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I think this question is for people familiar with economics (I am not) but I welcome amateur speculation :) I was reading a book about a commune. In general everyone was expected to do 40 hrs work a week, and they just picked the tasks they liked and everything worked out fine, except that nobody wanted to wash dishes. It was designated "hard to fill" and *everybody* was required to do it on a rotating basis. I am an anticapitalist but I can also understand that an "ideal" "free" "market" is a tool for collectively assigning value to things. I wondered about a different sort of system where instead of tracking time, everyone was expected to do tasks worth a certain number of points. Maybe it would be possible to use some kind of "market" to assign value to the tasks! ... but then the confusing thing is that jobs that are traditionally considered "low status" (dishwashing, anything mundane or gross) would end up with high "compensation" through points. Something feels backwards and I don't know enough about economics to understand what it is. thoughts?

>but then the confusing thing is that jobs that are traditionally considered "low status" would end up with high "compensation" through points. The point you're missing is that anybody can wash the dishes, so as soon as a reward is offered sufficient to get someone to do it, then you no longer need to increase the reward. Has to be compensated enough to be better than twiddling your thumbs, but can be nearly the lowest paying job around. More expensive jobs generally you can't just get anybody to do, so you're bidding against your competitors to try to entice rare capable individuals to work for you and not the other guy.

>>71943 >an "ideal" "free" "market" is a tool for collectively assigning value to things. That's incorrect. The free market view is that value is subjective. One person spends $100 on car parts another spends $100 on figures. It's not that the car parts and figurines have the same "value". The car parts are worthless to the figurine guy and vice versa. Prices are a way of measuring how much people want certain products in general if that's what you mean. But price is not the value. >do tasks worth a certain number of points The problem with this approach is that a central planner have no objective to know how many points to allocate to which task. All they can do is guess what other people want and/or project their own preferences. Look up the calculation problem for the full argument. >Maybe it would be possible to use some kind of "market" to assign value to the tasks! The problem with the commune is not that nobody wants to do the dishes the problem is nobody owns the dishes. In a market oriented economy somebody will have done work to create the dishes or buy them. That person, the owner, will want them clean when they are dirty. They will either clean it themselves or pay somebody else to do it. You can really start with a world of collectivized ownership and then add market principles.

>>71944 ahhhhhh, most collective-type situations I've been in, everyone was pretty much capable of every task and so the only variation was how much each individual desired each particular task. I think this is what I was missing

>>71944 >as soon as a reward is offered sufficient to get someone to do it, then you no longer need to increase the reward. Has to be compensated enough to be better than twiddling your thumbs What constitutes a "reward" in a community with no property rights? And where does the reward come from? How do you motives the commune members to contribute towards the reward when you can't even motivate them to wash dishes? >>71943 >capitalism: you wash the dishes, the ones who own them profit What a bad faith strawman. If the worker didn't profit from washing the dishes why would he do it. If your boss stopped paying you you wouldn't keep going to work.

>>71946 I appreciate the thought you put into this response, and I think maybe you are missing my point a little bit. Mainly, I'm not starting with a "world" of collectivized ownership. I'm talking about communities of self-selected people who are willing to actively reject the tragedy of the commons by caring for common property, while also accepting that the commune exists in a larger context of capitalism. You're right that there is some "central planning" in that a collective can decide the sum total of what it wants to accomplish together, on a small enough scale that each person has a sense that their democratic input is meaningful. But I have a hunch that the assignment of the actual tasks can be a little more market-y and based on individual preferences. I'm not trying to pick and choose the best parts of capitalism and socialism and make them work. I'm recognizing that if individuals freely exchange "tasks" for "points" then surely some microeconomic principles will help me understand the consequences - that's all

>>71949 > I'm talking about communities of self-selected people who are willing to actively reject the tragedy of the commons by caring for common property Dude your dish washing problem is a tragedy of the commons.

>>71948 I'm a little confused by this. I share a kitchen with housemates - I don't own the kitchen but I'm "rewarded" when it's clean and pleasant to use, so I cooperate with my housemates and we keep it in good shape. I don't own the street I live on but if I go out and pick up trash, my neighbors see me do it and thank me - I am rewarded with social capital and by the labor they are inspired to do in the future to make our block nice to live on. Are you never motivated by sharing, and building community, doing things together with your friends and peers knowing that the sum is better than the parts? ... it's OK if you aren't, it takes all types. Just don't try to join my commune :)

>>71951 >but I do all these things for free I'm guessing you're a student and you don't mind doing those things because your time is worthless. So you're not actually sacrificing anything. If anything these chores are an excuse to procrastinate from studying. >I'm "rewarded" when it's clean and pleasant to use If that was true then OP's situation wouldn't exist. It would be cool if he shared what book it was from.

>>71951 >my commune How does that one work. If you don't believe in property rights how can you stop me making use the things inside "your" commune?

OP here. omg why do you all have to make this so complicated?? The book was "Dishwasher: One Man's Quest to Wash Dishes in All Fifty States" which to be honest was a bit of a disappointment. The author settles into dishwashing because it allows him to compulsively quit jobs, and barely makes it to 2/3 of the states before becoming disappointed in his own inability to build anything meaningful in his life. Not to knock his life, it just doesn't make for very satisfying reading. He doesn't specifically name the commune that struggles with dishes but it's definitely East Wind in Missouri. If you have a local hippie co-op grocery store you can probably get their nut butters there. I am not a communist and I am making zero claims about property rights. At the same time, I *have* lived in a number of very functional intentional communities, that each share an agreed upon number of things in common. Each of these communities takes a different approach and has its own strengths and struggles. All of them provided me more access to resources with less money and labor than I would have had living in a 1 bedroom apartment by myself. I am not interested in learning that communities like this are difficult or even impossible. To be clear: These communities accept that they exist within the broader context of capitalism. Surely East Wind buys their dishes from someplace, and they *definitely* sell their almond butter for money. I am not talking about alternate economic systems - I'm talking about groups of people deciding that they want to try something unusual together, on a small scale. Again, I *know* that this can work because I have seen it first hand over and over. I *am* interested in considering new techniques for intentional communities. I am interested in what patterns emerge from a number of people making their own decisions. Now with all of this context... Imagine a number of people *who have their own personal belongings, and are not challenging the concept of property, but have freely and explicitly agreed to share a number of things in common* trying to determine who will do which chores. We have already enumerated the chores and everyone involved has agreed that they will do a certain amount of labor. I thought that perhaps there would be a way to assign "points" to tasks so that people would be able to freely trade tasks/points/etc. and I thought that perhaps there would be some kind of emergent behavior from this that existing microeconomics concepts could explain. I also noticed some surprising results - namely that dishwashing would be highly compensated in such a system. I'm not reaching a breaking point in a system that is ultimately doomed. I *am* inviting speculation and thoughts and input about how to comprehend human behavior and design interesting systems.

>>71954 >OP here. omg why do you all have to make this so complicated?? Because we can't read your mind and your language is very ambiguous. >I thought that perhaps there would be a way to assign "points" to tasks so that people would be able to freely trade tasks/points/etc. Where do the points come from, how do you prevent counterfeiting? Who decides how many points each chore is worth? What do you use the points for, why are they worth collecting?

>>71943 >People are required to do a number of hour, not an quantity of production This is how you get a productivity as low as humanly possible. Tell the same people to be at their workplace until X is done and it will be done ASAP. Sorry but you simply can't ignore how the human mind work, how workers are motivated and live a good life. Cutting wood is hard. It's tiresome, it's dangerous and it make the back hurt. Tell me to produce one cubic meter of firelog every week and it will be done in 4 hours. Now we can all have a lot of spare time or you get used to the wealth and you give everyone something else to do as well. Tell me to be "cutting wood" 40 hours a week and you won't get half that done. And then everyone live in poverty. >I wondered about a different sort of system where instead of tracking time, everyone was expected to do tasks worth a certain number of points. Maybe it would be possible to use some kind of "market" to assign value to the tasks! And what if someone want to a better life and to work more for more points? What if someone is fine with having less from the commune but want to enjoy more time? Hey, how about you do this task for me and I give you that number of point? Or if you need a lot of points now, I can give them to you and you will give me a bit more points latter. And what if we had a central point agency that would create points and then lend them to point banks who in turn lend them to everyone? There is a reason Karl and the others insist that salary must be independent from work. >... but then the confusing thing is that jobs that are traditionally considered "low status" (dishwashing, anything mundane or gross) would end up with high "compensation" through points. Which is perfectly normal and it's how every sane system work. If a job is hard/unpleasant, then to fill it you need to reward more the people considering doing it. Ho, God, your picture. >Libertarianism is when it's illegal for you to work for the boss that pay you the most and it's illegal to open your own kitchen as well. >Fascism is when we deport the Mexicans and there is a conscription. >Unemployment as a political stance >Marxism is vanguard communism, and it's not communism Now be serious please.

>>71949 >Mainly, I'm not starting with a "world" of collectivized ownership. I'm talking about communities of self-selected people who are willing to actively reject the tragedy of the commons by caring for common property, while also accepting that the commune exists in a larger context of capitalism. Yeah, don't you find strange how all communes are made in countries with a strong social net and how young everyone is in there? As soon as the easiest years of their life are gone, they are happy to jump back to the pension and healthcare society. When they don't aready all collect unemployment and use the free money to import things from the evil society they hate so much, that's is. Hypocrites, that's what they are. The only honest communes I know are monasteries. In some, the monks don't even own the clothes they wear and they elect the leader of the monastery, who despite being elected at the majority is expected to be fair to everyone. The small scale examples show you what s the purpose of religion in a social structure. >>71954 >If you have a local hippie co-op grocery store you can probably get their nut butters there. They sure seem to hate capitalism. Hypocrites, that's what they are. The entire operation is a company in a capitalistic world. >Now with all of this context... Imagine a number of people *who have their own personal belongings, and are not challenging the concept of property, but have freely and explicitly agreed to share a number of things in common* trying to determine who will do which chores. We have already enumerated the chores and everyone involved has agreed that they will do a certain amount of labor. Then share a place with housemates and brand that as a commune.

implicitly these are also exclusive groups that force people to remain out and afford certain rights to those who are in, its not borderless propertyless hypercommunism. cant you people just entertain some thought experiments. OP ultimately you're trying to create a currency is what it sounds like, and maybe an internal task market. Of course you already have a natural market one would assume, or if I'm your housemate and I offer you 200 bux to clean the kitchen wouldn't you do it? Maybe you create a system with a quantity of points, housemate can offer some number of his points to offer a task to be completed (200pts to whomever cleans the kitchen within 24 hours), people can add their bids to existing bids, and whomever completes the task gets the points and can then bid on other things they personally want. Some background point equalizing system could prevent people from amassing all the points and just sitting on them, or other such unwanted effects. of course people could just ignore this lol but if everyone buys in at the beginning points will have value and be useful. It could be tied into tasks which cost real money as well, so you'd include things like buying common supplies that the group needs.

