| You are aware that just because you read Marx you are not some superior being that levitates over the rest of us, right? Yes, there are entrenched interests, far more then just billionaires, that are always prefer the status quo. But its also wrong to say that the status quo only exist to serve those interests. Rather that the those players have best adopted to the status quo best. Wallmarkt is perfectly adopt to US idiotic zoning and land use strategy, but its not Wallmarkt lobbying that created that strategy. Its the other way around. And all known good changes have to overcome entrenched interested. And just standing around saying 'nothing can every change because billionaires' is silly. Other countries that have walkable streets have billionaires, there are very highly profitable shops and properties on those streets that billionaires can and want to invest in too. I would say that implementation of land value tax would generally help billionaires as well, because it just overall more efficient. That is the problem with the far left, if you see everything always as only a class war and specifically in the modern sense where its the 99.9% against the 0.1%, you miss that there are many other entrenched interest that matter a whole lot for deciding where society goes. Those can even be reasonably poor people. You are not wrong that 0.01% of the population matter but interpret society only as their tool is missing a much bigger much more complex picture. |
I have 20 veterinarians in my town. That means, if my pet gets sick, I have options. One vet has Elvis posters on the wall; I can't stand Elvis, but I have options. Some veterinarians suit me, some suit my neighbor. Life has a richness to it.
Now, Walton comes in and buys out 50 percent of the vets and makes them all into Walmart. It's all above-board; he has the means, they're all legal transactions. The veterinarians can hardly object, they made out good. But now, half the vets I go into are Wal-mart. The richness of that sliver of my life is gone. And on top of this, Walmart can now throw its weight around in the city council. Extra licensing to open a new vet. Mandatory Elvis posters by law.
See how this is a problem? It's not a Marxian "it's unethical to have accumulation" view. The surplus is not the issue; it's the accumulation.
I hate all of these tech people. I hate the way they think, I hate who they are, I hate their values and their taste. I hate how they raise their children and the media they like and the way of life they promote. Fleets of AI agents in every workspace! phones in every classroom! creepy cameras tracking you! Scan the QR code to see the menu!
But they own so much of society, they are so powerful, that there is _no alternative_. The richest man in the world is turning all of society into X. I wouldn't care if he owned 3 nail salons and turned them all into the "epic cyber meme palace of nails" but he owns like 1.5% of my retirement fund and dropped a quarter million dollars to elect the president of my country and that's just one of these fucking guys!
I am with you on NIMBY zoning (that's the one thing that I think will meaningfully change in my lifetime) but that is pretty far down the list of things that suck.
From TFA.
> The technique is to organize the work into the smallest possible learnable chunks
"The Work" == human activity == money.