Yeah I mean, these are the stories you only hear on the self selecting sample of the internet. My physician has done thousands and claims to have never had a compilation. Pick someone who does it for a living, and you’ll be fine.

That’s a pretty good deal, I forget what I paid

Based comment

Someone’s gotta live through it, give them a fighting chance.

A vasectomy

Great summary! Thank you

I’m an engineer too, and I don’t think capitalism works from an engineering perspective very well. It naturally leads to monopolies, it’s just inevitable, which have the same natural ailments as centrally planned economies, but with unelected people at the top. A decentralized economy needs to be engineered to be as such, culturally and legally, on purpose. Up till now it was just a technological fact that economies were decentralized, not true anymore. And with automated production, labor should no longer be the basis of the right to live, especially as labor decreases on the limit to 0 with increased AI.

UBI is not a good solution in that it doesn’t change the power structure, we still are controlled at the government and in our jobs by the rich, which do not have any mandate from the people.

Just an anecdote, between engineers, depending on your age, my experience is the older I get in engineering, the more I realize how totally un-meritocratic managers are, and how much they suppress us. Buisness and government use scientists and engineers to achieve poorly designed goals for dumb or evil ideas, like war or profit. Be wary.

I mean, maybe we can make an Ai that uses reason to uncover these biases in the future from this starting point. We are only at the beginning.

One of the first things I looked up on this involves someone wanting us to dismantle the hierarchy of gravity… maybe a bit too much woo for me.

Property right theory is a bit complicated, you have to understand a few things.

1. Property rights are a state derived system. That’s why we have weird things like corporate personhood, LLCs, land ownership, mineral rights, airspace, etc. Indigenous peoples did not have property rights. Monarchies had different property relations. Etc.

2. Property rights can be divided into 3 fundamental rights, the right to use (usus), the right to the fruit of use (profit, fructus), the right to abuse (abusus) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usufruct

3. There is a historical lineage of the owning class, from monarchy, to mercantilism and slave societies, to modern capitalism, etc.

I’d say that the reason there’s not a system to demonstrate these ideas is not because they aren’t pragmatic ideas, it’s because power begets power.

The reason I say it’s easy to imagine life outside of capitalism is not because it’d be easy to get there, just that it’s easy to formulate.

Anyway to your points, capitalism is not “when people own things”. It’s when those who do the work (usus) do not get the profit (fructus). Usually this is justified through investment and usury (interest) or even permanent ownership by outside investors (stock). However investment can exist in other ways, through credit unions owned by communities who bank there, or even from government grants. Not to defend the soviets, but they had great science, and most of our own science is done through gov grants.

When you enforce the rule that only people who are doing the work may own stock, and then you grow your economy through democratic investment strategies, you are on your way to socialism.

Edit: In old religions usury was considered immoral, if usury is immoral how much more immoral is our current system of investing? I think we should go back to interest based business loans and grants and cut out this ownership class.

Abusus should also be democratically controlled under eco socialism. Because we have so much trash these days and the destruction of so many good things under justification of ownership. That’s another talk altogether.