7 ms·

From a resource allocation perspective, this doesn't feel particularly undesirable, at least in terms of certain assets like vehicles. The current system of own

From a resource allocation perspective, this doesn't feel particularly undesirable, at least in terms of certain assets like vehicles. The current system of ownership is quite wasteful. I own a high end GPU that I use maybe 4 hours a week for gaming.

wslh 10mo ago
On the other hand companies go to cloud services as if they were scaling and complex as a FAANG.
XorNot 10mo ago
If capitalism prices me out of owning property, then I've not much use for it.
- ezst 10mo ago
  Maybe what you're calling capitalism is just oligarchy, in which case the nuance really doesn't matter.
  - HPsquared 10mo ago
    I think the standard argument is that capitalism inevitably develops into oligarchy. Even the most basic setup of property rights protected by a legal system, presupposes a central authority of some kind who makes the ultimate decisions. Where there is law, there are courts, executive and legislative functions. More complex structures like joint stock companies introduce their own dynamics but also depend on a central authority to enforce contract law. Everything is downstream of security.
- thrance 10mo ago
  Billions are already "priced out" of owning property, why do you think you joining them would have any broader impact? EDIT: I don't know why I'm being downvoted. Billions of human beings have absolutely nothing to their names, and they have no power to change things. Because they own nothing. That's a basic fact of our globalized capitalist economy.
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
  - gosub100 10mo ago
    The capitalist system depends on having some people below it to exploit, African villagers notwithstanding.
  - codyb 10mo ago
    I guess the broader impact is cause the people on here actually do have assets and can donate, vote, call, and influence. So if the upper middle and lower upper classes are being hollowed out... Well... what's that leave? Just the super rich, and the rest... And considering the way the super rich are acting, I suppose they're just fine with that. The morally bankrupt sacks of shit that most of them seem to be, or become...
- kakacik 10mo ago
  Trust me, losing freedom you most probably consider as basic as air we breathe since your birth will stop such petty worries. And no system would give you property just because it would be nice, neither did communism (I know since I grew up in it and saw its destruction of everything good first hand - it had to be bought for non-trivial money with good old mortgages, and only regime-aligned people could).
  - XorNot 10mo ago
    The spectrum of possible civic organization is not binary, and is not capitalism and communism in opposition. Though the insinuation of such is routinely used to justify the ongoing stratification of wealth, and corruption of government.
    - kakacik 10mo ago
      Well maybe but what examples out of real world do you mean? Nobody is justifying anything here btw, I don't get why people hyperfocus on imperfections and claim whole thing is useless without understanding underlying reasons and thus options for fixes. Or providing long term working & proven alternatives.
    - 9rx 10mo ago
      > and is not capitalism and communism in opposition. Hard to say. The prevailing assumption, and basis for the Communist Party (on paper, at least), is that capitalists will try to block reaching a state of post-scarcity — the necessary precondition for communism. This is why they are sometimes considered to be at odds with each other. They don't have to be. And thus far they don't seem to be. Capitalism, and especially American capitalism, has done far more to getting us closer to post-scarcity than anything else, with US-centric agriculture innovation being the shining example. We're almost there in that particular area. But we're not there yet and things can quickly turn. It is apparent in that agriculture progress that the capitalists remain deathly afraid of losing control (see the tales of Monsanto, John Deere, etc.), which is exactly the foundation on which the assumption is built.
      - 10mo ago
- victorbjorklund 10mo ago
  If communism you wouldn’t own anything?
  - beepbooptheory 10mo ago
    This is not the case, has been corrected a million times by millions of people, and, frankly, if it was about anything else would not be considered appropriate on HN as a comment. We can do better than play out the same conversations also happening in middle school cafeterias. It helps everyone and could even reinforce your opposing views on the matter. You do your entire ideological position a disservice just doing this old hat!
- dominicrose 10mo ago
  Property prices are a big concern nowadays indeed, especially in high-demand areas. Complete (rich) strangers can come and outbid you. In the most capitalist places (rich areas without rent control), you can rent a place for years trying to save money to buy in the area and see the rent grow fast enough that you can't buy and even have to leave as a renter. Capitalism seems to work well for transportable things though, including cars. A house isn't transportable and it also tends to be something quite unique, which makes it incompatible with production in series. Even if you are somehow authorized and able to buy a cheap home, you still have the issue of the terrain, which can be more expensive than the home. That being said I'm sure that there are people living on cheap (per square meter) terrain and happy about it, but that requires the ability to make the best of it, work on it or find work close to it.
