Shamar @Shamar@qoto.org

@grainloom

This one? www.cs.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/divergefs/

I can't find the sources... where did you get it?

@grainloom

Actually I didn't know about divergefs... did you write it yourself?

@grainloom

Uhm... maybe I'm missing the overall vision.

Which Nix are you referring to?
This one? http://www.quanstro.net/plan9/nixterm/term.pdf
Or maybe this one? https://nixos.org/

Also, why you say that `bind` is not enough?

@freemo

Interesting: given this addendum to such definition, I cannot think of any Nation implementing Capitalism.

It's an interesting argument, though.

It means that Capitalism is something that some animal do, but humans do not. 😉

@design_RG

@freemo

If you can only have one possible state, you can't call it as "default".

By that definition, everything is capitalism because everything continuously exchanges resources.

@design_RG

@freemo

By that definition, even atoms are capitalist! 😉

@design_RG

@freemo

If Capitalism was the default, you'd find it among apes. Instead Capitalism is a recent invention and it's always evolving towards stronger concentration of wealth.

But let's recap.

By now we know that wealth generation (by technology) doesn't prevent its concentration during distribution and how such concentration subtracts such wealth from being distributed (by definition).

Just like a dam at the river head, people concentrating wealth subtract to those who would get down the flow (think of Bezos and #Amazon employees).

Furthermore you accept that people are not rational agent: they are continuously manipulated through their biases (the "behavioral futures" that #Surveillance capitalist trade) to buy products they don't need (thus NOT generating wealth, but giving away their own wealth).

Also (as far as I can see in this thread) you don't contest the fact that corporation aren't rational either as they optimize one single scalar dimension, profit: the net wealth built by corporation that maximize profits is negative as soon as you take the externalities into account.

Now the point of a #UMW (Universal Maximum Wealth) is not to punish anyone for harming anyone else. And it's not even a way to turn irrational people into rational one! (for that we need education, with a strong focus on #History and #Informatics, see http://www.tesio.it/2019/06/03/what-is-informatics.html)

UMW is just a way to build a simple and effective incentive system designed balance #collaboration and #competition.

One the drive to accumulate more wealth is balanced by the need to increase the wealth of everybody else, corporations will have fewer and fewer reasons to fool people through #marketing.

So while people will stay as irrational as they already are, there will be no advantage to exploit their bias.

In that context, #AdamSmith's #trust would be possible again, raising the probability of actual wealth creation by rational trades.

Basically, in such framework Capitalism could probably work.

Now, you see all this is flawed, but you didn't explain (or I didn't understood) how.

@design_RG

@freemo

Where did I talk about regulation?

Actually, I think Capitalism could work reasonably if we had a simple regulation world wide: an Universal Maximum Wealth defined within a finite ratio of the minimum actual wealth that the poorest person in the planet hold.

A 3x or 5x should do.

I mean: as greed as #Bezos can be, with such regultation, the only way to raise his own wealth would be to raise the poorest person wealth too.

Sure, #education is important.
Fundamental!

But I don't think we should just educate people to resist to external systematic pressure: we should educate them to design and build system that remove such pressure at all. 😉

@design_RG

@freemo

Good points on healthcare.

As for

> people have the freedom to act responsibly or irresponsibly

that's plain wrong.

Not just because of context and cultural pressure: people always lack informations to do rational choices.

What you call "responsibility" is plain impossible, so much that, actually, my professor of Economics at the University explained us the concept of "Information Asymmetry" as a fundamental marketing tool: as long as you maximize the difference between what people know about a product and what vendors know about that same people, you can more easily rise the price (everything else unchanged) without reducing sells.

Indeed, now that I think about this, I recall that another way to state the fundamental assumptions of Capitalism is that information spread instantly.

Without perfect and symmetric information, you need to redefine "rational decision" to include (and factor out) growing amount of irrationality.

@design_RG

@freemo

Probably I've not been clear enough: I argued that people _are_ "in charge", but "mad" (irrational) in their choice.

And while Capitalism assume a #FreeMarket where #rational people trading to pursue their own interests, #advertising assumes people behaviour can be programmed through their irrational bias (and trade such #BehaviouralFutures, as Shoshana Zuboff call them).

Since the two model of the same people are in direct logical contradiction, they cannot be both correct.

Pick one:
- people are rational
- people are irrational

The first is a prerequisite of Capitalism model, it's the only way it could work to describe and predict its evolution, but it means that advertising does NOT work.

The second is a prerequisite for Advertising to work, but it means that Capitalism cannot work (at least as usually described by capitalists).

Now, afaik Advertising works so much that the most powerful multinational corporations in the world bid in behavioural futures.

Thus, Capitalism can NOT work as one of its main pre-requisite are not met in real world.

Having said that, I'm surprised to see that you have no objections about the irrational behaviour of corporations due to the maximization of a single scalar value (profit).

@design_RG

@freakazoid

> AIUI 9p has no concept similar to CGI.

It has `cpu` that let you execute a remote program on the server.

