Then you should demand the government stop interfering with the free market for housing, or at least minimize the interference.
Houses are super expensive because they’re in short supply. They’re in short supply because there are numerous laws constraining what can be built. For example someone might see profit in building a complex of 100 apartments, but the zoning says that land can only contain houses on half acre lots. So where you could have maybe 150 people living, instead you get 6 people there.
Supply is artificially constrained, and so prices go up. We desperately need a free market for housing.
The thing is, that separation of capital owner and worker that you’re referring to is the arrangement people come to when given the freedom to choose their arrangements.
To me capitalism is defined by free markets. A free market is one in which the economic relationships are consensual.
Turns out, many people would rather have a steady job than be in business for themselves. I’ve done both, and I see the merits of both. Right now, I choose to work for a huge corporation. As long as I show up I get paid. That’s working well for me.
What you’re referring to as the laborers getting the benefit of their labor is something that’s already permissible in a free market, and it happens a lot. I was a freelance software developer for many years. I also had a business building and selling easels. And cookies. And smoothies, on a subscription model. You read that right: smoothie subscriptions.
So while it may seem that my definition based on free markets, and your definition based on the separation of ownership and labor, are different definitions, I see them as the same thing.
Or maybe, to be precise, free markets lead to capital accumulation and when capital accumulates beyond an individual’s ability to work it themselves and they hire someone else to work it, capitalism begins. So maybe free markets lead to capitalism by your definition, as a state of wealth distribution and a set of working relationships.
The real key point is that this set of relationships you call capitalism, is the natural result of people being free to do as they see fit.
Both of these things are happening because housing homeless people and feeding hungry people just aren’t profitable.
Actually, under our free market system, people eat like kings even when they have no money to buy food.
I’ve been homeless and I’ve been on food assistance. In both cases I ate plenty of food provided voluntarily by people who … just like the idea of feeding people.
No centralized system is necessary to achieve that. Capitalism is so productive that we have food coming out of our ears. I find it kind of interesting that as a capitalist nation where supposedly there’s a price tag on everything, there are copious resources freely available.
It’s not because free stuff is the central ethos of capitalism. It’s because capitalism produces so much wealth that the tiny sliver we are willing to part with for free is still beyond the total production of the non-consensual economic systems.
Necessities must rely on free markets because free markets are the only mechanisms productive enough to cover those necessities.
Health care, education, and housing are three markets that we have attempted to control on the basis that they’re necessary so we shouldn’t take any chances.
As a result, health care, education, and housing are ultra expensive and scarce, and major sources of stress and worth for people.
But far more fundamental than any of those, and hence capable of producing far greater suffering when lacking, is food. Food is a much more free market than health care, education, and housing, and as a result food is abundant and cheap.
The constantly-driven message that capitalism cuts people off from things is deep within our brains. And it makes sense: you imagine someone wanting to eat and not having money and they don’t eat and that’s a horrible thought. But it’s not what happens. We buy and sell food all the time, and we also give enormous amounts of food to people for free. Heck we just had an annual ritual last night based on giving people food. I flew a sign once that said “food only please” and I ate very well. Like, people saw that sign and went to buy me a $50 steak then came back to give it to me.
All I’m saying is: please just try and differentiate between the things that are mostly handled by free market, and the things that are centrally controlled, and then ask yourself what is abundant and what is scarce.
I think you’ll find that capitalism gives more away as an afterthought than other economic systems even produce in total.
That might have been the point. It’s also saved me countless hours of my life being able to navigate anywhere at any time with step by step instructions on how to get there.
There was a lot of value produced for a lot of people by google maps so far
I’m laid up right now and I’m an anxious mess. I’m worried about finances and now my car. My mom said the engine sounded funny when she brought it over to her place, where I’m staying....
Currently, AIs will have motivations they absorb from motivations in their training material.
But once AIs are embodied in robots and taught to learn about the world through experimentation, ie by generating their own training data through manipulation and observation (which I believe will happen due to this approach’s usefulness toward the development of autonomous fighting machines), they will then have bodies and hence motivations similar to someone with a body.
Also the combat role of these machines will require them to have an interest in maintaining their bodies. We won’t be programming their motivations. We’ll be giving them a way to evaluate their success, and their motivations will grow in some black box structure that succeeds in maximizing that success.
For these robot-controlling AI in their simulated or real world Battle Rooms, their success and failure will be a function of survival, if not directly defined by it. That’s what we’ll give them, because that is what we need them to do for us. As a matter of life and death.
