/siberia/ - Off-topic

Don't worry Anon, they have an angle

>cost them everything
No, it cost them the death of the company they're working with, which is a good thing for them, they both made bank liquidating it, and they have less competition

>even if it costs them everything in the long run?
When did this ever happen?

>>809839
read this picture

>>809844
the planet is being destroyed

It's historcally progressive to risk everything for short term profits

>>809857
Shortest leftist meme

>>809864
If only we could have 5 chihuahuaposters

>>809844
it literally happens all the fucking time. the best way to administer capitalism would be a keynesian social democracy, for example, but porky is so braindead they dont want to sacrifice a small portion of their profits in the short term to receive a larger amount in the long term, another example of capitalism being an irrational anarchic system

>>809839
incentives, incentives, incentives.
for example: if a CEO has performance related pay tied to share prices, he maximises his own income by taking actions that boost the share price, even if their long term outcome is bad for the company. It doesn't matter if you take a stable firm and pump-and-dump it to maximise pay over your 5-year stint as CEO at the expense of guaranteeing it goes bankrupt in year 6. this is a particular vulnerability in the anglo model of companies, which tends to prioritise extreme focus on one thing, leaving you vulnerable to a downturn in that market.

contrarily if you look at, say, Japan, firms are extremely risk averse. the reason Hitachi makes everything from nuclear reactors to laptops, from trains to vibrators, from electron microscopes to washer-dryers, is so that a downturn or bad product in any one market can't sink the organisation as a whole.

(obviously this raises the "but why did the US and Japan have different incentives" question, but that's a very long and mutually reinforcing process. e.g. the very fact the Japanese model is weird in the US will put off US investors, not to mention violate various US antitrust laws etc.)

>>809873
the best way to manage things would be more like welfare-neoliberalism + infrastructure, without the economic micromanagement or regulationism of Keynesianism. that said, you're basically right that the system is managed irrationally and the reason is, again, incentives.

the good ideas of neoliberalism are that overregulation is bad and that evolutionary processes can result in better outcomes than rational planning. the airline industry demonstrates both cases: the fuel efficiency of planes has skyrocketed, this has been complemented by a competitive environment encouraging airlines to actually fill their planes, ticket prices have fallen, and airlines have innovated new business models (like effectively becoming flying banks with their mileage systems) to make up for the fact that the airline industry as a whole is ironically chronically unprofitable, something which seems profoundly irrational but which has the real world effect of making travel cheaper than ever, which is a good thing.
(you can off course use the environment as a get-out clause here, but the world where airlines remained regulated would be a world with roughly the same amount of pollution thanks to less efficient aircraft flying half empty)

unfortunately, the incentives of actually-existing neoliberalism cut more or less the other way. existing firms don't want deregulation (why would they? by the very fact of existing, they're protected by it!), they want tax cuts on the rents they're extracting from their protected position. so neoliberalism devolves into tax-cut slop which, because of an obsession with fiscal rectitude, also becomes welfare-cut slop, which undermines the central thesis of neoliberal welfare theories.
basically:

• you should protect people instead of jobs - typesetters don't need regulations banning using digital printers, they need money and retraining.
  
• you should give people incentives to get off welfare, the most effective of which is to make sure they're always better off in work, so welfare payments should taper off slowly as your income goes up. (ideally implemented with a negative income tax band) the alternative is a big risk - and unlike CEOs, people are very risk averse - that you get off welfare into a job that pays only slightly better than unemployment, then immediately lose that job and wind up poorer.
  
