[Saeko]

What I described matches exactly the second type of GMO you mentioned, and I alluded to the fact that there were another sort of terminator genes.

And I reassess that both cases are better than having farmers being sued over intellectual property laws because patented seeds were found in their fields, which is hold as circumstantial evidences of guilt. US farmers still have to buy new seeds every year, the difference is that now they need to do so even if they never wanted to use those seeds! In other words they're forced to buy those products. Every year.

But I admit the current situation is better for third-world countries where seed providers did not manage to get constraining laws. But for other countries it is worse.

Ok, you ignored alluded to the fact that the problem I was talking about existed, and then proceeded to go on about how great of an idea t-genes as a whole are by pointing to the significantly more benign case.

And I reassess that both cases are better than having farmers being sued over intellectual property laws because patented seeds were found in their fields, which is hold as circumstantial evidences of guilt. US farmers still have to buy new seeds every year, the difference is that now they need to do so even if they never wanted to use those seeds! In other words they're forced to buy those products. Every year.

Yet another ridiculous feature of capitalism that needs to be eliminated ASAP.

[Truth To Power]

TTP: You're half-right.

No, I am 100% correct as a matter of objective physical fact.

Right in the sense that rent is more toxic than profit.

Profit is not toxic unless it consists of rent.

Typical capitalists at least risk money and fund economic activity. Rentiers are just pure parasites.

Rentiers also risk money. That's the point of rent-seeking behavior. The difference is that the contributor of capital goods to the production process enables production that would not otherwise have been possible, just as the laborer does. The rentier simply demands money for not blocking production that WOULD otherwise have been possible.

As a socialist, you are committed to finding a way not to know that self-evident and indisputable fact of objective physical reality.

But you're also wrong.

No. I am not.

There's no reason why the working people shouldn't crush the capitalist leech just the same as the rentier tapeworm.

You mean, aside from the result that they would then be poorer for the absence of the productive opportunities the capital provider creates, instead of richer for the absence of the rentier's demand to be paid for opportunities that were already there.

Even if the leech has the decency of producing some useful anti-coagulant it's still a fucking parasite.

The provider of capital goods thereby increases production. The landowner does not. As a socialist, you have to find a way not to know that self-evident and indisputable fact of objective physical reality. As you have demonstrated so eloquently, above.

I didn't mention land because this is a very complex topic, I have some doubts about, and it could only make my explanation more confusing.

Not mentioning land GUARANTEES confusion.

So in theory land is just an intermediate financial channel:

No, it is in fact not. The financialization of land is an artifact of the modern banking system, especially the debt money system.

money is driven from the lower levels of the society to the higher ones but in the end it will land in productive assets after transiting through various levels of purely financial circuits (including land).

See? You have to find some way of not knowing the fact that the landowner and bankster do not make any contribution to production of wealth, while the provider of productive capital goods does.

As long as the final productive investments are viable and useful, this is not a problem and it does not contradict with what I wrote.

Land is certainly productive and useful. It's just the owner who is not. And the large fraction of GDP he pockets in return for doing and contributing nothing is very much the problem.

It is just one part of the financial circuits used to drive capital to productive investments.

Land is productive, but it is not a productive INVESTMENT because a given parcel is just the same whether it is free, or costs millions. By buying that parcel, the landowner does not increase production one iota. He merely diverts a portion of production into his own pockets.

It is not different in effect from loans for example.

That is false. A loan simply creates an obligation. Land enables production.

But what happens when there is too much capital available, more than the available productive investments? Bubbles.

No. There is no such thing as too much capital available. Bubbles happen when the welfare subsidy to ownership of rent collection privileges (there has only ever been one bubble in actual capital goods, the Dutch tulip mania, which still had to be financed by banksters) is expected to become so exorbitant that their present-value prices cannot be calculated accurately.

In other words the financial circuits (including land) no longer simply drive money to productive investments, they end up acting as a deflationary pressure over the economy: less and less money is available in the economy to buy actual goods, not just financial products, and growth is offset by prices' contraction, and illusions are created, distorting the ability of economic agents to correctly estimate value.

Your error is in attributing this phenomenon to productive investment in capital goods. It's not. It only happens in the markets for rent-collection privileges.