>>71957 >This is how you get a productivity as low as humanly possible. Tell the same people to be at their workplace until X is done and it will be done ASAP. You are destroying the illusion that everybody's labor is equal though. Bob will take 1 hour to make X amount of firewood and Alice will take 10 hours. Alice complains because it's "unfair" she has to work 10x as long. I expect the people who hate "capitalism" and join a commune care much more about "fairness" than efficiency. >>71959 >cant you people just entertain some thought experiments. Yes I know guys just stop being like so rational and stuff and just like have faith that it will work out somehow lol. >housemate can offer some number of his points to offer a task to be completed You need to think about where the points come from in the first place. Why can't someone just give himself 10000000 points and then pay everyone else to do all the chores? Literally our current financial system. >>71958 >They sure seem to hate capitalism. Hypocrites, that's what they are. The entire operation is a company in a capitalistic world. I'm sure in their mind they are exploiting capitalism to build communism. I wouldn't knock them for that. They are definitely in denial about the fact that capitalism is the only reason their commune is livable though.

>>71960 >Yes I know guys just stop being like so rational and stuff you're not being rational you're being cynical to the point of stupidity. assume a carefully selected group of idk 10-20 reasonably clever and well intentioned people. Lol maybe this isn't what the average commune is made of but you can assume a system where obvious exploiters and unwanted individuals get exiled and those who are allowed to participate want to and are willing to entertain the somewhat silly experiment system. And if anyone of them wants to kill all the others and steal all the points in principal he probably can do that. good for him lol. >whatabout the guy whu gibs himself 6 gorillion points m8 whatabout him huh huh huh???!!?? Well, assuming a reasonably well intentioned handful of people everyone just basically cooperates and this doesn't happen lol. Or when someone gives himself 100k points you throw him out, or laugh because its obviously a joke. The system I proposed doesn't need any new points ever to be created, so if fraud occurs at a scale capable of effecting the system it will be obvious to everyone immediately. Bigger worry honestly is 'how do we determine the kitchen has been cleaned, and what happens if someone cooks in it immediately after and leaves a mess?'.

>>71964 >just assume everyone is altruistic and won't try to scam each other Don't forget the problem you are trying to solve is that nobody wants to do the dishes.

>>71964 >you're not being rational you're being cynical to the point of stupidity. I'm just trying to understand how your proposed system works. Let's walk through it >alice and bob are in the commune >alice and bob don't want to do the dishes >alice can pay bob 100 points to do the dishes Question: where does alice get the 100 points from to give to bob?

>>71967 thats a problem of inefficient cooperation, scamming is a problem of defection.

>>71970 >just pretend the problem shouldn't exist then we don't have to solve it This thread is a good illustration of how communists think. None of you could design a simple specification of how this points system might work. I appreciate not everyone who comes to a tech oriented chan is a programmer but holy soykaf. If you're going to pay somebody points where do the points come from? This is kindergarten level problem solving. All you can do is make general statements about what you want the end result to be, nothing about how to actually get there.

>>71969 >question: where does allice get the 100 points Suppose at the beginning everyone gets say 10k points. You have order of 20 people, so lets say 200k points total. Suppose Alice and Bob want the dishes to be done, they bid 100 points each for someone to do the dishes. Charlie does the dishes and gets the 200 points, now charlie has 10.2k vs bob and alice's 9.9k each Obviously if charlie doesn't want anything and is happy to do the dishes its possible after a few months he gets all the points for himself and kills the market (if charlie would be doing the dishes anyway, maybe alice and bob shouldn't be paying him though). Ideally he finds something he wants and pays the others to drive him around places or something, cook him fancy meals or something. Its kinda silly but that's how fake money is, but if everyone buys into it and its possible to buy desiered things with it maybe it works.

>>71972 glitterboy the points are obviously money and the specification is for an internal market, its absurd to call it communism or people advocating for it communists. As with all currencies its neccisary for the 'points' to be relatively scarce. If the market is small enough someone making points from thin air will be obvious, because anything big enough to benefit them changes the balance of the market very visibly. Of course any such system is exploitable by people who are willing/able to counterfeit points, and if the system is to be practical and useful those people need to be punished. could even just use an existing system like cash, but that may upset the balance of the group in ways that someone like OP doesn't especially want. Anyway, if the points are used they'll end up having an effective cash value, bids could even be on things like 'do my 200dollar budget grocery shopping for me'. Of course no one will do it unless the points offered are worth it.

>>71973 >Suppose at the beginning everyone gets points ok >alice and bob both start off with 1000 points >alice can pay bob 100 points to do the dishes The next question is why should bob accept? The only thing the points are good for is getting out of chores and washing the dishes is the only chore nobody wants to do. >Ideally he finds something he wants and pays the others to drive him around places or something, cook him fancy meals or something. If the points are now tradable for anything then alice can give blowjobs in lieu of doing chores. I guess the next question is is it still a commune? Because the person(s) with the highest valued skills will end up accumulating more points than the others and your ancom egalitarian fantasy is ruined. It's double ruined if they decide they want to trade points for goods as well as services. >>71974 >currency needs to be scarce Good epiphany. I'm asking how you make the points scarce. It's not that there's no answer we just need a answer. Everyone starting off with a fixed number of points is one way of doing it. But if there is no way to mint new points then that is effectively ultra hard money and >>71973 has just re-invented anarcho-capitalism with extra steps.

>>71975 >The next question is why should bob accept? this is an obvious problem that I've attempted to discussz in several points see >>71974 >anyway, if the points are used they'll end up having an effective cash value, bids could even be on things like 'do my 200dollar budget grocery shopping for me' I do think its inevitable that if the points are worth enough to be useful, they will have a practical cash value. If I'm going out of town and want a ride to the airport, I might bid for someone to drive me, and that'll compete with the cost of i.e. a cab fare and price of gas/time etc. no way to avoid this imho. >If the points are now tradable for anything then alice can give blowjobs in lieu of doing chores. Yes thats a direction it might go in. >I guess the next question is is it still a commune? idk I'm not OP Im just spitballing and I don't care for communism much lol. OP is this a commune still ? >Because the person(s) with the highest valued skills will end up accumulating more points than the others and your ancom egalitarian fantasy is ruined. Ehh, obviously if bob has 99% of the points then the practical value of new points for bob drops, he probably stops chasing them unless they can get him something he wants. Ideally you have everyone using the system and everyone has things they want done and don't want to do. Bob can't give himself a blowjob, afterall. We could also invent something that I just made up I'm going to call it 'Ballooning', wherein say everyone gets a new 500 points each month from the local point printer to keep people from totally loosing out. This might long term make the value of points drop, but that doesn't really matter because its made up anyway. >It's double ruined if they decide they want to trade points for goods as well as services. points are a representation of value. goods have value as well as services. idk why youd want to restrict it only to services, unless you don't beleive in property. Even if you don't beleive in private property you might put out a bid of 'put a gallon of milk in the common fridge'. Of course what if it gets drunken before the bidder gets back home from work lol.

>>71976 >Of course what if it gets drunken before the bidder gets back home from work lol. a solution could be to make bids more specific: bob bids 200 points for there to be a gallon of milk in the fridge this evening at 6:30 when he plans to get home. Alice accepts the bid and guarantees that there will be a gallon there at the specified time. I call this a 'forepurchase'; bob has effectived bought a gallon of milk from alice at the designated future time and place. There might already be a gallon in the fridge so alice thinks she can get something for nothing, but chuck might want to thwart alice by going and drinking it at 6:15. If Alice is sufficiently well endowed she'll see to it that there's a gallon there at the appointed time anyway, and of course there'd have to be some sort of consequence for failing to fufill the contract if she doesn't.

How to learn basics of economics if you don't even properly know what capitalism really is?

OP, in my family everyone who doesn't cook dinner helps to wash the dishes. I imagine if my family was much larger we would simply split into small groups that alternate doing dish duty. A lot of people ITT seem to be focusing a lot on abstract incentives like money but that only makes sense when you have people that must cooperate but don't have strong social ties. In tightly knit small group situations social pressure and the desire to be seen as helpful and competent are enough. Literally millions of households have figured out equitable ways to get the dishes washed with little fuss and no money or pseudomoney changing hands. >>71948 >What constitutes a "reward" in a community with no property rights? The esteem of your peers and/or the ability to point out that you've been washing the dishes, so you shouldn't have to do some other disagreeable task. That on top of the innate reward that you don't have dirty dishes piling up. >>71952 >I'm guessing you're a student and you don't mind doing those things because your time is worthless. So you're not actually sacrificing anything. Mate most people wash their dishes and sweep their floor for their whole lives, even people who could easily hire a maid to do it for them. >If that was true then OP's situation wouldn't exist OP's situation occurred because people only did "what they feel like". I personally don't mind doing dishes but I could imagine a group of ten people all of whom don't like doing the dishes. In that case you need some agreed-upon rule for who does them. >>71953 Same way you can refer to "my family" without implying that you can do the following things associated with property: -control access to it -buy/sell it

>>71976 >they will have a practical cash value >no way to avoid this imho It depends how strict and isolated the commune is. It could be run like a cult where only a trusted person is allowed to handle cash and go outside. >idk I'm not OP I think it's important to understand what OP is trying to achieve by having a commune in the first place. Otherwise this thread is just "fuarrrk the commune and do capitalism instead lol". >idk why youd want to restrict it only to services, unless you don't beleive in property. You can't get much more than a gimped version of capitalism without property. Marxists know that which is why destroying property rights is the first thing they try to do. >say everyone gets a new 500 points each month from the local point printer to keep people from totally loosing out That's called Universal Basic Income. >This might long term make the value of points drop, but that doesn't really matter because its made up anyway. That's called inflation. It does matter because it inhibits people's ability to save. If the points you have are going to be worth less in one month then you are incentivized to spend them now instead of holding on to them. This spawns a lot of short term thinking and impulsive behavior within the population. (Which is also kind of what you want if you're trying to undermine capitalism.)

