Oceans Yet to Burn

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

ＰＲＩＶＡＴＩＺＥ ＴＨＥ ＳＵＮ

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[argumate]

what I’m trying to do is end the dominance of capital over all our lives, end the endless wars for profit, the system of white supremacy and settler colonialism that has resulted in generations of suffering, and end the actual destruction of our ecosystems. and since the only alternative to capitalism is communism,

I see this conflation all the time and I’m compelled to be bugged by it every time.

There just haven’t been that many wars for profit lately relative to historical standards, the ideology of white supremacy has little to do with adoption of capitalism across non-white nations, settler colonialism is orthogonal to all of these issues, and destruction of ecosystems is a side effect of industrialisation and ballooning population growth that needs to be addressed in similar ways regardless of economic system.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Anarcho-Capitalism and hardcore Libertarianism both assume the political and cultural conditions under which they can be created and maintained.  If some other group comes along that can undermine the cultural support for their ideals over the long term, or better unite to use force, they will inevitably be dethroned and replaced with something else.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[mitigatedchaos]

Don’t forget the part where markets pay people to lobby the government to undermine markets.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[ranma-official]

you can only either be completely okay with capitalism as it stands currently or be an unironic gulag jokes-making communist because these are the only two genders

[mitigatedchaos]

tfw you can only have the ability to develop policies that will help workers but not the will to enact them, or the will to enact policies intended to benefit workers but not the ability to design actually-good ones

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[argumate]

You can imagine a world in which the guardians of the state have a sudden epiphany and realise that involuntary taxation is theft, so they make tax payment completely voluntary, while keeping the rest of the tax code exactly as it is.

To prevent social collapse, people individually enforce the old ways by shaming and ostracising individuals who have not paid their share, and over time this spreads to become an ironclad system where no one will employ you or trade with you if you haven’t made your (entirely voluntary!) tax payments.

Amazingly, this decentralised coordination arrangement produces identical results to our current system, only it is Philosophically Pure as the essential virtues of liberty and freedom are not compromised by men with guns, etc.

Then the people realise all this shaming and ostracising is a lot of effort to go to, and decide to coordinate the enforcement of the tax code in a central authority- oh no, they’ve relapsed into a state of sin! Despite absolutely nothing changing, their community is now Impure and they have all become Slaves once more.

Perhaps this can be called the P-slave hypothesis, for philosophical slaves who will swear up and down that they are not slaves despite clearly living in a world with an income tax code.

[neoliberalism-nightly]

You can imagine a world in which the guardians of the state have a sudden epiphany and realise that involuntary taxation is theft, so they make tax payment completely voluntary, while keeping the rest of the tax code exactly as it is.

To prevent social collapse, the government fired corrupt and incompetent bureaucrats by the thousands, and consolidated the services they provide to be more efficient and offered them at a reasonable price.

Amazingly, the services offered were hot in demand, and the RGDP grew by 4% the next year even though there was some mild deflation. People brought more and more services for a while until for and not-for profit competitors started to emerge.

Then the government decided that they can better benefit the livelihood of their customers by split themselves into several smaller entities operating in smaller geographical regions, demutualizing into common stock corporations and spinning off some of their assets such as their road portfolio into a REIT.

[mitigatedchaos]

Is this before or after the Communist revolution that occurs because all of a sudden entire classes of people cannot afford basic Sovereign Services, or find that suddenly Hyper-Platinum™ GovCorp members are immune to prosecution for murdering their servants for sport?

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

ranma-official asked:

I'm going to shoot someone and claim they violated the NAP, ancapistan: hacked

argumate answered:

*ancap screeching*

[collapsedsquid]

What if you invite them on your property, then suddenly uninvite them when they’re in the middle of it.  Do you get to kill them immediately, or do they get a head start?

