5 ms·

Courtesy of TFA and capitalism: "In 1985, if you were a reasonably affluent American, the best computer that you could afford was the IBM PC AT. The PC AT woul

by mhb 5mo ago

Courtesy of TFA and capitalism: "In 1985, if you were a reasonably affluent American, the best computer that you could afford was the IBM PC AT. The PC AT would cost you about $6,000—$19,400 in 2026 dollars—and thus represented about a quarter of the median American’s annual income; and it ran on an Intel 80286 processor, capable of something like 900,000 instructions per second. Today, if you find yourself in a market stall in Nairobi or Lagos, you’ll be able to find a cheap smartphone—like the Tecno Spark Go, manufactured by China’s Transsion—for somewhere between $30 and $120. That phone will run on a processor capable of billions of calculations per second."

hackyhacky 5mo ago
This quote has nothing to do with capitalism. Please note that "commerce" and "capitalism" are not synonymous, and that the former does not imply the latter. Capitalism is in no way a prerequisite for technological development.
- CamperBob2 5mo ago
  Capitalism is in no way a prerequisite for technological development. Really? Who else builds stuff?
  - hackyhacky 5mo ago
    > Really? Who else builds stuff? Said the Christian in pre-Englightenment Europe: "Well, of course Christianity is the one true religion. After all, the whole civilized world is Christian."
    - CamperBob2 5mo ago
      That doesn't answer my question.
      - hackyhacky 5mo ago
        That's because your question is silly. I'll spell it out for you: Just because all modern states are capitalist does not mean that all states must be capitalist, as evidenced by the many erstwhile states that were not capitalist. Your failure to see beyond your immediate surroundings and ignoring the first sentence of my previous comment is perhaps the reason for your silly question.
        ivewonyoung 5mo ago
        > Just because all modern states are capitalist does not mean that all states must be capitalist, as evidenced by the many erstwhile states that were not capitalist However, I doubt anyone else would instead want to live in current day North Korea or pre-1990 eastern bloc countries, or in East vs West Germany.
        hackyhacky 5mo ago
        > However, I doubt anyone else would instead want to live in current day North Korea or pre-1990 eastern bloc countries, or in East vs West Germany. An astute observation, if your knowledge of history begins and ends with the 20th century.
        ivewonyoung 5mo ago
        So not a single country out of ~200, not one, emulated the alleged great successes and utopias of historic non-capitalist economies for a century plus. Which is why you're unable to name one in the 20th century. Hmm I wonder why. Maybe we can look at societies where the modern era hasn't touched, like some places in Africa. Why is the quality of life so great there that everyone wants to move from hypercapitalistic societies like the US to Africa instead of the other way around?
        hackyhacky 5mo ago
        Wow, talk about moving the goal posts. I was pointing out that capitalism has not always been the universal economic system, and now you're trying to make me explain why years of exploitative colonialism and corrupt authoritarianism haven't yielded a better alternative. Well, isn't it obvious? 300 hundred years ago, every country in the world was ruled by an absolute monarch, and that fact alone was considered persuasive explanation of divine will: the world must always be thus. Since then, the philosophy of rulers has changed, but small-minded apologists for the status quo have not evolved in their thinking. "If our current approach isn't the best option," say the small-minded apologists, "why isn't anyone doing anything different?" The answer to that question, in case it wasn't obvious, is the same as it was 300 years ago: entrenched interests. Are you seriously arguing that it is impossible to allocate today's abundance of resources in a more fair and productive way than our current system does?
  - torben-friis 5mo ago
    >Who else builds stuff? The Chinese, famously?
    - ivewonyoung 5mo ago
