His post was satirical (in my comment that I equalled his wishes with Chinese revolution).
“Socialism” vs. “Capitalism” debate
- Thread starter Kinsella
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one answer from a leftist would be that the alue created by the sales team is not real, and that in similar ways, modern measurements of value overvalue shit (like Lingard) and undervalue important things (like water).
I think you're getting a bit off track. The assertion was "making is easy, selling is hard". That's a simplistic viewpoint and lacks context. You using one very unique example does not support your argument well once you factor in companies around the world. Most sales work is easy. But if you want to limit it to just Apple, then sure, have your way with it.
Also, Apple is more than just a phone company. They do make computers, I hope you know. The computers are also superior to almost everything out there in the commercial market. Marketing and sales have a bit to do with that. However, you have to give more credit to the engineers who designed the quality products in the first place. Quality products make it much easier to sell. Let's see how Apple does if it had the same quality of engineers as, say, your local IT shop.
Then why Apple is worth 1.3 trillion and some Chinese companies no one has ever heard about who makes as good phones (but much cheaper) is valued at just a few millions?
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A transfer of wealth is not a transfer of ownership of the company. It's only .3% of shares in a relative way. If those extra shares don't exist, then they'd still own a majority stake. And if it's a government of the people and not a government of corrupt politicians owned by billionaires, then that money will be spent for the better good. Much more so than so than philanthropic efforts.
I think he's saying the *trillion dollar value is more of a perception than tangible wealth. I think.
China is definitely not a country I prefer. Fake communists, them lot.
China is not really communist, only communist by name. Communism is a stateless, moneyless society to start. Ain't nothing like that exists yet. If we're talking about something like the Star Trek universe (arguably communist), then consider me a comrade.Good to know. I was worried that @Florida Man has turned communist
That absolutely don't make any sense. Wealth is shares. If those shares doesn't exist, the government gets nothing. A definition of state owners is for govt to own more than 51% shares. How can the government take more shares, yet have them own the company? If a company is with $1 trillion is just price of shares. You can't have govt taking majority yet have them retaining ownership.
I am totally failing to understand this. If the shares don't exist, it essentially mean that you capping companies to not become too big, right?
The second line, that is exactly what has been tried. A government of the people, made by people, working for the people ... making the people starve and leave on mass.
Why a bureaucrat (in many cases an unelected one) will have the best of the people in his mind? Why he would be more efficient than someone who is owning his own money? Why he would be less corrupt?
Again, try to answer taking into consideration the real-world. Ane assumption that we are humans, not bees, would also be helpful.
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The rich getting comparatively more wealthy than the poor doesn't mean the poor are getting poorer. That's the literal point of wealth being infinite. One person being worth £2b and another being worth £1k is far better than two people being worth £100 (USA Vs DRC)
This is where socialism and the ideals of envy are inherently flawed. Who cares if the top 0.1% is more wealthy than the other 99.9% combined in a country where 95% of people aged 16 - 55 have a computer 100,000 more powerful than what put man on the moon in their pockets?
Stop looking at the comparison between the top 0.1% and the bottom 90% and start opening your eyes to what amazing things capitalism has brought to the bottom 90%.
The biggest barriers to the bottom 90% (and more pertinently the bottom 10%) are government. They live in the poorest areas so are forced into subsiding shite education and healthcare. They and their children don't go to university but are forced into paying taxes for the wealthy to attend Oxford. They can't afford a car but are forced into road taxes. They are disproportionately affected by VAT and National insurance. They subsidise "help to buy" despite being unable to buy a home. They subsidise flood defences in leafy boroughs despite again not being able to afford houses in those areas. They pay for the military and foreign aid despite being left behind themselves. They can't afford electric cars but pay for a £3k subsidy for a £90k hybrid Porsche. They struggle to turn the heating on but pay taxes on gas and electricity under the guise of "environmentalism".
Government are far more responsible for inequality compared with capitalism.
Cut £750b of government spending and give every family £45k each per annum and watch especially the poorest thrive.
Not exist as in convert them to cash rather than owning it. Or they exist but they are taxed at 100% rate. I'm open to ideas to make the goal a reality.
Damn. I felt that from here
If you're trying to allude to China again, then I'm not gonna keep repeating myself. Otherwise, you seem to have a problem with democracy.
Irrelevant question because I didn't advocate for that at all.
The real world changes over time. It's not fixed. Once upon a time, the real world would be ruled by kings and queens and disobedience would have you publicly impaled through your anus.
How about 3 Americans being worth more than 160 million Americans combined?
Because you can tell folks to stop paying attention to that all you want, but it’s bullshit.
I am alluding to every country who tried that system in the last century (they were 30 something, right?). Not a single success story.
