this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2024
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Okay, sure, I'll play devil's advocate. The engineering that goes into a single iPhone is unfathomable. It would take an entire lifetime of study to even try to produce something close.
But Apple pays about a jillion engineers about a jillion dollars each, and so they're able to create new iPhones every year or so. That was 100% powered by capitalism.
Yeah, workers physically put the pieces together. Do you think any of them could design an iPhone without any help or reference? Or a single body to tie it all together?
Do you think people cannot collaborate without capitalism?
People do all the time in academia and science.
Absolutely not! I'd ask why they should, and obviously there are many reasons.
Is the "help or reference" coming from other workers?
... It's coming from the culmination of, like 5 decades of absurdly educated engineering. If you want to call them workers, then sure.
They weren't workers? is this "absurdly educated engineering" like a magic ghost inhabiting the halls of Apple HQ? Is this "engineering" in the room with us right now?
Seriously, I fail to grasp the point you're trying to make here...
.......you do know what engineering is, right? It's... Definitely not a magic ghost inhabiting halls. It's learning physics, electronics, programming, and, well, engineering to create novel solutions to problems people have.
My point is that capitalism, for all of its failures, does indeed sometimes produce better things. You unequivocally hating on it, for no discernable reason; I I can't find a reason for that.
You do know that engineering doesn't exist independently, right? It comes from humans. And you know what those humans typically are? Workers.
[Citation needed].
Workers produce better things. Have been doing it before capitalism and will be doing it after. There's no need for a leecher class above them.
I'm starting to think you're not just playing devil's advocate...
How will we educate those workers, in order to produce better things? I guess some "workers" will be smarter than others. More intelligent. Should we send those stupider workers to the fields? Make them work off their stupidity while the genius, better workers invent new machines?
blinks
What does education have to do with anything? How does that even follow towards someone "sending them to the fields"? This is the mother of non-sequiturs...
Do...do you think education itself exists because of Capitalism?!
No, and I never said that I did. Do I think that people are motivated to be educated and create things by capitalism? Yes, of course. It's provably happened on both of our lifetimes.
Does that make capitalism the best solution? No. But obviously you're gonna need to provide more data against it to convince other people. This is a weak argument.
People were motivated to be educated and create things long before capitalism and will be long after capitalism.
Yes, I think I've already agreed to that fact. Which brings us back to: how should we pay for those people to be educated? Who should we choose to create things? What should we do with everybody else?
We don't have to "pay" to be educated outside of the capitalist system. "Paying" for education is a capitalist thing. In fact, most places outside of the US don't expect people to pay to be educated. Even within capitalism, various people have found ways to make education and healthcare a public service. Imagine that...
People who want to choose it themselves?
"We" don't "do" anything with other people.
Well, no. Paying professors isn't free. Some places just hide their salaries in their tax money. But sure. Everyone gets education (I agree with this). Some people choose to be artists and... I guess they just fend for themselves?
Now, let's be absurd. Pretend I'M a artist. I made a blank canvas, and I'm willing to sell it.
They laugh at your notion of money but you do you bro, they invite you home to share some of the excess of food that has been harvested by the people that had an honest desire to feed their fellow humans, instead of... getting power through making art?
I've yet to see how capitalism has done that where other systems could not, though?
The capitalists are the ones who own Apple in the OP, so the designers using decades of research are still workers. Apple paying them a bunch to work together is what gets them to make the iphone, sure, but you can't say that no other system wouldn't have eventually had a similar invention
In fact, I'm quite certain that if we had a more anarchistic system instead of capitalism we'd have gotten phones or something similar sooner, as groups of nerds were working on them as early hobby projects but told to stop by their bosses and work on other more profitable shit instead
It's coming from someone who dedicated their entire life to being smarter than you or me about electronics.
Go on. Give your opinion.
Is/was that person not a worker?
