realitista @ realitista @lemmus.org

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1 wk. ago

Do better next time!

I think that price gouging is mainly a result of allowing too much consolidation via buyouts and mergers, and not actively enough perusing antitrust and anti price fixing enforcement.

I suppose if it's allowed to get too bad, the government could try to compete in the market, but governments are almost never the most efficient way to do things and can rarely effectively compete on efficiency against a functioning open market. In my eyes, regulation of the open market via labor law, protecting unions, trust busting and anti collusion enforcement is a far better way for government to solve this problem.

Unfortunately a government that's not functioning well enough to do this kind of oversight will almost certainly fail at trying to compete against in the open market as a grocery store too. At which point you are just running subsidized food banks, which is also fine by me but I don't think subsidizing all food for everyone will work in most government budgets.

Of course I want to live in a post-scarcity society.

Unfortunately I don't live in a post-scarcity world. There are limits to everything. Energy, labor, minerals, fertilizer, economies, governments, etc. Due to abundant energy from fossil fuels we have started to believe that anything is possible and that's great, and I hope we do manage to continue via AI and automation and new technologies to get closer to post scarcity. But we aren't there today.

The other thing I don't like about post scarcity utopias like the Venus Project (and yes, I've spent a lot of time researching them), is that when it comes to governance, the current plan just seems to be old fashioned communism with a ton of handwaving about how technology will solve everything else. Communist societies of the past also had access to technology, and they didn't produce anything resembling post scarcity. As a matter of fact, if anything, they mainly produced more scarcity most of the time when compared to capitalist ones.

So for the time being I think the best we can do is to allow capitalism to do what it does best (innovation, scaling, bringing down costs), and let socialism do the things that capitalism can't handle (economic externalities like climate change, basic human needs that profit motives greatly mess up such as health care and education, solving food and housing insecurity, etc.).

Someday maybe we will get there with enough automation and some fancy resource management software, but I do very much fear the wrong people slanting those systems in their favor. Good governance and oversight will always be paramount to making any system work, and just hand waving about technology won't be enough.

Yeah, the hard part is deciding where the line is. This is why I'm a Social Democrat rather than a full libertarian or communist. The places that do socialism well (like Scandinavia) do it by using it where it's most effective and using capitalism where it's most effective. This is a never ending debate, which is absolutely needed to get this line drawn in the correct place.

While I don't disagree with this sentiment, it can be taken too far:

• Covering every disease to the point where everyone gets unlimited exotic multimillion dollar treatments
• Giving everyone unlimited delivery of high end chef prepared food
• Giving everyone access to the best colleges to study whatever they want (no one will study to be a plumber or chimney sweep, roofer, berry picker etc.)

So within the necessities to stay alive and aligned with the means and needs of the society I can agree. Where this all falls apart is that inevitably some tribunal will decide this and inevitably someone will take control of said tribunal to funnel the best food/health care/education/jobs to their cronies, as anyone who lives in a former Soviet state like myself can attest to.

Okay I guess I could phrase that better but this is the first time they've used public mass transit infrastructure that I've heard of. I will edit my comment to include the phrase "mass transit".

No it's "disruption", just offload all your delivery costs onto public mass transit infrastructure and fill up the subway cars with deliveries instead of people. Profit.

Why state owned grocery stores?

Why do this instead of Jackett?

Can you imagine just walking around in modern society looking dolled up like a member of Poison? I'm sure they didn't even go around like that every day.