Windows is objectively one of the shittiest operating system on the market, yet it is still the most commonly used.
Too much is made of the supposed ingenuity of people like Gates and Jobs or Zuckerberg. It’s often a matter of establishing a foothold and then monopolize the market by buying out smaller competitors and establish brand loyalty, which has to do more with luck. Those better Taiwanese phones doesn’t get to enjoy those advantages.
And it’s a direct rebuke of the concept of innovation being tied to efficiency in the market. It isn’t efficient for Microsoft or Apples to innovate and replace their golden goose with a potentially better golden goose, so for decades now all they did is rehashing the same concept with incremental changes and depend on third party developers and startups to do the heavy lifting before buying them out if anything proves to have potential, so essentially all that power and wealth they’ve accumulated due to their success isn’t efficiently being used to continue development/innovation.
Too much is made of the supposed ingenuity of people like Gates and Jobs or Zuckerberg. It’s often a matter of establishing a foothold and then monopolize the market by buying out smaller competitors and establish brand loyalty, which has to do more with luck. Those better Taiwanese phones doesn’t get to enjoy those advantages.
And it’s a direct rebuke of the concept of innovation being tied to efficiency in the market. It isn’t efficient for Microsoft or Apples to innovate and replace their golden goose with a potentially better golden goose, so for decades now all they did is rehashing the same concept with incremental changes and depend on third party developers and startups to do the heavy lifting before buying them out if anything proves to have potential, so essentially all that power and wealth they’ve accumulated due to their success isn’t efficiently being used to continue development/innovation.
Oh, I totally agree and I don't use that pile of shit, but still they had to convince billions of people to use it, while there are better (and totally free) alternatives.
So yes, selling is hard, building is easy. Linux is superior to Windows in every aspect, but people use Windows. Why? Because Gates and co convinced people to use it.
Nothing to do with the debate, but Gates is considered one of the greatest programmers, and his partner was even better at it. Not geniuses, but easily is 99.99 quantile. He was also a terrific manager. Zuckerberg was good at managing.
I'm not in the mood to itemize every single country but to blanket them all as a true people-powered system that failed because of themselves is just not true.
you were talking about arguing in good faith? if you are, then you can read the rest of the sentence and figure out what i meant. that the valuation itself is flawed.
also, "building is easy" as a general statement is nonsense. it's cart-before-horse.
in what terms?
And how did they convince people to use it? By using competitive advantages Linux doesn’t have.
If the majority of people is tech-blind, which is the case, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out the easiest way to get the majority of them to only know your product is to make Windows the default system in most laptops/PCs being sold on the market, they’ve aggressively pursued this strategy since they first partnered with IBM. So it really has nothing to do with how smart the people in charge at Microsoft are, but how they started.
Apple started off with Apple PC, but then morphed to design oriented "cool" stuff. It was only after late 90s that it went from near bankrupt to a behemoth and that was all due to Jobs becoming CEO. As to Microsoft, Gates was 2nd choice for IBM and Gates convinced them to use their O/S....exactly what you want from a fledgling company CEO. It's quite easy to write them off in hindsight as lucky or insignificant, but these simple decisions are worth trillions now. Considering that a major % of entrepreneurial ventures end up in failure, these people deserve recognition. They may not be genius, but they took advantage and made the decision that shot the companies to stardom.
Majority are tech blind is a super naive excuse. Nowadays almost every person who owns the latest iPhone has the capability to compare and most still buy it despite knowing other being better...all purely due to marketing. If making was the deciding factor, best phone would be the best made., which is not the case not just with phones, but in any product. Marketing trumps making hands down.
Simply put, wealth is not determined by what you can produce...but by what you can sell.
No matter how you cut it, that decision means you are moving away from a free market to a regulated market. And as Revan mentioned, regulated markets in practice have shown less progress than free markets. If you consider free markets as bad, regulated ones fare even worse.
Now, I like to qualify above statement. Though a supporter for free market by default, I still would vote for a regulated market in areas like Healthcare which I believe should not be profit oriented. Rest should be only subject to minimal regulation to prevent misuse and systemic failure.
Firstly, the market system itself is regulated, by default. It is the government which agrees to enforce certain contracts but not others; it is the government which agrees with some property claims and not others. This is true of all market systems throughout history. Completely divorcing economics from politics is therefore impossible.
Secondly, I disagree that regulated markets show "less progress" than free markets. 3 places simulatenously had regulated markets in the early 40s - the US, USSR, and Nazi Germany, and all 3 had massive technological advances which fueled things like the space race. Polio vaccines were developed outside the sphere of the market and then distributed largely outside the market sphere, and they led to a lot of human progress, progress that is tough to capture in GDP charts.