• you should just give people money, they know their own needs best. you shouldn't have a series of arbitrary programs that don't allow people to make their own trade-offs.
  

e.g. if there's a fixed $1000 allowance for housing and a $150 allowance for food, it's a lose-lose situation if you rent a $1000 apartment that is fancier than you want because you can't rent a $800 apartment instead and enjoy $200 worth of food and $150 of other stuff. the state pays the same amount of money, an apartment is badly allocated, and you don't get the right balance of stuff. better to just give you a $1150 allowance to do with as you please!

but the results of neoliberal governments seeking cost savings has generally been to create more such arbitrary little programs (a $50 tax credit for single working mothers put in an investment account to be accessed when the child is 16.5 years old, funded by a windfall tax on redundancies in the printer industry) while cutting older, simpler programs on cost grounds, which completely fucks up the whole thing. what should see the state simplified and shrunken (or at least reallocated to public goods like infrastructure) instead sees an expanding morass of administration to handle bungled cost-saving efforts.

similarly and perversely, because they feel unable to touch the tax system for fear of upsetting the wealthy, governments now try to bring about the changes they want via new regulations, which usually (a) don't have the effects intended and (b) usually have a worse impact on economic outcomes than if they'd just used taxes-and-transfers.
(e.g. between tax rises to pay for welfare+retraining for unemployed print industry workers, running a deficit for welfare, or a regulation effectively firms continue hiring typesetters, the average politician would break for the latter, which would be publicly popular and avoid the devil of tax rises. but that's the dumbest option! it's like requiring taxi firms hire qualified horse-drivers!)
the snake eats its own tail.
if you ever see a neoliberal, you should put this case to him. not that his ideas failed on your terms but that they have failed in many areas on his, leading to the present situation where they are now on the back-foot against anti-market populist idiots and monsters on the one hand and rising sympathy for socialism on the other, for reasons that his own theories could predict but could not prevent, like Kalecki's warning about the class dynamics of full employment Keynesianism.

>>809887
thank you chatpgt for shilling unregulated capitalism

>>809839
The CEOs get paid based on short term growth, they probably won't even be in the job for 5 years, they pump the stock valuation and revenue with short term cost cutting and asset stripping, sell their stocks at the peak, then leave the job with a golden parachute while the company crashes and burns, and go join another company and do the same thing.

>>809873
Keynesianism was so shitty it collapsed even faster than the USSR.

>>809898
chatgpt would never spit out so many comma splices, run on sentences, mixed conventions (are we doing bullet points or (a) / (b)? ) or dumb typos ("off course" lol, OF course.)

as a purported anticapitalist, you should surely understand that regulated and unregulated capitalism are the same beast in different clothing. that "regulation" in the abstract means nothing. a regulation saying that you cannot start a company in order to protect existing airlines and a rule saying that you cannot put arsenic in baby food are not created equal simply by merit of being regulations.

what i am shilling is not neoliberalism itself (that would be as pointless as shilling Keynesianism) but a certain analysis of its rise and fall. "ah, ah, you're just shilling Keynesianism by recognising what Keynes got right" is stupid and childish in a world where Keynesianism is dead and gone. more interesting to focus on how this happened, and how indeed some Keynesian sympathisers knew it was coming. the same holds for neoliberalism, which has obviously gone the same way: some correct analyses of the flaws of the previous structure (do you really imagine they could've been successful with literally zero correct - or at least less wrong - proposals?), a rise to prominence and fatally flawed implementation, followed by an implosion due to its own contradictions and replacement by something else. we've not yet coined a term for what that "something else" is, but we're clearly living through it, and what's coming next will make you wish that "real" neoliberalism had worked just as surely as you secretly wish that "real" Keynesianism had worked and spared you the ravages of actually-existing neoliberalism.

>>809918
no chatgpt, i do not 'wish' to keep capitalism on life support via whatever reactionary reforms you may come up with.

>>809919
i have not proposed any reforms. you are illiterate.

>>809921
>the best way to manage things would be more like welfare-neoliberalism + infrastructure, without the economic micromanagement or regulationism of Keynesianism. that said, you're basically right that the system is managed irrationally and the reason is, again, incentives.
<i did not propose anything
bad job at lying, chatgpt

>>809915
did it collapse, or did the capitalist class simply abandon it for short term profits?

>>809887
quality post, though idk if i quite agree with the defense of neoliberalism. isnt it at least partially responsible for deindustrialisation and a shrinking of wages? that doesnt seem very efficient even in a capitalist perspective

>>809925
within a capitalist framework there are more and less efficient ways to administer the system, ignoring its inherent contradictions and trying to get the best result from it. reread the post and youll understand thats what hes trying to say

Mental illness.

