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But what are you suggesting? We forcibly allocate capital less efficiently; make markets less efficient and less responsive to innovation; with the sole aim of

But what are you suggesting? We forcibly allocate capital less efficiently; make markets less efficient and less responsive to innovation; with the sole aim of achieving a utopian worker-cooperative owned world? Hrmmm, where have I heard that before...

ClumsyPilot 2y ago
> make markets less efficient and less responsive to innovation I wish we didn't force capital to do things like that. Then it can run wild with Mandatory arbitration which bars access to the justice system, algorithmic manipulation of prices for rents / real-estate (1) and installing spyware on the customer's computers (2) and MITM attacks of your communication (3). They are all free market innovations. Very efficient at doing the wrong thing. 1 - https://rentalhousingjournal.com/fbi-searches-property-management-company-in-rent-price-fixing-investigation/ https://rentalhousingjournal.com/fbi-searches-property-manag... 2 - https://www.pcmag.com/news/hp-accused-of-quietly-installing-spyware-on-windows-pcs https://www.pcmag.com/news/hp-accused-of-quietly-installing-... 3 - https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/26/facebook-secret-project-snooped-snapchat-user-traffic/?guccounter=1 https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/26/facebook-secret-project-sn...
forgetfreeman 2y ago
The market has spent the GDP of Madagascar to fuck over cabbies in a handful of metro areas in the US. Meanwhile "efficiency" in the ISP market has lead to regional near-monopolies and some of the worst residential bandwidth on the planet. Let's not with "efficiency and innovation" yeah? The emperor is clearly buck-ass naked.
- pembrook 2y ago
  Ahhh yes, the old "because the market didn't turn out the way I wanted it to once, it means the entirety of the capitalist system and the idea of free markets is fundamentally broken" retort. I call this the "Jr. developer fallacy." Start a job, encounter some bugs, suggest rewriting the entire codebase from scratch on [insert-trendy-framework].
  - malcolmgreaves 2y ago
    > once The many systemic market failure modes of capitalism are well documented and written about at great lengths.
    - nradov 2y ago
      The many systemic market failure modes of socialism and economic central planning are well documented and written about at great lengths.
      - forgetfreeman 2y ago
        You wanna review the track record of market driven healthcare systems vs socialized medicine? Spoiler: the US has one of the worst (by any metric you care to track) healthcare systems of any industrialized nation. Just because someone else's shit is broken doesn't necessarily mean your shit is working.
        nradov 2y ago
        I care to track cancer 5-year survival rates and the number of new drugs introduced per year. By those metrics the US is at or near the top. The US healthcare system has plenty of flaws but it does some things quite well.
        forgetfreeman 2y ago
        Drug discovery clusters in the US because the EU doesn't permit profiteering
        nradov 2y ago
        Then it seems that permitting profiteering results in better outcomes. At least for certain things.
        2y ago
- stale2002 2y ago
  > cabbies in a handful of metro areas in the US. The ones that were overcharging consumers? Yeah it is great for customers when prices go down. That's a benefit, not a drawback. Those cabbies should have offer better service at a lower price if they wanted to compete.
  - nativeit 2y ago
    Overcharging? It’s easier to beat their prices if you don’t have drivers or cars to pay for.
  - andrepd 2y ago
    Compared to dumping I guess everybody is "overcharging"...
    - stale2002 2y ago
      If you can't give the best product to consumers for the best price then get out of the market. Consumers are the judge of what's best. And they vote with their wallet and feet.
      - forgetfreeman 2y ago
