@tiotasram@kolektiva.social2026-08-11 16:22:46
Random thought that goes interesting places:
There are a lot of cheap ways to spend money to drastically improve the quality of life for lots of people (UBI, mosquito nets, digging wells, etc.). Those people almost invariably become way more economically productive in aggregate when this happens, far above the costs involved, if you measure from the perspective of the affected group. So for billionaires looking for outsized returns on investments, why not simply spend on some of these programs, then invest in a broad index of socks that are going to go up as a result?
The answer could be "billionaires by their nature are too evil to think of this," which, could be true....
But I think there's a deeper answer, which is that there *is no* bundle of stocks that goes up as humans flourish. This is directly contrary to neoliberal economic doctrine/propaganda, but it also has an explanation that's obvious from the neoliberal doctrine itself: the stock market is a gambling arena for bets on corporate profits. Corporate profits are money taken in in excess of costs. But the value of a corporation is not produced abstractly by the mere existence of the organization; it's produced by the labor of humans working for the organization, with raw materials that the organization purchases. So to make a profit, an organization has to do some combination of paying its workers less than the value the create, and/or paying less for it's raw materials than they are really worth. The more it does these two things, the more profit it can generate.
Notice that these two profit-generating activities directly and indirectly immiserate humans, *and* that reducing human misery by means other than reducing these activities makes them harder. People who have other means of income won't sell their labor for less than it's worth, nor will they sell their resources below their fair value. Only desperate people will agree to terms that corporations require to be profitable.
This is not a "Marxist analysis" by the way; it's the direct application of the basic principles taught in any neoliberal introductory macroeconomics class.
In any case, once we understand that the stock market is "gambling on how much corporations can exploit their employees/suppliers/customers", it's clear why you can't make money from stock investments in companies that profit from flourishing humans: profit is by construction made of human misery.
It also explains a lot of other things, like why private US employers who pay huge amounts of payroll towards health insurance for their employees would be *against* public health insurance that would offload those costs onto all taxpayers: the amount they're able to lower wages as a result of desperation for access to health care is more than worth the direct costs.
This is the central reason why capitalism (defined as: a system where money equals power) is inimical to human happiness: it allows profits built on suffering to be converted into the power to maintain the system of suffering and even extend and intensify it, creating a feedback loop of extractive domination.
Now I'm sure some people might read this and think: what about the good companies? The ones that pay their workers and suppliers a fair wage, and sell their products at fair prices? Even putting aside the fact that such a thing seems less believable than a unicorn these days, such a company by definition does not make a profit. The fair wage for its workers is the value they add to the raw materials it buys, and the fair price for those is the selling price of the finished product minus the value the company adds. The balance sheet will read exactly zero at the end of the day if compensation is actually fair. You can still run a company like this in theory, and even grow it, but of course under capitalism it will just get bought out by an unethical company that is profitable. Could you in some kind of utopian dream world run a tightly regulated series of markets where you have most of what people think capitalism is, without the bad parts? Maybe, but it definitely wouldn't involve actual capitalism, and it wouldn't have a stock market.
#anarchy #capitalism #econimics
@hex@kolektiva.social2026-10-10 14:57:20
I've been rolling over something in my mind for the past couple of days, tumbling this way and that. It's still not completely smooth, but there are so many interesting implications that it might be worth a glance in it's rough form.
By happenstance I started digging in to critical #cybernetics and found a talk by Klaus Krippendorff. One of the things he focused on was "agency." A human has agency, while a machine does not. A human can explain *why* they did something, he reasoned, while a machine cannot. It is in the ability to comprehend and articulate the "why" that makes agency. I'm not sure that I agree with this, and there some interesting implications to thinking about agency in terms of directionality.
Throughout history people have used systems, such as language, to make things easier. Writing solves a problem with the limits of human memory. At the same time, oral culture can be more dynamic. Spoken records cannot trap humans in the way written ones can. There is, with written language, some inversion of control.
Systems, like language, do not have agency in that they cannot think (in the human sense). But considering language as a meme, it *does* have *something like* agency in the same sense as a virus does: it is driven by evolutionary pressures to adapt in such a way to it's own replication.
