https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/30/capitalism-isnt-working-us-politicians-child-labor

I don’t mean it that literally. I mean just observing swaths of people putting straws into drinks, putting ointments on scrapes, etc might make them extrapolate and try similar actions using what’s available to them.

It’s not much of a reach for a primate seeing a human manipulate and dig with a shovel, and use that as inspiration to manipulate a bamboo shoot to scratch their own back.

We homosapiens spent 180,000 ish years wandering around in the dirt like idiots before it occurred to some of us that we could grow food in one place, thus beginning the path to civilization. Even we need examples to extrapolate from.

The difference might be in primates in captivity learning from humans using tools around them all day every day. Primate see primate do trial and error.

One seen doing it spontaneously in nature might be more significant.

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Why do vaccines need to be made by private companies for private profit at all? Why not publically funded research at universities and agencies that charge reasonably for use, where that capital is either turned into more public research or other commons? Other than the fact that we starved public research almost to death to cut private industry for private profit’s taxes.

Also private industry does NOT belong in basic utilities everyone needs AT ALL.

There should not be a single power plant or utility that’s for private investor profit. It’s too important to have any allegiance other than serving the citizenry full stop. There should be no private investor in a position to advocate sticking it to captive customers (or our sole shared communal habitat), who need any common utility like elec-fucking-tricity, to increase their quarterly private profit expectations. But here we are.

Thats why I choose to be a pessimist. It eliminates disappointment.

Expect the worst from humans and you’ll usually end up being factually correct, you’ll never be disappointed, and occasionally, if the moon and the stars align, you just might be pleasantly surprised about something at some point in your life, just don’t count on it.

Optimism looks fucking exhausting when dealing with our gem of a species. Being let down most of the time and still putting on a smile for the next disappointment you won’t expect 5 minutes later. Looks like masochism minus the sexual pleasure. Good luck with that optimists!

Capitalists don’t care about making quality products/services.

They care about squeezing more profit out of you as time goes on.

Capitalism is feudalism with a marketing team.

Land/capital shouldn’t be more important than people. Economies are supposed to be lowly tool of a society to maximize the equitable and efficient distribution of goods and services within a society for the benefit of the citizens of said society, not a few thousand sociopath families at most of society’s expense as it is.

Our society (the US in my case, but increasingly the entire west) literally lives in perpetual servitude to one of its broken tools. A catastrophe should have leaders coming out saying they’ll take every measure to protect their people and society, not their fucking economy and it’s quarterly private profit expectations.

Yep, intellect and capacity for introspection are curses in this bad joke of a civilization, especially in poor socioeconomic circumstances.

No one will even be honest with them in childhood and just tell them “because some sociopath families who were born before you called generational dibs, and convinced some of the other poories that are dumber than you to defend their dibs at gunpoint.”

Nope, they have to parse through the bullshit of bootstraps and can do attitudes that tend to be thrust upon children for years after the Santa Clause jig is up.

It depends kid.

What’s your parent’s net worth?

Shit, I thought he was saying paper is majestic.

That fucker has been pointing and laughing at me for 10 years in my head.

He’s not wrong, but still.

I promise you the Pentagon has already spent billions working to weaponize both AI and AI derived robotics.

Their philosophy is that if a new technology even has potential military applications, they demand getting it first, best, and in larger quantities than any other nation on Earth would even consider. Our military industrial complex is the largest surpassing the Joneses continuous effort humanity exerts.

That’s how we get to spending more on our military than the next 9 nations combined. That’s why we have 11 nuclear aircraft carriers, France has 1, and that’s all there is on Earth.

I’m not saying it’s right, but it’s the reality. Whatever we consumers have access to is behind what our military is testing and throwing basically infinite money at.

We’re less than 5 years out from networked, general purpose humanoid robots, that we’re using current AI technology to train to interact with the physics of the real world in virtual sandboxes, being everywhere.

Within 10 years there will be humanoid robots no human Olympian can compete with by any metric. We are static on timescales we can perceive, they are iterative. It won’t be close.

You’d think our response to Covid would have shattered the mass delusion of human hyper-comptetence.

We’re almost finished. This is just the transitional period where AI is roughly as inept as an average human. They have nowhere to go but up, and most humans are less competent than they believe they are.

waves at Dunning–Kruger effect

The first transistor was made in 1947, now AI can carry a conversation with a larger vocabulary than most humans. We spent 180,000 years wandering around in the dirt before it occurred to us we could grow stuff in one place.