@grainloom

@freemo

<WARNING>
I'm enjoining this conversation as I see we look at these things from very different perspectives. I hope it's the same for you. I'm sorry if I misunderstood your statements, so if I go back to them it's not (always) to confute them, but to clarify them better.
</WARNING>

The term "irresponsible" is, by itself, quite blaming.

It means they cannot explain ("responsibility" is from Latin "responsum abilem" that means "able to answer" to any question about an act).

Let's put aside the fact that, infact, Capitalism avoid to clearly define such "responsibility" because it would mean to choose someone who has the authority to ask and clearly defined rules to judge the answers as appropriate or not. To most champions of Capitalism, even the State should avoid to design rules that restrict free market, and you can easily see how its ideology is often very well expressed by people who actually workaround (if not break) the #Law (see Holmes' #Theranos for an example).

People can be irresponsible because they are not in charge, because they are "mad" (unable to intend and will) or because they are evil.

The ideology of #Capitalism assumes rational agents that can freely act in the market for their own interest: so they are in charge of the use they do of their own resources.

So, according to such model, if their behaviour is irresponsible it can only be because they are "mad" (irrational) or evil.

In fact, most of consumers are #irrational: otherwise advertising would just describe the experimentally verified qualities of a product.
Please, tell me any verifiable property of the product advertised here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwzzvEcYA6k

On the production/competition side, instead, Capitalism push for an extreme rationality but optimize a single dimension: #profit. So it inherently favour #greed and corruption.

Yeah, greed and corruption exist in all economical systems, but afaik #Capitalism is the only one that looks designed (or "evolved", if you prefer) to favour and _maximize_ them.

@design_RG

@freemo

> irresponsible buyer who
> buys things they dont need

This is victim blaming. 😉

In the age of #SurveillanceCapitalism, arguing that #Ads exist to merely inform people about products they might ignore sounds very naive.

As for the rest, there are tons of model that justify pretty much anything. All wrong.

Adam Smith's model of liberal market become one of fundamental building blocks of #Capitalism as an ideology (but not the only one, as #Webber shown).

Sure, we have plenty of options if we want a model to justify the growing inequality or blame the victims for it.

But still these models do not account for obvious "externalities" (as economist dismiss them) that basically throw costs and risks out of the balance sheets.

#Inequality IS one of this overlooked externalities. #Pollution is another.

Still such externalities are not the point of my argument. It's not because of the damage they do to most of people that I cannot accept the models that link Wealth to Capitalism.

It's just that such models do not explain so many observations (those externalities, ads, addictions, workers' exploitations, political lobbying...) that they are easy to dismiss to anybody that is open to their discussion.

A more interesting issue is: what are the alternatives?

Here's one: https://www.nomadelfia.it

@design_RG

@freemo

Unfortunately it's not that "obvious". Nor actually true.

For example, if you define wealth generation that way, you should ban marketing and ads, since they nudge people to buy things they don't really need.

The model of #Capitalism of #AdamSmith (that you are mis-quoting) has been designed in an economy of small villages and had a prerequisite that is _always_ overlooked: #trust due to very short #feedback loops and near perfect #information.

If I remember correctly (it has been a while from my studies) Smith gave an example: your #brewer won't put too much water in your beer, because otherwise you would make your own beer instead of buying his own. He needs your trust, that's why you can trust him despite both of you pursue your self-interest in each trade.

Now, replace "beer" with "smartphone": can you build your own smartphone if you don't trust any vendor?

"By now" the #Smith idea that trading generates wealth is widespread, but it's actually totally misunderstood.

The invisible hand is possible in a very small, mostly autonomous, rural village where everybody knows everything about everybody else.

____

As for technology being "literally everything", it's not what I mean.

Technology is NOT everything.

Technology is what humans build: http://www.tesio.it/2018/10/11/math-science-and-technology.html

However, in this economical context, beyond technology (human artefacts) there are earth's raw resources, that are finite. That's why, ultimately, beyond technology advancement, economy is just a way to distribute such resources.

@design_RG

@freemo

Actually animal husbandry is (one of) the #technology that enabled the #Neolithic #Revolution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neolithic_Revolution

@design_RG

@freemo

Sure, the y-axis is the class wealth. That's why I said that, to be fair, one should also consider the cardinality of the underling sets.

As for the "failing in my logic": sure #wealth can be generated, but only through technological progress. There is no problem with this and it's a good thing that we can improve human quality of life through #technology.

But then, wealth is distributed.

Wealth distribution is where the inequality issues arise.

The rich class hooks the wealth distribution process to concentrate it in its own hand.
This happens for new wealth AND for existing one.

But even if we don't consider how the rich class drain resources from the poor (think of #Bezos and his employees, for an obvious example), and only focus on the flow of newly created wealth, hooking its distribution so that it can be concentrated by few people IS literally draining wealth from others.

Is like building a dam at the river head: you can argue that you are not going to each of the people down the river to take their water (and in fact, some would argue that it's not their water, after all) but you are taking the water they would have received if you had not built the dyke.

@design_RG