At what point do they stop benefiting from their labor? They obviously can't keep working in the next things and the next thing. They might be a one trick pony. You would need robust social programs like ubi.
Eventually the money to start the process comes from somewhere like a bank or private loans. Sure, the workers could fund the venture by themselves, but nobody wants to take that kind of risk. Taking a job at a company is basically paying money to avoid risk.
Workers take plenty of risk to change jobs, homes, and even countries for a new job. The risks they take are comparatively much more significant than a venture of a millionaire or billionaire capitalist. That risk is somehow not rewarded under capitalism. Not to mention that the capitalist "risk" is nothing more than a scare tactic
That aside, someone "putting in money" doesn't mean they were useful and deserve any credit. It just means that you have an unjust system where the actual innovators have to agree to be exploited to survive.
It's extremely difficult to get started. I suppose I could live in a van down by the river and dumpster dive until I can make money from a product or service. However, many products and services require multiple workers to accomplish. If course businesses exploit workers and prevent competition. Those things should be addressed. However, it becomes extremely difficult to add a layer of fairness because some people will say that they deserve more than another person. Some people will get jobs based on who they know and who likes them. Does everyone get paid equally? Do you measure performance on some way? That creates competing interests and competition among workers. I worked in a shop under a "flat rate" system. It was constant bullshit with some guys doing anything they could to steal work from other guys. People would lie to get more work or bill customers for extra labor. It was a shit show.
Anarchist chad: Yes.
So, you've chosen violence
Nonsense
It's extremely difficult to get started.
But it would be easier to start if you got a fair amount for your labor and everyone you're going to work with pooled in.
The current system isn't fair either. Ultimately your boss decides what you get paid. They could be a benevolent dictator but they could also try to stiff you, you will never know. Now, we might not make it fair but we can definitely make it fairer. One way is democratization of the work place. Essentially everyone gets a say, say in how the revenue is split, say in who gets hired, say in whether there should be preformance metrics and if there should then also what those metrics should be.
And that's not some only theoretical idea, cooperatives are real life examples of this working. They aren't point by point as the examples I gave, but they do follow the concept of implementing democracy in the work place.
Entry to the market is a bigger obstacle than risk. You can't just make a phone at home from scraps. You need an army of workers and machines and supply chains and business relationships and licenses.
You don't actually have to have any of those things because you can have other companies make those parts for you and then even hire a company to assemble it for you. Apple doesn't make screens or tiny screws or batteries. At least they don't have to I'm not sure how their supply chain works. You could do presales on a site like Kickstarter and make the phone. The issue is getting enough people to buy it in order to make it viable as all of those companies are going to charge you a set up fee, so the more parts you buy, the lower the cost per part. You'd also have to design a phone that gives people a compelling reason to buy it. Selling stuff is hard probably harder than making the product itself. You'd also need the usual business overhead like an accountant and an attorney.
That's still market entry as the biggest obstacle, rather than risk. Getting enough people to buy it in order to make it viable is, itself, a factor of how much can be invested in marketing the phone. Designing a phone still requires at least a team of workers, if not an army, because that requires designing both the phone and software in addition to making it all work together in a usable product.
You also can't just start up a phone company from a lemonade stand. You need starting capital. Hence, market entry.
I would start by making a dev board in an SBC form factor like the raspberry pi and use an os like graphene and make it compatible with Linux. You could sell that and have your backers do testing for you while you build the rest of the phone. Then once the phone was built you could try to build an os of your own.
I'm pretty sure your cobbled together hackathon project wouldn't be functional as a phone, cell towers wouldn't communicate with it and it wouldn't make calls. Also, where did you even get backers? How did you attract them and scam them out of their money? And now you're using them to outsource your labor team??
Market barriers are real.
I guess you don't realize that there is easy to use pcb design software that lets you lay out your components and it will automatically run the traces between the board layers. You can them send those files off to a board manufacturer who will also solder the components on for you for an additional cost. It's not prohibitively expensive. People do it all the time
https://youtu.be/zc3sPoqOFG8
People do not make functional DIY cell phones all the time.
