This is what the original article and most comments are missing here in my opinion. Theories of value matter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_(economics)#Theories . To some degree I might agree with subjective value theory, so in essence everyone values things differently.

However as a framework it describes outcomes without being able to critique them, so whatever happens in a market gets called efficient by definition, including monopoly rents, regulatory capture and the steady drift of returns from labor to capital.

In my opinion labor theory of value describes the underlying relation correctly. The fundamental relation is between employer and employee and the structural goal of that relation becomes extraction of surplus. Customers and product quality enter only as the means through which surplus gets realized.

Once you see it this way, the just-say-no engineer situation makes sense without bringing ZIRP into it. They were doing customer-facing work, defending product quality, inside a structure that doesn't actually want it. They were tolerated, not central. When tolerance shrank, so did they. Good products are incidental to extraction, sometimes useful for it, sometimes in the way.

There's no money for public investments, but there is always money for wars. There's no money for raises and bonuses for workers, until workers show there's no company without them.

So, if there's no money for public investments, it's time to show there's no public for their wars and exploitation.

These finance jobs are low paid because they're not that skilled and many people can do them. Same basic reason as why fast food temp worker is low paid.

On one side they tell you "You'll get Weekends off! You'll get more money! You'll work fewer hours!" and other side says "You can't talk directly to your boss! Corruption could happen in your union if you do nothing to stop it! Lazy people might keep their job unless HR documents the problems!" and somehow people are like "Man, I'd much rather spend less time on my family and hobbies than not be able to go directly to my boss!"

Same with regulations. One side says "Have clean air and water! Don't get screwed over by companies who poison you!" and the other side says "Billion dollar companies would have to pay more to not poison you! Look at all these terrible regulations we already bribed lawmakers into passing! Regulations BAD!" and people just eat it up.

It makes me wonder how much more extreme they could take things before people stopped falling for it.

No billionaire is forced to break up a public company to pay taxes, the same as no average Joe is forced to sell his clothes to pay taxes. The idea in common is that if one knows that one must have cash at the end of the fiscal year, then one sets aside the money and simply avoids buying clothes or investing in assets.

Even if a rich person reinvests everything, the control over large amount of money is what makes it problematic.

Also the idea that welfare doesn't go to investments is wrong. When you buy groceries (or anything really), there is a decision made by the management of the company you buy these things from to reinvest part of it to maintain or build productive capacity.

There is no need for a "capitalist" (owner of the enterprise) to insert themself into the process, they are useless middlemen who get a cut, essentially. (They are not so useless when they do actual managerial work, but then they can be just an employee like everyone else.)

Believe it or not co-ops exist just fine and some do very well. It sounds like what you would like is a co-op and I will be quite happy for you if you start one.

What about the control that out-of-touch politicians and bureaucrats have over large amounts of taxpayers' money? Shouldn't we find that far more problematic overall?

> There is no need for a "capitalist" (owner of the enterprise) to insert themself into the process, they are useless middlemen who get a cut, essentially.

Then why do newly created enterprises almost universally seek outside capital investment? Sounds like there is a need after all, otherwise you could just have a partnership structure and take no outside money whatsoever.

These things are connected and both are problematic. See e.g. Citizens United vs FEC.

> Then why do newly created enterprises almost universally seek outside capital investment?

I agree there is a need to raise capital, because any large scale economic activity is a collective enterprise. Whether this collective enterprise should be owned by a single person, or small subgroup, or by all participants, is an orthogonal question.

This is where startup seed funding comes from, capitalists like YC who are good at it rather than some incompetent. It's why bad companies eventually lose the ability to raise, freeing up societal resources.

What appears to be implicit in your comment ("There is no need for a capitalist") is an advocacy for central planning for capital. Although you also say "they can pay taxes" so maybe that's not what you're advocating for.

If you want to know what I think is best, it's possibly a wealth tax applied on global wealth, along with stronger regulations around media concentration, political spending, and a few other things. But to eliminate capital markets and push it all into a central planner is bad.

No, it isn't. You can have democratic control over capital, respecting subsidiarity principle. It's no more centralized or decentralized than under capitalism.

> But to eliminate capital markets and push it all into a central planner is bad.

If you have a high concentration of wealth you have the same centralized control, regardless whether the mechanism is capital markets or gosplan.

That's certainly an opinion that some people have, but as the parent comment stated, companies don't run without employees, so the idea that the value created is solely attributed to the founders or other executives is not an empircal fact like you're claiming it is. There's no scientific formula for "how much of this result of a bunch of actions that multiple people took over the course of a few years is attributed to each of the people"; the only way to have any sort of objective delineation of that like you're describing is if you already bake in assumptions of how valuable each piece is before you've started, which just moves the opinions one later deeper.

