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[thompson]

And yet, mathematically speaking, 10^40 years is indeed infinitely closer to zero than to infinity, because math is bullshit and doesn't actually have much to do with this conversation~

Not if you're working with a log scale.

Smart-assery aside, I'd like to throw my support behind the idea of a public dividend, where everyone is given some fixed share of total output. Doesn't need to be enough for someone to live on, just supplementing wages and other welfare programs would be fine. You would then have a mechanism to progressively "socialize" the economy over time by increasing the tax rate that funds the dividend. I'd also suggest making the tax that funds the dividend progressive so that it mostly taxes the sorts of people who get a lot of money via dividends or capital gains. Abolishing capital gains tax discounts would also be good in my view.

I don't agree with the idea of making all basic essentials free. Imposing some price on, say, water, electricity and bread does encourage people to conserve them. So long as people have enough income to afford them, that should be sufficient. Most (every?) capitalist countries provides some services for "free" to the public as well, such as police, public parks, education and health. These sorts of services don't need conservation, so making them freely available makes sense. Public housing too, for that matter.

[Red Diamond]

I don't agree with the idea of making all basic essentials free. Imposing some price on, say, water, electricity and bread does encourage people to conserve them. So long as people have enough income to afford them, that should be sufficient. Most (every?) capitalist countries provides some services for "free" to the public as well, such as police, public parks, education and health. These sorts of services don't need conservation, so making them freely available makes sense. Public housing too, for that matter.

Rationing those things carries out the same function and works better. 

[scriver]

Why not both? Everyone gets done free allotted. If you want more you can pay.

[Red Diamond]

Why not both? Everyone gets done free allotted. If you want more you can pay.

Because then people pay.  If enough people pay the culture shifts so that consuming of the given good becomes normal, such that it is becomes 'impossible' for people to actually subsist on their rations.

The problem is that human needs are actually subjective and culturally determined rather than truly objective. 

[Reelya]

I don't agree with the idea of making all basic essentials free. Imposing some price on, say, water, electricity and bread does encourage people to conserve them. So long as people have enough income to afford them, that should be sufficient. Most (every?) capitalist countries provides some services for "free" to the public as well, such as police, public parks, education and health. These sorts of services don't need conservation, so making them freely available makes sense. Public housing too, for that matter.

Rationing those things carries out the same function and works better.

Just having UBI and pricing works even better. The problem with rationing on a per-item basis is that some people will want more, some people will want less than the rations you're handing out, then they're going to have barter to even things out. And someone will definitely see that as something to exploit: rations aren't going to 100% match anyone's preferred level of consumption of anything, so a new class of people will emerge who facilitate ration-swapping, getting rich in the process. It will be a huge inefficiency in the system and the outlet to fix that will be skimming and corruption.

Also, if you ration KWh per person, then are KWh credits going to roll over at the end of the month, or is it going to be a use it or lose it thing? They can discourage additional conservation efforts. And what happens if you exceed your monthly electricity or water ration? Do they just suddenly cut you off until the start of the next month?

Rather than being wrong, you just haven't thought this stuff through in the first place. Don't just say "rationing works better" come back with an actual proposal in detail and show how and why that works, because clearly the thing we call "rationing" doesn't in fact magically work better for resource allocation. It only works in the situation where scarcity is such that you know that what you're rationing out will all get used, hence why it worked well during the wartime shortages. You'd get like 2 strips of bacon and a sausage each week and a pound of rice per person. It's hard to have waste when that's you're entire weekly food.

[Max™]

And yet, mathematically speaking, 10^40 years is indeed infinitely closer to zero than to infinity, because math is bullshit and doesn't actually have much to do with this conversation~

That's only timewise before we have to worry about matter falling apart, low end, assuming we can't change that, and assuming we can't get anything worthwhile done in a steadystate looping sort of universe evolution, again, I'm well aware of how infinity works, and chose my words deliberately. Scarcity is nonsense forced on us by capitalism in every case except if you're arguing in favor of natural beauty preservation because it is a unique thing that we can't just replicate or restore right now.

[MrRoboto75]

I hate how capitalism has killed dating.  Its all done through online apps, which all the major ones are owned by a single company now (match.com).  These apps basically benefit nobody, woman drown in attention and choices while men beg for vague recognition.  Meanwhile you have a rent seeker profiteering on loneliness, and frankly has no interest in actually creating relationships out of fear of losing customers.  Its all misinformation and carrot stick leading to try and get subscribers.

