It’s amazing to me that so many people are willing to work as unpaid moderators so that Reddit’s investors can make more money.

The first paragraph is literally the same “I can’t justify capitalism but the others are worse” argument again.

Which happens to be true. Maybe in the future there will be something better, but so far it hasn’t been found.

The society we live in is an employment based, market fundamentalist society.

Sure, ok. And it’s better than a feudalist society where you’re tied to the land, or a slave-based economy where you’re property.

Instead of lashing out and calling it a silly caricature

I’m not lashing out. I’m just describing it as a silly caricature, which it is. Capitalism is fundamentally about owners of capital competing to make more money by investing in capital and selling goods at a profit. People who don’t own capital have to work in that kind of a system. Similar to how peasants were tied to land they had to work under feudalism, or slaves were required to do whatever their owners demanded in a slave state, but it’s less brutal. Workers can change employers and their bodies are not owned.

Is it fair? Of course not, but no socioeconomic system that has ever existed in reality has ever been fair.

That being said, how much money would it take for you to change your mind about existence being measured in terms of money alone being a silly caricature?

No amount of money would make me change my mind. There would probably be an amount of money where I’d be willing to lie, but what does that prove? You’d lie too if you were offered enough money. That’s human nature, not capitalism. If this were a feudalist system you could be bribed with land. If it were a theocracy you could be bribed by religious titles.

I don’t know what you’re trying to prove. Capitalism is bad, but other systems are worse. There are purely theoretical systems that would be better, but none of them has ever survived an encounter with reality. But, that doesn’t mean we should stop trying. Eventually we’ll find a way to improve on capitalism, just like capitalism improved on feudalism.

Capitalism and modern western democracy suck. But, life has always sucked for those without power. Life is/was much worse for people under “communism”. It was much worse under fascism. It was much worse under feudalism. It is/was much worse in a theocracy.

Also, this idea that “existence is evaluated in terms of money alone” is a silly caricature of capitalism. People with power have always been the ones to make the rules. It doesn’t matter if that power is in the form of money, or absolute control over anyone who lives on a certain bit of land, or in terms of absolute control due to being the representative on earth of a god’s will.

That’s nice, but the issue was whether they were part of the governing class. The rights the women were given in the GDR didn’t include the right to pass new laws. As for choosing new representatives, look up the term “Wir gehen falten”.

You’re on the right track, but the issue isn’t “the capitalist class”, it’s “humanity”. Slavery existed long before capitalism. Waste existed long before capitalism. Getting rid of capitalism won’t suddenly make people better humans.

There are no rules that say luxury goods couldn’t be produced for consumption

You don’t seem to even understand what a luxury good is. A luxury good isn’t a great bottle of wine, or a designer handbag. A luxury good is something that is rare and expensive and coveted for those reasons. Luxury goods are older than capitalism, they go back millennia. Important people in stone age groups had “luxury goods” that the rest of the people didn’t have access to.

Too much is made, most of it is wasted.

Yes, because it’s extremely hard to figure out what people want. Markets (which are much older than capitalism) are the best way we’ve found to figure out what people want and to meet those needs. You can’t get rid of markets, you can only drive them underground. When the USSR was meeting people’s needs by giving them the goods that the government decided they should have, the black markets were famous because the things people wanted were not the things that the government had decided they needed.

Workers must seize this system and destroy the old structures

If the “workers” are as idiotic as you, they’ll probably die because they simply have no idea how the world works. I’m not defending capitalism, I’m defending markets, which are much, much older than capitalism. An idiot like you thinks that you can magically replace markets with magic, when the fact is that every system that has tried to replace markets since the dawn of time has failed.

We’re not talking about “capitalist systems” though, we’re talking about “the market”.

“The market” existed long before capitalism. It’s an essential feature of human trade. Buyers offer goods for sale, sellers choose what they want to buy. People voting with their dollars, or with their cowrie shells provides a signal for what’s in demand and what producers should make more of.

Every system that has tried to get rid of the market has failed, and the market always pops up anyway, often in the shape of a black market.

But almost everybody wants something different in a home.

If you’re paying rent to a bank, you don’t own your house, at least not yet.

All countries have always been governed by the property owning class. With all its faults, capitalism has resulted in “peons” having the most say they’ve ever had. It’s not a lot, but it’s sure better than under classical democracy, feudalism, monarchy, theocracy, and “communism” at least as practiced in the USSR, Cuba, North Korea and China.

Sure, because that’s one thing socialist / communist systems are great at, making goods people want.

It’s a noncount noun.

Even people who pretend to believe it’s a count noun never use the singular, “a datum”.

Then you understand why being 10 meters away from other people doesn’t matter?

Feudalism

Year One

Your lord owns two hundred cows. You’re required to milk them sun-up to sun-down 2-3 days a week. The lord gets the milk. You’re not paid for your labour. You don’t own any land of your own, in fact, you don’t own anything. You’re allowed to live on your lord’s property, and not allowed to leave it. You’re considered to be “tied to the land”. On the days when you’re not required to milk the cows you’re allowed to work a small plot of land which you can use to feed yourself. Your lord gets a cut of anything you grow for yourself too. If your lord’s eldest daughter gets married, you’re required to pay your lord a customary fee. Since you don’t own anything, you’ll likely have to contribute some of your harvest which you were planning to use to feed yourself and your family. If your own daughter marries someone from outside the estate, you’re required to pay the lord a fine. If your lord chooses, you can be sold to another lord, and then you’ll move to their land and milk their cows instead.

Year Two

See Year One.

Year Two Hundred

See Year One.

At least it adds noise to the system. It’s better than the people who are happily training the AI.

The article talks about how Republicans are alienating virtually every woman in the country. So, to appear electable, they’re having their wives and kids do the ads, so that out-of-touch women will see a woman in the ad and decide that the candidate is a good guy.

But that, and the whole focus on “traditional family values” and everything boxes them into a certain image, that you’re not a real American man if you’re not married with kids by the time you’re in your 30s or something. So, even if he had a picture with his fiance and dog, it would prove he’s not a “traditional family values” republican. So, better to pose with a friend’s wife and kids than prove that he’s not “normal”.

Because it’s virtually impossible to buy a non-smart TV these days.

It’s not the real name for the crime, obviously. But, it’s true that section 1201 of the DMCA makes it illegal to bypass “access controls”, which are so loosely defined that just about anything qualifies. As a result, any device with “access controls” gets to define how you’re allowed to interact with it, and if you interact with it in the wrong way, even if you own it, you’re committing a felony.

What’s ironic is that the main purpose of reCAPTCHA v2 is to train ML models. That’s why they show you blurry images of things you might see in traffic.

AFAIK the way it works is that of the 9 images, something like 6 are images the system knows are True or False, and another 3 are ones it is being trained on. So, it shows you 9 images and says “tell me which images contain a motorcycle”. It uses the 6 it knows to determine whether or not to let you pass, and then uses your choices on the other 3 to train an ML model.

Because of this, it takes me forever to get past reCAPTCHA v2, because I think it’s my duty to mistrain it as much as possible.

Do you still, in 2024, not understand how airborne illnesses like COVID spread?

And, even if you do lobby the government full time, what if you’re a lobbyist who works on behalf of environmental groups. If the Sierra Club wants to alert politicians about a secret clause snuck into a new bill regulating coal mines, they can hire you to talk to the right people. If a town like Flint, Michigan is having trouble with contamination of their water supply, they can hire you to find the right people to talk to.

Maybe in an ideal world every politician would have enough time and enough staff to fully investigate things on their own. But, in the real world, we’re probably always going to need people to talk to the decision makers and advocate on our behalf.

What we really should have is good oversight and tight rules to ensure it’s just talking and not doing favors, giving money, etc.