bravetraveler 10mo ago
Join us on the floor of the gymnasium, Carol
- mynegation 10mo ago
  That prompted some googling, but all I could guess, it is some “The walking dead” reference(?)
  - dbalatero 10mo ago
    Pluribus, I think.
    - Tade0 10mo ago
      Ha, explains why AI is at a loss trying to figure out the meaning behind that sentence - to recent. Perhaps that's the ultimate AI detector? Information too recent, too obscure or too useless to have been used to train language models?
      - lossyalgo 10mo ago
        Not a bad idea, though 'too recent' I think would be the only benchmark - for now, until they get faster at training. OpenAI has thrown away most of their safety team so that shouldn't be a reason anymore to delay model releases "for safety checks". What would be too obscure or useless, when every new model boasts increasing parameter count (as if having more parameters would make the models better after a certain threshold)?
adamtulinius 10mo ago
Can we please not kid ourselves with thoughts about how this being good from certain perspectives, when the development is _clearly_ bad for consumers?
- b40d-48b2-979e 10mo ago
  Done charitably, I think the mainframe model of shared compute does meet most person's needs where they don't need to care about latency. It would allow us to take advantage of economies of scale. The problem, imo, is that no one has an incentive to do this as a service, so it would turn into rent-seeking.
  - goodcanadian 10mo ago
    But I do care about latency . . . and I want things to still work when the wifi is dodgy. I already find things like Office 360 deeply frustrating (only use it for work).
    - olyjohn 10mo ago
      You do, but most people don't. So not enough people will complain that it will make any difference. And the people who don't complain will just keep forking out money because they're addicted.
      - platybubsy 10mo ago
        Most don't? Streaming isn't large enough to say that yet I don't think. Google Stadia wasn't a big hit
  - WhyNotHugo 10mo ago
    Sure, a shared model does make sense in many ways. We could share within a family, neighbour cooperatives, and similar scales. With the users co-owning the means of processing. But the current model is that we all rent from organisations that use their position of power to restrict and dictate what we can do with those machines.
jrs235 10mo ago
I agree. However, I don't see the savings from the reduction of waste primarily going to consumers and everyone at large but being kept and collected by the owning class.
tbrownaw 10mo ago
> From a resource allocation perspective, this doesn't feel particularly undesirable, at least in terms of certain assets like vehicles. The current system of ownership is quite wasteful. People are by and large not that dumb. If they consistently choose a more expensive alternative, it means the cheaper alternative is missing something that matters. > I own a high end GPU that I use maybe 4 hours a week for gaming. Why? Why currently prevents you from being more efficient and streaming your display from the cloud?
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- Filligree 10mo ago
  > Why? Why currently prevents you from being more efficient and streaming your display from the cloud? Latency. 120ms extra latency makes many games uncomfortable, and some of them entirely unplayable.
fzeroracer 10mo ago
I'm not sure if you're doing this intentionally or not, but it is incredibly funny to see people on HN doing what is effectively manufacturing consent for people to not actually own anything. We've gone from home computing is the future to no one should own a computer because it's wasteful. I'm not sure where this sentiment even comes from but if the economy only consists of renters and landlords then we don't even have the thinnest veneer of capitalism anymore. We're just Feudalism 2.0.
- thrance 10mo ago
  Capitalism was never about owning things. It's about accumulating capital (hence the name), and renting stuff is more profitable than selling stuff.
  - andrekandre 10mo ago
    not quite: its about accumulating capital yes, but also with private ownership (as opposed to collective ownership) and the use of said capital to gain more capital (investment returns put back into more investment) > renting stuff is more profitable than selling stuff maybe, maybe not, but it is usually more stable and predictable
    - thrance 10mo ago
      Nope, you can have capitalism where the vast majority of the population is legally or economically barred from owning anything. The only private ownership required in capitalism is that of the means of production, which says absolutely nothing about the rest.
      - andrekandre 10mo ago
        > The only private ownership required in capitalism is that of the means of production well, thats exactly what i was referring to ^_^ i agree, for personal property, you indeed could have capitalism and deny private personal ownership, and that is a worrying trend nowadays.

wslh 10mo ago

On the other hand companies go to cloud services as if they were scaling and complex as a FAANG.

