HN user
As a mostly js/frontend/react dev at the time I was deep into React ecosystem for building SPAs.
Not to be too dismissive but I think that's the problem. Modern SPAs with React et al are very bloated and imo a massive wrong turn compared with the simple boring tech that was before it, with very little gain to show for it as well.
It's a fckn disgrace that you and globular-toast haven't been banned already. Cancel culture you think? No it's just basic GC to not let a few dozens relics from the 1950s poison the environment with misogynistic bullshit for everyone else. You are toxic.
I have certainly missed how for example Scandinavian countries fits with this:
In every instance I've seen, redistribution does limit mobility - as well as introduces a middleman (the redistributors that steal/war/lie/oppress), corruption, politics, and extreme inefficiencies.
Care to explain? Or are you just being childishly contrarian which your last sentence seem to suggest?
I also have a working class background, but in Sweden. The last thing I would like to do is to pull up the ladder that enabled me and so many others a better chance to a secure and comfortable life. The inheritance tax was actually recently abolished here, but not due to some popular uproar but because right-wing parties got into power.
I don't understand why people go to such great lengths to give current injustices the benefit of the doubt ad infinitum, even constructing ridiculously rare and hypothetical scenarios like that.
The real outrage here is the millions and millions of people squandering their talents in some shite job due to lack of opportunity, not the handful of billionaires that started from nothing and whose children might now be taxed somewhat.
In every instance I've seen, redistribution does limit mobility
Much of Western-Europe show you otherwise, I'm not sure how you could have missed that?
That's just pathological.
Your so focused on your own take on human nature that you ignore obvious evidence disproving it, namely that Scandinavia isn't a hell hole.
I'm sorry but this all strikes me as rather delusional.
The reason why functional languages doesn't take off is because programming languages are tools, not an end in themselves. Carpenters that are obsessed with perfecting their power tools would rightly be out of a job in a very short amount of time. Furthermore most of these "perfections" aren't even virtuous - in the sense of searching for improvement - but just self-indulgence and aesthetics.
Functional languages are dense, hard to read, have a high cognitive load, and are thus unproductive beyond the proverbial garage startup. They are also designed and used mostly by mentioned power tool decorators rather than practitioners, with the inevitable end result.
Because if and when the socialists take over, I can guarantee they won’t afford the capitalists the same freedom.
You should know your enemy better than lazily repeating Cold War rhetoric. 99% of all socialists today are firmly democratic.
Would be curious to know if he has changed his view since then.
Also I think that the source code of his projects in Python pretty much validates the point of writing simple code. He has made great user-facing APIs (flask) but as soon you dive into the code base itself it's imo a rather dense and hairy mess of abstractions.
The point I was trying to make that "free" and "unfree" isn't as binary as some people like to think. The former slaves weren't free from the economic coercion their destitution entailed. Just because you aren't someones literal property anymore doesn't necessarily make you free or in any position to demand a livable wage. The planters were well aware of the disposablity of the wage labourer and even used that it their pro-slavery propaganda that went something like "We actually need to take care of our property, unlike you, who just replace them".
A socialist system adamantly defending their intellectual property to prevent poor countries from developing generics? Sounds pretty rare.
If slavery had been critical to the U.S. economy, you would've expected a massive economic collapse right after the civil war. But there wasn't even a blip.
Do you believe that the newly emancipated slaves retreated to their own self-subsistence farms directly after the civil war or what?
It's not the same thing?
When American use the word “people”, it primarily refers to groups of Americans. Should they be more inclusive and invent a term, say, maybe peoplxs, that includes also non-Americans? That’s absurd, of course.
Sorry, but this makes no sense to me at all.
Moving the goalposts. I said that planned obsolescence is not, as you originally alleged, a general property of a market-driven economy.
I had to ask, because that's otherwise your MO.
Because like I already explained, product and brand reputation are extremely important for market success.
There's no brand reputation risk if most large manufacturers have similar durability.
The example that I gave was how Apple's hard-earned excellent reputation
How can you keep using Apple as an example when it has been one of the most obvious offender and is also one of the giants within the most obviously offending industry - smartphones.
It demolishes this idea that the market has a general incentive to reduce product longevity.
