sophrosyne42

Despite your reply obviously not being good faith, I will correct errors for others.

> Housing is not an asset to society or the economy, it's a drain that wastes money on preserving human life.

You are equivocating between asset in the sense of 'generally useful thing', and the sense I used above which is a capital good. Housing is obviously a useful thing and necessary, just as all other consumptive goods like food, clothing, etc. That makes it an 'asset' in the former sense to people (there is no such thing as useful to the economy, which is just an abstraction). But housing, food, and clothing are not assets in the latter sense. I.e., paying for housing is a consumptive act and not a productive act. There is nothing good or bad about either, the distinction is simply a distinction of economic function. Eating is important, but eating uses up resources; it is consumption. Cooking is important, but it is not eating, you don't get anything out of it until you eat; it is production. Both rely on each other, neither can be given up completely without harm.

Thus, a proper balance must be struck, because it would be foolish and self-destructive to only consume. If there was only consumption, then this would simply sacrifice your future and you would not be able to survive after you have used up what was produced before. The question is about whether you want a stable, regular, and lasting way to be able to have valuable things like housing, food, and clothing. To do that, you have to refrain from consuming your entire stock of assets, you have to refrain from using up all the resources you have. But that is what you would to if you took all the capital that companies have saved up and consumed it. The purpose of my original post was to point out that you can't look at production as if it were consumption, they have different roles and if you mistake production as an opportunity to consume, it is self-destructive.

Replying by ignoring this distinction and instead making a strawman will not prevent your perspective from being self destructive.

Then capitalism cannot exist and never has, because there is no such thing as something which produces wealth merely by possession. Mere ownership (as in a legal title) does not and cannot yield an income. To have a yield, something must be put to use. Without a use, there is no yield. Capital (in the sense of the monetary value of assets) is merely an index for the utility of assets in producing a yield. There is nothing special about the yield of capital; there is properly speaking no yield to capital at all, only a yield for the assets which the capital indexes. Entrepreneurs gain wealth by choosing which uses to put assets at their disposal. It is only when assets are put into production that they yield a profit or loss. And wealth accumulates only when there is sustainable profits. Mere posession would not involve exchange, let alone production, and therefore could not yield any profit. There is no "free" or "automatic" generation of income. It is the result of conscious activity on part of the owner, as is capital itself.

The distinction between capitalism and earlier forms of production is that money provides a means to index the yield of assets by capitalizing the value of those assets. The ability to quantitatively track the yield provides the ability to determine whether you are able to replace the asset or if you are consuming it. Accumulation can be planned by resolving to consume less than the yield of the asset. Capital and capital accounting, too, has existed nearly as long as civilization has existed. But the cause of the yield is in principle no different from the yield of resources in pre-history, which is refraining from consuming more than you produce. What is unique is the ability to determine the economic yield of things quantitatively, not procedure by which wealth accumulates.

This is why it was foolish to give a new name to it. It was originally called Wine Is Not an Emulator.

Every socialist tries to make this distinction and falls to their own guillotine. You do realize that "substitute with" is merely a synonym for "exchange"?

The exchange of labor, to be sure, has existed nearly as long as civilization itself, perhaps longer, as all people cooperate by exchange through the division of labor right down to the family, and it is exchange whether the articles to be exchanged are money or physical things or even intangible, ephemeral things like love, pride, loyalty, or otherwise. Since human society is human cooperation by the division of labor, by your definition capitalism is nearly synonymous with human society itself. Fine by me.

The third of the worls that lives in poverty obstinantly refuses to adopt capitalist methods.

"Capitalism" is an ever shifting ambiguity that exists to be a scapegoat to attack but is completely meaningless in its concrete usage by the attackers.

But "capitalism" in its historical and practical meaning means nothing other than commerce, i.e. the society based exchange, the system of production based on exchange. It was only through capitalist accounting methods that businesses were able to conduct commerce in such a way as to contrast costs and proceeds, and therefore create the optimizations that lead to mass computer production or, what is the same, cheap computers for the masses.

> The amounts of money circulating whilst some of us struggle to make rent ...

It may be expressed in terms of money, but these are assets and capital. You wouldn't find a fab a very comfortable or satisfying place to live.

The reason the numbers get so big is the gargantuan accumulated savings that are prepared to fund the similarly gargantuan ventures. The large numbers are supported by maintaining and sustaining the capitalized value by profitable investment and depreciation.

