Gregory's ServerI always find it funny when getting into arguments with libertarians and they're like "The profit motive is great. See? Look at my phone" and my response is "Dude... I've written some of the code that's running on your phone, and I did it for free. It's a device built on open standards and the unpaid labour of 100,000 unpaid nerds. You are not making the argument that you think you're making".
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 @Natanox @jsbarretto we will nonetheless insist you are passionate about our goals if you want to work here. @dysfun @jsbarretto Of course, you'll also see us as your new family and help us in your free time because you damn well care about us like family. "Ah, but there's some of it that was built for profit" oh, you mean the pieces that deliberately diverge from existing standards with the specific goal of creating a walled-garden captive market and breaking the ability for any future competitors to do a better job? Or do you mean the bits designed with the sole purpose of throwing copyright-infringing adverts in my face at any possible opportunity?  @jsbarretto they’re not opposed to volunteer effort. But every step of the manufacturing is massively subsidized.  @jsbarretto for all the rhetoric about competition, most libertarian / ancap thought leads directly to unbreakable oligarchic monopolies. see thiel's "competition is for losers".  @jsbarretto EXACTLY! I think anti-trans asshats should be banned from using or even looking at any tech that was made or improved by a trans person... They're also ignoring the "Not having to worry about dying, freezing or starving motive" that comes with not being in an awful capitalist system. If you stopped all the geeks and nerds having to maintain networks, websites and work on dozens of competing standards and software just to survive, then the pace of technological advancement would increase rapidly. Still they can't organize enough to distribute open devices to the public. Which isn't an argument FOR the market, just AGAINST lazyness and staying in your box. @berlinfokus I think that's a fair criticism, although as mentioned: a lot of this is because the market is almost designed to make it difficult for competitors to enter. Regardless, I think we'll see a lot of non-profits (or non-profit-adjacent, with bylaws/goals that diverge significantly from your typical vendor, like Fairphone) entering the market. 🤔 hmm Maby "entering the market" alredy is the problem here. If it would be possible to attract more (especially poor people that have no "market-value") to maker-spaces, repair-shops, etc. and they can walk out with non-commercial devices that operate in an open-source environment (without ads and scams and all) .. that would be really something (dangerous). @berlinfokus I think there's an inherent tension here though: a non-profit, user-oriented phone market that internalises externalities (such as labour rights, environmental cost, etc.) wouldn't look much like the setup we have today. Phones would be designed for longevity and repair. Their manufacture would not be lucrative and would happen at a lower frequency. It's just a different definition of 'success' to that which existing manufacturers, driven by the profit motive, operate upon. Yea it's difficult, no question. I just remember the 1990s and early 2000s (in Berlin) when you had a lot of underground-spaces where very "normal" people went to seek help repairing their broken radio .. and got the help there from the very nerds who not only did that, but constructed their own (very crazy sometimes) devices, started coding and made experimental music. These connections did a lot good. And they are all broken now. (Also money destroyed all the physical spaces.)  the same also happened in UK, Netherlands, France (I was part of this scene in late 90s) - we didn't even call them "hackspaces" or "makerspaces" as such, they grew out of the squats/raves and finding a lot of abandoned hardware in buildings that were used for parties, a lot of which we got working again - my then hometown was Reading in SE England, which had a lot of tech companies but also much "boom and bust" that led to many going bankrupt Write your stories down & post them somewhere. Next gen definitely needs some input that doesn't come from crooked #billionaires and their Igors. (Also, I should do the same I guess. 😬)  @jsbarretto @berlinfokus I’m just thinking that the manufacture of phones and computer parts frequently _isnt_ lucrative. I think much of the actual “industry” going on runs wafer thin margins. It’s the businesses having the devices built that makes the profits and steers them towards obsolescence .  @jsbarretto Then you tell them that US phone plans cost ten times those in Europe. @jsbarretto You should, perhaps, differentiate between economic libertarianism - which is what you're refuting - & social libertarianism. The latter argues that people should be allowed to do as they please, as long as what they're doing doesn't harm anyone else - if it harms themselves, that's their look-out! Thus all laws against personal use of recreational drugs should be repealed - even the hard ones, like heroin & cocaine. See J.S. Mill, "On Liberty" (1859). @rmblaber1956 This is a random mastodon post I made while eating my breakfast while thinking back to a conversation I had more than a year ago, not a dissertation paper. "Libertarian" meaning "libertarian right" is pretty common parlance on the interwebs. Libertarian-left people tend to refer to themselves with other terms (anarcho-, democratic*, etc.) or otherwise specify the 'left' part. @jsbarretto private sector did not bankroll semiconductor R&D or the Internet or operating systems. @jsbarretto I think the reality is worse than your hypothetical person believes and you argument here. If they think (and with some sad merit) the phone is the latest greatest big thing... then we are, with all that supposedly effective profit motive stagnating for decades now.  @jsbarretto The Fundamental problem with Libertarianism is THERE ARE NO WORKING EXAMPLES... No Libertarian Countries, Cities, Towns Communes... NOTHING... Their Ideas work great in FICTION BOOKS but in the real world they always fail... @jsbarretto Libertarians are incapable of having an honest argument. Everything always comes back to greed and FYIGM @jsbarretto @cygnathreadbare profit is a secondary idea, the main idea is having the right incentive structures so that you can have a nice shot at a nicer society by trying to channel individuals towards building it instead of giving all the power to a centrallized superstate/hierarchy. It's about a decentralized algorithm vs a centralized one. Also about giving more value to individual rights over collective rights. But you can implement that in many different ways, trade freedom is just one.  @jsbarretto Profit is thinly veiled theft from the whole of society. @jsbarretto @stevegrunwell I’m torn between defending libertarians and pointing out that this specific point that they’re making is legitimate and that you’re is parochial and silly. |
@jsbarretto lol but without a profit motive noone would do anything.
like dude have you heard of nerds?