In those conditions, anything that drives money to the financial sphere ends up impoverishing workers and destabilizing the economy.

But what you call "the financial sphere" is totally concerned with getting something for nothing, not making productive investments in capital goods that actually increase production.

TL;DR:

It was not too long, and you know it. I am very clear and concise, and my clients pay me well for those qualities. You just decided you did not want to know the facts I identified.

land is no different from other financial schemes

Absurd. Land enables production, and it existed before any human. Debt is a human construct that just creates obligations.

"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." -- Voltaire

The more interesting corollary of Voltaire's penetrating observation is that those who would make you commit atrocities will first try to make you believe absurdities. Your absurdities are designed to rationalize and justify the atrocities -- including two Holocausts per year -- committed in the name of private property in land.

where capital drives money to the productive investments through indirect convolutions.

You don't even know what productive investment consists in (hint: land and debt are not productive investments).

However as too much capital is driven to financial circuits and exceeds productive investment opportunities, then it ends up harming the economy and impoverishing workers.

More absurdity. What impoverishes workers is forcibly taking the fruits of their labor and giving them to rich, greedy takers such as landowners and banksters.

But maybe it is just that capital has been heading to China instead for the past decades.

China has attracted actual productive investment by allowing profitable private ownership and operation of capital goods while retaining land in public ownership (although they have been allowing more and more land rent to be diverted into private pockets, at great risk to their economy and society).

The real estate bubbles is certainly preoccupying but difficult to properly understand.

Real estate bubbles are actually quite easy to understand: debt-fueled rent seeking encouraged by seemingly indefinite expansion of the welfare subsidy to landowners. They are always all about landowner privilege and parasitism. ALWAYS.

And I reassess that both cases are better than having farmers being sued over intellectual property laws because patented seeds were found in their fields, which is hold as circumstantial evidences of guilt. US farmers still have to buy new seeds every year, the difference is that now they need to do so even if they never wanted to use those seeds! In other words they're forced to buy those products. Every year.

Correct. The judges who found in favor of the IP rent seekers in those appalling cases are simply corrupt, evil filth, and should rightly be killed.

But I admit the current situation is better for third-world countries where seed providers did not manage to get constraining laws. But for other countries it is worse.

It is an atrocity, nothing but pure, naked, smirking evil.

[Harmattan]

We'd treat innovations somewhat similarly to the way capitalism does. Under capitalism companies do consumer research and design products that consumers appear to want. Then they prototype them, make a first production run and market them. If they sell well more production runs will follow, if they don't stell it will be the first and last.

This is not how innovation is produced. Instead corporations typically buy back young enterprises that did innovate.

And more often than not few people did believe in what this young enterprise was doing before it became a success, because only a few people did understand what it was about. Even those with the required technical knowledges rarely does - either because they lack imagination, or because their context is different, or because the innovators fail to communicate their vision before it is materialized.

Innovation and centralization are antithetic for me and I am convinced that any centrally planned economy would be doomed to fail miserably. The great strength of capitalism is precisely that is has very efficient ways both for consumers to signal their arbitrations, and for innovators to attract speculative capital to get a chance to try things out.

My preference for most other goods is that their consumption be tracked and predict and attempt to meet the demand for it. If people are really into peas, we will endeavor to meet their demand for peas, likewise if corn is left on the shelves we will produce less corn. We don't need profit to signal demand when we can track consumption directly.

But what about arbitration? You cannot simply give everyone everything they want, there are not enough resources. To arbitrate between things you need to know the value of things. Today people have a limited number of monthly tokens called "euro" or "dollar" and they decide how much they're ready to give to each product.

Even if technology reached magical levels, high enough to offer everyone about everything (which is not very interesting in a discussion about production organization), what if everyone wanted its own planet, or its own Picasso?

Yet another ridiculous feature of capitalism that needs to be eliminated ASAP.

It is fair to remunerate labor regardless of whether it produces material or intellectual goods.

If I work two years to produce an intellectual good, why should others have the right to enjoy my work without remunerating me? If tomorrow someone spends millions to remunerate actors and technical staff to produce a movie, why should he be forbidden to get money back? Intellectual workers are not your personal slaves.

I would like to modify and weaken a fair number of intellectual property laws, but the concept itself is fair and needed.

