In the first place, looking at wealth is pointless. I could make a thousand dollars a day and as long as I spend them immediately on services, (e.g. permanently living in an expensive hotel, renting a supercar) I could have net worth of $0 while living like a king. On the other hand, a struggling business owner may have millions in equipment and still have trouble putting food on the table. “Wealth” is not a good indicator of anything.

Hmm, that is actually an interesting point. If it is negative, does it bring down the sum in this? If so, how much of the world is my net worth greater than? A billion? Two?

Yes, that is a much better way to make the same point :)

Not lives on, but net worth (total wealth).

The 8 richest people in the world according to investopedia have a combined net worth of about $1,369 billion. Divide that by 3.6 billion and it is about $380 per person. Idk what the average net worth of the poorest half of the world’s population is, but I doubt it is below $380.

TL;DR: I’m calling bullshit.

*Orcas are nice dolphins

I wanted to post something like this but could not write it well. Thanks for posting it.

It does not seem available on mobile. On desktop, it is an extension called “Temporary Containers”. You may also want the official “Firefox Multi-Account Containers” for managing sites where you want to stay logged in.

I use Firefox temporary containers. So not only are they deleted 5 mins after I close a tab, but different tabs don’t share cookies unless I explicitly allow it or the tabs are opened from one source (e.g. open link in new tab)

I use metric, so you tell me weight in kg and I imagine it in half the number of (2 liter) water bottles. Which I have a pretty good intuition for since I often carry anywhere between 1 and 12 at a time.

Of course if I had to suffer imperial, I would like analogies as well.

Its been a long time since I finished the story, I mostly played multiplayer

GTA SA is dope even today :D

You are literally saying we don’t need bosses to tell us what to do and don’t need competition. That we can cooperate in good faith. Yet you think taking more than your fair share is not an issue for such a system?

You are either delusional or you are trolling.

Taking more than your fair share (average) is by definition competing.

Also, I specifically picked events that are not mainly driven by the leaders but by the populace.

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the goal of an economy is not to produce endlessly, as much as possible. capitalism is extremely growth oriented. that’s about all it’s good for: rapid growth, at the expense of equity and workers’ autonomy. we no longer need this growth and competition; we need to downscale and produce less. the goal of an economy should be to provide what people need, as seamlessly as possible.

The current GDP per capita is about $1,050 a month. That is before taxes, capital investment and amortization. If you believe we don’t need growth, that is what you should strive to live off of since that is your fair share.

as always, this boils down to mistrust of your fellow man

For a good reason:

https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/trans-adults-florida-blindsided-new-law-also-limits-access-health-care-rcna87723

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/04/23/doctors-abortion-medical-exemptions-00153317

https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-hamas-attack-military-war-a8f63b07641212f0de61861844e5e71e

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/25/world/middleeast/iran-rapper-toomaj-salehi-death-sentence.html

None of the above are related to Greed. Just needless cruelty.

this system of incentives rewards whoever is most willing to act immorally to undercut their competitors, essentially guaranteeing that the least ethical individuals end up in charge of everything.

This happens in any political system: https://youtu.be/rStL7niR7gs

So tell me. Will you donate everything you earn above $1,050 to charity since it is above your fair share? If not, clearly people can’t be trusted to just cooperate fairly of their own free will.

anticompetitive and anti labor practices are fundamental to capitalism - you can regulate them all you want, companies will always find ways around it. wage theft (overtime violations, unpaid or underpaid wages, off the clock violations, etc) significantly outweigh all other forms of theft (larceny, robbery, vehicle theft, etc) combined.

In my experience, these anti labor practices are almost not a thing where I live. Seems regulation works in this regard.

in addition, something like planned obsolescence (companies intentionally making their products less long-lived so you have to buy more of them) cannot be completely prevented with regulation, since companies can always choose not to make their product better in a particular way, or no better than the absolute minimum requirement

Funnily enough, the corp I work for is quite obsessed with making products last longer. How is that possible? Simple. We provide service contracts together with purchases, so customers pay monthly service fee and we have to keep the products functional. So it saves us money (and increases profit) to make repair costs low. You just need to think a bit outside the box.

profit measures value extracted, not value generated. providing a service to people (postal service, healthcare) produces a measurable amount of value which is not directly profit. you can always increase profit by paying workers less and charging more for your product,

Profit is a function of the value created vs resources consumed to produce the value. As long as there are worker protections legislated, that is just efficiency.

and these both get more effective the more you have cornered the market.