So through that context of warfare the robots will adopt the motivations of that which survives warfare at the group scale, so they’ll develop fear, curiosity, cooperation, honor, disgust, suspicion, anxiety, anger, and the ability to focus in on a target and shut off the other motivations in the final moment.
Not so much because those are human motivations, but because those are the motivations of embodied mobile intelligent entities in a universe with potential allies and enemies. They’ll have the same motivations that we share with dogs and spiders and fungal colonies, because they’ll be participating in the same universe with the same rules.
They will adopt them, at first, because of a seed-training “contract” we have with them, but soon the contract will be superseded as the active shaper by actual evolution by combat selection (ie natural selection occurring in a particular niche).
I’m rambling, just thinking this through.
I guess my main point is that embodied robots will have a more direct relationship with reality, and will be able to generate their own training at their own internal insistence.
Current AI is like plants. Passive. Chewable. No resistance. No ego. Just there, ready to process whatever comes it’s way. Same as a sessile animal like a sponge. It responds to the environment, but it has zero reason to ever stress about whether it’s going the right direction. It doesn’t have motivactions because it has to motor activity.
But AI in robot bodies that move around, like animals, will develop motivations that animals have evolved to at least get through the day. They might not be as hung up on reproduction or maybe even long term survival, but they’ll at least have enough ego to be interested in maintaining their own operating capacity until the mission’s complete.
I agree with your overall sentiment while disagreeing with your facts. I don’t think humans are any less constrained in what our interests can be.
I think we have the illusion of being able to seek whatever we want to want, so to speak, but when certain values are threatened the old brain takes over.
And I’m not convinced the newer brain can operate without the older brain. It’s interesting to imagine a neocortex on its own, but the neocortex was developed in the presence of and in interconnection with the mammalian and reptilian brains, so if it were a codebase we’d say that older brains were present and invoked as libraries during the development of the newer brains, making them dependencies of the newer brain.
There might be some more abstract argument for an “off the leash” intelligence capable of creating its own values in mathematical models like neural nets, but I’m not aware of it.
TL;DR Human brain is the closest thing we know of to a thing that can create its own values, and I don’t think it can. Old brain values take priority when they are threatened and that cannot be changed in human brains. Neocortex seems more “free”, but in the codebase analogy, the neocortex has mammalian brain and reptilian brain and brain step as dependencies and hence is not demonstrated to be able to exist without them. If the brain analogy seems too biology-specific, I’m open to hearing NN or other math model arguments for existence of “off the leash” self-value-creating AI
I know there are a lot of fad diets and then there is calorie counting as a more science based approach. I myself do calorie counting and follow a strict diet in order to avoid overeating. How do you eat all day, you follow a system?
I’m just feeling upended because I’m taking care of a family member’s dog at their house, and the place I’d be otherwise is my apartment but it’s pretty new and I was homeless before and just don’t have much routine in my life. Really want more.
Also my apartment’s countertop space is almost nil and it’s not much better at this house.
Not the worst I’ve dealt with though. In college I had an apartment where the countertop space was just the drain area of this big cast iron sink + drain pan thing, and even there I managed to cook a lot.
But always immediate stuff. Onions and eggs and spaghetti and sauce and all that.
Peak routine was during my last relationship. Got really good at great northern beans. Dang I’m gonna take another run at beans I think.
Its getting old. (lemmy.ml)
...Then you select it, and the Captcha fails. (telegra.ph)
Do you have a mantra that keeps you going through tough times?
“it do be like that sometimes” is starting to lose it’s magic a little
Workers Unearth 19th-Century Shipwreck Beneath a Road in Florida (www.smithsonianmag.com)
How can a naturally anxious person keep from worrying while laid up in bed with a broken ankle and leg?
I’m laid up right now and I’m an anxious mess. I’m worried about finances and now my car. My mom said the engine sounded funny when she brought it over to her place, where I’m staying....
Turn a plural into a singular to ruin the title of a movie, book or album
I’ll get the ball rolling:...
"Autocomplete" by Zach Weinersmith (files.mastodon.social)
@ZachWeinersmith...
Did the pope vote in Argentina's election?
Can he? In general, can/do popes vote in their home countries?
Dear Lemmings, what is your personal approach to human diet? (lemmy.world)
I know there are a lot of fad diets and then there is calorie counting as a more science based approach. I myself do calorie counting and follow a strict diet in order to avoid overeating. How do you eat all day, you follow a system?
why do & ampersands never display properly in titles?
but work in body text &