>>71960 >You are destroying the illusion that everybody's labor is equal though. If your economical/social/political system is based on an illusion, you end with a famine. >Bob will take 1 hour to make X amount of firewood and Alice will take 10 hours. Then Bob go cut the wood, a thing he do 10 time faster than Alice and Alice cook thenext meal, something she does a lot better than Bob. Do you seriously think we are all clones or robots or something?

>... but then the confusing thing is that jobs that are traditionally considered "low status" (dishwashing, anything mundane or gross) would end up with high "compensation" through points. Something feels backwards and I don't know enough about economics to understand what it is. Those jobs are 'low status' because you're dealing with other peoples' mess. Imagine it's 2023 BC and I've asked you, a stranger, to wash my toilet. Why would you do it unless you were really desperate? That's slave work. 3800 years or so of slavery and 200 years or so of less slavery later and we still view tasks that would traditionally be done by slaves as 'lower', even when they are the most important or involve a great deal of skill.

>>71978 If this is a real question and not commentary then I would love to suggest a libgen search for "krugman microeconomics"!

>>71979 >Mate most people wash their dishes and sweep their floor for their whole lives Yes people wash their own dishes. Not other people's. That was a weird deflection. Man is your worldview going to change when you graduate and actually start working for a living. >>71982 >Then Bob go cut the wood, a thing he do 10 time faster than Alice and Alice cook thenext meal What if bob doesn't want to cut wood because it's actually hard work. How much cooking does alice have to do make up for bob's wood? Who decides what the ratios are? At least just pretending that 1hour == 1hour they sidestep many of those problems. >>71983 >Why would you do it unless you were really desperate? Desperate for what? If you pay $1m you'll get plenty of people who will lick it clean. This is why trying to do economics without prices doesn't work.

>>71981 >That's called inflation. No its called ballooning I just made it up cant you keep up? >It does matter because it inhibits people's ability to save this is a funnymunny token system designed to incentiveize shortterm goals like cleaning the kitchen. if you want to save, use something real. >Which is also kind of what you want if you're trying to undermine capitalism. capitalism is about investing/stock trading/joint ownership soykaf, not free market like this is. >That's called Universal Basic Income. think about it as a wealth redistribution plan. >it could be run like a cult where only a trusted person is allowed to handle cash and go outside. that's maybe true, but that changes the dynamic a great deal from what I think I and OP are contemplating. Of course if your people have access to cash maybe its worth wondering why they don't just use that instead of tokens. Having an internal system which you fully control does give a different dynamic than cash and I think a system can be made up that's better for getting the dishes clean. Or the house could just hire a maid lol.

>>71943 >Maybe it would be possible to use some kind of "market" to assign value to the tasks! To address unresolved problems with positive-value points systems people are talking about, what about this idea for a negative-value futures system: At the start of each quarter year, everyone starts out with evenly distributed tokens representing specific obligations for every task that needs to be done, so like 100 each of DishCoin, FirewoodCoin, LaundryCoin. Then they can freely trade these semi-anonymously (for other tokens), maybe via some simplified automated market maker system through an app or website or something. As you do tasks you burn tokens. If you're left with tokens at the end of the quarter you are reprimanded somehow. If you have negative tokens you could get some symbolic reward. Using the AMM to indirectly arrange trades for cash or sexual favors would be complicated and impractical to begin with, combine that with an explicit prohibition and it probably wouldn't happen at all. If it turns out more of a particular type of work needs to be done, more tokens can be minted and distributed as needed. >>71981 >That's called Universal Basic Income. It's a good idea because it presents a solution to the problem with undesirable labor also being paid badly. If people can always afford basic needs regardless of the work they do, unpleasant jobs will need to pay enough that the reward makes it actually worth doing, rather than effectively a gun to the head type situation.

>>71986 >Desperate for what? Food, shelter, etc. > If you pay $1m you'll get plenty of people who will lick it clean Yes, there are plenty of desperate people. I have $10 or so to my name and you couldn't pay me enough money to lick your soykaf, because I have a reasonable expectation that I will have enough in the future.

OP again here. I am delighted that this has sparked so much conversation In my personal experience these types of groups find it necessary to (reluctantly) expel members from time to time when they don't uphold agreements. I have lived places where I, again, gained access to resources I would never had had on my own, with the understanding that if I don't participate I will be asked to leave. For folks here who are worried about a significant incentive, it's untraditional, but there is one. Also issues of enforcement are not important to me - I used the word "economics" because I'm thinking about different people having different preferences which result in emergent properties. Detecting employees that don't actually work is more business than economics, and detecting counterfeit currency is more textiles and materials and UV light than economics. I think that maybe some people are getting too caught up in specific systems of who gets which points when. Even one specific community needs different systems over the years depending on how its members coexist. I think that "where do the points come from" is not really a big deal, if you understand that 10 people in a meeting can agree to pretty much any system, and try it out for a month, and discard it the next month if it didn't work well. I recognize that culturally the types of people in these communities would reject systems bases on payments even in an invented local currency ? it's a fine line. >>71989 This system is complicated but roughly the kind of thing I was asking about in the first place. I think "negative values" is something I should really consider

>>71992 To make it even more complicated, I have a specific idea for the implementation of the market system. Clone Uniswap V2, either on a public (testnet?) blockchain if you want more transparency, or emulated blockchain on your own server if you want more privacy/control. At the start of each period allocate a portion of tokens created to liquidity for each respective trading pair (DishCoin<->FirewoodCoin, LaundryCoin<->DishCoin etc.), possibly weighted based on the final distribution the previous quarter. To ensure that all tasks are ultimately fulfilled, this liquidity will need to be bled off and distributed to commune members over time in a similar way to the initial distribution; this could be an automated task where a percent of liquidity from each pool is withdrawn every day and evenly split. This backend would allow for a simple app or website where anyone could at any time easily swap any given task for its equivalent in another task, and not need to themselves worry about dealing with complexities like finding a person to make the specific trade they want or learning the ins and outs of an orderbook trading system. The advantage of doing it this way is that most of the work is already done, the code is already written, and most of the complexity would not need to be borne by the end users.

>>71989 >Then they can freely trade these semi-anonymously (for other tokens), maybe via some simplified automated market maker system through an app or website or something. [...] Using the AMM to indirectly arrange trades for cash or sexual favors would be complicated and impractical to begin with I'm not sure I follow, unless the exchange rate is set from on high (and therefore probably wrong) users get to set their own prices so I dont see quite how this system really discourages trades for cash or other external goods. I am also not sure its good to prohibit such trades (prohibit prostitution? sure, other miscellaneous chores and favours? seems alright to allow). There's also the trouble of assessing when a task has been completed, and predicting how many tokens will be required over a given period, as well as the fact that i.e. not all kitchen cleanings are equal (and nor are all half hour cleaning periods). If I'm having some guests over today and realize that last night there was a big party that left all the common areas a mess but I have to go to work right now, what methods does this system offer me to make the house clean by the time I get off this evening ?

>>71994 >Clone Uniswap v2 (op here) Tokens are actually one reason why I thought about this in the first place! I think it's fascinating that people have been able to spin up little tiny economies that all work in slightly different ways. On the one side, in my experience the feeling of one's own part in group self-determination is an important feature of these kinds of communities, and so I've rejected more complicated processes in the past when not everyone was able to understand it well enough to suggest changes (it's a little bit better for everyone to discuss the merits of different combinations of potential housemates in a longer conversation, than do ranked choice voting and have people be unsure what to say if they don't like the result). On the other side, in a larger group (>30?) this feeling is already watered down enough, something like this might work. I feel like you've got the math pretty much right and I love that the final interface can be less about some invented currency and more about "Ahhh I could do dishes once or I could trade it for doing laundry 1.5 times." One last comment is that as others have pointed out, when not every person is able to do a task, it becomes more "valuable," and maintaining this system is a task, and in my experience there's a risk of some resentment building up if people feel like they are being "told what to do" in a community like this. Personally I would want to ensure that maintaining this does not become a high value task! This is not a criticism though, I know plenty of lefty programmers who would understand this and would be willing to do it even if it's not "incentivized". >>72000 >I dont see quite how this system really discourages trades for cash or other external goods I think this is OK. Keep in mind that most groups like this already share some kind of subculture and are small enough to work things out with a little discussion. It's OK for things to be a little bit fuzzy because you can assume that everyone has their own *and* the groups best interests at heart, and if they don't they will be asked to leave. In the extreme that people are trading sexual favors for doing the dishes, I think that a group would notice this and have a broad discussion and ultimately have to decide if they find this acceptable or not. >not all kitchen cleanings are equal As a side note, this is so so so true hahaha! In my experience, checklists go a long way (then if it takes Frank an hour to do what it takes me 20 minutes to do, that's on him). In general I've found that if someone is just not doing their chores and saying they did, it's pretty clear to everyone, and on the flip side some people are willing to go above and beyond because they like a clean bathroom/kitchen/whatever and they are rewarded with social capital (and people are more likely to make exceptions for them in the future).

>>72011 >checklists go a long way A checklist can maybe guaruntee a consistent end state, or at least define what a clean kitchen should be, but its also worth remembering that the starting state isn't always the same. I've cleaned up after some roomates' enthusiastic parties that left a mess beyond pretty much anything I ever do in a kitchen, and take far more effort to bring to an equal end state. >some people are willing to go above and beyond because they like a clean bathroom/kitchen/whatever and they are rewarded with social capital if social capital was enough for this, then you would have a clean kitchen already and wouldn't need to have this chorecoin system to begin with.

>>72014 >I've cleaned up after some roomates' enthusiastic parties that left a mess beyond pretty much anything I ever do in a kitchen, and take far more effort to bring to an equal end state. Then you should have made your roommates do it. Obviously someone has to be responsible for an extraordinary mess they make, regardless of whether it's "their turn" to clean it. >if social capital was enough for this, then you would have a clean kitchen already and wouldn't need to have this chorecoin system to begin with. It usually is. There probably isn't a single household on earth that really needs a cryptocurrency to get the dishes done. It seems like some people ITT are treating dishes as the actual chore that you do, while some other people are treating it as an allegory for any kind of economic activity using the commons.

>>72014 Again, some fuzziness is acceptable here. I think that there is a significant difference between normal group housing and intentional communities. In the places I've lived in the past, if someone had a bunch of parties and didn't clean up after, it would quickly become a public issue! If someone came to a house meeting and said "well I wiped down the surfaces and swept the floor but I didn't clean up after so-and-so's baking project" everyone would understand. >if social capital was enough for this, then you would have a clean kitchen already I think this is a yes-and situation. Yes, I think it's worth looking into chore systems, but also, I think the social capital has value.

