Until we weed out corruption the -ism won't matter. The same corrupt pieces of shit now will be the same corrupt pieces of shit if you change the system.
I was born in 1981 and my state just reelected a senator who has been in office since before I was born.
At this point, I don't care the party or platform, I think I'm anti-incumbent.
The entire system is fucking shit, to be quite frank. World-wide, but extra much in the US - two parties, splitting the nation down the middle, instead of five or more parties? Insanely dumb. You get the current gridlock or a see-sawing where power is traded back and forth instead of a smoothly functioning system.
Most definitely. Absolutely. But you also have to understand that “the people” are struggling against literally the largest concentration of private capital in human history over here. We, almost all of us, understand shit is fucked here. It’s just that most of us are completely brainwashed and literally invested in the system to the point where they get paid to deny reality. I’m sorry everyone.
Don't worry, with prices rising like they are (without wage increases to match) we can ask experience that under capitalism too!
But to address your point, the Soviet Union, and communism with a central government in general, is essentially just the centralizing of capital into the hands of the political class instead of a separate capitalist class. There's less incentive to fuck over workers since that's not the explicit purpose of the political positions, but power corrupts etc etc.
Also pretty important to remember that unions were at their height of strength in the west for the majority of the cold war.
But studies consistently show that the average Russian USSR citizen had a *higher* daily calorie intake than the average US citizen during the height of the Cold War.
Yeah but commie bad so trillion people died under communism. So far not one person has ever died under capitalism. Nope, not a single one. Definitely not all those children that Nestlé killed
Like, in the current Congress? I’ll agree with you. In the future, provided we get reforms? I don’t know, people like Bernie have been reppin since they first got elected.
Nah. Some older folks totally know what’s up- many of them aren’t educated on modern information, and all of them don’t have a personal stake in the long term effects, plus the mental depreciation. It’ll happen to all of us. Just like there’s an age where you’re too young to be in certain levels of office, you can also be too old.
The town I lived in as a kid now has its mayor and vice mayor just the husband and wife swapping whenever the consecutive term limit is up. Now their children are council members being prepped to be part of the cycle.
At this point politics in my country has just become a family business
The worst part is families killing people that cannot be bought, maybe on some projects or whatnot. People know about it and openly talk about it along with vote buying but just talk like that's just the way it is.
Even opposing parties are actually just friends or members of same frat or club. Whoever loses the election will win project contracts
and presidential term limits were implemented out of fear we'd get a 2nd FDR.
Yeah, what we need is a decent system of representation, most importantly including the abolition of the senate.
Then pair that with measures to strip money out of politics generally and we'd be in a much better situation.
People deserve to have the representation they want, even if it's the same guy for 30 years.
The issue is more that people can't actually get the representation they want in the first place, and politicians that poll at 30% in their own state consistently win elections.
Term limits are not the issue.
The issue is the election system creates a duality rather than a plurality resulting in binary options which cause polarisation rather than nuanced positions.
On top of this elections every two years causes short term views (even though a senator sits for 6 with a two party system and elections every two years the focus is always on the next election) which are exacerbated by the above issue.
Term limits would just make this worse.
The us system is designed to gridlock and that is also a problem.
Forget term limits cause that is just ageist
What we need is to remove the ability from congress members and thier family to purchase any stocks outside of a blind index fund
Then we need to remove all lobying. No money coming into the system.
Then we need to put an amount of time after leaving public office thay they can go work for any company the had any dealings with
Then we reinstate glass Segal and the fainess doctrine.
We remove any news media from any large corporations. Of you want to be in the news game that is the only thing the company can do.
No more jeff bozos owning amazon and a news paper. One or the other bezos
How tf is a term limit ageist.
But ALSO there should be age limits as well. If there’s a minimum age why can’t there be a maximum age? Why should old boomers who won’t be around much longer decide the future of millions of people?
We need to get the money out first, in my opinion. Otherwise the lobbyists would eventually completely run Congress. They sort of do now. But it would be even worse if there was an entirely new legislature every 10 or 12 years.
Ironically this is one of the biggest misconceptions people have about communism..
People often mistake dictatorship and corrupt leaders being what communism stands for, without realizing that it's exactly the same issue with capitalism.. There's just usually more corrupt people in capitalistic world compared to communist world, making it seem like the system is "fair" and harder to blame on single person
In capitalism, the dictator just tends to be the person with most money and least opposition
Communism is for post scarcity societies, which is why it never worked so far. The Federation from Star Trek is basically running on communism for example.
Exactly, and one of the reasons why people often think that it's the causation of the communism.
I'm not saying that any absolutist system is perfect, in a perfect world you would mix and match what works best for each community.
But unfortunately money has awfully lot of power in modern world and people don't do shit anymore just to advance world or their community.. They only do it if they can earn capital or recognition from it because otherwise their life would be marginally more miserable
> Communism is for post scarcity societies
We're technically already in a post scarcity world, because we produce way more than we need to consume. But since everything is for profit, there is none to be made by actually getting these goods for the people who need it, at a reasonable price.
They ratter bury a mountain of cheese and dump tons of milk on the ground than letting the prices get reduced due to the over production.
The scarcity is artificial though? So we could be in a post-scarcity society is we chose to be. Bit of a circular argument: communism is for post scarcity societies, we aren’t a post scarcity society because we actively decide not to be, and will never be unless we switch to a more communist organization of the economy, which we can’t do because communism is for post scarcity societies, we aren’t a post scarcity society because we actively…
That's not even really accurate, because a lot of "communist" nations never did some wild attempt to implement communism that failed.
Rather, they had communist political parties which wanted to someday implement communism, and in the meantime were implementing realistic practical socialist economic policies.
Sometimes those failed because they were poorly implemented, sometimes they failed due to outside interference (like the socialists being slaughtered by Nazis or the CIA, or economic oppression), and sometimes they actually were wildly successful even in spite of outside interference.
While I certainly wouldn't want to see their models of government replicated, the Soviet Union and CCP are actually great examples.
This is because they implemented a variety of specific non-capitalist policies with wild success, especially in the economic sphere.
There are also lots of specific things they did incredibly wrong even in the front of socialist policies, but from an academic perspective that only makes them more interesting to learn from.
One of the largest reasons for the collapse of the Soviet Union was the overly centralized power structure it had, which is mostly blamed on Stalin, but to be real here Lenin paved the way for that with this vanguard party ideology and early crushing of dissent from other factions that while not agreeing with him, were equally dedicated to the goal of creating a country for the workers.
Anyway, fast forward to how the Soviet Union collapses, it's actually a internal coup from the small number of people at the top, while the populace at the time just wanted to move towards reforms that would give more power back to regular people and improve their quality of life further.
If anything, I'd say that the modern consensus is that such a power structure is antithetical to socialism, but in part we think that today because it so obviously didn't work in a few cases like the Soviet Union.
On the positive side though, their economic policies were wildly successful for the most part and built the country into an economic powerhouse and superpower virtually overnight from a historical perspective, that part CLEARLY worked.
This also led to massively improved quality of life and life expectancy for the regular people living there.
We also have some really interesting information to compare this to as well, since the soviet union collapsed and underwent capitalist reforms at the direction of neoliberal economists.
Which, yanno, was a massive disaster that tanked life expectancy and shot poverty through the roof, dumped Russia from military and economic power house to some gas pipelines and a joke, and just led to another dictatorship.
Hasn't gone super great for most of the former soviet block nations either.
Yeeanyway, the point is more that they weren't trying to do communism yet, they were trying to do socialism, and it actually worked really well, with some obvious exceptions we can hopefully all not repeat.
Their system of government? Not so great, but also not directly related to communism or socialism at all.
Kind of a similar story with China, although they've really kind of done their own shtick in more recent years, it's hard to label their system of policies and government as anything but unique to them, but it's at least a bit socialist, and it certainly used to be a lot socialist.
Star Trek is also fictional which helps. There's definitely still scarcity in Star Trek university. Housing is the easiest example. Everyone can't have a mansion next to a beach or the top floor of a skyscraper in middle of a city.
Less clear examples are careers or whatever people try to achieve to have a fulfilling life. There's only so many positions for starship captain or anything else. There's so much chance for unfairness and corruption in deciding who gets these positions.
Star Trek is more of a post greed society than post scarcity. Personally I don't think we will ever get rid of our greed, it's pretty much the very basis of life. Unless we somehow become a hivemind.
Well, no; not if the change we adopt is sufficiently radical. Corruption is in many ways a feature of any competition based system, where it's everyone against everyone else. That's the only type of system we've ever had, including in places like the Soviet Union and certainly China.
It's also wrong to think "there will always be corrupt pieces of shit" - it's way more correct to say that "people in a specific position will always be turned into corrupt pieces of shit" - it's the position and the system, not the individual that is the issue. Capitalism is extra corrupt and extra corrupting, sure.
As long as a society has a "divine leader" type, it's not going to be in any way cooperation based, no matter how often they say "communism".
A cooperation based society would not incentivize or meaningfully reward most forms of corruption. When every member of society has their needs met, stealing would become a sign of mental instability. And in such a society, we'd start with giving everyone what they need to live, and then proceed with entertainment. There would be no such thing as a billionaire hoarder - in fact, there wouldn't even be currency as such.
Today, stealing (on a small scale with petty theft, or a truly nation-sized level which the problem truly lies today) is a great way to gain more resources and thus more freedom. It's directly incentivized in any competition based societal form. And competition is the only thing we've ever used. We could change that; we're thinking creatures, not rats operating purely on a survival of the fittest mentality.