      China is a great example of a counter point to the argument. They only started making things once they realized capitalism was better. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_and_opening_up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_and_opening_up > The reforms [starting in 1976] de-collectivized agriculture, abolished the people's communes, relaxed price controls, allowed foreign direct investment into China, and led to the creation of special economic zones, most prominently the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone and the Shanghai Pudong New Area. Private enterprises were allowed to grow, while many state-owned enterprises were scaled down or privatized. Shanghai Stock Exchange and the Shenzhen Stock Exchange were established in 1990, allowing a capital market system
      - hackyhacky 5mo ago
        > They only started making things once they realized capitalism was better. Free commerce is not the same as capitalism. A country where production, wages, and ownership are decided centrally can hardly be said to be unfettered capitalism.
        ivewonyoung 5mo ago
        > A country where production, wages, and ownership are decided centrally can hardly be said to be unfettered capitalism. The reforms in China I listed heavily cut down on that. Are you claiming that China is somehow less capitalistic now compared to 1976? By your metric the US isn't capitalistic because NASA and various govt agencies and entitlements worth trillions of dollars a year of taxes exist.
        hackyhacky 5mo ago
        Please avoid straw man arguments. I didn't say that China didn't use capitalism: I said that it didn't use unfettered capitalism. Its capitalism is strongly tinged by its authoritarian rule with the explicit goal of reducing poverty. The US, like China, continues to use a mixed approach to economic management in the form of regulated capitalism. The degree of regulation in the US has been declining since the 1950s, resulting in larger wealth inequalities and more poverty.
  - lkey 5mo ago
    You don't have to demonstrate this kind of ignorance of human history on main. Aren't you embarrassed? Do you value knowledge even a little bit? When did capitalism begin? How was 'stuff' created and distributed prior to that? How do other, distinct and contemporaneous modes of production create 'stuff'?
    - WalterBright 5mo ago
      Capitalism began when Thag, who was a good hunter, brought home two dinosaur steaks. His buddy Grog was a lousy hunter, but was good at making spears. Thag traded a dinosaur steak for a new spear.
      - hackyhacky 5mo ago
        That's commerce, not capitalism. Capitalism began when Thag declared that he owns all the dinosaurs, and anyone who hunts a dinosaur must pay him 10 percent of the meat as a tribute, or else he will stab them with his spear.
        WalterBright 5mo ago
        Um, Grog had the spear.
        hackyhacky 5mo ago
        [flagged]
      - lkey 5mo ago
        Really Walter? You know better than this. First, pedantically, we did not share time with 'dinosaurs' in the sense you imply. Secondly, pedantically, that kind of hunting was not the main source of calories for hunter-gatherers. It's more apt to imagine them as gatherers first and primarily. Thirdly, and also pedantically, you are not describing the system of capitalism that I, and most educated people talk about when they use the word. That system has only been with us in the main for, generously, 250 years. Critically, Thag and Grog both own the means of production for their spears and 'steaks' respectively. The necessary abstractions for capital accumulation, debt, and private ownership simply do not exist.
- tick_tock_tick 5mo ago
  I mean we don't really have any counter examples even China didn't really start advancing in any meaningful way until they started moving towards capitalism.
  - hackyhacky 5mo ago
    We didn't have any examples of states without a divinely appointed absolute monarch until we did. Things can change. And as a matter of fact, there are many examples of non capitalist societies.
- WalterBright 5mo ago
  > Capitalism is in no way a prerequisite for technological development. Communist countries copied technology, their inventions are very few. Capitalist countries routinely exhibit rapid technological development.
  - WalterBright 5mo ago
    I was just watching "Shock and Awe", a documentary on Amazon, about the development of electrical theory and products. It was driven largely by people who wanted to make money off of their inventions. None of the progress came from communist countries. Did you know that Gutenberg invented the printing press in order to make money? Did you know the Wright Bros invented the airplane in order to make money? And so on and so forth.
    - hackyhacky 5mo ago