>>72016 >It seems like some people ITT are treating dishes as the actual chore that you do, while some other people are treating it as an allegory for any kind of economic activity using the commons. OMG RIGHT THANK YOU

>>71948 >If the worker didn't profit from washing the dishes why would he do it >Unemployment setting record highs while job vacancies also setting record highs We've reached that point. How do we balance after the fact? Given the naturally variable system, naturally correcting itself, if owners want too much profit, causing dishwashers to drop out of the kitchen because they're no longer profiting, what comes thereafter? Given the opposite were true, that workers were profiting too much, how can we correct it? Workers will not accept pay docks. Due to this inerrant greed, these systems cannot balance themselves. They rely on the Government to inflate, deflate, or redistribute. This isn't a flaw of Capitalism, it's a flaw of Man; There should exist prescription drugs to treat the disease that is greed the same way there are drugs treat other hallucinations like OCD or Paranoia. Wanting too much is not healthy, is fantastical grandeur to the point of schizophrenia, and has destabilizing social and economic consequences. Greed needs to be treated like a mental illness, and in some cases, mental retardation. Some people shouldn't even legally be allowed to own property, that would cure their greed in the same way you fix a 4 year old that says "MINE" by taking it away permanently. In summary, it should be far more difficult for humans to accumulate capital then it is for corporations. This protects the capitalist interest in societal, academic, and military development, as corporations vie for prominence, reminding each individual that alone, they are nothing. Withholding individual profits, we should even allow corporations to vote; Bureaucracy is blind to the individual anyway, exactly as it should be. Given this ideal of hypercapitalism and corporate representation mediated by government self-interest, individuals shouldn't be able to vote at the government level. But this all comes down to >The government is responsible for mediating human greed Unless you can correct the first points without the government, this is the inevitable necessity, and absolute progression, per human development.

>>72102 >Unemployment setting record highs while job vacancies also setting record highs >We've reached that point. How do we balance after the fact? Its a popular fake argument by corps to import cheaper immigrant workers which can be better exploited under threats of getting send back and using them as expert workers while denying their qualification papers which makes them eligible for low pay as there are legal hurdles against underpaying qualified workers. "we have no workers" is just code for "we cant exploit native workers as much as we want to" >They rely on the Government to inflate, deflate, or redistribute. Government starts this issue in first place. Fiat is a money pump upwards. Whenever they generate wealth for themself by creating more money, the value of it is extracting from your pocket as it devalues the existing fiat. Workers arent paid too much, they are paid too little because wages never kept up with inflation rates which means each decade the worker is getting poorer. And if you have no money you naturally cant pay a fair price to anyone else either. So its not greed but necessity that mandates the avg worker to penny pinch. The whole system is build to centralize wealth and thats what also forces people then to rely on welfare which is a roundabout way to centralize power for the one owing the printer. Now once you understand this the obvious solution is to simply decouple yourself from fiat and not play their game so they can't rob you passively. What happened to those countries who tried to stay independent is seen the middle east - they last independent countries got invaded and replaced with new governments loyal to central banking. Of course the game isn't over and other countries are trying to go independent to gain power but is what it is currently.

>>72105 Forgot part of the explanation on first one: They are legally obliged to try hiring locally before they can go for immigrant workers on visas. So they have to fake it by setting hiring standards nobody can fulfill and to make it more believable they also scream about it so the public buys it too and everyone agrees they tried. The worker visa is secondary essential part of the con because that visa is only valid while you work which makes unemployment a deportation threat which is a huge burden on immigrant workers who commonly shoulder their families well being by going overseas at great expense to bring back an income home that can support them at home. They know they got them by the balls once they are here and they exploit that.

>>72111 Hostels and construction sites do a lot of that. >Nobody want to work in my company, even trough we have a 10% unemployment rate and people are desesperate. This is why I only hire people on visa who just happen to be much cheaper and docile. Please vote to make it easier for me to hire them rather than you, it will be good for the economy. >>72102 >We've reached that point. How do we balance after the fact? There is a reason capitalists try to reduce the economic freedom of their competitor. They will pass laws that increase the entry price, they will sue the new business to death, they will blackmail the raw material provider into not selling to them. The solution to your question is the free market, which is a thing that prevent the concentration of capital in a good measure. You get the perks of capitalism but almost none of the inconvenients.

>>72114 Again with the agendas ITT! I dunno... is it suddenly somehow impossible to have a monopoly and other "market failures" if there is zero regulation of a free market?

>>72124 assuming imperfect people is it possible to have a free market without regulation/protection in some form?

>>72124 Monopolies stem from exclusive rights gained by bribing gov. kill ip/copyright and monopolies would die out. The very reason these practices exist is that its the only way they can sustain themselves.

>>72000 >I'm not sure I follow, unless the exchange rate is set from on high (and therefore probably wrong) users get to set their own prices so I dont see quite how this system really discourages trades for cash or other external goods. With an AMM, trades are not between individuals, but instead to a central "pool" containing a certain amount of each of the two assets in the trading pair. Think of a currency exchange vending machine with a balance scale built into its mechanism, where the more weighted towards one side the scale, the more skewed the exchange rate. The exchange rate is neither directly set by users or by a central administrator. It is possible to launder money through these to fulfill an external arrangement, but there is an array of complex challenges and requirements involved in doing so. For instance, if the amount of assets you personally hold is much smaller than the liquidity in the pool, trading all you have will barely move the price at all. Even if you can move the price significantly, there is a risk that a third party will take advantage of this differential before your trading partner can fulfill the indirect trade you're trying to accomplish. >I am also not sure its good to prohibit such trades (prohibit prostitution? sure, other miscellaneous chores and favours? seems alright to allow). Maybe it would be better to allow person to person trades as well, either way could be done easily, just have a block on transfers with the AMM addresses whitelisted, or also whitelist all registered members. My intuition that it would promote a toxic dynamic mostly comes from board games where you can freely trade stuff like Catan, so it might not actually apply, just seems better to me to take potential personal feelings and cliques out of price setting decisions and make it only about how much people want to do given chores. >predicting how many tokens will be required over a given period More could be issued as needed, but yeah there are unresolved issues, like how to avoid a situation where most of the DishCoins are languishing in the liquidity pool while dirty dishes pile up, or if different coins 'expire' at different times, how to square that away with the exchange. Maybe for some chores you have leeway over when you can redeem the tokens, and for others like dishes there are tiers where DishCoin whales have to redeem every night while those with very few are scheduled for a particular single day of the week. >>72011 >in my experience there's a risk of some resentment building up if people feel like they are being "told what to do" in a community like this. Personally I would want to ensure that maintaining this does not become a high value task! This is not a criticism though, I know plenty of lefty programmers who would understand this and would be willing to do it even if it's not "incentivized". Makes sense. Perhaps then some design priorities could be, ease of hosting (or entirely avoiding any hosting) and enabling less-technically involved administration, and possibly the code itself could be an open source project not specifically regarded as being a contribution to any particular community. There's also varying degrees to which the system could be democratic and transparent, would be possible to do it without any central administration, albeit with some tradeoffs in complexity and ease of use.

>>72127 >AMM hey thanks for the explanation

>>72126 >Monopolies stem from exclusive rights gained by bribing gov. Monopoly literally just means there is only one seller of a service. For instance if there's just one shoe merchant in town they have a monopoly on the shoe market. This can obviously happen without any government interference at all. "But someone else would just start their own shoe business if it's profitable!" -- so they'll just cut a deal with the shoe distributor/manufacturer that the existing shoe store has had set in stone for years, probably involving payment for a large shipment that they can't prove they can sell? And they'll just convince everyone in town to go to the new shoe place? Maybe by lowering prices somehow even though they're already in the hole from startup costs? Even without any shady business practices it is not easy to break a monopoly.

>>72139 >so they'll just cut a deal with the shoe distributor/manufacturer that the existing shoe store has had set in stone for years Your whole argument rests on the shoe distributor/manufacturer being a monopoly itself and also not wanting to make more money for some reason. It's the original shoe store that doesn't want the new one to open. The only thing he can (legally) do is lobby the government to create regulations that the new store can't follow. That's why Walmart lobbies for $15 minimum wage for example. Why oil companies lobby for insane nuclear safety regulations.

>>72139 you forget the part where monopolies exploit their position with inflated prices so any second place can comfortable undercut them while making a profit. And alternatively you can compete on quality. The reason bribing gov is preferred is cause its the cheapest way to monopolize the market. It doesnt matter how much you price hike and how soykafty your products are when you are the only one allowed to sell.

>>72159 >The reason bribing gov is preferred is cause its the cheapest way to monopolize the market. Because they externalize the cost of maintaining the monopoly onto the police and taxpayers.

>>72159 >It doesnt matter how much you price hike and how soykafty your products are when you are the only one allowed to sell. This is also why you don't want the government itself to have a monopoly on anything like healthcare or education. Quality drops to the bare minimum they can get away with and if you don't like it then it's not like you can stop paying your taxes in protest.

>>72164 technically you can and people do - the skilled with wealth leave the country. Those stuck can go for unemployment welfare and neet it up. Then there is crime and simply working under the table. Refusing to cooperate is an option.

>>72154 In my hypothetical the old shoe store and manufacturer(s) make no active moves against the new business at all. It is simple business's sense: if some new guy shows up and says he'll sell your shoes, you don't let him take the shoes now and pay layer, even if your established buyers do. You ask for cash payment up front. The basic fact is, it's easier to continue an existing business than it is to create a new one. This is why natural monopolies are hard to break even when no shady business practices are going on.

>>72175 The idea was not to resell from same producer. It was to bring a competing product out. Big manufacturers suffer inertia. Kodak ist the best example of the worst result due to that. Btw if you wanna see how to kill resellers refer to amazon - they created a monopoly simply by getting big funding and eating up competition with heavier money bags. They broke laws and ignored it cause their pockets were deep enough to pay fines and continue aggressively undercutting competition into the red til they were dead. Paypal likewise established itself the same way - they had bigger funding and bribed people initially for using paypal. Competition among corps is generally underhanded and not the better product wins fairy tale.

