Libra

I don't appreciate that one oligarch is better at lying to us than another one, that kinda makes it worse in my mind. Instead of telling ourselves comforting stories about how generous these societal leeches are we should be telling ourselves stories about how much better everyone else's lives could be if they didn't exist.

There's an estimate floating around that it would cost about $20 billion to end all homelessness in the US. Whether or not that's an accurate estimate, there is an amount that could do it, and every day that billionaires wake up and choose not to do it they choose evil.

If your standard for 'a good example' is being a bit more creative with his tax-dodging PR stunts than other billionaires, that's a pretty low bar. A better example to set would be to not exploit people to accumulate wealth in the first place. It takes a whole lot of people like you and me staying poor to make Bill Gates that rich.

but I am determined that “he died rich” will not be one of them.

Bill Gates has a net worth of ~$168 billion. Even if this isn't just PR intended to launder his image, even if he does in fact give away 99% of that, it will still leave him with $1.68 billion dollars. Even if he ups that to 99.99% that'll still leave him with $16.8 million, which is still rich by anyone's measure. Bill Gates' idea of 'not dying rich' is radically different than yours or mine; he was never not going to die rich.

Yes, I too am aware that people often misuse words. It might be safe to assume that the guy who just demonstrated that he knows how to operate a dictionary probably isn't one of them though. Especially if you had read my comment that they were replying to, because then you would have seen that the nation I was calling an authoritarian regime (in fact, a 'whole-ass authoritarian regime') was Nazi Germany, so I don't think we were in any danger of not labeling Western colonial powers as authoritarian in this thread.

Hmm, obvious troll is obvious. My apologies for assuming that you were merely confused rather than confused and malicious. I won't make that mistake again.

authoritarian /ə-thôr″ĭ-târ′ē-ən, ə-thŏr″-, ô-/ adjective

Characterized by or favoring absolute obedience to authority, as against individual freedom.

"an authoritarian regime."

Look, it's right there in the example even.

If you would like to argue definitions I encourage you to spend some quality time with a dictionary. Google can point you to several.

(Premise - suppose I accept that there is such a definable thing as capitalism)

I'm not sure why you feel the need to state this in a discussion that already assumes it as a necessary precondition of, but, uh, you do you.

People blaming capitalism for everything then build a country that imports grain, while before them and after them it’s among the largest exporters on the planet (if we combine Russia and Ukraine for the “after” metric, no pun intended).

...what?

What does this have to do with literally anything, much less my comment about innovation/competition? Even setting aside the wild-assed assumptions you're making about me criticizing capitalism means I 'blame [it] for everything', this tirade you've launched into, presumably about Ukraine and the USSR, has no bearing on anything even tangentially related to this conversation.

People praising capitalism create conditions in which there’s no reason to praise it. Like, it’s competitive - they kill competitiveness with patents, IP, very complex legal systems. It’s self-regulating and self-optimizing - they make regulations and do bailouts preventing sick companies from dying, make laws after their interests, then reactively make regulations to make conditions with them existing bearable, which have a side effect of killing smaller companies.

Please allow me to reiterate: ...what?

Capitalists didn't build literally any of those things, governments did, and capitalists have been trying to escape, subvert, or dismantle those systems at every turn, so this... vain, confusing attempt to pin a medal on capitalism's chest for restraining itself is not only wrong, it fails to understand basic facts about history. It's the opposite of self-regulating because it actively seeks to dismantle regulations (environmental, labor, wage, etc), and the only thing it optimizes for is the wealth of oligarchs, and maybe if they're lucky, there will be a few crumbs left over for their simps.

That’s the problem, both “socialist” and “capitalist” ideal systems ignore ape power dynamics.

I'm going to go ahead an assume that 'the problem' has more to do with assuming that complex interacting systems can be simplified to 'ape (or any other animal's) power dynamics' than with failing to let the richest people just do whatever they want.

Such systems should be designed on top of the fact that jungle law is always allowed

So we should just be cool with everybody being poor so Jeff Bezos or whoever can upgrade his megayacht to a gigayacht or whatever? Let me say this in the politest way I know how:

LOL no.

Also, do you remember when I said this?

‘Won’t someone please think of the billionaires’ is wearing kinda thin

You know, right before you went on this very long-winded, surreal, barely-coherent ramble? Did you imagine I would be convinced by literally any of it when all it amounts to is one giant, extraneous, tedious equivalent of 'Won't someone please think of the billionaires?'

Simp harder and I bet maybe you can get a crumb or two yourself.

I meant backpedaling in the journalistic way of 'Oh you seem to actually know more about what you're talking about than I do and have a lot to say on the subject, I should, uh, redirect to a different topic where I can catch you out for that sick sound bite' or whatever. Maybe that's not what was going on in that interview, Iono, I haven't seen it.

Thus my skepticism that she had anything useful to say in response.

Funny how every time anyone talks about replacing capitalism everybody trots out the examples of innovation and competition as things we would lose. Meanwhile capitalists are over here doing their level best to sabotage innovation and buy or legislate their way out of competition so they can remain complacent in their dominant market position. 'Won't someone please think of the billionaires' is wearing kinda thin when they're actively undermining the purported benefits of their wanton exploitation and delivering nothing but stagnation and enshittification.

Since the Stasi were one arm of an authoritarian government and the Nazis were the whole-ass authoritarian government, including Stasi-like arms, it's not an apples-to-apples comparison. But I mean if you're just here to conflate fascism and communism then you are probably immune to nuance and subtlety anyway, so by all means, don't let me stop you.