XorNot 10mo ago

If capitalism prices me out of owning property, then I've not much use for it.

ezst 10mo ago
Maybe what you're calling capitalism is just oligarchy, in which case the nuance really doesn't matter.
- HPsquared 10mo ago
  I think the standard argument is that capitalism inevitably develops into oligarchy. Even the most basic setup of property rights protected by a legal system, presupposes a central authority of some kind who makes the ultimate decisions. Where there is law, there are courts, executive and legislative functions. More complex structures like joint stock companies introduce their own dynamics but also depend on a central authority to enforce contract law. Everything is downstream of security.
thrance 10mo ago
Billions are already "priced out" of owning property, why do you think you joining them would have any broader impact? EDIT: I don't know why I'm being downvoted. Billions of human beings have absolutely nothing to their names, and they have no power to change things. Because they own nothing. That's a basic fact of our globalized capitalist economy.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- gosub100 10mo ago
  The capitalist system depends on having some people below it to exploit, African villagers notwithstanding.
- codyb 10mo ago
  I guess the broader impact is cause the people on here actually do have assets and can donate, vote, call, and influence. So if the upper middle and lower upper classes are being hollowed out... Well... what's that leave? Just the super rich, and the rest... And considering the way the super rich are acting, I suppose they're just fine with that. The morally bankrupt sacks of shit that most of them seem to be, or become...
kakacik 10mo ago
Trust me, losing freedom you most probably consider as basic as air we breathe since your birth will stop such petty worries. And no system would give you property just because it would be nice, neither did communism (I know since I grew up in it and saw its destruction of everything good first hand - it had to be bought for non-trivial money with good old mortgages, and only regime-aligned people could).
- XorNot 10mo ago
  The spectrum of possible civic organization is not binary, and is not capitalism and communism in opposition. Though the insinuation of such is routinely used to justify the ongoing stratification of wealth, and corruption of government.
  - kakacik 10mo ago
    Well maybe but what examples out of real world do you mean? Nobody is justifying anything here btw, I don't get why people hyperfocus on imperfections and claim whole thing is useless without understanding underlying reasons and thus options for fixes. Or providing long term working & proven alternatives.
  - 9rx 10mo ago
    > and is not capitalism and communism in opposition. Hard to say. The prevailing assumption, and basis for the Communist Party (on paper, at least), is that capitalists will try to block reaching a state of post-scarcity — the necessary precondition for communism. This is why they are sometimes considered to be at odds with each other. They don't have to be. And thus far they don't seem to be. Capitalism, and especially American capitalism, has done far more to getting us closer to post-scarcity than anything else, with US-centric agriculture innovation being the shining example. We're almost there in that particular area. But we're not there yet and things can quickly turn. It is apparent in that agriculture progress that the capitalists remain deathly afraid of losing control (see the tales of Monsanto, John Deere, etc.), which is exactly the foundation on which the assumption is built.
    - 10mo ago
victorbjorklund 10mo ago
If communism you wouldn’t own anything?
- beepbooptheory 10mo ago
  This is not the case, has been corrected a million times by millions of people, and, frankly, if it was about anything else would not be considered appropriate on HN as a comment. We can do better than play out the same conversations also happening in middle school cafeterias. It helps everyone and could even reinforce your opposing views on the matter. You do your entire ideological position a disservice just doing this old hat!
dominicrose 10mo ago
Property prices are a big concern nowadays indeed, especially in high-demand areas. Complete (rich) strangers can come and outbid you. In the most capitalist places (rich areas without rent control), you can rent a place for years trying to save money to buy in the area and see the rent grow fast enough that you can't buy and even have to leave as a renter. Capitalism seems to work well for transportable things though, including cars. A house isn't transportable and it also tends to be something quite unique, which makes it incompatible with production in series. Even if you are somehow authorized and able to buy a cheap home, you still have the issue of the terrain, which can be more expensive than the home. That being said I'm sure that there are people living on cheap (per square meter) terrain and happy about it, but that requires the ability to make the best of it, work on it or find work close to it.