>>71989 >If you're left with tokens at the end of the quarter you are reprimanded somehow. This only works if the punishment is somehow worse than the combined labor of all the tasks you didn't do and could result in a system where one person agrees to take all the coins in exchange for cash for the service of taking the full collective punishment when it comes. You could expel such a person from the commune, but where do you draw the line? How do you design punishments that adequately discourage unfulfilled tasks without being unnecessarily cruel? AFAIK, the russians punished unfulfilled work quotas with gulag time, which doesn't really strike me as an ideal solution, but I don't don't really have a good alternative.

>>72193 easiest punishment is immediate action because a lot of people don't even register delayed punishment. Simplest form is they have to do unwanted labor asap. I.E. Whoever has to do dishes gets freed and they have to do it now. So its only worse in terms of okay you didnt do soykaf? Then you have to do it now and dont get to pick anymore. The reward of cooperating would be the ability to chose what and when.

>>72197 alternately, just remove them

>>72193 Maybe just have a public board with the names of everyone who didn't complete tasks and which/how many went unfulfilled? And then removal decisions could ultimately take that info into account indirectly. Going based on what OP has been saying people will do work without any explicit carrot or stick and are intrinsically motivated to contribute, what's missing is a flexible organizational layer on top of that which takes everyone's preferences and abilities into account, without them feeling like they are being bossed around too much or treated unfairly. So it's probably better not to think of such a system in terms of theoretical ways of compelling homo-economicus to action.

>>72198 i was proposing amicable solution because such niche projects have trouble with recruiting as is. If you have more people trying to join than you can hold sure, then you can afford harsh rules.

>>71989 >[UBI] is a good idea because it presents a solution to the problem with undesirable labor also being paid badly. Maybe a negative value system could also benefit from a similar sort of feature to universal basic income? I'm personally of the belief that the carrot is more humane than the stick, and prefer a positive-value system to reflect that. >>72202 >>72199 That said, it seems a bit harsh to punish people immediately for missing one or two chores, it's human to be a little apathetic sometimes and I think we can mostly agree that there is an acceptable and livable level of mess below having every chore done and your living space spotless. Maybe put the threshold for punishment around like, 3 or more unburned tokens? Maybe with the stipulation that carry-over coins must be burned by the next quarter, so no task goes undone for too long.

>>71954 Why can't everyone just clean up after themselves? Clean your own fuarrrking dishes, take out the trash when you add to the point where the next person will be fuarrrked, clean up the spaces you use, etc. And you don't even REALLY need to incentivize these things, because they incentivize themselves to normal non-psychopaths: normal humans with functioning brains and shame and empathy clean soykaf when it starts getting annoyingly dirty, and simply establishing a routine of immediate/always-performed cleaning/maintenance makes things not pile up. I never fuarrrking understood my roommate who got the sweetest deal of the century, $400 for a room in a $1250 apartment and all the access to the same apartment as I had for my $850 share, yet could never be arsed to clean a single fuarrrking thing, do dishes, take trash, etc. But that's where you have leadership who actually discipline these mental children and teach them to do basic fuarrrking human function. Why does it have to be somebody's job to clean up after you, or a "chore" assigned? Sorry I can't stand to read all the theory in this thread, it repulses me to think people would prefer to come up with such complications when they can just clean up their own damn mess.

>>72209 >Why can't everyone just clean up after themselves? normal people clean soykaf when it starts getting annoyingly dirty I think basically everyone does, but the problem is different people generate more or less mess and have different tolerances for messyness. Maybe you want all the dishes in the rack and the sink and counters clear, but my default is to let dishes stack up for a couple days and do them all at once. If you visit different people's residences, especially bachelors, you'll see a pretty wide range of cleanliness, Im no cleanfreak but I've seen some stuff that I wouldn't be comfortable with. If you've got person A who doesn't care about a lot of things many would find messy and keeps his house in a sort of pig sty, and suddenly modest cleanfreak person B moves in to be roomates, person B will likely end up doing a lot of work to clean up after person A so the house meets his standards. He may think he's doing it for A's benefit, that A isn't doing things because he knows B will do it, but in reality B is just doing it for his own benefit and A litterally doesn't care. Maybe part of the trick with group houses should be getting people who's previous houses are all tolerably clean to everyone else in the group.

>>72209 >And you don't even REALLY need to incentivize these things, because they incentivize themselves to normal non-psychopaths: normal humans with functioning brains and shame and empathy clean soykaf when it starts getting annoyingly dirty, and simply establishing a routine of immediate/always-performed cleaning/maintenance makes things not pile up. Again, this happen in a commune. >>72205 > I'm personally of the belief that the carrot is more humane than the stick, and prefer a positive-value system to reflect that. This can't happen because the state don't create value. It only take money at one point to place it somewhere else. Printing and debt don't solve this problem. That's the problem with UBI, it's not universal at all. Say you have A and B. A make $4000 and B don't work. With a $1000 UBI, A now make $5000 and B$1000, but the state have to take money somewhere, so A pay $2000 in taxes. And now the income isn't univrsal at all, there is even less reasons to work and more to not work.

>>72361 This hypothetical doesn't hold up in practice. The state of Alaska, for instance, has extremely low unemployment right now.

>>72361 >That's the problem with UBI, it's not universal at all. this problem isnt unique to ubi though, the case for nearly all wellfare programmes.

>>72368 >This hypothetical doesn't hold up in practice. The state of Alaska, for instance, has extremely low unemployment right now. Alaska is a very harsh environment to live in and a US citizen can be unemployed in any of the other 49 states too. The only reason to be in Alaska is because you're getting paid mad money to work there so of course unemployment is non-existent. So that's not a very good counter example. You worded your post to implie you have more examples but I bet you don't.

>>72376 alaska is also not alltogether cheap, its not just dakota with ubi, is the oil money enough to live off at all nicely?

>>72378 Alaska do not have an UBI but a dishonest and democratic bribe. The money come from the oil industry and since the people oppose the big smoking chimney and the long pipes, they decided to give something like $1000 per year to everyone so they would have popular support. It's great that corruption is now given to the masses rather than to some selected official, but it stay corruption. And no, you can't live with it.

>>72376 I pretty much just looked at a list of places where UBI has been implemented and picked the first one. Your hypothesis requires ad-hoc exceptions the moment it comes into contact with reality, maybe the hypothesis is bad then. >The only reason to be in Alaska is because you're getting paid mad money to work there so of course unemployment is non-existent A lot of people move there because it's the "final frontier". Plus there's also a large native population that has always had problems with alcoholism.

>>72425 >Your hypothesis requires ad-hoc exceptions the moment it comes into contact with reality UBI causes unemployment except in a cold remote region where nobody wants to live. Well done you found an edge case. >reality We're already living through a worker shortage. What >>72361 said is exactly right. The state pays people $8 an hour to stay home. McDonalds pay people $9 to cook fries. That effectively makes the wages $1 per hour so nobody wants to work. Meanwhile that $8 has to come from somewhere it comes from the middle class who pay all the taxes and it comes from the future where our money has been inflated away by the central bank. >I pretty much just looked at a list of places where UBI has been implemented and picked the first one. Yes I am sure you did a google search to find any evidence you can to support a thing you want to be true. The problem with these UBI trials is that they are very limited experiments within a much bigger political structure. Of course you can give 2.000 people free money when you have 5.000.000 tax slaves to pay for it. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-47169549

>>72427 >UBI causes unemployment except in a cold remote region where nobody wants to live. Well done you found an edge case. faggit this is ridiculous look at the actual amount of alasaka dividends. Its inconsistent such that year to year the total amount can change by 100%. The highest it gets is less than six dollars a day, less than 200 dollars a month. Its a 'UBI' in the sense that its free money for everyone just about but its no where near '1000 bucks a month' style plans--even those people say aren't enough. try 1000 bucks a year lol. Maybe the point is that UBI is ok if its not enough to live off of. Also worth pointing out that in the case of alaska its not taxation of the populace, its oil money.

>>72361 >Say you have A and B. A make $4000 and B don't work. With a $1000 UBI, A now make $5000 and B$1000, but the state have to take money somewhere, so A pay $2000 in taxes. If the idea is to redistribute income from jobs sure. But why do that when you can redistribute wealth assets instead? We already have a problem where ownership of stores of value (stocks, real estate, etc.) has flowed away from regular people and continues to do so. This is exacerbated by all the dollars the government floods into the economy; consumer goods prices stay mostly the same because those are dictated by consumer demand and consumers aren't getting higher wages, but things representing wealth skyrocket. Some of those things, like housing, we need to live, so the result is that to an increasing extent we're all getting squeezed by the owners. It is impossible for us to compete with their capital and expertise, so they will always continue accumulating share of resources. The way I would pay for UBI is to make a condition of doing business or being traded within the nation for every publicly traded company, that they allocate a certain proportion of shares/dividends to the program. The amount distributed wouldn't be a fixed dollar amount but rather however the split in dividends works out. Maybe also do taxes on underutilized real estate.

>>72427 >The state pays people $8 an hour to stay home. McDonalds pay people $9 to cook fries. That effectively makes the wages $1 per hour so nobody wants to work. It's a lot worse. The state now have to give the Mc slave and the hobo $8 each. That's $16. So, now not even a 100% tax rate is enough. The state need to tax the slave at 75% of his income, so he now make less than the hobo but the state also have to "borrow" money (Greece, anyone?) or to print like there is no tomorrow, and indeed there will be no tomorrow. The only good way to do an UBI is to make it light enough to not ruin everything but then it defeat the declared role of UBI which is to replace most if not all welfare programs. >>72430 Honestly, just pass the antitrust laws we always had an make it so we live in the good old fair trade capitalism of Smith instead of mega investment funds hoarding all the wealth like a dragon to price gouge the workers. There is a limit at how much you can tax the economy.

>>72432 >antitrust laws >fair trade >hoarding >price gouge This is handwaving. There is no mechanism by which any of this stuff actually resolves the problem. "Hoarding" and "price gouging" are natural and inevitable parts of the economy, not moral failures to be corrected. Capital builds capital is a fundamental law of economics. It will accumulate indefinitely from those without capital to those with it, laissez-faire policy does not resolve that. >There is a limit at how much you can tax the economy. This is true, but think about it in terms of basic resources. Are we wealthy enough as a species that everyone can be provided enough resources for food and shelter sufficient for survival? Yes, and we passed that point years ago and are now way beyond it. A UBI need not exceed the limit, especially in a more wealthy country. There are factors that make it seem more expensive than it is, most notably housing costs, but that can be addressed. The amount that would need to be distributed for UBI to work would be much less if protectionist zoning laws were overruled and new construction was encouraged in order to drive down property values and rents.

ubi is supposed to be paid regardless if you work - that's what the"universal" stands for. The benefit is you can delete all bureaucracy around welfare distribution which is money saved. Of course the money paid by ubi is money the employer doesn't need to pay for a livable wage but since ubi is there the employer is forced to pay enough to get you working so it has to be more than just $1/hour. I think the general idea is you can either neet it up on ubi living frugally or you get a high end job that pays even after taxes enough that the quality of life improvement is worth it or you can use ubi to start a business yourself which is what many wanna do but are too afraid due risk of going homeless if it goes completely wrong. Note giving ubi to neets ain't for charity. Its a way to pacify people and stop them from going the crime route. The tax burden on the middle also keep them poor which prevents them from becoming competition for the upper class.