I can't prove you wrong any more than you can prove the parent commenter wrong, because what you've said is based on so many premises that I fundamentally agree with that seem like universal laws to you.

I can think of a few. You've got things like Shapley values. But it's not a "neutral" way to attribute outcomes to actors.

It's funny actually, I read about Shapley scores ages ago, and then the go-to example was basically political corruption: assume a bunch of political parties with varying vote weight but no principles whatsoever, aiming to secure a majority to split a "prize" among themselves. But looking at Wikipedia now, it's practically presented as a method to guarantee fairness.

Either way, there's no neutral measure of value (or for that matter, effort) either. What a dollar gets you depends 100% on who else has dollars and how much, so productivity or efficiency can never be separated from distributional concerns.

That's why the owners get to keep what is left AFTER paying employees. It's called profit.

One way to become a billionaire is when you offer that stream of future profits securitized as "stock" to other people who buy those future profits from you and collectively value those securitizations at over a billion dollars.

The owner takes the risk that there is no (or negative) money left over after paying employees and all other costs. As a result, if there is money left over, they get to keep it. I suppose I should remind you that the vast majority of businesses fail. The entire dataset visible to you is imbued with survivorship bias.

Welcome to money 101. This is how all business works everywhere. Nobody thinks that value is created "solely" by the owners. That's a fake strawman.

This is not true, and somewhat confusing, because "takes the risk" means two distinct things - making decisions and living with the consequences of them. Economic production is a collective effort. The management of the company is who usually makes the decisions; these might coincide with owner (especially in small business) but often they're just another employee.

On the other hand, bad decisions made by management affect everyone in the company, not just the owner. The rich enough owner rarely lose their livelihood (we have limited liabilities btw), but the employees might lose the only source of income.

And the system where you have only one person (owner as main manager) making decisions ("take risks") that can negatively impact many people (his employees, customers and what not) is structurally risky, it actually increases the risk of something going wrong (aside from it being a moral hazard). (POTUS is an extreme example of this.) The risk is shared (collectively owned, if you will) and so should be the decision-making.

Is this a possible failure mode of the system?

What sort of symptoms might one look for in a society if we believed this might be happening?

Or do we simply dismiss that this has been proven impossible (as per the theory of Money 101) and move on?

Right, and CEOs famously are the first ones laid off when the company is flailing and losing money, because after all, they're the ones at the helm of the ship! And of course when a CEO does leave, they never get a golden parachute.

> Welcome to money 101. This is how all business works everywhere. Nobody thinks that value is created "solely" by the owners. That's a fake strawman.

Sure, but plenty of people think that the way value is distributed today is completely out of proportion to their contributions, and you're presenting it like the current way is the only possible rational way rather than an emergent property of the entirety of human history being an uneven playing field.

Without billionaires, money stays in the community where it circulates (workers and small business owners make money and they spend it). With billionaires it is extracted from the communities and hoarded in investment accounts a thousand miles away.

There's also all the various shenanigans they employ to avoid paying a fair share of tax, so they're mainly "stealing from society".

The level of wealth hoarding by certain people would be classed as a serious mental illness if they were hoarding something else, but it's actually far more damaging to the rest of the world that they hoard wealth.

Since 2/3rds of American billionaires are from industry, if it is true that their parents were multi-millionaires, that is wonderful. The fact that children here can take the platforms their parents build them and turn that into great value for the American people is a good thing and one of the reasons I am drawn to this country.

Brings to mind a certain creature that thrives in festering wounds.. It's in the tip of my...

You're ascribing a level of agreement with your opinions about who deserves what level of credit people deserve for results that are far beyond the scope of a single person to vast swaths of people who have no power to contest the system that has existed for so long that no one alive created. The reason I "pay my dues" to the grandchildren of random rich people from 100 years ago is not because I owe them but because there's literally nothing I can do to avoid it regardless of how plausible I find the extreme opinion you're confidently asserting is some sort of self-evident fact.

Also, it's not sharing with society that makes people billionaires, it's taking from society. Had all that profit gone to society, they wouldn't be billionaires. Now often (not always) they provide some value to society but that generates that profit, but quite often even that was based on taking from society. They take natural resources to exploit, monopolise a market, exploit workers, etc.