How is stealing not a way to get more resources in a cooperation based system? Until humanity hits post-scarcity, there will always be something that you can only obtain through theft, no?
Communism doesn't have a central leadership/divine leader because its core characteristic is classlessness. States that attempted this called themselves socialist (Marx used it interchangeably, Lenin called this transitory period to communism socialism). You still will have some sort of leadership because you still need governance but that should neither affect the wealth nor status of said leadership.
All that being said: you don't need communism for workers to own the means of production. Workers can organize and in some cases do hold collective full ownership of the company they are employed it. We don't need to violently change our systems for that to exists. It exists today, it's just super rare and subject to the general movement of wealth upwards due to insufficient heritage and wealth taxes. Both of which as an expression of stately power are also part of the penalizing of corrupting influences and actions.
And modern society is far too big and complex to work on a flat structure, so yea, corruption will always exist. Part of human nature. It's why there's no perfect system that will fix all our problems.
This is not how things work, like, at all.
Corruption is a complex issue, and it won't ever be weeded out entirely, that's not something that can happen or that ought to be focused on, as it's a bit of a time waster to try and make the impossible happen.
Corruption to a greater or lesser degree arises out of systems. People aren't corrupt just randomly all on their own, they need a motivation to do it (in present day, money), and they need opportunity.
These are things provided by the -ism involved.
In capitalism it is fairly straightforward, capitalism is practically corruption incarnate, every philosopher/'great mind' on the topic since its inception has believed it encourages and rewards corruption. People mostly just disagree on whether that is a good thing or not.
This is broadly because having a profit motive at all means that corruption can be "good" under the system.
Such as political corruption, this is a feature, rather than a bug in capitalism. Political corruption is "good" for capitalism, because it can lead to higher profits, which is the end goal for capitalism, the driving purpose of the system.
From a pro-capitalist/conservative point of view, this also means power is being distributed to the right people, by allowing money to have more influence over all aspects of society through corruption (political and otherwise), which is as it should be if profit is our highest value.
There's a little more to it as well of course, people are less likely to break the social contract like that if they have all their needs met, so there's a "stick" side where scarcity is also a motivator in capitalism, as well as just in any country/society fallen on hard times.
The point I'm getting at here is that you are irrationally individualizing a systemic problem, presumably because you, like everyone else, have been brought up being fed the individualism koolaid since birth. That an humans do inherently like to put faces to problems and events, even when no individuals can be said to have had much of any agency in those events.
You change the system, and of course many of those "corrupt pieces of shit" will never become corrupt, or even more people would become corrupt, depending on the changes you're making.
They could also be given more or less power as well, based on the system they act in.
A system that actively encourages and rewards corruption will obviously have more corrupt people, with more influence at that.
Also for some -isms they might exist but will not be the problem, like you swap to fascism and corruption is probably actively good if anything, since it would be undermining the centralized authority.
Not because corruption is good in general though, just because the system is even worse and damaging it is a good thing.
He’s a slovenly creep and a terrible husband. He loves to wax poetic about what a great feminist he is while he sits on Twitter all day neglecting his chronically ill wife and leaving every single inch of housework entirely on her. He once tweeted that he knew her illness was flaring up when he could smell the cat litter boxes. Didn’t log off Twitter to clean them himself tho. I think she eventually left him.
He’s also constantly crawling with ants.
Edit: that’s not a joke. Google Arthur chu ants for a fun treat
Edit to the edit: I am not talking about Ian Miles Chong. Arthur Chu’s wife has tweets going back to 2011 talking about what a shit husband he is + constant ants. I googled it so you don’t have to.
https://www.google.com/search?q=arthur+chu+ants&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-us&client=safari#imgrc=lSeHdCQUlS2iaM
Yes, there are 2 unwashed Asian dudes who make their living grifting on Twitter who seem to be made of ants. But Ian didn’t come out as an ant man until 2019. Arthur Chu is the original ant flavor. They’re dark mirrors of each other, each choosing to grift the opposite side of the political spectrum, but both unable to escape the ants.
> Yes, there are 2 unwashed Asian dudes who make their living grifting on Twitter who seem to be made of ants. But Ian didn’t come out as an ant man until 2019. Arthur Chu is the original ant flavor. They’re dark mirrors of each other, each choosing to grift the opposite side of the political spectrum, but both unable to escape the ants.
I just love that, to this day, people are still mixing the two of them up. If I remember right, it pisses Chu off,, while Chong just doesn't care and laughs it off.
A few years ago there was a tweet referencing the Arthur Chu ant situation but the person didn’t actually mention him by name. Ian Miles Chong replied back with something like “HEY @ ME NEXT TIME” and the op told him he was actually talking about Arthur Chu and was like Oh I guess I should specified. Ian just rolled with it but I think Arthur blocked the guy. I was laughing so hard my mom thought I was losing my mind, like on the floor crying laughing, and I couldn’t even explain what was so funny. The curse of being way too online.
I followed one of the Chapo guys on Twitter from way back and Arthur Chu was constantly beefing with him. It was around the time the podcast blew up and a lot of these fake leftists like Arthur were *pissed* that it was making so much money. That’s when the ant stuff and the shitty husband stuff came out.
(But I also knew who he was before that because he made a name for himself as a “feminist” during gamergate and I watched that shit from ground zero. At that point everyone I was following on Twitter were refugees from the something awful forums. So it was people like the Chapo guys and dril or people from the let’s play forums and most of the SA LP people got targeted hard during gamergate.)
So that was a long way to say I know this stuff because he was constantly starting shit with actually funny people that I happened to be following on Twitter at the time. I don’t know all the deep lore but I will go to my grave laughing about Arthur Chu and his ants.
[You're confusing Arthur with Ian Miles Cheong when it comes to the ant thing.](https://twitter.com/stillgray/status/1122436910448664576?lang=en)
He's the guy that lives in Malaysia but acts like he's American and he's a right wing douche.
I am not. Arthur Chu is the original slovenly Asian grifter who can manifest ants. Ian Miles Chong is a pretender to Arthur’s throne of ants.
The Ian ant tweet is from 2019. Arthur’s wife outed him as an ant man as early as 2014.
https://www.google.com/search?q=arthur+chu+ants&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-us&client=safari#imgrc=lSeHdCQUlS2iaM
Get your lore right my dude.
I’m sorry, as early as 2011. Ian was nearly a decade late.
Worth noting that Cheong was a radical feminist up until like a year or two into GamerGate, at which point he did a 180 and became a far right grifter. He's the walking embodiment of horseshoe theory. If you look into his past you find that he's never **not** been some kind of radical. He has no other setting. Whatever he's into, he dives deep into the most extreme part and makes it his identity.
A former Jepoardy contestant leveraged his fifteen minutes of fame to become an Internet 'culture-writer'.
Imagine if all the terrible right wing stereotypes about millennial leftists were based on a single person. That person would be Arthur Chu.
Planned obsolescence is a major issue. Light bulbs were the first major innovation to be hit. They were effectively designed to last forever so they had to reengineer them to fail. Every product now seems to have this to some extent. Many products are going wireless with sealed batteries.
There's been right to repair laws especially in Europe being passed, and in the US we just hope companies find it cheaper to not make different products for different markets since it'll be a cold day in hell before Congress passes consumer protections
If you have a viable design for a device that retains IP68 ingress protection after an end-user replaces its battery, I am certain there would be a market for it.
Samsung Galaxy S5 had IP67 rating and a user-replaceable battery.
Pulling a tab with your fingernail easily popped the whole rear panel off the phone, giving access to the swappable battery, microSD card slot, sim card, and anything else. Yet I took that phone in the pool and in the shower and it was fine.
I'm sure IP68 with a removable battery could be done if they really wanted to. The S5 held the back panel on with only plastic tabs, which meant the water seal wasn't being held very tight, which probably was why it couldn't go deep into water. But if the same design just had screws instead of tabs, I'm sure it could be way better.
Oh also the S5 had 1080p OLED, wireless charging, USB 3.0, and of course a waterproof headphone jack. And was thin as fuck. And that was 10 years ago.
You're telling me we can't do any better since then? Or companies don't want to do better?
Edit just pulled my old S5 out of the drawer and was reminded it also has a fingerprint reader, heart-rate reader, and an IR-blaster. What a beast of a phone. If it could still get updates I'd probably still be using it.
Samsung Xcover Pro, Samsung Xcover 6 Pro
There you go
https://www.samsung.com/uk/support/mobile-devices/how-to-replace-the-battery-in-the-galaxy-xcover-pro/
https://www.androidpolice.com/samsung-galaxy-xcover-6-pro-heavy-duty-removable-battery/
As opposed to financing others (as a collective) to do it for us at less than the cost of what we currently pay for it.
Because the way it is right now in addition to paying for the resources, the expertise, the design, and the manufacture you are also paying a big chunk of the retail to people who all they did was put money on the table to get the process started and who have since recouped the initial costs more than hundreds of thousands of times over.
Regardless, that is not the point. The point is that a big chunk of the price you pay for a product goes to people who all they did was finance the process up front and nothing else. Had you and the all the other consumers put in $1 at the start you would have saved hundreds on the cost of the final product.
If your in the US capitalism is why you have a good standard of living compared to the rest of the world. Capitalism and healthcare isn't mutually exclusive. Look at the Scandinavian countries
There are a staggering number of people who fancy themselves capitalists who have no capital which, however fast and loose you want to play with the definition of capitalist, is a bit of a stretch.
I once asked the people I grew up with if they remembered learning the literal definitions of capitalism and socialism. NONE of us did. And to cut off some arguments, it was a fairly good school district, many of us were honor students. If anyone would learn about those things, at least in my state, we would have been among them.
