When it comes to capitalist macroeconomics, as I understand it, wealth disparity is one of the big decay factors the government is supposed to monitor and correct for. Mind you, I learned MacEc in the mid 1980s but even after theory shifted from national economies to globalist economics (the free(-er) trade movement of the 1990s) wealth distribution, and the bow of that graph was supposed to be kept shallow.

There are a lot of ways to restore some balance, such as taxing rich people and investing in welfare programs and social safety nets. In the case of freelance musicians (and freelance investments, which allowed people of lower income classes to invest sooner) these are just paradigm changes that allowed more people to participate, with the expectation that more people would be moderately successful rather than a few people being ostentatiously successful. Fewer Bruce Springsteens, more John Coultons. This wasn’t contrived by government though, so it’s more of a happy accident.

And yes, Marx in Das Kapital notes that the ownership class invariably captures government and regulation which ends efforts to keep wealth more evenly distributed so we have situations like now (or like the Great Depression, a century ago) where a few people own almost everything and aren’t willing to let it go, even though the only thing they can do by hoarding their wealth is accumulate more wealth. And history has continued to bear this out, and to show that a well-regulated capitalist system is only temporary at best, which has driven me to believe we have to figure out something better.

Post-scarcity communism would be ideal, but we haven’t yet worked out how to get there from here, and really I’d be happy for anything that doesn’t turn into a one-party plutocrat-controlled autocracy held together by fascism and a nationalist war effort.

And sure, economics is a soft science so this is all just someone’s opinion, though the someones in this case are multiple smart historical figures who actually thought about it a bit. I’m not an economist, so I rely on experts who are.

PS: This is my attempt to either find common ground, or to lay plain what my position is and where it comes from. I’m not invested in you adopting it, but if you want me to consider a different one, I’ll need cause to do so.

Well, the California example is about too many PSA warning labels. So many things are known by the State of California to cause cancer that no-one takes heed of the labels anymore. Similarly Nancy Reagan’s anti-drug campaign (and Tipper Gore’s parental advisory music labels) only encouraged kids to do more drugs and listen to angrier music.

So it’s not that kids will smoke more (or much more) it’s that the labels will be more easily ignored when the government fails to be sparing in their use.

In an non-government example, when everything is a sin, then nothing is a sin.

That’s rather dismissive. Also vague. Are you saying that the notion that wealth disparity is bad is just some guy’s opinion, or that you’re not supposed to be able to get rich being a movie star (or a private equity investor, or a hedge fund manager, or a California gold miner)?

Usually when people are vague and terse, I assume they’re losing interest in the conversation. It’s okay to walk away.

I don’t really understand how [The bit on Van Gogh – that he was only posthumously appreciated in the art sector] follows from what I said.

My following paragraph is about that. Art often happens before the framework made to create it. In fact, when we have set up studio, they’re already doing knock-offs, trying to repeat prior successes.

For every $1 spent on the moonshots, we got $14

Do you have a source for that?

This came up during a TED talk on the benefits of investing in big science. On an unrelated research effort, I found the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958 which Eisenhower signed during his freak out over Sputnik, and the big grant to Fairchild Superconductor which kicked off the electronics boom in Silicon Valley (~San Jose, California), so the $14 value is certainly plausible.

Capitalist ideologues, for one. I remember in Macroeconomics class that wealth desparity will destroy your economy and then your civilization if you let it get out of hand.

So when (for example) we have eight guys that own more than the poorer half of the world population, that’s a bad sign for every economy on the planet, and is going to cause way more problems than merely discontent and social unrest.

Hence why copyright was originally in the 10-20 year range.

Movie star isn’t supposed to be a dream job that makes you fabulously rich, but a decent living.

Interestingly, musical artists who work off the web will do exactly that: Tour and make hundreds of thousands instead of millions (in the aughts and 2010s, so pre-inflation), rather than rolling the dice with the record labels.

If it is art that other people value then that framework already existed

From Wikipedia on Vincent Van Gogh: Van Gogh’s work began to attract critical artistic attention in the last year of his life. After his death, Van Gogh’s art and life story captured public imagination as an emblem of misunderstood genius

The art we get from pre-made frameworks emerged because people figured out they like art, and then someone capitalized on that. Or in cases of monarchs and governments, they created a fund to allow artists to do their thing instead of waiting tables.

There is a compelling argument that tens of billions of dollars being used productively to research anything would have at least some useful results.

For every $1 spent on the moonshots, we got $14. Feel free to look for other investments, but big science really has proven itself.

Nope. People will still make content. It’ll be on far less of a budget, but that didn’t stop the Film School generation of independent films in the 1970s (before which you had to sell your life and soul and beating heart to a studio). In between all the schlock were the occasional arty films we consider classics today.

And then there’s government subsidization of art projects, as per the National Endowment of the Arts.

I think the MCU movies, the DC movies, the many studio iterations of Spiderman have shown us what capitalism eventually churns out. Sony actually chose this path content as product the same resort to formula that plagued the music industry in the 1980s (and drove the Hip Hop Independent movement of the next half-century).

