aninhumer

>If my experience is at all representative

I don't really see any reason to think that your interactions with one trans woman would be representative?

Maybe he realised that speech has consequences beyond an employer not hiring him, and decided to take responsibility for those consequences?

And that rather than "watering down" ones thoughts, understanding the implications of language and avoiding unintended ones actually expresses your ideas better?

Or, in short, he grew up.

Indeed, I think part of the problem is that the only interactions a lot of people have with trans people is with political advocacy, where people are too busy trying to deal with rampant misinformation to ever get into nuance. And people then assume this is the only form of discourse that trans people ever engage in.

Much as people like to deride "safe spaces" as echo chambers, actual safe space trans communities are far more open to discussing conflicting feelings, doubts, regrets etc. because they know people won't use those admissions to judge or invalidate them. Which is of course, exactly the point of a safe space.

(PS: The preferred term is "transgender people" or more commonly just "trans people".)

>is he really just being happy about officially having a dick again ?

Yes that's probably exactly it. It's very easy for people who don't experience these things to say "well logically it's not that bad so why are you so unhappy?", but these kind of issues can cause constant psychological stress, and even purely cosmetic changes can make a huge difference to people's quality of life.

>how do we prevent people who are fantasizing about a sex change from deciding something they will come to regret

You can't absolutely prevent it, but it's vanishingly rare in practice, and these kind of overblown concerns end up causing far more harm by making it difficult for trans people to get surgery than they do by saving hypothetical confused cis people.

Also, for trans people who do opt for sex change surgery, it's usually driven by persistent discomfort caused by the body they currently have, not just "fantasizing" about the body they want.

Also a lot of it is essentially wrong, since they expect you to transliterate parts of the sentence that would probably not be included in context, e.g. saying "watashi wa" for any sentence starting "I".

I'm not really sure what the eventual safety of self-driving cars has to do with Telsa providing an unsafe system right now.

Unless you're suggesting that Tesla is justified in actively making people less safe because it helps them develop self-driving technology faster?

Saying "society is just individuals" is reductive to the point of uselessness though. People exist within a system of social and economic realities, and the choices they make, indeed the choices they can make, are shaped by that system.

And therefore, many choices which would improve society only make sense as collective choices. An individual deciding whether to delete their facebook account is deciding between privacy violation or social isolation. In that context, the privacy violation might actually be the better choice for the individual.

When people criticise that choice, they're noticing that collectively it would be better if everyone made a different choice. But it's pointless to blame individuals for not making a collective choice. If we actually want people to make that choice, we need to act collectively, and transition away from facebook in a coordinated way.

I wouldn't be surprised if commercial dumping is a factor, but I don't find the idea of 10 large rivers transporting that amount of waste in a minute that hard to imagine?

So how do you suggest we solve the problem without collective actions? What "changes on an individual level" do you think need to occur, and how do you expect them to come about?

Because to me, it seems like the individualist's prescription is just to judge people for making bad choices and hope they make better ones in future.

>Very few people ever read "Terms & Conditions" and that's a problem.

Many people seem to be blaming this on the individuals for not reading it, but I would argue that the problem here is a legal system that allows this kind of dark pattern to be considered consent.

>So I have currently zero empathy for the "victims" of this leak. Quite the contrary, I feel a little angry. Because I have to leave in a world that could be much more beautiful if only people, sometimes, just sometimes, though about the consequences of their life instead of just going with the motion. And this affects much more than privacy. And it's unfair.

And the very fact that you insist on blaming the individuals for a collective problem is why problems like this are so hard to solve.

If so many people don't care about this issue, despite its importance, maybe you should stop blaming them and expecting them to magically start caring, and start thinking about how our society leads them to believe it's not an issue?

The former. The rich have more to spend, so in the pricing mechanism their demand counts more than that of the poor. This makes the idea that prices reflect subjective demand highly suspect.

And of course, people will ignore most of these deaths when comparing capitalism to the alternatives, because the responsibility is distributed, and can often be placed on individuals.

That's not what is meant by "scarcity thinking" in this context. I suggest you read the chapter about it.

I said "limits" not "prevents". During the Cold War both the USA and USSR developed their space programs extremely rapidly by deciding collectively to prioritise them.

Since that ended, the industry has developed much more slowly in the absence of an obvious profit incentive. Indeed, even now, SpaceX has relied on collectively allocated resources from NASA for many of their contracts, not to mention all the research done during that period.

And in any case, SpaceX is still an example of prioritising capital creation. SpaceX is a privately owned space launch system, which will likely primarily benefit other privately owned space industries in the near future. We may like that this particular capital is being created, but it's only a small part of the wider economy.

If you're interested in the role of attention under capitalism, I would recommend Peter Coffin's videos:

https://www.youtube.com/user/petercoffin

Most of his stuff is focused on how attention is used to manipulate people's worldview in the "Marketplace of Ideas", but his latest video is about considering attention as labour. (Although, I thought it was a little unclear tbh)

The point isn't that avoiding scarcity thinking magically provides a solution. It's that it's very difficult to implement a solution when you have e.g. a lot of fishers who stand to lose out from it.

The idea is that we should work towards a society where the people who currently fish are happy to stop fishing if necessary, because they don't fear for their survival or comfort if they do.

I'd agree it's not really a good short term solution to acute problems though.

That's not the argument being made there.

Indeed, the argument is that "scarcity thinking" prevents people from addressing those problems, because people are afraid of losing what they have individually, and so are incapable of collaborating on collective issues.

>From what I'm seeing around me, people usually grab small short term advantages over other people even if they suffer long term consequences together

I would argue this is a symptom of capitalism, not an inherent property of human nature. We live in a system that requires us to compete to sell our labour in order to survive. This leads us to think of everything in terms of competition.