[mitigatedchaos]

Technically I think the official AnCap answer is the latter, but that doesn’t actually work since property rights cannot be used to derive the appropriate moral principle to obtain it.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

motherboard.vice.com

Why American Farmers Are Hacking Their Tractors With Ukrainian Firmware

[dagwolf]

A license agreement John Deere required farmers to sign in October forbids nearly all repair and modification to farming equipment, and prevents farmers from suing for “crop loss, lost profits, loss of goodwill, loss of use of equipment … arising from the performance or non-performance of any aspect of the software.” The agreement applies to anyone who turns the key or otherwise uses a John Deere tractor with embedded software. It means that only John Deere dealerships and “authorized" repair shops can work on newer tractors.

“If a farmer bought the tractor, he should be able to do whatever he wants with it,” Kevin Kenney, a farmer and right-to-repair advocate in Nebraska, told me. “You want to replace a transmission and you take it to an independent mechanic—he can put in the new transmission but the tractor can’t drive out of the shop. Deere charges $230, plus $130 an hour for a technician to drive out and plug a connector into their USB port to authorize the part.”

[ranma-official]

This is a very strange cyberpunk future

[blackblocberniebros]

No one ever thinks about the farmers and rural areas in the cyberpunk future.

[ranma-official]

No one ever thinks about the farmers and rural areas regardless of the cyberpunk future.

[shieldfoss]

How can they get away with this? Do they have a monopoly on tractors? Are their tractors just so much better that people will buy them even with this bullshit in place?

[mitigatedchaos]

Patents ensure that any tractor by a start-up competitor will likely be 20 years out of date, making a small run of new tractors you aren’t sure people will buy is prohibitively expensive, but also Capitalist competition isn’t as powerful as Hard Capitalists say it is or should be.  Partially this is because Hard Capitalists assume that state interference is deeply unnatural and non-Capitalist, when in reality the state is necessary for Capitalism to exist, and the market incentivizes corporations to attempt to establish control of the state.

If there are few enough major tractor manufacturers, and tractors are absolutely vital to farming, then they can all start using restrictive EULAs all at the same time.  As long as they limit their rent-seeking to something less than the cost of a whole extra tractor, they can all benefit from it without engaging in tight collusion.  Farmers looking to violate the situation would have to do something like import tractors from Japan or Russia or something.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

A continent-spanning superstate controlled by a network of computers implementing the thing that comes after the thing that comes after prediction markets over a vast and inscrutable state bureaucracy physically realizing a National Utility Function, attacking enemy nations in ways they don’t even understand, its terrifying efficiency only truly understandable as a creeping horror to the very few.

But unironically.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[mitigatedchaos]

@e8u

Problem: YouTube is owned by Google, who are ad scum. Paying for YouTube gives Google more resources to direct toward producing their primary product, advertisements.

This entire situation happened because people were unwilling to pay for content.  Your plan for this is… to not pay for content.

[e8u]

This seems akin to the, “why do you make me hurt you” defense.

If Eve attempts to derive revenue from manipulating Alice into spending her money unwisely, thereby deriving less benefit from it than she could otherwise, it is bad for Eve to succeed, and it is good for Eve to fail and starve in the street.

Advertisers deserve to be given long prison sentences. I don’t want to do that, because it would violate their freedom of speech. However, they do deserve it.

“Content” that cannot survive without advertising doesn’t deserve to exist.

[mitigatedchaos]

Remember that time when Google took over the government and forced everyone to connect to websites that had advertising at gunpoint?

Well you probably don’t because we’re not in that timeline.  As for myself, I still haven’t forgiven GDN, but fortunately it doesn’t exist yet, and it may never exist.

Look I’m not gonna wring you out for using an ad blocker just because you don’t like ads, but don’t style yourself as a morally superior revolutionary over it.  You aren’t.  This “content that’s supported by ads doesn’t deserve to exist” thing is ridiculous posturing, and on some level you know it. 

Internet advertisements are a form of microtransaction payment that exists due to coordination problems, partially because the value of one read of a webpage is both low and unknown before reading it.  A proper alternative system would be a form of widely-accepted digital currency that made it cheap and easy to send very small amounts of money, perhaps backed by the State if you’re into that sort of thing.

Suggesting that paying money, which is a direct and very expensive signal about not wanting advertisements, is unacceptable, is basically the exact opposite of solving the problem.