memes

Sometimes I get mad about how we in practice have basic income for the rich. If you have a few million dollars, you can park it in zero or low risk investments (eg: high yield savings, bonds) and get free money. Then you can just fuck off and pursue your dreams. No risk. Lots of reward.

But if you're poor? Well you better take any job for any salary or you're just a parasite blah blah blah. All pain, some risk, little reward.

Capitalism, since its inception, has been 99% of people having no capital.

We hit a tipping point though, where 99% of people do not have any capital to risk

When do you think this tipping point was? Because as far as I can tell this was around the French revolution.

And then uses his immense wealth and contacts to make frivolous lawsuits against smaller bakers trying to make their own machine, knowing full well they will not win in court but will financially ruin the smaller baker and tie them up in litigation for years, then forcing them to an unfair arbitration where they make a shit offer to buy out the competition

Uh... This is coming from the folks who said "he who does not work, neither shall he eat" during a famine so... uh... yeah, that's not the flex you think it is.

Edit: And in case anyone is wondering, this gets worse with context.

And those were obviously 100% kept 🤡

Luckily, the Soviet union treated homosexuals to a similar standard. /s

Stalin 1936 constitution. Holidays for "enemies of the people" were unpaid and in a quite cold climate of Siberia. They also cared about fitness of citizens by ensuring no one has too much of food. And if you didn't like it, you get a free ride in a black car to the place of final rest.

The maximum hours you can work did not apply to everyone as my former boss has stories of working 12+ hours in the gulag he was sent to for reasons he does not know.

In that case literally every court also shows a complete misunderstabding of patent law

So...

I understand what you are saying but i hope you never invent something that can solve a current day crisis.

We are already behind schedule to solve things like climate change. If someone invents breakthrough tech then we need that today and open so other minds can quickly iterate and improve. Not after 20 years of stalling on a bureaucratic advantage.

If it wasn’t for capitalism chaining survival to productivity there would be no reason for this system to exist and we can move on to teach that “all good ideas should be copied” And “the same ideas can emerge in multiple different minds”

This comment shows a complete misunderstanding of patent practice. Patents exist not for inventors, but for companies. Destin, from Smarter Every Day, has a recent video trying to make a grill scrubber in which he talks with many people about how Amazon for example constantly avoids patent claims from small inventors.

Humanity progressed from hunter-gatherers to the industrial revolution without the need for a judge to determine whether I can arrange atoms in a given way or not without giving a canon to someone else who decided to arrange atoms like that before me.

If it were a misunderstanding, why do we always see a spike in innovation once a patent expires? According to capitalist ideology, isn't competition the best that could happen, instead of having an unlimited monopoly for 20 years?

Then patent law is better than intellectual property law, I think it's 50 years after the creator dies and there are loopholes for companies

I'm not super familiar with patents themselves, but I used to work in genetics back when human genes were able to be patented, and Myriad Genetics used their patent of the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes to lock genetic testing for these common factors in breast cancer predisposition behind a massive paywall. Even after gene patents were no longer allowed, they refused to share their previous test results with researchers trying to develop a more comprehensive, accurate, and cost-effective test, slowing down medical research.

Research eventually progressed without Myriad Genetics' help, and within a few years after the genes stopped being patented, genetic testing for the BRCA genes and many more was down to an affordable price, even for people without insurance coverage. We now learn more and more about these genes quicker than ever, and can offer tests that cover many genes at once for a low price and with high accuracy, due to the sharing of test results between labs that never would have happened while genes were patented.

This may be an outlier in patent usage - though I doubt it - but it still shows that big companies can use patent laws more to bully fair competition than to offer a better product. Patents are a good idea for helping small businesses and individuals protect their right to make a new product without a big company swooping in, but there are still massive issues with the process that need to be fixed to keep those same big companies from using the process in reverse to keep small businesses from growing into the competition necessary for a healthy economy.

All other things aside, 20 years is a long fucking time. 20 years ago we barely had cell phones. The iPhone was 2007 I think.

the only way to make more money than someone else is to work more hours regardless of profession

Workers aren't capitalists. The whole point of Capitalism is to ensure the ruling class never has to do the actual work. Capitalists make their money by exploiting workers, not working themselves.

Capitalists are people who own the means of production. Working in a capitalist system you will never earn enough to buy the factory. Inheritance is one of the main ways to become a capitalist. Sure some people get lucky but with few exceptions if you are rich the way you got rich was by exploiting other people .

Copyright was a halfway decent idea when it first came out. Give a chance for an artist or inventor to profit from their work for a few years and then it becomes public property. Thanks to corporations like Disney, that has all been twisted, and now it's used as a cudgel to keep others from competing and it takes almost 100 years for something to go out of copyright now (thanks congress).

A system where you do the work and get paid for your value is closer to Socialism than capitalism.

A society where no one has capital and the only way to get ahead is to provide more labour? And you call them steamed hams despite the fact they're obviously grilled?

Under true capitalism, everyone starts at 0 regardless of their birth

Then true capitalism will never exist. At best, it's a Platonic Ideal.