So we can begin to think of these systems in terms of systems that are used by people, and systems that use people. Some of these systems are symbiotic. Language, for example, replicates because it provides clear value to the user.
But we can begin to imagine a system that is more parasitic than symbiotic. Imagine a system that (though lacking consciousness) hijacks the minds of humans in order to replicate itself, to not simply passively be accepted but to force itself onto others.
Perhaps such a system could allow humans to control other humans. Of course, I could be talking about capitalism or the State here. But imagine a system that could parasitize that system. One that could hijack capitalism to use *its control* to maximize the propagation of something that isn't doesn't even serve that system.
Imagine such a cybernetic parasite. Perhaps it could even be described in terms of demonic possession. Imagine a thing hijacking humans in control of other humans, spreading the infection at threat of starvation. Jumping from host to host. Replicating itself ruthlessly by exploiting the weakness of concentrated power. Agents without consciousness, mindlessly stripping the agency from humans. Turning humans into mindless vessels that mechanically change the environment to the benefit of the possessor. Try to imagine. .
You know you don't have to. Yes. This is a post about the #LLMs and the #AIBubble..
@peterhoneyman@a2mi.social2026-10-01 03:20:25
i think about this a lot
@philip@mastodon.mallegolhansen.com2026-07-21 00:36:46
@… Haven’t gotten that far in the post yet, so I won’t comment on your exclusion of AP yet, just to note that I agree with what you want to build, and I have a PDX local friend who is a film buff and has been working on a Letterboxd replacement on and off over the years.
I really hope something comes to fruition. I just want to log how I feel about things I sa…
@simon_brooke@mastodon.scot2026-08-16 13:37:35
@… (I think we agree on this but) if we view capitalism and the market economy as inherently toxic (as I do), is work to make it less unequal not counter productive? We need to be building the new structures, not trying to shore up the wanton excess of the old.
Accidental Gods - The Thrutopian Podcast: Podcasters Unite! Thinking about systemic change with Tim Log…
@roland@devdilettante.com2026-07-21 03:54:40
fascism-washing or something sad face
https://cosocial.ca/@mhoye/116937498616819671
@pre@boing.world2026-10-01 18:02:01
☎️ ☎️ ☎️ ☎️ ☎️ ☎️
💂♂️Hello this is OfGov how may I help you today?
🏌️♀️Oh hi! You know I usually agree completely with my representative but I'm afraid he hasn't really understood the issues on taxing the homelessness so I'd like to override his choice on the vote on Wednesday.
💂♂️No problem madam, would you prefer your vote-weight to be for or against the taxing the homeless bill on Wedesday.
🏌️♀️Oh, I'm all for it! Tax them off the streets I say. Its the only way to help them
💂♂️Allright, your vote-weight is recorded as overriding your normal representative for the taxing the homelessness bill on Wednesday. Is there anything else I can help you with?
🏌️♀️Nope, he's right about everything else. Continue to let him represent me on every other vote until I call again.
💂♂️Thank you, do call again.
@inthehands@hachyderm.io2026-09-18 00:38:36
I went out on a limb a bit. I talked about how in the course of teaching college I'd known several students through the length of their transition, before and after — and in every one of those cases, it felt like a weight had lifted, like there was this feeling of “Ah!! •That’s• who you are!” Like when they cleaned the Sistine Chapel, when they lifted this layer of grime away, and suddenly there were all these incredible colors.
He grabbed my hand with both of his, looked me straight in the eye, and said with sudden earnestness, “Paul, I agree •completely•. Thank you. Thank you.”
2/
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io2026-08-19 14:27:27
RE: https://hachyderm.io/@thomasfuchs/117122488745257105
I'd welcome any thoughts you have on this, even if unstructured.
There should be reasoning and a line of argumentation, not just "it's unethical".
I'm interested in the why a specific thing about it is (e.g. "data centers are unethical because of pollution and water use", or "generating text and serving it to humans as your own is unethical because it's deceitful").
It could also be counter-examples, like "generating code that's verified through testing and based on training data from open source projects is not unethical."
(These are just examples which you may or may not agree with, it's not the point.)