>elon musk was born jun 28 1971 and has been alive roughly 1.73 billion seconds
>elon musk as of may 2026 has a net worth of 788 billion dollars
>elon musk has roughly $455 for every second he has been alive
classcucks will say he "earned" that. lmfao. that every second of his life, his genius brain innovates 455 dollars into his pocket.
can a person really "earn" that much or can they only get lucky and maybe also position themselves properly in a fundamentally exploitative system? some of you will no doubt answer that he "earned" it for the sake of provocative contrarianism
64 posts and 6 image replies omitted.>>2812324so you can't answer the question in OP? curious. you might be one of them.
>>2812338>musk is a dope who got bought out by people making something goodthat's not the problem with that post. the problem with that post is the notion that "capitalism heckin creates incentives!!!!!!" which was responded to repeatedly, but those responses were ignored.
>>2812319>they obviously aren't saying that incentives don't exist absent capitalism, they're saying capitalism creates more incentive to (say) create a digital payments processor than alternate systems. wow capitalism creates an incentive to perpetuate itself and not incentives in general? that is a lot more specific of an argument, a lot more true, and I won't argue with it. thank you for moving the goalposts to my side of the field.
>>2812284>Bro has never been in a long lasting relationship everwrong
>, I am not going to start an argument over a book.leftcom anon this would be believable if you weren't always calling everyone a classcuck for much less. maybe you're just afraid to put your persona in practice IRL because you know it sucks
>>2812729>Bro start a discussion with your wife because she read the first 20 pages of an irrelevant book!You are obsessed and mindbroken
>>2812732>have a discussion? insane! I'm just gonna throw it away when she's not lookincoward. bordiga is rolling in his grave
>>2812734Happy wife, happy life
>>2812698If the USSR had the right incentives it wouldn't have humiliatingly collapsed. Meanwhile you can simplify dengism down to getting the incentives right.
Fundamentally, almost nobody on leftypol talks about incentives. "People will just like, freely make all the steel they need dude!" is not a serious vision of how things will look after capitalism. "The USSR but it totally works, dude!" Is maybe the only thing less credible. The best alternative proposed in the thread so far is just jailing people for not working hard enough. That'd underperform the status quo, but fuck, it'd get the steel made most of the time.
>>2812694>"How do you get people to do things, especially when it's not always obvious in advance what things people want, and most people don't know their own real preferences"Well, how?
>>2812744This fucking chimp actually used steel production as a way to shit on the USSR
>>2812744capitalism is not "markets" and "incentives" you can have these things you are talking about without capitalism. "Dengist" china still has high level economic planning, state owned enterprises, etc.
>Fundamentally, almost nobody on leftypol talks about incentives. "People will just like, freely make all the steel they need dude!" is not a serious vision of how things will look after capitalism. Cybercom and political economy talk about this stuff all the time. you might like those threads.
> "People will just like, freely make all the steel they need dude!"Communism is not freedom to do whatever you want. Bourgeois individual freedom is the freedom to accumulate property and exploit others. Communist freedom is freedom from poverty, freedom from unemployment, freedom from exploitation in the marxist sense in the word. But if the government drafts you to produce steel, so be it. Marx talks about labor conscription in the manifesto. If you can conscript people for bourgeois armies, or jury duty, why not labor?
>>2812743opportunism. you tell her she's a classcuck for having a musk book and then have make up sex. NOW.
>>2812759Ok give ma couple of hours
>>2812762i'm proud of you
>>2812744Part of the solution to basic incentive problem is piece rate wages. The USSR in the early 50s had become number one in Europe and second in the world for percentage of employment remunerated on a piece rate basis. Yevgeny Spitsyn repeats this in many different lectures.
For innovation, I forget the exact video, but Andrei Fursov also mentions dedicated funds allocated to a review board that would reward workers that came up with new methods or techniques with fairly substantial bonuses (usually several months ay) after a period of review. Not only this but their entire department & workplace would receive some benefits as well, so as to encourage pro-social behaviour when it comes to improving production.
>>2812755No, I used the fact the USSR collapsed to shit on the USSR. I used steel production to attack the idea that individual/immediate communal needs and wants provide all the incentive necessary to do complicated tasks.
(I wouldn't be surprised if the USSR overproduced steel. I know it certainly
goodharted carting it around by train.)
>>2812756I don't particularly care about the capitalism part. The markets and incentive structures are what is interesting. That so many self proclaimed socialists/communists get caught on the pedantic question of "what, technically, is capitalism" instead of the more meaningful question of "whatever the status quo is, why is it clearly working well enough to knock off most alternatives?"
At the individual level: if the government drafts me to make steel while I'd rather be posting on leftypol, why shouldn't I half ass my job?
>>2812779This (for example) is a valid answer to that question.
>>2812812To limit overproduction in a mature economy in general, basically you would need a quantitative output cap on piece rate wages (Could be set at something like 105% or 110% of quotas for normal production).
Still I doubt if the USSR overproduced steel. In the 70s the were material shortages for a lot of construction projects (related the kosygin reforms I mention below).
—
Note also that USSR didn't really collapse economically until after reforms towards capitalism. It was only when perestroika was introduced that you had a significant recession.