No, it just shows that technology has moved forward with regards to a advanced industrial product.
like consumers consciously choosing more disposable products over longer-lasting ones
You've cherry-picked the only type that fits your narrative, preference for disposable products (which I actually agree with you on, but causes of this is an interesting topic in itself). But to pick that and not to explain the type where billions of dollars each year are spent on trying to create new non-essential needs that aren't really there making the existing products obsolete, a.k.a "Perceived obsolescence"? How is this "efficient"?
but any reasonable person who read your original comment would agree that the latter was what you were originally referring to.
This is my original comment: "Well, yes, that capitalism will cause a production craze is even written in the Communist Manifesto. What "effective" means in practice however is another thing - there's nothing effective about planned obsolescence, great for the current measurement of economic growth though."
How is this inconsistent with focusing on the inefficiencies of all kinds of planned obsolescence of the free market?
Googling to find a bunch of articles about planned obsolescence and then listing them without checking first to see if they are credible sources or even providing a summary of the evidence they contain to accompany them is completely inconducive to constructive discussion.
Once again, you linked to a single reddit post, eat humble pie.
It does in the case of the word "latinos", but it only says that the group is not all-female: this is the gender neutral form.
And that requires information about a groups composition ahead of time doesn't it?
Anyway, I think it's important to remember that this is English speaking folks that are trying to be more inclusive and finding "Latinos" to refer primarily to a group of males. They may even disagree with the original preference of Spanish to go with Latinos over Latinas for a mixed composition.
But "Latin" is ambiguous and normally not used to describe people of Latin-American decent, at least not in Europe, and the emphasis in America seem to be towards Spanish speaking countries rather than the Latin/Romance languages as a whole.
It’s like if I started calling you “Swedix.”
It would be comparable if English already divided up in Swedish and Swedishess or similar.
Why did you skip the Swedish example? That's the most similar to this. It's just a shortcut.
This is English speaking folks that have adopted a Spanish word and are now making it gender neutral by skipping the last letter. They are under no obligation to continue to follow the the original language's grammar. We would have a major linguistical crises on our hands if that was so.
You seem to be mixing gendered nouns with something that's actually referring to actual people. Two different things.
In German for example every job ad title need to be suffixed with (m/w). It would be handy if it was gender neutral. I don't understand how the grammatical gender of a random noun e.g. wine, that happens to be masculine in German, is comparable to something that's referring to actual persons.
In Swedish for example there are the pronouns "han" (he) and "hon" (she), and now there's a gender neutral "hen". The latter being very handy when you don't know the gender of the person that's being talked about. But of course this addition has made culture warring people (a.k.a right-wing folks) very upset in Sweden too.
It seems to be a bit strange to complain about how widespread the use is of a newly coined term.
I assume that much of this "outrage" is some kind of a "culture war" thing. Instead of focusing on important stuff people get all distracted with "old man angry at minor change" and bike shed things like this ad infinitum.
yes, that’s exactly the issue
What? it's not needed with "Americans" so there's no need. In some languages gender neutral terms can be legitimately used as a shortcut for using both after each other or similar.
What would be the point of that? "Americans" is already gender neutral?
All this huff and puff just for someone using a gender neutral term? I can't understand why people get upset by something so unimportant. Or to get upset for not using it for that matter.
Yes, one can cherry pick 8 sources. Most of your sources were unscientific media articles, and most of those from left-wing activist outlets.
That was like just the first 8 articles describing it, as I said, there are certainly many more if you were willing to entertain another perspective than your own dogma.
So do you deny that the entire concept of planned obsolescence exists at all, or that there is something other driving it than the free markets pursuit for more profits? If so, why wouldn't more profits as an incentive not be pursued using planned obsolescence?
You and I both know that you weren't claiming
Haha, alrighty then. You know what I actually meant.
Why would I stop at a more narrow definition when criticizing the incentives of the free market, when all types all grounded in that same incentives?
The last self-congratulating paragraph is not a good look: "I'm good, honest and righteous. You, however, are purposefully lying and have no time for truth and decency."
You have posted a single link that show, allegedly, that specifically cars are more durable nowadays. That's blatant cherry-picking. How is that honest and in good faith? I expect someone that's honest to research the topic and try to find other examples contradicting ones idea, and that is not very hard as I shown with a few links. But instead you go on the defensive, dismiss the links as left-wing, and yet again try to hide behind telling me what I actually meant with planned obsolescence, even though it was in direct reference to the supposed "efficiency" of the free market.