See? You have to find some way of not knowing the fact that the landowner and bankster do not make any contribution to production of wealth, while the provider of productive capital goods does.

Organization is a part of any value creation and finance is a part of capitalistic organization. Financial tools are mandatory for capitalism, they are an integral part of the way value is created by allowing resources to be distributed, invested and concentrated at a global scale. They do create wealth, so do the executives who coordinate economical agents, the lawyers, the accountants, etc.

But even if they weren't, so what? You treat the money collected through rent as something that disappeared in a black hole, but it circulates instead. Financial goods are not the destination, just an intermediate step for your labor before it is converted into productive assets or seized under the form of personal goods by someone else.

No. There is no such thing as too much capital available.

There is: if there are only X billions of dollars of possible productive investments and ten times more capital looking for possible investments, then capitalism is doomed to create problems.

The more interesting corollary of Voltaire's penetrating observation is that those who would make you commit atrocities will first try to make you believe absurdities. Your absurdities are designed to rationalize and justify the atrocities -- including two Holocausts per year -- committed in the name of private property in land.

You are ridiculously and remorselessly instrumenting the holocaust for your propaganda. The Holocaust was not remarkable by its death toll, negligible at a human scale, it was remarkable by its nature, as an industrial and systematic extermination of specific categories of human beings.

Now private property is just a specific form of usage exclusivity, which also exists in communism and everywhere else, because human beings do not want anyone to barge in their houses claiming that they are entitled to occupy it. Communism too would have to grant exclusive usage rights and arbitrate value repartition between productive and unproductive human beings. And historically it has not been nice towards unproductive elements.

More absurdity. What impoverishes workers is forcibly taking the fruits of their labor and giving them to rich, greedy takers such as landowners and banksters.

If they invested this money in luxurious goods for their exclusive usage only, your labor benefits to them only.
If they invested this money in productive assets, your labor benefits to the common good.

In a communist system the government would also have to seize the same amounts of labor to build those same productive assets.

[KlassWar]

Even if technology reached magical levels, high enough to offer everyone about everything (which is not very interesting in a discussion about production organization), what if everyone wanted its own planet, or its own Picasso?

"We're currently unable to supply the items you're requesting. Place a realistic order and try again. " Neat and simple.

[mikema63]

But what about arbitration? You cannot simply give everyone everything they want, there are not enough resources. To arbitrate between things you need to know the value of things. Today people have a limited number of monthly tokens called "euro" or "dollar" and they decide how much they're ready to give to each product.

Even if technology reached magical levels, high enough to offer everyone about everything (which is not very interesting in a discussion about production organization), what if everyone wanted its own planet, or its own Picasso?

Limit how much people can take out of a distribution center and limit how much they can store as surplus.

One of the major issues facing such an economy isn't really arbitration so much, since there really is less incentive than people think to simply hoard cans of peas. The problem is smuggling. I'm not saying that people can just walk in and demand a flat screen to go over the toilet, but a great many goods could certainly be made more or less free without risk of people over-consuming them. People only want so many pillows after all, and a fort made of cans of vegetables is going to be a rather rare occurrence.

[Harmattan]

Limit how much people can take out of a distribution center and limit how much they can store as surplus.

You are right to point out that some goods do not really need to be limited (only excessive behaviors need to). Food and such. Although this would lead to increased wastage.

But for other products, isn't it exactly like today where people get as much as they have credits available, and distributors/producers already use algorithms to predict demand and optimize prices and stocks?

[mikema63]

You are right to point out that some goods do not really need to be limited (only excessive behaviors need to). Food and such. Although this would lead to increased wastage.

I doubt the impact of waste would be significant compared to what we already have, most produce is thrown away while being picked because it simply isn't pretty enough for people to want to buy it. Which is a crying shame in my opinion but thats more a problem with human psychology than anything.

But for other products, isn't it exactly like today where people get as much as they have credits available, and distributors/producers already use algorithms to predict demand and optimize prices and stocks?

