Untitled

[bloodandhedonism]

What do you think of the rumors going around that Trump never wanted to be president?

I thought a lot of people, even amongst those who voted for him, already knew that. I heard he wanted to impress Chinese investors for some project or another, Trump TV is the big thing going around the rumor mill, and the two aren’t necessarily exclusive given global economics these days.

Trump was the meme candidate and a lot of people, especially the 4chan types, voted for him basically for entertainment-related chaos reasons more than any proper policy. Trump saying out loud what were clearly his actual opinions made the rest of his eventual voters tip him over into unwanted glory.

Related, slightly more serious take: if people are voting for the joke candidate precisely because not only he but his voters themselves don’t give a shit anymore – and he then proceeds to win – what does that tell you?

[twalh]

okay, I know that 4chan is tiny and doesn’t actually affect the world at all besides providing memes to an only slightly less tiny portion of the internet, and there’s no way you can’t know that too, so what is your reasoning here?

[bloodandhedonism]

In my defense I used “4chan” as a shorthand, but I feel very comfortable saying there’s larger and larger amounts of people increasingly uncaring and/or doing things to annoy other people for its own sake, especially amongst the younger generations. 

I think a lot of the current cultural climate is the way it is right now due to trying to find more abstract ways to deal with the social and political directions things have gone in recent history.

[twalh]

I don’t understand where you’re coming from at all. Which isn’t to say your assertions are wrong but that’s not my experience; my experience is still that the only people who are going out of their way to provoke are the ones who still care (and this as a member of the Young Generation).

The second part is probably true to be sure, but I don’t see that as the philosophy people are taking. It’s rage against the machine, or apathy, or progressivism or populism if you’re still political.

[bloodandhedonism]

What do you think of the rumors going around that Trump never wanted to be president?

I thought a lot of people, even amongst those who voted for him, already knew that. I heard he wanted to impress Chinese investors for some project or another, Trump TV is the big thing going around the rumor mill, and the two aren’t necessarily exclusive given global economics these days.

Trump was the meme candidate and a lot of people, especially the 4chan types, voted for him basically for entertainment-related chaos reasons more than any proper policy. Trump saying out loud what were clearly his actual opinions made the rest of his eventual voters tip him over into unwanted glory.

Related, slightly more serious take: if people are voting for the joke candidate precisely because not only he but his voters themselves don’t give a shit anymore – and he then proceeds to win – what does that tell you?

[twalh]

okay, I know that 4chan is tiny and doesn’t actually affect the world at all besides providing memes to an only slightly less tiny portion of the internet, and there’s no way you can’t know that too, so what is your reasoning here?

[winterskorn]

     There’s literally no universe where anyone can convince me that Luke Skywalker, the same guy who looked at Darth Vader, a man who:

slaughtered the Jedi Order down to a few straggling remnants

murdered babies in the crib

helped construct, maintain, and enforce a totalitarian Empire that will straight-up explode an entire planet just out of spite

personally tortured Luke’s friends for no reason other than so that their pain would bring Luke to him

killed Luke’s lifelong best friend

tried personally to kill Luke a couple times

killed Kenobi right in front of Luke

seriously, this guy kills people all the fucking time, it’s a running gag at this point

beat Luke within an inch of his life and then cut off his hand

     and then proceeded to say to himself “There is still good in that man” for basically no reason other than Darth Vader is his father

     and then proceeded to single-handedly redeem this hulking mass of 20 years of atrocities and bad decisions stuffed into a black suit

     is the same guy who decided that his child nephew was irredeemable due to some shitty 2-in-the-morning invasive thoughts planted by Space Goldmember

[serkentsi-deactivated20180207]

Y'all are going to make me watch this piece of shit so I can explain how it’s actually Tangna Chuanpu Meiguo Shi Huangdist propaganda

[bloodandhedonism]

speaking as a friend

don’t watch it, save your money

it’s not worth it

[serkentsi-deactivated20180207]

If the movie is garbage, that is because the propaganda value of the movie is increased by having it be garbage. The garbagitude of the movie illustrates the bankruptcy and sterility of the establishment, you see. What could be more establishment than Star Wars?

