I’m an engineer too, and I don’t think capitalism works from an engineering perspective very well. It naturally leads to monopolies, it’s just inevitable, which have the same natural ailments as centrally planned economies, but with unelected people at the top. A decentralized economy needs to be engineered to be as such, culturally and legally, on purpose. Up till now it was just a technological fact that economies were decentralized, not true anymore. And with automated production, labor should no longer be the basis of the right to live, especially as labor decreases on the limit to 0 with increased AI.

UBI is not a good solution in that it doesn’t change the power structure, we still are controlled at the government and in our jobs by the rich, which do not have any mandate from the people.

Just an anecdote, between engineers, depending on your age, my experience is the older I get in engineering, the more I realize how totally un-meritocratic managers are, and how much they suppress us. Buisness and government use scientists and engineers to achieve poorly designed goals for dumb or evil ideas, like war or profit. Be wary.

I mean, maybe we can make an Ai that uses reason to uncover these biases in the future from this starting point. We are only at the beginning.

One of the first things I looked up on this involves someone wanting us to dismantle the hierarchy of gravity… maybe a bit too much woo for me.

Property right theory is a bit complicated, you have to understand a few things.

1. Property rights are a state derived system. That’s why we have weird things like corporate personhood, LLCs, land ownership, mineral rights, airspace, etc. Indigenous peoples did not have property rights. Monarchies had different property relations. Etc.

2. Property rights can be divided into 3 fundamental rights, the right to use (usus), the right to the fruit of use (profit, fructus), the right to abuse (abusus) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usufruct

3. There is a historical lineage of the owning class, from monarchy, to mercantilism and slave societies, to modern capitalism, etc.

I’d say that the reason there’s not a system to demonstrate these ideas is not because they aren’t pragmatic ideas, it’s because power begets power.

The reason I say it’s easy to imagine life outside of capitalism is not because it’d be easy to get there, just that it’s easy to formulate.

Anyway to your points, capitalism is not “when people own things”. It’s when those who do the work (usus) do not get the profit (fructus). Usually this is justified through investment and usury (interest) or even permanent ownership by outside investors (stock). However investment can exist in other ways, through credit unions owned by communities who bank there, or even from government grants. Not to defend the soviets, but they had great science, and most of our own science is done through gov grants.

When you enforce the rule that only people who are doing the work may own stock, and then you grow your economy through democratic investment strategies, you are on your way to socialism.

Edit: In old religions usury was considered immoral, if usury is immoral how much more immoral is our current system of investing? I think we should go back to interest based business loans and grants and cut out this ownership class.

Abusus should also be democratically controlled under eco socialism. Because we have so much trash these days and the destruction of so many good things under justification of ownership. That’s another talk altogether.

AI creates a strong incentive for a planned economy, because the goal of markets was always that planned economies were “impossible”, but now they are not. Read the peoples republic of Walmart for more info. Or this YouTube video https://youtu.be/xuBrGaVhjcI

Remember too that like 3 hedge funds own every company in America, and the stock market is run by AI, we already live under an inefficient planned economy.

As for climate change, what you are suggesting when the public owns the natural resources, is socialism.

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I also think that mutualism is the best theory. My Marxist friend would tell you that capitalism will just incorporate your work into its superstructure though.

I volunteer with DSA some, should I volunteer a lot, a little? Is electoralism a good avenue, is mutual aid? Does it matter if my comrades have other ideas, or is big tent prefered? Should we organize under the banner of socialism, or should we use a less tainted word? Should you try to be a social democrat instead just out of defeatism? Or maybe I just go off and be a good person, be charitable. Or maybe I start a commune.

I think you’re lost then, this is the socialism sublemmy.

I used to think like you, but then I realized capitalism is not synonymous with markets or being paid, it’s synonymous with a class of people who do not work extracting value from those who do. It’s very simple to not have capitalism, simply have national credit unions instead of banks, and coops for buisnesses. This replaces CEOs and Bankers with democratic governance and isn’t authoritarian.

So I’m all on board with that level of socialism, there are two problems:

1. Getting from here to there involves going THROUGH the ruling class, the capitalists, as they control the government, media, and war machine.
2. We are about to reach AI and Climate Change tipping points, and planned economies are about to become a must because of these things (inevitably). How do we make this planned economy non authoritarian? Can we do it in any kind of open source anarchic sort of way, or does it demand state violence?

Glad to see others that don’t buy the idea that we should destroy the existing system without an alternative vision. When I read that, and we discussed it, I thought it was crazy. Sometimes I feel kinda gaslit by other socialists lol, like surely you don’t believe we should destroy without replacing.

Sure, but I guess I want two practical outcomes:

1. A theory of action, that can then be put into practice.
2. A level of commitment to that theory of action.

So, like, I could put 100% of myself into something I think will definitely work, or I could put 5% of myself into something I think likely won’t work but I’ll try anyway, or anything in between.

Not just for internet debates or something.

Also I’d like to be able to effectively share my vision for the world and answer common criticisms.

War is usually a war between STATES that has very little to do with its people. People are just the cannon fodder of the state interest.

In cases like Gaza one side actually does have PEOPLE involved, Gazans, vs a STATE. It makes it much more clear who is in the wrong.

I’ll never understand devs that go “I don’t know that language”. PHP is one of the only languages used in production I don’t know. I have read examples and it looks like you bastardized a Java/c# clone with bash or a string templating language, which isn’t very appealing. But like, if I had to learn it, I’d do so in a month, functionally writing it in a week tops. Learning languages is part of the job, and they all add something to your understanding of paradigms.

This is exactly right and very educational

So the question is, how should engineers behave and be treated under capitalism? I work on AI and hope it will be revolutionary and try to only take ethical work. I think we do have an opportunity to become post scarcity if we simultaneously educate and empower people to seize the new technologies. We need people to see it’s capacity and rise up politically in response to it.

Fucking hate Andreson and other tech billionaires. That was an insane list of ideals. However I do believe tech is our salvation under socialism, and necessary to change our material conditions enough to make socialism inevitable.

Wait is this a mod or have I just been totally out of the loop on factorio updates

Say no more.

Btw I recall there were several of these developed at the same time, one by chucklefish (edit: starmancer) I think, did this one “win out”?

I can’t even parse what you mean when you say their input is the same as their output, that would imply they don’t transform their input, which would defeat their purpose. This is nonsense.

This is all just, like, your opinion bro