      > It was driven largely by people who wanted to make money off of their inventions. I am getting a little tired of repeating myself, but you're evidently confused so I'll indulge you. The opposition to capitalist as a monetary system does not imply the opposition to the profit motive. As I've said several times, and which you continue to ignore, the exchange of goods and services in the form of commerce requires the profit motive. Conflating my position with communism is a straw man.
      - WalterBright 5mo ago
        Well, you do repeat Marxist tenets, like the class struggle and the labor theory of value.
        hackyhacky 5mo ago
        Just because they are Marxist tenets doesn't mean they aren't true. Feel free to refute them if you feel otherwise.
        5mo ago
- sophrosyne42 5mo ago
  "Capitalism" is an ever shifting ambiguity that exists to be a scapegoat to attack but is completely meaningless in its concrete usage by the attackers. But "capitalism" in its historical and practical meaning means nothing other than commerce, i.e. the society based exchange, the system of production based on exchange. It was only through capitalist accounting methods that businesses were able to conduct commerce in such a way as to contrast costs and proceeds, and therefore create the optimizations that lead to mass computer production or, what is the same, cheap computers for the masses.
  - hackyhacky 5mo ago
    > But "capitalism" in its historical and practical meaning means nothing other than commerce, i.e. the society based exchange, the system of production based on exchange Completely wrong. Many of my comments here distinguish commerce from capitalism. Commerce, ie the exchange of goods and services, has existed longer than civilization. Even some animals do it. Capitalism is specifically the substitution of labor with ownership as a means of profiting. This produces an imbalanced market: some people compete for resources by selling their labor, while others compete simply by owning capital: the means of production. The problem is that the latter mode allows unlimited accumulation of wealth, while the former is limited by time and effort. Imagine if Elon Musk was working a salaried job that paid $60000 per hour. How long would he have to work in order to earn his current fortune?
    - sophrosyne42 5mo ago
      Every socialist tries to make this distinction and falls to their own guillotine. You do realize that "substitute with" is merely a synonym for "exchange"? The exchange of labor, to be sure, has existed nearly as long as civilization itself, perhaps longer, as all people cooperate by exchange through the division of labor right down to the family, and it is exchange whether the articles to be exchanged are money or physical things or even intangible, ephemeral things like love, pride, loyalty, or otherwise. Since human society is human cooperation by the division of labor, by your definition capitalism is nearly synonymous with human society itself. Fine by me.
richforrester 5mo ago
That has little to do with what I said. A third of the world lives in poverty. That's the fault of capitalism.
- CamperBob2 5mo ago
  Really? What other systems are better at lifting people out of poverty (without killing a few tens of millions in the process?) There are so many other places where this sort of low-effort high-school edgelording fits in better than here.
  - hackyhacky 5mo ago
    > There are so many other places where this sort of low-effort high-school edgelording fits in better than here. A good sign of low-effort edgelording is championing an obviously broken system by using a straw man to disparage the alternatives.
    - CamperBob2 5mo ago
      [dead]
- rationalist 5mo ago
  > A third of the world lives in poverty. That's the fault of capitalism. So what you're saying is that capitalism lifted about two thirds of the world out of poverty. Thanks to capitalism, I don't have to toil in the fields.
  - hackyhacky 5mo ago
    > Thanks to capitalism, I don't have to toil in the fields. No, that's thanks to commerce not to capitalism. Capitalism benefits those those who hold capital, which is not me. The fact that there are more than enough resources for no one to live in poverty should suggest to you that something is wrong with the distribution system. "It's true, Mr/Ms Rationalist, that our patented Miracle Medical Snakeoil caused a third of your leg to become necrotic and fall off, but be glad for the two thirds that did not fall off!"

