No we are just close allies with countries who will
Quantum computing. It might be a real thing but it’ll go through a grift phase first.
Another one will be environmental carbon capture, like pulling carbon out of the atmosphere. This one would be easier to fake but might not get traction for longer since the ideological superstructure in our society is already built up so that it is hard for a political crisis to emerge due to global climate concerns. Even though climate change is worsening, and whole cities are being destroyed by hurricanes, the debate is still pretty stabilized. However since this grift will end up being sold as a commercial solution to a political problem, the grift will probably come from a larger player like Lockheed or Boeing, which would necessitate investing in the most evil companies in existence. Still you never know, Tesla stayed afloat for years without making a working product by selling carbon credits issued by the government to other car companies, so you might be able to bootstrap this one
This is the wrong question in my opinion. What is being corrupted? One’s morals and ethics? The purity of the human soul? What is the nature of the corruption? Any time we start thinking about “purity” and “corruption” we are moving in dangerous ontological territory.
What is money? Well, it is a stand in for value. Then what is value? Where does it come from? Value comes from exchanging commodities in the marketplace. These commodities are created with human labor power, in other words, value is the crystalized time+energy that it takes on average to produce commodities. New value is created when a commodity costs less to produce than it can be sold for in the market.
In our current historical mode of production, capitalism, the labor that is used to mass produce a commodity is socialized, which means instead of a single craftsperson creating a commodity from start to finish, the production process is broken down and simplified so that it takes many workers to mass produce commodities, each worker specializing in their part of the production process, with the assistance of machines to speed up or simplify this process in order to be more productive.
In contrast, even though the production process has been socialized for the first time in human history, which was in it’s time a progressive if cruel human advancement, the fruits of that production are privatized meaning that goods become the private property of the legal “owner” of the productive apparatus, who can sell those commodities to market for more than they paid to produce them, producing profit from the perspective of the capitalist, or surplus value from the perspective of the workers.
This creates distinct classes which is where we will interrogate the effect of money on the human spirit. There are the owners of capital, who have commodities to sell at the market and workers who have little or nothing to sell but their labor to the capitalist in a labor market. This can be taken even further: there are large capitalists who own a great deal of capital and exploit many workers, small capitalists who own a small among of capital and exploit a few workers (or maybe they even self-exploit,) intellectual or specialized labor that is able to demand higher value in the labor market, and simple or unspecialized labor who’s labor can be easily replaced. A side effect of this creates another class: the unemployed or marginally employed reserve surplus population which can be used to threaten simple laborers with replacement hence driving down the cost of labor and increasing profits for the capitalist. The larger this reserve population, the lower wages can be made, and vice-versa.
Every atomized member of society is then thrown into competition with each other, with a very real threat of losing their class position, with the possibility of being thrown into the reserve population unable to find meaningful work that can support themselves and their family. A large firm can be gobbled up by a larger firm, and its specialized workers eliminated due to “redundancies”. A specializrd worker can be replaced by another unspecialized worker who has the qualifications to do their job or some technological advancement transforms that role into unspecialized or less-specialized labor.
This competitive drive forces individuals to do whatever they can to maintain or increase their class position. If company A refuses to pollute the rivers for increased profit, but company B is willing to, this makes company B more profitable, forcing company A out of business, or acquired by company B; unless the board of directors of company A (pressured by gains-seeking investors) replaces the individual demurring eco-conscious executives with people who are willing to pollute for profit; unless some outside political force steps in to regulate the entire market, creating the necessity of a governing state to manage the market and resources, lest the whole system collapse into complete anarchy. Individual workers must remain “productive” such that they continue to create profit for their capitalists or risk replacement themselves, although they can always be replaced by technological advancements or monopolizing forces as discussed above. The reserve surplus population competes for their very survival or risks starvation, homelessness and death.
So now we have uncovered the forces that cause the “corruption” of money. There is a whole other thread we could pursue here that shows how this system abstracts things like “polluting a river” into numbers on a balance sheet, hiding these forces from anyone who might observe them, and lending a plausible deniability to anyone who would be responsible and hide the real lives of anyone who would be affected. I’ll call this process objectification, which is a huge topic unto itself.
But in my opinion, what this system corrupts is the natural inclination for most people to cooperate with one another, and work creatively. When i recognizes that another person has subjective experience like me, I’ll become more likely to identify and then help them if they need it, as I can relate my own experience to theirs. Our system creates cooperation through competition, since the drive of all productive relations is to pursue profit, the mechanisms of which I’ve already described. There is a constant objectification of the outside world as a function of this pursuit for profit and others which dehumanizes and keeps us in our little competitive consuming silos.
Tldr: does money corrupt? Yes, but it doesn’t corrupt the individual so much as it corrupts the entire social superstructure that is inherent to a functioning society in which people can thrive and self actualize.
Edit: just one note on “objective fact”. Object/subject duality is only one way to look at things, and in fact separating them out like this is a form of “corruption” in that it hides certain truths and leads to certain conclusions. While this has contributed to the development of many kinds of human scientific and technological advancement, we must also understand that all things concerning humans and their experiences need to be understood by unifying subject and object. Pure objectivity is as incomplete as pure subjectivity and while both are useful to increase our understanding we have to put the pieces back together to see the whole picture.
Whelp looks like the ps4 will be my last Sony console, too bad
“You made me be rude after I insulted you and you called me out on it”
Leave me alone. I’ve wasted enough time on you. You clearly have your mind made up and can’t even comprehend why someone would be skeptical of a company that is driving away its users and advertisers, of which I provided many examples. I wrote several paragraphs supporting my argument, and several sources. You responded in seconds with two sentences. Hopefully you wise up before taking a bath on whatever your investments are. I wish you all the best in life, but this is finished.
Oh for sure, I was just being funny, or at least funny to me. Appears I’m laughing alone as usual
Lemmy: someone should make billionaires disappear
China: disappears billionaires
Lemmy: this is an outrage!
I have been saying this for years
Google is having problems, they can’t make profits anymore. Its different because reddit was never profitable, but googles been profitable for years.
Edit: I said they can’t make profits, but what I should have said is they can’t innovate and produce new value, they can only cut expenses and squeeze consumers with subscriptions and advertisements in order to remain profitable. Eventually there won’t be anything left to cut and will then cease to be profitable. Google is on the decline.
I can’t wait for google to crash and burn. Bring back GeoCities and Netscape navigator.
Or you could do a 60 fps bloodborne remaster that people would actually play for orders of magnitude less money, but what do I know I’m just a plebe who didn’t lose 400 million dollars
What’s this thing where when you need to italicize something that is already italicized, you change it to a sans-serif font? Looks bad
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YouTube can make sure not to target certain people with certain content but also they have no control over it sending me tons of far right wing stochastic terror influencers like Ben Shapiro and matt walsh
Yeah, nah