>>72434 >so they have to pay you more than 1$/hr what if the gov pays you the equivalent of 1$/hr full time? (this is more than alaska dividends) Is this still UBI? >a way to pacify people and stop them from going the crime route are you sure keeping people busy as possible isnt more effective for this ?

>>72437 Well we are using current value i think. You cant live on $1 so defeats point of ubi. If you wish to downscale currency where $1 is enough and corp pays $1 then sure that could be worth it then. >are you sure keeping people busy as possible isnt more effective for this ? plenty people cant be used for work. Its cheaper to let them rot peacefully away at home.

>>72438 rescaling the currency is irrelevant, don't talk about it it will only confuse the conversation >You cant live on $1 so defeats point of ubi. just earlier people in the thread were calling alaska dividends UBI, even though they appear at most to be about 170 dollars a month, so I thought I'd ask. One might argue that the point of UBI is to prevent people from suffering in cases of certain disasters, and it might be allowable to have it lower than a sustainable living wage in those cases, I'd think. >plenty people cant be used for work. Its cheaper to let them rot peacefully away at home. systems like 1000$/month are astonishingly expensive, cut it in half and its still astonishingly expensive. If this is a matter of economy then its obviously cheaper to just let them figure out their own lives, or starve if they so choose.

>>72440 was just considering it cause i coudlnt make sense of it otherwise. Far as i understand ubi is supposed to replace welfare entirely so it needs to be enough to survive. Starving people start robbing and then you end up housing them anyway in jail which costs more. Of course there is a desire to push down cost for keeping them alive. Food quality will drop further for that purpose.

>we currently have a worker shortage People don't want to work low paid dead-end jobs where they get constant disrespect. Meanwhile highly valued, highly impactful, decently paid careers such as tech are in a profound worker glut. Surely the problem is that people are being treated too nicely by the government, we should lower their expectations. >>72438 >You cant live on $1 so defeats point of ubi If you don't need the extra $1/hr you can save it, which is directly correlated with personal safety and comfort as well as community improvement. Opt-in UBI seems like the best route for me. Realistically only a small portion of the population will sign up and you need people to tell the government where to mail the checks anyway.

>>72429 >faggit this is ridiculous look at the actual amount of alasaka dividends It was one of your guys who held up alaska as the best example of UBI he could find. >>72432 >It's a lot worse. The state now have to give the Mc slave and the hobo $8 each. That's $16. >So, now not even a 100% tax rate is enough. That's true, the incentives are stacked so more and more people will rely on the free money and fewer and fewer people will actually do the work to supply the money. But of course the more people depend on the free money the more they will vote to keep it. Something something vote your way in shoot your way out. >the state also have to "borrow" money Borrowing is such a misleading term because the banks don't have any money either. They literally just print new money out of nothing and then spend it. Which devalues all the money that is already in circulation and makes it look like the price of everything is going up. And then they play dumb and be like nobody knows why inflation happens herp derp. >>72444 >Surely the problem is that people are being treated too nicely by the government You can be as sarcastic as you want the problem is still the same, the government is robbing one group of people and giving the money to another group of people who now have no incentive to work. >People don't want to work low paid dead-end jobs where they get constant disrespect. This is somewhat a social issue too. There is nothing stopping you from being polite to your starbucks barista and tipping $15 if you really think his labor is worth that much. The problem is you want the cheapest price possible for yourself and high wages for the workers and you think government can wave a magic wand to square that circle but they can't.

>>72450 > The problem is you want the cheapest price possible for yourself and high wages for the workers and you think government can wave a magic wand to square that circle but they can't. Its simple restore wealth to middle class and they can tip more. As a previous poster said - all the service people cant get paid because the workers dont get paid. Wealth concentration at the top is the issue.

>>72451 >Wealth concentration at the top is the issue. I don't have a problem with some people being richer than others. What I have a problem with is bankers who print dollars, euros, etc. out of thin air and spend it without adding anything of value to the economy. All they are doing is making the rest of us poorer by devaluing the money we actually do work to earn.

>>72452 neither do i have a problem with a gap. Was just saying people cant pay if they have no money and what you mention is the main cause. In simple terms Inflation = Increased taxation.

>>72450 >(((your guys))) fam i dont know wut to tell ya, if sometimes one of my guys is an idiot and falls for the ubi meme its not my fault I just want to set him strait. >>72451 >Its simple restore wealth to middle class ah yes, just steal from the rich and give to me. then I will show that highschool barister how a real aristocrat tips.

>>72433 >"Hoarding" and "price gouging" are natural and inevitable parts of the economy And that's why ancap is a meme and you need a state to at the very least ensure trade stay free and fair. Something vital that no state in the west do. >Capital builds capital is a fundamental law of economics. Sit on your wealth and you will see your concurrents outrun you. Look at the arrogant NASA and it's all powerful contractors Boeing and others. Elon come and where are they now? Where is AOL? As long as trade is fair and free, the market will correct people who sit on wealth. >laissez-faire policy Funny name. It come from a letter wrote by naval constructor to the French ministry of the marine. After an entire century of public spending to rebuild the ports, create countless manufactures, give them the slave labor of prisoners, create schools for ship builders, dig the underwater ground in many ports like Brest so it would be deep enough, after 100 years of economic mobilization so France could become a naval power, the ministry asked them what else they can do. The navel constructors answered "Maintenant laissez nous faire." This is laissez-faire capitalism: massive investment by the state and the creation of an infrastrucure and a superstrucure so free market can function.

>>72444 Why should they want to work those jobs? They are paid poorly because half of the money is taken by uncle Sam and if they sit on their ass then uncle Sam provide for every thing they need to stay alive. Of course they don't want to do it. If I told you that one generation ago, a manual worker could pay for a family house with his income alone, would you believe me? The alternative was to live in the slum. It used to be the case. We had a good reason to go to work even if the boss was unpleasant. It's gone. >>72450 >Borrowing is such a misleading term because the banks don't have any money either. They literally just print new money out of nothing and then spend it. Which devalues all the money that is already in circulation and makes it look like the price of everything is going up. And then they play dumb and be like nobody knows why inflation happens herp derp. Good morning, I hate America. In America, a private, for profit bank, the FED have the state monopoly of creating money out of thin air if they borrow it to banks. The banks then borrow it to everyone else, take their fair share and somehow, there is a family that is richer than Elon, Jeff, Bill and Mark together.

>>72455 >ah yes, just steal from the rich and give to me. then I will show that highschool barister how a real aristocrat tips. unironically. The bottom spends as much as they have so any money you pump into them gets passed on. Meanwhile currently you simply cant ask $20 from a dude who only has $2 himself.

>>72459 >Gimme money Why? >So I can give it to others Whoudn't it be more effective to give it to others directly then? This is how we have built the golden gate bridge and Hoover Dam.

>>72460 never said give it to a single person.. The point is to uplift the entire bottom. The barrister is not the end, he can pay more to the plumber, the plumber pays more to the tool company,... The entire cycle need to be lifted in value. Currently the opposite occurred - inflation slowly lowered everyone into poverty. Each year your labor is worth less even if your employer matches inflation because taxes are progressive and bigger number means more gets taken away.

alternately, just quit taxing everyone lol. in any case this thread has gone a long way from where it started and is just devolving into wealth redistribution/hate the rich general

>>72462 >cant refute anything said >goes for hurr durr im silly many such cases

>>72461 >never said give it to a single person.. The point is to uplift the entire bottom. Gib money to the entire bottom Why? So they can give it to people who work It would be better to pay people to work than to pay people regardless if they work or not. The absolute worse, obviously would be to pay people to not work. You get what you buy. Your idea is trickle down economic for poor people. Trickle up if you want. It won't work more than the Regan one. Look at the great stimulus of Obama. It made a flop and the debt stay.

>>72461 I'm not the person you are talking to, but I'd like to point out: >The point is to uplift the entire bottom. Thanks to the greed of the rich, this just reduces the middle class by reducing the value of the dollar. >The barrister is not the end, he can pay more to the plumber, the plumber pays more to the tool company,... This just increases the number, not the value or worth representation. >Currently the opposite occurred - inflation slowly lowered everyone into poverty. You should consider what causes inflation instead of adding to the inflation without considering reprocussions. >Each year your labor is worth less even if your employer matches inflation because taxes are progressive and bigger number means more gets taken away. If we had less progressive taxes, this wouldn't be as much of problem. Consider the following in america: >$3.8B goes to Israel, per year, and it does usually get increased. (It was $3B/yr in 2019. With a total of $146B from 1946 to 2020.) >$112B to Ukraine in 2022 alone. That's just two wasteful areas of government spending. You would soykaf your pants about the amount of waste coming from the military alone. I know a guy who bought a pallet full of military laptops from the previous year for $25. These were modern, the previous-year made enterprise-grade laptops. Half of them were never turned out. They also do this with vehicles, weapons, etc. Now the vehicles and weapons don't sell that low, but you can buy $400K+ vehicles for $200. Then there's the issue of "missing funds" in the government that reaches some easily sincerely upsetting numbers. This is an issue every year and has been for decades. Oh and the paper trails are often destroyed in "inccidents" that border on "conspiracy theory"-tier, but the information is all out there. What you need to do is drop your marxist understanding of finances, because they have no understanding of finances, and recognize the issue is in your, and the "capitalist", worship of capital. If you (and whoever else is reading this) really cared and wanted to seek solutions, you'd discuss the root of the issues (Worship of capital, usury, non-government controlled mint, etc.) But your ego won't let you admit you are wrong. So your solutions will continue to promote economic slavery, cultural and racial destruction, cutting of buying power, distrust, and unfulfilment. >increase wages Why don't you, instead, support the control of economic value in a different way? Bread will always cost X dollars, rent costs Y dollars, etc. Then control the wages? Bakers get X dollars, landlords get killed, plumbers get Y dollars. It's still stupid marxism and blows up pretty quickly, but at least it follows your theories better than the weimer "MUH MORE MONIES" strategy. In fact, the marxist economic suggestion of full control of markets + values would last a little longer if you just did not allow people to have more than an n amount of money saved up, this would prevent the rewarding of good, healthy financial decision making, like you guys prefer to do. It would also reverse our post-keynesian world and put us in a keynesian economy until someone like me cuts your leadership's head off in the town square.