The problem with capitalism isn't that certain products are limited or that there is a rationing system in place. The problem is the distribution of power to the owners of the means of producing commodities. Beyond the arguments about alienation of labor and the idea that profits are the excess value of a laborers work, you have a system where those profits go to purchase even more of the means of production. You end up with a constant accumulation of the means of production into the hands of fewer and fewer people. This makes those few people ever richer and creates income inequality levels that is essentially unsustainable for the entire system. While this could be ameliorated by government controls you face the problem that with that money and the power granted by being a major player in the economy those people who own the means of production have significantly more control over the governmental process.

http://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf

^This study shows that the probability of a law being passed is not affected by the opinions of the bottom 90% of income earners and is effected by the opinion of the top 10%.

This power is leveraged to the end of giving the owners of the means of production more power and money. This is again, more of a problem of human psychology.

So my main issue with a capitalist economy is not that some things are rationed or that some people can consume or produce more than others, but that the capitalist system produces profits that go to an increasingly smaller group and that peoples relative position in society is determined by how much money they have. You see multi-millionares striving to make millions more dollars that they cannot really do anything with except make more money, but because money is prestige in our society they are driven to collect it. I strongly prefer a society that would grant prestige to people that produced more, created new products, made new discoveries, and did great things in a way that didn't warp the power structure of society in an ultimately unsustainable way. We want to keep score and incentivize people, and indeed part of that incentive may well be the ability to consume more luxury good. but we cannot ultimately keep score with something that would allow an increasingly smaller group to buy up all the means to actually produce or create things. The give them the power to buy themselves more power.

The problem isn't to devise a system that would distribute goods more efficiently than capitalism, the problem is to devise a system that would distribute goods while not giving people the means to hoard power to themselves.

[quetzalcoatl]

you have a system where those profits go to purchase even more of the means of production. You end up with a constant accumulation of the means of production into the hands of fewer and fewer people. This makes those few people ever richer and creates income inequality levels that is essentially unsustainable for the entire system. While this could be ameliorated by government controls you face the problem that with that money and the power granted by being a major player in the economy those people who own the means of production have significantly more control over the governmental process.

This sums the problem up nicely. The power imbalance is more important than income inequality. The means of production have become so powerful that it is now possible for the owners of these means to become rich beyond the wildest dreams of avarice while simultaneously providing a comfortable level of sustenance for the 99%. Yet this is not happening - not only is it not happening, but there is intense pressure from these owners to remove existing levels of support.

The end result of this process is a system wherein electoral politics will no longer matter. There will be a powerless official government and, alongside it, a deep state representing the interests of the owner class.

[Saeko]

It is fair to remunerate labor regardless of whether it produces material or intellectual goods.

I don't care about what's "fair". I don't believe that people should be making decisions about their labor on the expectation of reward or the fear of punishment, but out of recognition that they (just like everybody else) need to contribute what they can for their country. The state should give them what they need to do what is expected of them. Nothing more and nothing less.

If I work two years to produce an intellectual good, why should others have the right to enjoy my work without remunerating me?

If tomorrow someone spends millions to remunerate actors and technical staff to produce a movie, why should he be forbidden to get money back? Intellectual workers are not your personal slaves.

If the state is already providing you with everything you need to live and do your work, then why should you be allowed to restrict access to things other people need?

I would like to modify and weaken a fair number of intellectual property laws, but the concept itself is fair and needed.

This is what oldthinkers actually believe.

[Truth To Power]

See? You have to find some way of not knowing the fact that the landowner and bankster do not make any contribution to production of wealth, while the provider of productive capital goods does.

Organization is a part of any value creation and finance is a part of capitalistic organization.

Fallacy of composition. You could with equal "logic" claim that the slave owner produces value when he whips his slaves to make them work harder, because slaves' efforts must be "organized," and their owner is a part of "slave organization."

Financial tools are mandatory for capitalism, they are an integral part of the way value is created by allowing resources to be distributed, invested and concentrated at a global scale.

Financial intermediation is useful for allocating resources, but that is not how modern banksters make their money. They make it by issuing debt money -- which they are uniquely privileged to do -- and charging interest on it.

They do create wealth,

They destroy wealth, as the GFC would have proved to you, if you had been willing to know the facts it demonstrated.

so do the executives who coordinate economical agents,

Management of productive resources is a contribution to production. But landowners and banksters don't manage productive resources. They just charge the productive a fee for not getting in their way.

the lawyers, the accountants, etc.

Rent seekers privileged by law to charge producers for the service of either avoiding officially imposed injustice or making them the beneficiaries thereof.