Really the destruction of the USSR has far more to do with class questions rather pure economics.
Though it should be said kosygin reforms of 65 onwards did mark a significant shift in the direction of state capitalism (& strengthen petty bourgois class elements as well as slowing the long term growth rates).
Though in my opinion the conclusion is too strong, have a look st "The Restoration of Capitalism in the Soviet Union" by Bill Bland.
>>2812969anon, what're you doing? the fact that capitalists can adopt soviet innovations better than the soviets could adopt capitalist innovations (remember: capitalism is still here and the USSR is not) speaks
well of capitalism and badly of the USSR.
"how do you not get outcompeted and die?" is an important question for any socialist project that doesn't conjure up a world revolution.
>>2812994Just one bourgeois project dying for other bourgeois projects to grow
Incentive under capitalism is an odd one, because people like Musk and Zuckerberg were themselves just consumers of technologies and standards that were developed by large, slow, bureaucratic organisations to satisfy rather mundane requirements rather than because of “incentivised visionaries”.
None of the dotcom billionaires actually created the internet or any of the technologies their businesses were initially built upon and although you could claim they were visionaries to utilise the pre-existing technology in a certain way that others enjoyed, none of their businesses currently resemble their initial visions.
VCs came in to pump a lot of air into the dotcom bubble but again, no one considers them visionaries for that. Their incentive was a return on their investment, the bubble burst, the space was consolidated into a few mega-corporations, every product and service is intentionally shit and exploitative.
So it’s only really the last step where “enterprising minds” produce billionaires and that’s also the part no one likes. Sure Facebook without VC investment would have stayed a small platform that gets users via word of mouth and it would have just been an internet yearbook for colleges forever, but who cares? That’s the era of Facebook people liked, it’s the era of Meta being a multi-billion dollar behemoth that’s actually attributable to the incentive to get rich and everyone hates it.
>>2813039I remember being on Xiaohongshu during the Tiktok exodus, and one thing that confused our Chinese hosts was the disdain that Americans had for Elon Musk. They only get the PR sanitized version of him, so they think of him as being a modern Thomas Edison. While across the Great Firewall and the language barrier, us Americans get to see him up close and personal and end up hating Musk.
>>2813111There is a part of me that recognises every society has elites and wishes our current ones were better at PR. I'd like to live in a world where Musk was an amusingly geeky tech visionary rather than manifestly being little more talented than me, addicted to low status low autism score right wing slop, and of substantially worse taste, and the difference between these two worlds is just keeping the cunt off twitter. (That would also steer him more libertarian than nazi as a bonus) The manifest lack of elite taste under capitalism is one of the major aesthetic appeals of alternative systems. I can handle inequality (something I often forget) but the rulers can't be manifest cretins.
>>2813147It feels like it’s a fairly new circumstance with Musk where he’s connected himself with the general public in a public forum. Previously you’d not find out how unremarkable the wealthy are, because they’d hide from being too public for fear of people discovering exactly that.
I can only imagine Musk broke rank with that to get into flamewars online where he invariably comes off worse, because he is unironically a moron and arrogantly believes he is in fact remarkable.
>>2813147> I'd like to live in a world where Musk was an amusingly geeky tech visionary rather than manifestly being little more talented than me, addicted to low status low autism score right wing slop, and of substantially worse taste, and the difference between these two worlds is just keeping the cunt off twitter. nobody likes to talk about this anymore, but this is basically how many americans thought of musk during the obama years
>>2813237this is going to sound very soy and reddit, but I think we need a new Engels. A capitalist, perhaps even a billionaire, who openly uses his platform to say "look, I'm just a regular guy. I'm not a genius or a maverick. I didn't earn any of this. I just own property and exploit labor. Don't listen to the people who glaze me."
>>2813242Yes but that’s not Musk. Musk has an obsession with the letter X, he names his shit X (x.com, SpaceX, his son with the weird name has an X in it) because X supposedly represents the “unknown variable” whose value changes the calculation for all else.
Literally the guy is fucking looney tunes with the ego.
>>2813250>Yes but that’s not Musk. Of course not. I hope it didn't come off like I was suggesting that LOL
>Literally the guy is fucking looney tunes with the ego.Yes
>>2813250I see what happened here. I meant for
>>2813242 to be a reply to
>>2813147 >>2813111i wonder why he is promoted in china?
>>2813317musk begged the US government for protectionist policies to defend his cars from the superior chinese competition
>>2813948>Not only has there been a fall in demand for milk (with less being consumed in classrooms as the school year comes to a close), but processing plants are unable to deal with the rising amounts. >The state of Wisconsin is the biggest cheese producer in the US, and 90 percent of its milk is made into cheese. This means that it needs to be processed, but plants are full up and cannot take on the excess milk. Most farmers are not able to process their own milk, meaning they rely on plants to ensure the product gets to market. this does not sound like a problem you could resolve by giving the milk away
>An increasing number of US consumers are moving away from milk over ethical, environmental, and health concerns. Despite this, however, the US government is still handing out billions of dollars in subsidies each year to the dairy industry. Experts have stated that in doing so it’s supporting an “unsustainable” industry. and "short sighted economic policy" remains part of the equation.
