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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Your comment is weirdly aggressive and is entirely predicated on the idea that we can’t have any economic system other than the one where the ownership class and the working class are distinct.

    The whole point of workers owning the means of production is that they will take on the risk as well as the reward. The belief in that idea conjoins with the belief that it shouldn’t be possible to profit from the labour of others purely because you have money to start with. It’s conjunctive with the belief that the investor class is surplus to requirements.

    An argument against this is, how would we maintain productivity if no wealthy people were investing in new businesses or in reviving dying ones? There are entire industries that exist only to feed into this machine. This system, that claims to be only motivated by increasing productivity to increase profits, is only putting the brakes on human advancement and betterment of our quality of life. Advertising is, by many measures, the largest industry in the world. So much talent and effort is exerted on how best to sell people a product they don’t need, an art form mostly now perfected to convince us we can’t live without these things, all in the name of profit.

    I’m not well read enough to say that I definitely believe that the world would be better if we enforced worker co-ops. There’s so many other ways things could go wrong. I do think you need to open your mind to the fact that the systems we have in place exist only due to opportunism of those who came before us.
















  • Re: your last paragraph -

    Think of it this way. Google pulls in 300 billion USD a year and 80% of that is advertising revenue, not leaving a whole lot of the pie for Pixel phones once you take out subscriptions, Chromebooks, GCP, etc etc.

    Sure, they’re probably making some money on every pixel sale but the point of them making mobile phones is to support their advertising business.

    I’m not a Graphene user, but that’s the way I see it. At the end of the day if you get the phone secondhand you’re not giving them any money at all.