But even if they weren't, so what?

So rich, greedy takers are robbing the productive.

You treat the money collected through rent as something that disappeared in a black hole, but it circulates instead.

So does the money that is stolen by thieves.

HELLO???

Financial goods are not the destination, just an intermediate step for your labor before it is converted into productive assets or seized under the form of personal goods by someone else.

I don't want the rightful fruits of my labor seized by someone else.

No. There is no such thing as too much capital available.

There is: if there are only X billions of dollars of possible productive investments

Hypothesis contrary to fact.

and ten times more capital looking for possible investments, then capitalism is doomed to create problems.

Silliness.

The more interesting corollary of Voltaire's penetrating observation is that those who would make you commit atrocities will first try to make you believe absurdities. Your absurdities are designed to rationalize and justify the atrocities -- including two Holocausts per year -- committed in the name of private property in land.

You are ridiculously and remorselessly instrumenting the holocaust for your propaganda.

"Instrument" is not a verb. The removal of people's rights to liberty by private landowning is the principal cause of poverty, which kills 12-15 million people PER YEAR. Almost all are landless. That's the ANNUAL toll of landowner privilege.

The Holocaust was not remarkable by its death toll, negligible at a human scale, it was remarkable by its nature, as an industrial and systematic extermination of specific categories of human beings.

But it was epically horrible because it killed so many people, not because it was organized, industrial and systematic. If those people had just been forcibly relocated and their assets confiscated, as was done to Japanese Americans, it would just be a footnote in history.

Now private property is just a specific form of usage exclusivity, which also exists in communism and everywhere else, because human beings do not want anyone to barge in their houses claiming that they are entitled to occupy it.

See? You have to pretend there is no difference between a house, which someone had to create by their labor, and would therefore not have been accessible to others, and land, which no one ever created by their labor, and WOULD have been accessible to others.

Communism too would have to grant exclusive usage rights and arbitrate value repartition between productive and unproductive human beings. And historically it has not been nice towards unproductive elements.

Communists are a subclass of socialists, whose refusal to know that the capitalist qua capitalist contributes to production is mirrored by your refusal to know that the landowner qua landowner doesn't.

More absurdity. What impoverishes workers is forcibly taking the fruits of their labor and giving them to rich, greedy takers such as landowners and banksters.

If they invested this money in luxurious goods for their exclusive usage only, your labor benefits to them only.

And...?

If they invested this money in productive assets, your labor benefits to the common good.

Nonsense. If they put the money into land, they benefit no one but themselves.

In a communist system the government would also have to seize the same amounts of labor to build those same productive assets.

A communist (or socialist) system is even worse than a capitalist one, as history proves.

[quetzalcoatl]

Innovation and centralization are antithetic for me and I am convinced that any centrally planned economy would be doomed to fail miserably. The great strength of capitalism is precisely that is has very efficient ways both for consumers to signal their arbitrations, and for innovators to attract speculative capital to get a chance to try things out.

Your devotion to innovation is charming in its naive way, but lets get real. The need for constant innovation is nothing more than an addiction, like the addiction to heroin or sugar. Capitalism cannot help itself in this regard. It has a logical imperative to liquidate everything in its path, constantly clear-cutting the forests of humanity to make way for its newest "innovations". Fostering an addiction to constant novelty is de rigeur, as is its apologists making the case for efficiency and innovation.

You're an apologist. I would compare your intellectual position to that of Stephen Douglas, who privately acknowledged the evils of slavery, but continued its public advocacy. Capitalism is slavery. This is not a 'moral' critique, it's simply the quotidian nature of modern life. No amount of efficiency or innovation can mask this basic fact. The most hypocritical argument you could possibly advance is centralization, considering the fact that transnational capitalism has contributed more to centralized power than Stalin and Hitler combined.

[Left Behind]

Your devotion to innovation is charming in its naive way, but lets get real. The need for constant innovation is nothing more than an addiction, like the addiction to heroin or sugar. Capitalism cannot help itself in this regard. It has a logical imperative to liquidate everything in its path, constantly clear-cutting the forests of humanity to make way for its newest "innovations". Fostering an addiction to constant novelty is de rigeur, as is its apologists making the case for efficiency and innovation.