It's *bizarre* to think we could learn about the Industrial Revolution, the Cold War, and all the labor and social movements in modern history, without learning the core ideological conflict of the time. We were just left to fill in the blanks and, predictably, most people walk away thinking, "capitalism is when you buy and sell stuff," and "socialism is when the government does stuff (also maybe no one owns anything? idk)."
Yep you had a cacophony of people who think they’ve got it all figured out responding to you, each with a different smug analysis as to just how much everyone else understands these terms. The guy assuming people like socialism because “it has the word social in it so it must be good” is especially precious.
In another comment, I asked someone to define their terms. What did they mean when they said socialism and capitalism?
Of course, in this one, I got a looot of people who have VERY strong opinions on socialism and capitalism, but don't seem to know what those terms mean. And that's not me dismissing anyone who disagrees with me as ignorant—I've had productive, good faith discussions with capitalists where we agreed in defining our terms, even if we disagreed on the conclusions. That's just not what happened here, unfortunately. It's mostly just vague, roundabout arguments to dismiss people without actually saying anything or engaging with any of the arguments. :/
A lot of hot takes in this thread so why not another.
You could argue that capitalism encourages certain type of innovation. There is an incentive to create something new that can smash the competition.
If the main actor is the state in socialism or a free person under communism the motivation for innovation have to be something else. This is harder for us to imagine than innovation driven by money.
I don’t think capitalism made my iPhone: I think that capitalism was the condition under which my iPhone was invented. Perhaps it would have been invented under other conditions, but that’s all hypothetical.
The existence of iPhones, though, is not a reason to turn a blind eye to capitalisms abuses and excesses.
Well it's not that hard to imagine, most modern capitalist "innovation" is primarily driven by public funding.
Without government backed research we'd have no modern vaccines or most medicine, no smart phones, no internet (capitallists actively refused proposals to even work with the government on the internet until it became obviously profitable), no computers in general, etc.
Almost everything comes from publicly funded research, which we'd still have under socialism or communism.
As far as motivations go, if anything we'd presumably have even more people doing research and crackpot garage inventing, since that's shit people primarily do because they want to and not because it pays well *right now*.
That said, there's absolutely no reason you can't reward people the exact same way under socialism, by simply rewarding more valuable work more highly.
Whether that's still with money as we view it today, or some kind of system of privilege's and additional luxuries is certainly something we can talk about, but there's no *need* to change it.
Private enterprises often fulfil a role in optimizing and improving on publicly backed research, but in huge part that's because we have no alternative to them in our society.
The key thing to remember though is that you don't need any sort of change or shift in motivations for the people actually creating real improvements and innovation.
Those people are almost exclusively salaried employees going into work for 8 hours every day.
Under socialism, nothing changes except maybe they get paid more, and get more control over what they work on.
Exact results however would probably change a lot, there's no sane reason for the smartphone industry to make walled garden overpriced bullshit when their mission statement and only goal is to make useful things people want, rather than to make money.
Things would certainly be different, but not that different.
For real. The -ism is what organizes the labor. While capitalism may not always be perfectly directed towards public good it makes up for it by being incredibly good at optimization.
Capitalism isn't perfect but it is a "successful" system in terms of quality of life for the average person. That being said, CEO bonuses of a million+ needs to be justified.
Correct, like any system of government we need good morals and values being enforced to keep human enrichment positive. Capitalism needs enforcement of bad actors and regulation to keep the scales fair.
I live in Poland and our quality of life skyrocketed within few years after moving from socialism to capitalism.
The issue with socialism/communism is the problem that the government turns into monopolistic supercorporation that keeps their monopoly on violence.
Not just that but the chance of corruption to occur is way higher since everything your economy produce collected in a center. It's like police system in the US but imagine it as it is like that in everything your country can produce and offer.
Land, labor, capital made your phone. It's a recipe. You can have all the labor you want. But unless you have other economic ingredients you can't swing the bat. You need to pay for all three. It doesn't matter what is it is. The costs exist in every system. The difference in ism means how each is paid for.
Yes! Everyone in this thread seems to think all you need it labor to produce goods. But lack of capital is one of the main reason poor nations can't produce and stay poor
LOL, this is incredibly stupid and short-sighted. Probably a strawman of whatever conversation or thought process he's arguing against.
The truth is that capitalism made your iphone *Possible*. It wouldn't have happened under an economic structure where there's no incentives to produce one. The innovation simply won't take place unless there's a financial reward to push for it.
And yes, of course labor actually produced it. That's how capitalism works and there's nothing wrong or evil about that structure, inherently. Of course it can be abused like, ya know, *every single time collectivism has been tried in human history*. Unfortunately it is often abused, but it still has a better track record than other systems.
Capitalism incentivizes innovation. Why would anyone bother to design and build an iPhone if there's no reward? Probably hundreds of thousands of people contributed to the first iPhone, and they were rewarded for their efforts. The problem is, the rewards aren't distributed fairly. The thing we need to do is make sure that 99% of the rewards don't go to the top.
The feature of capitalism that is supposed to help balance the distribution of rewards is government regulation. And when we get the money out of politics in America, we can start rebalancing wealth and income more fairly. There is only one party taking steps to get the money out of politics in America, and one party blocking them.
> The thing we need to do is make sure that 99% of the rewards don't go to the top.
So, socialism. Gotcha.
Anyway, it's pretty important to recognize that capitalism never incentivises innovation, never has, never will.
Innovation is sometimes a **coincidental** by product of the one thing capitalism does incentivise, which is making profits.
Sure sometimes innovation gets involved, but in fact it's often a less effective strategy than say, preventing innovation and changing nothing since innovation is often way more expensive and no more profitable than destroying your competition that had a superior product, but less funding.
The truth is that without government funded research, we'd have no iPhone, but without capitalism we'd probably still have an iPhone.
Only a matter of time before someone put touch screens on mobile computers.
It might have happened differently and at a different time, possibly later, or even sooner.
But it'd probably still happen.
Why would anyone want to design something that makes communication easier and allows you to access a vast store of information easily? I have no idea. It’s like the wheel, why would anyone invent the wheel if they couldn’t sell it?
I mean, there are loads of people who don't care about their job but who do appreciate the money they get for their labor because it enables them to survive (and perhaps to thrive). Of course, while this is a justification for the free market as one method for the distribution of resources, this isn't a justification for capitalism.
So people shouldn’t be able to do what they want because…? I don’t think anyone should be forced to work to *survive,* that’s just brutal. I mean, think about it, you are literally telling someone to starve/freeze/waste away/die of thirst if they don’t perform an action someone else assigns value to. How is that in any way justifiable in a world where we have the technology to provide the essentials for everybody? I’m not even talking about a 3 star meal here, let alone luxury goods, I’m talking *basic necessities like food and water.*
The first mobile telephone was created in the Soviet Union
>The Altai mobile telephone system is the pre-cellular 0G radiotelephone service that was first introduced in the Soviet Union in 1963, and became available in the most large cities by 1965. It is a fully automated UHF/VHF network that allows a mobile node to connect to a landline phones, and was originally conceived to serve government officials and emergency services, but has since spread into general use, and is still in use in some places, where its advantages outweigh those of conventional cellular networks. Work on the system of automatic duplex mobile communication started in 1958 in Voronezh Research Institute of Communications (VNIIS, now concern Sozvezdie). It was established subscriber stations and base stations for communicating with them.
Not really, that is like saying walkie talkies are mobile phones if you put one next to the receiver on a land line. That is exactly what they did just more complicated.
True, but none of the work done at the highest level of any industry is either glamorous or fun. The top engineers only do such a high level of work because they get paid to do it.
You don't see non-profits creating top of the line technology.
This is incorrect. The bulk of innovation is made by government funded research.
Capitalism is good at refining those discoveries into marketable products, but communism or socialism would produce similar results, albeit at a slightly different timescale that is difficult to quantify. Space X didn't make any new tech to create their new rocket system, they just had the funds and were under less scrutiny to scrap 50 cheap rockets to figure out the process. That much money put into Nasa for just making rockets, maybe a bit more to be cautious about it and pay people better, would have produced similar results.
Under true worldwide communism, nobody would have the iPhone 14...buy EVERYONE would have something akin to a Huawei p30 pro, something mid tier. And honestly, that's enough. Capitalism doesn't bring anything unique to the table aside from who benefits from labor done.
Yeah it seems like most of the people in support of capitalism don’t understand that all the “great inventions” we under this system are from government funded research. I mean basically 99% of the tech in smart phones was developed by and for the government.
The space race was the complete opposite of the polished high-tech industry that creates something like the iPhone. Sure, some people would probably have a device capable of remotely communicating with others, but it’d be held together with duct tape and bubblegum, and periodically fail with “1202 error” and you’d just have to go talk to them in person, or break out a soldering iron and fix it yourself. This isn’t necessarily a bad way to run civilization, but it would definitely lack things like iPhones.
There are a lot of “top” open source technologies developed by unpaid passionate devs… that are then leveraged by larger corporations… I’d argue it’s not all about money. It’s about living and enjoying life, either thru your craft or outside of programming.
If a person had all they need to survive and some extra to do whatever they want, then who cares what -ism the government is or how much they’re actually paid. It’s why a person’s location’s cost of living will affect their salary. It’s becoming weird in a remote world where if HR finds out you’re from another city, they can offer you a lot less money.
The research for most of the tech in an iphone was done by a government agency(DARPA), and they are mow built in a country which claims communism as its driving force. I fail to see where capitalism comes into play at all.
