And so they won’t be ripped to shreds by an angry mob of millions of hungry, angry poor people; aye, it should be an easy choice for them if it comes to that.
The problem right now is those mobs of poor people have been taught to blame themselves for not being rich. They vote into office politicians who’s primary goal when elected is to lower taxes in a way that benefits the rich almost exclusively.
Those same rural poor vote for welfare cuts, vote against socialized medicine, and vote for extremely long prison sentences. It just seems bitterly ironic.
Maybe once the bottom 50%…or 99% of America start actually starving, things might change, just commenting on it.
And yet, we are in a time where, world wide, less people live in absolute poverty than at any time in our species history. It’s funny how your sentiment has transcended time…we have been hearing this same line for well over 200 years now, yet year after year things actually get better for more people across the globe.
Why do you suppose that is? As for your theory on capitalism, this is more of a relative new comer, since it’s only with Marx and Engels we’ve been hearing about how more and more wealth will be concentrated into fewer and fewer hands until you have only a single (or small group) of capitalists controlling everything, and everyone else will be living in abject poverty throughout the world. This is cutting edge compared to the other…
XT, it’s funny how the facts seem to indicate that this isn’t a totally static situation.
Very few people dispute that capitalism can do some good. What we’re complaining about is that at the moment it seems to be doing less and less good over time, and we question whether it is working to the benefit of society by funneling basically all of the gains in productivity into the hands of a small number of people.
The all part is what irks me. I understand that some people are worth a lot more than others. I understand that inventors and CEOs and neurosurgeons and pilots are worth more to society than hamburger flippers. Orders of magnitudes more.
But the current economic system seems to be funneling 100% of any productivity gains just to the CEOs and owners. Nobody else. It’s fine that some of us get a much bigger piece of the pie, but in the last 30 years, as the pie has grown because millions of us have worked their whole lives to improve technology and business methods, by a little or a lot, all of the pie growth is going to the 1%.
If this trend continues, automation is going to boost the size of the pie 10 times. Maybe 100 or 1000 times. But if all the gains just go to the 1%, see, we have a genuine crisis here.
Umm, I think we’ve had this argument, and instead of defending the basic facts, established by IRS data, I think you choose to just deny the wage : productivity gap? I mean if you believe that only capital owners and CEOS and a few lucky individuals should gain any benefit from increasing productivity, go ahead, defend that argument. But please don’t just deny facts, that’s no fun for anyone.
I know this is going to be a big shock to you, and I fully understand if you need a cite, but I’m going to make a bald assertion right here and I think the facts will back me up…here goes. Ready? The US isn’t actually the entire world. I know, I know…that’s hard to grasp. It really seems that the US is the entire world, and that, really, there aren’t any other countries. Just some other people who are from the US who sound funny. But it really is true.
Now, I can dig up a cite for that if you really want one. But in light of my bald assertion, go back and re-read what I said and see if it makes more sense to you. You don’t have to accept that there is more to the world than the US, but just try and see what I’m saying and then, if you really want a cite, I’ll see what I can do. Going to be tough, but I’m fairly sure I can find one that demonstrates that the US isn’t the world…
Ok, I accept that in other countries with socialism, they are doing great. Like most of Europe. And whatever system China has. You can’t really talk about “most of the world is doing amazing with capitalism” when most of the world is still either an impoverished third world country (just *less *poor now) or using socialism.
And free trade has done a lot for countries with extreme poverty, uplifting many of them.
But if we’re gonna say #LateStageCapitalism, we mean the United States only. So :
a. Do you deny the existence of the wage: productivity gap. That is, productivity has doubled since 1978 but wages have not gone up much at all.
b. Do you think that this is WorkingAsIntended or do maybe you think something different should be done to patch this bug in capitalism?
^ This. I have no issue with capitalism, but I do take offense with it being used as a means to siphon all of the wealth generated by the labor on the bottom directly to the top. Hence the flat wages for decades despite skyrocketing productivity. A disturbing number of people seem to be operating under the delusion that we live in a meritocracy; that hard work is always rewarded and you’re only poor because you aren’t working hard enough.
To that I have to ask, those 8 people who have more wealth than 3.7 billion people: did they each work 462.5 million times harder than anyone else? Of course not. People work 3 jobs just to keep their heads above water, trapped in endless cycles of generational poverty. And politicians look at that and call it “uniquely American” with beaming smiles that you’d just love to punch.
Even if you just isolate to the people who are worth something. Did Bill Gates create Windows and the Office suite through his own typing on the keyboard? No. He had tens of thousands of people pour everything they had, for years on end, to create the software Microsoft sells. They typically were paid low 6 figures for the service - which isn’t nothing - but every year Gates, when he was CEO, was being compensated many millions in stock options.
He obviously didn’t architect 100 times or whatever the pay ratio difference was (depends on the year) as much stuff as his subordinates.
Similarly, we now have robots and cell phones and jet planes and all these other wonderous things. Most of it came from the lifetime work of millions of people.