>>2811686>destroyed instead of given away in order to stabilize pricesThis is true.
>>2811731>the actual operation of milk markets is substantially more complicated than thisThis is getting lost in details.
The following holds IN GENERAL in capitalism, it's not specific to a company or an industry: The goal is NOT to produce as much as possible at the price that covers cost, the goal is to maximize profits. When following that goal, it can be a better strategy to destroy some of the output rather than lower the price enough to be able to sell it all. The limit to lowering the price is not the point where the business breaks even, the limit is at a higher price point. And the destruction of stock is only the tip of the iceberg that is capitalist inefficiency, because this is the fallback strategy for when the capitalist overestimated demand. It is of course more profitable to not even produce the stuff just to destroy it. (And if cost of storage and destruction is high it makes sense to err well on the side of underproducing.) So what happens if capitalists estimate demand well is underemployment and underproduction.
In socialism the goal will be changed to produce the amount as close as possible to the demand at the price that covers cost: Producing a bit above or below that quantity can be taken care of by storage buffer, bigger discrepancies can be managed in various ways, the most obvious (and IMHO more elegant than other options like waiting lists) being price adjustments. These discrepancies are handled in a more symmetric fashion than in capitalism. The discrepancies in either direction are regarded as failures. When the produced quantity at cost-covering price is below demand, the raised price is first of all used for rationing purposes. The raised price is no reason to celebrate at the factory, neither for the bottom of the hierarchy nor the top. The raised price is evidence of a failure. It is certainly not used to pay a bonus out of that to people whose task it is to estimate demand. When there is over-supply, the stuff is not destroyed, instead the price is lowered below production cost.
The factory in socialism will not be a self-financing entity.
>>2814224This is basically a very good post to which I see little to add, so don't take the shortness of my reply as dismissive or either of these questions as an attempt to "gotcha" you:
- who do you propose sets prices and how?
- if the answer is firms and consumers much as now, how do you imagine their general incentive structure functioning? e.g. absent profit and higher incomes as the motivation for pairing price and supply in a particular way, is the motive prestige, or ideological commitment, or a more limited form of differential compensation, or what?
>>2814264Can be done by algorithm tracking inflows & stock levels & outflows with human override. Similar items are grouped and treated together for this (so it's not distinct firms doing their own thing). The humans in the loop are just doing a job. They may get a performance bonus based on how close their estimates are to how consumers actually behave. An increased price is for rationing, the increased price is not a source of additional wealth going to whoever sets the price higher in order to keep a little bit of stock in the buffer. Likewise lowering the price is not a source of distress for the price modifiers because their income does not come out of these sales. They look out for keeping the buffer within certain limits and try to set the price accordingly.
>>2814224You mean a break even entity. Its finances will be used by a state bank in according to directives & norms established by the state planning committee & its suborgans.
>>2814079>this does not sound like a problem you could resolve by giving the milk awayit certainly couldn't be resolved
profitably which is the whole problem with capitalism. you overproduce to outcompete the competition, but then destroy the surplus because giving it away is unprofitable. it keeps happening. This has been thoroughly documented since the 1790s.
>>2814457what do you propose to do with unprocessed milk when every milk processor in the state is at capacity? this isn't even a "keeping prices high" problem, it's a "the product is literally useless due to a supply chain bottleneck" problem.
you wouldnt even have food if it wasnt for him lmao. imagine being this ungrateful
>>2814661Sounds like a situation whereon milk processing capacity (& perhaps transport) needs to be increased, no?
>>2814683wow. he invented farming? I'm hearing this now for the first time.
>>2814748depends on whether milk suppliers are overproducing and milk processors are meeting demand accurately, or whether milk suppliers are meeting demand accurately and milk processors are underproducing.
>>2814774see engels on rodbertus
>>2811930 >>2814774Your framing is a bit weird because its treating final demand as if it counts for all stages of production. But demand for raw milk comes from milk processing & the latter's demand comes from final consumption. This is how it is dealt with in standard neoclassical as well, so this is even stranger if you acting as a higher level pro-capitalist troll.
In the USSR they used material balances to make sure that the outputs of an upstream sector matched the inputs of a downstream sector the other.
Therefore, assuming your example takes place under conditions of that kind of basic socialism, its highly likely that milk production capacity was expanded before milk processing capacity (maybe wrongly? processing & transit should usually be setup before production to reduce initial waste, unless some large initial buffer stocks are needed)
This is especially so because cows/sheep/etc. are a form of capital stock and therefore capacity, and it makes little sense if processing capacity & output was meeting final demand to already have had oversupply of milk sheep/cattle/etc.
>>2814985>In the USSR they used material balances to make sure that the outputs of an upstream sector matched the inputs of a downstream sector the other.In traffic engineering they do this to anticipate saturation between adjacent intersections.
>>2811601>elon musk has roughly $455 for every second he has been aliveI've pointed out similar things and retard lolberatarians actually use that as an opportunity to say "well this proves the labor theory of value wrong" as if it were a labor theory of compensation LMFAO
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