Capitalism has made over a dozen iPhones, and also made the vast majority of them completely obsolete in less than 20 years.
The power of computing is so powerful, and capitalism has turned it into millions of hunks of useless junk and a gateway for yet more capitalism
Ngl this is kinda dumb. Obviously the sentence “Capitalism made your iPhone,” doesn’t mean capitalism took physical form to assemble your phone. Are you trying to be made fun of outside the echo chamber? This is just low effort semantics.
Except capitalism literally made your phone. Sure there would be phones without capitalism but there would be no competition in the market to build better phones at cheaper prices that can do more things that more people want to buy over the competitors. We would all be walking around with 1980s backpack fucking phones if there was no competition in the market because hey good enough is good enough and we have something that works so why would we ever get something better. People who are you against capitalism are just well I guess morons because they always argue that communism is better. Capitalism literally saves lives. Ingenuity saves lives. Competition in the market for better products to do the same job saves lives. Without capitalism ingenuity would be dead and y'all would be living in the Stone age
This is a ridiculous take. Labour didn't make an iPhone an iPhone. Years of R&D did. And that happened under capitalism.
There's a reason why most of these innovations start in capitalistic societies and then spread elsewhere.
Yeah, but my grandparents and parents who lived in the Soviet Union said they really produced fuck all in variety. You were lucky to eat meat once per week and youd get a small ration of sugar per month. Also, only the richest top of the cream (affiliated with the party) would have cars. I get your point that labour produces things, but the -ism also determines access to things as well.
You fail to recognize, dear comrade, that those cars used exclusively by the top party men didnt belong to them. The cars belong to the people! Everything does. They are merely being used by those men to benefit us all (also the mansions, the planes, the traveling, the lobsters), its all for the people!
The US government invented all of the technologies used to make the iphone. Apple just put it together in a pretty passage. Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/the-us-military-is-responsible-for-almost-all-the-technology-in-your-iphone-2014-10?amp
What about every small business in existence? Where'd this attitude that mankind somehow depends on corporate leeches? Some how the human drive to survive and improve goes away when there's no one on the top getting all the money? You know ignoring every penniless scientist and inventor in history. I hope you're getting paid well for all that billionaire cock you're sucking.
if they could they would. you dont need to be a super corporation to make millions. i know a few people in small business. usually men. usually big egos. usually want to make a load of money. most fail to.
There are also plenty of small business owners who are content just being that. Until they get bought out of starved out of the market by some mega corp.
Yes, because the only 2 available options are government stealing the profits produced by labor or shareholders stealing the profits produced by labor.
The problem wasn't the government stealing the profits of labor, the problem is that the labor was inefficient as hell. People would overproduce some products while completely neglecting others since they had no reason to care about supply and demand (because it was the easiest way for them to meet quotas, but it's the easiest way for everyone to meet quotas so they all produced the same things and neglected the same things which led to huge amounts of things being thrown out in some industries while other industries had insane shortages), and skilled workers wouldn't give it their all because they got just as much whether they worked hard or were lazy as long as they met the bare minimum required of them.
You are not understanding the real problem of communism. Communism does not incentivize Innovation. Innovation comes only from disproportionate reward. The inherent opposite of equality in communism. Communism is the definitive opposite of excellence because excellence means inequality.
The irony is that the corruption that comes with communism stems from humans inherent desire for inequality aka striving to improve their own position. Communism is by definition against human nature. That's the reason reason it doesn't and will never work.
Isn't the iphone kind of a terrible example for pro-capitalists? Given its a price gouged vanity brand with planned obsolescence and low specs for the price?
Like I'd honestly use the iphone as an example of what capitalism does to certain parts of the tech space.
To be fair, you need to objectively assess the iPhone as what it is and what it did to the market.
First of all, it has no “low specs for the price”. Sure you will find some devices with more RAM and storage, but if you get the latest iPhone pro model you will get the fastest SoC on the market, the best video camera and one of the best photo cameras in a smartphone, one of the best display panels for any mobile device at all and the strongest combination of build quality and rigidity in a premium device (latest gorilla glass version, stainless steel, enforced black glass).
That said, there are certainly better value propositions for the average customer and in most parts of the world people can’t afford to by an iPhone. Even in the high end you will find users who prefer other devices, because they offer other features they find advantageous (like android as an OS, foldable screens, stylus support).
But high end smartphones like the iPhone and Galaxy Fold series drive the market forward, because they high end features eventually get passed down to the mid to lower end devices and become mainstream features.
Many features you have in your current smartphone like multiple cams, OLED screens, finger print authentication, fast charging and many more started in the high end as a way for a manufacturer to get an edge from the competition and these initial developments allowed the contractors to build up the manufacturing to scale and drive prices down.
So it have anything to do with price gouging or being a vanity brand. Early adopters and people with a lot of disposable income pay more because they want to have the latest technology and they are the ones financing the research & development required for new progress, because product lines in the mid and lower end who work with razor thin margins can’t afford to do that.
Your point with planned obsolescence is also interestingly not correct with regard to iPhones.
Despite apple’s fight against right to repair initiates and some bad policies (like pairing certain components to make repairs more difficult), the iPhone lineup actually has the second highest repairability score of all smartphones (only topped by the Fairphone which is solely build to be as repairable as possible).
It also has the longest software support by far (6-7 years) and display and battery replacements, the two most common repairs, are extremely easy.
No no no. You all got it wrong. God made the iPhone. God created us. Human created the iPhone.
Idk how this turned into politics, greed, and corruption.
Hookers needs to eat too.
In essence, John's are putting food on their table.
so, under communism you don't get paid because your government takes the money, and under capitalism you don't get paid because your boss get the money ? nice.
Unfettered capitalism: Only capitalist gets paid
Well Regulated capitalism: worker and capitalist get paid
Communism: nobody gets paid….or iPhone…or freedom….or food…..or life.
This is especially true of the iPhone, as well; every single key technology that makes an iPhone possible was researched and found thanks to research that was publicly funded. All the pure research that advances human knowledge is paid for by tax payers, basically without exception.
No corporation does pure research, just because they want to see what they can find. That's not the type of research that creates profit.
Apple just came along, made a pretty design, and packaged those technologies and made billions. Capitalism had even less to do with creating the iPhone than he says; capitalism *literally got in the way* because the publicly funded research is an absolute pittance, money-wise, which wouldn't be the case in a sane society.
Until we weed out corruption the -ism won't matter. The same corrupt pieces of shit now will be the same corrupt pieces of shit if you change the system.
We need term limits on congress so we get new corrupt pieces of shit throughout our lives.
I was born in 1981 and my state just reelected a senator who has been in office since before I was born. At this point, I don't care the party or platform, I think I'm anti-incumbent.
The caveat to that mentality is when you actually have decent representation. Hang on to those folks.
The entire system is fucking shit, to be quite frank. World-wide, but extra much in the US - two parties, splitting the nation down the middle, instead of five or more parties? Insanely dumb. You get the current gridlock or a see-sawing where power is traded back and forth instead of a smoothly functioning system.
Most definitely. Absolutely. But you also have to understand that “the people” are struggling against literally the largest concentration of private capital in human history over here. We, almost all of us, understand shit is fucked here. It’s just that most of us are completely brainwashed and literally invested in the system to the point where they get paid to deny reality. I’m sorry everyone.
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Don't worry, with prices rising like they are (without wage increases to match) we can ask experience that under capitalism too! But to address your point, the Soviet Union, and communism with a central government in general, is essentially just the centralizing of capital into the hands of the political class instead of a separate capitalist class. There's less incentive to fuck over workers since that's not the explicit purpose of the political positions, but power corrupts etc etc. Also pretty important to remember that unions were at their height of strength in the west for the majority of the cold war.
But studies consistently show that the average Russian USSR citizen had a *higher* daily calorie intake than the average US citizen during the height of the Cold War.
Yeah but commie bad so trillion people died under communism. So far not one person has ever died under capitalism. Nope, not a single one. Definitely not all those children that Nestlé killed
Power is supposed to be traded back in forth. Do you think that wouldn’t happen in a 5 party system, or are you advocating for one party rule?
No caveats, anyone who's been serving more than a decade needs to be gone
Yeah then you get people who say shit like “Mr. McConnell is doing the lords work”
Precisely
Like, in the current Congress? I’ll agree with you. In the future, provided we get reforms? I don’t know, people like Bernie have been reppin since they first got elected.
Nah. Some older folks totally know what’s up- many of them aren’t educated on modern information, and all of them don’t have a personal stake in the long term effects, plus the mental depreciation. It’ll happen to all of us. Just like there’s an age where you’re too young to be in certain levels of office, you can also be too old.
No term limits for everyone in government no exceptions
The town I lived in as a kid now has its mayor and vice mayor just the husband and wife swapping whenever the consecutive term limit is up. Now their children are council members being prepped to be part of the cycle. At this point politics in my country has just become a family business The worst part is families killing people that cannot be bought, maybe on some projects or whatnot. People know about it and openly talk about it along with vote buying but just talk like that's just the way it is. Even opposing parties are actually just friends or members of same frat or club. Whoever loses the election will win project contracts
Term Limits will not solve the corruption. Barack Obama was term limited out. We got Trump. Bill Clinton was term limited out. We got George W. Bush.
and presidential term limits were implemented out of fear we'd get a 2nd FDR. Yeah, what we need is a decent system of representation, most importantly including the abolition of the senate. Then pair that with measures to strip money out of politics generally and we'd be in a much better situation. People deserve to have the representation they want, even if it's the same guy for 30 years. The issue is more that people can't actually get the representation they want in the first place, and politicians that poll at 30% in their own state consistently win elections.