bravetraveler 10mo ago

Join us on the floor of the gymnasium, Carol

mynegation 10mo ago
That prompted some googling, but all I could guess, it is some “The walking dead” reference(?)
- dbalatero 10mo ago
  Pluribus, I think.
  - Tade0 10mo ago
    Ha, explains why AI is at a loss trying to figure out the meaning behind that sentence - to recent. Perhaps that's the ultimate AI detector? Information too recent, too obscure or too useless to have been used to train language models?
    - lossyalgo 10mo ago
      Not a bad idea, though 'too recent' I think would be the only benchmark - for now, until they get faster at training. OpenAI has thrown away most of their safety team so that shouldn't be a reason anymore to delay model releases "for safety checks". What would be too obscure or useless, when every new model boasts increasing parameter count (as if having more parameters would make the models better after a certain threshold)?

adamtulinius 10mo ago

Can we please not kid ourselves with thoughts about how this being good from certain perspectives, when the development is _clearly_ bad for consumers?

b40d-48b2-979e 10mo ago
Done charitably, I think the mainframe model of shared compute does meet most person's needs where they don't need to care about latency. It would allow us to take advantage of economies of scale. The problem, imo, is that no one has an incentive to do this as a service, so it would turn into rent-seeking.
- goodcanadian 10mo ago
  But I do care about latency . . . and I want things to still work when the wifi is dodgy. I already find things like Office 360 deeply frustrating (only use it for work).
  - olyjohn 10mo ago
    You do, but most people don't. So not enough people will complain that it will make any difference. And the people who don't complain will just keep forking out money because they're addicted.
    - platybubsy 10mo ago
      Most don't? Streaming isn't large enough to say that yet I don't think. Google Stadia wasn't a big hit
- WhyNotHugo 10mo ago
  Sure, a shared model does make sense in many ways. We could share within a family, neighbour cooperatives, and similar scales. With the users co-owning the means of processing. But the current model is that we all rent from organisations that use their position of power to restrict and dictate what we can do with those machines.

jrs235 10mo ago

I agree. However, I don't see the savings from the reduction of waste primarily going to consumers and everyone at large but being kept and collected by the owning class.

tbrownaw 10mo ago

> From a resource allocation perspective, this doesn't feel particularly undesirable, at least in terms of certain assets like vehicles. The current system of ownership is quite wasteful. People are by and large not that dumb. If they consistently choose a more expensive alternative, it means the cheaper alternative is missing something that matters. > I own a high end GPU that I use maybe 4 hours a week for gaming. Why? Why currently prevents you from being more efficient and streaming your display from the cloud?

deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
Filligree 10mo ago
> Why? Why currently prevents you from being more efficient and streaming your display from the cloud? Latency. 120ms extra latency makes many games uncomfortable, and some of them entirely unplayable.

fzeroracer 10mo ago

I'm not sure if you're doing this intentionally or not, but it is incredibly funny to see people on HN doing what is effectively manufacturing consent for people to not actually own anything. We've gone from home computing is the future to no one should own a computer because it's wasteful. I'm not sure where this sentiment even comes from but if the economy only consists of renters and landlords then we don't even have the thinnest veneer of capitalism anymore. We're just Feudalism 2.0.

thrance 10mo ago
Capitalism was never about owning things. It's about accumulating capital (hence the name), and renting stuff is more profitable than selling stuff.
- andrekandre 10mo ago
  not quite: its about accumulating capital yes, but also with private ownership (as opposed to collective ownership) and the use of said capital to gain more capital (investment returns put back into more investment) > renting stuff is more profitable than selling stuff maybe, maybe not, but it is usually more stable and predictable
  - thrance 10mo ago
    Nope, you can have capitalism where the vast majority of the population is legally or economically barred from owning anything. The only private ownership required in capitalism is that of the means of production, which says absolutely nothing about the rest.
    - andrekandre 10mo ago
      > The only private ownership required in capitalism is that of the means of production well, thats exactly what i was referring to ^_^ i agree, for personal property, you indeed could have capitalism and deny private personal ownership, and that is a worrying trend nowadays.