Also, the whole notion about value that is being discussed here is an extremely potent case against capitalism and even markets as a way of organising society. One consequence of assigning value this way is, of course, the difficulty of dealing with pollution, and even more, the impossibility of dealing with the long-term effects of pollution (climate change).*
On a more mundane level, the acceptance of marginal value as the only measure of value means that you accept paying Lingard 100,000 pounds every week, while about 1.6bn people lack adequate shelter, as an optimal distribution of society's resources. It means that actions like taking care of a dying relative are literally worthless. It means that a company figures out the correct proportion of fat and flavour to make their fast food addictive, is more valuable to society by many orders of magnitude than building a garden and jogging path.
*The libertarian answer to this is to literally privatise air and charge for breathing and/or polluting it.
On a more mundane level, the acceptance of marginal value as the only measure of value means that you accept paying Lingard 100,000 pounds every week, while about 1.6bn people lack adequate shelter, as an optimal distribution of society's resources. It means that actions like taking care of a dying relative are literally worthless. It means that a company figures out the correct proportion of fat and flavour to make their fast food addictive, is more valuable to society by many orders of magnitude than building a garden and jogging path.
*The libertarian answer to this is to literally privatise air and charge for breathing and/or polluting it.
It's definitely about beliefs. If you believe socialism has all these benefits of course I will be perceived as a loon!
Amazing, your examples speak for itself. If you wish for progress the way Nazi Germany did, I have no response to that...apart from disagreeing in principle. Growth of US post 1940s is evidence in itself for free markets, nothing more I can say.
folks, just remember as you read this thread that edgar makes more money than you ever will and thats the best argument against capitalism
This is just a BS general statement that actually means zilch. If you're going to talk about "free markets" and their progress, you should have the common sense to mention the boom-bust nature of it and havoc in wrecks on working-class, and the poor on a constant/regular basis(every 5-8years especially in the US)
you are talking about the efficiency of economic systems, and that is what i'm talking about. a free market would not have produced the V2s or the Shermans or the T-34s or IL-2s in the quantities and speeds that the government-distorted or government-owneded systems did. and the rapid advancement in technology then led to things like jet airplanes and space travel within a few decades. you are defending a system not on moral grounds, so i am not responding to those claims on moral grounds.
of course you leave out the US, USSR, and the polio vaccine because that's tougher to deal with.
You really have this belief that you're super-intelligent and look down at others. Bitter man!
Eboue's awfully rude. Can't stand him.
I much prefer your posts where you never pretend to be intelligent.
No I don't have to mention any of those. Do you deny US post 1940s was a economic boom? Simple as. Do you deny it was result of capitalistic free markets? Yes or No? Simple as.
A market under WW2 conditions is not really comparable to a free market under current situation. I have absolutely no idea why you'd compare a WW2 market with what we have now. US is not under war so a war-time economy has no relevance here. And in wartime the goal is win, not economic growth or poverty reduction...which make the comparison even more absurd.
If a guy who has no background, no advantage, no benefits can make it, I'm happy to be quoted as an example for others.
You have absolutely no idea of my background or what it took me to reach what I am now. If there ever was a Trump for the Left, it'd be you. As much damaging with no proof or backing for your statements and pulling out grandiose declarations out of your ass.
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i have the belief that all people deserve a dignified life and that people like edgar are symptoms of a system which denies this to the masses. so when i come on here and see you two posting some of the dumbest shit imaginable to defend the system and imply that regular folks deserve to struggle for basic human needs, its feckin obnoxious.
ive read this capitalism v. socialism argument many times before and in every other instance the people favoring capitalism say "look at the increased standard of living" "more people have clean water" "wages have risen" "even poor people have iphones" etc. and i dont agree with those arguments but at least they make sense from a certain point of view. you two have spent the last few pages literally just saying "making things doesnt matter. working hard doesnt matter. all that matters is marketing and selling things to people". its a joke. both of you are fecking jokes. you can continue to pontificate from your swiss university and edgar can make gobs of money in manhattan but just know that any regular working person would read the shit you have said and tell you to drop dead.
What have I ever done to you? We go way back, Fruit Cake.
Hmm, yah Dota. I apologize. Sometimes, I forget myself. No offence.
I'll take a short break and sleep this off.
Edit: Can I start a name change thread?
feck off dude. Do something useful in your life, educate yourself, maybe you will manage one day to get out of your mum's bedroom and earn a minimum salary.
You have no idea about mine or EAP background, where did we start, what we achieved, how easy or hard it was to do so. You're just a bitter man, so feck off.
NB: I am not at a Swiss university.