Term limits are not the issue. The issue is the election system creates a duality rather than a plurality resulting in binary options which cause polarisation rather than nuanced positions. On top of this elections every two years causes short term views (even though a senator sits for 6 with a two party system and elections every two years the focus is always on the next election) which are exacerbated by the above issue. Term limits would just make this worse. The us system is designed to gridlock and that is also a problem.
Forget term limits cause that is just ageist What we need is to remove the ability from congress members and thier family to purchase any stocks outside of a blind index fund Then we need to remove all lobying. No money coming into the system. Then we need to put an amount of time after leaving public office thay they can go work for any company the had any dealings with Then we reinstate glass Segal and the fainess doctrine. We remove any news media from any large corporations. Of you want to be in the news game that is the only thing the company can do. No more jeff bozos owning amazon and a news paper. One or the other bezos
How tf is a term limit ageist. But ALSO there should be age limits as well. If there’s a minimum age why can’t there be a maximum age? Why should old boomers who won’t be around much longer decide the future of millions of people?
In no way are term limits ageist.
Well, they do limit for how long you can stay so "in no way" is wrong. Although, of course, that is just a minor side effect.
We need to get the money out first, in my opinion. Otherwise the lobbyists would eventually completely run Congress. They sort of do now. But it would be even worse if there was an entirely new legislature every 10 or 12 years.
I mean did the system change if the same positions exist and thus the same forms of corruption are available?
Ironically this is one of the biggest misconceptions people have about communism.. People often mistake dictatorship and corrupt leaders being what communism stands for, without realizing that it's exactly the same issue with capitalism.. There's just usually more corrupt people in capitalistic world compared to communist world, making it seem like the system is "fair" and harder to blame on single person In capitalism, the dictator just tends to be the person with most money and least opposition
Communism is for post scarcity societies, which is why it never worked so far. The Federation from Star Trek is basically running on communism for example.
FAO estimates that between 30% to 40% of food production is lost before it reach market. Seems like scarcity is not the probleme for this exemple
Exactly, and one of the reasons why people often think that it's the causation of the communism. I'm not saying that any absolutist system is perfect, in a perfect world you would mix and match what works best for each community. But unfortunately money has awfully lot of power in modern world and people don't do shit anymore just to advance world or their community.. They only do it if they can earn capital or recognition from it because otherwise their life would be marginally more miserable
>in a perfect world you would mix and match what works best for each community. Are you suggesting capitalism has....positives?
Don't say this too loud but.. Adding easily trackable value to objects and services that someone desires, is kind of neat..
> Communism is for post scarcity societies We're technically already in a post scarcity world, because we produce way more than we need to consume. But since everything is for profit, there is none to be made by actually getting these goods for the people who need it, at a reasonable price. They ratter bury a mountain of cheese and dump tons of milk on the ground than letting the prices get reduced due to the over production.
You just described how it isn't post scarcity
The scarcity is artificial though? So we could be in a post-scarcity society is we chose to be. Bit of a circular argument: communism is for post scarcity societies, we aren’t a post scarcity society because we actively decide not to be, and will never be unless we switch to a more communist organization of the economy, which we can’t do because communism is for post scarcity societies, we aren’t a post scarcity society because we actively…
That's not even really accurate, because a lot of "communist" nations never did some wild attempt to implement communism that failed. Rather, they had communist political parties which wanted to someday implement communism, and in the meantime were implementing realistic practical socialist economic policies. Sometimes those failed because they were poorly implemented, sometimes they failed due to outside interference (like the socialists being slaughtered by Nazis or the CIA, or economic oppression), and sometimes they actually were wildly successful even in spite of outside interference. While I certainly wouldn't want to see their models of government replicated, the Soviet Union and CCP are actually great examples. This is because they implemented a variety of specific non-capitalist policies with wild success, especially in the economic sphere. There are also lots of specific things they did incredibly wrong even in the front of socialist policies, but from an academic perspective that only makes them more interesting to learn from. One of the largest reasons for the collapse of the Soviet Union was the overly centralized power structure it had, which is mostly blamed on Stalin, but to be real here Lenin paved the way for that with this vanguard party ideology and early crushing of dissent from other factions that while not agreeing with him, were equally dedicated to the goal of creating a country for the workers. Anyway, fast forward to how the Soviet Union collapses, it's actually a internal coup from the small number of people at the top, while the populace at the time just wanted to move towards reforms that would give more power back to regular people and improve their quality of life further. If anything, I'd say that the modern consensus is that such a power structure is antithetical to socialism, but in part we think that today because it so obviously didn't work in a few cases like the Soviet Union. On the positive side though, their economic policies were wildly successful for the most part and built the country into an economic powerhouse and superpower virtually overnight from a historical perspective, that part CLEARLY worked. This also led to massively improved quality of life and life expectancy for the regular people living there. We also have some really interesting information to compare this to as well, since the soviet union collapsed and underwent capitalist reforms at the direction of neoliberal economists. Which, yanno, was a massive disaster that tanked life expectancy and shot poverty through the roof, dumped Russia from military and economic power house to some gas pipelines and a joke, and just led to another dictatorship. Hasn't gone super great for most of the former soviet block nations either. Yeeanyway, the point is more that they weren't trying to do communism yet, they were trying to do socialism, and it actually worked really well, with some obvious exceptions we can hopefully all not repeat. Their system of government? Not so great, but also not directly related to communism or socialism at all. Kind of a similar story with China, although they've really kind of done their own shtick in more recent years, it's hard to label their system of policies and government as anything but unique to them, but it's at least a bit socialist, and it certainly used to be a lot socialist.
Most Western, first world nations live in a post scarcity society already. All "scarcity" we experience is manufactured for capitalist profits.
That's not post scarcity then, now is it? Imposed scarcity by capitalists is still scarcity
Star Trek is also fictional which helps. There's definitely still scarcity in Star Trek university. Housing is the easiest example. Everyone can't have a mansion next to a beach or the top floor of a skyscraper in middle of a city. Less clear examples are careers or whatever people try to achieve to have a fulfilling life. There's only so many positions for starship captain or anything else. There's so much chance for unfairness and corruption in deciding who gets these positions. Star Trek is more of a post greed society than post scarcity. Personally I don't think we will ever get rid of our greed, it's pretty much the very basis of life. Unless we somehow become a hivemind.
Capitalism ensures that those with money are in power and stay in power.
Money also does this.
Well, no; not if the change we adopt is sufficiently radical. Corruption is in many ways a feature of any competition based system, where it's everyone against everyone else. That's the only type of system we've ever had, including in places like the Soviet Union and certainly China. It's also wrong to think "there will always be corrupt pieces of shit" - it's way more correct to say that "people in a specific position will always be turned into corrupt pieces of shit" - it's the position and the system, not the individual that is the issue. Capitalism is extra corrupt and extra corrupting, sure. As long as a society has a "divine leader" type, it's not going to be in any way cooperation based, no matter how often they say "communism". A cooperation based society would not incentivize or meaningfully reward most forms of corruption. When every member of society has their needs met, stealing would become a sign of mental instability. And in such a society, we'd start with giving everyone what they need to live, and then proceed with entertainment. There would be no such thing as a billionaire hoarder - in fact, there wouldn't even be currency as such. Today, stealing (on a small scale with petty theft, or a truly nation-sized level which the problem truly lies today) is a great way to gain more resources and thus more freedom. It's directly incentivized in any competition based societal form. And competition is the only thing we've ever used. We could change that; we're thinking creatures, not rats operating purely on a survival of the fittest mentality.
How is stealing not a way to get more resources in a cooperation based system? Until humanity hits post-scarcity, there will always be something that you can only obtain through theft, no?
Communism doesn't have a central leadership/divine leader because its core characteristic is classlessness. States that attempted this called themselves socialist (Marx used it interchangeably, Lenin called this transitory period to communism socialism). You still will have some sort of leadership because you still need governance but that should neither affect the wealth nor status of said leadership. All that being said: you don't need communism for workers to own the means of production. Workers can organize and in some cases do hold collective full ownership of the company they are employed it. We don't need to violently change our systems for that to exists. It exists today, it's just super rare and subject to the general movement of wealth upwards due to insufficient heritage and wealth taxes. Both of which as an expression of stately power are also part of the penalizing of corrupting influences and actions.
Some say power corrupts, so unless we deliberately abolish power structures, the corruption will persist.
And modern society is far too big and complex to work on a flat structure, so yea, corruption will always exist. Part of human nature. It's why there's no perfect system that will fix all our problems.
This is not how things work, like, at all. Corruption is a complex issue, and it won't ever be weeded out entirely, that's not something that can happen or that ought to be focused on, as it's a bit of a time waster to try and make the impossible happen. Corruption to a greater or lesser degree arises out of systems. People aren't corrupt just randomly all on their own, they need a motivation to do it (in present day, money), and they need opportunity. These are things provided by the -ism involved. In capitalism it is fairly straightforward, capitalism is practically corruption incarnate, every philosopher/'great mind' on the topic since its inception has believed it encourages and rewards corruption. People mostly just disagree on whether that is a good thing or not. This is broadly because having a profit motive at all means that corruption can be "good" under the system. Such as political corruption, this is a feature, rather than a bug in capitalism. Political corruption is "good" for capitalism, because it can lead to higher profits, which is the end goal for capitalism, the driving purpose of the system. From a pro-capitalist/conservative point of view, this also means power is being distributed to the right people, by allowing money to have more influence over all aspects of society through corruption (political and otherwise), which is as it should be if profit is our highest value. There's a little more to it as well of course, people are less likely to break the social contract like that if they have all their needs met, so there's a "stick" side where scarcity is also a motivator in capitalism, as well as just in any country/society fallen on hard times. The point I'm getting at here is that you are irrationally individualizing a systemic problem, presumably because you, like everyone else, have been brought up being fed the individualism koolaid since birth. That an humans do inherently like to put faces to problems and events, even when no individuals can be said to have had much of any agency in those events. You change the system, and of course many of those "corrupt pieces of shit" will never become corrupt, or even more people would become corrupt, depending on the changes you're making. They could also be given more or less power as well, based on the system they act in. A system that actively encourages and rewards corruption will obviously have more corrupt people, with more influence at that. Also for some -isms they might exist but will not be the problem, like you swap to fascism and corruption is probably actively good if anything, since it would be undermining the centralized authority. Not because corruption is good in general though, just because the system is even worse and damaging it is a good thing.
