[hermannj314]

I worked at a biotechnology company, we had thousands of clients but five of them were 80% of our revenue. In your world, should that business not exist as well?

I don't understand the princple that revenue should be uniformly distributed as a condition for existing. How would you enforce this?

[gcanyon]

I’m not claiming revenue must be even.

And I’m assuming that the five customers actually benefitted from your company’s work? If so, then they’re not really comparable to gambling addicts, alcoholics, and gun fanatics, right?

We already (poorly) enforce (weak) laws requiring casinos not to prey on addicts.

We already (poorly) enforce (weak) laws requiring bars not to over-serve and alcoholics to get treatment sometimes.

We do almost nothing about gun addicts.

But commenting that something shouldn’t be the way it is isn’t a claim to know how to fix it.

[achierius]

Kinda weird to shoehorn in the last one, isn't it? People who own four guns aren't ruining their lives any more than someone who owns four laptops is. So long as they're not using them to commit crimes it's basically just a hobby, and the sort of person who needs a shed to store AR-15 accessories is actually going to be significantly less likely to misuse it than someone with only one or two guns.

[gcanyon]

I’ve read articles that (drawing from memory) say that 10% of drinkers are responsible for 90% of all alcohol consumed in the U.S. I haven’t read articles on it, but I assume gambling and gun ownership are similar.

I know people who:

1. Live remotely 2. Have (estimating, they’d never tell anyone the real number) over fifty guns.

Largely because they are convinced the big one is coming. The guns + ammo might be $50k of money spent?

Certainly it’s not as problematic as alcoholism or gambling addiction, but it’s not nothing. And I’m not blaming them, I’m blaming any gun manufacturer that depends on them for profitability.

[inkcapmushroom]

I don't get how gun fanatics fit into these other groups.

[gcanyon]

I’m not categorizing addicts, I’m categorizing the companies that prey on people who purchase vast quantities of their product against their own interests.

[ElevenLathe]

Are those clients addicts who are ruining their lives with your product? If so, yeah you shouldn't exist, or at least you need to downsize and try to get that percentage way down.

[consteval]

It depends on what you're selling.

> How would you enforce this?

Case by case. We already do this, this isn't a hypothetical. You can't advertise tobacco anymore and guess what, lots less people addicted and we're saving literally millions of lives in the long run.

[butterfly42069]

I presume one would just continuously uniformly distribute everything till they arrived at communism lmao

[consteval]

Or, if we decide to come back to Earth, we simply make the obvious restrictions on a case by case basis via cost analysis. Then we stop when we feel like it.

For example, tobacco is now extremely restricted. That's an obvious industry that profits off of addiction. We went ahead and fixed that. The result? Millions of lives saved.

Oh, but the spooky hypothetical communism! Come on kids, light up these cigs! They make you look cool and masculine! Oh woe is the modern American for being a commie!

[butterfly42069]

What if I want to grow a plant and smoke it? Who are you to take that away from me? What if your experience of life doesn't align with mine, and my cost/benefit analysis for me personally is that I gain more from smoking than I lose?

That aside, I wasn't advocating for smoking to defend capitalism, and think you appear disingenuous for suggesting that. Merely that that is the end route of just dividing everything equally. I'm willing to go out on a limb and say attempting to divide everything equally doesn't work.

Edit: Apparently I'm arguing against someone I'm unable to reply to, go figure. Either way they appear to be now arguing for the status quo, over 18 regulated gambling, which I fail to see has anything to do with sharing equally, and for some reason they're acting like what they're advocating for is not the status quo. I think I may have stumbled into an argument with a nonsense Chinese LLM lol

[consteval]

> What if I want to grow a plant and smoke it?

That's allowed: again, reasonable and obvious restrictions.

> and my cost/benefit analysis for me personally is that I gain more from smoking than I lose?

All well and good, but that goes out the window when you sell Tobacco.

> I wasn't advocating for smoking to defend capitalism, and think you appear disingenuous for suggesting that

It's not disingenuous IMO, it's obvious. Gambling is addictive, okay so let me draw a comparison to an already existing addictive substance that we've successfully regulated. Oh, look, tobacco!

We managed to do that and not be communist. And everyone is all well and good and we're pretty much all over it. Turns out, only wins! So it can be done, was kind of my point.