I don't care if you can hack together something in your garage, it's not a phone unless it can make calls using cellular infrastructure. That requires licensing, contracts, and business connections to the providers.
A project like that is good for making shortwave radios to avoid Israel installing bombs on your battery, but not useful for this specific purpose outside of making a prototype model to maybe be able to beg for money from investors.
You can buy this thingy
https://www.adafruit.com/product/1963
You could place similar circuitry on the same board as the soc and other stuff.
Here is a cellphone with off the shelf parts.
https://learn.adafruit.com/piphone-a-raspberry-pi-based-cellphone/overview
It's called a modem and a SIM card sweetie
That's not a cell phone? Pretty sure you're stuck to an internet connection.
Pick one of the many chipsets that are used in Mobile devices. Slap that baby on the circuit board next to the processor and ram. I'm pretty sure your can get these packaged on a small surface mount board with shielding and everything on it already.
https://www.electronicproducts.com/top-10-5g-chipsets/
Engineers are workers. Well paid yes, but you're going against the wrong people, they're not capitalists and don't make the decisions that matter.
Then, why do you think an a economy post capitalist wouldn't be able to develop smart phones? Do you think we'd return to feudalism and the world would devolve into dark ages and all the scientific knowledge would disappear?
Yea we can still innovate without capitalism, though, and even in spite of it people still develope things just for the fun of it. They even create non-profits designed around making things accessible and writing standards to help keep everyone organized. Fuck, Linux distros are free, dude. Literally this post points out that the people working on the software and the design are also of the working class and you’ve glossed over that.
Capitalism is the system which puts capital first. It a system whereby having money is having power and not having money is a death sentence. It is a system that that says equates your current monetary value with your value to society and which suppresses anything that cannot be monetized. So many people can’t even have hobbies anymore without some feeling of guilt and weird conservatives won’t stop shitting on the arts like they’re so broken as people they no longer understand the concept of enjoyment or living for more than just producing stock value.
Under a system that focuses on making sure people are cared for you can still have private business. A system which has safety nets and offers free education, healthcare, and basic utilities is one in which the ordinary person is free to live their life instead of worrying about losing their job and their employment-connected health insurance.
You’re not playing devil’s advocate by ignoring important details, you’re just being weird and wrong. Also no one fucking asked, anyway.
I don't disagree with any single point that you've made. I agree with most of them.
But you mentioned linux. Tell me again, Linus Torvald, was he employed under a capitalist country when he created linux? How about most of its contributors?
Your point is easily defeated. Please make a better argument.
You can’t genuinely believe that that’s an argument for why mine has been “defeated”?
It took my two seconds to verify that Linus Torvald did his work with Linux on his own time and at university, not in the pursuit of capital. Since his childhood he has simply found joy in computers and does these things because he genuinely wants to. He worked at Transmeta for six years afterwards and then left to go work for one of the non-profits that eventually became the non-profit Linux Foundation. His whole fucking shtick is that the software should be open-source.
He’s also from Finland, a country well know to prioritize its citizens’ well-being. That care allows citizens to pursue their goals with a level of safety that capitalism cannot offer.
You’re either a weird, pathetic troll and/or unfathomably stupid. Either way this conversation isn’t going to get us anywhere.
Dude is the living "and yet you participate in society. I am very happy intelligent. " meme, you're wasting your time.
Yeah, in a capitalist system the difference between a smart person with a good idea and a successful person is capital.
With enough capital you don't need to be smart or have any good ideas. You don't even need to be a person.
Socialism was made under capitalism.
Using the same logic, that would make socialism powered by capitalism. Well, that, climate breakdown and school shootings: all powered by capitalism.
Edit: clearly were only allowed to use that "logic" on things that people believe will make capitalism look good.
What. A. Surprise....