[forest_dweller]

I cannot stand the gas-lighting here. Your perception of capitalism is one that is framed as a winner takes all mentality that been sold to you by propagandists.

Capitalism is about free market trade. You provide something and people choose whether they want to buy it or use it. People add greed qualifier in there so they can frame it as something illicit going on.

The fact still remains that if people cared about their privacy (and there is no evidence they do), they wouldn't use these sites.

Before it was done online. Store cards used to track purchases and spending habits in store in the same way that sites do today (however at a much greater scale) and customers were given vouchers in return.

In much the same way. Almost all the local stores have dissapeared to be replaced by large corps that can provide everything in super stores and in much the same way that is the fault of the consumer by not supporting their local stores.

> For all benefits we yield from it, it's still fair to call it capitalistic greed and notice the ethical failures the market strongly encourages.

No the failing is on us and the users of the site for using these services when we were warned by many people that this would be the case. Pretending otherwise is passing the buck.

[dgb23]

I agree, the consumer has responsibility here, and leverage.

But that does not absolve the producer. They are still using ethically questionable methods.

The market doesn’t get to decide the rights and wrongs. It just allocates resources. That we have to do collectively if we want to call ourselves democratic.

[forest_dweller]

I don't care for democracy, so no I don't want to call myself democratic.

> But that does not absolve the producer. They are still using ethically questionable methods.

Most people don't care. How can it be an ethical issue if the vast majority of people are unconcerned by it?

[Catsandkites]

But the free market literally cannot exist? The free market won't bring you back to life so you can "choose a different competitor" if it kills you.

That food? Bad. Dead. That tool? Dangerous. Dead. That work on your house? Dangerous. Dead. That car? Unroadworthy. Dead. Those aircraft parts? Counterfeit and not to spec. 300 people dead.

Every single thing humans do is already regulated in some way. Why? Because humans in the end, like all animals, try to achieve the best least effort : highest reward ratio they can.

In the modern world, these regulations need to be extended to automatically cover modern technologies and prevent inherent harm. They shouldn't be overbearing. They shouldn't be pointlessly excessive. But they are required for all things.

Many people think capitalism is greedy because they have literally spent a lifetime experiencing greed fueled capitalism first hand, not because they sit on YouTube watching propaganda videos.

[forest_dweller]

> But the free market literally cannot exist? The free market won't bring you back to life so you can "choose a different competitor" if it kills you.

Life is full of risks. Lots of things were approved by bother government and experts in the past that was bad for you.

> That food? Bad. Dead. That tool? Dangerous. Dead. That work on your house? Dangerous. Dead. That car? Unroadworthy. Dead. Those aircraft parts? Counterfeit and not to spec. 300 people dead.

The FDA has stopped people from getting medication in the US that are over the counter medicines because they haven't been approved for use. It is a double edged sword.

>Every single thing humans do is already regulated in some way. Why? Because humans in the end, like all animals, try to achieve the best least effort : highest reward ratio they can.

Unfortunately. What has the current light regulation on the web brought us cookie popups that are irritating that people just click through and a GDPR warnings that don't actually solve the problem of collecting your data. I don't hold out much hope for future regulation, which btw will favour the big tech players that have been collecting our data thus far. BTW you don't know the names of many of them, because they are B2B players and provide services to the companies we do know the name of.

As for "best result for least effort". Well it depends how it manifests itself. It can either be laziness or efficiency. The latter is not a problem.

> In the modern world, these regulations need to be extended to automatically cover modern technologies and prevent inherent harm. They shouldn't be overbearing. They shouldn't be pointlessly excessive. But they are required for all things.

Inviting any sort of regulation will involve government. Government will try to justify itself by demanding more regulation. It will always be overbearing and that will cement these players in place.

At the moment, we have the best chance of these players being toppled. People are looking at alternatives to big tech and are going to smaller players, mainly due to censorship. The trickle has now become a stream, sooner or later it will be a flood. However because of regulation on the horizon (which doesn't address any of the issues we care about)

> Many people think capitalism is greedy because they have literally spent a lifetime experiencing greed fueled capitalism first hand, not because they sit on YouTube watching propaganda videos.

I suspect you are confusing corporatism (which is a form of fascism) with capitalism (which is a party of liberty).

As for propaganda. I never said anything about Youtube. Don't put words in my mouth. I am talking about how hollywood, novelists (since the 19th century), newspapers have framed it since forever. You are soo fermeted in it you don't even realise it is propaganda.

[TeMPOraL]

> What has the current light regulation on the web brought us cookie popups that are irritating that people just click through and a GDPR warnings that don't actually solve the problem of collecting your data. I don't hold out much hope for future regulation,

GDPR is quite decent as laws go; the problems you mention happen because the regulation enforcement is too weak. Displaying a cookie popup was never anything but an admission that you're doing something you're not supposed to. GDPR notices again mostly give the same evidence. A lot of them aren't even compliant. I honestly wish DPAs of EU member states would start beating these companies down until this bullshit stops.

> I suspect you are confusing corporatism (which is a form of fascism) with capitalism (which is a party of liberty).