"Innovation" does not merely take the form of consumerist novelties, it can take and has taken the form of technologies which better mankind significantly. Innovations in healthcare, sanitation and communication have made the world a better place, innovations in weapons technology have (largely) made it worse. I would consider certain forms of innovation to be vital for the alleviation of problems such as climate change (which ironically appeared as a result of innovation), which requires either a primitivist retreat to horse and cart (which would result in other issues) or the development of viable alternative industrial fuels. The need for innovation is real, however you are right in criticising capitalism's need for "constant novelty."

Rather than leaving innovation to the machinations of the free market, perhaps it would be better to guide innovation (if this is not a contradiction) and technological progress so that we witness the development of technologies we need rather than the latest iteration of the iPhone. Capitalism does provide a fairly reasonable model for innovation, however capitalist innovation tends to spend most of its time creating consumerist products for which there is a strong profit motive. This profit motive also leads to large costs for innovative technologies that are needed by individuals. Although this divided innovation has led to significant advancements, imagine what could occur if it were focussed on several important goals.

There may even be a need to slow innovation in some areas, in which the development of new technologies is more likely to be harmful.

[Saeko]

Innovation is a double-edged sword.

For every new actually useful invention, there are a hundred new ways to swindle people.

[Harmattan]

The problem with capitalism isn't that certain products are limited or that there is a rationing system in place. The problem is the distribution of power to the owners of the means of producing commodities.

And I totally agree with that.

That being said there is much to say about the forms this power can take. While the power over the organization of labor is mostly total, only limited by the labor regulations and the need to satisfy some employees, the power in other aspects of the society is more difficult to exert.

* As for the correlation between the top 10% and the approved laws, in my opinion it is less related to money than to a social class problem. In my opinion the social proximity between politicians and wealthy people, who all belong to the same social classes, is far more important than money itself. But this is caused by the fact that electors prefer successful, good-looking, aggressive and wealthy politicians.

* On the other hand using money to influence ideas is actually hard. One can buy medias but there are limits to how much you can twist the editorial lines without creating scandals and any attempt to hide facts will lead to a Streisand effect. Owning medias is useful to set up exceptional communication campaigns but it looks ineffective as an ideological propaganda mean. Same goes for lobbies: they only work for specific issues.

* One exception is that corruption works well. But it does not work in all countries. It works exceptionally well in the USA because it is usually legal and not considered as such: mostly unregulated political campaign funding coupled with unregulated and extensive political advertisement, alumnus' bonuses in upper education, pharmaceutical visitors (almost all physicians and health experts are corrupted), etc. In the USA you can buy anything, votes and diplomas included. But many of those traits are specific to the USA in substance or magnitude.

Your devotion to innovation is charming in its naive way

I could say the same about the way you underrate it and rather favor alternative economic organizations.


"Let's get real" as you said. Whatever economic organization you choose...
* People will still have to work about as much as today, much more than today if you reduce efficiency.

* Many jobs are simply not interesting, and you cannot share them because you need the rest of people elsewhere. You are not going to ask your physicians to collect garbages.

* There will always be winners and losers in the arbitration of value repartition. How much are rare skills worth? How much are physical efforts worth? Intellectual efforts? Risks for articulations and backaches? Exposition to toxic products? Night work and week-ends? Noisy environments? Social (un)consideration?

* Labor will still be a social activity with power games, assholes, toxic groups, clans, prejudices, discriminations, unpopular people, etc. Democracy in the workplace only guarantees that the majority's perceived interests are favored against the rest's, it does not prevent the exploitation of the 49%.

* There will always be limited opportunities for a given person with given skills in a given area. And sometimes none of those opportunities will be satisfying.


Hence why I am convinced that it is far far better for all to rather build a society where people work as few as possible, only when they want rather than because they are forced to. Innovation >> economic organization.

Rather than leaving innovation to the machinations of the free market, perhaps it would be better to guide innovation (if this is not a contradiction) and technological progress so that we witness the development of technologies we need rather than the latest iteration of the iPhone.

I hate mobiles. They are personal tracking devices, incredibly harmful for privacy and social isolation, stupid gadgets who easily break, fashion objects, etc. And yet!