>>72465 what obama did was watering once in the desert. That can't have an effect beside getting some short goodwill for "distributing freebies". Trickle down also is pointless because the rich don't trickle down. Most of the cash stays at the top inflating prices as investments into property for example. >Why? So they can give it to people who work >72466 >This just increases the number, not the value or worth representation. Consider that it wont affect everything equally. The untouched goods are dropping in price in relation if you raise wages&expenses by adding a zero. Its really simple - look at what happened in the last decades and then just think going opposite. I just want to revert the damage done by inflation. The only alternative to boosting wages is killing fiat to stop people getting poorer each year or continuously lowering taxes as a counterweight. Both are even less realistic than playing santa. As for fixed prices & wages - pretty much no different to current problem - not all goods get fixed pricing which means they explode and people cant afford them. And then there is trading outside with free market countries as another issue. As for weimar - US printed more than half the dollars in existence in just 2 years. Printing doesn't kill the currency instantly by itself. Weimar was worthless as a country and had nothing to stay relevant.

>>72459 >The bottom spends as much as they have in my experience, the difference is not that the poor spend and the rich save (though the rich do save a bit, possibly more) but significantly that the poor buy depreciating/consubale assets whereas the rich buy appreciating/enduring assets. Poor person's networth is just barely proped up by his salary, rich person buys things that at least don't decrease his networth and might increase it. Its not a world of misers sitting on pots of gold, and if it was then freeing up that gold would arguably just reduce the price of gold, not neccisarily improve any poor persons life (except perhaps the cheif theif).

>>72467 >Its really simple - look at what happened in the last decades and then just think going opposite So, we do not create new taxes and regulations but we remove them? Ha, no, you mean the state get even bigger and careerist politicians distribute the resources according to electoral needs. Great idea. The only consequence it will have is to water the desert on a regular basis. You either tax/borrow/print, all of which criple the economy, give it to people who have done nothing in particular and they buy made in China stuff on wish. The economy of China boom and you are left with a crippled economy.

>>72471 The state grows from more regulations not less. More laws require more bureaucrats. The cost also goes beyond paying these bureaucrats high salaries. It stifles everyone because every business has to fight regulatory hurdles. There are fancy dissertations on the idea how bureaucrats are the cancer that kills nations as their dead weight grows til the state cant sustain them. The collapse causes a reset and then the process restarts.

>>72450 >The problem is you want the cheapest price possible for yourself and high wages for the workers and you think government can wave a magic wand to square that circle but they can't. It's simple, just force the owners to make less profit and stop treating workers like worthless pieces of soykaf. Except that's not so simple because the bosses own the government too. UBI is just the most recent way that bourgeois progressives have figured out they can appease the workers enough to avoid a messy revolution or unions.

>>72473 >to avoid a messy revolution Gun control will suffice. >Or unions The unions do a great job at keeping the workers outside of the unions. A conspiracy theorist may think a few members are paid to do so. >It's simple, just force the owners to make less profit and stop treating workers like worthless pieces of soykaf. A long time ago, the class warfare was the most important political topic. Everyone saw the failure of the early Soviet union, the famine in Ukraine and how it crawled back to state capitalism. The few people who had any respect for anarchy saw what happened when Spain and Ukraine got large anarchist movement, basically they were just bandits with the mask of an ideology. Then they decided to create a new ideology. One where the state is the union and have the duty to represent the working class. The capitalists would have no other choice than to desescalade the class war and the workers would get a lot more than what they can get with usual syndicates. The economical result of this ideology was outstanding.

>>to avoid a messy revolution >Gun control will suffice. Gun control is an ineffective deterrent without a competent police force. >Then they decided to create a new ideology. One where the state is the union and have the duty to represent the working class. This is called social democracy and it predates the soviet union. Get your history right. In any case, most liberal democracies haven't really followed this ideology for decades. In reality the state basically let's the capitalists do whatever they want, only stepping in to intervene when it would be too damaging to the state's legitimacy not to do so.

>>72465 >It would be better to pay people to work than to pay people regardless if they work or not. This only makes sense under the assumption that everyone needs to work, which is just not the case in our current economy. Because people need money to live and need to work to make money, therefore needing to work to live, a lot of work gets reduplicated just to give people something to do so they don't go broke and starve. Workers are incentivized to do their jobs as inefficiently as possible without getting fired because it ensures job security. The assumption that everyone needs to work only really works in preindustrial times before we had the massively automated supply-chains we have today. The big issue we have now is that we never planned our economy to work in the context of automated labor, so business owners/shareholders now permanently control and constantly reap the profits of their automated and globalized labor without any mechanism for redistributing that wealth causing massive inequality and resource scarcity for the other 99% of people. The classic marxist maxim of the workers "seizing the means of production" no longer really works, because the middle/working class have no obvious means of direct action to do so. Wealth tax and wealth redistribution, possible through UBI, seems like the most straightforward way to restore balance to a top-heavy economy.

>>72487 You're vastly overestimating the degree to which industrial and other systems are automated, and underestimating the value that humans can contribute. However, if the world were as you describe, then the 99% sound like leeches to whom the 1% owe nothing, but rather who owe the 1% essentially everything. why cant you make something worthy, and not just be a looter, lain?

>>72487 It is not like the system could run without everyone working. It is however the case that technological capitalism allows the owner to exploit the worker more efficiently. If it were really the case that not everyone needed to work then things would be a lot better. The roads wouldn't all be fuarrrked up, for instance. There would be no such thing as an understaffed store or a crumbling apartment building. The reality of the situation is that, as money is concentrated at the top, it is distributed primarily to the institutions that maintain the pyramid (military, government administration, financial markets, banks, and insurance companies, for instance) rather than institutions that actually maintain society at large such as public works departments.

>>72498 Forgot an important point: since those institutions have such a massive amount of money and nothing to do with it, they naturally grow massive money-wasting bureaucracies. The US military is a perfect example.

>>72498 on the other hand, where does most of the US gov budget go ? HHS. Where does most of US mil. budget go ? Payroll, mostly to not especially wealthy individuals. 'The Pyramid' needs the military, and so the military sees to it that there are good transcontinental roads for its uses, but everybody gets to drive on them. btw if you're gonna call this technocapitalism then don't focus so much on governmental spending lol. On an unrelated note, its definitly the case that there are workers who contribute negatively.

>>72502 >on the other hand, where does most of the US gov budget go ? HHS. As far as I can tell the biggest slice of the pie is social security, but also, there's a specific opt-out tax that you pay to social security and theoretically you get it back with interest when you retire. >btw if you're gonna call this technocapitalism then don't focus so much on governmental spending lol. I don't view capitalism and government as opposed in general, government is basically a bag of money that capitalists squeeze.

>>72473 >It's simple, just force the owners to make less profit And then the owners decide it's not worth it and move away or give up and now you have no product and no jobs. Congratulations you're half way towards your communist famine. It's funny how people like you always want to force somebody else to pay for your values. The idea of you sacrificing your own[/b[ money is unthinkable. >>72499 >important point: since those institutions have such a massive amount of money and nothing to do with it, they naturally grow massive money-wasting bureaucracies. You're on the right lines but I would argue that [b]all government spending is wasteful regardless of how much money they have because there is no way to measure success. A private company has a balance sheet. They spent X amount of money and earned Y amount of money and is Y is bigger than X then they are winning. Profit is a proxy for how much value the company is providing to other people. Because nobody would buy their products/services if they were not providing value. A government has no balance sheet. They steal money from citizens at gun point and then spend it on stupid soykaf like bombing children in the middle east and giving free needles to homeless junkies. Government spending it always wasteful and self serving because the people actually paying for it have zero control. >>72503 >I don't view capitalism and government as opposed in general, government is basically a bag of money that capitalists squeeze. What is capitalism without government then? Because that's where things get interesting.

>>72455 >ah yes, just steal from the rich and give to me. then I will show that highschool barister how a real aristocrat tips. That is literally how western marxists think. Eat the billionaires and then we'll all be rich and drive ferraris. It's only fair to distribute everything evenly. Oh but if the government were to take 90% of your money and give it to starving children in africa that's not cool. Those same people would stop being marxists in a heartbeat if wealth redistribution meant they were going to lose something instead of gain it.

>>72507 >let me make a silly strawman and get angry over it annoying npcs

>>72503 social security is part of HHS isnt it, but you get the point >theoretically you're using social sec. as a savings bank and they give you access when your older theoretically you chose through your representative democracy to give millions of dollars to gender programs in afganistan.

>>72507 I can confirm. I was strongly into redistribution as a student and my first payslip changed my mind. Seriously, 60% of my money is simply drained by a vampire and I was asking for more.

>>72530 >wagie is afraid of redistribution targeting trillion dollar institutions lol'd, i guess for you guys " you will earn nothing and be happy" aint just a meme, its already your reality.

>>72533 >wagie is afraid of redistribution targeting trillion dollar institutions This is the other hilarious thing about western marxists. You want a dictatorship of the proletariat but you are not the fuarrrking proletariat. You need to actually work to be a worker.

>>72535 its not marxism but youre too dumb to understand that i simply want to stop getting robbed. Since you failures are proud poor users and cant be cooperated with we will bail to another country and let you rot away in content. Enjoy your misery. Ironically soviet union is your future.

>>71943 >Something feels backwards and I don't know enough about economics to understand what it is. Value, in your system the highest paid doesn't end up being something that is considered more valuable, like educators, researchers or something that requires a lot of thinking and complex problem solving. If nobody wants to do it but it's really needed = high demand, low supply. Humans are complex because if we would ever impose better remuneration on any roles, whatever those are sadly there will always be people to covet it just for the money or prestige, this ends up in corruption and degeneracy of that role. And if the better remunerated are the best thinkers then how does everyone know how complex really is the problem? Better education and better cared children can do away all the coveting, and yes impishness is a personality type some people are born with but it doesn't have to present in that way. The world is filled with irresponsible assholes or people with issues that pay their frustrations by being assholes to others and think its le ebin kewl to be bury bury baad They could die without growing up, be the change lain.

