The Impending Death of Modern Capitalism

Lol it's people agreeing with you that are short termists. They don't even have children (which should fully disqualify them from having a say about the future).

Yeah but Amazon mostly mirrors consumer consumption. That's on consumer behavior. But you can certainly argue that our consumption in a lot of ways is too high.

But Amazon is highly efficient. And that efficiency allows for the potential to move products and services at more of an environmentally friendly rate at an equal rate of consumption than a nationalized one. Do you disagree with that?

Why not use that efficiency to your benefit and regulate and control the output of emissions and the sale and use of toxic material?

In the efficiency calculation are you including welfare that governments have to provide to its workers because it pays so little, and the cost to health services of its low paid and exhausted workers?

It seems to me that a country's workforce is subsidising Amazon.

You need to count welfare on the margin and/or in the counterfactual.

In an america without Amazon, would those people earn higher salaries elsewhere? why? if the answer is no, then Amazon isn't causing any additional welfare , it is not causing increased societal costs, so you shouldn't detract that from the contributions of amazon to society.

lmao, fascist says fascist things. But no no no no, he's not a fascist, not at all!

Possibly.

But in any case other companies that rely on paying minimum wage to maxmise profits are also subsidised by tax payers. The original claim was that Amazon is highly efficient, which doesn't show the whole picture.

It is still efficiency, because all companies have the same opportunity to employ those people, yet amazon squeezes more out of it.

And it is still better for those employed people , because literally otherwise they would do something else rather than work for amazon fulfillment centers. It's not like amazon is the only employer of low wage workers is it?

Btw it's not like amazon can't operate in countries with higher minwage laws. Amazon exists in Denmark (afaik, the country with the highest mandatory minwage? but maybe these days someone else is even higher, not sure).

Whatever amazon has to pay more to their fulfillment center employees though, is 100% paid by customers down the line. It's danish customers paying more for the higher minwage mandate, not amazon. Same as it's american customers profiting from the low wages paid by amazon in fulfillment centers, not amazon.

There is absolutely zero argument on my part that Amazon is efficient. Amazon has reached its market dominance as a result of its unparalleled efficiency.

But imagine your job was to ensure the survival of the human species.

Would you consider Amazon an effective proponent of that objective ?

No .... you would say that Amazon's prodigious efficiency was thwarting your objective. They make it less expensive to consume Earth's limited resources. Their efficiency is accelerationist as it pertains to human extinction.

I dispute that Amazon is efficient but agree it's obviously more efficient than its competitors.

Amazon exists in a society which is a capitalist money engine. In such a paradigm, an organism like Amazon thrives as a result of ever greater results of consumption.

The Earth is finite. We humans live in a bubble. Both psychological bubbles and an actual physical bubble.

The physical bubble is the Earth's atmosphere whose breathable air (for humans) extends just a few miles from the surface. You can't survive a day without mechanical assistance at the top of Mt. Everest.

The composition of that atmospheric bubble is critical to human survival. Fortunately, the supply of oxygen at the surface is not in jeopardy.

But the composition of the bubble also determines the Earth's climate. Temperature, wind and ocean circulation, hydrological cycles that govern water exchange between soil and atmosphere and micro-organismal life. We need a moderate level of greenhouse gases (GHG's) to survive. Greenhouse gas molecules are the only thing that absorb heat (infrared radiation) and keep our bubble warm. No GHG's and we would live on a frozen rock incapable of sustaining any biological life.

For the past 2.6 million years, the Earth's physical configuration has been static and the contents of our bubble have been controlled by the Earth's cyclical orbital relationship with the sun. These are called Milankovitch Cycles and they last 100,000 years. These cycles are indeed limited feedback loops. Increasing sun ==> increased heat ==> increased released of GHG's from Earth's land and ocean reservoirs ==> increased heat. These cycles are self propelling until the Earth's orbit results in less sunlight at the surface and the cycle goes in reverse.

Humanity evolved under this regime and the weight of CO2 in the atmosphere during our evolution oscillated between 7x and 12x the weight of Mt. Everest. That modest variation resulted in a temperature oscillation of 5 degrees Celsius.

Since the year 1900, we have exploded the effective weight of GHG's (including methane) in the atmosphere to 25x the weight of Mt. Everest. We have fundamentally altered our physical bubble in a manner which commits us to a new feedback loop which will raise global temperatures by 5C unless we quickly come up with a miraculous form of artificial photosynthesis for carbon storage.

The psychological bubbles we inhabit are three.

1) We only know a world in which the food supply has increased.
2) We only know a world with sovereign currency.
3) We are visually dominant in a narrow band of the EMR spectrum. We see light. We don't see greenhouse gases, heat or micro-organisms.

Food Supply
The major events in the development of human civilization have been expansions of the food supply as the result of the Neolithic Revolution, Second Agricultural Revolution (17th century) and Haber Bosch process (20th century) which makes ammonia for industrial fertilizer. Modern humans only know a world in which the food supply expands. Food, like oxygen and water .... is the foundation of human civilization.

Changing the contents of the physical bubble means the first global contraction of the food supply in the history of human civilization. We do have regional examples of contraction which have been accompanied by the apocalyptic collapse of those regional civilizations.

Sovereign Currency

We live in a world of national "tribes" in which the dominant tribe is perpetually changing. Greek, Roman, Dutch, British, America, Russia, China...... the cycle involves a perpetual transfer of power to whomever has the greatest weaponry of the day. Now we have a handful of tribes capable of destroying the world with nukes. China has now surpassed the US as the world's industrial superpower with a form of capitalism that is subordinate to an authoritarian communist master. They can make an EV that profitably retails for $8k .... far superior to what can be accomplished in the US. The US currency is beginning to collapse.