* The smartphone explosion led to unprecedented discoveries in batteries. If our future ever ends up filled with electric cars and 100% renewable grids, it will be thanks to those stupid phones.

* Two decades ago most of Africa relied on physical transports for communication because there were no phone networks in most villages. Let's not even mention Internet! On the other hand mobile networks are cheap, so nowadays you can almost surf the web from any isolated African valley. Not only this did bring them instant communications and better knowledges, it is also bringing banks, loans and money transfers: most of rural Africans were hiding money in their garden or behind their bed, now it is safe in banks, farmers can easily order specialized tools and seeds to remote corporations, sometimes using other currencies, and they can track the international cereal markets.

* The commoditization of computing power (through the cloud) was greatly hasted by the fact that smartphones have such a small computing power. And this change is in turn necessary for many applications, starting with the improvement and commoditization of AI, which will be a driving force of productivity gains in the future.


Those stupid smart phones ended up being the driver of many important technological and societal revolutions.

innovations in weapons technology have (largely) made it worse

Not for the West. I am convinced that if Europe is at peace, or if the third world war didn't happen between the USA and Russia, it was all thanks to the incredibly deadly weapons we now all have.

I don't care about what's "fair".

Of course you do: you are debating politics! As for my answer I was arguing for IP rights in a capitalist context.

For every new actually useful invention, there are a hundred new ways to swindle people.

Such as working 20h a week instead of 80h? Or sometimes developing a cancer because of pesticides rather than starving because the pests did ruin the crops? Or being afraid of incredibly deadly weapons rather than being at war every 20 years? Or suffering more diseases because you no longer die at 30?

[Truth To Power]

We'd treat innovations somewhat similarly to the way capitalism does. Under capitalism companies do consumer research and design products that consumers appear to want. Then they prototype them, make a first production run and market them. If they sell well more production runs will follow, if they don't stell it will be the first and last.

This is not how innovation is produced. Instead corporations typically buy back young enterprises that did innovate.

Wrong. Most innovation is the result of government-funded academic research and engineering projects at large companies.

The great strength of capitalism is precisely that is has very efficient ways both for consumers to signal their arbitrations, and for innovators to attract speculative capital to get a chance to try things out.

That is a strength of liberty to produce, property in the fruits thereof, and markets, not of capitalism.

Yet another ridiculous feature of capitalism that needs to be eliminated ASAP.

It is fair to remunerate labor regardless of whether it produces material or intellectual goods.

It is fair to remunerate labor. That does not mean the only way to do so is monopoly privilege.

If I work two years to produce an intellectual good, why should others have the right to enjoy my work without remunerating me?

Because you did not keep it private, and they have rights to liberty.

If tomorrow someone spends millions to remunerate actors and technical staff to produce a movie, why should he be forbidden to get money back?

No one is talking about forbidding them to get money back. The question is how to enable them to get it back -- assuming they have invested it wisely -- without abrogating others' rights.

Intellectual workers are not your personal slaves.

The inevitable absurdity designed to justify atrocities.

I would like to modify and weaken a fair number of intellectual property laws, but the concept itself is fair and needed.

It is not fair, and it is not needed. See "Against Intellectual Monopoly" by Boldrin and Levine.

I don't believe that people should be making decisions about their labor on the expectation of reward or the fear of punishment, but out of recognition that they (just like everybody else) need to contribute what they can for their country.

But that's just objectively false. They need to do no such thing. Which is kinda the point.

As long as you are devoted to such absurdities, your philosophy is just a way of rationalizing and justifying atrocities.

The state should give them what they need to do what is expected of them.

You need to read "The Gulag Archipelago" to find out where that leads.

If the state is already providing you with everything you need to live and do your work, then why should you be allowed to restrict access to things other people need?

The first clause is superfluous, and the second should read, "...things other people would otherwise be at liberty to use?"

you have a system where those profits go to purchase even more of the means of production. You end up with a constant accumulation of the means of production into the hands of fewer and fewer people. This makes those few people ever richer and creates income inequality levels that is essentially unsustainable for the entire system. While this could be ameliorated by government controls you face the problem that with that money and the power granted by being a major player in the economy those people who own the means of production have significantly more control over the governmental process.