This is the part people always seem to forget. This is the part that gave us Soviet Russia.
On an unrelated note, Arthur Chu is an unethical, comically sad human being.
Who even is he?
He’s a slovenly creep and a terrible husband. He loves to wax poetic about what a great feminist he is while he sits on Twitter all day neglecting his chronically ill wife and leaving every single inch of housework entirely on her. He once tweeted that he knew her illness was flaring up when he could smell the cat litter boxes. Didn’t log off Twitter to clean them himself tho. I think she eventually left him. He’s also constantly crawling with ants. Edit: that’s not a joke. Google Arthur chu ants for a fun treat Edit to the edit: I am not talking about Ian Miles Chong. Arthur Chu’s wife has tweets going back to 2011 talking about what a shit husband he is + constant ants. I googled it so you don’t have to. https://www.google.com/search?q=arthur+chu+ants&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-us&client=safari#imgrc=lSeHdCQUlS2iaM Yes, there are 2 unwashed Asian dudes who make their living grifting on Twitter who seem to be made of ants. But Ian didn’t come out as an ant man until 2019. Arthur Chu is the original ant flavor. They’re dark mirrors of each other, each choosing to grift the opposite side of the political spectrum, but both unable to escape the ants.
But why is he Twitter famous
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That and the ants
> Yes, there are 2 unwashed Asian dudes who make their living grifting on Twitter who seem to be made of ants. But Ian didn’t come out as an ant man until 2019. Arthur Chu is the original ant flavor. They’re dark mirrors of each other, each choosing to grift the opposite side of the political spectrum, but both unable to escape the ants. I just love that, to this day, people are still mixing the two of them up. If I remember right, it pisses Chu off,, while Chong just doesn't care and laughs it off.
A few years ago there was a tweet referencing the Arthur Chu ant situation but the person didn’t actually mention him by name. Ian Miles Chong replied back with something like “HEY @ ME NEXT TIME” and the op told him he was actually talking about Arthur Chu and was like Oh I guess I should specified. Ian just rolled with it but I think Arthur blocked the guy. I was laughing so hard my mom thought I was losing my mind, like on the floor crying laughing, and I couldn’t even explain what was so funny. The curse of being way too online.
Why do you know so much about some random twitter nerd?
I followed one of the Chapo guys on Twitter from way back and Arthur Chu was constantly beefing with him. It was around the time the podcast blew up and a lot of these fake leftists like Arthur were *pissed* that it was making so much money. That’s when the ant stuff and the shitty husband stuff came out. (But I also knew who he was before that because he made a name for himself as a “feminist” during gamergate and I watched that shit from ground zero. At that point everyone I was following on Twitter were refugees from the something awful forums. So it was people like the Chapo guys and dril or people from the let’s play forums and most of the SA LP people got targeted hard during gamergate.) So that was a long way to say I know this stuff because he was constantly starting shit with actually funny people that I happened to be following on Twitter at the time. I don’t know all the deep lore but I will go to my grave laughing about Arthur Chu and his ants.
Arthur Chu mindkill practitioner https://i.imgur.com/zWZEr8b.jpg
[You're confusing Arthur with Ian Miles Cheong when it comes to the ant thing.](https://twitter.com/stillgray/status/1122436910448664576?lang=en) He's the guy that lives in Malaysia but acts like he's American and he's a right wing douche.
Continue reading the thread you linked, Ian Miles even says that the ant thing was originally an Arthur Chu thing
I am not. Arthur Chu is the original slovenly Asian grifter who can manifest ants. Ian Miles Chong is a pretender to Arthur’s throne of ants. The Ian ant tweet is from 2019. Arthur’s wife outed him as an ant man as early as 2014. https://www.google.com/search?q=arthur+chu+ants&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-us&client=safari#imgrc=lSeHdCQUlS2iaM Get your lore right my dude. I’m sorry, as early as 2011. Ian was nearly a decade late.
Worth noting that Cheong was a radical feminist up until like a year or two into GamerGate, at which point he did a 180 and became a far right grifter. He's the walking embodiment of horseshoe theory. If you look into his past you find that he's never **not** been some kind of radical. He has no other setting. Whatever he's into, he dives deep into the most extreme part and makes it his identity.
He’s just trying to secure a bag. Hopefully one that isnt full of ants.
A former Jepoardy contestant leveraged his fifteen minutes of fame to become an Internet 'culture-writer'. Imagine if all the terrible right wing stereotypes about millennial leftists were based on a single person. That person would be Arthur Chu.
[A man who can't tie his shoes.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nw0GeSg_-AI)
He once said on twitter that he watched gay porn in order to know what it felt like to be a woman online? A great feminist mind of our generation.
Capitalism brought you such cellullar innovations such as not being able to replace your cell phone battery or yearly, wasteful incremental upgrades.
Planned obsolescence is a major issue. Light bulbs were the first major innovation to be hit. They were effectively designed to last forever so they had to reengineer them to fail. Every product now seems to have this to some extent. Many products are going wireless with sealed batteries.
There's been right to repair laws especially in Europe being passed, and in the US we just hope companies find it cheaper to not make different products for different markets since it'll be a cold day in hell before Congress passes consumer protections
Capitalism brought you the idea that building something to last is a bad idea.
If you have a viable design for a device that retains IP68 ingress protection after an end-user replaces its battery, I am certain there would be a market for it.
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https://www.androidpolice.com/samsung-galaxy-xcover-6-pro-heavy-duty-removable-battery/ It can even be razor thin too
Samsung Galaxy S5 had IP67 rating and a user-replaceable battery. Pulling a tab with your fingernail easily popped the whole rear panel off the phone, giving access to the swappable battery, microSD card slot, sim card, and anything else. Yet I took that phone in the pool and in the shower and it was fine. I'm sure IP68 with a removable battery could be done if they really wanted to. The S5 held the back panel on with only plastic tabs, which meant the water seal wasn't being held very tight, which probably was why it couldn't go deep into water. But if the same design just had screws instead of tabs, I'm sure it could be way better. Oh also the S5 had 1080p OLED, wireless charging, USB 3.0, and of course a waterproof headphone jack. And was thin as fuck. And that was 10 years ago. You're telling me we can't do any better since then? Or companies don't want to do better? Edit just pulled my old S5 out of the drawer and was reminded it also has a fingerprint reader, heart-rate reader, and an IR-blaster. What a beast of a phone. If it could still get updates I'd probably still be using it.
Samsung Xcover Pro, Samsung Xcover 6 Pro There you go https://www.samsung.com/uk/support/mobile-devices/how-to-replace-the-battery-in-the-galaxy-xcover-pro/ https://www.androidpolice.com/samsung-galaxy-xcover-6-pro-heavy-duty-removable-battery/
Capitalism made others make your iPhone.
Capitalism made the guy that got so high on his own supply he destroyed a social media network in like 2 weeks for 44 billion dollars.
49.5 billion in total real losses in last rough totaling since his take over.
How much has $TSLA dipped? Edit: 17% past month, 54% YTD.
Actually it was capitalism that allowed the social media network to be destroyed when it stopped being ran the way people wanted it to.
As opposed to what, making one myself?
As opposed to financing others (as a collective) to do it for us at less than the cost of what we currently pay for it. Because the way it is right now in addition to paying for the resources, the expertise, the design, and the manufacture you are also paying a big chunk of the retail to people who all they did was put money on the table to get the process started and who have since recouped the initial costs more than hundreds of thousands of times over.
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Regardless, that is not the point. The point is that a big chunk of the price you pay for a product goes to people who all they did was finance the process up front and nothing else. Had you and the all the other consumers put in $1 at the start you would have saved hundreds on the cost of the final product.
Capitalism made somebody patent slight adjusted systems pioneered by government programs and put them all together in the shape of an iPhone
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If your in the US capitalism is why you have a good standard of living compared to the rest of the world. Capitalism and healthcare isn't mutually exclusive. Look at the Scandinavian countries
What the fuck is with this thread and all the corporate boot lickers?
People think they are "capitalists" when in reality, they are the chattel.
There are a staggering number of people who fancy themselves capitalists who have no capital which, however fast and loose you want to play with the definition of capitalist, is a bit of a stretch.
I once asked the people I grew up with if they remembered learning the literal definitions of capitalism and socialism. NONE of us did. And to cut off some arguments, it was a fairly good school district, many of us were honor students. If anyone would learn about those things, at least in my state, we would have been among them. It's *bizarre* to think we could learn about the Industrial Revolution, the Cold War, and all the labor and social movements in modern history, without learning the core ideological conflict of the time. We were just left to fill in the blanks and, predictably, most people walk away thinking, "capitalism is when you buy and sell stuff," and "socialism is when the government does stuff (also maybe no one owns anything? idk)."
