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suddenlybananas 13 hours ago

Yeah, these decisions just appear out of the aether, there absolutely not the result of capitalists acting in their self-interest. It's nice to claim, oh poor little me couldn't possibly have done anything else, I guess I just have to benefit from all this money my decisions give me.

CalRobert 12 hours ago | parent [-]

I think you’re agreeing in a way - they are making the decisions that maximise their profits in the existing system (capitalism) and the system is such that it will produce people like this. They can nudge it in their preferred direction but if they were in, say, a frontier economy they’d likely make different decisions.

TeMPOraL 5 hours ago | parent [-]

That. And the aspect I'm trying to emphasize is, those profit-maximizing people are technically free to choose to not profit-maximize, but then the system will happily punish them for it. They can nudge the system, but the system can nudge them back, all the way to ejecting them from whatever role they played in that system so far. And yes, the system is just made of other people.

That's the nature of self-reinforcing feedback loops.