We just need to empower artists. Make sure they don’t have to moonlight as restaurant wait staff in order to eat and pay rent while they create, and make sure they have access to half-decent (not necessarily high end) hardware with which to do their thing. And yes, as Sturgeon observes, most of it will be schlock, but through sheer quantity of content we’ll get more gems than Hollywood is putting out.

As per Das Kapital our industrialists always move to capture regulation and seek to eliminate competition, which are the two aspects that can make capitalism work for the public. Then you have what we have today, late stage capitalism which is about tiers of rent, so everything is both shoddy and expensive.

That’s how Disney and Warner Brothers (Warner Sister too!) end up owning all the franchises. It’s how Sony owns all the music and sues to take down dancing baby videos.

The EU and California have both made in-roads to slowing down the steady takeover of regulatory bodies and the mulching and mass merging of megacorps into monolithic monopolies, but they can’t stop it, and both are seeing the bend into precarity that is symptomatic of late stage capitalism.

That said, true post scarcity communism is realistically a pipe dream well beyond a few great filters we’ve yet to navigate, but we will see small victories, of which piracy – what is essentially crime against ill-gotten gains – offers more than a few.

The service they provide (from a perspective external to obligatory capitalism) is less about making them, but providing a framework by which people engaged in artistic expression and development get paid and permitted to survive.

As the COVID-19 Lockdown furloughs demonstrated to us, art manifests so long as people are fed and need something to do. Healthy humans can’t couch-potato for two weeks without fidgeting and whittling wood into bears. And the great resignation that followed showed that enough people were able to make it lucrative (that is, work out marketing and fulfillment enough to make it profitable enough to quit their prior job) that it lowered worker supply that we were able to contest the shit treatment, low pay and toxic work environments that were normal before the epidemic.

It gets worse in other industries like big pharma in which the state provides vast grants for R&D of drugs and treatments, but the company keeps all the proceeds. Contrast the space program, which is why memory foam (the material) is in the public domain, as is a fuckton of electronics and computer technologies.

We can’t even come together to wear a peice of cloth to slow the spread of a virus.

• No one washes their hands — Increased infection rates.
• Research doctors don’t work — Reduced cure research speed.
• Sick people given hugs — Infectivity increased once spotted.
  – Plague Inc. description of Easy Difficulty (Written before the 2020 COVID-19 Lockdown)

If an asteroid were to hit the Earth large enough to cause human extinction, it would save us the embarrassment of killing ourselves from poisoning the climate or microplastic pollution.

I’m pretty sure we navigated nuclear holocaust, but we haven’t fully ruled it out either.

Not for over half a century, once Disney lobbied the US federal government to extend temporary monopolies to egregious lengths. The point of intellectual property rights is to build a robust public domain, so every year of every extension is a year denied to the public.

This has been forgotten or ignored by the ownership class with Sony and Nintendo prosecuting use and public archival abandonware games the way Disney goes after nursery murals.

So no, we would be better off with no IP laws all than the current laws we have, and the ownership class routinely screw artists, developers and technicians for their cut of their share of the profits in what is known as Hollywood Accounting. And the record labels will cheat any artist or performer who doesn’t have a Hammerhead Lawyer (or bigger) to ensure their contract is kosher.

So no. Come with me to Barbary; we’ll ply there up and down. 🏴‍☠️

Jetflicks, which charged $9.99 per month for the streaming service, generated millions of dollars in subscription revenue and caused “substantial harm to television program copyright owners,

The ownership class will tremble before a communist revolution!

If we get rid of the licensing we get rid of the lawyers.

This YSK offering does feel like a way to provoke a fight among boomers and Gen-Xers.

It raises the question what does or doesn’t count as an addictive feed. I bet this doesn’t specify any particular dark pattern or monetization model.

If we gave half a fuck about mental wellnes regarding mobile use, we would have addressed all this when it was particular to mobile games.

No, this is about our kids learning early how fucked society is, and how their own generation is being fed a pro-ownership-class indoctrination regimen before being appointed a string of dead-end toxic jobs.

Social media is how we learn about the genocide in Gaza, police officer-involved homicide rates, and unionization efforts. and that is why we want kids off social media.

Don’t make me put up the koala cartoon again.

As the Twilight Zone episode shows, this has been a known issue for a while. But we haven’t yet seized the means of production even a century since the Great Depression.

Looking for new gigs is currently the new normal regarding promotions anyway, according to HMW. Since companies have long shown that have no loyalty to their workforce and will lay them off as soon as they need their numbers to go up for shareholders.

And new hires to positions get paid better than promotions from within to the same positions. So it’s better just to routinely keep sending out résumés to openings.

So the no promotions threat is mostly a paper tiger.

The problem is our upper management are paranoid of time theft (even though its opposite, wage theft, costs the economy more money than all petty crime combined). And out of sheer paranoia, they’re going to be susceptible to technological snake oil, especially of the sort that tightens the collars on labor and makes them that much more miserable.