You claim it's cherry-picked while you cherry picked any article you could find supporting your claim.
I cherry-picked 8 articles? There are so many articles about it that it's not hard to produce 20 more if you want. Or perhaps info about the court proceedings in France?
is NOT using planned obsolescence in the context where you were using it
Alright, so now we're back again to the classical CryptoPunk style of honing in on semantics and refusing definitions. There are several types of planned obsolescence as you can read in the Wikipedia link. All are still a product of the incentive to get more profit.
engage in planned obsolescence by monopolists and oligopolists
Yes, and these are also the product of free market incentives.
You provided no evidence at all
Evidence: "one reddit post about a single product, cars, deffo not cherry-picked"
No evidence at all: "8 links, including an economics professor and an article form an economic journal in a self-evident subject"
Gotcha.
What you're exhibiting now is the hubris characteristic of the over-confident and under-informed, whether it's flat-earthers, Moon-landing denialists, anti-vaxxers, or socialists.
Pretty on point for a free market fundamentalist to add socialists to that list.
You just keep replying with shallow anecdotes and telling me that I'm a ignorant layman without saying why. Apparently ignoring the links as well.
Apple is one of the most common examples of planned obsolescence, so much so that nations (France especially) have recently gone about to sue and create laws to oppose their practices. So I'm not sure why you're using that example and also adding that it's a large company like that is relevant in any way shape or form. The entire point of planned obsolescence is to make more money ffs. If anything, that is some strange mental gymnastics.
There's no point in me continuing to spend time refuting your mental-gymnastics/weak-objections to science.
You haven't spent a single minute refuting anything in any thread I've replied to you in. It's all just hot air from you, every single time. If it doesn't fit your free market narrative, like planned obsolescence this time, you just ignore it or dismiss it with extremely shallow cherry-picking.
As it is, you're discounting Economics as a generally opted social science being used to manipulate the public for the interests of a capitalist elite,
Not really. I am however disagreeing with the notion that the "free market" objectively leads to the best outcome possible, so history should stops with free market Capitalism. That no more progress is possible. That a much more equal economical system, and thus society isn't possible - "because free market economics have said so!". And I do think that the field of economics is biased towards the current status quo due to the incentive structures that are present in that field, among with the fact that the current system is what is the core of what is actually studied.
you're making these extreme conspiratorial allegations without having studied economics for yourself.
Yes. Most do. I disagree that it's some "extreme conspiratorial allegations" think it's very reasonable given the circumstances of that field.
It is not obvious at all. There is no evidence at all of a general trend toward planned obsolescence. This is another layman's talking point.
All incentives in capitalism encourages quick cyclic consumption, and corporations spend vast amounts of resources to various forms of obsolescence [0]. This can't just be ignored even if you would like it, because it blatantly shows how wasteful the current system is.
You didn't even address what I provided about Pareto Efficiency
"I ignored your questioned and posted something else, now please answer what I posted meanwhile I'll keep ignoring the question".
Yes it is alleging a conspiracy, and you're claiming Economics in general has been coopted by it. This is no different than anti-vaxxerism.
A field of study with so close connections to power and wealth must be seen with skepticism. It's like not questioning the upper-classes theories of society of old. There's a lot of examples of theories justifying their privileges.
There's also an important distinction to be made. It's true that capitalism/free-market produces alot of stuff. But it's certainly not true that it produces freedom, happiness, and justice for all. The problem is that you will take the former to justify the latter injustices. That's obvious bias.
[0] Planned obsolescence:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/apr/15/the-right...
https://www.green-alliance.org.uk/resources/A%20circular%20e...
https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2015/mar/23...
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160612-heres-the-truth-...
https://www.consumersinternational.org/news-resources/blog/p...
https://www.bbvaopenmind.com/en/technology/innovation/origin...
"Yale University economics professor Judith Chevalier explained to the BBC that companies react to consumer tastes, and that planned obsolescence is not simply a deception by manufacturers, but in certain situations the fault lies with consumers, who do not value a more durable product, but one that possesses the latest technology." (admits to its existence, but just blames it on the consumer instead)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence
"An Economic Theory of Planned Obsolescence"