Better yet, it’s well known that the original trilogy was written in accordance with traditional principles—George Lucas talking to Joseph Campbell and so on. The new trilogy’s cargo-culting of the original, you see, illustrates the establishment’s empty cargo-culting of past forms that worked where their imitations don’t, because the people running the imitations are too stupid to realize there’s a difference or that this difference is worth paying attention to.

[twalh]

come on, listen to yourself

I mean you have to realize what you sound like

[serkentsi-deactivated20180207]

The author is dead, bicth. All interpretation’s are vali’d. The Star Wars movie is revolutionary anti-Illuminati propaganda if I say it is.

[the-grey-tribe]

The politics of cinema-going are so 2016

[shieldfoss]

I mean I am like five steps from agreeing with Nyd here:

The new trilogy’s cargo-culting of the original, you see, illustrates the establishment’s empty cargo-culting of past forms that worked where their imitations don’t, because the people running the imitations are too stupid to realize there’s a difference or that this difference is worth paying attention to.

That doesn’t read like a hot mess, that reads like a Hot Take Fresh Off the Press.

[twalh]

you are hardly a bastion of sensibility either.

[fierceawakening]

Im too exhausted rn to dive into actual discussion but this is like the second time pro gun people have been like “huh wow USUALLY gun control people are not trying to parse out what’s reasonable” and I just

Are my views REALLY that unusual? Because they don’t seem especially out of the norm among people I talk to who think America has a weird gun problem that needs fixing

So I’m wondering if I just have odd nuance liking friends or if a lot of these people have a distorted idea of what the other side actually thinks

[thefutureoneandall]

Are my views REALLY that unusual? … So I’m wondering if I just have odd nuance liking friends

…yes?

Like, throughout your gun control threads, even when there was a thing you didn’t know about existing law or guns, you seemed interested in knowing what’s true and reasonable, and making sure gun laws actually do something about violence. This is… um… exceptional.

My basic experience is that in personal conversations, with activist groups, and even among politicians, gun control advocates don’t know or care how their proposed laws will actually work in practice. This seems widely true even with smart, knowledgeable people.

Without rehashing the debate, an illustrative story:

New York State decided to restrict magazine capacity, which is a common goal of gun control activists. The initial law restricted new magazines to seven rounds, which was immensely unpopular because many popular guns do not have seven-round magazines, and so it became impossible to buy new magazines for them.

This is obvious to most recreational shooters, and anyone with actual expertise in guns and gun laws. But zero of those people were consulted, because the NY SAFE Act was passed in 24 hours from first public draft to signing, and none of its supporters had meaningful knowledge of guns.

(It also strengthened the idiotic “assault weapons” ban on weapons with features like bayonet lugs. I know gun advocates keep harping on how ‘assault weapons’ are stupid, but it’s because people keep trying to legislate them.)

After passing a law restricting magazines to seven rounds, the governor discovered that it was a stupid law, and publicly stated “There is no such thing as a seven-bullet magazine.” He asserted that the law actually meant to restrict magazine capacity to ten rounds, but magazine loading to seven rounds. (And then, several months after asserting this was already in his law, got around to actually changing the law to match the claim.)

Meaning that you could have ten rounds of ammo, and a ten round magazine, but the state politely asked you not to combine them at risk of losing your gun license. Trivial to bypass, and also an easy offense to commit completely on accident. This was the result of an attempt to modify the behavior of spree killers.

That’s what happens when the fourth largest state drafts what’s intended to be a nation-leading gun law.

No one knew anything about what they were doing, and no one cared enough to ask for a single competent opinion. Everyone involved was either completely indifferent to ‘reasonable’, or completely incompetent to hold any sort of government power. (Or both.)

This is basically what I see every time American gun control gets further than a dinner-table conversation. It’s not that reasonable gun control advocates don’t exist, but honestly it doesn’t look to me like the 2nd Amendment crowd have a real distorted sense of the other side. 

I think you’ve selected for lots of thoughtful people with good goals, but my experience is that advocates like you are painfully rare. The people who have power and resources on the gun control side seem either shockingly indifferent to efficacy, or else utterly dishonest.

