Comment by clanky
3 days ago
This technology should be liberatory, and allow us all to work less while enjoying the same standard of living. We've all contributed in its development by creating the whole corpus of the internet, without which it could never have been bootstrapped.
The only reason we can't expect this is that we live under a system that is arranged for the sole benefit of the owners of capital, and have been convinced that this is an immutable state of affairs or that our own personal advantage can be found in making a Faustian bargain with it.
> we live under a system that is arranged for the sole benefit of the owners of capital, and have been convinced that this is an immutable state of affairs
What alternative do you propose?
I would like to propose a cap on net worth.
Realistically, if you have 300M, you and your direct family are settled for life. So, I want to propose 1B cap on net worth, if its more than that for 12 months straight, surplus goes to government, if your net worth is down after that, government obliges to return it partially to make it to 1B.
People, who are eager building things and innovating, will keep building regardless, power hungry will try to find other ways to enrich themselves, but eventually they will give up (e.g. having 10 kids, each with 1B net worth)
Instead of an arbitrary net number, why not a multiplier of the median? For example, capping at 300x the median citizen/household.
This is so arbitrary and incredibly naive. How did you come to with 300M, why not 300k or 300 billion? How would you determine the worth of rare, illiquid or intangibles? What about wealth held in trusts or companies? How does the accounting work if I borrow against my wealth? What happens when things change value dramatically in a short period of time? And the government is going to "make billionaires whole again" if they crater their wealth?
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So let's say we implemented this and the government suddenly receives billions of credits from wealthy individuals. Would anything actually change? Is this what's holding us back from repairing all the roads to a fine standard? From implementing universal basic income?
It seems to me that if one tried to actually spend those credits we'd simply get inflation. Prices for roads, food etc. would just go up.
We definitely want to work on inequality, but I think numbers above 1B net worth are just weird quirks of the system. Musk is powerful because he's powerful, the number is just a reflection of that. Keeping his number below some arbitrary threshold isn't going to combat his power.
We need to tackle the problem head on: we need to stop individuals from amassing so much power. We get lost in this stupid abstraction called money. It's not what matters.
Doesn’t the US have an almost $2T deficit?
What do you think all that money you taxed from billionaires will do in the hands of the “government”, pay the bills for 12-24 months? Then what’s your plan after the government has spent it all? No amount of taxation can solve a spending problem.
Would SpaceX exist if your ideas were in charge?
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Not forcing a scarcity of necessities like housing would be a start.
Peer competition is what makes everything work. You need scarcity of necessities to force people in to the system. Recent rulings allowing the criminalisation of homelessness are pushing this further. Your existence is default-illegal unless you work to outbid your peers for housing.
Be realistic, demand the impossible.
A reference to France in May of 1968: "Soyez réalistes, demandez l'impossible."
See for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_68#Slogans_and_graffiti
"I demand a purple unicorn build the things I want to."
Now what?
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The same but less rigged would be a good start. I feel like people ask your question as a gotcha because they can't wrap their head around a system more nuanced than "cancerous capitalism" or "potato famine communism"
Something like we had in advanced western europe and the US between ww2 and the late 70s seemed much more balanced while not requiring a complete system change. Most people would be fine if we sprinkled a bit of socialism on top of the gigantic pile of capitalism.
Stuff like housing, energy, transportation, shouldn't make you live paycheck to paycheck forever. Just the fact that people are slowly starting to talk about 50 years mortgage should be a wake up call.
Most people would be happy knowing there is something a tiny bit better coming, rather than knowing they will never make it out and will kept getting fucked a tiny bit more year after year. My grandparents had objectively a harder life than mine, but their life was improving every year, mine is stagnating at best, and usually I'm losing purchasing power year after year, while being relatively well paid for my country
Perceived success of 1950s and 1960s does apply to non-white people, women or countries destroyed by war.
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It's always the same: workers need to unionize and form a political power bloc. Then, those most impacted—the majority—have an array of options, which are well explored in the annals of leftist and socialist political theory.
This is not at all to say that more conservative or reactionary theorists are wrong about how the world works. In fact, I think they're usually more right about what's really going on abstractly.
But, the working man doesn't need to know what's really going on. They need to win the war, and there's a ton of tactical advice written down—hard won lessons by those who built the modern world through the labor movement.
The place to start is with the usual suspects. Verso Books, The New Centre for Social Research, histories of the labor movement, and new political commentators like Josh Citarella.
"Let us finally imagine, for a change, an association of free men, working with the means of production held in common ...."
It would be a deep irony if LLMs ended up ushering in the social rupture that never arrived in the industrial era. When the pigs turn hogs and refuse to share even the scraps, they shouldn’t be surprised if the system they depend on becomes their undoing.
We should all hope so. It's clear that mass surveillance, the vast psyops architecture including social media platforms, autonomous drone warfare, Starlink & Neuralink, the whole Silicon Valley project in general is intended to have everyone eventually so discombobulated and "interfered with" that they can't even tell they're experiencing exploitation that should cause discomfort and radicalization (and quickly dispatch the few stragglers who can). It's either social rupture or total oligarch victory in the class war and a 10,000-year Thielreich.
> s intended to have everyone eventually so discombobulated and "interfered with" that they can't even tell they're experiencing exploitation that should cause discomfort and radicalization (and quickly dispatch the few stragglers who can).
It sounds like you have not read Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut.
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Do the owners of capital work less?
The numbers of hours that they work relative to the average wage laborer bears absolutely no relationship to whether they are the beneficiaries of an exploitative socio-economic arrangement. But they all certainly work much less than the laborers in the most precarious positions who are forced to work multiple gig economy jobs to make ends meet, yes.
> we live under a system that is arranged for the sole benefit of the owners of capital
This is totally false. The vast majority of consumers enjoy huge benefits from the system while owning almost no capital. For example, Walmart customers or iPhone owners.
A lot of people can't tell the difference between capitalism (which has made their lives materially wealthy beyond imagination) and the root cause of today's economic troubles for ordinary people, which is affordability, which is mostly driven by the housing crisis, which is dominated by nimbyism in megacities.
Fix megacity housing regulation to enable cheap/low risk building that the market wants, and you fix the affordability crisis.
No need to rebuild the (greatest system in the history of humankind) from scratch.