Visual Limitation
We don't see many aspects of the world which we are dependent upon. We don't see that most of the cells with the "human" vessel are not actually human cells. Most of the cells in our bodies are symbiotic bacteria and they are dying off. We don't see the micro plastics accumulating in our brains and sex organs. We don't see greenhouse gases or heat. We don't see the micro-organismal life which creates what we refer to colloquially as "topsoil". We don't see through the Earth's surface to the dwindling reserves of fresh water in Earth's acquifers.

The US became the world's superpower because it leveraged the intelligence of people who understood the world we couldn't see. The Manhattan Project was a great example of that. A socialist endeavor.

It is completely obvious on the surface that a capitalist system which relies on perpetual growth on a finite planet will come crashing down. Only the most obtuse and ignorant people such as exemplified by Lucifer here will attempt to refute that.

Yes they would .
Maybe not all of them but many would .
Lot of business got shot down because of Amazon .

Like any other business .
Doesn’t mean it covers government expenses for those poor workers because Amazon would make more money .

Amazon is not a root cause of anything. Amazon is a symptom.

Humans fear death. Money provides us a perception of insulation against death. It provides that illusion that money guarantees us access to the resources necessary to survive.

So .... we live in a world where we hunt money the way we once hunted animals and foraged for food.

How do we get money ? We sell things to other people in exchange for money. But first we have to create the desire for those things. That's marketing.

Amazon is just a mechanism which is so efficient at delivery and distribution that it allows those things to be sold as cheaply as possible.

Human labor is expensive. Amazon is replacing humans with robots. A process which is destroying the customer base upon which they depend.

Amazon is a vehicle in the end game of capitalism. Their efficiency is making human labor increasingly irrelevant.

The people at the top of the pyramid ? They fear death just like you and me. Their fear is guiding them to hoard. Hoarding is nature. It's historically been a survival attribute in times of scarcity.

Until too many have too little ..... then something crazy happens. The starving German's in the 1920's show us what happens when too many have too little.

We lie to ourselves with a mask of human civility.

The only thing matters is survival and we humans are animals with a selfish and vicious nature.

You don't the full truth of people until they don't have enough to eat.

We are living in a spiral of fear. Afraid to discuss and acknowledge the real truth. It's like that character Jack Nicholson played in a Few Good Men said. "You can't handle the truth".

I agree, Amazon's efficiency is at odds with environmental sustainability. It allows us to deplete the resources and makes it too easy for us to overconsume and so on.

But their tech driven efficiency is a useful tool, and it likely isn't going anywhere in the future, and even if we take down Amazon, that framework is going to eventually be used somewhere else.

Why not take what's useful and implement your consumption focused policies, labor laws, and regulations to prevent costumers from causing environmental Harm due to buying non-essential items and such? And amazon would be perfect because they'd be best situated to withstand those changes that and still operate the masses.

Because burning down Amazon for being the environmental leader in destruction kind of misses the point. It's delivering more boxes due to overconsumption, but the boxes are cleaner than what the other companies are delivering. You've got something useful there to implement.

I agree with you that what Amazon has developed can be extremely useful in the service of the proper master. We just have to change the master from what we desire in the form of excessive consumption to a paradigm of what we need

Rich people are not going to give up their luxuries easily. They have demonstrated that having poor people suffer and die is preferable outcome to their giving up their luxuries. It is inevitable that there will be some sort of war associated with that privilege. History has no precedent of the majority of the population agreeing to roll over and die.

I agree in the sense of Final Consumption but I don't think we actually overconsume in an unstainable way. If we divvy up all the labor hours say for all the food we eat in a week, that works out to about 1 hour a day of labor. It's everything else from farm to market to mouth that turns that food consumption into an 8 hour day. The latter is the huge resource drain in the equation. So in that sense we could maintain our current level of actual consumption if we could make everything else more efficient.

Because that's how capitalism consumes itself. As with food, capitalism has made human labor largely irrelevant in the production of it compared to times past. That's the whole point because it allows us to free up labor from present sustenance and employee it making more productive capital goods for the future.

What are some ideas you have about making everything more efficient?

As the socialists argue, we could effectively double real output per labor hour if we got rid of the entire commercial apparatus that doubles the price of goods from factory to consumer. It's a valid argument but consumers' dollars prefer variety, selection and for a lot the retail shopping experience itself. So the Invisible Hand would need a hand if we want some other societal outcome than our current consumer behavior dictates.

It is hard to gauge the efficiency of large US corporations since once they reach a certain size, a lot of their success becomes based on paying politicians and parties for favorable regulation and taxes in sums that smaller corporations can't match.

Now, I'm aware that this is mostly legal in the US, but it is in essence legalized corruption.

Not in extremely competitive sectos like being a cloud computing provider or selling groceries, especially not when compared to other big players that do worse than them in the same sectors.

Sure but a lot of the payoffs are to prevent being disadvantaged. It's like with advertising, once one of your competitors start paying for it you're forced to.

.... made possible by a highly corrupt legal system. It's corruption is essential for political corruption. That predates modern capitalism: "Old Billy was right: let's kill all the lawyers—kill 'em tonight"

In the big scheme of things, there is only one "capital good". It's called Earth.

Everything of value we have comes from the Earth. Food, water, breathable air. Sand for cement. Metals. Wood. The materials for launching satellites. It all comes from Earth.

All of our cities were built on a different version of Earth. A version which had half the greenhouse gas forcing we have today.

This new version of Earth is going to turn all of the cities and all of the their "capital goods" to dust or rust them under a rising ocean.

There is no capital without a food supply. Atmospheric carbon poisoning is going to undo the gains humans have made in agricultural productivity over the last 10,000 years.

Few think that the variety or the retail experience is worth paying double for.