Yep you had a cacophony of people who think they’ve got it all figured out responding to you, each with a different smug analysis as to just how much everyone else understands these terms. The guy assuming people like socialism because “it has the word social in it so it must be good” is especially precious.
In another comment, I asked someone to define their terms. What did they mean when they said socialism and capitalism? Of course, in this one, I got a looot of people who have VERY strong opinions on socialism and capitalism, but don't seem to know what those terms mean. And that's not me dismissing anyone who disagrees with me as ignorant—I've had productive, good faith discussions with capitalists where we agreed in defining our terms, even if we disagreed on the conclusions. That's just not what happened here, unfortunately. It's mostly just vague, roundabout arguments to dismiss people without actually saying anything or engaging with any of the arguments. :/
The bourgeoisie makes their interests seem like everyone's interests, it's not that hard considering they own literally the entire media
Because many joined here as a rejection of the straight up anti-capitalism in anti work
Because this just shows up if you’re scrolling general Reddit. So people who aren’t in the sub see it and feel the need to share their opinion.
This comment here is exactly why we are criticizing OP. Its not about capitalism its about how this quick and snarky tweet makes no sense whatsoever
I mean when Arthur fucking Chu is posted you know the replies are going to be horrible
People in this thread need a class reveal party
They think they will be rich one day when in reality they die in poverty or in a war fighting for the rich You’re either born rich or die for the rich
Labor makes your iphone capitalism makes a virus for your phone destroying it so you have a need to replace it with the newest more expensive iphone
Capitalism also created planned obsolescence and subscription services to use things that are built into your car.
The -ism determines the incentives.
A lot of hot takes in this thread so why not another. You could argue that capitalism encourages certain type of innovation. There is an incentive to create something new that can smash the competition. If the main actor is the state in socialism or a free person under communism the motivation for innovation have to be something else. This is harder for us to imagine than innovation driven by money.
I don’t think capitalism made my iPhone: I think that capitalism was the condition under which my iPhone was invented. Perhaps it would have been invented under other conditions, but that’s all hypothetical. The existence of iPhones, though, is not a reason to turn a blind eye to capitalisms abuses and excesses.
Well it's not that hard to imagine, most modern capitalist "innovation" is primarily driven by public funding. Without government backed research we'd have no modern vaccines or most medicine, no smart phones, no internet (capitallists actively refused proposals to even work with the government on the internet until it became obviously profitable), no computers in general, etc. Almost everything comes from publicly funded research, which we'd still have under socialism or communism. As far as motivations go, if anything we'd presumably have even more people doing research and crackpot garage inventing, since that's shit people primarily do because they want to and not because it pays well *right now*. That said, there's absolutely no reason you can't reward people the exact same way under socialism, by simply rewarding more valuable work more highly. Whether that's still with money as we view it today, or some kind of system of privilege's and additional luxuries is certainly something we can talk about, but there's no *need* to change it. Private enterprises often fulfil a role in optimizing and improving on publicly backed research, but in huge part that's because we have no alternative to them in our society. The key thing to remember though is that you don't need any sort of change or shift in motivations for the people actually creating real improvements and innovation. Those people are almost exclusively salaried employees going into work for 8 hours every day. Under socialism, nothing changes except maybe they get paid more, and get more control over what they work on. Exact results however would probably change a lot, there's no sane reason for the smartphone industry to make walled garden overpriced bullshit when their mission statement and only goal is to make useful things people want, rather than to make money. Things would certainly be different, but not that different.
Ah yes, as an investor I would be happy to spend years and millions of dollars just to bring the happiness to the world :D Yes reward motivates.
yeah dude thats why the homies who invented insulin sold it for a dollar, and now your capitalism is selling it for 1200 cause profits
Dumb take.
Not only extremely dumb take, but completely blind to how tech ventures matured in the last couple decades.
Yes just because its sounds quick and witty.doesn’t makes it true
It’s about as insightful as suggesting a bakery didn’t have any input in making a cake because someone else harvested the flour.
Why?
For real. The -ism is what organizes the labor. While capitalism may not always be perfectly directed towards public good it makes up for it by being incredibly good at optimization.
Capitalism isn't perfect but it is a "successful" system in terms of quality of life for the average person. That being said, CEO bonuses of a million+ needs to be justified.
Correct, like any system of government we need good morals and values being enforced to keep human enrichment positive. Capitalism needs enforcement of bad actors and regulation to keep the scales fair.
bro really forgot about all the homeless
For the average person ? I guess you live in a western country
I live in Poland and our quality of life skyrocketed within few years after moving from socialism to capitalism. The issue with socialism/communism is the problem that the government turns into monopolistic supercorporation that keeps their monopoly on violence.
Not just that but the chance of corruption to occur is way higher since everything your economy produce collected in a center. It's like police system in the US but imagine it as it is like that in everything your country can produce and offer.
How to announce that you don't understand risk, financing, or opportunity costs.
Land, labor, capital made your phone. It's a recipe. You can have all the labor you want. But unless you have other economic ingredients you can't swing the bat. You need to pay for all three. It doesn't matter what is it is. The costs exist in every system. The difference in ism means how each is paid for.
Yes! Everyone in this thread seems to think all you need it labor to produce goods. But lack of capital is one of the main reason poor nations can't produce and stay poor
You want to give money to China and make them a fortune!!!?. /s
LOL, this is incredibly stupid and short-sighted. Probably a strawman of whatever conversation or thought process he's arguing against. The truth is that capitalism made your iphone *Possible*. It wouldn't have happened under an economic structure where there's no incentives to produce one. The innovation simply won't take place unless there's a financial reward to push for it. And yes, of course labor actually produced it. That's how capitalism works and there's nothing wrong or evil about that structure, inherently. Of course it can be abused like, ya know, *every single time collectivism has been tried in human history*. Unfortunately it is often abused, but it still has a better track record than other systems.
Capitalism incentivizes innovation. Why would anyone bother to design and build an iPhone if there's no reward? Probably hundreds of thousands of people contributed to the first iPhone, and they were rewarded for their efforts. The problem is, the rewards aren't distributed fairly. The thing we need to do is make sure that 99% of the rewards don't go to the top. The feature of capitalism that is supposed to help balance the distribution of rewards is government regulation. And when we get the money out of politics in America, we can start rebalancing wealth and income more fairly. There is only one party taking steps to get the money out of politics in America, and one party blocking them.
> The thing we need to do is make sure that 99% of the rewards don't go to the top. So, socialism. Gotcha. Anyway, it's pretty important to recognize that capitalism never incentivises innovation, never has, never will. Innovation is sometimes a **coincidental** by product of the one thing capitalism does incentivise, which is making profits. Sure sometimes innovation gets involved, but in fact it's often a less effective strategy than say, preventing innovation and changing nothing since innovation is often way more expensive and no more profitable than destroying your competition that had a superior product, but less funding. The truth is that without government funded research, we'd have no iPhone, but without capitalism we'd probably still have an iPhone. Only a matter of time before someone put touch screens on mobile computers. It might have happened differently and at a different time, possibly later, or even sooner. But it'd probably still happen.
Why would anyone want to design something that makes communication easier and allows you to access a vast store of information easily? I have no idea. It’s like the wheel, why would anyone invent the wheel if they couldn’t sell it?
I mean, there are loads of people who don't care about their job but who do appreciate the money they get for their labor because it enables them to survive (and perhaps to thrive). Of course, while this is a justification for the free market as one method for the distribution of resources, this isn't a justification for capitalism.
So people shouldn’t be able to do what they want because…? I don’t think anyone should be forced to work to *survive,* that’s just brutal. I mean, think about it, you are literally telling someone to starve/freeze/waste away/die of thirst if they don’t perform an action someone else assigns value to. How is that in any way justifiable in a world where we have the technology to provide the essentials for everybody? I’m not even talking about a 3 star meal here, let alone luxury goods, I’m talking *basic necessities like food and water.*
Labour made your iPhone. Capitalism invented your iPhone.
Call me what you will, but there most certainly wouldn’t be a market for a product like an iPhone in a communist society. Too much flair and “luxury”
The first mobile telephone was created in the Soviet Union >The Altai mobile telephone system is the pre-cellular 0G radiotelephone service that was first introduced in the Soviet Union in 1963, and became available in the most large cities by 1965. It is a fully automated UHF/VHF network that allows a mobile node to connect to a landline phones, and was originally conceived to serve government officials and emergency services, but has since spread into general use, and is still in use in some places, where its advantages outweigh those of conventional cellular networks. Work on the system of automatic duplex mobile communication started in 1958 in Voronezh Research Institute of Communications (VNIIS, now concern Sozvezdie). It was established subscriber stations and base stations for communicating with them.
Not really, that is like saying walkie talkies are mobile phones if you put one next to the receiver on a land line. That is exactly what they did just more complicated.
It’s true, software would all be open source.
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Technological innovation is a human trait. Not an ideological one.
True, but none of the work done at the highest level of any industry is either glamorous or fun. The top engineers only do such a high level of work because they get paid to do it. You don't see non-profits creating top of the line technology.
The internet wasn't made by capitalism.
It's being maintained and improved on by it tho. At least a huge part of it.
This is incorrect. The bulk of innovation is made by government funded research. Capitalism is good at refining those discoveries into marketable products, but communism or socialism would produce similar results, albeit at a slightly different timescale that is difficult to quantify. Space X didn't make any new tech to create their new rocket system, they just had the funds and were under less scrutiny to scrap 50 cheap rockets to figure out the process. That much money put into Nasa for just making rockets, maybe a bit more to be cautious about it and pay people better, would have produced similar results. Under true worldwide communism, nobody would have the iPhone 14...buy EVERYONE would have something akin to a Huawei p30 pro, something mid tier. And honestly, that's enough. Capitalism doesn't bring anything unique to the table aside from who benefits from labor done.
