Also, with all due practicality, I would not assume that present-day inequality is mainly due to that rather than past inequality perpetuating itself through feedback processes.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman![]()
No, I reject the idea that capitalism must be "torn down" or "eliminated" and the unique blaming of modern problems on it. Inequality and exploitation have existed throughout all times and in all systems, and we are objectively far better off today than 100 years ago.
This and your following sentence mean one of two things: Either I am terrible at communicating or there is a mindset that anyone who challenges an anti-capitalist talking point must be a full-on champion of unregulated laissez-faire capitalism. Maybe both.
What I do not support is the substitution of labels and talking points for reasoned arguments, and the reason I don't support it is that effective solutions need to go deeper than slogans and explore the actual causes for problems.
One example of this is the absurd implication that child labor is somehow a unique capitalist problem.
Edited by Fighteer on Nov 25th 2021 at 3:40:29 PM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"![]()
The allowance of past inequality to impact the level of equality in the future is itself a form of systemic inequality.
I’m more than happy to condemn poor rhetoric, but it’s worth trying to understand what people mean when they talk about eliminating capitalism. By and large (outside of Twitter idiots) they mean moving the balance point of our society such that the major motivating factor for society as a collective is the good of society (‘Socialism’) rather than profit (‘Capitalism’).
The blaming of everything on a Capitalism is just people having a shitty understanding of history. Same as people blaming religion for all war.
I’d like to offer a third thing. That many people are terrible at understanding what’s being communicated to them. So they misunderstand you as going for zero-regulation (in part because of poor communication on your part) and fire back against that accidental strawman, to which you fire back against your own accidental strawman that they see any criticism of their criticism as going full zero-regulation.
See I can’t find anywhere where anyone has implied that here. What I can find is your implication that Capitalism has solved the problem of child-labour (which I’m sure you agree is also an absurd assertion and isn’t actually what you meant by your point).
Edited by Silasw on Nov 25th 2021 at 8:46:59 PM
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranHonestly, these conversations always lead to the conclusion that we should keep capitalism but regulate it and increase or implement "social safety nets" to mitigate its excess and help those who fall behind; both things every capitalist state does anyway (noting that the Americans can and should do a lot more). I have never heard of a comvincing argument to eradicate capitalism wholesale, and perhaps never will.
Edited by RareEditor on Nov 25th 2021 at 1:06:24 AM
The whole thing gets a bit Ship of Theseus, if we’ve replaced so many bits of raw Capitalism with regulation and a social safety net is it truly Capitalism anymore?
In the end the name isn’t actually what matters, what matters is that the system is better.
Edited by Silasw on Nov 25th 2021 at 9:07:54 AM
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranThis is the same status quo reinforcing propaganda line that gets applied to every billionaire.
You claim that whether or not Elon Musk "deserves" to be as rich as he is is an impossible question, but it's a question that capitalism gives an absolute answer to. Capitalism says "Yes, everyone who has money deserves to have that much money, as proven by the amount of money they have, and when they use that money to get themselves more money that just proves that they should have more money." The absurdity of this is (one reason) why people want to reject capitalism entirely.
Musk is actually a pretty poor example for that, what his wealth coming from an electric car company (a social good) and a rocket company (a socially neutral and/or good (depending on your view on space travel and space science) company).
A better example would be a coal baron, the CEO of a tobacco company or someone who inherited their wealth.
Edited by Silasw on Nov 25th 2021 at 9:17:53 AM
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranTake Jeff Bezos. Amazon has unquestionably revolutionized the shopping experience and in turn affected many other aspects of the economy: supply chains, storefronts, "last-mile" delivery. It has also become a monolithic, impersonal employer that stomps on the individual needs of workers. So is Bezos a hero, a villain, or some combination? Is he a person that just happened to get lucky, a skilled entrepreneur, a slimy crook, a dilettante, a champion of capitalism, or any/all of those? If he hadn't built Amazon, would someone else have done something just like it and we would now be hating them?