Meanwhile dating culture is utterly degenerate with constant seeking of perfection.  With so many options there's literally no reason to settle.  It feels like yet another job search with your profile being a resume that someone has to filter out of hundreds.  Assuming it even gets read at all.

At this point I'd rather give up entirely.  Average won't cut it anymore, and I'm below average anyway.  Nobody wants an autist.

[martinuzz]

I refuse to enter the world of dating apps.  And no, it's not come to the point yet where that is the only means of dating... Or well, with all pubs and venues closed for corona, maybe it is right now, but that won't last forever.
And being an autist does not disqualify you from the love market, have faith.

[MrRoboto75]

And no, it's not come to the point yet where that is the only means of dating

Yeah, and I can just walk into an office and ask for a job.  Oh wait, you apply online.

[Reelya]

Half the reason that you apply online is that they need a paper trail to ensure they're complying with all the rules about fair employment. And those are due to worker protections. Companies need to ensure it's done with a paper trail or you can sue them claiming discrimination. This is not due to capitalism. You get the same but worse applying for government jobs.

I also think the problems with dating go deeper than the dating apps themselves. Dating was already broken, and nay sayers on both sides of the gender divide have recognized for a long time. The MGTOW people for example, you get some misogynists, but the core legitimate complaint there is that "traditional" dating expectations are hopelessly broken in the modern dating scene. You know the whole "man provider" thing. The healthiest move is that you don't play the "game" in the first place. If you meet someone and hit it off, great, but if you do the whole "i gotta get a relationship" thing then you're just going to drive yourself crazy and get into all these unhealthy scenes. To get ahead in those scenes you need to play a role, usually the "man provider" role, You're going to be dating girls who probably make more income than you but they expect you to pay for dinner and plan the whole date out, and that's basically bullshit. And why do they expect that? Because they can, because it's a buyers market. And not just on the apps, anywhere where there's an expectation to meet people for this. The whole thing is decidedly fake, and you'd have to basically put on a fake persona to make it work, and you just can't keep that up.

Taking the view out to a broader perspective, "dating" as we know it is a very modern invention. It's not like there was some heyday when dating worked, because before the post-war period there really wasn't any such thing. Really it's just a modern affectation that people have cobbled together as a patchwork series of social conventions to fill a void left over from no longer having most of this arranged for us. It's the double-edged sword of having freedom and choice. Relationships are a free market now, regardless of capitalism or any other system, and that means some people of both genders are going to get a raw deal, and they're likely to be vocal about it. And the lesson there is to focus on yourself first and foremost, and make you a better you: not for the purposes dating, but for you alone; better dating prospects may arise from that, but don't focus on them. Imagine an auction and the price is your blood, and that's what being desperate in the dating game is like. The answer is to not get involved in the auction in the first place. Anyway, relationships are fairly overrated and often a clusterfuck you can't get out of. Pick and choose them carefully. They're not the magic rose-colored thing that's going to make you happy, and this goes back to those unrealistic traditional expectations. So even if you get on these apps and get a date or even a girlfriend, the euphoria may be short lived, then you gotta rinse and repeat to maintain the same feeling. This is why some people are serial daters, because they're addicted to that first few weeks of a relationship.

[MrRoboto75]

Anyway, relationships are fairly overrated and often a clusterfuck you can't get out of. Pick and choose them carefully. They're not the magic rose-colored thing that's going to make you happy, and this goes back to those unrealistic traditional expectations.

I swear, people stomp and kill every dream and aspiration I have.  What am I supposed to do with life other than waste time and space.

[Reelya]

Trust me, you can actually be more miserable in a relationship than without one. But as a word of advice, if you have geeky hobbies at least get a girlfriend who has some geekier hobbies than you do. Girls who are very mainstream in their interests may actually decide that your hobbies are something that need to be stomped out of you, in an effort to turn you into a bland ideal doormat. This is mainly where the "man cave" thing comes from. No matter how it's couched, single guys have that stuff in the lounge room and/or bedroom, but once you're hooked in a relationship you're basically forced to keep that stuff only in a designated room.

