basalisk.bsky.social
Just Lion Around
78 posts
136 followers
253 following
Getting Started
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Could they be cluster headaches?
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Could make the argument that one corporation owning another corp is technically slavery, as the law thinks they are people already
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Dooooom!
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Thank you for getting this far, I largely wrote this to try and coalesce my opinions for myself, I don't expect people to agree with me, I'm just a dumb furry who doesn't like the way the world is going
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But perhaps, some philosopher will put some ideas like this into a coherent model. Maybe intellectual activists will figure out what ought to be done. With luck, maybe in a few generations, some small corner of the world will try a different way of doing things, and prevail against the status quo
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I don't think there's an easy road from where we are to where I think we should go, there's a lot of powerful people who benefit from the status quo, and a lot more people who don't mind a boot on their neck as long as they can also stamp on someone else's neck
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In my ideal society, words like 'dynast' and 'rentier' would be mortal insults.
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I believe societies grow great when it's impossible for a powerful person to ensure their children retain power through purchase or fiat, but that the children of the powerful have to be good citizens in their own right to acquire power afresh
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But the end result is, I would like to see a society where vast inequality is a transient and unsustainable state, and power is distributed as thinly as vegemite on toast, so no one person or faction can dictate against the interest of everyone
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For a far better exploration of this idea, C.G.P Grey did an animation exploring the economics of the golden age of piracy, and how a pirate ship worked as a worker cooperative, that I think illustrates my beliefs well
(www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0fA...)
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And then, I'd like to see the profits of each firm return to the workers of that firm, but to avoid some of the issues that occur with coops, have something like the internal capital accounts that Mondragon style firms have
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I think what I'd like to see in its place is a system that involves the economic firm and the legal body being more coincident, with internally democratic, 'bottom up' control structures, rather than the essentially military dictatorships with absentee landlords of most modern large firms
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The consequence is, the 'ownership' and control of a firm really should belong in the hands of the people working in it, not the people that lend it money, or on which lord's land it occurs. This is largely an idea developed by a guy called David Ellerman, and I'm still getting my head around it
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As a result, when a worker hires out their labour, they are assumed to be incapable of 'owning' the product they create. Then, the person that gets the profit becomes the person doing the hiring. In the current system, that's the employer, and they get to retain any profits
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(This is not to imply that those separate institutions are alike in indignity, slavery was and is a cruel institution, and treating women as their husbands or fathers possessions is also inhuman. But the family resemblance between them arises from a genetic similarity)
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That is, those contracts all assume that the worker, slave, or wife, is incapable of independent action (except when it comes to criminal matters of course) and so any product of their actions 'rightfully' belong to the 'guardian', either the slaver, husband, or employer.
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I subscribe to the view that employment contracts contain the same flaw as sale into slavery and coverture marriage contracts have. They take away people's agency and give them to another person
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Finally, there isn't a good term for it, but I oppose the current 'employer-employee' wage system, and the hierarchical nature of most businesses, not on any Marxist basis that it's due to exploitation of labour-value, or a bourgeois construction to oppress the proletariat
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Obviously, I am also very much in favour of free trade between equals. I'm not as convinced that it's a good idea between unequal countries, where there still exists inequality between working people, and uncompensated exploitation of nature. Tariffs aren't an answer, but I don't know what is
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I do think the Georgism of my utopia would help this, land and rents in the 'poorer' side of the border would be cheaper, and so that would provide a gradient acting in the opposite direction
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I am at heart an internationalist, but the current system has set up some very wide gradients of wealth and inequality that need to be carefully defused and equalised before borders can be erased. For instance, the fact that the internal German border can still be seen on maps is a symptom of this
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High internal immigration should be seen as a sign you are doing something right. Moving up to the level of international migration does bring issues where privileged areas don't want to be 'swamped' with migrants. I think this is a dangerous line of thought to go down, but this is the internet
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I think by having a lot of districts that each have some differences in policies, and allowing free movement between them, you make local governments more responsive. Obviously there are some things you would want to keep standardised across regions, and this would be the role of any federalism
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This also leads into another belief I have, that borders should be open. I wish I could find the source of a quote that is stuck in my head: "Borders are the scars left on the map by war." I think that people should be able to move to the district that has the best opportunities for them
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I also believe that government bodies should be distributed rather than centralised wherever possible, and with multiple member positions. For example, something like the Swiss federal council rather than a single powerful president.
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But I think a randomly selected sample of the population that can assent or veto legislation would provide a better representation of the people being sovereign than a single monarch or head of state acting in this role
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On the other hand, there's no better way I know of for people in general to express the direction they wish their government to go. I'm not sure a vote every N years for either evil or diet evil parties is a great expression of this. Perhaps voluntary voting on individual matters might work
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I say this because elected bodies, such as parliaments and congresses, are made up of people that try to get elected, sometimes by doing 'whatever it takes'. There's opportunities for others to corrupt them by helping with electability in undue ways.
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I'm a sortitionist. I believe that elected bodies are prone to electioneering and corruption, but they are a good way of having the people's voice heard. They should be complemented with a body that is randomly selected from the population, to give thumbs up or down to proposed laws
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Those failure modes are things like when there is monopolisation, or it's dealing with externalities, information asymmetry or goods that should not be traded. This is where regulations are good, and I prefer a Pigouvian to a Coasian solution
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This links to another of my beliefs. I'm not anti-market like a lot of leftists following Marx are. I think that it's a good tool for allocation and distribution. It does have flaws, and there are failure modes, but it is a distributed algorithm for the economic calculation problem that mostly works
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This should result in less hoarding and speculation of scarce resources, and more efficient and equitable allocation. A lot of wealth is captured by a few individuals by 'rent' on physical land, intellectual property, pollution 'rights', and other common property that has been enclosed
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One of my beliefs is Georgism, although it is far from the whole of my beliefs. I think that "economic land", that is, the monopoly on location, as well as other commons that are enclosed such as the atmosphere's carbon capacity, should be taxed as at close a value to the rent derived as possible
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every accusation is a confession
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I say this because of
- how rapidly the shock troops went for the obscure fiscal organs
- how much they've been hyping rip toe over the past few years and need line go up
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Redesign your logo, we know how to do it, colour makes us hungry, everything's connected
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I feel wrong commenting on another nation's internal politics but it's affecting us too. Is there any way that progressives in the US can do to collaborating dems what the tea party did to moderate repubs back around 2009 in primaries? I think more needs to be done than asking them nicely to be good
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I'm of the view that the "purity testing" is half the time people getting tripped up on inadvertently (or sometimes advertently) laundering or harbouring far right ideas. It's a defence mechanism against the insidiousness of evil, but like all immune system responses it causes collateral damage
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They want to get rid of the trans kids. That's the final sol- er, end goal they have in mind
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"Obviously the way our non Christian neighbours have been persecuted is distracting from the real issue of merging with Austria. Once we've dealt with that then we can focus on this so-called 'jenny side' you claim will happen."
/s if not obvious, also trying to avoid bot-triggering phrases/words
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bouncing off the furry hacker organisation idea, I think there needs to be "pirate equity", (inspired partly by cgp greys animations about how 18thC pirates worked) who would target a vulnerable corporation, buy it out leveragedly, and convert it to a worker owned business. Then move on to the next.
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"human resources" energy
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Hyperroo!