Lack of good examples of countries that are successful without being capitalist?

Pretty ubiquitously non-capitalist countries have a pretty poor track record.

I often hear the phrase, capitalism is terrible, but it’s the least bad of the terrible options.

As an aside, I’m arguing here for capitalism, not billionaires. Supporting capitalism isn’t an endorsement of a complete lack of controls and safeguards.

Google doesn’t seem to find anything with that title when I Google it?

The Ash Tree seems to be some early 1900s story, and Daniel Harms doesn’t seem to have anything of that title as far as I can tell. :(

No, it was kind of a standalone type web forum. Greyish background, iirc.

Pretty sure I was linked it from Lemmy, and I don’t subscribe to no sleep here.

I think he was talking about some of the questionable representation of the tribal peoples in the film.

A few I’ve been big on lately:

The Meat and Dairy Network Podcast - A British humor surrealist comedy podcast about the inner workings of the meat and dairy industry.

The Horror Virgin - A guy who hates scary movies has two friends who make him watch them.

The League of Ultimate Questing - High production actual play DnD podcast. Very funny with some fun hooks.

Midway Games stock is gonna shoot through the roof selling all the extra copies to make this system work. :P

I don’t understand why you think that guy was conflating communism and socialism. He claimed communism is moneyless, and in your response you said “neither is moneyless.” What’s being conflated?

And it’s worth noting that most definitions include, if not expressly the word “moneyless,” clauses about all property being held in common. And if there is no property, then there is equally no money, by definition (as money is simply a system for the valuation and exchange of property).

Do you do those things because you truly get enjoyment out of them, or are they simply your drug of choice to help you cope through to the next day?

Those are all things that can be enjoyed in a healthy way certainly, but if it’s just “wake up, work, binge internet, sleep,” every day, then I’m afraid you have a problem. Maybe not a full blown addiction, but at least an extremely unhealthy coping mechanism for some deeper underlying issues.

This is something that you can work on though. Ideally with the help of a professional therapist who can help you identify why you feel the need to cope in this way and help you start breaking those destructive patterns in your life.

You say you don’t like anything or give up on everything, but what does that look like? I assume that you don’t spend 8+ hours every day staring at a blank wall. You must do something to fill your time.

But if you are truly finding it difficult/impossible to be interested in the world around you, then your issue isn’t that you don’t have a girlfriend my dude. It sounds like you’re suffering from pretty severe depression.

And I hate to break it to you, but untreated mental illness is definitely a mood killer, and not just with the ladies. You’re gonna need to get yourself into a better place, or you’re gonna drive more than just romantic partners away.

But I’ll tell you, you’re awfully fatalistic for 35. Women tend to pretty holistically prefer guys in the 33-40 bracket. You’re not past your prime in the slightest. A little self confidence and a little investment in the world around you, and I think you’ll find that you will attract people no problem.

And hey, maybe I’m wildly off base. I know I’m making a lot of assumptions based off a very small paragraph. And maybe I’m reading you super wrong. If so, I apologize.

One thing to keep in mind though. The idea of a relationship and sex you have in your head? That’s a fantasy. Both are great things certainly, but when I was younger I feel like I built them up to be something deifying in my head. That once I had them, all my greatest desires would be met, and that life would be finally “complete” for me.

Understand that relationships are work. Fulfilling work, but work nonetheless. They require just as much “sticking to it” as any hobby that you haven’t stuck with, if not substantially more. And let me tell you, you’re absolutely not going to want to do it all the time. It requires a lot of dedication and perseverance.

And don’t build up sex to something more than it is. Its great, certainly, but I promise you’re putting it on a higher pedestal in your head than it deserves.

But all that to say, right now, you’re in love with the idea of a relationship, not the reality of one. I’m confident that you’d find the reality to not be what you’ve dreamed of it. And the problems and struggles you have in your life are rarely made easier by adding more work and responsibilities.

Take care of yourself and get to a point where you love yourself and the world around you as it is, and I think you’ll find that the rest of this will kind of take care of itself.

I feel like you’re taking a bit of a dissonant position here, no?

If it would be a moral tragedy to kill a cat and eat it, why is that not true for a cow? If life eats life, it’s not murder for me to kill and eat the cat, correct? So why is it a moral evil if killing and eating the cow is not?

I think you’re saying that this is just one of the “fucked up” stances that society has taken? But then why participate in it?

