
The Rise of Anti-Capitalism - md224
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/16/opinion/sunday/the-rise-of-anti-capitalism.html
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angersock
Aaaargh.

Author bandies about the Internet of Things as though, somehow, magically,
that's going to make production costs for everything zero. That's absurd.

Author goes on to talk about the magical collaboration instead of capitalistic
nature of this--and omits that that same "collaboration" really can mean
"gigantic panopticon of surveillance".

There's ways to make the post-scarcity argument---this isn't one of them. :(

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jonnathanson
There's some fallacious reasoning in this article that is the economic
equivalent of believing we've broken the laws of thermodynamics. Marginal
costs aren't being magically erased. They're simply being shifted from one
party to another, or sometimes diffused from one party to a handful of others.
Column A shrinks, but Columns B, C, and D grow to account for the shrink in A.
As consumers, we're often so far removed from B, C, D,…,N that we _perceive_
the marginal costs to have disappeared into the ether. But the costs are still
conserved within the total system, in one form or another, borne out by one
party or more.

And so it will be for the "internet of things." Someone's got to make all
those things. Someone's got to lease and operate the EM spectrum. Someone's
got to build, own, and operate the pipes. That infrastructure is pretty
freaking far from cost-free. And it's going to get _massively_ more expensive
as we place exponentially larger demands on it.

Net productivity and net value are being created, and so in total, the system
is growing. We're getting a lot better at generating systemic upside.
Economics is not zero-sum and mercantilist, the way it was hundreds of years
ago. But so long as there are scarce resources, someone's got to pay for them.
That someone is going to charge someone else for converting the input
resources into higher-value output. TANSTAAFL still applies. It's just getting
harder for us to understand who's eating the lunch, and who's picking up the
tab.

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to3m
Yes. People have a tendency to want to be paid for their work, equipment
usually costs money to acquire, and raw materials almost never come for free
(if only because there are the aforementioned people and equipment involved).
Even if it's proving easy to lower the cost of producing each additional unit,
driving the fixed costs to zero will, I think, prove much harder.

From the point of view of the producer (as I think is your point) the whole
thing is moot. Your costs are £(fixed_cost+num_units*marginal_cost), broadly
speaking, and if marginal_cost ends up zero then you still need to pay for the
people and the equipment. The likelihood of each unit actually costing the
customer zero are... well... zero. And to my eyes that means that overall
nothing is going to change.

This is unlikely to be news to anybody that runs a software company, which is
a good example of a business that has long had large fixed costs and low costs
per unit. However much each unit costs, you've spent money to make it, and
that money has to come from somewhere.

I'm sure Intel and the like have also got a good deal of experience of
spending vast amounts on R&D and fab setup so that they can produce a chip for
£0.10 that they then have to sell to you for £500 if they're to make any money
out of it.

But I suppose this could be news to people running a non-profit?

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kungfooguru
I prefer to call this 'Star Trek socialism' and while I support it I think we
are kidding ourselves if capitalists will go out peacefully.

Even if creation of a device or food is nearly 0 cost in the future they will
stop this through IP law.

And the mention of non-profits is out of place. Hell, the NFL is non-profit.

I think the real issue with advancing technology isn't that products and
services will be available for nearly nothing but that doing so destroys jobs.
As variable capital (labor) is continually replaced by constant capital (means
of production) labor battles will have to intensify.

Capitalism must end but it won't come from what this article talks about but
workers organizing to create an efficient democratic economy.

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revelation
Jesus, somebody really misread some "Internet of Things" Cisco marketing
material. They want to sell more IPv6 ready routers, not bring about your
favorite economic crank theory.

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DanielBMarkham
Good grief. How many times do we have to have this same idiotic conversation?

Wars are not solely fought as a conflict over resources. Capitalism does not
solely exist to exploit scarcity.

I could go on. And on. These are -- let's be generous -- oversimplifications
used to give people the general gist of things without having to burden them
with thousands of hours of study. The problem develops when we start believing
our own BS.

Capitalism is trading stuff. I can safely assure you that we're not going to
stop trading stuff, no matter what the degree of efficiency in the economy.

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AdrianRossouw
wow, i can't really comprehend how the author even came near that conclusion.

And how does attaching a sensor to something make it zero margin? And how do
car-sharing services, which actually involve money changing hands, become
considered anti-capitalist?

What kind of rand-ian nightmare world does he imagine where people are going
to be selling the humidity level of the soil in their potted plants.

at least it's just an opinion column.

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kiba
Capitalism is such a loaded word these days that it should be tabooed.

~~~
networked
An HN clone that intelligently taboos certain words in each thread would be
interesting to see.

Another option is a user script that would allow HN users to opt in to have
certain words tabooed in their posts in the same manner.

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ethana
The progressive media recently has been cranking out nonstop economic bs
articles. Drumming up class warfare is the end goal. Divide and conquer.

~~~
mempko
Class warfare is engaged every day in capital hill. Look at the growing
inequality. It is clear which class is winning.