When you talk about rent, while it may be expressed in the same unit (money), the economic function played is very different. Here, it is consumption rather than saving/investment. If the dollar equivalent of all those assets went towards paying rent, while it would secure housing for some time, it would eventually become completely exhausted, and so too would housing security. Large pools of assets are simply not a way to get stable housing, it would only consume the large savings society has accumulated to be able to undergo those big ventures. It would be short-sighted and harm us in the future.

The cause and solution to rental instability is to be found in housing, building, and land policy that restricts the production of housing.

Not if they are straight and white, which is a disproportionate amount of socially awkward geeks

I am not describing the school

I'm not looking, I am sharing my observations on what people here and other discussion forums tend to be saying.

I don't really see what you have presented as an "argument" against polymarket. [1] tells us that it has costs and benefits. Well everything has costs and benefits, but those are subjective anyway. That is not an argument against it and cannot be, because no science can tell you what is good or bad (i.e. what counts as benefit or cost), let alone whether the good outweighs the bad. [2] tells us that polymarket exhibits the same property as any other securities market, which is that only a very small amount of players tend to make a profit. Again, that is not an argument against it unless you want to include some kind of resentment or digust that some profit more than others.

Inequality of profits is both expected and unconcerning. The social function of the stock exchange is not to ensure everyone receives a fair or equal profit, but to ensure that the pricing of ventures and assets is correctly (as is possible) adjusted to expected future demand of consumers. For polymarket, the function is to express information about expectations of future events. There are straightforward economics reasons why polymarket and similar institution tends towards expressing our expectations about future events.

The term you are looking for is price gouging (i.e., having a higher price than everyone else). However, these terms (price fixing, gouging, undercutting) are completely vaccuous, and can be equally applied to any market price, making the accusation moot. Monopoly law is just a racket designed to allow rent seeking behavior by companies who do not want to compete.

Based tbh

Patents and copyright were the original form of monopoly. As long as software is not open source, it is by definition a monopoly

This kind of naiive cynicism is exactly why we don't deserve Valve, and will eventually lose companies like them.

I have yet to see an argument against them that isn't more than personal disgust

Which regulations in particular? All businesses rely on governments not choking them into nonexistence by having regulations that harm that business. Regulations are not an amorphus blob. There are other regulations that would also benefit a business to enable its existence, but we would not say (or should not say) that "the whole business relies on having regulations," because that is being intentionally vague about what the regulations in question actually are. The way you phrase it almost implied there is inherently something dangerous or suspect about something that is universal about how regulations can effect businesses.

You say "actively" as if it wasn'y a one-off event... maybe because Iran is forcing children to sit at IRGC checkpoints or other military targets?

None of the gulf countries allowed offensive US strikes to occur from their territory. Its all used to defend against attacks from Iran trying to kill Gulf country children.

These are the secondary and tertiary bad effects of lockdowns which were ignored at the time.

I don't know who these "capitalists" are, but generally speaking business regularizes as entrepreneurs learn to read new signals after unexpected market shifts.

It is unlike a socialist system in that there are signals to read in the first place. What, do socialists claim that failure is optimal when you can't even tell if you've failed?

False dilemma

This, more than anything, is the cause of limited space utilities monopolies. Companies have to license use of the backing infrastructure, and most often municipalities only give these easements to a tiny number of players. It's a textbook government granted monopoly.

Unfortunately too often authors of non alarmist research end up promoting alarmist interpretations of their work in science media.

I agree very strongly with intellectual humility. I just wish the microplastic fear mongerers would also take that lesson.

The market producing what people desire is a functioning society. All the concern about so called addiction is simply a displaced puritanism disguised as humanism.

Open firmware would become commercially viable when IP is abolished

A guess for what's next is not a slippery slope argument, let alone a fallacy.

If all problems were solved, we should have already found a paradise without anything to want for. Your editing workflow being the similar to another for a 1970s era language does not have any relevance to that question.

The church turing thesis is about following well-defined rules. It is not about the system that creates or decides to follow or not follow such rules. Such a system (the human mind) must exist for rules to be followed, yet that system must be outside mere rule-following since it embodies a function which does not exist in rule-following itself, e.g., the faculty of deciding what rules are to be followed.

Its not an assumption, it is a fact about how computers function today. LLMs interpolate, they do not extrapolate. Nobody has shown a method to get them to extrapolate. The insistence to the contrary involves an unstated assumption that technological progress towards human-like intelligence is in principle possible. In reality, we do not know.

The relative abundance of land compared to other factors of production is, in fact, such a proposition. But when land is restricted through zoning laws this stops holding true. In other words, we must eliminate restrictions on production for the benefit of all people, but particularly the poorest.