Capitalism brooks no competition. You won’t find another economic system to study that isn’t markedly worse.
Look into what the Blackfoot Indians were doing. Their lifestyle inspired Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs — though he gets it pretty wrong IMO.
But here’s the thing: the Blackfoot didn’t really have an economic system divorced from other systems. It was all part of a whole that valued people and made sure everyone had what they needed.
Now here’s the kicker: Its my belief their society was based on spreading abundance. Whereas Capitalism is based on spreading scarcity.
You asked for a thing to research. So go do that and report back. Maybe it’s bullshit. Maybe you’ll do some research, be inspired, and change the whole world.
I dunno. I’m not an economist… have you asked an economist?
Edited to add: hey I found a use for AI; here’s a prompt for your favorite model:
“What economic systems have humans devised over the course of recorded history?”
Capitalism, socialism (what people refer to as communism), and then communism which will never exist because it always stops with the government stealing everything and not wanting to give up power to move on to communism.
What are other economic systems? Not saying there aren't any other ones, I just don't know.
I grew up in ESSR or as it was known locally ENSV. Replying to any criticism of capitalism with an immediate “so you want communism” without even a stopover in complaining about socialism is quite something.
Isn't there capitalism, socialism--which is what people are actually talking about when they talk about communism, and then communism which will never exist?
Not to sound like a hippie but we could just try to be a bit kinder to each other and not put money as the single most important thing above all else. You can run a business to make money AND do it in a way that leaves our world in a slightly better state than you found it.
It’s not a black and white choice of either we jump hardcore into capitalism or all the other way into socialism.
Similarly to OP I work at a company that has a certain set of core values and the moment they have changed irreversibly I am gone out the door.
Which is good, I can't figure out how anybody can see the government owning everything as a good thing for anyone.
If you just look at postal services across the world, as an example, or anything else run by government, they're 100 times less efficient then competitors and their workers always look like they're super-miserable. Imagine if that was the only option.
I would say both less efficient and less profitable.
If you're saying FedEx people are also depressed, then maybe it's just delivering boxes that's the problem?
But I think it's pretty safe to say that there is nobody more pissed off than post office workers. Are they nice in Estonia? Luckily I do most stuff online nowadays but when I have to go to the post office it's always an awful experience.
I would say it's more likely that the hours and wages are the problem.
A few grumpy delivery workers aside, most people in Estonia are nice in general. You should come visit :)
I don't know where you are but consider that the reasons your postal workers are pissed of may go deeper than simply being government employed. Could it be your state-owned services are being managed in way that makes their workers unhappy because they are run by people who think that government services even need to be profitable in the first place?
I'm in Poland, but I'm from Italy and I've lived in the U.S. for a few years. Worst post offices in Italy by far, but Poland and U.S. pretty similar.
Other low-paying jobs don't seem to generate the same amount of unhappiness.
I have no idea what the reason is, to me it's just that governments can't do anything right because they're too big with no oversight.
That's why I was complaining about socialism, anywhere I've been where the government runs more than just post offices it was hell.
In Poland, all these Soviet buildings and if you look at old pictures of people standing for hours in queues for bread. Truly horrific. I was recently in Cuba and even if they can't talk about it many people told me they would flee right away if they could, but the government doesn't give them passports. Socialism destroys everything.
Well all the things OP complained about are inherently caused by capitalism but I think it’s probably possible to engage in capitalism in a way that is cognizant of those issues and actively trying to avoid them instead of treating them as eh that’s just how business is done
Then I'd suggest, in good faith, avoiding the "Ugh, capitalism" framing in the future. That just comes across as lazy, which doesn't help your point. As exemplified by the replies you got, all arguing about words.
I admit I could've probably used more words but when someone says "it's just business" that is a clear example of how the particular flavor of capitalism we live under has enabled and indeed encourages brushing away any moral and ethical qualms as "it's just business" and as you say, it was quite interesting to see how many people immediately jumped to dictionaries, communism, and whatever else the moment capitalism was criticized.
Capitalism is a moral framework as much as it is an economic system, especially in the US where it is deeply entangled in the Protestant work ethic and prosperity gospel ideals.
Is that in any dictionary, though? Capitalism means capitalism, free market with citizens owning companies.
If it's deeply entangled in the Protestant work ethic and prosperity gospel ideals in the U.S., then what's bad is the Protestant work ethic and prosperity gospel--whatever that might be.
Capitalism is what capitalism does. Name one "capitalist" economy strictly and exclusively defined by a "free market with citizens owning companies." None. There are no free markets. Governments always own some interest in companies, regulate and interfere in markets. Culture and morality always influence class and power hierarchies, and by extension economic systems. The real world is more complex than dictionary definitions allow.
Right, I agree that governments should stay out of people's business.
If you're saying that governments always mess with the free market, then I guess we're in socialist-capitalist economic systems..? Still better than just socialist.
If your definition of capitalism requires pure free markets, and you consider any regulation of markets by government to be socialism, then yes all existing economic systems are socialist and no capitalist systems exist.
Personally I don't find a framework so reductionist that it considers the USSR and the US to be equivalent to be very useful.