This sums the problem up nicely. The power imbalance is more important than income inequality. The means of production have become so powerful that it is now possible for the owners of these means to become rich beyond the wildest dreams of avarice while simultaneously providing a comfortable level of sustenance for the 99%. Yet this is not happening - not only is it not happening, but there is intense pressure from these owners to remove existing levels of support.

The end result of this process is a system wherein electoral politics will no longer matter. There will be a powerless official government and, alongside it, a deep state representing the interests of the owner class.

No, you are both wrong, because you refuse to distinguish between land and capital, and thus do not understand how ownership of the means of production might or might not make one rich depending on WHICH means of production one owns. It is not the owners of capital goods -- tools, machinery, etc. -- who have become rich beyond the dreams of avarice, and are constantly being made even richer in return for doing and contributing nothing. It is LANDOWNERS(and other greedy takers like banksters and IP owners, who own PRIVILEGES, not tools and machinery).

Even Marx realized in the end (but buried it in Vol. 3 of "Capital") that the landowner takes all the profit he incorrectly ascribed to the capitalist class in Vols 1 and 2). Learn it, or continue to talk nonsense on the subject permanently.

[mikema63]

All of those things are means of production, I care very little which means of production allow you to accumulate other means of production more easily.

If the factory owners end up getting disposesed of their factories by the land owners, then the land owners own the factories and capital accumulates just the same. The results remain the same no matter who "wins."

[quetzalcoatl]

No, you are both wrong, because you refuse to distinguish between land and capital, and thus do not understand how ownership of the means of production might or might not make one rich depending on WHICH means of production one owns. It is not the owners of capital goods -- tools, machinery, etc. -- who have become rich beyond the dreams of avarice, and are constantly being made even richer in return for doing and contributing nothing. It is LANDOWNERS(and other greedy takers like banksters and IP owners, who own PRIVILEGES, not tools and machinery).

Even Marx realized in the end (but buried it in Vol. 3 of "Capital") that the landowner takes all the profit he incorrectly ascribed to the capitalist class in Vols 1 and 2). Learn it, or continue to talk nonsense on the subject permanently.

You're a bit off base. Other than resource extraction and building/housing rents, land doesn't pay a big part in the accumulation of wealth. It is the rent on money rather than the rent on land that powers late capitalism. Reforms in land ownership, attractive as they might be, would not address the financialization of the economy.

[Brother of Karl]

A stunning per/capita growth rate of 1.2% a year for Africa in the last decade. In terms of where they're at right now, my description of them as "never-to-be-developed" is probably too optimistic.

I found a mistake in your post. You might want to reread that chart and find your mistake because it goes against your argument.

[Left Behind]

Those stupid smart phones ended up being the driver of many important technological and societal revolutions.

Did I deny that the smartphone was a technological breakthrough? Notice how I said "the latest iteration of the iPhone", the iPhone itself may have led to significant advancements however this is not the issue. The issue is that once such a breakthrough technology has been produced, time and resources will be spent developing endless versions of it. When innovating for profit it will often be the case that a "new" version of an existing product will have a greater exchange then a new, and potentially risky, technological innovation. While capitalism does undeniably produce technological breakthroughs like the smartphone the resources which are devoted to "improving" could be utilised far more effectively. Not to mention the "new" products which are simply mindless toys of consummation.

Not for the West. I am convinced that if Europe is at peace, or if the third world war didn't happen between the USA and Russia, it was all thanks to the incredibly deadly weapons we now all have.

Fantastic, after innovation in weapons technology led to the immense casualties in both world wars, we can praise it for preventing a third.

[AFAIK]

No, you are both wrong, because you refuse to distinguish between land and capital, and thus do not understand how ownership of the means of production might or might not make one rich depending on WHICH means of production one owns.

It's pretty rare for an investor/ capitalist to own one "means of production" outright and nothing else. S/he's more likely to own 5% of 20 different ventures, which s/he can abandon at the click of a button. That's why investment firms will boast of outperforming the stockmarket as a whole.

Even Marx realized in the end (but buried it in Vol. 3 of "Capital") that the landowner takes all the profit he incorrectly ascribed to the capitalist class in Vols 1 and 2). Learn it, or continue to talk nonsense on the subject permanently.

I haven't read Marx but surely rent controls and other property regulations limit landlords' ability to maximise returns.