavior of the system. There are lots of people playing the capitalism game who don't want to cheat. But the system rewards cheaters who then use their power to produce the world we are all forced to live in.
  - xp84 4y ago
    This is one of the most insightful explanations of our present capitalist "system" that I've read in a long time. Well put.
  - wankle 4y ago
    It remains a world in which anyone can compete, regardless your dystopian, Hollywood writeresque style prose. It's a world I and most people prefer to one run by the mafia: https://www.justice.gov/criminal-ocgs/infiltrated-labor-unions#:~:text=Historically%2C%20organized%20criminal%20groups%20such,threats%20and%20acts%20of%20violence https://www.justice.gov/criminal-ocgs/infiltrated-labor-unio....
    - wwweston 4y ago
      If organized crime infiltrating particular institutions invalidates them by itself... then you're obligated to disdain or even eliminate large chunks of capitalism. Certainly casinos and night clubs. Lots of restaurants. Probably construction and real estate, definitely certain kinds of banking. Oh yeah -- law enforcement too. That's the thing about crime: it's pretty much everywhere people are. Churches have cooperated with it. But that association doesn't define what churches are, it doesn't define what law enforcement is, it doesn't define any of the other businesses. In any walk of life, in any kind of organization, there can be people who will organize force and influence for private benefit rather than cooperating for the ideals an institution was created for. Unions are subject to that too? Well no kidding. Also "dystopian, Hollywood writeresque prose" -- WTF? The comment you're replying to contains a credible model of how market systems become non-competitive. It's useful whether you like market systems or not (if you like them, you can use it to inform improvements). And what's comes out of creative media production is such a wide variety of content that the only thing that's certain is that you can't keep it all under one umbrella, much less one as tattered as the one you just unfolded. But even if we could imagine some representative-middle it sure wouldn't have a lot of dialogue in it resembling the comment you're responding to. The whole thing just smacks of name-calling driven by unreflective associations.

try_the_bass 4y ago

> most capitalists would not want price fixing I would strongly challenge this. Capitalism is generally oriented around maximizing profit. Any time you can sell a good for more than its cost of production, you make a profit. Competitors, when not prevented by things like IP laws, can undercut prices within that gap and take your market share, provided they have a similar cost of production. The "profit gap" can be exploited. Price fixing "fixes" that bug, and is a net positive over the alternative of racing to the bottom. Better yet, you can use price fixing to arbitrarily increase that gap, which is exactly what TFA is about.

BoiledCabbage 4y ago

> Of course, that’s not true, most capitalists would not want price fixing - something generally done under centralized planned economies. This is an incredibly weak and misguided argument. You're saying "Capitalists don't like X when it harms them, therefore they never like X". Yeah, but they like X when it benefits them... You can't extrapolate from a single data point to make a generalization about a whole. Especially when there are enormous differences.