        Three quarters of a trillion dollars are spent annually on marketing worldwide. Consumers are persistently manipulated into all manner of poor choices.
bccdee 2y ago
> We forcibly allocate capital less efficiently Efficiency with regard to what goal? The current allocation of capital in the US is quite inefficient if we're interested in the welfare of the public. Billionaires have far more capital than they know what to do with, and since they're unaccountable for their investment choices, they strongly tend to steer the economy toward vanity projects. Meanwhile, many families can't put food on the table, and infrastructure is falling apart. Whatever it is about this system that you find "efficient," I don't find it valuable. The Chinese state takes a rather strong hand in allocating capital, and that has treated it fairly well over the past few decades. A mixed economy where private capitalists are not solely responsible for investment choices, and where ownership of that capital is more evenly distributed among the public, could fix a lot of problems.
- blackhawkC17 2y ago
  > The Chinese state takes a rather strong hand in allocating capital, and that has treated it fairly well over the past few decades. The Chinese government has spent massive amounts on vanity projects. A lot of government funds have also been looted by CCP honchos. Thanks but no. I’ll take American capital allocators over the Chinese any day. Most importantly, I don’t want to live in a dictatorship.
  - hgomersall 2y ago
    There's a big range between living in a dictatorship and having only private entities allowed to invest in things.
    - hellojesus 2y ago
      Is take the American system every day. What is the moral justification for a state stealing private property? Billionaires get to invest however they want because it's their property. What you see as a vanity project actually employs workers, feds families, and generates tax revenue. They are massively contributing to the economy.
      - 2y ago
piva00 2y ago
Capital allocation under capitalism is also not efficient, it's pretty damn wasteful when you consider the resources used to find its "efficiency". Innovation is also becoming a meaningless word to defend the system, the innovations have their foundations fostered with public money, through funding of scientific research which is then later captured by the industries to develop products. The innovation is productionalising another innovation, the foundation is built mostly on public funding. Very few companies actually do ground-breaking research that innovates, they're pretty risk-averse in this sense, the productionalisation of those discoveries has its own value, not questionign that, but it only gets traction afterwards when the brunt of the work of discovery was done. Efficiency of markets is a hypothesis of financial economics with much better written criticism than I can write here, Warren Buffet doesn't believe in it, for example. It's not a given whatsoever, nor proven empirically.
- WalterBright 2y ago
  It's way more efficient than any other system that has been tried. Free markets bury command economies.
  - piva00 2y ago
    It doesn't mean it's the end all system, if it's wasteful it can be improved. At no point I advocated for a command economy, once more you reply to a strawman to one of my comments, Walter.
    - WalterBright 2y ago
      Public funding for whatever means the government is picking winners and losers. Whoever pays the piper calls the tunes. Public funding always comes with strings. The government funded Langley with $60,000 to build a working airplane. It fell into the Potomac "like a sack of wet cement". The Wrights spent $3,000 and build a working, flying airplane. The jet engine was invented and developed with private funds. The US government told Lockheed to stop working on jet engines and develop better piston engines instead. AI, the biggest tech revolution in a couple decades, seems to have been privately funded.
Demonoculus 2y ago
Turns out the only thing we are doing is making more and more monopolies, there are no free markets and no choice for buyers. Your 88 brands of toothpaste are owned by two corporations. But yeah.