>>809930
you clowns are discussing 'capitalism: the video game' and act as if there was a 'meta' that the 'players' ('capitalists') should follow, which they don't for whatever obscure reasons.
the more i read >>809887, the less sense it makes. there are so many uncommunicated assumptions, it's completely laughable.
the case study of the 'air line industry' is so completely and profoundly retarded, i have to revoke my assesment that it was shat out by an LLM. it was shat out by an absolute moron who has not the slightest grasp of anything he writes about.

>>809949
>which they don't for whatever obscure reasons.
its not obscure as a matter of fact everyones giving pretty clear answers. its not like anyones defending capitlaism here, idk why youre getting mad at this

>>809949
Why is the case study retarded? It's not like "airline deregulation was a success" is some niche contrarian opinion. I'd say it's a fairly common opinion even for aviation nerds (who're the most likely people to be against it for leading to the end of many famous airline brands and making stuff like airline fleet choices much more boring, which is much more relevant to the hobby than boring stuff like pic #2)

I was going to do a point-by-point on each claim in the example but I don't expect it to be worth the time (tl;dr they're all true, but downsides like many airlines going bankrupt or flying becoming less glamorous were left out to paint a purely rosy picture), so here's three funny things that I didn't know before.

1. Picrel
   

A wonderfully disingenuous ad from Delta Airlines who - in line with the thesis of >>809887 - lobbied against deregulation by arguing that airline deregulation was actually… regulation! The extreme, untested proposal of… letting airlines decide what airports to fly to and which ones to stop flying to… poses some real dangers!
(Funny at the time since this was already what states that only served one state like Southwest or PSA were doing - hence why they lobbied for deregulation - and even funnier in hindsight since Delta is one of the airlines that won out from deregulation and is still with us.)

1. https://anderson-review.ucla.edu/airline-shareholders-were-the-big-losers-from-deregulation/
   

An economic paper saying that consumers, employees, and even fuel sellers benefitted from deregulation in the long run - while airline shareholders lost it. Funny if true!

1. https://thebhc.org/node/97714
   

Just the abstract for a paper, but notes two funny things: the sort of obscene corruption the old airline regulators used to get up to as airlines tried to buy their favor, and the role of Ralph Nader in drawing attention to them and lobbying for deregulation.

>>809858
They are not the ones who are going to bear the costs of that.

>>809865
since it's short I assume you read it

It's called high time-preference, or classically, "risk". Personalities disposed to high time-preference are often poor since they demand short-term rewards over the long-term. With the stock market, the economy being a casino is easy to see.

>>810094
the excessively risk-averse also remain poor. e.g. the classic "would you take a guaranteed $50k or a 50% chance of $1mil" mathematically resolves in favour of taking the gamble (the "expected value" of the 50% chance is $500,000, way more than the $50k), but most people go for the guaranteed return.

the best thing of all to get really rich is to combine high time preference with risk tolerance. al gore, for example, is independently incredibly wealthy because he correctly bet on computerisation and computer networking taking off way back in the 1970s. most people on the other hand don't even buy index funds, even though they know the entire purpose of the economy is to make that line go up, because they're afraid of losing money or just living by default.
(of course, and unfortunately, the best thing to make you risk tolerant and low-time-preference is to be raised in comfortable and safe conditions where setbacks aren't ruinous and no matter what you'll have enough to get by… say, in a rich family.)

>>810109
two asterisks:

1. not disagreeing, just adding on.
   
2. inb4 "most people don't buy index funds because they're poor": even people with disposable income don't! many people leave money sitting in savings accounts because they're "safe" while stocks are "risky", even though most savings accounts offer below inflation returns. e.g. people prefer guaranteed loss of small amounts of money over taking a "risk" of losing more, even though the most likely scenario is that they gain money.

>>810109
>>810110
I try telling everyone I'm close to about index funds and even giving them a step by step guide on how to do it but I'm pretty sure nobody has actually done it.

