this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2023
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Capitalism itself rarely invents new things, but it does optimize existing things quite well
Though what it tries to optimize it for isn't always what is best for the consumer
Chicken sandwiches used to be so much better. Now it occasionally feels like I'm biting into a tire. I don't understand this business strategy.
Its simple, capitalism treats the consumer like cattle, and the optimization of profit drives them to replace real quality products with cheaper and cheaper substitutes over time until you're expected to bite into that tire and go "wow, this chicken is delicious"
But I just stopped buying them instead.
Unfortunately, you're the minority.
Most people seem to as economic actors behave quite a lot like cattle, which is why treating them as cattle works...
I just broke into the fast food chain's headquarters to find the secret formula. Next year's recipe is going to be this between two buns:
You still bought it and they saved money. Profit!
Even the almighty Chick-fil-A has seemed lower quality the last 3-4 times I went. Used to never get chewy chicken from them.
Maybe one day you'll stop hating gay people too.
They recently stopped donating to anti-LGBTQ orgs, for what it's worth.
They've said that every single time they've been called out for their actions before. If you support them, you hate gay people. End of discussion.
As a gay person with plenty of unrelated self-loathing, that tracks
Could be the supply chain or that location? The only chicken sandwiches that are worth are CFA and MCD.
I was a bit impressed with the one I had from Fatburger on the weekend. Since I'm allergic to beef, I eat a lot of chicken sandwiches, and it was better than most.
Woody breast syndrome?
Damn chicken steroids.
Woody breast syndrome
Indeed. People like to claim that capitalism is the most efficient system, but what it's efficient at is transferring wealth to the ownership class.
That's what efficiency means in context, and in practice.
Well, everything is learned in comparison. I lived in USSR, and that OP meme for USSR would be just an empty frame. At least under capitalism there is this wealth that is being transferred and if it is democratic capitalism then a safety net can be created to correct for capitalism failures.
To be honest, the whole farce is the capitalism vs socialism argument anyway. It was just a an idea so that we can do us vs them.
We should be doing what's best for the country each and every time as best we can. In some cases this may mean socialism when providing free education which then enhances capitalismn having a smarter country average of people.
The problem is people don't realise we're not really capitalist. When everything's good for companies rich CEO's blame capitalismnin why they keep their fat pay checks and why if you don't like it you should leave. When everything's bad, CEO's blame society in why they deserve a free government bail out. Because the truth is, either way it's the people who get screwed over.
Sure we may have many companies with competing products (usually only 2 big ones) that's supposed to bring competition. Until you realise they're all largely owned by two main shareholder groups.
Simply having it worse doesn’t validate something that’s not quite as bad. The whole reason it’s called capitalism is because the driving factor is capital and everything else is secondary. It was literally made as a replacement to monarchies because the nobles and merchants already held all the money and could keep their undeserved power.
You should know as well as anyone else that you didn’t live under communism in the USSR. The USSR was stuck in the place on the way to communism because people didn’t want to give up their power. It was basically state-run capitalism at that point.
Correcting for the failures of capitalism is a waste of time when better systems exist that don’t require going all-in on extreme ideologies. If it takes bringing up the disaster that was the USSR to make it sound good then it’s just a joke and shouldn’t be taken seriously.
USSR economic system is called socialism, which is a step in direction to communism. Given that this might be a particular flavor of socialism/capitalism, nothing significantly different was tried experimentally, so to say.
I also disagree with the certainty of you last statement claiming that a better system exists, which I assume you mean communism. Existence of such system on paper does not mean that it works in practice. It is possible, and in my opinion is very likely that particular features of human brain, of human psychology makes the system relying only on altruism to be less effective that the system that relies also on material interests.
It is plausible that in future, with different level of economic development, and with possibility to directly modify brain pathways (or transferring to silicon all together) the situation can be different and better system may exist. But with current biological humans and present development level? I seriously doubt that.
What better system exists?
Holy shit this is a reach. "Maybe you can't afford to live under capitalism, but that guy on a yacht is having a nice time, so it's really all worth it. Imagine if we all couldn't afford to live? Then you couldn't see that guy's cool yacht!"
That's clearly not the situation in the most developed western democracies.
that's not what efficiency means in context. Stop spreading ignorance.
Also source in the claim that capitalism is the most efficient system?
My source is communists claiming that capitalism is too efficient and mean for their system to compete against
Capitalism is also highly adept at taking the credit for the inventions and innovations of talented engineers and other scientists.
Steve Wozniak: makes hardware and writes the software
Steve jobs:
I can't find it anymore, but there was an excellent Youtube vid or podcast about the components and integrations of an iPhone and how almost none of them were new inventions even though their particular use was patented by Apple, and they were in fact mostly publicly funded projects! University grants, AR&D defense contracts, infrastructure allocations, open source, etc.
GPS, touchscreen, LCDs, cell networks, HTTP, GPS, IMUs, basically every file format on the thing aside from distribution formats, much of the SDK and the foundations of the IDE.
Capitalism does not foster innovation. It fosters opportunism. The public sector takes the 1-in-a-million risk inventing something like HTTP, and carefully nurses small saplings into a sprawling fruit-bearing orchard, then the private sector comes along and harvests it, taking credit for inventing the apple. (Pun intended)
Capitalism only ever optimizes along the "maximum profitability for the seller" axis, and buyers only ever benefit if there is a ton of competition and it's a low brand recognition domain (otherwise the profitavility optimization mostly just ends up influencing marketing, not price or quality) and only ever whilst said situation lasts (the profit optimization will also tend to end high-competition low brand recognition situations if possible as that's not optimal for profitability).
Optimization is only a guaranteed good thing for those who benefit ftom what is deemed the optimal state or direction of improvement and in Capitalism that's the ones taking the profits.
I don't know that it even makes sense to say that capitalism (or socialism, or communism) invented something, but it seems fair to say that most of inventing we've seen in the modern world was done in a capitalistic system.
Sure, it's not really the economic model itself doing the inventing, but people like to say that there couldn't be any innovation under any economic model but capitalism.
But more often than not, new technologies come from universities since investing in potential technologies is risky, it's much safer to invest in refining an existing one. Meanwhile universities are more willing to spend money on research for researchs sake
Take the language models that are all the rage these days, the underlying technology was created at a university, then once it existed, companies took it and pretty much just made them bigger and more easily available
Computers, screens, modern encryption, lithium batteries, the internet, touchscreens, wifi, i could go on. Your phone is pretty much just a pile of parts that were invented at an university, then made smaller, cheaper and assembled together by a company
And while some of those university projects were also externally funded, it was usually state funded, usually for their military applications
It does spread and apply new things fairly well though even if it doesn't invent them as much.