But if they offer an equal or superior product at lower price, they would have a fundamental advantage: people/businesses would be more incentivized to switch to them when money gets tight, when previously it may not have been a priority.
It's not purely "free market" to restrict housing supply, but the freedom to influence politics to your own advantage (like NIMBY's restricting housing supply) is absolutely an effect of the free market system.
Capitalism is not exactly equal to "free market". There's still a hell of a lot of market under socialism.
I'm just pointing out that you have to regulate SOMETHING. Regulating nothing = people amassing wealth and buying political influence = those current power holders regulating everyone else so the current power holders just continue to win. Then you don't have your "free market" anymore. It's inherently unstable.
In my opinion, the wealthy should have no more political power than the poor. But of course the wealthy have an outsized ability to influence politics. So they can work to repeal or nullify the very laws meant to reduce their influence - it's a fight that will never end and requires working and poor people to constantly be aware, organizing, and participating in politics to have any chance at all.
Or maybe one day, in my dream world, the rich and powerful will realize hey it's not so bad to have a workforce that is educated and healthy and has enough money in their pocket to buy the things we produce without taking out loans! And then we all leave in peace and harmony...
> There's still a hell of a lot of market under socialism
Completely agree. It's frustrating, because with words like "capitalism" and "socialism", why use words at all? Nobody means the same thing -- yet most people want the same thing -- it's really frustrating. I view it as a really important failure of science and philosophy. And a great opportunity for simulations in the service of empirical morality.
Which reminds me: Adam Smith's advisor wrote a whole tract on "Moral Computation" back in the early 1700s
> Completely agree. It's frustrating, because with words like "capitalism" and "socialism", why use words at all? Nobody means the same thing
And there's the reason why, in my original post at the beginning of this sub-thread, I used neither of those terms, in order to communicate more precisely.
Centrally planned economies are inferior to freer economies, whether the top-down controls are imposed by democracy or autocracy; both create economic inefficiencies. History has borne that out repeatedly.
But of course, that statement disregards non-economic externalities like environmental impacts, and one may want a central power to map non-economic externalities onto economic costs through e.g. taxes and fines for polluting because the economic inefficiencies incurred are worth the tradeoff (like having clean water/air). Then the market can price those non-economic externalities accordingly, once the market is appropriately regulated.
There is a bit of a puzzle because many large corporations do pretty well with hierarchical planning and competition involves lots of duplicate effort. The markets also seem to encourage centralization for economy of scale? (Consider big tech, the airline industry, and index funds.)
I often wonder if there could be a feasible system by which things inside a large company could be run by a market-like thing, and whether that could end up using work more efficiently.
I hear about some part of a company requesting another part do some market research on some topic, and then just entirely disregard the results, when the market research department could have used that effort and time and money to do some other more useful market research that would have actually been used,
and I wonder whether there could be some way to make sure that the requests to another department that something be done, have appropriate costs in some sense.
If one was better off by not requiring some other department do some work that doesn’t actually get used than if one does produce such a requirement for them, then presumably one would try to be less likely to produce such requirements, which seems desirable.
Is there a realistic feasible way to do this? I don’t know.
Companies do experiment with this sometimes as part of the budget-making process, as well as internal competition. I haven't heard of any big wins though.
It seems better to take internal functions and open them up to outside customers, as the cloud computing companies do.
Each of these systems is degrees of the other as well, and that seems proper for the exact reasons you mentioned - not including desired externalities in pricing/market dynamics.
There are a few things that I believe only work in a moral way when they are taken out of the hands of capitalist pursuit-of-profit dynamic:
* Healthcare: What does the demand curve look like when your alternative is death or a painful, limited life?
* Pollution/Environmental damage control: Without regulation the chemical company owner has zero incentive not to dump their leftovers in the creek.
* Access to quality education: Equality of opportunity
* Access to housing: Simply a question of morality. In the US at least, we have so much goddamn money and so much goddamn land and the ability to build giant buildings on that land. No one should be homeless.
This just gave me the thought... if exception stack traces came with the argument values of each method call, they would be 1000x more helpful. You wouldn't even have to attach a debugger and step through in many cases.
I think when people talk about this, they mean to push back against the fact that people will often to be biased to hire someone they think they could be casual friends with, share interests with, etc.
I like my coworkers and I find them perfectly find to work and make small talk with, but I don't share interests with many of them and wouldn't really care to hang with them outside of work. That shouldn't be a criterion for hiring.
I have found it highly annoying to work in engineering orgs where everyone seems to have the same interests. Everyone talking about Star Wars, Dungeons and Dragons, Lord of the Rings, etc. constantly because it's assumed everyone else around also enjoys that conversation.
