4 ms·
'Capitalism': the inevitable reduction of all humanity to fungible currency
by cyanydeez 7mo ago
'Capitalism': the inevitable reduction of all humanity to fungible currency
- PowerElectronix 7mo agoBetting with one another predates any notion of capitalism, or economy.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- ModernMech 7mo agoTrue, but capitalism eventually makes gambling the whole economy.
- PowerElectronix 7mo agoI don't think it does. Capitalism only allows one to save one's fruit of their labor to use down the line. You exchange it for money, then use that money to buy other stuff. People using it to gamble has more to do with gambling people than with capitalism people. You can have gambling in communism or socialism, only stakes there are limited because the fruit of the labor of people doesn't belong to them like in capitalism.
- ModernMech 7mo agoLook around you, the economy is aligning itself entirely around gambling. From bitcoin to nfts to the stock market to AI to art to dating apps to social media feeds to video games to venture capital to literal gambling apps infesting our phones ads sports. And finally we have actual members of the government gambling on policy. The capitalism you grew up with is dead, the arguments for and against it are old and stale. That nature of what it is has changed. It's metastasized, devolved into something else entirely as the middle class is evaporating, the lower class is continually squeezed, billionaires become trillionaires, people are lighting warehouses on fire citing low wages as the proximal cause, and the President is ordering automatic SS registration as he threatens total civilization destruction. This shit is not working and it's only going to get worse.
- pigpop 7mo agoThose are diseases of morality, not capitalism. Someone who lights a warehouse on fire because they aren't paid enough is an immoral person. In a communist country they would be called a Wrecker and they'd face a firing squad for their actions. Gambling, likewise, is a moral problem. It should be illegal or highly restricted and often was. Many other problems we face now could be fixed simply by reinstating laws that used to exist.
- bdangubic 7mo agothere a lot of things that may be immoral but it is the system that promotes it or prevents it. our system promotes it (there are ads for kashi and fanduel on nickelodeon) so it is the capitalism
- ModernMech 7mo agoYou and I probably have very different ideas about what is moral and what is not. For me, the highest moral crime is greed. A lot of people seem fine with it today. So for you to claim that the fire happened because of the poor moral character of the person who lit the fire, I can just as easily say this happened because of the poor moral character of the people who didn't pay him a fair wage, which leaves us nowhere. That's why I focus on purely systemic arguments. The humans in the system are abstract. It doesn't matter if they are moral or not, they respond to systemic incentives. So if they're acting immorally according to you, why is the system incentivizing degenerate behavior instead of moral behavior?
- pocksuppet 7mo agoI think you're mixing up capitalism with commerce. Commerce is where people buy and sell stuff. This is good. Capitalism is where capital is hoarded by an increasing smaller group of people. This is bad.
- eru 7mo ago(Many) people love gambling. Capitalism is great at giving people what they want.
- azan_ 7mo agoHow?
- ModernMech 7mo agoOnce the capitalists get enough control of the government they rig everything for themselves. In a capitalist system money is paramount and they have the most of it, so their opinion is regarded higher than everyone else's. Once capitalists rig the system for themselves, the only way to get ahead is just pure luck or connections. Sine not everyone can be connected, luck is all that's left for most people, so it becomes a huge part of economic activity along with whoring and warring. See Also: OnlyFans, and the Department of War.
- eru 7mo agoWhen Bill Gates was the richest guy in the world, he still had to battle the authorities for ten years to import his sports car from Europe. I'd hardly call that controlling the government.
- ModernMech 7mo agoAgain, like I said, the capitalism you knew and loved is dead. When Bill Gates became the richest man in the world he had like $10 billion dollars. Today we are talking about trillionares now. As today's elites aspire to be able to own 1995 Bill Gates 100 times over, so yeah apparently he didn't have enough power back then. Can you entertain the idea that someone several orders of magnitude more powerful than 1995 Bill Gates might have more effective control over the government?
- eru 7mo agoAren't you begging the question? You are saying that today's richest have more money (though you should probably adjust for gdp growth), and I agree. However, you are automatically concluding that they have more power?