I’m fine with either answer. Either “eating meat is fine because animal life is less valuable than people’s dietary needs/preferences,” or “vegetarianism is the only moral option, as all life is equally valuable,” but it seems to me like any answer in the middle is hypocrisy, no?

Haha, we responded at like the same time lol. Wild.

And fair on all counts, but it does seem at odds to an “a life is a life” position, no?

Like, I’d assume you would be more upset if they were farming humans for meat than you are that they raise chickens and cows for meat, no?

And are you against all farming, or just factory farming? If an old school farmer raises a cow in a field, and then kills and eats it, is that acceptable?

And are fish’s lives not valuable? Less valuable than a chicken’s or a cow’s? It’s still a life, no?

I’m truly not trying to be combative. I’m actively trying to understand how to jive these two positions.

Fair. I’d be curious how you square that with the idea that “a life is a life”?

I don’t mean that in an accusatory way. It just seems like an inherent contradictions to me.

And to be clear, not that you’d save your cat over a stranger or enemy. Like, I know people who would save inanimate objects before either because the emotional connection is that strong

I mean more in the abstract that human and animal life are of equal value.

Like, would you support the farming of people to sell their meat at the grocery store? I’d assume not, but then it feels like a contradiction to me, and I’d be genuinely interested to hear how you square that circle.

I feel like the idea that an animal life is worth less than a human life is demonstrably true at a societal level though, right?

Like, we don’t sell human parts at a grocery store to eat, and I feel like people would call it a moral tragedy if we did.

If an animals life is equivalent to a humans, then meat is in fact murder, no?

Yeah, I didn’t mean it as a jab. I just thought it was an interesting assertion that “a life is a life” in this context. Seemed a strong stance, and I wondered how far they carried it.

People have gotten weird about animals over the years. I adore my cat, don’t get me wrong, and would do everything in my power to save them, but like, it is still an animal at the end of the day.

In scenario one I can see saying cat if you actually wanted your worst enemy to die. Like, if you were fine with killing them without the cat in the balance, then yeah, of course.

But otherwise it’s the person, right? Animals have lower moral value than people, right? I mean, I’d be curious what percentage of people saying that they’d save their cat are vegetarian/vegan?

Just out of curiosity, are you vegetarian/vegan?

I don’t think you understood my last apple analogy at all, but honestly, I’m not really emotionally invested in trying anymore.

I think our impasse at it’s core is that we simply disagree on how much luck plays a factor in becoming a “X-ionaire.”

You seem to think that the ones who did it are just the best of the best at being unethical businessmen. I look at the ranks of those who made it and I don’t see genius Machiavellian strategic masterminds. I see people who capitalized on exactly the right idea at exactly the right time.

I can’t pont to a Zuckerberg or a Gates or a Musk and say, “ah, this was the unethical strategy that got them to the top.” I see that they were at the right place and time to fill a massive unfilled niche in society, and to beat everyone to the punch.

That’s not skill. That’s luck. That’s not masterful strategy. Luck. It’s not the inevitable outcome of their unethical business practices. It’s dumb luck.

Are they unethical? Absolutely. Did that help along the way? To a degree, certainly.

But like, think about it like this. Did Bill Gates ruthlessly stomp on others people and companies to grow Microsoft to what it is today? Absolutely. But how many competitors were there in that space that he needed to stomp? Five? Six? That means that out of 8 trillion people on Earth, he was one of 5, maybe 6, that even had the opportunity to corner that market.

And why is that? Because life isn’t perfect information, and opportunities aren’t evenly spread.

To make one final pass at the apples example. In life, the apples aren’t uniformly spread across the trees. You have to have the thought, “I bet there are some apples over in that part of the orchard,” and then go look for them there. Sometimes there’s a few. Sometimes there’s a lot. Sometimes there’s none. Not every area you search will be bursting with apples. Sometimes, very very very rarely, there’s 200 billion apples in the area you go looking. And not everybody knows what’s going on everywhere else in the orchard at all times. Sometimes you and 5 or 6 buddies stumble onto the same patch of 200 billion apples at the same time, and you fight to the death over them. Sometimes you leverage that big pile of apples you just got to force others to look for big apple patches for you. Sometimes you use the influence from your big pile of apples to change the apple finding rules in your favor. Or sometimes, you’re a random dude who thinks, “man, I bet there’s a bunch of apples over there,” and you find them and pick them all on your own. At the end of the day, the people who have big piles of apples have them because at some point they either looked and found a motherload of apples, and beat out anyone else who saw it while they were picking, or someone who did gave them all their apples on their deathbed. And being unethical can help you kill off the people in your immediate vicinity who saw the same bunch of apples you did, but to even have that opportunity to crush your competition means that you were lotto winning lucky to even be in the race at the start.

