Capitalism: the cause of and solution to all life's problems

[bradrn]

3) Decisions which effect a whole region require a) a majority of sub-regions to vote in favour of that change and b) a majority of the population within that region as a while vote in favour of that change (this, however, I think, is likely to stand in the way of break-away movements within the system, so perhaps moves towards self-determination should only be given local concern)

This is pretty much how Australia works for constitutional changes. In practice, this has the effect of making any constitutional change extremely difficult.

[sangi39]

3) Decisions which effect a whole region require a) a majority of sub-regions to vote in favour of that change and b) a majority of the population within that region as a while vote in favour of that change (this, however, I think, is likely to stand in the way of break-away movements within the system, so perhaps moves towards self-determination should only be given local concern)

This is pretty much how Australia works for constitutional changes. In practice, this has the effect of making any constitutional change extremely difficult.

I was under the impression this was how Swiss (national) constitutional changes happened as well. It seemed more "direct" without relying on the usual "two-thirds majority" that appears to be the usual alternative. Beyond "50% wanted the thing on the ballot" are there any other alternatives?

[Rounin Ryuuji]

Perhaps three-fifths might be a good number? One does not want a constitution that's too easily changed (imagine vast sweeping changes under Reagan — I shudder at the thought), but having it unchangeable has the opposite problem, making them too rigid. I don't suppose there's any one magic bullet number, but more than 50%, but less than 75%, seems to be a decent-ish range.

[Ares Land]

I've been wondering recently if a sort of "central vs. split" + "popular vs geographic" style of voting and elections might make sense (but this could be a UK-centric idea), e.g.:

1) There's some "House" which seats are elected (through some form of proportional representation), on a regional basis, but in a way that no individual region has a majority of seats (this does disproportionately underrepresent some regions at the expense of others)
2) There's some other "House" which is elected, across some larger region, on the basis of population alone (regardless of the number of regions mentioned above, the entire electoral sphere, at this level, would be equally divided on the basis of population)

This is much like the common upper house/lower house system, with the same strengths and drawbacks.

With the common situation of rural places being more conservative than urban ones, and with some careful staging of elections, beware that this has the result of making sure one house remains conservative no matter what damn fool idea the electorate gets.

There are advantages to having two houses. The more checks and balances the better! But I think we could try different ways to elect the upper houses.

3) Decisions which effect a whole region require a) a majority of sub-regions to vote in favour of that change and b) a majority of the population within that region as a while vote in favour of that change (this, however, I think, is likely to stand in the way of break-away movements within the system, so perhaps moves towards self-determination should only be given local concern)

I think you'd have the same drawbacks with rural areas skewing conservative.

I do think that system would work great for the EU for instance, where the member countries have both more power than the UE itself, and a strong significance. Requiring majority vote would be a big step up! (Our current rule is that some decisions must be unanimous... which means Luxembourg and the Netherlands get to keep being tax havens...)
There is besides a strong case for member countries to be allowed to go to hell in their own private way.

I'm not sure this works in the US, for instance -- both the Electoral College and Senate ensure decision making is more conservative than the majority would wish... On the other hand maybe it's a matter of state boundaries sometimes not making much sense too. (Not an expert in US politics, but shouldn't California be two states? Shouldn't NYC and the rest of Long Island belong with New Jersey and Connecticut rather than with the rest of NY state? Why do you guys need two Dakotas? Shouldn't one be enough?)

6) "top-tier" positions are actually devolved positions, e.g. you're not (or the larger council grouping isn't) electing one representative, but you're, instead, electing a person to a certain position (say, minister for health, finance, housing, the environment, etc.)

Can't disagree with that one!

7) Indirectly elected councils always serve in an advisory role to directly ones elected ones (

Ditto!

8) No person can serve more than two terms within an elected position
9) No person can switch directly from a directly elected position and vice versa

I don't know about that. In France we switched rather brutally from politicians that had been around basically forever to relative newcomers.

I'm of two minds about that.

On the plus side, the people who got kicked out deserved to be kicked out. I don't miss them in the slightest.
On the minus side, dear god the newcomers are incompetent. It's painfully obvious their one and only quality is being yes men.

The trouble with kicking out politician early is that the public don't really get to know them, so they depend on more prominent figures for survival, not their voters.
Looking across the borders, it looks like Germany keeps its politicians around basically forever and doesn't seem any less democratic or well-governed for it. (On the other hand, I gather Merkel is an historical accident and that German politicians are generally just as stupid as in country.)