I'm not following you. Capitalism just means free market. Private individuals own the companies instead of the government, and they do that with the main goal of making money.
I can't figure out why that must necessarily mean that those companies can't leave the world in a slightly better place. A LOT of them do, specially small businesses.
I've seen the destruction that socialist governments left even after decades and I went to Cuba and other socialist countries and the government treats them like literal slaves and life is shit over there, with no way out.
Anyways, I know of capitalism, socialism, and communism. I just wanted to see if you meant another form that I wasn't aware of.
Sure, as a theory capitalism is just a free market but I obviously mean capitalism as it exists today and shapes our entire world. And socialism has it's own can of worms, sure.
But what I was responding to in particular with my original comment was the parent commenters claim that "It’s just business" and that engaging in capitalism means you must inherently engage in the practices the OP was complaining about.
Give an abstract requirement and access to your AI tool. Ask the candidate to create a working solution and review the AI generated code. requirement analysis and code review are now the primary skills for developers.
I don’t think code review of AI is important at all - specially given the developer might not even know the language, in which case it’s irrelevant.
I think ability to build checking, verification, linting, testing and cross LLM code review mechanisms is important, which ensure that fast changing or unpredictably changing ai code has consistent behavior and is security checked.
'Hoop-jumping' is an indication that the rest of the organization is inept at moving fast and being decision-oriented. I believe capable organizations can make good decisions on limited information and their interview process should be reflective of that.
If the interview process takes more than 3 steps and 3h, I'm out.
My interview process is very reasonable. If you’ve hit the point where you are required to do a 2-3 hour technical interview round with me, you’re a short list candidate and only have 1-3 competitors for a very lucrative job.
If that’s too much of a hoop for you, I’ll just take the sandwich, no fries with that.
“Oh, you don’t want to work for us? Well that’s a bullet dodged because not wanting to work for us means you suck (expressed in any number of ways, in this case you say I’m cynical) . We remain awesome!”
I mean, there definitely are bad companies that abuse that attitude.
However, on the other hand, a lot of keyboard warriors on here love to be edgelords about refusing to take any initiative, as if every single form of interview that makes you work the muscle in your skull is a violation of the Geneva convention.
Like I said, perhaps selfishly, I don’t want to work with people who are going to complain every time they’re made to do something while being paid very good money to do it. I’m not telling them to work a 996 or miss their kids’ dance recital, I’m just asking for a solid 4-6 hours of honest work per day.
"I could not ask their sons to fight and die for the properties of the wealthy: Lee Kuan Yew"
"I resolved to enable every household to own its own home. If we were going to get the people to take National Service seriously, I could not ask their sons to fight and die for the properties of the wealthy. We worked out a personal savings scheme that allowed them to own an apartment painlessly through instalments over 20 years. We sold the apartments to them at below cost to enhance their assets. Today, 95 per cent of Singaporean households are homeowners. It has immeasurably increased their wealth and our social stability. Without home ownership, we would have become like Tokyo, Seoul or Hong Kong, where the voters in the cities are disaffected because they pay a large proportion of their salaries in rents.”
It’s a pretty good policy: Singapore owns most land and therefore you lose the rent-seeking ability on land. So all homes are leasehold apartments and the government can develop places either by right or by using repurchase agreements with substitution. A unique setup that works given their constraints. In the worst case, you get to hold your apartment 99 years and then the government can take it all back to redevelop it. You don’t get nail houses like in China or California.
Ownership is closer to 90% now or something and the 30% of non resident foreigners will have much lower ownership obviously.
just wondering... do you think bun's rewrite with ai was vibe coded or engineered with ai? i know it wasn't perfect in the beginning but i think it was good engineering and what was built will make it faster and better.
I design all my services expecting to receive sockets this way. It makes sandboxing easy as the service itself doesn't need network access to have a listening socket.
It's a shame docker never supported it. I feel like if they had got on board all those years ago there would be broad support across the software ecosystem for it and we wouldn't need half of these complicated iptables rules and proxies and service mesh. It would be a step towards a capability based system.
This is very interesting. I'm not sure what I'd use it for yet, but I imagine it could be useful for triggering ad hoc jobs over the network. Maybe have Home Assistant make a network call to kick off a daily back up when I leave the office at the end of a work day.
A pretty nice use case I have for socket activation is for isolating containers or applications from the host network.
The great thing about socket activation is that opened sockets carry over even if the application/container unshares into a different network namespace!
It also works great with Podman pods with networking in the pod completely disabled and, as those are host sockets, does fully retain the connection info of peers (so logs are not just uselessly containing the gateway IP, depending on the container network config)
I believe its original motivation was just speeding up boot times by starting fewer services, even if you'd eventually want the service running. This was achieved in the past with xinetd, but systemd made the approach more popular for the masses.
inetd began to fall out of favour in the mid-late 90s as services became more heavyweight and startup times became longer (think of the initial crypto setup needed by sshd vs rsh/telnetd)
CPU speeds have increased & and i/o latency has decreased so much since then that startup times are generally imperceptible, so the pendulum has swung back to favouring socket activation.
The anti-systemd "traditionalists" never seem to acknowledge that history, though!
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