Take another example, someone who won a lottery vs someone who hasn't, but otherwise lived the same life, in your world view one deserves it and the other doesn't. And their their offspring forever on as well? If you accept this now your list of exceptions is using force, connections and also luck. But we can keep adding examples and exceptions to the rule until at some point you need to admit that way of looking at the world is too flawed, no? BTW this luck aspect is the same as the "Texan got a knock on the door offering them millions forever because they have oil under their house" so I guess I did end up re-arguing that.

I appreciate that this is a flippant remark, but there are crypto billionaires proving that there are exceptions to this assertion.

I guess one important nuace is that it's not all billionaires for whom this is the case. You have lots of Carlos Slim style 'get a government monopoly and collect the rents'. So it's a bit messy.

I truly cannot believe that anyone with an ounce of empathy or integrity could possibly believe a statement as absurd as this.

She gets more utility than she pays for (that's the one trick of capitalism).

Is that trickle down?

Maybe look for a better word that encompasses other political systems too - power?

There are many examples of surveillance states (and the best known examples were not labeled capitalist).

The surveillance you blame on Musk is the same from other ISPs - therefore your analysis is simply incorrect. She needs a VPN to avoid ISP snooping on the metadata (IP addresses used, DNS, etc).

And the US is a bigger snoop (Echelon, 5 eyes, Room 641A).

Our individual choices are limited in New Zealand (written on an iPhone - far more snoopy than my ISP).

I don't have any problem with people getting insanely rich from stock price increases, but the argument that it's society sharing the value they created ignores the fact that they were only responsible for the initial foundations of that value, and not all the work that continues later.

And re the impact of the founders/early investors, I agree that they didn't contribute 1000s of times more. But like, if I bet a million dollars on a sports games and I get bet right and make 5 million would you say I ought to pay the players who really did the work? It's not about "adding value" its about property rights. The the second tier of engineers isn't happy they can (and sometimes do) found a competitor.

That's a meaningful tradeoff of risk vs. return. If you choose to be an early hire rather than founding your own risky venture, that ultimately means you value the security of "only" getting millions over a lottery ticket that might or might not be worth billions.

Like, there is this computer game, authors used some models or something like that, generated by AI, but it was only used during prototyping and later it was replaced by proper models. No one would know about that, if authors would not tell about it. So, if someone writes in their own words what AI generated for him, is it still argument made by human or by AI? What if someone uses AI only as placeholder and replaces all that content, so you never actually see actual AI usage, but it was used in the process?

For me, premise that using AI in any form invalidates your work, starts with logical fallacy, so such arguments against using AI are weak. It's like saying that your work is wrong, because you used calculator, so your calculations can't be right, if done by machine, because it had to make mistake or that's wrong for ethical reasons or whatever.

Work generated by AI can be easily poor, because these models make mistakes and like to repeat in certain ways, but is it wrong that I'm writing comment with keyboard, instead of writing letters with pen? Is it wrong, when I use IDE or some CLI to write code with AI, instead of using vim and typing everything on my own? Is it wrong that someone uses spell-checking?

In the end it doesn't matter who seems smarter, when you're expected to use AI at work. Reality shows you actual expectations.

Anyway, my university did not ban AI, and now most students have degraded to proxies between teaching assistants and ChatGPT.

At certain point it's no longer about AI specifically, but about power and showing who makes decisions.

I agree that there might be some threshold for obvious spam, but if you're making argument in good faith and you don't claim to have authority on some matter, there will be always people that think differently or disagree with you, because they have different interpretation or they need better sources, more evidence. It's actually typical, because different people use different perspectives, different assumptions, different tools. I don't believe that rules should be used to silence people that have different opinions and that's the biggest risk I see, because penalty for not following such rules, which are hard to measure correctly, creates power imbalance.

At some points it becomes dogma, not fair debate and not everyone likes to stick to dogma and it's hard to do creative or innovative work, if your work has to meet strict, but subjective, possibly incomplete criteria, to be considered valid work at all.

For me it sounds just as yet another form of gatekeeping, so either you sound human or you're not good enough to post/comment. Like, really? How isn't that genetic fallacy? It doesn't matter what someone thinks, because someone used AI to make their thought clearer, so their whole argument is trash? Like it has to hurt to read and write, if you're not using English perfectly and your work is seen as inferior based on superficial factors like proper grammar and style?

It's dumb crusade, I did not use AI to write this comment, but I hate when people try to monopolize the truth and tell who is "better, smarter" based on irrelevant facts. Not using AI doesn't make anyone superior. Using AI also doesn't make you superior. Focus on what you mean, because that's what matters.

There are hidden reasons behind centralized solutions, that make decentralized solutions unpopular. If anyone suggests "just go out and make it better", it's missing the point. That's like saying: "don't participate in society, just start your own". In theory it makes sense, in practice it's just ignorance and lack of awareness on how difficult and complex task it is.

