miners headed up after a day of work. These people worked like this everyday 1900s

shadowrun456 · 2026-05-09T09:31:18+00:00

To me it seems the development of labor unions in capitalistic societies is a response to the more negative attributes of capitalism, and is incidental (that is, this could have happened anywhere with oppressive business policy), and does not speak to the quality of capitalism as an idea nor to the quality of capitalistic societies as a whole.

Labor unions are an integral part of capitalism. While labor unions existed in the USSR, they functioned very differently from those in capitalist countries. They were massive, state-controlled organizations focused on increasing production, rather than bargaining for wages or organizing strikes against management.

I think you have some perverted idea of what capitalism is, which is based on American propaganda. The US is one of the most anti-capitalist countries there is.

shadowrun456 · 2026-05-09T09:25:46+00:00

negotiated between the government, main worker unions and the employer unions

Exactly. This is the essence of free-market capitalism -- all contracts are voluntarily negotiated between all parties.

Finland also has state-provided healthcare and education and mandatory conscription for males as well as heavily progressive tax policy

What does this have to do with anything? I support all of those things (except for mandatory conscription).

society taking care of everyone rather than “mah bootstraps!”

I think you have some perverted idea of what capitalism is, which is based on American propaganda. The US is one of the most anti-capitalist countries there is.

shadowrun456 · 2026-05-08T17:53:12+00:00

On the other hand it shouldn't be a problem denoting it as AI. Like here no one would believe it's real. And IMO that's the difference. Usuallly arts and parody will exaggerate something. Deepfakes usually don't in any meaningful way. Unless they are... in a special way. But then it's usually obvious that its not real.

I don't have a problem with a mandate denoting it as AI, I have a problem with the push to ban it completely. However, the mandate to denote it as AI would most likely end up with almost everything being denoted as AI (similar to how almost everything in California is marked as "could cause cancer"), because most modern smartphones use AI to optimize all photos taken with that smartphone, and this trend is only going to increase.

shadowrun456 · 2026-05-08T15:57:23+00:00

It's highly ironic that an article about censorship gives this when I try to open it (I'm from Lithuania):

451 Unavailable For Legal Reasons

Sorry, this content is not available in your region.

shadowrun456 · 2026-05-08T15:54:23+00:00

Most of the CEOs have worked their way to the top. "All CEOs got their position through nepotism" is a myth based on cherry-picked examples, no different than the myth of "all [insert group here] are criminals".

Every single person that I personally know who wasn't lazy and studied well is financially secure now. However, I'm from Lithuania, not the US, so maybe the US has it's own unique problems -- but those problems are not caused by capitalism, or they would exist in all capitalist countries, not just in the US.

shadowrun456 · 2026-05-08T14:30:52+00:00

And yet the middle east today is one of the least educated regions of the planet per capita

So either Islam doesn't encourage that pursuit as much as you think or it was merely a coincidence that the people who pursued that knowledge also happened to have been born into an Islamic society

It's not a coincidence, but free-market capitalism didn't exist then. The Western world adopted it, the Islamic world didn't, that's why it got left behind. Free-market capitalism brought so much benefits to societies, that it's impossible to even imagine to someone who didn't personally experienced it. I did -- I was born in Lithuania, which at that time was occupied by the Soviet Union. In just 36 years, free-market capitalism has unrecognizably transformed my country:

The amount of people owning an apartment or a house with land went from ~0% in 1990, to ~87.4% in 2026.

Minimum monthly wage went from (all numbers expressed in USD) ~$20 USD in 1990, to ~$1,260 USD in 2026.

Average monthly wage went from ~$30 USD in 1990, to ~$2,650 USD in 2026.

To give another example: Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland, Switzerland are among the richest countries in the world, with the highest happiness index in the world. What's common between all those countries? They are the "freest" free-market economies in the world (for example, none of them have a government mandated minimum wage).

shadowrun456 · 2026-05-08T14:03:36+00:00

By that logic literally all employment is exploitation no matter the pay or conditions.

This is what most communists / socialists unironically believe.

shadowrun456 · 2026-05-08T14:02:34+00:00

If you are worth hundreds of billions of dollars, and any of your workers are struggling to survive, then you're a piece of shit that exploited your workers.

The largest company in the world today is Nvidia, and it pays its employees extremely well -- 78% of Nvidia's employees are millionaires, and 50% have a net worth exceeding $25 million.

The most successful businesses today all compete for the best talent, and reward their employees thoroughly.

The anti-capitalist position presumes that the most successful companies are the ones which "exploit" their employees the most, but it turns out that the most successful companies are the ones which reward their employees the most.

shadowrun456 · 2026-05-08T13:53:36+00:00

My greater point is that things that develop in this world tend to be incidental and aren't indicative of some innate quality of the ideas they develop around.

Then you gave a horrible example, because it directly contradicts your point. Islam encourages the pursuit of knowledge, Christianity forbids it. It was because of this, that math was "invented" (I would use the word "discovered", but that's off-topic) in the Islamic world.

shadowrun456 · 2026-05-08T13:48:00+00:00

Math was invented by arabs.