by mhb 5mo ago

hackyhacky 5mo ago

This quote has nothing to do with capitalism. Please note that "commerce" and "capitalism" are not synonymous, and that the former does not imply the latter. Capitalism is in no way a prerequisite for technological development.

CamperBob2 5mo ago
Capitalism is in no way a prerequisite for technological development. Really? Who else builds stuff?
- hackyhacky 5mo ago
  > Really? Who else builds stuff? Said the Christian in pre-Englightenment Europe: "Well, of course Christianity is the one true religion. After all, the whole civilized world is Christian."
  - CamperBob2 5mo ago
    That doesn't answer my question.
    - hackyhacky 5mo ago
      That's because your question is silly. I'll spell it out for you: Just because all modern states are capitalist does not mean that all states must be capitalist, as evidenced by the many erstwhile states that were not capitalist. Your failure to see beyond your immediate surroundings and ignoring the first sentence of my previous comment is perhaps the reason for your silly question.
      - ivewonyoung 5mo ago
        > Just because all modern states are capitalist does not mean that all states must be capitalist, as evidenced by the many erstwhile states that were not capitalist However, I doubt anyone else would instead want to live in current day North Korea or pre-1990 eastern bloc countries, or in East vs West Germany.
        hackyhacky 5mo ago
        > However, I doubt anyone else would instead want to live in current day North Korea or pre-1990 eastern bloc countries, or in East vs West Germany. An astute observation, if your knowledge of history begins and ends with the 20th century.
        ivewonyoung 5mo ago
        So not a single country out of ~200, not one, emulated the alleged great successes and utopias of historic non-capitalist economies for a century plus. Which is why you're unable to name one in the 20th century. Hmm I wonder why. Maybe we can look at societies where the modern era hasn't touched, like some places in Africa. Why is the quality of life so great there that everyone wants to move from hypercapitalistic societies like the US to Africa instead of the other way around?
        hackyhacky 5mo ago
        Wow, talk about moving the goal posts. I was pointing out that capitalism has not always been the universal economic system, and now you're trying to make me explain why years of exploitative colonialism and corrupt authoritarianism haven't yielded a better alternative. Well, isn't it obvious? 300 hundred years ago, every country in the world was ruled by an absolute monarch, and that fact alone was considered persuasive explanation of divine will: the world must always be thus. Since then, the philosophy of rulers has changed, but small-minded apologists for the status quo have not evolved in their thinking. "If our current approach isn't the best option," say the small-minded apologists, "why isn't anyone doing anything different?" The answer to that question, in case it wasn't obvious, is the same as it was 300 years ago: entrenched interests. Are you seriously arguing that it is impossible to allocate today's abundance of resources in a more fair and productive way than our current system does?
- torben-friis 5mo ago
  >Who else builds stuff? The Chinese, famously?
  - ivewonyoung 5mo ago
    China is a great example of a counter point to the argument. They only started making things once they realized capitalism was better. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_and_opening_up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_and_opening_up > The reforms [starting in 1976] de-collectivized agriculture, abolished the people's communes, relaxed price controls, allowed foreign direct investment into China, and led to the creation of special economic zones, most prominently the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone and the Shanghai Pudong New Area. Private enterprises were allowed to grow, while many state-owned enterprises were scaled down or privatized. Shanghai Stock Exchange and the Shenzhen Stock Exchange were established in 1990, allowing a capital market system
    - hackyhacky 5mo ago
      > They only started making things once they realized capitalism was better. Free commerce is not the same as capitalism. A country where production, wages, and ownership are decided centrally can hardly be said to be unfettered capitalism.
      - ivewonyoung 5mo ago
        > A country where production, wages, and ownership are decided centrally can hardly be said to be unfettered capitalism. The reforms in China I listed heavily cut down on that. Are you claiming that China is somehow less capitalistic now compared to 1976? By your metric the US isn't capitalistic because NASA and various govt agencies and entitlements worth trillions of dollars a year of taxes exist.
        hackyhacky 5mo ago
        Please avoid straw man arguments. I didn't say that China didn't use capitalism: I said that it didn't use unfettered capitalism. Its capitalism is strongly tinged by its authoritarian rule with the explicit goal of reducing poverty. The US, like China, continues to use a mixed approach to economic management in the form of regulated capitalism. The degree of regulation in the US has been declining since the 1950s, resulting in larger wealth inequalities and more poverty.
- lkey 5mo ago
  You don't have to demonstrate this kind of ignorance of human history on main. Aren't you embarrassed? Do you value knowledge even a little bit? When did capitalism begin? How was 'stuff' created and distributed prior to that? How do other, distinct and contemporaneous modes of production create 'stuff'?
  - WalterBright 5mo ago
    Capitalism began when Thag, who was a good hunter, brought home two dinosaur steaks. His buddy Grog was a lousy hunter, but was good at making spears. Thag traded a dinosaur steak for a new spear.
    - hackyhacky 5mo ago
      That's commerce, not capitalism. Capitalism began when Thag declared that he owns all the dinosaurs, and anyone who hunts a dinosaur must pay him 10 percent of the meat as a tribute, or else he will stab them with his spear.
      - WalterBright 5mo ago
        Um, Grog had the spear.
        hackyhacky 5mo ago
        [flagged]
    - lkey 5mo ago
