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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • Huge companies used to make a lot of stuff back in the golden age of capitalism. General electric was a big chemicals and plastics company for instance. It was just normal.

    Nowadays, those mega-corporations make more money acting as a bank than they do selling stuff. They’ve just kept some product lines rolling because they’re profitable and safe.

    You couldn’t just start a motorcycle company and be competitive against Yamaha. The specific expertise they have took decades to build, so why waste it by closing down those weird branches when they’re still making money.




  • It sounds absolutely great in theory, but in practice it could never work.

    Say I want to build a house: As a society, we’ve come up with mandatory building codes that tell me how to build a house that’s going to be safe for everyone.

    Suppose we got rid of this regulation for libertarianism’s sake.

    Most people would still build to code because that’s just the smart thing to do but a small proportion of people would build it the cheapest way possible because it is now their god-given right to do so.

    When that house inevitably fails at the worst possible time, I don’t care too much about what happens to the guy himself. He understood the risk and did it anyways. But in a worst case scenario, he could’ve been hosting a kids party that day or something.

    Now apply this analogy to… Basically any regulation you’d want to get rid of.

    It’s kind of always a balancing act between stopping people from killing each other from sheer stupidity, and letting them do and say whatever the fuck they want when they’re between their own four walls, and pure libertarianism doesn’t allow for that.









  • It gives an air of legitimacy to those thoughts.

    Those people are LOUD but they aren’t nearly as numerous as we, or they, think.

    Most people, by and large, just want to do their little thing and want to be nice to others, and want others to be nice to them. Most people don’t care that their neighbors are a black gay couple, as long as they’re nice.

    When we let 10 people who post a 100 racist memes a day drown out the 100 regular people who post 10 times a day gives everyone the impression there is more racism than there really is, which breeds more racism, and drives out regular people who don’t want to be on a racist platform.

    (Using racism here as a stand-in for whatever form of bigotry you feel passionate about)



  • Depends on how you define deliberate. The wealth gap between the super rich and the rest of us is getting bigger and bigger, and a lot of those issues seem related to that.

    “Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced [robots] wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.” -Stephen Hawking