(Edit: I should add that a lot of pro-gun advocacy is comparably stupid, with the added evil of being utterly callous. ‘Status quo’ is just harder to implement wrong, even when your motives are dumb.)

[isaacsapphire]

Yes. Fierce, this isn’t your strongest subject, but you aren’t just “blarg gunz r bad! How do you idiot redneck babymurderers not see that?!” which is unfortunately pretty standard for gun control folks. You are actually willing to listen and learn, and focused on reducing crime and violence, which puts you way ahead of the crowd.

[fierceawakening]

Thank you. :-)

I do have to say though that I wonder if your assertion that it’s odd that I’m “focused on reducing crime and violence” is echo chambery though. I can’t imagine that anyone would be in favor of regulation if we thought it wouldn’t reduce violence.

We’d be throwing our hands up and saying “Whatever” if we thought nothing would work. (That’s what it seems to me that a lot of our side thinks your side is doing, tbh.)

[shieldfoss]

Gun control - in America and Canada - is not only about controlling guns.

You can tell because a lot of the enacted legislation does not solve gun-related problems.

Instead, it often does one of two things: Completely ineffectually faff about (The “Incompetent legislators” hypothesis) or completely ineffectually faff about while severely inconveniencing legitimate gun owners. (The “Virtue signalling fools” hypothesis.)

Note: This is not all firearms legislation. Some does potentially help stop spree killers.

But it’s a lot of firearms legislation.

(Also, you sometimes see the completely infuriating “We should confiscate all firearms/Nobody is coming for your guns” double move.)

[twalh]

Gun control - in America and Canada - is not only about controlling guns.

You can tell because a lot of the enacted legislation does not solve gun-related problems.

It’s a common misconception, but this isn’t actually a tell.

Of course gun control is only about controlling guns—or, more accurately, controlling guns in order to save lives and probably also for the sake of peace. People may be wrong about whether the former leads to either of the latter, or about what is a good idea, or sometimes even believe contradictory things at different times and states of emotion, but you should never, never, ever, claim that they want something other than what they want.

[bloodandhedonism]

if there really is going to be a not-insignificant amount of people dying alone (due to lifelong poor social skills, bad personalities, simply being unable to attract anyone or being the last half of a couple who chose not to have kids), i wonder what the policies are for body discovery and pickup

[twalh]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xy71Vvah7fM&list=PL2g-7NS0WKivfm3zEVIT8P8lq2UWbdOeB

[winterskorn]

     There’s literally no universe where anyone can convince me that Luke Skywalker, the same guy who looked at Darth Vader, a man who:

slaughtered the Jedi Order down to a few straggling remnants

murdered babies in the crib

helped construct, maintain, and enforce a totalitarian Empire that will straight-up explode an entire planet just out of spite

personally tortured Luke’s friends for no reason other than so that their pain would bring Luke to him

killed Luke’s lifelong best friend

tried personally to kill Luke a couple times

killed Kenobi right in front of Luke

seriously, this guy kills people all the fucking time, it’s a running gag at this point

beat Luke within an inch of his life and then cut off his hand

     and then proceeded to say to himself “There is still good in that man” for basically no reason other than Darth Vader is his father

     and then proceeded to single-handedly redeem this hulking mass of 20 years of atrocities and bad decisions stuffed into a black suit

     is the same guy who decided that his child nephew was irredeemable due to some shitty 2-in-the-morning invasive thoughts planted by Space Goldmember

[serkentsi-deactivated20180207]

Y'all are going to make me watch this piece of shit so I can explain how it’s actually Tangna Chuanpu Meiguo Shi Huangdist propaganda

[bloodandhedonism]

speaking as a friend

don’t watch it, save your money

it’s not worth it

[serkentsi-deactivated20180207]

If the movie is garbage, that is because the propaganda value of the movie is increased by having it be garbage. The garbagitude of the movie illustrates the bankruptcy and sterility of the establishment, you see. What could be more establishment than Star Wars?

Better yet, it’s well known that the original trilogy was written in accordance with traditional principles—George Lucas talking to Joseph Campbell and so on. The new trilogy’s cargo-culting of the original, you see, illustrates the establishment’s empty cargo-culting of past forms that worked where their imitations don’t, because the people running the imitations are too stupid to realize there’s a difference or that this difference is worth paying attention to.