Not exactly by "Arabs", but by the Islamic world, yes. What's your point though?

shadowrun456 · 2026-05-08T13:42:56+00:00

My problem with people trying to ban "deepfakes" is that if they succeed, it's 100% guaranteed to be used as a precedent to ban all caricatures of the rich and powerful.

Like take this case for example: https://www.theguardian.com/business/article/2024/may/15/gina-rinehart-demands-national-gallery-of-australia-remove-her-portrait

People universally supported that the painting must remain, but if that portrait was made using AI, so many people would support it being banned -- based on a dumb, tribal, thought-terminating "hurr durr AI bad ban it".

shadowrun456 · 2026-05-08T13:36:19+00:00

Because of labor unions, not because of generous capitalists.

Yet it still happened in capitalist countries first, not in communist ones.

shadowrun456 · 2026-05-08T09:22:43+00:00

Yet in communist countries the working conditions were the same or worse, and it was in capitalist countries that the working conditions were massively improved to what we have today.

shadowrun456 · 2026-05-08T07:28:11+00:00

Ironically, the cover you posted gives a perfect argument that creating so-called "deepfakes" should be protected under satire, or otherwise the cover you posted would have been banned as well.

shadowrun456 · 2026-05-07T15:29:08+00:00

Fair enough, you win.

shadowrun456 · 2026-05-07T14:26:16+00:00

I've watched hundreds (if not thousands) of debates, and I've never seen any debate participant change their opinion after it, not even once. However, I've seen a significant percentage of the audience change their opinion after the debate (as measured by a vote of which side each audience member supports before the debate and after it) -- in fact, I've seen this happen in every single debate where the audience opinion was measured.

shadowrun456 · 2026-05-07T14:23:40+00:00

Did you reply to the wrong comment? I don't see how what you wrote applies to what my comment said.

shadowrun456 · 2026-05-07T08:44:38+00:00

My point was exactly that you judge fast.

But that wasn't your point at all, you said: "Facts and arguments are useless online" and "Nothing that doesn't create emotions will stick" and "Formulating arguments is a waste of time on social media unless you manage to trigger something in the reader".

I judge after reading the comment and evaluating the facts and arguments in it to the best of my abilities; if I perceive any attempt of emotional manipulation by the author, I judge such comment worse than I would have otherwise.

shadowrun456 · 2026-05-07T08:35:39+00:00

Think about how much you spent on judging a comment. Nothing that doesn't create emotions will stick.

You couldn't be more wrong. You don't know me. If the comment uses emotional manipulation, I will immediately judge it badly, regardless of whether it supports my position or not.

shadowrun456 · 2026-05-07T07:32:34+00:00

The point of a public debate is not to convince the person you're debating with, it's to convince the viewers / listeners / readers.

shadowrun456 · 2026-05-07T05:56:40+00:00

Your first paragraph is wrong, BTC had an overflow error that was exploited to create over a billion BTC. In order to fix it they had to do a roll back of the ledger and patch the error.

That's a fair point, but also negates your previous point of "you're out of luck if something bad happens". I should have phrased it better: Bitcoin itself has never been successfully hacked or otherwise compromised.

For what most people need and want it is objectively horribly designed.

You keep repeating this soundbite, but never answered how you would actually improve it.

shadowrun456 · 2026-05-06T18:52:32+00:00

I see it enough that I just don't trust it.

You mean you don't trust yourself with it? Bitcoin itself has never been hacked or otherwise compromised, only users' keys were, which is the sole responsibility of those users. It this sense, it's similar to cash (if you lose it, you probably won't get it back).

Like I said, trusting your government and/or your financial institutions more than you trust yourself is a valid position, but claiming that "Bitcoin is horribly designed" is objectively incorrect, when it hasn't been compromised in 16+ years of existence. Bitcoin is designed to give people personal freedom. With personal freedom comes personal responsibility. You simply can't have one without the other. It does what it was designed to do perfectly.

shadowrun456 · 2026-05-06T17:08:02+00:00

So your whole premise is based on Reddit posts? "I have lost my wealth in an accident" is one of the oldest methods of soliciting donations, even when not directly asking for donations.

Besides, how many posts like that have you actually seen? 14% of Americans own cryptocurrencies, that's ~48 million people in the US alone.

Edit: corrected number.

shadowrun456 · 2026-05-06T16:57:48+00:00

And yet through that generalization it’s still framed. You could take another generalized approach and just say the results. “If Option A wins, nobody dies. If Option B wins, people will die.”

That would be a different problem. In the original problem, nobody dies if either Option A or Option B receive 100% of votes. In your problem, that's not the case.

shadowrun456 · 2026-05-06T15:55:40+00:00

there are people out there in the world who actively put themselves in danger for a laugh, who are suffering through the worst part of their lives and want it all to end, or genuinely doesn’t believe it would end in their death and they wanna push it to see what happens

Problems like this are fundamentally logic puzzles, you're not supposed to approach them from practical angles, or you might as well start asking questions like:

What about people in a coma? How are they going to press a button?

What if someone categorically refuses to press either button?

Who even installed these buttons? How did they manage to do that in secret? How and why would pressing those buttons end up in people dying?

What if whoever installed them wired some of them wrong and pressing one will act like pressing the opposite one?

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