The question of whether his wealth is "deserved" or "earned" seems kind of puerile. If we target that wealth for punitive taxation on the premise that it is not deserved, we are playing right into the narrative that liberals hate the rich, while also failing to fix the system that allows those kinds of wealth accumulations.
All this focus on billionaires is a distraction, which is not to say that I have any sympathy for those who inherit their wealth. We've been over that plenty of times, and even Elon Musk has said that dynastic wealth is unhealthy... although you won't hear Bernie Sanders quoting him on that.
Edited by Fighteer on Nov 25th 2021 at 4:55:17 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!""It has also become a monolithic, impersonal employer that stomps on the individual needs of workers" Yeah, not in my experience having worked there. At entry level, Amazon was paying significantly higher than the miminum wage in my area and offered insane health/dental benefits. If you had to take off for personal reasons, they let you do that. They frequently asked for employee feedback and took suggestions based on that. They did ask a lot from their workers but this ideas that they treat their workers like garbage has shown itself to be a myth.
Edited by RareEditor on Nov 25th 2021 at 2:15:17 AM
I know that Amazon has been noted to have a significant difference in its approach to workers in the office environment compared to the warehouse & delivery environment.
That or you just got a location that was different to the norm, but a personal anecdote doesn’t overrule the documented issues with Amazon warehouses.
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranYeah I was not in any cushy office; I was in a warehouse for ten hours a day, four days a week moving packages for the last mile. Everyone who worked did well and seemed content with their positions.
And, sure, it is just my anecdotal account of my lived experience. Far be it to call myself a journalist doing hard-hitting investigations of...interviewing Amazon workers and obtaining their anecdotal accounts of their lived experience.
"To become a billionaire you must have done something unethical" and "to become a billionaire you must have contributed to the world greatly enough that your wealth is fair reward" are perhaps equally simplistic viewpoints*, but the latter viewpoint is treated as universal fact by capitalism, even though there are obvious counterexamples like the coal barons and tobacco companies who profit from things that are ultimately harmful.
And Fighteer I don't think you can be pro-capitalism but dismiss the question of whether billionaires deserve their wealth. You're essentially saying "Yes they do, but also it's a silly question that we shouldn't bother discussing, but its answer is yes". And while I'll never pretend I don't hate rich people, wanting to tax them more isn't about punishing them, it's about redistributing wealth to people who need it. And you can do that while also fixing "the system that allows those kinds of wealth accumulations" (the system also known as capitalism).
*(Though there is an argument that hoarding wealth is inherently unethical regardless of what you did to get it in the first place.)
I'm not going to put someone else's personal experience on a higher one than my own if they are comparatively similar circumstances. I will be a sport and concede that it is possible that conditions are not so good at other locations or have not been so good in the past. Nontheless, the idea that Amazon is this evil soul crushing entity seems absurd to me based on the totality of what I know.
This is also a comical strawman. You're one person. These reports are the gathering of hundreds of hundreds of accounts.
"All you Fascists bound to lose."I'm pretty sure "megalomaniacal journalists are eenacting some form of harmful conspiracy (either by design or by accident) against saintly Amazon" qualifies as a strawman.
"All you Fascists bound to lose."I 100% agree. That would be a horrible strawman. Emphisis on the 'would be' part.
The reality is that the public often enough comes to unfounded conclusions often parroted as "common sense" and the media, like all media, plays to an audiance to get attention. People have been hating on the rich and corporations for a very long time now. They are powerful, they have resources, and they get to order people about. Amazon is a major player in tbe world right now because of the capitol it wields, and also has a huge workforce. Of course joirnalists are going to publish stories attacking such enities. And good on them; I certanly do not want corporations given a free pass from scrutiny. So that is why those articles exist. They never "exposed Amazon" causing an awakening as to how evil the company is; they gave people fodder for what they already believed.
I read up an article by The Guardian and another from NYT. Seems there are issues based on those accounts but the kicker is they were both interviewing workers from JFK 8 on Staten Island. Yes, the same warehouse. These problems do not seem to be sweeping across the company or at the very least I have insufficient evidence to believe it does.