[twalh]

come on, listen to yourself

I mean you have to realize what you sound like

[serkentsi-deactivated20180207]

The author is dead, bicth. All interpretation’s are vali’d. The Star Wars movie is revolutionary anti-Illuminati propaganda if I say it is.

[twalh]

stupid: having bad ideologies as a joke

not stupid: not having bad ideologies at all

[bloodandhedonism]

You haven't been political and controversial in a long time, Bloody. Say something that will make your followers hate you.

subtle answer: i wish the t-34s rolled across all of europe and including the british isles too, because i’m always up for seeing the british trolled. a soviet-dominated eastern hemisphere – with the sovs inheriting the old colonial empires – would have sucked badly and give rise to some apocalyptic feelings in the western hemisphere at times, but the laws of economics would have come knocking on the door eventually and the whole red nightmare would have crashed. a post-communist eastern hemishere would have suffered badly for a long time, like a lot of post-communist states are suffering now, but a lot of east euros and east asians have proven themselves quite hardy and everyone would have eventually recovered. it would have made any sort of serious commie thought unbearable over there like it does in the old red sphere even now and make the intriguing rise of america as the center for world communism a lot more obvious… if potentially more dangerous for the future of that timeline.

obvious answer: gosh i don’t know. something that will make my followers hate me? most LGBT people are genuinely horrific people and are usually genocidal nutcases in their own right, and if backlash against LGBTdom to the point of a fourth reich in the USA then they honestly would have brought it on themselves. 

[twalh]

“laws of economics” as if it was ever about communism the thing you refuse to call communism, christ

[winterskorn]

     There’s literally no universe where anyone can convince me that Luke Skywalker, the same guy who looked at Darth Vader, a man who:

slaughtered the Jedi Order down to a few straggling remnants

murdered babies in the crib

helped construct, maintain, and enforce a totalitarian Empire that will straight-up explode an entire planet just out of spite

personally tortured Luke’s friends for no reason other than so that their pain would bring Luke to him

killed Luke’s lifelong best friend

tried personally to kill Luke a couple times

killed Kenobi right in front of Luke

seriously, this guy kills people all the fucking time, it’s a running gag at this point

beat Luke within an inch of his life and then cut off his hand

     and then proceeded to say to himself “There is still good in that man” for basically no reason other than Darth Vader is his father

     and then proceeded to single-handedly redeem this hulking mass of 20 years of atrocities and bad decisions stuffed into a black suit

     is the same guy who decided that his child nephew was irredeemable due to some shitty 2-in-the-morning invasive thoughts planted by Space Goldmember

[serkentsi-deactivated20180207]

Y'all are going to make me watch this piece of shit so I can explain how it’s actually Tangna Chuanpu Meiguo Shi Huangdist propaganda

[bloodandhedonism]

speaking as a friend

don’t watch it, save your money

it’s not worth it

[serkentsi-deactivated20180207]

If the movie is garbage, that is because the propaganda value of the movie is increased by having it be garbage. The garbagitude of the movie illustrates the bankruptcy and sterility of the establishment, you see. What could be more establishment than Star Wars?

Better yet, it’s well known that the original trilogy was written in accordance with traditional principles—George Lucas talking to Joseph Campbell and so on. The new trilogy’s cargo-culting of the original, you see, illustrates the establishment’s empty cargo-culting of past forms that worked where their imitations don’t, because the people running the imitations are too stupid to realize there’s a difference or that this difference is worth paying attention to.

[twalh]

come on, listen to yourself

I mean you have to realize what you sound like

[kontextmaschine]

Turning “consequences”, “accountability”, and “basic human decency” into partisan clichés was a terrible idea, they all wore through within months.