Potayto, potahto. Capitalism structurally favors something resembling corporatism, because capital compounds - the more you have of it, the easier it is to get even more. The market is a dynamic system - what matters is what it evolves over time into.

[forest_dweller]

> GDPR is quite decent as laws go; the problems you mention happen because the regulation enforcement is too weak. Displaying a cookie popup was never anything but an admission that you're doing something you're not supposed to. GDPR notices again mostly give the same evidence. A lot of them aren't even compliant. I honestly wish DPAs of EU member states would start beating these companies down until this bullshit stops.

All that sites will do is do a cost assessment of whether it is worth serving those in the EU and just block the IP range and people that want to use those services will just use VPNs anyway (which is what I do when I am banned by IP from a site because of the GDPR rules).

>Potayto, potahto. Capitalism structurally favors something resembling corporatism, because capital compounds - the more you have of it, the easier it is to get even more. The market is a dynamic system - what matters is what it evolves over time into.

No it doesn't. Corporatism is a collusion with government. If governments were smaller, buying influence wouldn't be effective. You don't even understand what you are arguing.

Yes the market is a dynamic system that why if you allow it to operate freely those companies that are abusing their position will start to lose market share when other competitors that don't will be more attractive to consumers. However once you involve regulation, then that mechanism doesn't happen because you just raised the bar higher for all the would be smaller players.

Again you always want to frame it in the worst light.

Anyway. Fuck this site, dissenting opinion is frowned upon here. So much for the hacker part.

[pushrax]

The major barriers to competing with Google/Amazon/Facebook etc are not regulatory hassles, by far. Even in highly regulated industries, like space launch vehicles, the additional cost of compliance over your own due diligence isn’t the biggest barrier.

Also, consumers on average do a bad job of managing anticompetitive behaviour and harmful externalities, even if they know about them. Convenience and habit are strong motivators. And we need regulation to disincentivize companies from outright lying in the first place.

Companies and people in a fully free market system won’t magically become rational automata that behave ideally. We’re only human. Our superpower is the ability to collectively leverage our individual specialization. Foresight for negative externalities is a specialization that needs regulation to be effective.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

There's plenty of room for dissenting opinion here. But if you're going to offer up an argument for capitalist-libertarianism that isn't any more than a largely evidence-free rehash of the same positions that filled talk.politics.theory on usenet in the 1990s, then yeah, you're probably not going to see a lot of support. Offer up a cogent, evidence-filled position that genuinely causes people to say "huh! gonna have to think/read about this ..." and I'm fairly sure you'd see a different response.

[forest_dweller]

I've given my rationale. Calling it evidence-free when there are thousands of examples where it works and almost everytime there is government involvement it happens to be a mess. So piss off with you patronising response.

[Catsandkites]

Thanks for your reply, it was really interesting and gave me some things to think about.

I agree that government intervention is not ideal, as government is also often dumb, evil or incompetent. But that's more our failure to set up a political system where only the best, skilled, most ethical, least selfish people can rise to the top. We are nowhere close.

Propaganda: I wasn't putting words in your mouth intentionally, I see your point though. It was a description of how your words felt to someone making a critism of capitalism, that for me to dare criticise I must be propaganda-ised.

I don't watch movies. I don't have a TV. I don't read newspapers. I read a lot but a broad spectrum of works from a variety of times.

I like your distinction between capitalism and corporatism, it's a great point. I wonder though: Corporations exist inside of capitalism, so isn't it a failure of capitalism to bring outrageous cooperations to heel?

I dislike your "fermeted" comment, you literally followed an accusation of fallacy from me to you, with a whole bunch of actually intentioned fallacy of your own?

Anyway, have a great day!

[HexagonalKitten]

> Capitalism is about free market trade.

A sort of freedom. Not free from taxes, free from interference. But that's really never the case.

Say you buy something from a store, and you expect their use of your data to follow the terms on the loyalty card. They've got a bunch of commercial-code laws that protect them. You can't pay with counterfeit money, or give yourself a 2-for-1 discount. If you use credit and don't pay, men from the state with the right to use violence come and collect for the store. They're totally legally protected. But how are you protected? Only at the end of a hugely expensive court case in the best outcome, but probably not at all.

The potential risk to the store from you is limited to the cost of goods, the risk to you is almost unbounded. You might lose healthcare coverage, or your boss might buy your data and use the store to link your id to your pornhub usage and fire you. Minimal, limited risk for them, huge unbounded and unprotected risk for you.

But then you discover after buying your gallon of milk, that they (knowingly) sold your data to someone who then sold it to, let's say an insurance company, in direct violation of the words on the back of the card. Now, how do you get made whole?

So, no. I don't actually feel that the free market meets that description for 99% of transactions. Between two citizens over a used lawnmower, yes. Between Warren Buffet and Bill Gates, yes. But between you and the supermarket - not even a little.

[TeMPOraL]

> Your perception of capitalism is one that is framed as a winner takes all mentality that been sold to you by propagandists.

Not really. My perception comes from thinking about the market as a dynamic system, and not a static picture described by pro- and anti-market propagandists.

> Capitalism is about free market trade. You provide something and people choose whether they want to buy it or use it.