      Really Walter? You know better than this. First, pedantically, we did not share time with 'dinosaurs' in the sense you imply. Secondly, pedantically, that kind of hunting was not the main source of calories for hunter-gatherers. It's more apt to imagine them as gatherers first and primarily. Thirdly, and also pedantically, you are not describing the system of capitalism that I, and most educated people talk about when they use the word. That system has only been with us in the main for, generously, 250 years. Critically, Thag and Grog both own the means of production for their spears and 'steaks' respectively. The necessary abstractions for capital accumulation, debt, and private ownership simply do not exist.
tick_tock_tick 5mo ago
I mean we don't really have any counter examples even China didn't really start advancing in any meaningful way until they started moving towards capitalism.
- hackyhacky 5mo ago
  We didn't have any examples of states without a divinely appointed absolute monarch until we did. Things can change. And as a matter of fact, there are many examples of non capitalist societies.
WalterBright 5mo ago
> Capitalism is in no way a prerequisite for technological development. Communist countries copied technology, their inventions are very few. Capitalist countries routinely exhibit rapid technological development.
- WalterBright 5mo ago
  I was just watching "Shock and Awe", a documentary on Amazon, about the development of electrical theory and products. It was driven largely by people who wanted to make money off of their inventions. None of the progress came from communist countries. Did you know that Gutenberg invented the printing press in order to make money? Did you know the Wright Bros invented the airplane in order to make money? And so on and so forth.
  - hackyhacky 5mo ago
    > It was driven largely by people who wanted to make money off of their inventions. I am getting a little tired of repeating myself, but you're evidently confused so I'll indulge you. The opposition to capitalist as a monetary system does not imply the opposition to the profit motive. As I've said several times, and which you continue to ignore, the exchange of goods and services in the form of commerce requires the profit motive. Conflating my position with communism is a straw man.
    - WalterBright 5mo ago
      Well, you do repeat Marxist tenets, like the class struggle and the labor theory of value.
      - hackyhacky 5mo ago
        Just because they are Marxist tenets doesn't mean they aren't true. Feel free to refute them if you feel otherwise.
        5mo ago
sophrosyne42 5mo ago
"Capitalism" is an ever shifting ambiguity that exists to be a scapegoat to attack but is completely meaningless in its concrete usage by the attackers. But "capitalism" in its historical and practical meaning means nothing other than commerce, i.e. the society based exchange, the system of production based on exchange. It was only through capitalist accounting methods that businesses were able to conduct commerce in such a way as to contrast costs and proceeds, and therefore create the optimizations that lead to mass computer production or, what is the same, cheap computers for the masses.
- hackyhacky 5mo ago
  > But "capitalism" in its historical and practical meaning means nothing other than commerce, i.e. the society based exchange, the system of production based on exchange Completely wrong. Many of my comments here distinguish commerce from capitalism. Commerce, ie the exchange of goods and services, has existed longer than civilization. Even some animals do it. Capitalism is specifically the substitution of labor with ownership as a means of profiting. This produces an imbalanced market: some people compete for resources by selling their labor, while others compete simply by owning capital: the means of production. The problem is that the latter mode allows unlimited accumulation of wealth, while the former is limited by time and effort. Imagine if Elon Musk was working a salaried job that paid $60000 per hour. How long would he have to work in order to earn his current fortune?
  - sophrosyne42 5mo ago
    Every socialist tries to make this distinction and falls to their own guillotine. You do realize that "substitute with" is merely a synonym for "exchange"? The exchange of labor, to be sure, has existed nearly as long as civilization itself, perhaps longer, as all people cooperate by exchange through the division of labor right down to the family, and it is exchange whether the articles to be exchanged are money or physical things or even intangible, ephemeral things like love, pride, loyalty, or otherwise. Since human society is human cooperation by the division of labor, by your definition capitalism is nearly synonymous with human society itself. Fine by me.

richforrester 5mo ago

That has little to do with what I said. A third of the world lives in poverty. That's the fault of capitalism.

CamperBob2 5mo ago
Really? What other systems are better at lifting people out of poverty (without killing a few tens of millions in the process?) There are so many other places where this sort of low-effort high-school edgelording fits in better than here.
- hackyhacky 5mo ago
  > There are so many other places where this sort of low-effort high-school edgelording fits in better than here. A good sign of low-effort edgelording is championing an obviously broken system by using a straw man to disparage the alternatives.
  - CamperBob2 5mo ago
    [dead]
rationalist 5mo ago
> A third of the world lives in poverty. That's the fault of capitalism. So what you're saying is that capitalism lifted about two thirds of the world out of poverty. Thanks to capitalism, I don't have to toil in the fields.
- hackyhacky 5mo ago
  > Thanks to capitalism, I don't have to toil in the fields. No, that's thanks to commerce not to capitalism. Capitalism benefits those those who hold capital, which is not me. The fact that there are more than enough resources for no one to live in poverty should suggest to you that something is wrong with the distribution system. "It's true, Mr/Ms Rationalist, that our patented Miracle Medical Snakeoil caused a third of your leg to become necrotic and fall off, but be glad for the two thirds that did not fall off!"