10) All elected representatives, regardless of "rank", are subject to an "end of term" judgemental procedure (I guess sort of like a mandatory impeachment, to use what I think might be the closest US terminology) - basically everyone is held accountable for any and all actions during time in office, and some randomly elected group of "constituents" and those trained in judicial procedure spend some amount of time going over it (since it's a political matter, though, I can see the need for the judicial portion to exist mostly to maintain proceedings)

In our last presidential campaign, there was an idea I liked a lot, much in the same vein: a procedure for voters to get rid of their representative if they're not happy with them.

11) There also be a level of sortition involved (honestly, I'm not sure if this is mostly me messing with my own system, but say 5% of any "official" is elected by sortition for like 6 months, just to have a voice)

As long as their opinion counts, yeah, go for it! (We had a randomly selected advisory council for environmental issues. The quality of their recommandations was extremely surprising! Of course we won't listen to them.)

And then you'd have stuff like "the wage of elected officials is tied to the average wage of people within that region +/- some level of expenses regarding travel.

Agreed on this!

Staffing, I guess, could also be an issue. How do you handle the bureaucrats within that system? They can't each be elected by the public, so they have to be brought in by some other method.

I'm mostly in favor of hiring them just like you'd hire anyone else. There needs some kind of system whereby we'd get elite school graduates (ENA, Oxbridge, what have you) because these are great at their job and some out of the box thinkers. I don't know how you'd go about that, though!

[Raphael]

Polite hint: the standard acronym in English is EU, not UE.

[Ares Land]

Polite hint: the standard acronym in English is EU, not UE.

Ah thanks -- and fixed. I know what the proper acronym is, but I always end up using the French one... Go figure.

[MacAnDàil]

Anyway, Standard Oil got split up into 18 companies in 1911 because it had an overly large monopoly. Why not do that to today's Big Oil and the GAFAM among other companies?

[Travis B.]

Anyway, Standard Oil got split up into 18 companies in 1911 because it had an overly large monopoly. Why not do that to today's Big Oil and the GAFAM among other companies?

I would personally prefer that over some things such as requiring one to pay for linking news articles, as that addresses their influence as companies directly whereas requiring paying for linking is attempting to change by fiat how the web works so as to favor one set of companies instead of a different set of companies, in a way that divides up the web by country.

[Ares Land]

Anyway, Standard Oil got split up into 18 companies in 1911 because it had an overly large monopoly. Why not do that to today's Big Oil and the GAFAM among other companies?

I'll be a little contrarian here... The Big Oil companies don't have a monopoly: they are competing with each other. For that matter, they're probably not that important in setting oil and gas prices. I'm more concerned with tax evasion and lobbying.

The GAFAM are all each others' competitors. Google and Apple have been sanctioned for anti-competitive practices in France, and IMO they are not being sanctioned enough. To be honest, I'm not overly concerned with the GAFAM. None of them really provide anything essential and irreplaceable, and I'm not even sure all of these will stay big in the future. I am concerned with the lobbying and the tax evasion.

The heart of the issue is that I don't trust my own government in fostering a healthy competitive market. Successive governments have, time and again, made a show of homegrowing our own GAFAM: generally, there's been quite an expense of public money with little result.

Unpopular opinion: the GAFAM aren't nearly as evil as they're made out to be and their demonization has all sorts of unforeseen, negative consequences.

[MacAnDàil]

Certainly, Big Oil isn't monopolistic so should not be dealt with as Standard Oil was. It should be dealt with on the basis that 20 major fossil fuel companies cause 35% of CO2 emissions. (Guardian October 2019)

The GAFAM compete to some extent, but Google has a massive share of search engine use (I've moved to Ecosia and there are others like Qwant).
I think monopolies are a problem in and of themselves, especially when they concern people's data and devices people spend way too much time on.

Are you referring to the encouragement of French 'start-ups' by Macron?

What could be less evil than thought about the GAFAM?

[Ares Land]

I agree with you on Big Oil... The one idea I can think of is gradually introducing penalties for CO2 released.

Are you referring to the encouragement of French 'start-ups' by Macron?

Among others, but it's a good example... the practice didn't begin with Macron. (Qwant is a good example. There's actually an awful lot of Bing under the hood so I kind of don't see the point of spending public money on it...)

What could be less evil than thought about the GAFAM?