ClumsyPilot 2y ago

> make markets less efficient and less responsive to innovation I wish we didn't force capital to do things like that. Then it can run wild with Mandatory arbitration which bars access to the justice system, algorithmic manipulation of prices for rents / real-estate (1) and installing spyware on the customer's computers (2) and MITM attacks of your communication (3). They are all free market innovations. Very efficient at doing the wrong thing. 1 - https://rentalhousingjournal.com/fbi-searches-property-management-company-in-rent-price-fixing-investigation/ https://rentalhousingjournal.com/fbi-searches-property-manag... 2 - https://www.pcmag.com/news/hp-accused-of-quietly-installing-spyware-on-windows-pcs https://www.pcmag.com/news/hp-accused-of-quietly-installing-... 3 - https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/26/facebook-secret-project-snooped-snapchat-user-traffic/?guccounter=1 https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/26/facebook-secret-project-sn...

forgetfreeman 2y ago

The market has spent the GDP of Madagascar to fuck over cabbies in a handful of metro areas in the US. Meanwhile "efficiency" in the ISP market has lead to regional near-monopolies and some of the worst residential bandwidth on the planet. Let's not with "efficiency and innovation" yeah? The emperor is clearly buck-ass naked.

pembrook 2y ago
Ahhh yes, the old "because the market didn't turn out the way I wanted it to once, it means the entirety of the capitalist system and the idea of free markets is fundamentally broken" retort. I call this the "Jr. developer fallacy." Start a job, encounter some bugs, suggest rewriting the entire codebase from scratch on [insert-trendy-framework].
- malcolmgreaves 2y ago
  > once The many systemic market failure modes of capitalism are well documented and written about at great lengths.
  - nradov 2y ago
    The many systemic market failure modes of socialism and economic central planning are well documented and written about at great lengths.
    - forgetfreeman 2y ago
      You wanna review the track record of market driven healthcare systems vs socialized medicine? Spoiler: the US has one of the worst (by any metric you care to track) healthcare systems of any industrialized nation. Just because someone else's shit is broken doesn't necessarily mean your shit is working.
      - nradov 2y ago
        I care to track cancer 5-year survival rates and the number of new drugs introduced per year. By those metrics the US is at or near the top. The US healthcare system has plenty of flaws but it does some things quite well.
        forgetfreeman 2y ago
        Drug discovery clusters in the US because the EU doesn't permit profiteering
        nradov 2y ago
        Then it seems that permitting profiteering results in better outcomes. At least for certain things.
        2y ago
stale2002 2y ago
> cabbies in a handful of metro areas in the US. The ones that were overcharging consumers? Yeah it is great for customers when prices go down. That's a benefit, not a drawback. Those cabbies should have offer better service at a lower price if they wanted to compete.
- nativeit 2y ago
  Overcharging? It’s easier to beat their prices if you don’t have drivers or cars to pay for.
- andrepd 2y ago
  Compared to dumping I guess everybody is "overcharging"...
  - stale2002 2y ago
    If you can't give the best product to consumers for the best price then get out of the market. Consumers are the judge of what's best. And they vote with their wallet and feet.
    - forgetfreeman 2y ago
      Three quarters of a trillion dollars are spent annually on marketing worldwide. Consumers are persistently manipulated into all manner of poor choices.

bccdee 2y ago

> We forcibly allocate capital less efficiently Efficiency with regard to what goal? The current allocation of capital in the US is quite inefficient if we're interested in the welfare of the public. Billionaires have far more capital than they know what to do with, and since they're unaccountable for their investment choices, they strongly tend to steer the economy toward vanity projects. Meanwhile, many families can't put food on the table, and infrastructure is falling apart. Whatever it is about this system that you find "efficient," I don't find it valuable. The Chinese state takes a rather strong hand in allocating capital, and that has treated it fairly well over the past few decades. A mixed economy where private capitalists are not solely responsible for investment choices, and where ownership of that capital is more evenly distributed among the public, could fix a lot of problems.

blackhawkC17 2y ago
> The Chinese state takes a rather strong hand in allocating capital, and that has treated it fairly well over the past few decades. The Chinese government has spent massive amounts on vanity projects. A lot of government funds have also been looted by CCP honchos. Thanks but no. I’ll take American capital allocators over the Chinese any day. Most importantly, I don’t want to live in a dictatorship.
- hgomersall 2y ago
  There's a big range between living in a dictatorship and having only private entities allowed to invest in things.
  - hellojesus 2y ago
    Is take the American system every day. What is the moral justification for a state stealing private property? Billionaires get to invest however they want because it's their property. What you see as a vanity project actually employs workers, feds families, and generates tax revenue. They are massively contributing to the economy.
    - 2y ago

piva00 2y ago

Capital allocation under capitalism is also not efficient, it's pretty damn wasteful when you consider the resources used to find its "efficiency". Innovation is also becoming a meaningless word to defend the system, the innovations have their foundations fostered with public money, through funding of scientific research which is then later captured by the industries to develop products. The innovation is productionalising another innovation, the foundation is built mostly on public funding. Very few companies actually do ground-breaking research that innovates, they're pretty risk-averse in this sense, the productionalisation of those discoveries has its own value, not questionign that, but it only gets traction afterwards when the brunt of the work of discovery was done. Efficiency of markets is a hypothesis of financial economics with much better written criticism than I can write here, Warren Buffet doesn't believe in it, for example. It's not a given whatsoever, nor proven empirically.

WalterBright 2y ago
It's way more efficient than any other system that has been tried. Free markets bury command economies.
- piva00 2y ago
  It doesn't mean it's the end all system, if it's wasteful it can be improved. At no point I advocated for a command economy, once more you reply to a strawman to one of my comments, Walter.
  - WalterBright 2y ago
    Public funding for whatever means the government is picking winners and losers. Whoever pays the piper calls the tunes. Public funding always comes with strings. The government funded Langley with $60,000 to build a working airplane. It fell into the Potomac "like a sack of wet cement". The Wrights spent $3,000 and build a working, flying airplane. The jet engine was invented and developed with private funds. The US government told Lockheed to stop working on jet engines and develop better piston engines instead. AI, the biggest tech revolution in a couple decades, seems to have been privately funded.

Demonoculus 2y ago

Turns out the only thing we are doing is making more and more monopolies, there are no free markets and no choice for buyers. Your 88 brands of toothpaste are owned by two corporations. But yeah.