[twalh]

they’re not partisan clichés you idiot, not everything is a partisan cliché

open your goddamn eyes and lift up your head

[serkentsi-deactivated20180207]

berlusconi is running on ubi, does this make vox fascist by association

[serkentsi-deactivated20180207]

given that the last proposal for ubi came from nixon and the one before that came from huey long i could see it. it’s probably even technically true, in that ubi doesn’t redistribute the means of production except insofar as people can use their ubi payouts to buy stocks or whatever. haha ur all fash now

distributists are also fash because just trying to move the world closer to the utopia of universal artisanhood (read: petit-bourgeosity) is of course fash. what u need to do is make everyone a prole and then institute a dictatorship of teh enlightened philosopher kingz!!!111 to wipe out the entire nation of every single person who looked at them funny in high school

[dedicating-ruckus-blog]

> thinking “fascism” as popularly used actually has a rigorous definition that can be applied rationally to determine membership or nonmembership

[serkentsi-deactivated20180207]

The Marxist definition is perfectly rigorous; the problem is that it is impossible for anything to exist that it doesn’t apply to

[twalh]

if you think this is true then you are missing the point of fascism, and probably also the point of definitions in general.

so are they, but you’re missing it harder.

[adzhe]

Since you actually know about coding can you tell me how tumblr can be so fucked? Like they add something new and functions completely unrelated just break completely. Like when the activity page broke a day after best stuff first

All my experience with web-dev has been in-house for relatively small things, so I’m really not in a position to speak on it. Plus I know nothing about their codebase.

I think a lot of tumblr’s problems stem from poor executive decisions. Algorithmic timelines suck, but yet here we are. No amount of good code will fix fundamentally stupid features.

At least the uptime is pretty good.

[twalh]

There was a post that went around at some point showing a link to a review by someone who had worked there saying that it was the developers were all incompetent and also completely unmanaged.

I do agree that there are a lot of stupid design decisions though.

[bloodandhedonism]

i smell blood in the water tonight

[twalh]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psIuidkkLjI

[twalh]

http://w-r-o-u-g-h-t.tumblr.com/post/167175197206/churchyardgrim-girlfriendluvr

I have no words

[bloodandhedonism]

So, when's the Second American Civil War coming up? I wish to rain genocide upon [opposition side of my choice].

I’M WORKIN’ ON IT

[twalh]

stop

[left-reminders]

Capitalist culture is service industry workers not being allowed to sit down for their entire shifts, no matter how dead the traffic flow gets.

[left-reminders]

Capitalist culture is service industry workers sacrificing their comfort for antagonizing and pervy customers who are “always right”.

[left-reminders]

Capitalist culture is giving students homework in order to prepare them for their future careers where they’ll inevitably need to “take work home with them” or work extra hours in order to put bread on the table.

[left-reminders]

Capitalist culture is helping physically/mentally ill people only to the extent that they’re able to generate profitable labor again.

[left-reminders]

Capitalist culture is destroying food that can’t be sold rather than distributing it to poor people according to need.

[theinternetcrab]

internet leftist culture is when somehow you arrive at the idea that life being hard and a constant fight for survival is an invention of the eighteenth century

[twalh]

and internet anti-leftist culture is thinking we can’t do better when we very clearly can

[theinternetcrab]

the burden of proof is on your side

[everything-narrative]

Buddy Rand-wank, listen the fuck up.

A company is — by any and all means you might classify its actions — an alien intelligence. It is a compound organism made up of its employees, of its bureaucracy, of its bylaws. It is motivated (oftentimes) by a singular desire to maximize shareholder value.

Shareholder value is not niceness, or kindness, or charity, or the common good, it is a number. If you gave a company free reigns to reshape reality it would replace all its employees with robots and use every bit of material in the universe to build computers and write “shareholder value = 9999999999999…” with the nines taking up every nano-angstrom of memory.

Google “paperclip maximizer” for more info.

That is what a company wants. So let’s just throw out the idea that a company can be benevolent by its own merit: it is always and only ever doing good because doing good is profitable, or because somebody is overpowering the company’s wants.

Next: in a company, the rules that workers abide by — be they bylaws or managerial decisions — are dreamt up by fallible humans. Fallible here meaning they are poor approximations of what policies would actually maximize shareholder value. The errors in judgment made by the fallible humans are informed by politics, misinformation, ignorance, and a lot of other things. Humans are pretty stupid.

So hence, a managerial decision like “workers can’t sit down ever even if there are no customers” is probably not an effective means of maximizing shareholder value. It is probably made by some executive who has never worked a store floor in her life, and thinks poor people should really have thought about the consequences of choosing to live in poverty before they decided to do so.