>>72506 >And then the owners decide it's not worth it and move away or give up and now you have no product and no jobs. This analysis rests on the fundamental assumption that the owners are always doing some kind of key work and without them nothing would happen. However a lot of owners are just speculating on the value of somebody else's work, and a lot of them are just looking for their rent money. If that type of parasite left tomorrow everyone would be better off. All of the machinery, logistics, and skilled labor necessary to produce and distribute products would still be there, and we wouldn't have parasites stealing away the proceeds. >buh buh governments is the real parasite! The state is owned by the same people. Always has been, even in soviet russia. Don't you get it lain?

>>72498 >If it were really the case that not everyone needed to work then things would be a lot better. The roads wouldn't all be fuarrrked up, for instance. Road construction is just another jobs program subsidized by the US government. Roads are horribly inefficient for moving people and product, but they do one thing really well and that's create a lot of work in maintenance because you now have acres and acres of asphalt that all needs to get ground up and repaved every 10-15 years, and their inefficiency also doubles as good justification to build even more roads. We purposefully pursue inefficient solutions to every problem, because we designed our system such that life is dependent on employment and if those unemployment numbers get too high, people are forced out onto the streets to die. We designed the economy to make sure everyone is doing a job, because we falsely assumed that anyone doing a job was somehow solving a real problem and creating real value. In many ways these inefficiencies are bankrupting us. There's countless industries that are subsidized like this, using tax money extracted from those same workers, in addition to workers in industries that form the real backbone of wealth. It's practically cannibalistic. We like to play this game where we pretend the US is this laissez-faire, free market capitalist playground instead of a dirty commie planned economy, but it turns out that capitalism thing never really worked out and we just have a really soykafty plan propping it up where countless man hours and trillions of dollars are wasted in indirect costs caused by the greed of the few and the ignorance of the many.

>>72591 oh yeah, almost forgot, pic related

>>72591 Roads have been considered a fundamental aspect of civilization since civilization became a thing, lain. They're not new and they needed maintenance long before cars existed. Maybe you are thinking of freeways and highways?

>>72595 hes thinking any road with potholes. Like anything else you can do it dirty which causes the roads to break fast or you can invest more for lower repair costs longterm. What happens is they do cheap and enjoy perpetual work with a stable budget for road repairs. tldr: planned obsolescence exists for roads too.

>>72595 >Maybe you are thinking of freeways and highways? That's primarily what I was referring to, particularly in terms of federal subsidies, but roads also dominate spaces where just making bike paths or pedestrian infra would have just been a better idea, and we can't forget the problem of where we put all the fuarrrking cars. Parking devastates city density, limits the efficiency of city services, wastes very valuable land, which are all ways municipalities indirectly subsidize road/car infrastructure. It's a really nasty domino effect, taxes ultimately pay for all of it, and the return on investment is poop ass. dogshit. We might as well just pay people to dig big holes in conspicuous places and then fill them back up with literal money for all the good it's doing. At least that way it might be a little more obvious what a waste it all is, and we wouldn't have to figure out what to do with all this goddamn asphalt.

>>71944 Having done jobs that were both somewhat technical and unpleasant to the point where most people required a period of learning to be tough before they could be effective. The labor is devalued by workers willing to be trod on and the attitudes of the people higher up toward anyone willing to tolerate dirty and unsafe conditions. You're worth less for even showing up. Of course this would never be spoken aloud but I really get a kick out of the attitude adjustment people from that period of my life make talking to me now that I have a cake ass desk job, money, and a degree.

>>72533 >The state is redistributing the majority of my income >Lol, you are afraid of the state redistributing the uber wealthy money to you We live in representative democracies. That mean politicians can not exist if the press turn against them. Of course the press is neither free or independent and obey to the will of the people who own it. Look at Trump, this is the absolute best you can get that isn't press owner approved. A representative democracy can not tax the rich. It is not a possibility. At best, they may tax the moderately rich who pose a threat to the actual richs but the press is a dog that never bite the hand that feed him. According to my calculations, the capitalists steal 23% of the value I produce and the state 65% of what is left. Explain why I should be revolted by only the rich stealing my money or only the politicians trading my money against vote. I think both are revolting, but it seem I am the only one. Apparently, if you have a problem with someone stealing your money to play the Godfather, you are supposed to be fine with the capitalists and if you do have a problem with the shareholder sitting on a bag of money taking value from you, then it is fine that some politician turn you into a modern slave.

>>72689 >Look at Trump, this is the absolute best you can get that isn't press owner approved. lmao, he had the full backing of Fox News and pretty much every conservative news source for his entire presidency. He has a rabidly devoted fanbase that make perfect marks. Why does everyone think he's some kind of underdog? >According to my calculations, the capitalists steal 23% of the value I produce and the state 65% of what is left. May I ask how you did these calculations?

>>72689 >According to my calculations, the capitalists steal 23% of the value I produce and the state 65% of what is left. I highly doubt this because you sound like an impoverished NEET

>>72690 Not an Amerimutt, but look at the campaign before the Republicans accepted that this not-blue-nor-red outsider was their only chance.

>>72690 > and pretty much every conservative news source Yeah, so one MSM. All the others were spouting the biggest possible lies they could come with, day and night. The collusion, the piss video, how he should be impeach for this or that. >May I ask how you did these calculations? I have bought one share of my company, just to see how much I would gain from it. The dividend plus the salary of the people at the top account for 23% of the total income of the company. I know in most industry, the usual margin is around 2% but in my case it's much more. Calculating my total tax rate is easy because my payslip says how much my boss have to pay in total and I can see what make it to my bank account. We have taxes to pay so my boss can pay me. That alone take a huge share of the total. The rest is what make it to the top of my payslip. Then we have 5 different names for taxes and then there is the income tax that is now preleved before the money make it to my bank account. And then I am paid and I have to pay my local taxes, housing taxes, car taxes and VAT.

>>72777 >Yeah, so one MSM. Out of what, three?

>>72779 NTA, but even assuming "just three". It would be, what? ABC, NBC, CNN? Those are the ones the orange nigger worshippers raged on and on about. >CNN: 587K viewers >NBC: 5.1M viewers >ABC: 2.3M viewers Honorable mention of MSNBC, which boasted 1.165M viewers. I found this with a simple search "[NETWORK] Viewer Count". These are lower now than they were during the "Trump Era", and that's all just TV. That doesn't account for youtube or any other platforms. This is not even counting the other MSM. That's a lot of people being influenced. Oh, and for the statistics, it would be important to note that "only" about 72.7M households have cable. You should have mentioned that FOX is actually owned by the same people who own CNN/ABC/NBC.

>>72781 >You should have mentioned that FOX is actually owned by the same people who own CNN/ABC/NBC. That's not true, but it is true that Fox owns a lot of local news stations.

>>72781 >You should have mentioned that FOX is actually owned by the same people who own CNN/ABC/NBC. I have worked in media technology for over a decade and have done work for all of these companies and know current employees of all of them on a first name basis. Unless you mean "rich people" or "shareholders" this is so laughably inaccurate. I challenge you to explain what you mean by this or where you picked up this idea. CNN is owned by Warner Brothers/Discovery who is in turn owned by a bunch of banks and small shareholders. ABC is owned by Disney as is Fox with the exclusion of Fox News which Disney wanted no part of and is still owned by the Murdochs. NBC is owned by Comcast. Both Comcast and Disney operate like banks in their own right. For the sake of further shutting you up CBS is owned by National Amusements which also owns Paramount. You probably know them from movie theaters and arcades and for whatever reason they don't advertise their brand to American end consumers. I say again: I challenge you to explain what you mean by this or where you picked up this idea.

>>72810 At least the other guy tried to "debunk" with "Trust me bro(tm)" and assholery. >>72794 >Unless you mean "rich people" or "shareholders" this is so laughably inaccurate. Who else would I mean? These people use proxies, Daddy warbux isn't going to be publically own everything, because even if he isn't "evil", most people would not like that. >For the sake of further shutting you up What an oddly aggressive response. Why are you spazzing out? >I challenge you to explain what you mean by this or where you picked up this idea. No. It's a widely known thing and it's entirely off-topic of the discussion. The quick part is: The same people who own those companies are part of a bigger group and so on. One example is the Bilderberg Group and the Trilateral Commission. It's too big of a discussion for this, this website, or even you, and don't like having to spell things out if I can help it. With that, I'm out: Have a good night defending corpos lol

>>72813 >No. It's a widely known thing and it's entirely off-topic of the discussion. Ah, so it's true, but you can't tell us how you know it's true, and we're dumb for not believing you already. Welp, I'm convinced!

>>72813 It does not matter if it is true or not. It's wrongthink and wrongthink is death. Only doubleminus people do wrongthink. >>72810 And if I was to use the words "capitalists"? Would the power structure seem more apparent to you? Would you, then, have a problem with just 5 people, who all know each others and who all have the same position in society and all share the same interests, to control all the important medias in America?

>>72827 >Would you, then, have a problem with just 5 people, who all know each others and who all have the same position in society and all share the same interests, to control all the important medias in America? You said "the same people" not "the same class of people". Obviously everyone who owns a major news media corporation is wealthy, that doesn't mean it is literally the same person as >>72781 claimed. Also, I think it's reductive to say that all rich people have the same interests -- they share many interests in common, but they are also constantly fighting each other. Anyone who trusts _any_ major news outlet, even InfoWars, is a pawn.

>>72827 >5 people, who all know each other to be fair if its just 5 people you're going to know eachother just as a matter of course.

if its only 5 people they will make deals with each other. Same as germany & france make deals between each other and tell rest to eat soykaf and deal with their decisions. The other issue not yet mentioned is if there is only one source all media outlets will report the same which is something that can be and was already verified repeatedly, often they even repeated the same message word for word.

>>72889 > if there is only one source all media outlets will report the same which is something that can be and was already verified repeatedly, often they even repeated the same message word for word. Well, yeah, that is a fundamental property of the news. They'll all put their spins on it of course, and they'll have pundits blabber endlessly. Do you want them to just make soykaf up?

you just need to let them soak first. they pretty much clean themselves.

>>72890 2. options 1. mention source which would clarify to people all news reports come from same single source instead of giving the illusion of choice 2. if its some event or other crap have your own guy present or find more than just one source everyone copies and then you also have soykaf like everyone reporting about some new science release citing same source without digging up other publications that stand in contrast. tldr: its a mix of fake OC to look good and lazyness which would be both fixable if there was interest