@mapachin @Huntn00 @cykonot

Yes, and people wanting to get funky with all this should absolutely read some Marx and probably some Lenin and also some Kropotkin, Polonyi, and maybe some Gramsci, Lefebvre, and Harvey. But I get annoyed when theory gets trapped in the ML vortex.

STS and ANT are a great tonic for that, as is Gibson-Graham's Diverse Economies. It's all people who tried ML and found it wanting and tried to come up with something more grounded and workable.

@MichaelTBacon @mapachin @cykonot Capitalism won’t survive when most citizens don’t see or perceive benefit. The gluttony of billionaires, corporations eliminating workers via automation and AI, millions of jobs exported for $$$, Capitalism is the characteristic of human endeavor that easily slips into greed, where ME>WE, not WE>ME. We’d better start thinking in terms of us and the planet or it will be a nasty end for millions, maybe more.

@Huntn00 @MichaelTBacon @mapachin what if capital reproduction is no longer significantly based on human input? When society can be fully ignored

@cykonot @MichaelTBacon @mapachin Then Capitalism as we know it can’t exist, can it?

@Huntn00 @cykonot @MichaelTBacon @mapachin Capitalism exists in the form that we agree on as a society. If enough of us decide that computers should be the sole arbiters of what is symbolic value (money), then that is the system that it is. If we agree that these machines should decide whether a corporation should or should not continue to exist, then that would be how the system works.

@yoused @Huntn00 @MichaelTBacon @mapachin I would say "decide on" (or have determined?) as a society, rather than agree. But I agree with the thrust of what you're saying.

I'm not sure that we have a shared sense of capitalism right now, at any rate.

@cykonot @Huntn00 @MichaelTBacon @mapachin You are probably right. It is a complex subject that has a lot of vectors. One of the fundamentals is a mechanism for representing substantive and transient value symbolically (money in exchange for action or product). After that, it gets into what I think it means vs what you think it means and is highly influenced by cultural paradigms.

@cykonot @Huntn00 @MichaelTBacon @mapachin We have immortal corporations in contemporary capitalism, but is that a defining quality or just what we call it right now? My mother was fond of saying that corporations were originally temporary collectives formed to accomplish a thing (e.g., build a dam) and then dissolved, which seems to sound preferable to what has been imposed on us.

@cykonot @Huntn00 @MichaelTBacon @mapachin Then we have this whole raft of shit with the Stock Markets, where people make money on the change in perceived value of a business. Instrument trading and profiting on value shifts does not look to me like it contributes anything worthwhile to anyone other than the trader who profits. It is a big casino.

@yoused @Huntn00 @MichaelTBacon @mapachin I'd say the information of a stock's price has value, insomuch as it's related to the rate of return on capital. It's a market, encouraging investment in businesses with the highest rate of return (over a given time period).

@cykonot @Huntn00 @MichaelTBacon @mapachin except that the vast majority of stock/instrument trading does not involve actual investment but just passing notes around. The money goes from one investor to another, not to the company itself. There is a tradable instrument called ^VIX that lets you bet on the net price volatility of the market itself.

@yoused @Huntn00 @MichaelTBacon @mapachin even derivatives have some information value. I'm not saying it's equivalent to insurance, but there is value.

And the company can issue stock etc. they get capital when they go public and often hold stock themselves. when the stock price goes up, the value of shares can be leveraged for capital.

It's not JUST a betting table with zero connection to reality lol. This isn't cruelty squad

@cykonot @Huntn00 @MichaelTBacon @mapachin There are companies with data centers devoted to trading large blocks of instruments in millisecond time frames in an effort to extract profit in tiny changes in value. What value does that provide? Sorry, but I think one of the big problems with modern capitalism is the tunnel vision and only this thing matters, I do not need to look at anything else.

@yoused @Huntn00 @MichaelTBacon @mapachin this sounds like tunnelvision. Like, hft is silly bs that doesn't achieve much, but I addressed your other points reasonably enough, I think.

Financial instruments have utility in this kind of system.

@cykonot @Huntn00 @MichaelTBacon @mapachin Talk of signals and stuff sounds awfully Austrian School to me. Yes, instruments and their prices provide information. The problem is, the information is related to the real world, but the nature of the market tends to obfuscate that. Investors look at the capital and spend very little time looking at all the related vectors.

@yoused @Huntn00 @MichaelTBacon @mapachin one big question for me is when and where markets should be used. When should price be controlled by another mechanism, ie: algorithmically? I do not know.

Within a market system (like capitalism), various financial tools provide different amounts of marginal utility, different costs, different pressures to the larger system. I am not an economist or financier or whatever, so I am not qualified to go into the specifics of which would be ideal.

Idk lol

@yoused @Huntn00 @MichaelTBacon @mapachin and I said information, not signals, because I was thinking cybernetically (actually about information from mathematics but whatever). I said utility in the standard econ sense tho, idk how that's used elsewhere.

I don't know OPTIMAL regulations for any particular market or segment thereof. But I DO know that the idea of a free market is asinine because it ignores the wider material, social, etc context. Which is bad. So, that's about where I'm at.

@cykonot @Huntn00 @MichaelTBacon @mapachin I understand the basic econ sense of utility. But it is just like a shovel: it has utility when you need to move dirt and when you need to kill someone (actually convergent utility there). How the information is used does matter. And if the effect of targeting increased profits has side effects that damage the underlying elements, then you have just boned yourself.

@cykonot @Huntn00 @MichaelTBacon @mapachin Perhaps you cybertraders can be designed to not be as myopic as human traders, look at the vectors that drive an instrument and pursue an investment strategy that is optimal all the way around. But you would have to design out the natural sociopathic tendencies that most traders seem to fall victim to.

@yoused @Huntn00 @MichaelTBacon @mapachin I'm not a cybertrader lmao I'm just a nerd who likes cybernetics and took a few econ classes. My major was like comp/sci (technically engineering general then math then network administration, but really more like a normal compsci major putting on airs), but I didn't finish. And I also changed majors EVEN MORE to bypass course restrictions so I could take a 400 level class or 2 early 🤫. Among other dabblings lol

@yoused @Huntn00 @MichaelTBacon @mapachin I just read papers as a hobby. And like bio. And psychology/pharmacology. I was designing some exciting computer systems and programming language and dabbling in hardware and briefly wanted to do computational biology to enable biological computation. Some ai dabbling. Just a mess, really. But, basically comp/sci. With a bit of a chaotic flourish.

I'm probably missing stuff still but good enough. I'm a messy boi.

@yoused @Huntn00 @MichaelTBacon @mapachin if my credits are active im like half a semester from a general studies degree, but I don't think that would get me more money now so why bother.

I also bought two doctorates for funsies. One in metaphysics, one in something else. And I'm a reverend. Lmao

@cykonot @Huntn00 @MichaelTBacon @mapachin My hero was the mechanic on Black Sheep Squadron who was always throwing down his cigar saying “fix it yourself, college boy”. I read a lot (Sci-Am is great) but have never been properly educated. I just pay attention and see how things really work. And there is a whole lot of not-pretty.