That's a "motte and bailey" defense. Such a perfect free trade almost doesn't exist, and very few are privileged to partake in it. Market offerings aren't independent - they're in competition, which means a lot of possible products aren't provided, and those that are face competitive pressure to provide less value for more price.

The most important thing to recognize is that the market, as a dynamic system, optimizes for profitable companies. Not for maximizing value these companies deliver to their customers. Usually, providing value is the most straightforward way for profit. But there are other ways - ways to provide no value, or even negative value while still netting additional profit - and the market takes them as much as it can. Vendor lock-in and surveillance are just few ways of making money by providing negative value-add.

> People add greed qualifier in there so they can frame it as something illicit going on.

Not illicit. Immoral. Because after all is said and done, the market is still entirely made of people and their decisions, which get to be evaluated through the lens of ethics.

> The fact still remains that if people cared about their privacy (and there is no evidence they do), they wouldn't use these sites.

They care and they will use them anyway, because the market doesn't provide any other option.

> Store cards used to track purchases and spending habits in store in the same way that sites do today (however at a much greater scale) and customers were given vouchers in return.

In the store. Not across stores. And they gave vouchers back, not shoved extra ads in your face. And that's without touching the qualitative difference between a human clerk doing the surveillance and automated systems doing the same.

> Pretending otherwise is passing the buck.

I hate to invoke the concept of "victim blaming", because it's usually invoked very unreasonably, but - you can't expect individuals to be able to rationally make market decisions while working their asses off trying to make ends meet, having their attention DDoSed, and facing against compounding improvements in manipulation techniques (courtesy of the market). I'm willing to cut regular folks some slack, and instead focus on the people running these companies, who had a clear choice, and chose to engage in abusive practices. You don't impulse-adopt business models, so you can't excuse it as a moment of weakness either.

(But then I'm willing to cut these business folks some slack too; in many cases, it's the market pressures that force to choose the abusive option - which leads us back to my original point: the market is a capitalist greed optimization engine. It promotes business people who think that, much like your margin, your ethics are their opportunity.)

[forest_dweller]

> Not really. My perception comes from thinking about the market as a dynamic system, and not a static picture described by pro- and anti-market propagandists.

Nonsense. Your framing is exactly the same. Don't gaslight me on this. I am not naive.

> That's a "motte and bailey" defense. Such a perfect free trade almost doesn't exist, and very few are privileged to partake in it.

Yes the free market doesn't exist because governments stick their noses in.

>Market offerings aren't independent - they're in competition, which means a lot of possible products aren't provided, and those that are face competitive pressure to provide less value for more price

What a load of nonsense. It is because of the free market we have niche products (Amiga accelerators would exist and that is pretty damn niche).

> The most important thing to recognize is that the market, as a dynamic system, optimizes for profitable companies. Not for maximizing value these companies deliver to their customers. Usually, providing value is the most straightforward way for profit. But there are other ways - ways to provide no value, or even negative value while still netting additional profit - and the market takes them as much as it can.

You are speaking out of both sides of your mouth.

> Vendor lock-in and surveillance are just few ways of making money by providing negative value-add.

If vendor lock in a problem if the customer is happy with it? It is up to the individual customer to decide.

> Not illicit. Immoral. Because after all is said and done, the market is still entirely made of people and their decisions, which get to be evaluated through the lens of ethics.

That is splitting hairs. No you want them to be evaluated through the lens of ethics because it benefits to do so in this argument.

> They care and they will use them anyway, because the market doesn't provide any other option.

You don't need yourtube, you don't need facebook, you don't need a lot of this nonsense.

> In the store. Not across stores. And they gave vouchers back, not shoved extra ads in your face. And that's without touching the qualitative difference between a human clerk doing the surveillance and automated systems doing the same.

You have no idea if that data wasn't sold to anyone else. The vouchers are in themselves ads.

These store cards proved two thinds. The first being that people will willingly give up their details for some trickets, and two that tracking customers and optimising via that works. It was a stepping stone.

> I hate to invoke the concept of "victim blaming", because it's usually invoked very unreasonably, but - you can't expect individuals to be able to rationally make market decisions while working their asses off trying to make ends meet, having their attention DDoSed, and facing against compounding improvements in manipulation techniques (courtesy of the market). I'm willing to cut regular folks some slack, and instead focus on the people running these companies, who had a clear choice, and chose to engage in abusive practices. You don't impulse-adopt business models, so you can't excuse it as a moment of weakness either.

Yes I do expect individuals to able to rationally make decisions. People have been told for years and year and years on end what these companies do and they don't care. So it is their fault.

[itsoktocry]

>If vendor lock in a problem if the customer is happy with it? It is up to the individual customer to decide.

No customer is happy with vendor lock-in. It is negative value to the consumer, which was the parent's point.

[forest_dweller]

Why do people buy Apple products on mass then?

[thesteamboat]

Because there are many factors which go in to decisions and a particular negative feature might be outweighed by other concerns?

Also, pedantic point, I think you were looking for the phrase en masse, of french origin. See https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/en_masse

[TeMPOraL]

Think how many more people would buy Apple if not for the lock-in.