It's more a case that there's nothing particularly evil about the GAFAM as compared to other businesses' practices.
Working in an Amazon warehouse can be pretty sucky but the practices that are denounced are, I'm sad to report, typical for warehouse work. Here Amazon is often contrasted with your small mom'n'pop neighborhood bookstore, but honestly their competitors are massive supermarket chains and chain bookstores, and they don't anything worse than these do.
Many of these track your personal data. So does every other business that finds it profitable to do so, and so do government and public businesses. (For instance, the public transport company in Paris, very much known as a left-wing hotbed introduced an Oystercard-like scheme some 15 years ago. This has brought absolutely no value to public transport user, and now they know where you live, where you work and what you do during the day.)
Fake news and conspiracy theories may have been spread by Facebook and I generally found moderation to be lacking. But the worst excesses are to be found outside the GAFAM: Mumsnet in the UK, 4chan or whatever they call it now, or just random places (one of the worst online places I know is a privately hosted discussion board for computer hardware). Or even outside the web altogether (consider CNEWS or Fox News).
Ditto with tax evasion, carbon footprint, etc. The GAFAM do not behave particularly ethically, but honestly they do no worse (and often better) than other companies.

I feel that generally by singling out the GAFAM we forget about the big picture. Of course Amazon deserves blame for underpaying warehouse workers; but without effective labor laws warehouse workers will always be underpaid. Besides, singling out the GAFAM allows other player to appear spotless by contrast; not so. Honestly I'd rather spend money on Amazon than at Auchan (or Walmart). At least Jeff Bezos is under a certain amount of scrutiny, and I know that at least he's gonna blow some of it on space cadet stuff. Who knows what the fuck the Mulliezs (read: Waltons) are spending their money on? (they're probably buying elections or funding gay conversion therapies or something)

That said, I do agree that Google and Microsoft do have an unhealthy hold on the market and uncompetitive practices, especially with OEM rebates for Microsoft and the whole Android ecosystem for Google.


Another problem is that there's no clear mandate to act. I find that generally people don't care about Google tracking them or Microsoft stifling innovation. I've been in quite a few business meetings regarding GPDR issues and how to navigate these: when you ask questions such as: 'why do you even need personal data for this service?' or 'this is a static website with no authentication, what do you even need a cookie for?' people will then talk to you in those soft, careful tones one normally uses around small children and the severely mentally impaired.

I get the inaction of politicians in these matters; there's probably lobbying involved, but even without it, why spend time and resources on issues your voters neither understand nor care about?


Is there nothing to do then? No, I don't think so. One place to start would be to properly fund computer science research. POSIX (the protocol behind Unix codes) was partly a scientific effort; so was the web.

[MacAnDàil]

Those are good points. I especially did not think that cookies would be insisted upon without question even when useless.

Certainly Qwant would be better without the Bing parts, but it's still better for privacy.

I think one problem is a general lack of listening to experts, whatever the domain.

Another problem with the GAFAM is the overuse of digital technology in itself, as Michel Desmurget details in his review of the scientific literature on the dangers of the overuse of screens, La Fabrique du crétin digital.

[Ares Land]

Regarding cookies and privacy, one problem is the expert themselves... We in IT are often blissfully unaware of the negative impact of what we do. Cookies are just added unquestioningly, because that's what the framework we use do. Ditto for the environmental impact: most of what we use servers for could be done for a fraction the power used -- the problem is, hardware is really really cheap so it's extremely tempting to log into VMWare (or any equivalent) and just add resources.

I'll have to pick up Desmurget's book sometime. There's a bit of a moral panic regarding screens -- I'm generally of two minds about it. I do agree that people should, generally, get out more (though that's kind of a difficult proposition these days!) watch less TV and generally use less of social media (especially if they intend to inflict us with their Correct Opinions). Plus I'm enough of an old fart now to wish that the damn snotty teens would stop playing with their smartphones and go play catch or sniff glue or something...
On the other hand, hey, I don't know, haven't things improved a bit since I was a kid? I mean we watched the same amount of cartoons as kids these days, but we also watched a damn lot of commercial break, and I think a bit more live footage from the Gulf War than was healthy... At least Netflix got us rid of that.

[MacAnDàil]

Yes, I heartily recommend Desurget's book. It's the most comprehensive book I've encountered on the subject and one of the most well-researched books I've encountered on any subject.

Each individual's experience is different. I find that watching the cartoons on the weekend morning was all I did as telly as a child and that was too much, and then went on to spent hours in front of computers on the internet as a teenager.

[Travis B.]

