▲ | JohnFen 2 days ago | ||||||||||||||||||||||
>Both ads and capitalism are messy and have some externalized harms, but are better than the alternatives. Some is doing an awful lot of work there. Both ads and capitalism have become so degenerate and abusive that I'm no longer confident that either are better than the alternatives. Even phrasing it as "better than the alternatives" is a symptom of one aspect of the overall decline: seeing everything as an either-or choice. | |||||||||||||||||||||||
▲ | dontoni 20 hours ago | parent | next [-] | ||||||||||||||||||||||
What exactly is the alternative to capitalism? If you aim for a watered down capitalism with regulations, that’s still capitalism, just not as fast or fully-fledged. In HSL, if you reduce saturation you still have the same hue and thus the same color: it just doesn’t look that aggressive to the eye. All other alternatives than capitalism or partial capitalism have been ruled out by any country that has anything to do in the world, or for any society in which material well-being is present for the majority of their population. The fact that ads are annoying doesn’t mean that capitalism is bad or degenerate. If I have had a bad girlfriend and I’m ugly as hell as to not afford any other, then yes I’ll be prompted to say the relationships market has become degenerate. But probably it’s just that I can’t find good partners on it. The same if you can’t pay for YouTube Premium, X Premium+ or the like. And precisely because capitalism isn’t degenerate but buoyant, ad-free solutions like Perplexity for search are rising at such a rapid pace it can’t do anything but increase optimism in the future. | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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▲ | chairmansteve 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | ||||||||||||||||||||||
Very well said. Capitalism works very well within boundaries. When those boundaries expand too much, capitalism becomes degenerate. The ideal is a strong state which polices capitalism so that we get the benefits but not the harms. | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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