Or just think of the labor ratio when a titan of industry sits in their mansion. Just how many hours of labor from other people did it take to gather the resources, design the place, and build the mansion for a billionaire to use once a year? Much less all the hand built exotic cars in front.
Because, yeah, honestly the person who works 3 jobs in fast food probably doesn’t deserve much. But all the skilled architects and craftsmen and programmers and engineers and all the rest, why do the 1% make so many orders of magnitude more?
You don’t have to wait. There are open source machine learning tools that do exactly this. (One of my interns taught me about them.) But you still need enough data. And you can’t use data from the last chip or process. Each process generates defects in its own way.
You mean #TrueScotsmanCapitalism
“Third world” “Socialism” and “Late stage capitalism” don’t mean what you seem to think they do.
Umm. Ok, yeah, I agree. Technically what Norway has is not socialism, but we commonly refer to it as such. It’s much more heavily regulated capitalism with labor unions and socialized medicine? Do you agree with that?
And the LateStageCapitalism shills on reddit are communists, which I am not. I just think we should have a system more like Norway.
Instead of starting a meaningless argument over words, will you accept “Norway” as the answer?
I disagree. At the very least, he doesn’t deserve to have to work 3 fast food jobs in order to pay the rent.
There are plenty of people in fast food that could never aspire to more, whether because of lack of intellectual capacity or interest, but there are also many who are stuck there as they have not been able to find any opportunities to do something more fulfilling.
Well, and that is because they own the means of production, and so they get to say how much of the pie that they get, and how much is left for the rest of us to split.
And I will note that it is not really the 1%'rs that are the guilty party. A 1%'r is fairly wealthy compared to most of the rest of the 99, but skilled architects and craftsman et al can break into that percentage.
It is the .1% and the .01% that are really causing the problems.
Capitalism is great. We should defiantly acknowledge that. It is the best method for distributing limited resources to people with unlimited wants. It is great for exploiting resources and improving production. It is certainly responsible for nearly all the growth and increase in quality of life for billions around the globe.
OTOH, one thing it fails at is to ensure that resources are allocated to those who need them. Capitalism ensures that there will be loser in the competition for resources. There will be those who are unable to secure the resources that are needed to live with dignity, whether through ability, inclination, or just bad luck.
So, there is a need for socialism to ensure that those who do not compete are not left behind in squalor and misery. How generous that safety net should be is up to the community. This is something that we did not have the resources to do up until relatively recently. When the vast majority of people had to be involved just in the production of food, you had very little room to allow people to slack off and still use community resources. As we are now though, there are plenty of resources to ensure that no one has to go hungry or homeless, it is just an inefficiency in their allocation that is a problem.
As technology further leverages human labor and increases productivity further, there are more and more resources that are freed up to go to supporting an idle population. If you worked at a factor that produced 1000 widgets a day with 100 people, and now that factory produces 2000 widgets with 10 people, If those 90 displaced people continued to consume the way they did when they were employed, the economy would still have more production per person than before, and so there is no reason to think that these displaced people will now be a drain on society. Their displacement alone more than paid for their upkeep.
An idle population is not a bad thing. These people, just because they are not currently working in a job that creates profits for capitalism are free to do other things. They can learn. They can teach. They can write books or poems or plays and movies. They can post on message boards, which some of us have decided is a productive use of time. Or, they can just take a bit of a rest, all of us deserve that from time to time.
Of course not.
There were two problems with what you wrote. The first is the statement that “most of the world is still either an impoverished third world country (just less poor now) or using socialism.” is not remotely true (though “third world” is such an out of date term it can mean almost whatever you like. Singapore third world? Sure).
If we want to define “socialist” to just mean “has UHC” and “third world” to mean “poorer than the US” then sure the statement becomes almost true because most wealthy countries first make sure their citizens have access to healthcare. But that’s exactly a “true scotsman” argument; we’re arbitrarily defining terms to try to make our point.
The other thing is that it’s an attempted handwave of what XT said.
Living standards have improved a great deal worldwide. And it’s not true to just say “they’re a little less poor”.
If you look at a distribution of GDP around the world, where once there were two clear peaks of rich and poor, there’s now just a single peak at middle income and the whole graph has shifted to the right. So while it’s true some countries have merely become less poor, plenty have moved from poor to middle-income or middle-income to developed.
I agree with you though that the US should move somewhat in the direction of Norway in terms of healthcare, taxation and regulation.
Leaving aside the fact that your definition of what socialism is seems to be based on what right wingers in the US think, you are still using strawmen and still missing the point. I never said ‘most of the world is doing amazing with capitalism’…you seem to be talking to an alternative universe XT, just as you have in the past, using strawmen arguments to shift the goalposts about and not actually address what I’m saying.
Let’s take it back a step. Here is what I said…“And yet, we are in a time where, world wide, less people live in absolute poverty than at any time in our species history. It’s funny how your sentiment has transcended time…we have been hearing this same line for well over 200 years now, yet year after year things actually get better for more people across the globe.”. The eagle eyed out there will note it doesn’t say anything about the US (which was your first response to strawman), nor about how great capitalism is (which seems to be your second).