Denying workers the ability to sit down provably decreases their effectiveness, which means in order to maximize shareholder value you have to make this decision as part of some grander scheme to utilize desperate minimum wage workers, and making sure the poor stay poor because working at your company tires them out.

I’m not sure why you would, though, because the strategy that actually maximizes shareholder value is probably more along the lines of something like increasing consumer spending by paying your workers more, getting legislation passed that increases economic equality and consequently vastly increases economic growth. Sure, that won’t maximize shareholder value in the next fiscal quarter but it will on a timescale of a decade.

Actually, we can probably model companies as “maximize shareholder value in the next fiscal quarter and add noise” and get decent predictions. This behavior more accurately reflects things like AirBnB getting a developer to build houses explicitly for AirBnB (which is a hotel, but not subject to hotel regulation because loopholes) and Uber existing (which is a taxi service, but not subject to regulation because loopholes) — in essence the free market in aggregate interprets regulation as damage and re-routes flow around the damaged area.

So, short-term maximization. It’s short-term. It is probably driven by inverstor desires which ultimately clash with shareholder value maximization — Q1 boom, followed by Q3 bankrupcy is not shareholder value maximization, it is suicide by stupidity.

And so we have short-term concerned execs informed by neo-liberalist ideology, who have their minds warped by the possession of incredible wealth, and who have opinions informed by executive culture, who make decrees like “the customer is always right” and “employees are not allowed to sit down.”

This is what I mean when I dispute your claim that we can’t do “better.” We have fucknuts in power parroting truisms from 200 years ago. This is not a glorious shareholder-value maximization, this is human stupidity getting in the way of human values and corporation values.

This is capitalist culture: it’s not even compatible with idealized capitalism!

What the flying fuck do you mean this is the pinnacle?! Where are my god-level artificial intelligences maximizing shareholder value? Where is the abolition of capitalism with all its affront to all humanity holds dear? Where is your god damned ambition, you spineless libertarian?!

“But what can we do right now?!” Fucked if I know what’s right. I just know you’re wrong.

PS. fuck off with that burden of proof bullshit. Your claim is just as extraordinary.

[theinternetcrab]

I don’t know how you interpreted any of this into two lines of post but I hope you feel better

[twalh]

oh, come the fuck ON, not you too

[theinternetcrab]

me too what

[twalh]

the ‘u mad bro’ bullshit. fuck off with it. it needs to stop

[theinternetcrab]

i don’t think you’re matching the right patterns here

[twalh]

I don’t know what else “I hope you feel better” could possibly mean

[bloodandhedonism]

Say something nice about the Soviet Union.

Sometimes I think we should have left all of the old world to the reds, including even the UK. Sure, the situation for the USA and friends would have been more desperate, but they’d still win in the end. The laws of economics would come knocking on the door of this super-USSR eventually (and probably not much longer than in IRL history, even with more real resources under its control), it would have made the “Russian Empire” aspect of that bloc all the more obvious, and said more desperate situation would likely lead to a more authentically high tech 2017 than now, especially with both sides keeping funding for technology going on longer in order to get tech leads over the other side. That stuff was petering out by the 1980s due to visible Soviet decline, most notoriously with space exploration as the greatest example.

Plus, when communism falls, you’d have all of the Eurasia loathing it and similar ideologies the way Eastern Europeans do in general, and things would generally be more… sustainable. And it would be deeply amusing to have the USA being the lefty epicenter of the planet by default in that situation, compared to what some people say about it now. 

[twalh]

That’s not something nice about the Soviet Union.

[left-reminders]

Capitalist culture is service industry workers not being allowed to sit down for their entire shifts, no matter how dead the traffic flow gets.

[left-reminders]

Capitalist culture is service industry workers sacrificing their comfort for antagonizing and pervy customers who are “always right”.

[left-reminders]

Capitalist culture is giving students homework in order to prepare them for their future careers where they’ll inevitably need to “take work home with them” or work extra hours in order to put bread on the table.

[left-reminders]

Capitalist culture is helping physically/mentally ill people only to the extent that they’re able to generate profitable labor again.