Centralized solutions are often just a business, they're not transparent, they're not cooperative, they're not ethical, they're there to conquer market and there's big money behind them, they're part of surveillance capitalism.

These are just examples, but there's lot more, so in context of social media, it's intertwined with the rest of simulation called "real world", so almost no one is going to know what you're talking about, when mention Loops/Mastodon/Bluesky, people know dominant platforms and stick to them and they may do so as part of social pressure and because they compete for status. In this society, you won't gain status by using Loops. People are buying iPhone for status, even though something like Samsung or Fairphone would be good as well. People are buying luxury frames for glasses, because they want to show brand, they don't care that it's more expensive and quality is basically they same.

I often talk to people about Signal irl, most download the app but some folks do. Some people actually want a For You feed and will bounce off Loops, Mastodon, or whatever. That's all fine. These spaces can have content about cars or guns or whatever else without eating the entire world.

You said:

> I want loops/mastodon to be a diverse place that has content from all over the internet.

Again, I think lots of people who are already in the Fediverse want that. But, if everybody who likes cars decides they won't join in until somebody who shares content about cars does, that car community may never show up.

You seem to have interests that you feel are undeserved. Just... regularly share things about what you think is cool. Just do it for funsies.

If you really feel strongly about wanting to make a diverse space, cross promote your stuff in spaces with other people who have the same interests. Share a post, share a video, ask them to follow you. Maybe even start an instance dedicated to the topic if that's your vision.

One approach is based on science, other bases on unfounded feelings. Some people will use these decentralized platforms, but that's not the point. My point is that it's not as simple as just telling people around you "just use this". There are systemic reasons why most people don't use them and serious analysis starts once you get it. Without that it's just wishful thinking, so sure, you will get something on these platforms, but it's like one commenter here mentioned, he tried Loops, used it for a while and it's mostly trash for him, while better community will never appear there.

To get real traction and user base on such decentralized platforms, we would need to change the way society functions first. That's why it's impossibly hard challenge. Without foundations, such projects are doomed to fail, they just can't compete with mainstream, centralized platforms.

> the people on it are just so far away from what me (and men my age) deem interesting and seem to be hostile to anything that doesnt fit their very restrictive ideals.

Okay. If you don't want to participate, don't. But, if your other comment about wanting to see a more diverse audience join was honest, then do. Either way.

There's traction. There's a user base. There are people enjoying and getting use out of it. There's plenty of communities and relationships that will go on just fine regardless of what you decide.

You seem to be frustrated about something, maybe that the fediverse isn't matching Facebook in size? It won't. It probably can't, since the commercial incentives aren't there. But, at no point does that invalidate what exists.

That's all I'm going to say about it.

But we don't live in an evidence-based world, we live in one shaped by power dynamics. We have the blueprint for collective prosperity, but we choose extraction. In the US, this has gone so far that Christianity has been twisted into a prosperity gospel, a heresy that serves as a moral shield for raw capitalism. It allows the system to pretend that business interests are actually virtues.

The world is in a mess because we ignore the mechanics of the systems we build. Be it capitalism, feudalism, or authoritarian communism, they all fail the same way, they lead to elite overproduction (Turchin).

When you funnel all resources to the very top, you create too many aspiring elites with no productive role to play. They inevitably turn on the system and each other. These systems are mathematically destined to collapse. Ostrom polycentric governance is one of the few ways out.

One reason is that it's cheaper to use AI, even if the result is poor. It doesn't have to be high quality, because most of the time we don't care about quality, unless something interests us. I wonder what kind of shift in power dynamics will occur, but so far it looks just like many of us will just lose a job. There's no UBI (or social credit proposed by Douglas), salaries are low and not everyone lives in good location, but corporations try to enforce RTO. Some will simply get fired and won't be able to find a new job (that won't be sustainable for personal budget, unless someone already has low costs of living and is debt-free or has somewhat wealthy family that will cover for you).

Well, maybe at least government will protect us? Low chance, world is shifting right and it will get worse, once we start to experience more and more results of global warming. I don't see scenario, where world is becoming better place in foreseeable future. We're trapped in society of achievement, but soon we may be not able to deliver achievements, because if business can get similar results for fraction of the price (that is needed to hire human workers), then guess what will happen?

These are sad times, full of depression and suffering. I hope that some huge transformation in societies will happen soon or that AI development slows down, so that some future generation will have to deal with consequences (people will prioritize saving their own and it won't be pretty, so it's better to just pass it down like debt).