Fighteer, with a non-sequitur you managed to derail the conversation from "is capitalism inherently bad" to "do billionaires deserve their wealth". Not that it's a problem, as there was nothing really to add to the former. We managed to conclude that the worst to be said about capitalism is that it's not any best than anything other done historically, and the best we can do is to keep doing the same thing we are doing right now but do it better, but still kept arguing whether capitalism is inherently bad or not. Now I have a feeling that the billionaire topic will be just as vein. Are they any better than the aristocracy of old because they need to invest into the right enterprise (and be lucky to find the right one) to become rich instead of just inheriting it? I just don't think that it ultimately matters. What matters is how you treat the people you employ.
Fjón þvæ ég af mér fjanda minna rán og reiði ríkra manna.For what I get about amazon is they reaaaaally have a very meritocratic ethos in that if you can sugest way to improve the system they will take those to heart regardless of rank instead of having just a CEO table so to speak.
BUT for what also speak that same ethos also make amazon fairly sure they can burn and chunk a HUGE quantity of worker pretty quickly because if you dont follow the rhymt, you get lost and out.
So, take that for what is worth I guess.
"My Name is Bolt, Bolt Crank and I dont care if you believe or not"Also, I don’t think anyone here is saying every person needs to have exactly the same amount of money. But there is no reason to accept a world where some people have more money than they could spend in a lifetime, while others lack basic necessities.
Nobody needs to be a billionaire - that’s more important than the question of ‘deserving’. If all the money the super-rich are pouring into the stock market and using to drive up house prices to unaffordable levels through speculation was in the hands of poor people using it to have a decent life, that would not only be a better world, it would improve the economy.
In an ideal world, I’d have a law that there could be no more than a limited difference - somewhere between 10x and 100x maximum - in compensation (whether payment in money or stock options or other things) between the lowest-paid person in any company and the highest-paid.
And Amazon treats its employees like automatons in horrific ways, to the point of literally working them to death.
Edited by Galadriel on Nov 26th 2021 at 4:37:14 AM
The problem is that economy doesn't work that way. It requires money to innovate, and some innovations require more money than others. Without Elon Musk being rich in the first place, we wouldn't have Tesla and electric cars would still be a pipe dream. Also, say you divide all of Musk's money among everyone in the US, then everyone will get about a few dollars. That won't help anyone. It's the rich people's responsibility to invest their money in something that forwards society, or possibly spend money on charities that do actually help. The Soviet Union tried a model where they take everything from the rich, look at how that worked out.
Fjón þvæ ég af mér fjanda minna rán og reiði ríkra manna.

When people talk about eliminating inequality the technical term for what they’re talking about is either the provision of equity (which in your example would mean we provide everyone with the necessary ladders to reach high shelves) or the removal of systemic inequality (all shelves are placed so they’re at a reachable height for everyone).
Yes inequality is technically the improper term, but not everyone has studied political terminology.
If you haven’t seen it already, I’d suggest the Equality vs Equity sports game comic that’s been around the internet for years. Here’s it on 9gag [1]
From my reading any solution that has the word Socialism or Communism attached to it.
That’s part of what makes these conversations so frustrating at times, people suggest solutions and you approve of them, but then you denounce Socialism and the rejection of Capitalism even though you seem to agree with Socialist/non-Capitalist solution when they’re provided without a label.
Where along the balance line does the system become a Socialist one as opposed to a Capitalist one? Because it seem we’re divided not on solutions but on if the solution ‘counts’ as a Socialist one or a Capitalist one and if the resulting system is a Capitalist system or a Socialist system.
I will note that I am genuinely (and pleasantly) surprised at your above statement. All your previous posts had led me (and I’m sure others) to believe that you rejected any inclusion of Socialism within the government system, seeming to view any Socialism as meaning going full Lenin.
Edited by Silasw on Nov 25th 2021 at 8:36:03 PM
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran