grapist420

yeah. This is the “I hate social media” equivalent of the daily mail’s pop science coverage. Most of it’s wrong, and the parts that aren’t are totally uninformative.

what are you watching, what’s the point, how is it screwing with your life

main problem is that so many firms are doing buybacks and I don’t see evidence that most of them are doing this. Might be wrong, but this indicates it can be misused vs is mostly misused

headline should include that “some”

what corporations in America are zombies? Buybacks are happening in sectors like tech as opposed to ones like utilities, which are more zombieish

what’s the dump part

I will eventually read leftist theory, but I won’t be caught dead watching political YouTube

and we could transition to a nuclear wasteland too, slow doesn’t mean the end can’t be bad. Amazon has people trained to manage Amazon and they currently do so. why would their interest be any more aligned with workers

what’s magical about workers? why wouldn’t they just be corrupt themselves

the soviets had expert top down control, not worker control. we currently have decentralized (by a bunch of experts who own stuff and pay each other and publish papers and legislate) control

let’s say workers now control Amazon. all of Amazon workers. But it turns out Amazon AWS is a big part of Amazon revenue, the workers know jack about that, they either delegate authority to some aws experts and now as bans the same problem again if they ruin it. And you’re also assuming worker cooperatives wouldn’t follow profit motives - wouldn’t they? Workers want money. You want to abolish profitmotive but won’t do that. Workers could totally abuse monopoly or regulatory capture by vote

yes representative democracy deals with this problem in a way that workers councils doesn’t. swarms of lobbyists (not evil) and aides are not industrial workers

okay my issue wasn’t that worker controlled firms would be legally incapable of joint ventures for profit. My issue was - who makes the decision? Do the workers understand finance and supply chain management and commodity prices and political risks? No, so why should they make the decisions

just google the phrase “five billion dollar joint venture”. They don’t come from rich peoples’ pocketbooks, but they do from other areas and are important. And don’t come from governments. They come from the businesses lol.

Similarly, early and late stage venture funding and other forms of funding different companies would also take a haircut, probably (not much with a 10% tax above 100M, yes with a 100% above 100M). Which would suck for people who like medicine and electricity

> ITER and LCH

Yeah governments absolutely can fund things. The question is should they fund everything. And you should note that they weren’t funded by “workers councils”.

dude we have regional workers councils it’s called state legislatures and they absolutely do fund stuff. We even have decentralized hierarchical councils - city and county govt! And they do make infrastructure decisions! What they don’t do is fund chip development or factory scaling. And even the things they do fund they offload the decision work to experts (not workers).

boys absolutely bully each other reputationally. “Trolling”, insults, etc

I agree likes are bad, but 4chan doesn’t have likes. insta girls can still farm attention without it dude

scale began when the first RNA doubled itself, when the first cell doubled, when the first animal doubled, when the first rat learned from another, etc

giving workers board seats doesn’t reduce their order following, it makes the orders better.

> Another, if we are imagining a different society, is to make sure our educational system teaches every student the principles of worker self-management

what are those principles? Yeah modern work absolutely crushes the soul, but ... how else do we make the heckin .1% tolerance raw materials in the heckin factories? Where’s the room for improvisation or self driven innovation if you’re a line worker in a butcher shop? Seems hard. Not sure black panther community leadership is gonna help.

Someone needs to fund the judges and regulators and the NSF! I mostly just disagree with “employee run corporations”

okay but the adage of “VC profit is mostly the huge winners”, so your marginal benefit goes down only at the highest valuation companies, and does that really harm much?

There’s a great argument that yes, I’d rather have Elon be able to pump billions into spaceX or bezos billions into his ventures than have poor people spend them, but incentives? No clue, genuinely

I mean you can just think about “would I rather have CEO musk / bezos or CEO drunk BPD girl”. It’s not actually based on percentages

> is whether it is socially sustainable not to re-distribute that

“Bread and circuses” is derogatory, but the unsustainable parts of technological industrial society aren’t “rich people exist”. Conditions are so ridiculously prosperous and powerful for everyone that the new injustices are stuff like “my life expectancy is 70 instead of 80” and “I can’t afford to pay for debt I took”. What’s unsustainable?

There are plenty of homeless, but there’s also lots of jobs. They may absolutely fucking suck, but in terms of buying power you’re not gonna die and can live quite materially well vs rural.

yeah and computers are “just” interactions between electromagnetism and matter. This slides a lot

> History has not been kind to nations whose governments break those rules and started nationalizing corporations

Yeah but history has been kind to companies who mold laws for and heavily intervene in them

you don’t want pharmaceutical plant workers and accountants voting on whether the company should invest in mRNA tech in 2013?

okay so if nobody can have personal control over $100M how do $5B infrastructure investments (tens of thousands of which you personally benefit from, like chip foundries or joint city infrastructure and pharmaceutical ventures) or billion dollar company investments (again you depend on many ... apartments, factories, agriculture)

I have no idea why the workers of, say, Uber would know how to decision make for tech infrastructure and strategy. unless you mean “give them board seats”, which is rather different.

ok and in an open democracy it’s not for you to decide that 55% taxes are too much. The public discourse determines that ;)

https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2020/10/23/the-dangers-of-bu... this is slightly informative unlike OP

it’s section on leverage supports my sense that debt financed buybacks aren’t a massive catastrophe, and are prob ok in terms of collapse. but who knows...

Gravity is already helping all it wants to. Gravity is constantly redirecting the velocity in the circular orbit. A velocity change will push it into a new orbit, that will be slightly offset from the old one. You need so much velocity change to offset the orbit so much, and then you are still orbiting - still in something of a a steady state trajectory, just a slightly different one. It’s symmetric in fact

they have been doing this for a long time

when I hack it into python, it’s slightly annoying. when done properly, no, it’s no worse than f(a+g(b+c())), which is everywhere in code already. And debuggers / error messages should indicate what sub expression caused it, which would clean that up