and just like in biology, you need a system to fight the cancer, you can't just wish it away.
since we've refused to maintain such an immune system, we're now going to have to go through a miserable period of chemo treatment to rid ourselves of the tumors.
Sorry. We're stage 4. It's terminal.
I’m a fan of capitalism with tight regulations and checks on corruption, personally
The very nature of capitalism facilitates concentrations of power, which will utilize that power to accumulate even more in any conceivable way. The system is fundamentally flawed and needs to be replaced if we care at all for basic human rights and a future for this species.
What is your proposed alternative? I struggle to think of any system that doesn’t inevitably result in concentrations of power
Social Democracy. Commerce is key to strong economies, not capitalistic wealth hoarding.
I'm not a fan of any overarching system, however capitalism is the one I, and I suspect most of the people reading this, live in. Therefore the best way of addressing the problems our society faces is to do so using the tools that our capitalistic system provides (such as regulation and oversight) rather than twiddle our thumbs waiting for some grand revolution to fix everything.
Claiming that the only way to improve our situation is to completely overturn the system does nothing but promote inaction.
If this post gets 100 upvotes then capitalism will fail and everyone will get sex.
But if you measure growth in made up numbers, you can just keep rolling them up indefinitely.
If we lived in a made up number world where people are resources can just be pulled out of thin air without consequence that would work I suppose.
That's called inflation.
Greed seems to be the inevitable outcome, at the expense of other humans and animals around us all. It's disturbing and has no real end-game of benefit now that we have automation. The question is how do we take back control from the authoritarians?
We can't. People like to think it's possible by voting in the "right" type of person and things like peacefully protesting etc. The truth is that it's a lost cause. We can't make the changes necessary to fix the planet, stop the ultra rich or any other large scale issue. I know I sound defeatist, but it's true. Short of bloody violence we're stuck like this.
I wish you were wrong.
Time for degrowth
Buh degrowth is genocide 😅🤣
Literally what some ignoramus on Facebook said when I suggested this.
I'm all for an individual decreasing their own consumption for the environment. I try to do that. But decreasing someone else's quality of life is where it gets dicy. You can very easily get discrimination.
Put a high upper limit only. Don't touch the bottomline.
For example, no more than 4 cars per person: Average Joe won't even know this rule exists but it will still reduce mineral mining due to people who collect cars.
Possible problems with my shitty example: Now a car is a controlled substance. Who decides the limit and how? What if there is a mental disease (with a better example this would make more sense) which requires a person to have 20 cars?
I believe that's called Clarkson's Disease and mostly affects lovable assholes.
I think a better solution is to give everyone less reasons to need and use cars, that a ban becomes unnecessary. But if we're putting limits on things to reduce their consumption, that's what excise taxes are for, most places already do it for fuel.
And of course there could always be taxation relative to a person or company's environmental impact. People get angry at this one.
degrowth doesn't mean worse quality of life, in many instances it very much increases quality of life.
would you not prefer to work half as much as you do? we can have that with degrowth.
Not that I'm capitalism's greatest fan, but this sounds about as clever as, "evolution is impossible because the second law of thermodynamics says chaos always increases, and the sun doesn't exist."
"Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell."
Edward Abbey
Things like apps, media, or art can be more valuable without taking any more resources. Plus through greater efficiency, the same resources go much further. But it's often easier to grow by just consuming more, so companies to that since they don't really care. The sad thing is, I think we can have limitless growth if it's slow and deliberate and conscious of it's impact to the planet. But the current system doesn't incentive that, instead everyone is flooring the growth pedal to catastrophic effect.
Things like apps, media, or art can be more valuable without taking any more resources.
They take energy and memory on the local devices and in the cloud. Uploading and downloading also does. Better software often needs better (new) hardware. The developers take office space and hardware and energy. Do you want me to go on?
The bigger question for my is why growth is supposed to be a good thing. With all the technology, we could work less but on the whole, we work more.
This is a popular take that is just completely wrong. Capitalism as a system does not require growth. Capitalism is a system in which the factors of production are owned by private parties and can be freely traded. The capitalists believe is that markets will allocate those factors of production to the owners that can best exploit them. This can result in growth, but it isn’t necessary for the system to function.
There are literally a thousand issues with the system ranging from inequality to environmental concerns to market concentration (all of which capitalists tend to ignore). I really do not understand why people pick this one to quibble over.
Because shareholders demand almost always increasing growth despite the factual impossibility to provide that. The gaming sector is a good showcase where trust, release quality & creativity and monetization practices continually degrade the overall experience until the company starts to sink in its entirety. Ubisoft comes to mind. I have been burned so bad by them, started to refuse their products and certainly I seem to not be the only person.
I wouldn't say capitalism is based on the notion of infinite growth, but it is an inevitability of there being no limits on capital accumulation. The notion that humans have endless desire for more, always needing a stronger hit to maintain personal satisfaction, is more psychological than something inherent to private ownership itself. Capitalism feeds the natural animal reward system to disastrous effect, but it isn't required for capitalism to work. In fact, insatiable desires are the reason capitalism doesn't work, because if people could be satisfied with a reasonable amount of resources, never trying to acquire more than they need, capitalism would be a fairly decent system.
All organizations fail eventually. Companies lose focus at the top (management), become like a cancer, over extend, and then die off. The remaining assets are picked off. Same thing with governments. Same with unions. Hell, the same happened with boy scouts. Same thing with churches.
What is described is a human condition, not a problem specific to capitalism. Greed cannot be organized out, legislated against, nor fought with fists.
this is literally capitalist propaganda, human nature is the exact opposite, we're an absurdly generous and non-greedy species due to how social we are, just like how ants don't hoard food.
a few select humans who most likely have a number of mental illnesses are greedy, and they have for thousands of years now managed to convince everyone else that they for some reason deserve special treatment to the detriment of the rest of society.
Where did this meme of "capitalism requires infinite growth, therefore it's impossible and bad" come from? Capitalism doesn't require infinite growth, the universe has basically infinite resources, modernity which is largely but not exclusively caused by capitalism has allowed us to do so much more with fewer resources than generations previous, and as societies get richer in material wealth they produce fewer children and have the luxury to pay attention to things like the environment and their impact on it.
Wow, such a… deep comparison
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