To me the complaints about screens are just a moral panic, nothing more. Other things, ranging from radio to novels have been subject to moral panics in the past. Personally, I have spent much of my life in front of them, yet the only negative point I can think of is staying up extra late to be on the computer (but this is not an effect of being on the computer as I spend plenty of time on the computer today yet have much better sleep patterns).

[Ares Land]

To me the complaints about screens are just a moral panic, nothing more. Other things, ranging from radio to novels have been subject to moral panics in the past. Personally, I have spent much of my life in front of them, yet the only negative point I can think of is staying up extra late to be on the computer (but this is not an effect of being on the computer as I spend plenty of time on the computer today yet have much better sleep patterns).

I'm not completely sure about that -- though my own 'screen use' (not entirely comfortable with the word 'screen' which puts, I think, very different things in the same bag) has always been very high and had nothing but very positive consequences, I have seen some really bad cases of video game addiction; I know people who were radicalized by social media.

(My own experience is nothing but positive I think, because I always had other interests and reasons to get out of the house. Which in turn suggests the problem goes beyond 'screens'; maybe our society tends towards loneliness and alienation...)

[Travis B.]

I'm not completely sure about that -- though my own 'screen use' (not entirely comfortable with the word 'screen' which puts, I think, very different things in the same bag) has always been very high and had nothing but very positive consequences, I have seen some really bad cases of video game addiction; I know people who were radicalized by social media.

(My own experience is nothing but positive I think, because I always had other interests and reasons to get out of the house. Which in turn suggests the problem goes beyond 'screens'; maybe our society tends towards loneliness and alienation...)

I agree that the term "screen" lumps together many different things. E.g. my daughter watches YouTube heavily, while my screen usage aside from watching DVD's (particularly foreign mysteries) with my family (well, my daughter doesn't watch mysteries) is otherwise almost all textual (e.g. programming, using IRC or Discord, using forums, or reading the news) or musical, and it has been ages since I have even played a video game, and I use YouTube almost solely to play music rather than to watch. If anything, screen usage has allowed me to communicate with people in ways that would not be possible without it, as I am rather socially isolated, family aside, in Real Life.

[MacAnDàil]

If screen use were just about a moral panic (being moral is not a bad thing anyway), then a neurologist couldn't write hundreds of pages of well-cited material explaining the dangers.

Obviously, there are differences between the different forms of screens and the different uses thereof. Desmurget recognises this. That's why recommendations regarding screens, like the psychiatrist Serge Tisseron's 3-6-9-12, recommend allowing some screens before others.

Some consequences are of course not noticed as being caused by the screens, for example the loss of sleep or concentration might be just not noticed or be thought of as 'I don't know why' without any link being made to the device.

And, yes, isolation/atomisation of society is another problem in itself, separate but related, one encouraging the other in a vicious cycle.

[Travis B.]

Capitalism can't support too many capitalists. This is obvious once you consider that making a profit entails spending fewer beans that you rake in. Even capitalists say Capitalism actively works to lower the numbers of capitalists: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvirpCAbGSY You might argue that this is anti-capitalist activity, but consider that the alternative to this "anti-capitalist activity" can only be violent revolution to overthrow it.

If you wish to discuss this further, let's take it to the Anti-Capitalism thread. The issue I have with anticapitalism in that it says in essence: 'some people hoard up anything that can be owned, others don't own what they need to survive, therefore no one shall be allowed to own anything ever again.' Which, I mean, is a solution, at least in theory, but doesn't adress what people want at all.

The sort of anticapitalism I am for is more like "therefore ownership shall be redefined so that what one owns is by definition what one uses" - a workplace is to be collectively owned by its workers, an apartment building is to be collectively owned by its tenants, while one's personal computing devices are to be owned by oneself, and one's house is to be owned by those who live in it including oneself.

[Ares Land]

The sort of anticapitalism I am for is more like "therefore ownership shall be redefined so that what one owns is by definition what one uses" - a workplace is to be collectively owned by its workers, an apartment building is to be collectively owned by its tenants, while one's personal computing devices are to be owned by oneself, and one's house is to be owned by those who live in it including oneself.

Relevant and amusing: I spotted a libertarian doctor complaining on Twitter that things used to be much better when hospitals were run by physicians.


The sort of capitalism I'm in favor is the barest expression of the idea: people can hold property and exchange stuff. I don't mean that you can't do that and no questions asked. (You can exchange labor for currency but not at rates that amount to slavery, you can own businesses or share or whatever, but you don't get to accumulate these until everybody's clothed, housed and fed, that sort of thing.) I'm also, of course, in favor of as much socialized property as necessary (which amounts to a huge lot!)