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Make a product people really want.

That applies to fentanyl and tiktok.

Yes, and people keep paying ridiculous prices for the first and for ads for the second.

Under this principle no human has ever been able to consent to anything in the history of the world. Certainly 99.99% of humans.

This would also imply that the best thing ethically is not to give people goods in exchange for labor because the simple act of interaction with them puts their housing and food needs under your responsibility.


No human can _100%_ consent to anything (… probably: free will is tricky). Coercion is a continuum, not a binary.

I don't really think that companies (or other parties in trades) bear moral responsibility for this inherently — a company that accepted every job applicant to try to meet their inelastic demands wouldn't last long, so the company itself is also under some duress even if it might like to. Trying to assign blame for complex distributed problems isn't really that simple. Your example in particular is a trolley problem, and I (personally) don't believe that pulling the lever makes you more culpable than deliberately choosing not to pull the lever.

But regardless of your chosen ethics, my point is pragmatic — while it's not correct to say that people take jobs only because they are under duress, it's also not correct to base arguments on them acting on their own free will based on their personal preferences. UBI experiments show significant changes in employee behaviour when inelastic demands are guaranteed to be met and negotiations pertain only to elastic quantities.


That is wonderful. What makes billionaires valuable to society is that the act of trying to make a business worth a billion dollars that people want is really, really hard. It essentially punches you in the face constantly. You have to power through a bunch of really tough situations. There has to be a really strong reward at the end to make it worth it. Otherwise everyone would just toy around with free projects.

Hopefully the billionaires are happy with the reward at the end of the tunnel.

I suspect they may envy the laymens position in life eventually. You loose alot becoming wealthy in the monitary sense. There are many ways to define richness and wealth beyond what society defines it as.

As they say, more money more problems.


One can agree that they would rather see wealth more equitably distributed while also admitting that the current system of private property and capitalism is the most effective at broadly generating wealth.

You could say that, but you also don't have to concede it.

In fact, my argument would be that the more regulated, industrial-policy-driven economies of the recent past were better at generating wealth and improving society.

For the most part, the real conflict that we're having around these topics is about the reorganization of the economy that happened starting in the mid-1970s.

This change shifted the focus of the US economy to financial extraction and away from industrial policies, a role that we sold out to China for the benefit of our elite classes and the severe detriment of our working class.


On a trillion year time frame, sure.

How much of the land on planet earth is currently unclaimed by a nation state or individual?

You don’t need a trillion year scale for the average man to already be dealing in finite resources and ability to create wealth.

It takes 30 seconds of research to see the cost of an acre of land has far exceeded inflation over the last 50 years. That’s finite resources at work.


Nike has some of the best labor policies of all the shoe companies now. Their controversies were in the 90s.

Look around you and see we are not living in mud and huts anymore

Actually I'd rather start from a mud hut and then upgrade it myself than live in the current rental system, but I don't have that option because landlords own most of the land.

It's racism that fuels this comparison with value. I'm living in a yurt and would gladly trade it for a mud hut. Humans are currently threatening most life (including our own species) on the surface with extinction in multiple ways. That's not value and it is an inevitable conclusion to any form of binary thinking at scale. That includes the thinking that says "this way of life has more value than that way of life." We're living in the curse of the Greeks, whereby we've grown away from connection with our environments in the same ways they did by pedestaling their ways, including a form of logic that's too constrained to model reality.

Here's a paper on uncertainty logic to expand from. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1506.03123


Thank you for saying it. The racism is so embedded into western society it’s intractable

And saying so will get you downvoted on here most times. To anyone downvoting, show us the depth of your reasoning for it?

The fact that while racism exists, Western society is certainly not at the forefront of it? If anything the collective "West" is the most sensitive about race and racial issues.

It's performative because resolving it would require the end of the governments within the "West" and replacing with reindigenizing governance. Supremacy is at the foundation of the whole "West" and racism will always exist while that's in play. The racism is systemic and cultural. Sensitivity isn't sufficient; there needs to be actual systemic shifts that help drive cultural shifts and vice-versa. Not simply language changes, either. Rooting out binary thinking is key to it all. Nondual animist views are more aligned with how things work in the cosmos than dualism/nonanimism.

> Supremacy is at the foundation of the whole "West" and racism will always exist while that's in play.

If this is indeed the case, then it is very much not unique to the West, nor is it most tightly ingrained in the West. I'm not sure in how many different countries you'd live, but I can tell you this from lived experience. It could well be that most of the West is above average on a global scale in terms of belief in supremacy. I too have not lived in a 100 countries so I can't place "the West" as a block with accuracy. What I can tell you is that it does not land at #1.

Unless you call any vaguely US-aligned high-HDI country "The West" regardless of ethnicity, but that would be completely opposed to how any reasonable person would interpret your stance given the mentions of racism.


I'd say Greek culture heavily influenced colonization of the world & this has, in large part, led to dualism being implemented systemically , which drives supremacy-based thinking. Not saying ancient Greece invented it, but definitely helped in formalizing the basis for it.