[left-reminders]

Capitalist culture is destroying food that can’t be sold rather than distributing it to poor people according to need.

[theinternetcrab]

internet leftist culture is when somehow you arrive at the idea that life being hard and a constant fight for survival is an invention of the eighteenth century

[twalh]

and internet anti-leftist culture is thinking we can’t do better when we very clearly can

[theinternetcrab]

the burden of proof is on your side

[everything-narrative]

Buddy Rand-wank, listen the fuck up.

A company is — by any and all means you might classify its actions — an alien intelligence. It is a compound organism made up of its employees, of its bureaucracy, of its bylaws. It is motivated (oftentimes) by a singular desire to maximize shareholder value.

Shareholder value is not niceness, or kindness, or charity, or the common good, it is a number. If you gave a company free reigns to reshape reality it would replace all its employees with robots and use every bit of material in the universe to build computers and write “shareholder value = 9999999999999…” with the nines taking up every nano-angstrom of memory.

Google “paperclip maximizer” for more info.

That is what a company wants. So let’s just throw out the idea that a company can be benevolent by its own merit: it is always and only ever doing good because doing good is profitable, or because somebody is overpowering the company’s wants.

Next: in a company, the rules that workers abide by — be they bylaws or managerial decisions — are dreamt up by fallible humans. Fallible here meaning they are poor approximations of what policies would actually maximize shareholder value. The errors in judgment made by the fallible humans are informed by politics, misinformation, ignorance, and a lot of other things. Humans are pretty stupid.

So hence, a managerial decision like “workers can’t sit down ever even if there are no customers” is probably not an effective means of maximizing shareholder value. It is probably made by some executive who has never worked a store floor in her life, and thinks poor people should really have thought about the consequences of choosing to live in poverty before they decided to do so.

Denying workers the ability to sit down provably decreases their effectiveness, which means in order to maximize shareholder value you have to make this decision as part of some grander scheme to utilize desperate minimum wage workers, and making sure the poor stay poor because working at your company tires them out.

I’m not sure why you would, though, because the strategy that actually maximizes shareholder value is probably more along the lines of something like increasing consumer spending by paying your workers more, getting legislation passed that increases economic equality and consequently vastly increases economic growth. Sure, that won’t maximize shareholder value in the next fiscal quarter but it will on a timescale of a decade.

Actually, we can probably model companies as “maximize shareholder value in the next fiscal quarter and add noise” and get decent predictions. This behavior more accurately reflects things like AirBnB getting a developer to build houses explicitly for AirBnB (which is a hotel, but not subject to hotel regulation because loopholes) and Uber existing (which is a taxi service, but not subject to regulation because loopholes) — in essence the free market in aggregate interprets regulation as damage and re-routes flow around the damaged area.

So, short-term maximization. It’s short-term. It is probably driven by inverstor desires which ultimately clash with shareholder value maximization — Q1 boom, followed by Q3 bankrupcy is not shareholder value maximization, it is suicide by stupidity.

And so we have short-term concerned execs informed by neo-liberalist ideology, who have their minds warped by the possession of incredible wealth, and who have opinions informed by executive culture, who make decrees like “the customer is always right” and “employees are not allowed to sit down.”

This is what I mean when I dispute your claim that we can’t do “better.” We have fucknuts in power parroting truisms from 200 years ago. This is not a glorious shareholder-value maximization, this is human stupidity getting in the way of human values and corporation values.

This is capitalist culture: it’s not even compatible with idealized capitalism!

What the flying fuck do you mean this is the pinnacle?! Where are my god-level artificial intelligences maximizing shareholder value? Where is the abolition of capitalism with all its affront to all humanity holds dear? Where is your god damned ambition, you spineless libertarian?!

“But what can we do right now?!” Fucked if I know what’s right. I just know you’re wrong.

PS. fuck off with that burden of proof bullshit. Your claim is just as extraordinary.

[theinternetcrab]

I don’t know how you interpreted any of this into two lines of post but I hope you feel better

[twalh]

oh, come the fuck ON, not you too

[theinternetcrab]

me too what

[twalh]

the ‘u mad bro’ bullshit. fuck off with it. it needs to stop