Comment by haritha-j
9 days 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. I own a high end GPU that I use maybe 4 hours a week for gaming.
Join us on the floor of the gymnasium, Carol
That prompted some googling, but all I could guess, it is some “The walking dead” reference(?)
Pluribus, I think.
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On the other hand companies go to cloud services as if they were scaling and complex as a FAANG.
> 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?
> 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.
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.
If capitalism prices me out of owning property, then I've not much use for it.
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.
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).
> neither did communism (I know since I grew up in it
Impossible. Communism is a work of science fiction, much like Star Trek which is a more modern adaptation of the same idea. Like Star Trek, the concept is dependent on post-scarcity, which we've never seen, and isn't likely to ever happen. Perhaps you mean you grew up under rule of the Communist Party?
> it had to be bought for non-trivial money with good old mortgages, and only regime-aligned people could
The defining features of communism are no class, no state, and no money. It imagines these will no longer be relevant in a post-scarcity world.
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I don't know where you live currently, but I can walk 5 blocks and see all of the broken promises Capitalism made too.
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.
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Maybe what you're calling capitalism is just oligarchy, in which case the nuance really doesn't matter.
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.
If communism you wouldn’t own anything?
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!
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.
The capitalist system depends on having some people below it to exploit, African villagers notwithstanding.
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...
Can we please not kid ourselves with thoughts about how this being good from certain perspectives, when the development is _clearly_ bad for consumers?
I do agree with the negatives, but at the same time, I do see some upside. I live in a cycling city, and need to rent a car maybe once a year. why then should I bother myself with the annoyances of vehicle ownership?
Let me be clear here: I do not own a car and I live in a city that doesn't require car ownership.
There is a difference between choosing not to own something because it is personally more efficient or reasonable to do so, and being priced out of owning something. I don't own a car because I don't need it, I rent because I cannot afford a home.
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.
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.
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).
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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.
The sentiment comes from techbros who see yet another avenue through which to exploit the average person.
Capitalism was never about owning things. It's about accumulating capital (hence the name), and renting stuff is more profitable than selling stuff.
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)
maybe, maybe not, but it is usually more stable and predictable
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