You are reversing cause and effect. Productivity is rarely affected by bottom level employees to a significant extent these days. That is why there is no pressure for wages to keep up. Your own graph proves productivity is going up despite your claim of unmotivated employees.

Depends on your definition of solve. There is no mechanism directly within capitalism to solve negative externalities that appear in capitalism once they appear. You need government regulations via democracy or another external force to step in and resolve them. That is why the increasing influence of corporations on politics is so harmful.

But capitalism allows fewer negative externalities to appear. Let me give you an example for the worker owned factory. The elected leaders incentive is not to lead a productive factory. It is to be popular and win elections. So what happens when a role becomes obsolete. Perhaps you no longer need a person to stand in an elevator and operate it for people, since it can be automated. But firing people or retraining them for different role is unpopular, so the boss is incentivised to keep elevator operators. This means these people are not allowed to find jobs that are actually productive in improving the standards of living for everyone. People don’t like being fired when their position becomes obsolete but it is necessary to develop economies and advance civilization.

Another example is investment. When the factory has surplus profit, should he increase the wages of the employees immediately or invest the money into improving the productivity by buying better equipment or building another factory site? What about maintenance? Should he increase wages and delay the maintenance until it is someone else’s problem? Which will be more popular? By the way, this delayed maintenance issue is why public infrastructure is crumbling almost everywhere, since that is overseen by democratically elected leaders.

Capitalism prevents these issues from happening in the first place, since the owner gets a share of the factory output. He is incentivised to make the factory productive. And everyone below the owner is incentivised to help the owner increase productivity since the owner ultimately decides if they are fired or get raises and bonuses. This tends to fall apart when you have short term investors or reintroduce elections of CEO via shareholders. This is why privately owned companies like steam, costco, etc. are usually so much better and rarely get enshitified compared to corporations.

I am not saying this is not an issue, but it feels like the article is at best misunderstanding what sovereign cloud brings even with an ME backdoor under it and how international relations work.

How do externalities turn communist revolutions into authoritarian regimes?

This is an incredibly complex topic and depends somewhat on your exact setup of revolution and regime.

Let me give another example of negative externalities to at least vaguely illustrate: corruption. It’s the exact same mechanism. The person receiving a bribe benefits from the bribe, but the cost (harm) is usually paid by their employer or society.

For a news agency, a negative externality may be to intentionally spread incorrect information and propaganda. So as an exercise, try to think of the incentives of a news organization in capitalism when it is privately owned and anyone with money can start a competing news agency and in communism, where some kind of political organ (elected or named by elected officials) decides the news agencies funding and if resources are allocated to create a competitor.

Economic and political systems are about incentives. The more the incentives of individual people are aligned with the incentives of society as a whole, the better the system.

I am pretty sure what you are trying to talk about is called negative externalities. A negative externality is simply put a cost (harm) that a company inflicts on others and does not have to “pay for” itself. E.g. destroying the environment. The issue is that negative externalities don’t just apply to companies and capitalism. They are also what turns communist revolutions into authoritarian regimes. Dealing with them (or realistically minimizing their impact) is an incredibly complex subject. Trying to say we should solve it by getting rid of billionaires is like saying we should solve global warming by dropping ice cubes into the ocean.

You know, there is nothing wrong with not knowing how investments and markets (stock, commodity, …) help direct the economy. It’s a complex topic that most people really don’t need to understand for their lives. But confidently claiming they do nothing just because you don’t know is ridiculous…

I am skeptical about a cap, but the rest is definitely true. Letting them have too much influence on policy is the issue.

We need solutions to issues like capital allocation, keeping money circulation speed relatively constant and many many more. Capitalism is one solution to these problems. Perhaps not the best one, but the only one we know can work.

Because they are not gonna hate losing their ownership of the companies even more? Like it’s still significantly easier to push for reforms than completely toppling the economic system.

It would. Eliminating the HR would reduce the overhead from HR to zero. Eliminating the tax office would reduce money spent on that to zero. But these things fulfill a function. Could it be done better? Maybe. But why risk on maybes when that’s not the biggest problem we have with society at all. Not even in the top 10 if you ask me.

It’s funny that people can understand every person having a lump of gold won’t improve their standard of living, but at the same time refuse to understand that owning a piece of a factory or a company they work at also does not directly change the standard of living. Reducing the fraction of the factory output that goes to the owners instead of the workers could. This can be done directly with raising the minimum wage or indirectly via taxes. But in the end, even the most pessimistic calculation I was able to make on how much the owners take was only about 50% of the output. Probably more like 30%.

So the billionaires owning too much is IMO a distraction. Pushing politicians to implement policies that would improve quality of life would have much bigger impact on peoples lives. Consumer protections, walkable cities, good public healthcare, social safety nets, better education, reforming how stock market works, … And it does not involve the massive risks of trying to switch to a differwnt economic model that always collapsed before.

Perhaps it’s the modern obsession with fairness. People don’t want to even consider that in reality they may have better quality of life in an unfair system (where billionaire kids get everything on silver platter) than in a fair system. Because in reality, system change, fending off corruption, laziness, authoritarianism, etc. have large costs.

Well, I wouldn’t say unreliable. It does not match the real dislike count, because it only knows about the people using the extension. It’s like the difference between the official rating of an app on the google play store and some third party user review site. It’s not that one is more reliable than other, just different people contribute.

This is literally then one case where the slowness of the courts could have worked for the people. Even if the town lost after years of litigation, so what. They would have moved it elsewhere in the meantime. But someone got bribed to drop the lawsuit.

People act as if it was a bug and not a feature. This was intended. After people sufficiently make fun of the current solution that everyone knows how easily it is broken, the next step is requiring both ID and face scan and comparing photo on ID with face scan. Congrats, privacy is removed completely. Every poster is now tied with real life identity.

Yes, it’s a dumb idea. I imagine the idea is that you can tell if an email is from a government domain or not.

You seem surprised that this is how losing trust works. If people don’t trust you will keep your promises, then it doesn’t matter what you promise them.

That being said, there are thing they can do that are not just virtue signalling.

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Assuming you mean publicly, no argument with that.

But the goal is to reduce consumption, and it will work.

Yes, but the black market has serious sides effects. You have to compare the disadvantages of allowing people who want to smoke to smoke, damaging their own health vs the black market funding cartels, mafias, and/or other criminals, causing problems for everyone.

Taking your own stuff back without giving the bloodsuckers (lawyers) their tribute.

It definitely happens all the time with houses and apartments (kicking out squatters/trespassers), but I think I also read it in regards to taking back your own car or something like that. It was a long time ago so I don’t remember the details.

I think it was that the owner called the cops, those did nothing because thief claimed it is his (despite owner being the registered owner). Owner was told to sue the thief so that judge decides who is telling the truth. So owner took the car later and got arrested.