Xik posted:

grecy 36 minutes ago | parent | flag | favorite | on: Manufacturer Threatens To Sue Volunteers who print...

COVID-19 is bringing to the surface more and more fascinating cases where under "normal" circumstances Capitalism and making a profit is a good thing, but under just a little bit of pressure, suddenly it's evil.

Canada have just made it illegal ($5000 fine) for trying to profit off sales of toilet paper or sanitizer, and listings for them have been banned from eBay and Kijiji (Canada's version of Craigslist). Of course, under normal circumstances it's perfectly fine for Nike to make a pair of shoes for $3 (paying people terrible wages) and then sell them for $300 dollars. Their share price goes up and the Capitalists are happy.

Under normal circumstances patents are a good way to protect IP, and nobody cared last month that a part was $11,000 dollars and they had a monopoly on making it.

As one twitter post said "COVID-19 is a blacklight and it's revealing a lot of nasty stains on our Capitalist society"

Antigravitas posted:

something most people can agree on (hoarding sanitizer during a pandemic is bad)

Antigravitas posted:

That reads like someone paving the ground for their socialist revolution pitch tbh.

Start with something most people can agree on (hoarding sanitizer during a pandemic is bad) and before they know it they agree to institute the death penalty for insurance executives.

quote:

We should be building palliative care centres across the country, not pop-up hospitals.
Pay everyone who contracts Coronavirus in the next 4 months and is refused ICU care, $100,000. If they die, the amount is divided between their surviving immediate family members or previously registered carer.

The current panic seems to be driven by the guilt of not being able to treat everyone. This payment should alleviate that guilt and allow us to continue with life.

Xik posted:

How do you grow up and became someone that thinks like that? Like, I've known people who have gone through some of the most hideous life changing experiences and seen the worst of humanity and yet still grown up to have more compassion for other people then some hn users.

Sapozhnik posted:

Black-eyed techno-fascist sociopaths like the dwellers of Silicon Valley are an excellent demonstration of why exposure to arts and humanities is essential for a well-rounded adult.

suffix posted:

quote:

AntonStratiev:
Not only that, but the population of Taiwan itself is shrinking and aging rapidly. The fertility rate is only 1.13.

Eventually, there just won't be enough Taiwanese engineers left to continue development.

High IQ is linked to lower fertility around the world (dysgenics) and average IQ is already declining in some Western countries, so it makes sense to develop high-tech products now, and ride the advantage for the rest of human civilisation.*

*Until we accept and carry out human genetic engineering on a widespread basis and target high-IQ traits in engineered offspring.

bob dobbs is dead posted:

counterpoint: peter thiel was a liberal arts major

they make you take lots of ethics classes at stanford, it didn't seem to have filtered into that guys head any

fritz posted:

my understanding is at stanford any idiot professor who wants to can teach a class that fulfills the ethics requirement

Oneiros posted:

goldcd 1 hour ago [-]
...
Clearly the Palestinians are physically suffering most from this - but whether they acknowledge it or not, it's destroying the Israelis involved. Similar to the US involvement in VietNam - doesn't matter if you win/lose or even why - people who come back are changed.
...

fritz posted:

my understanding is at stanford any idiot professor who wants to can teach a class that fulfills the ethics requirement

bob dobbs is dead posted:

only since 2015

quote:

joe_the_user 5 hours ago [-]

An economy is not something that one should have to shovels lives into to keep going. And in any case, if we sacrifice all the lives this virus could take to the economy, it won't help the economy at all - the massive dislocation involved in the deaths will certainly be far worse than the shutdown, if you really want to think that way.
All that said, part of the collapse of things like the stock market comes through the financial system having been built up into finely tuned but extremely fragile edifice - end QE created an environment of limitless leverage and short-term thinking. This environment created the situation of not having future resources, of jury rigging everything to work in a super-efficient but fragile fashion (the 737Max being a perfect product of this paradigm).

Covid shock is logical result - in another, a more far seeing society might have made preparations beforehand, had an epidemic team in place, etc.

So a lot of things are collapsing because they weren't built to last to begin with, not because of the virus.

quote:

core-questions 4 hours ago [-]

> An economy is not something that one should have to shovels lives into to keep going.
I think this is almost the literal definition of the economy. I've been shoveling my entire life and eventually I will die.

salisbury shake posted:

stemlord rising

daxorid 48 minutes ago | parent | flag | favorite | on: Beware second waves of Covid-19 if lockdowns eased...

> the impact to the economy will only get worse

To be fair, most of the economic sectors affected by this are silly frivolities, e.g. travel, tourism, fine dining, vacationing, nightclubbing, cruises, sportsball, etc.

The actual, value-generating, real economy will continue on as before, and may possibly even benefit from it as our attentions are shifted away from garbage pursuits that don't advance society at all.

reply

lancemantis posted:

maybe they just have the 'POS-brain;