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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: February 22nd, 2026

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  • People use the word “capitalism” to mean different things.

    If you ask someone “Should someone who doesn’t do any work get money from people who do?”, a lot of people would say no. And they’d probably think you’re talking about welfare or communism. But that’s capitalism. The guy who “owns” the company can sit at home and watch netflix while all his office workers make stuff, and he keeps the profits. If you frame it right, you can get people to agree with you or suffer some cognitive dissonance.

    But none of that is what some people are thinking of when they think capitalism. They think “free markets” and “competition”. They often don’t really think about how that trends towards monopolies or cartels. Either because of magic, or “the government will prevent monopolies.” But not too much regulation. There’s got to be a few decades of suffering before an intervention, typically.

    There’s also a lot of binary thinking. Either capitalism, or total state ownership and oppression.


















  • Well, yes, “why don’t you care about things?” is a timeless problem. People don’t like to see beyond the immediate. Probably because in pre-history, the creatures that focused on right now did better than the ones who went “but if we keep cutting down the trees, eventually it’s going to cause problems.”

    Well, now we have many problems, and our brains have not advanced.