This is why so many people in creative jobs (including software development) end up feeling like they can't do their work efficiently because their manager won't let them. Because the employer-employee relationship is based on exchange, it is fundamentally antagonistic.

>Everyone consumes. It's the basis of the economy.

Yes that's my point. You can't just say production is a better use of resources than consumption, because people need to consume.

The real question is what's the best trade-off between expanding productive capacity, and producing consumer goods? Given that we seem to have vast productive capacity, and yet many people in the world seem to still live in poverty, perhaps we're not making the best trade-offs there?

But the question is, is the lack of access to healthcare in the US result of an inherent shortage of capital, or is it due to the system used to allocate healthcare to individuals?

Given that the majority of the developed world seems to be mostly able to deliver universal health care with relatively little difficulty, it seems more likely that the problem is the system, not a need for more capital.

>not something that, through the laws of human action, evolves spontaneously between free individuals.

Because it isn't. There is nothing "spontaneous" about private property. There have been a wide variety of conceptions of property throughout history, many involving notions of collective ownership. The system as it currently exists is enforced by state violence and was created historically by privatising collectively owned property.

e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure

>an alternative to capitalism ... necessitates the use of coercion to enforce

So does capitalism. The only way you can "own" capital is by using violence to prevent other people trying to use it.

>Let us assume that a collective has made a decision to produce pineapples and not bananas, what happens to the guy who likes bananas and funds the production of bananas and refuses to participate in the production of pineapples?

There are a lot of assumptions here. Why is this a mutually exclusive choice? Can we not grow both pineapples and bananas? Does the man believe the amount of bananas produced will not be enough to satisfy him? How many bananas does he expect to be able to eat?

In any case, the answer depends on the system. In some systems, the guy would be punished (as he would if he were employed by a pineapple farmer under capitalism) in others, the decision of what to grow would be his, and the collective just coordinates to inform him how many bananas are already being grown nearby, so he can make an informed decision about whether bananas are the right thing to grow.

>No, the subjective theory of value does not say that, in fact it says the opposite: it is impossible to determine the value of goods since they come from the subjective choices of free individuals. Prices come pretty damn close though.

The last part is what I'm criticising. An exchange system weights the demand input to market price determination based on the wealth of the individual. This means the market optimises for the subjective values of the rich over those of the poor.

And since the rich already have plenty, what they tend to demand is more capital. This leads to a system which is very effective at creating capital, but very bad at distributing its bounties. This is perhaps good when we have a scarcity of capital, but the argument made by the author here is that we have enough now, so we should redirect the economy to distribute wealth more effectively.

Is that a problem of scarcity though?

In most other developed countries, there is some form of universal healthcare, and this hasn't caused these countries to come grinding to a halt. Which suggests that the problem in the US is not "scarcity" but how the existing resources are allocated.

Asking what should replace Capitalism is a very reasonable question. The problem is that lots of people don't actually explore this question in a spirit of intellectual honesty.

>What do the central planners like the author of the book have in mind to "replace" capitalism?

Right off the bat, you insist that any alternative to capitalism is necessarily the whim of a "central planner", and go on to suggest that:

>Socialism _always_ fails because a central authority cannot, objectively, plan an economy better than the collective decisions by acting men in the free market.

But of course, Socialism does not prescribe a central authority (although many theories suggest one), and an exchange market is not the only way to collectively make decisions.

If you're interested in alternatives, I'd suggest you read some leftist theory, because this is pretty basic knowledge.

>he believes that certain things should be worth more and others should be worth less, and damn the market for telling me why they cost the way they do.

The market doesn't tell us why things cost what they do. Proponents of a free market argue that anything the market values is inherently valuable, even if that seems unintuitive. However, I think when many many people are unhappy with the priorities of the market, we should perhaps consider this claim with more scrutiny.

>* Put goods to their highest use

That's just dodging the question. What is the "highest use"?

>* Allocate capital to those who can produce more rather than consume it

And thus the optimally rational world as conceived based on this premise is one where no one ever consumes anything.

What exactly do you think it means to have "enough" capital, and how would you suggest measuring it?

Surely looking at the value of goods and services we are able to produce with existing capital is precisely that which we should be measuring to determine whether it's enough?

The argument being made here is not that we don't need the things we call capital, it's that we have enough capital now that allocating it is not the primary problem we need our economy to solve, and that the current system we use to do so (i.e. Capitalism) is limiting our ability to prioritise anything other than the creation of more capital.

Therefore I would read the title not as "after capital ceases to exist" but "after capital ceases to be as relevant".

I wouldn't go quite as far as saying people "have to" use Facebook, but there are fairly significant social costs to someone who chooses not to.

Many people's friends communicate primarily via Facebook, and you can't just get around that by using phones and emails. People have discussions, invite people to events and post important life updates on Facebook. Often the primary communication mechanism for an organisation or even a local business will be Facebook. And they often won't re-circulate all that information via email just for the benefit of people who don't use it.

And yet people insist on trivialising these costs, and blaming individuals for this massive invasion of privacy because they chose not to incur these costs, rather than questioning the circumstances that have led to people feeling forced to make such a choice.

Do you really think the people who are having their privacy violated explicitly chose that trade off because they're "lazy"? Or do you think, presented with a choice between signing up to a seemingly innocuous helpful website, or encroaching social isolation as their friends start using it, they chose the former?

More pressing issues like building yachts for rich people to make sure they're still "incentivised" to produce wealth?

>So no, the "youtube can not demonetize videos" straightforward nonsense is not an analysis of systemic reasons behind this shooting.

Indeed it is not, but that would be a very shallow reading of the systemic arguments made in this thread.