- azan_ 7mo ago
- kingleopold 7mo ago[flagged]
- kodegod69 7mo agoSure keep saying that to yourself. All of you sound so damn sure when speaking about socialism. Like the first nation to pierce the firmament of human fabric wasn't a socialist one. And that the union wasn't making great strides in technology.
- logicchains 7mo agoSuch great strides in technology, their standard of living was so high that their president was literally shocked just by the abundance of food in a normal western grocery story.
- deadbabe 7mo agoWhether you like it or not, socialism is the key.
- 948382828528 7mo ago[dead]
- pocksuppet 7mo agoAgree, shareholder. 1400 million dead are a small price to pay for our capitalist utopia. We just need one more chance.
- croes 7mo agoCapitalism neither prevents gulags nor famines. And you can bet (pun intended) someone will create them on purpose if they can make profit from it
- logicchains 7mo agoPlease do share what capitalist country had a famine in the past century.
- airstrike 7mo agoCapitalism is just a projection of our natural competition for scarce resources onto an economic system.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- testing22321 7mo agoResources would not be scarce if some people were not hoarding.
- pigpop 7mo agoThe supply is greatest at the source.
- eru 7mo agoAre you going to work for free?
- NeutralCrane 7mo agoEven in non-capitalist systems people aren’t working for free
- eru 7mo agoAnd those systems also have scarcity. And it's not just because you are hoarding your labour.
- b65e8bee43c2ed0 7mo agohoarding what? you could dekulak all 3500 billionaires, magically transmute their make believe money into hard cash, and that $20 trillion would yield less than $2500 per human. hooray?
- NeutralCrane 7mo ago
- gib444 7mo agoThe price of everything and the value of nothing.
- jancsika 7mo agoIs that necessarily true? E.g., suppose I'm grocery shopping online and get put in behavioral histogram bin #1. You're in bin #2 because of stuff like impulsive browsing habits and low battery. Your bin's price for chips is consequently x% more expensive than mine. Now, suppose both of us get separate uber rides from the same location. Similar data bins end up with your low battery generating y% higher price for your Uber. Seems to me enough consolidation and behavioral data-based pricing practically impedes the fungibility of currency. Because while you and I can still borrow and pay back the currency directly to each other with impunity, the literal price of goods and services we can buy with that currency will be different. I.e., if you buy me a sandwich on Monday and I pay you back with a sandwich on Tuesday, you're losing money. Edit: for the steel man of what I'm saying, imagine most grocery and convenience stores have shifted away from static pricing to something like qr codes. Also, assume pricing based on personal data is rampant across industries for most basic private goods and services.
- miki123211 7mo agoThe truth is, price differentiation is something we've been doing for centuries, just with much worse heuristics. People are triggered when you frame it in terms of one cohort paying more than the rest. However, if there's a sticker price that basically nobody pays, with most customers getting a discount based on how rich the heuristics say they are, that's suddenly fine. Transit tickets work this way in most of Europe. There is a sticker price, but most people don't pay the sticker price. In practice, most tickets are purchased by school children, university students, seniors etc, and they all have varying levels of discounts. Whether you think of it as a "student discount" or as a "probably-rich-person surcharge", it doesn't really matter, in the end, the result is the same. Same applies to cinemas, museums, amusement parks. Here, you even have some grocery store chains that give you discounts if you have a "large family card."
- cyanydeez 7mo agoYou know what else we've been doing? Replacing 2 consumers with 1 consumer when the 1 consumer has more money and is easier to statisfy. Eventually it'll be a couple of billionairs selling a few boner pills for a few million dollars.
- chollida1 7mo agoThat may be true, but capitalism has nothing to do wit betting or prediction markets. You can have those with any government or market style.
- NeutralCrane 7mo agoWith an individual tendency towards betting? No. But I think Capitalism absolutely is a huge part of the fanatical drive to financialize everything, and the broader regulatory environment that enables the creation of entities like Polymarket and Kalshi.