Here’s the the disconnect though. There are hundreds and hundreds of businesses that have done exactly the same things that Facebook did and went nowhere. Same strategies. Same exploitation. Same formula.

What makes Facebook different isn’t that they did those things better. It’s that they did them in the right place at the right time to corner the market.

I think there’s a good analogy to the music industry. The most popular/famous/wealthy musicians aren’t that way because they are more talented, or ruthless, or have the “winningest” music strategy. There are tens of thousands of other musicians who can play their songs as well or better than them, with more natural talent and willingness to murder for fame and wealth. So why are the famous people famous? Why are they household names while so many who are just as good if not better, with the same drive and strategy and goals, can’t earn enough to put food on the table? It’s luck. They won the popularity lottery by being in the right place at the right time to play to the right people that started the ball rolling.

And sure, ruthlessness and being unethical can help on that path, just as natural talent and determination can. But ultimately, at the scale we’re talking about, they’re negligible forces in the face of raw luck.

To use the apple picking example, what I’m saying is this. If you remove all “extraordinary” luck, and just see how well someone can do by being the meanest, most ruthless, crafty apple gatherer it is possible to be, the most they could end the day with is, let’s say, 10 million apples. But we know that some people have 200 billion apples. So how do we reconcile that? The people with that many apples found an apple pile. That’s the only way to get more than 10 million apples. And sure, maybe you actually found some other guy who found the pile and killed him to take the pile from him, or had some system by which you could trick people into pile hunting for you, so that you have better odds of finding the pile, but at the end of the day you have to find the pile to get more than 10 million apples. There is no other alternative. And yes, being unethical can greatly raise your odds of finding an apple pile, but anyone can find it. It’s just very likely to be one of the unethical people.

But all this is, again, irrelevant to your original position, which was that there is some dollar amount X that you cannot get or keep without engaging in unethical behavior. Not that it’s unlikely to get or keep, but that it is an actual impossibility. Do you still hold to that position in the face of the lottery example?

Of course billionaires can exist without having a winning strategy. Notch didn’t set out to be a Billionaire. He just played infiniminer and thought it was cool, so he asked Zach Barth if he could make a spinoff. Facebook was started because Zuckerberg was trying to trick a chick into sleeping with him. These billionaires didn’t have some Machiavellian scheme to become billionaires. They just made a thing that happened to dominate their respective industries. It happens when someone is first to market in a field that is prone to natural monopolies.

And of course money is a zero sum game. There’s a limited amount of currency in circulation. That’s true on it’s face (ignoring government’s creating more, etc.)

But I think the issue that we are actually disagreeing on is your claim that someone can’t get more than X dollars by chance.
My counter to that is, “sure they can, by winning an X+1 dollar lottery.” And I don’t think you’ve made any sort of counter to that point other than, “yeah, but they couldn’t keep it without being unethical,” without ever providing a timeframe that you would consider sufficient to meet the definition of “keeping it.”

The issue is that your example fails to be analogous in that no one has ever had a winning strategy to becoming a billionaire. If there was an implementable strategy that anyone could do if they were unethical enough, there would be a hell of a lot more than 3000 of them in the world.

The only way to become a big-apple-person in your example is to find the treasure trove. You aren’t physically capable of beating people up quick enough to steal all their apples. No current billionaire strategized their way into that position. They all found the apple lotto pile. Sometimes that pile is called Minecraft, and sometimes it’s called Amazon, but they all became billionaires by finding a giant pile of apples.

And absolutely not on any strategy that makes more than 2% overtaking you. If I have 200billion dollars, at 2%, and you have 1billion at 10%, it’s gonna take you nearly half a century to even reach my starting balance. Yeah, sure, you’ll overtake me eventually, but that’s more likely to happen because I died than because you ended up making more money than me.

And this is once again you moving the goalposts. What does it mean to “maintain that level of wealth”? Stay the richest for 5 years? 10? 20? 100? Your whole life? What if I die the day after I got the money? Do I have to invent an immortality potion to ever be able to claim to have “maintained” it? If you are unwilling to define what you mean by that, I’ll just be aiming for an ever expanding, nebulous, “that’s not quite enough.”