The majority of the progress in moving people from abject poverty into poverty less abject has happened in non-European (or non-US for that matter…or even non-1st world nations) such as China and India, as well as in many parts of Africa. I’m sorry that you don’t seem to get this or are hung up on whatever it is you are hung up on wrt socialism verse capitalism or whatever it is you think you are talking about. You completely missed the point of what you quoted in the context of THIS discussion and the OP.
As for the last part, well, yeah…I CAN talk about it since it’s reality. It’s not just in Europe where poverty has been lessened it’s been worldwide, and mainly the major progress in recent years hasn’t been in Europe (or the US). Certainly a lot of people are still impoverished, but the key point you seem to be missing (well, there are a lot of them I guess that you are missing, since you are responding to a lot of things I am not saying and almost nothing to what I am) is that the trend for years now is that it’s going down. To YOU it might not seem that great to go from being in extreme poverty to being simply poor but with some additional security, to be at around $2 a day might not seem that much better to you, but to someone who maybe was at $2 a week (or nothing) it would look like an improvement…and in the last 5-10 years close to a billion people moved from less than $2 a day to over $2 a day. And that trend continues upward.
None of this addresses anything I said in this thread, nor does it have anything to do with the topic at hand. I’m unsure why you bothered quoting me to start some anti-capitalist rant about the US or whatever it is you are doing (in a thread talking about robotics and automation), but next time just do your rant screed without quoting me as it’s just annoying.
I think human psychology makes this a very complex question.
Gene Roddenberry, who I always considered a visionary, believed that humanity could never really flourish as long as the large majority of people were basically enslaved to the process of surviving economically for a lifetime. He believed that people had to be relieved of this huge burden in order to truly realize their dreams and maximize their talents. That’s why, in his Star Trek world, there was no longer any money or economic system as we know it.
On the other hand, people seem to need “work” because it gives them “purpose”. It has been shown that chronic unemployment has a deleterious effect on people emotionally as well as economically even if they are receiving financial aid and getting by economically. It tends to lower self-esteem, and increase domestic violence. Instead of “realizing their dreams and maximizing their talents”, many people pretty much sit around and feel useless.
Ok, first of all, I was mistaking you for Shodan, who is just an ignorant idiot. Sorry for straw manning your point.
I accept that capitalism - and free trade - has done more for the poor than anything else.
As for an anti-capitalist rant…umm…did the rest of what I was talking about just whoosh over your head? Not sure how this massive crisis that affects everyone in America but the 0.01% (that is, we have found ways to produce more for a lot less through automation but instead our society is squeezing everyone but a few for all they have) is something you can call a “rant”?
And umm, not sure how suggesting “Norway” makes me anti-capitalist. Unions, socialized healthcare and a strong safety net don’t make a society not capitalist.
This is a warning for personal insults. I’m aware that Shodan hasn’t posted in this thread, but he is a poster on the boards and the rules against insults applies to him even if he is not a participant in the thread. If you feel you must, the BBQ Pit is right around the corner.
[/moderating]
My apologies. I meant to simply say that Shodan is a right wing poster who does not seem to process any cites or posts or facts when you make them, he just continues to parrot conservative news positions. Which translated in my mind to the insult I used. Sorry, I’ll keep such statements to his pit thread.
Because it had zero to do with anything I said in this thread and zero to do with the discussion happening. It was basically a rant that used my post as a springboard, even though it wasn’t related to anything I said.
Norway is as much a socialist country as, well, the US is (i.e. both are capitalist countries with some socialist programs to soften that capitalism…they just do it to different degrees and in different directions). What I was saying is that your definition of what is or isn’t socialist seems to be more based on what right winger types in the US THINK it is, which is ironic since you obviously aren’t one of those. Yet you still seem to be thinking in those terms.
At any rate, this has zero to do with the OP and nothing to do with anything I posted. I didn’t see any posts from Shodan, but it’s a long thread so if you are mistaking me for him (we do have similar names) then that’s fine. In future, just address what I’m saying and I’ll be less annoyed, and you won’t have to be annoyed at me being annoyed at you and we can live together in peace and harmony.
Ok. So right now, present state, we live in a society where we have managed to double productivity and funnel 100% of the gains to just our owner class, nobody else.
That’s what the numbers say. You can’t dispute them unless you can show the IRS is a fraudulent organization and is lying.
So the topic of this thread is that we can develop robots that can probably increase productivity 10 times above what it is now. That is, if machine learning robotics can take over every last boring task, so that we can put our valuable human workers on tasks humans are best at, that will be an immense amount of new wealth.
Yet if the same pattern holds, all this will do is create a small number of trillionaires and a massive number of unemployed. Our society has no real safety net, so those unemployed will ironically be homeless, starving, and without medical care in a future world where all those things will probably be obtainable with less human labor than ever. (we can almost certainly build intelligent systems, using already demonstrated methods, that construct housing, gather and prepare food, and produce pharmceuticals and medical diagnoses and even do most of the grunt work of medical research with minimal human effort)
This is a massive looming crisis and is directly relevant to the thread. Basically the only poster saying it isn’t is you.