I’ve found asyncio to be a very simple model to understand, using the aio libs: aiohttp, aiopg, aiobotocore, etc.
Basically just slap “async” or “await” in front of everything and understand that anytime there is a network connection being accessed, that method will release control of the main thread.
You just have to pay attention to where something might block the thread for any significant amount of time - heavy calculation or lengthy file IO
You can spawn a multitiude of async tasks on startup and have super basic “scheduling” by using asyncio.sleep with some jitter.
The only time I have seen the performance limits of a naive asyncio app reached was in an auth app that sat in front of every API request for the whole company, and even then it was an obscure DB connection pool management issue deep in psycopg2.
The important issue with Warren's "plan" is that it's essentially a $8,000 per year per employee head tax, so it's a regressive tax. An afterthought in the expense of hiring a very highly-paid employee, but a not-insignificant expense of hiring a lower-paid employee.
Not to mention that her plan exempts contractors and business under 50 employees, so it incentivizes businesses to to lean on contract labor or reorganize themselves into smaller sub-companies - a small paperwork expense in the scheme of things.
The business tax should be universal to stamp out avoidance and scaled to all payroll spend so it's at least not regressive, even if it's not a progressive tax.
The problem with a new business tax is that it doesn't come for free.
Increasing businesses taxes reduces international competitiveness which can reduce taxation collected in other areas. Also politically it's an incredibly hard thing to implement.
And remember you have to do this at the same time as you're implementing Medicare for All. Making it a pretty radical transition by any measure.
Oh I agree it's a radical change from what we have now (Although the resulting system is one many countries have already succeeded with). I was merely pointing out how if the program - and the tax to support it - is not truly universal, you have created incentives for businesses to weasel out of it.
The exemptions are billed as being "pro-small-business" but that's a BS talking point. Universal medicare for all would take away all that healthcare-plan-administration overhead that small businesses already have to deal with and pay for. Plus the extraneous benefits of having employees and customers who aren't pressured to avoid basic health care and preventative care and then go bankrupt when they need a larger procedure.
But I think only a radical change can have any real effect. You have to get the denying-care-for-profit insurance bloodsuckers out of the system completely; any concessions to them should be viewed with extreme suspicion.
Agreed, the one thing I have promised myself is to never have a commute over 35 minutes. I even found a 35 minute commute to an internship in the suburbs disheartening when it was mostly spent sitting in traffic.
It's insane to waste that much of your daily life shuttling to your job (if you have an option, which I hope to remain lucky enough to have).
I used to ebike for an hour each way, and it was torture. Now it's a ~20min drive and 30mins of the commuter train. Still pretty miserable, but at least it's not raining directly into my eyes anymore.
Truthfully, though, the weather in Amsterdam isn't so bad. And wow, there is some infrastructure for biking! These two things combined would make biking so much better, but then you add in the average style of bicycle you see there: Comfortable seats with some space for traveling with stuff.
I have some of the infrastructure where I live in Norway, but I'm not brave enough to bike on the snow and ice in the winter. Walking is perilous enough.
When I lived in the states, biking was often dangerous and the fastest routes weren't always available to me. I lived in the countryside for years, close enough to bike by main roads, but it not only wasn't allowed on the best path, but it would have been dangerous. No shoulder, curvy road, and cars going over 55mph (over 80kph). It was illegal to ride on sidewalks, where there were sidewalks, and few cities had bike lanes outside of downtown areas (if that).
One job literally had no entrance other than off of a 4-lane divided highway: No biking or walking to that job.
Even if I got over those hurdles, there was often no where to safely put my bike while I was at work. Heck, some of these places didn't have anywhere to store cold things for lunch.
This. I used to have a longish commute (about 1h door to door) but I took Caltrain, and that time was never wasted. I could work, connect with friends, or just unwind. The few times when I did that by car I ended exhausted. Throw in a weekly 3h bike ride to work to stay fit and it was quite excellent.
If I happened to have a job in Amsterdam, Copenhagen or similarly cyclable city, I'd totally find a place with 1 hour bike commute from the office, to both save money on rent and get free cardio exercise.
Not to mention that the internal Exxon-Mobil climate predictions matched up with current public scientific consensus forty years ago and nearly exactly predicted the level of warming we had today, as well as the need to combat the public perception of them as the cause.
The science is (secretly) correct even on the corporate side too - they just say otherwise.
I'm somewhat of minimalist with trying to keep a low number of apps on my phone but whenever I see my friends phones they have hundreds of apps