To protect their fragile egos, men in these situations agree on the fiction that their entire personality being constrained to the "man cave" was somehow by choice. But even then, there is a lot of negativity targeted from the woman to the guy's man-cave. How dare he have a room with his stuff in it, how arrogant is that? We better mock him for holding onto that stuff, it's so childish to have a room full of stuff you like. Really the goal there is to snuff out that stuff completely, it's also where the whole emotional blackmail "you love that computer/game/motorcycle/etc more than me!" thing comes from: they forced you to constrain everything interesting about you to a specific room, now they're apparently baffled as to why you spend your time in that room. The real goal here is the irrational belief that if they get rid of all your hobbies, that pleasing them will become your hobby. I'm assuming they have some sort of emotional abandonment issues or something, but this approach of trying to control someone just makes it worse in a vicious cycle. As a guy this is a specifically common type of live-hand-grenade-with-the-pin-removed type of relationship that you might end up with in the dating scene.

Anyway, relationships are fairly overrated and often a clusterfuck you can't get out of. Pick and choose them carefully. They're not the magic rose-colored thing that's going to make you happy, and this goes back to those unrealistic traditional expectations.

I swear, people stomp and kill every dream and aspiration I have.  What am I supposed to do with life other than waste time and space.

Yeah sorry about that but I'm just pointing out that getting a relationship isn't some kind of fix-all thing that people seem to think it is. You'll still have the same existential questions with or without one. If you want more purpose, get a pet or a hobby or volunteer.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Please, for the sake of all that is half-off with Amazon Prime, stop posting MGTOW apologetics in the Late Stage Capitalism thread. Even if there was anything to that it's wildly off topic. People's collective behavioral response to living in the hell of capitalism is one thing, but this ain't it.

[Reelya]

I don't agree. As for relevance, generally this is seen as the most important relationship in a person's life and it's changed radically over the last 40 years, so saying it's not relevant to discuss this in a discussion about how the evolution of capitalist system has affected people's lives seems like a fairly major omission. If I wrote something about how modern relationships for women suck, would you have had the same complaint about it being irrelevant to the discussion, or would you have lauded that as another piece of evidence of why the capitalist system sucks?

BTW that thing about modern relationships sucking does go equally for women as well as men, i just wrote that from my own experience, it's not my place to comment or have an opinion on what women go through, because how could i? that's not my lived experience so it's up to women to speak for their experiences themselves, then it's our job to take that at face value. Plenty of women write about how women don't need a relationship to be happy or about how the whole dating scene for women sucks. I'm just writing the same thing. It is possible for the dating scene to just generally suck for both genders, but you can still do an analysis from your own gender for the specific types of toxicity each gender faces, which are different. Things are falling apart for both men and women, to the point where a lot of men (and women) just don't want to settle with anyone or have kids. That would seem to be a relevant point to bring up that's specifically caused by capitalism. And it's likely that if the ultimate cause of this is the system, that's not going to be apparent to the individuals involved, is it? The individual involved interacts only with the other individuals, so the proximate cause of women's distress would be men, and the proximate cause of men's distress would be women, so that's what people complain about, and those complaints are legitimate, yet ultimately it's the collapse of the system that's to blame, not the individuals.

(and I haven't read any MGTOW sources so I have literally no idea what they talk about. If i read about anything gender or feminism-related my sources are huffpost, guardian and the independent, those are the ones I read to see what's being talked about. What I've written here is from personal experience and people I know, or from mainstream media sources, not any mgtow sources. I wouldn't even know what dark corners of the web to find that stuff. Hell I don't even go on Reddit or Facebook).

As for an alternative system can you actually outline some specifics what sort of system you'd actually want? I'm guessing it goes further than the Nordic Model. just saying capitalism sucks and you want socialism isn't actually that enlightening, and if you're not more specific then you can basically argue against anything without actually putting your money down on the table. The pros and cons of any system can be critiqued on their merits so I'd like to hear more about that.

[scriver]

I'm actually very sad and upset about the Swedish Relationship Model dying and being replaced by the American Dating Model. It used to be that you just met people through friends and hung out it you liked each other. It seems so much more natural and less... what's the word for these people that used to follow fiancés around in the 19th century to make sure nothing fun went on -- make an adjective out of that word. Less that. Nowadays it seems you basically have to arrange a relationship before you even meet as if it was done kind of business deal. Capitalism and American prudishness gone mad, I tell you!