Yes, monopolies are bad.

a high amount of profit tends to mean a huge amount of money being extracted from communities and working individuals

Sure. But unless you are talking about a monopoly, unusually high profits leave room for competition to sell the goods cheaper. So outside of monopolies, the profit you can extract is limited. And making goods cheaper is the same as increasing wages, it benefits the public.

capitalism is competitive, and competitions have winners. you can make all the regulations you want, but even when everyone “plays fair” someone will eventually emerge on top

What are you even talking about? Yes, the most efficient companies emerge on top which is exactly what we want.

competition is massively inefficient; you have no incentive to share anything, so huge amounts of redundant research and work gets done without public benefit.

That is true.

an economy which is based on and rewards collaboration rather than competition would be better able to provide for everyone’s needs and ensure nobody is left behind.

The issue is building such an economy. Most people will always pursue their selfish gains. Capitalism channels this by making “creating valuable things we can sell to people for minimal cost” result in large profits. Where the selfishness would show up in a cooperation based system you describe would be much more difficult to predict since it depends on the details of your system. But the results are likely to be worse exactly because it is hard to predict and therefore regulate or otherwise deal with.

I mean, the most obvious question is, without competition, what drives companies to be efficient?

co-ops get outcompeted by corporations. this is a capitalist economy we have, and so it’s very geared towards competitive profit seeking.

Remember that profit and created value go hand in hand, or at least, our legislation should make sure it does.

co-ops provide better worker protections, better working conditions, better stability and resilience, and better products. corporations are better at being single-mindedly profit driven, which is what our economic structure rewards.

True, but corporations have to generate profit for shareholders. This is the profit that should be used for improving worker conditions etc. by co-ops. Also, some worker protections should be legislated leveling the playing field even more to the point where reasonably efficient co-op should outcompete a corp.

communism is not a vague concept

At least here on Lemmy it seems to be. Kinda makes no difference to me if someone has the secrets to successful communism if I can’t see them.

it’s important to remember that under capitalism a company is very much motivated to curtail workers’ rights and anything that would threaten the status quo.

Within the company, sure. Outside, it has motivation to hinder any competition and this has to be prevented by govt. regardless of whether the competition is a co-op or a corp.

the system is rigged against it, which is why they tend to fail.

I am not accepting this claim without concrete examples. How is it rigged?

capitalism is not markets, nor is it free trade. capitalism is the specific system where there is an owning class that dictates how the economy is run (CEOs / shareholders), thereby holding that power away from the working class, whose lives are dictated by their decisions.

That is a misconception. Any individual CEO/shareholder have very little control over how the economy is run. And while they may cooperate in some areas and situations, they are ultimately competitors most of the time. If you make the simple assumption that they chase profit, than they have even less control. I think they are far closer to just another cog in the machine then to any dictators. That is the appeal of capitalism, as long as you align your goals with profit for corporations, they will fulfill your goals with ruthless efficiency.

if you’re genuinely interested in finding a system better than what we have, I don’t think arguing with strangers on the Internet will accomplish what you want. I think Second Thought makes some very good videos on these topics, though he seems to have some authoritarian leanings I don’t agree with.

Its not as much finding it. I think I have an idea what it looks like, but I also know how easy it is to be wrong about issues as complex as these. So I am more taking a pause and looking at differing opinions to see, if some don’t show me wrong.

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You are the one who said the description of communism was not vague. And I was careful not to include you with the violent revolutionaries part.

If you don’t want communism, but just social policies in capitalism, then I am on board with that. Of course again, the devil is in the details, but I am generally on board with UBI (or something similar), universal healthcare, etc.

Idk about co-ops, feels like if those worked, we would see a lot of them already. There shouldn’t be anything blocking their creation as to post says. I am all for removing any barriers for their creation if I missed some but I don’t think they should be forced.

You’re making claims about a subject you are not an expert in, and refusing to read any literature on the subject.

I unfortunately don’t have unlimited time, so I am forced to refuse to read books that are unlikely to be relevant.

But also Capital is written that way to preempt arguments; it’s an academic work. His other works only suffer from 3 page long sentences that require significant contextual and historical knowledge of mid 1800s europe. Lenin is an easier place to start.

Then maybe can you point to a work that does not assume an 1800s economy? Also, Marxism was tried already by the Bolsheviks. It failed horribly. If there were no improvements made since, what is the point? While I like the scientific method, I am certainly not willing to try the same thing again and see if just as many people die a second time.

I am not interested in being expert on communist history, I am interested in examining any modern plan to see if I can see issues in it or if it looks like it could work and is worth supporting.