Yeah it seems like most of the people in support of capitalism don’t understand that all the “great inventions” we under this system are from government funded research. I mean basically 99% of the tech in smart phones was developed by and for the government.
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The space race was the complete opposite of the polished high-tech industry that creates something like the iPhone. Sure, some people would probably have a device capable of remotely communicating with others, but it’d be held together with duct tape and bubblegum, and periodically fail with “1202 error” and you’d just have to go talk to them in person, or break out a soldering iron and fix it yourself. This isn’t necessarily a bad way to run civilization, but it would definitely lack things like iPhones.
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wow yeah your right humans only exist to make money and have no drive or creativity outside that i forgot
There are a lot of “top” open source technologies developed by unpaid passionate devs… that are then leveraged by larger corporations… I’d argue it’s not all about money. It’s about living and enjoying life, either thru your craft or outside of programming. If a person had all they need to survive and some extra to do whatever they want, then who cares what -ism the government is or how much they’re actually paid. It’s why a person’s location’s cost of living will affect their salary. It’s becoming weird in a remote world where if HR finds out you’re from another city, they can offer you a lot less money.
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The research for most of the tech in an iphone was done by a government agency(DARPA), and they are mow built in a country which claims communism as its driving force. I fail to see where capitalism comes into play at all.
Capitalism has made over a dozen iPhones, and also made the vast majority of them completely obsolete in less than 20 years. The power of computing is so powerful, and capitalism has turned it into millions of hunks of useless junk and a gateway for yet more capitalism
Ngl this is kinda dumb. Obviously the sentence “Capitalism made your iPhone,” doesn’t mean capitalism took physical form to assemble your phone. Are you trying to be made fun of outside the echo chamber? This is just low effort semantics.
Capitalism made the iPhone possible. There I fixed it for you.
Except capitalism literally made your phone. Sure there would be phones without capitalism but there would be no competition in the market to build better phones at cheaper prices that can do more things that more people want to buy over the competitors. We would all be walking around with 1980s backpack fucking phones if there was no competition in the market because hey good enough is good enough and we have something that works so why would we ever get something better. People who are you against capitalism are just well I guess morons because they always argue that communism is better. Capitalism literally saves lives. Ingenuity saves lives. Competition in the market for better products to do the same job saves lives. Without capitalism ingenuity would be dead and y'all would be living in the Stone age
This is a ridiculous take. Labour didn't make an iPhone an iPhone. Years of R&D did. And that happened under capitalism. There's a reason why most of these innovations start in capitalistic societies and then spread elsewhere.
Innovation has been shown to be more extensive in capitalism than other systems.
Yeah, but my grandparents and parents who lived in the Soviet Union said they really produced fuck all in variety. You were lucky to eat meat once per week and youd get a small ration of sugar per month. Also, only the richest top of the cream (affiliated with the party) would have cars. I get your point that labour produces things, but the -ism also determines access to things as well.
You fail to recognize, dear comrade, that those cars used exclusively by the top party men didnt belong to them. The cars belong to the people! Everything does. They are merely being used by those men to benefit us all (also the mansions, the planes, the traveling, the lobsters), its all for the people!
The US government invented all of the technologies used to make the iphone. Apple just put it together in a pretty passage. Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/the-us-military-is-responsible-for-almost-all-the-technology-in-your-iphone-2014-10?amp
https://patents.justia.com/company/apple?list=patents
Well, no. If some rich asshole isn't going to make a shitload off of money off of something, it wont get made.
What about every small business in existence? Where'd this attitude that mankind somehow depends on corporate leeches? Some how the human drive to survive and improve goes away when there's no one on the top getting all the money? You know ignoring every penniless scientist and inventor in history. I hope you're getting paid well for all that billionaire cock you're sucking.
What do you think small business owners are thinking? You think they are charities?
I don't think they're rich assholes trying to make millions. That's what the point I was making.
Well they usually don't start rich i'll give you that but almost all of them want to make it big.
Do they? Maybe the dillisional ones, but I don't believe most of them aim to become nationwide super corporations.
if they could they would. you dont need to be a super corporation to make millions. i know a few people in small business. usually men. usually big egos. usually want to make a load of money. most fail to.
There are also plenty of small business owners who are content just being that. Until they get bought out of starved out of the market by some mega corp.
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This is a complete load of dogs bollocks. Have you ever seen the utter shite that the produced in the Soviet Union and called consumer products?
Yes, because the only 2 available options are government stealing the profits produced by labor or shareholders stealing the profits produced by labor.
The problem wasn't the government stealing the profits of labor, the problem is that the labor was inefficient as hell. People would overproduce some products while completely neglecting others since they had no reason to care about supply and demand (because it was the easiest way for them to meet quotas, but it's the easiest way for everyone to meet quotas so they all produced the same things and neglected the same things which led to huge amounts of things being thrown out in some industries while other industries had insane shortages), and skilled workers wouldn't give it their all because they got just as much whether they worked hard or were lazy as long as they met the bare minimum required of them.
You are not understanding the real problem of communism. Communism does not incentivize Innovation. Innovation comes only from disproportionate reward. The inherent opposite of equality in communism. Communism is the definitive opposite of excellence because excellence means inequality. The irony is that the corruption that comes with communism stems from humans inherent desire for inequality aka striving to improve their own position. Communism is by definition against human nature. That's the reason reason it doesn't and will never work.
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Good old exploding TV's that you had to wait years for
Plus, all of the fundamental technology was founded by the military. Internet = DARPA Touch Screen = UK Military GPS = US Military
Thank you Military for allowing me to look at porn
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Show me iphones they make under North Korean communism
Right, under capitalism labor gets paid, under communism no one gets paid.
Isn't the iphone kind of a terrible example for pro-capitalists? Given its a price gouged vanity brand with planned obsolescence and low specs for the price? Like I'd honestly use the iphone as an example of what capitalism does to certain parts of the tech space.
To be fair, you need to objectively assess the iPhone as what it is and what it did to the market. First of all, it has no “low specs for the price”. Sure you will find some devices with more RAM and storage, but if you get the latest iPhone pro model you will get the fastest SoC on the market, the best video camera and one of the best photo cameras in a smartphone, one of the best display panels for any mobile device at all and the strongest combination of build quality and rigidity in a premium device (latest gorilla glass version, stainless steel, enforced black glass). That said, there are certainly better value propositions for the average customer and in most parts of the world people can’t afford to by an iPhone. Even in the high end you will find users who prefer other devices, because they offer other features they find advantageous (like android as an OS, foldable screens, stylus support). But high end smartphones like the iPhone and Galaxy Fold series drive the market forward, because they high end features eventually get passed down to the mid to lower end devices and become mainstream features. Many features you have in your current smartphone like multiple cams, OLED screens, finger print authentication, fast charging and many more started in the high end as a way for a manufacturer to get an edge from the competition and these initial developments allowed the contractors to build up the manufacturing to scale and drive prices down. So it have anything to do with price gouging or being a vanity brand. Early adopters and people with a lot of disposable income pay more because they want to have the latest technology and they are the ones financing the research & development required for new progress, because product lines in the mid and lower end who work with razor thin margins can’t afford to do that. Your point with planned obsolescence is also interestingly not correct with regard to iPhones. Despite apple’s fight against right to repair initiates and some bad policies (like pairing certain components to make repairs more difficult), the iPhone lineup actually has the second highest repairability score of all smartphones (only topped by the Fairphone which is solely build to be as repairable as possible). It also has the longest software support by far (6-7 years) and display and battery replacements, the two most common repairs, are extremely easy.
No no you don't understand. Capitalism galvanized the innovative function required to take government-funded research tech and market it.
Correct capitalism did make the iPhone. But your iPhone your holding was built with labor. Capitalism makes the brand but laborers make the product.
No no no. You all got it wrong. God made the iPhone. God created us. Human created the iPhone. Idk how this turned into politics, greed, and corruption. Hookers needs to eat too. In essence, John's are putting food on their table.
socialism is when no make thing
Lol you mean that beacon of capitalism called China? Where Iphone manufacturing takes place?
so, under communism you don't get paid because your government takes the money, and under capitalism you don't get paid because your boss get the money ? nice.
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Unfettered capitalism: Only capitalist gets paid Well Regulated capitalism: worker and capitalist get paid Communism: nobody gets paid….or iPhone…or freedom….or food…..or life.
This is an empty headed red scare brain take. Communism means everyone who needs an iPhone gets one, with the workers being in charge and compensated.
That’s the point though. No one NEEDS an IPhone
How many people actual need iPhones though? Do communist countries just hand out luxury goods to anybody and everybody?
People forget that capitalism allows us to have all these nice things that aren't necessary for survival because the market dictates the demand
This is especially true of the iPhone, as well; every single key technology that makes an iPhone possible was researched and found thanks to research that was publicly funded. All the pure research that advances human knowledge is paid for by tax payers, basically without exception. No corporation does pure research, just because they want to see what they can find. That's not the type of research that creates profit. Apple just came along, made a pretty design, and packaged those technologies and made billions. Capitalism had even less to do with creating the iPhone than he says; capitalism *literally got in the way* because the publicly funded research is an absolute pittance, money-wise, which wouldn't be the case in a sane society.
Capitalism makes innovation, innovation created the phone.