Formerly u/CanadaPlus101 on Reddit.

  • 13 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Modern industrial economies are really complicated. I like trains. To make trains, you need parts, labour, equipment and power. They themselves need to be made, which uses parts, labour, equipment and power, and meanwhile you have competing uses of all those things for making, I dunno, printing presses, or for completely different things like farming or art curating. If you drew it all out as a diagram it would get super interconnected super fast.

    Meanwhile, even a simple binary choice like which of two lots a rehab center should go on can be very politically complicated. Anarchists like to handwave it away with “we’ll figure it out together”, and I really don’t find that convincing.

    Markets offer a system that’s proven to work insofar as if you need to buy a train or a hair clip or lunch someone’s always selling it. How do you guarantee that, or something similar?










  • No, vapourware. If their thing worked but also had remote prisons this would be a totally different (and ethically abstract) conversation, so that’s not the important detail.

    In practice, their thing didn’t work, and still ran on market-style money transactions, albeit with multiple currencies and a lot of random red tape. And then a huge unofficial market cropped up as well to close the gaps from it not working.


  • A bigger market share (or just market size if it’s something new-fangled) at the expense of current profit, because that can turn into future profits. See most modern tech companies, which make a loss but still have value. For example, Uber just made a profit for the first time, and since they’re everywhere that’s a great position for a shareholder. People bought in in the past in hopes that this would eventually happen.

    OP is a little off, BTW. US law - and it’s probably the same elsewhere - says that the C-suite has to work in the interests of shareholders, who they represent as fiduciaries. It’s just that there’s only a few things a million APPL shareholders have in common, so in practice that interest is value and dividends. In a privately-owned company other things might factor in, for better or for worse.

    IANAL






  • “Humanity” feels like a grand term for a concept a couple decades old or so, but I guess it’s right, and it’s the same thing that happened with railways way back in the day.

    Legislation would be amazing, and it even seems plausible that the EU might adopt something like that eventually. Even without, though, we have the advantage that monopolies have a way of collapsing themselves in the long run, whether by dynastic succession (the Medici bank IIRC), complacency (Xerox) or anti-trust issues (Standard Oil), while the fediverse can’t really die that way.