I mean, why not?

Because with the apparent exception of Vietnam, billionaires run the show in the society they live in. They use their capital, which is just an expression of power, to change laws, buy courts, shift responsibility to their corporate entities that receive a cute lil meaningless fine that costs less than the profit of the crime instead of prison time, and here in the US they even literally OWN and PROFIT off many of our prisons. That’s the primary reason billionaires shouldn’t exist, because it’s close to impossible to put a check on such insane levels of power, which again, at those quantities, is what capital becomes, raw power. You can’t have a functioning representative democracy where people can grow so wealthy that their power over society extends beyond their single vote.

Most of the peasants in the world are subject to their respective judicial systems and prison systems largely configured to protect PROPERTY rights over human rights by design of those they work for, and guess who that is?

There are beautiful exceptions, the Nordic nations come to mind, but sadly my country, the US, has been spreading its greed disease for decades. We toppled south American rigimes daring to make something better to keep their markets open for our capitalists to rape using our military industrial complex, and we’ve been converting Europe with our greed disease a little at a time(YOU can live larger than you’ve ever dreamed, foreign legislator, just betray your countrymen for our profit!), the UK has fallen to it, the French are fighting it but losing, etc.

I’m against the death penalty in general, but I also acknowledge that in terms of tangible damage to humanity, any billionaire walking the Earth makes any serial killer who has ever walked the Earth seem positively quaint by scale.

I also recognize that we are living under class occupation. The owner class handily won the class war by convincing most of the developed world not to fight it half a century ago.

The peasants don’t have the luxury of taking prisoners. We are the losers of a war, in spite of the fact that many have come to worship their occupying oppressors.

Keeping the most destructive humans locked away and well fed until they die of natural causes is a peacetime luxury for those in charge, and unless you’re holding a reprehensible amount of capital, that isn’t us. You might believe we are in peacetime, but if we refuse to stop them, and it looks that way, they will force our shared, communal habitat to stop us all through their insatiable, sociopathic avarice.

We love to think we’re not, but we’re still subjects wholly dependant on this world, even the owners activily attacking us and it simultaneously.

We’re no less corrupt in the US, merely more expensive.

Our cheats just hire lobbyists to make their corrupt practices legal, shout out to Citizens United, and/or hire enough lawyers to make the consequences meaningless, like fining a company that makes billions a year thousands for profitable criminal activity.

Our “solution” to corruption is simply to make it legal for the right price. Donald Trump should have lost his empire and gone to jail for his business practices long before he was a game show host, let alone POTUS, but he learned and inherited enough from daddy to understand how to wield American style corruption, and he’s still free.

Since there’s no rational hope of addressing the other 3k or so billionaire parasites on Earth without building a really big Titanic wreckage tour sub and making little paths of stock certificates leading to it like reese’s pieces in ET, I’ll take whatever incidental vicarious revenge against humanity’s oppressors I can get.

The fact that making significant sacrifices in abandoning many of the decadent comforts of this period at our only habitat’s irreparable (on a human timescale) damage expense is met with ridicule shows how determined we are to wreck this place.

Imagine mass famines and frequent catastrophic weather events a couple generations from now. I’m guessing they’ll look at us being above living with our once kind, nurturing habitat with disdain and bewilderment when they’re steeped in the fruits of our lifestyles.

Im not saying going back to the dark ages, im not advocating rejecting knowledge, only the rushing around and consumerism. There’s no more reasonable room for growth, growth is killing us, and robbing us of meaning.

If we can’t live with this paradise, the idea of us spreading to hostile, unforgiving worlds within reach like Mars or Titan is a bad joke. Unlike the infinite mistakes we get to keep making here without instant death, one major mistake out there where we didn’t evolve, and poof everybody dead instantly thanks for playing space faring civilization. That isn’t a game humans can pull off. Maybe some small crew of exceptional people, but certainly not a colony of regular people.

This is what we got. So yeah, maybe spending our time whittling stuff we need and moving at the speed of horse would be better for humanity long term than racing to grow our GDP into extinction.

Whats the endgame of all this growth and “innovation” if it wasn’t killing us as it is? To have Google ad AI generated amalgums of our dead relatives transmitted directly into our brains to convince us to buy more crap?