That's a very different claim, and no one reading your first comments would've interpreted "The West" as "The Western style of thinking" (which is hardly tractable) rather than "The bloc that is the West in 2026".

It would be in a sense Eurocentric and patronizing to suggest that supremacy-based thinking all the way from the Middle East to East Asia stems from Greek culture. And if you're trying to say that dualism is universal and arises everywhere, then Greece becomes almost irrelevant and there's no real point to be made that the West has particularly relevant unique or exaggerated characteristics when it comes to the pervasive supremacy-based thinking.


You might be mixing my comments with someone else's. I'm not focusing on the "West", just addressing what someone else brought in. And it's neither all "the West's" responsibility nor is its responsibility irrelevant. The educational indoctrination used by European/American colonization practices has focused around teaching "Greek logic", and this includes how academic science and math has evolved and spread. The comment this one is in response to even presents a binary as a misrepresentation of what I've written before.

Dualism is not universal. And its wide spread in this world was brought about in large part through brutal colonization carried out by Europeans and their descendants with the help of various Christian denominations. They used Christian spirituality and forcing their own languages on people to disconnect them from the land (which includes the people themselves, as we are all land).


Housing prices certainly can get high, but they aren't anywhere close to a billion dollars, which is the actual number under discussion

The thing being discussed is that wealth can be created, not merely stolen.

The existence of housing is an example of something vlauable being created. The price of housing is not relevant to the example.


But it's extractive, i.e. the housing costs what you can pay if you sacrifice. Those who got housing first need to get paid by latecomers. If the cost of building magically went to 0, the soft costs would inflate.

Sure. The extractiveness of housing costs can exist alongside the fact that constructing a building on land creates value.

Always the same straw man argument. Nobody here is arguing that wealth can't be created.

Did you not read the comment chain above? That's precisely the point that was being discussed, then misunderstood.

I read the comment chain above. I just went back and read it again. I question whether you've done the same.

I can't understand the writing for you. But I can present it.

TheTayTay said "wealth can be created". Avicebron asked for an example of wealth creation. cm2012 provided one, housing. saghm misunderstood the intent of the example. I pointed out the error, and then you came in and have apparently repeatedly failed to understand again multiple comments, both the people who literally are saying that some quantity of wealth cannot be created, and myself.

If you didn't get that after a reread, all I can suggest is that you seek out a literacy class at a local community college. It will improve your life, because this certainly won't be the first or only time you misunderstand written words.


The argument that you seem to have had trouble parsing isn't that it's impossible to create wealth, but that the rewards are not distributed according to the role that people played in creating it. If a company sells for a billion dollars, there isn't a single "correct" way to decide how much each person in the company deserves to get. Some people (likely including yourself) believe that the way it's currently done is the best way, but other people (like myself) disagree and think that the current system gives rewards that are not proportionate to the amount of work each member does in reaching that point. There are plenty of coherent counterarguments you could make against my viewpoint, but asserting that it's equivalent to claiming that wealth "can't be created" is not one of them; I'm arguing that how much each person contributed towards that wealth creation is different than you are, not that it's literally not happening.

I'm sorry to say that you don't seem to have read either the thread or my comment.

What you bring to the discussion is the straw-man argument that "wealth can be created, not only stolen." Nobody was disputing that. Nobody is disputing it now. It's common ground.

Saghm tried to return to the actual topic, but you don't seem to have understood (or you aren't willing to acknowledge) what that topic actually was. People were talking about how to fairly divide wealth, not about whether it can be created or not.


No, I don't believe that you are sorry. And discussions can diverge; making a comment that follows only the original discussion but is a non-sequiter to the comment it actually replies to, makes the comment nonsensical, not "a return to the original discussion".

The thing you say was not claimed, was claimed by multiple commenters.

Considering you are neither truthful nor literate, I won't be replying again. Feel free to get the last word in if you like.


If anyone else is unlucky enough to be reading this, please just scroll up to see what everyone actually said.

Also note that we're 8 billion people living on a much higher average material living standard than when we were 2 billion 100 years ago.

No one is arguing that such a thing as wealth creation doesn't exist. The question is about who or what creates it.

Which is a topic of intense discussion in economics over the last few hundred years, BTW, and the discussion here so far has shockingly few references to those.


Well, this is outrageously impressive

Thank you!

Two of my favorite games of all, Chivalry 2 and Hell Let Loose, are indie studio games and this law would make more expensive to make.

Im not sure for Hell Let Loose, but Chivalry 2 is a Unreal game and all unreal games come with a server.exe that works by default and works through direct IP connection. It would cost them 0 and im sure the game could just host servers with the normal client build like all unreal engine games do by default.

Just no. There's zero reason (other than greed as you can rent your own server) as to why you can't run your own server with Chivalry 2, likely no reason for Hell Let Loose either. I ran a Chivarly 1 server for years, its just an unreal game with a server browser, its not an mmo or pubg like matchmaking style that requires more infrastructure to run. And even if you did that, you could still allow people to run their own private servers, just have an old style server browser, which comes out of the box with engines like Unreal.

When I realized I could build a lead gen mini-site in Replit in ten minutes that was better than I have ever had an engineering team build

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