o_class_star

"Socialism" may be a word we need to retire, not because it's an invalid concept, but because it means different things to different people.

Democratic socialists largely want a saner version of a market economy, where power resides with labor and government aggressively combats capital's worst tendencies, but they aren't calling for old-style command economies like the USSR, Communist China, or Castro's Cuba.

AOC is a fantastically talented politician with a lot of good ideas, but I think she needs to replace the word socialism with something that has less baggage.

This is the general disadvantage socialism has relative to capitalism in terms of appealing to others. Socialism and communism have more than a hundred years of history, including a lot of mistakes we've had to learn from. Capitalism has no memory and therefore on its own terms has no history.

The last movement of "Dancing Mad" (FF6) has been playing in my head all week.

The problem we have on the Left is that even though 65% of the American population prefers our ideas (when stripped of D/R labels) they don't really like us. We're not very good at branding, and we've let Capital convince half the country that it's actually a "liberal elite" that is holding them down.

We need to get better at getting our actual message out there. The recent victory is a start, but if it were down to ideas rather than personality politics (and, you know, other stuff the other side uses) we'd be up by 20 points in every state.

This is in reference to the American standard business practice ("American Rule") whereby each party to a transaction pays its own legal bills. It is not necessarily connected to the more general American work culture (which I agree is as you characterized it, although I hope that changes with the recent defeat of the final boss of Boomer capitalism).

It's a cuck test. They want to know up front that you'll take abuse. If you "fail", by standing up for yourself, then they'll just work with some other interchangeable would-be founder who's more of a "culture fit".

Legal fees are a rounding error to these companies. It's all about the "power move". They don't want to work with people who'll stand up for themselves over "a measly" $50K.

Envy is a negative-sum emotion. It's no fun to be envious, and while people think it must be enjoyable to be envied, it's really not. When you're aware of it at all, it's just uncomfortable. It's a shitty emotion on both sides, but it's great for capitalism.

Comparing yourself against others is a loser's game. If the person is better, you lose. If the person comes out worse, you're taking a dip by comparing yourself at all to that person, so you still lose.

The cultures wars are stoked by the 0.01% because they want working people divided against each other.

If "blue state" workers think their red-state brethren are incorrigible racist assholes, and "red state" working people think the blue states are full of virtue-signaling effete hypocrites... then capital wins because, even though 75% of the American public likes socialist economic ideas (when stated plainly and without a "socialist" label) they are all fighting each other over unrelated stuff, like whether J.K. Rowling's latest misinformed comment means we should stop reading her.

I'm curious: how do people who are tone deaf learn and use tonal languages? Are such languages redundant enough that they can get by, or do they find other ways of adapting, or do they struggle to speak fluently even if the tonal language is their first language?

What I've observed with novelists is that there are two kinds. There are those who write with frequency but stop at "good enough", the satificers who are usually quite good at keeping their word count within genre bounds, understand market trends, and if they're working full time can put out two or three books per year.

Then there are the ones who spend years studying rhetoric and linguistics, have worlds and characters they've been building for years, and want to write "Big" novels that often hit 200,000 words or more and can't really be compressed. They're as hard working as the prolific crowd, but from the outside it looks like they're dilly-dallying. When they finally publish, they're putting forward the best 200K words out of 2M... which makes a distinction that a few people care about although, to be honest, most readers don't. It's not an economical way to write. You do it because you're chasing some kind of deified Relevance that you'll never fully know if you've achieved because the real test is whether you're remembered 100 years after you die.

I'm immensely curious to see if He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named gets his book out, just to watch the YCs squirm. Rumor through mutual acquaintances is late 2021, but having never met this person, what do I know.

It's psychological, but it also goes from an understanding that profits, in the rigid economic sense, don't reliably exist.

A profit is gain realized by buying things, recombining them using innovation, and selling at a favorable price. A true profit is something you make, again and again, and with diminishing returns because prices move and the gap closes, as with arbitrages. Rents, which are more reliable, are payments you collect because you own things. (You may use those things, or you may, using the more common sense of the word, rent those things out.)

Most "profits" are actually just rents. Rents extracted because the company owns real estate, rents extracted because of brand presence, interest (which is a rent on money) through financing programs, rents extracted because workers' need for daily survival has them systematically underpricing their labor, and rents on political capital (favorable regulatory environment).

Getting paid because you have a great idea is intermittent, and usually requires taking on a lot of risk, and risk is something established companies hate. Getting paid because you own something is easy-as-shit and forever reliable. Where does the car industry make the bulk of its gains? Not on selling the cars, but in financing. It's an evergreen business, so long as there is capitalism-- there will always be people who need money they don't have, and it will always be an easy business to collect the vig.

Regular businesses eventually stop innovating-- they have plenty of smart people, but the bosses don't want to take risks because they're busy collecting personal rents by holding management positions, and obviously don't want to lose that-- and their "profits" converge to the rent roll on the resources they own. That's just how it works. Average equals mediocre, the latter used non-pejoratively.

That said, it's not sexy to imagine that one is investing into companies that have become mere utilities, that will continue to collect rents on the resources they own (of which a person can buy a tiny fractional share of the ownership) but not really do anything interesting.

These ultra-capitalist non-profits (non-profits-for-now) create the illusion that they're something different... that they're "rocket ship" companies run by people with supernatural talent and "vision", that they aren't rent-seekers using capital's native advantage over labor for reliable but unpulchritudinous gains... which is what all large companies are... but, instead, a kind of "new company" that is going to innovate moonshots and synergize us up a new century of prosperity, freedom, and magical puppies that never poop. Smart investors recognize that all of that is bullshit, and that these tech unicorns are just as exploitative as traditional companies (and, in fact, probably more so) but they also realize that dumber investors get the warm fuzzies and that there is therefore a premium.