Oh well at least I won't have any guilt about when I'm the wealthiest of everyone I know

>>810111
Hell I've even told favoured coworkers. I guess I'll just cry myself to sleep on my £30k of unearned income.

>>810109
>people are poor because theyre stupid
no, taking the 50 thousand is objectively the right choice there. youd be able to instantly pay off all of your debts, and maybe even start investing some of it to increase your revenue, whereas if you select the coinflip option you could simply gain nothing

>>810115
Yeah I was thinking 50 thousands is too high to be unattractive really

>>810115
>>810116
it's not about being stupid, it's about being risk averse. if you want to maximise how rich you are you have to take the risk. if you just want to be better off, you don't. don't think about it monetarily and cloud your judgement with how life-changing even $50k could be, think of it as a game: if you want to maximise your score, there is no point going for the safe option. if you just want to not lose then you take the safe option.

the index fund case is stupid (or at least irrational) on the other hand, since it's accepting being worse off in a situation where accepting a small amount of risk will make you better off most of the time. (which is useful for showing that the underlying trait is risk aversion and not just "prefers a small guaranteed gain over a big risky one.")

risk mainly. Better to have a profit now than a theoretically better profit later that may or may not exist.

>>810115
>>810116
Obviously 50k is significant but realistically is not going to last forever, 500k is wife changing money.

Well maybe it's about perspective, to me 50k wouldn't even be half of what I have now, if I had $0 maybe it would make sense to take it.

>>809962
>Why is the case study retarded
Because you can't even formulate coherently what your case study is supposed to show. What the intended outcome is supposed to be. From the OP, who asked
>Why porky loves short term gains over long term gains
You first babbled about 'Incentives'. So you go on and talk about CEOs. Which is the first confusion inducing point, because CEOs are not capitalists. They are managers. Of course there are incentives at play which influence their decision making. There are 'incentives' for every fucking living being on this planet. Hot tip: it might have to do with material conditions. Don't tell nobody tho, top secret shit.
Anyway, without you specifying what CEOs of what companies, the way you describe it, you seem to think of CEOs of Anglo/Burger style corporations (financialized corporations at that, but whatever).

Well enough, lets go on. You then start to talk about japanese CEOs. Or rather the structure of japanese conglomerates and how these differ from Anglo/Burger style corporations. Fair enough, this could be an interesting thing to analyze. Delving into how the political economy of the anglosphere and japan developed in different ways. But fuck it, you handwave this shit away, its all about 'incentives' and too much effort to actually research/think about/write down.

Thanks i guess. Its all about 'incentives' or somesuch.


Then you proceed to shift the topic entirely. You start talking about 'optimal ways to manage capitalism'. Or rather 'things'. Whatever 'things' is. Best way to manage is, according to you
>the best way to manage things would be more like welfare-neoliberalism + infrastructure, without the economic micromanagement or regulationism of Keynesianism
Okay. Lets see.
>welfare-neoliberalism
complete schizoid garbage. without any further elaboration, this doesn't make any sense. neither in 'classical economic' terms, nor marxist analysis of political economy.
>+ infrastructure
Yeah well - what about infrastructure? Does it fall from the heavens? Will it be magically willed into existence? Does someone somehow have to plan and build and maintain it?
>without the economic micromanagement or regulationism of Keynesianism
Hoe is Keynesianism about economic micromanagement and regulationism? What is 'economic micromanagement'? What is 'regulationism'? Made up garbage neoliberal propaganda is what it is. No anylsis, no concrete examples. Just bullshit made up by charlatans based on their 'incentives'.
>that said, you're basically right that the system is managed irrationally and the reason is, again, incentives.
How is the system managed 'irrationally'? What are the 'incentives'? How do they lead to 'irrationality'? Is the system itself 'rational' in the first place? What if the system itself, its inherent contradictions, are what gives birth to these 'incentives'?

Whatever, lets move to your braindead 'case study'.
>the good ideas of neoliberalism are that overregulation is bad and that evolutionary processes can result in better outcomes than rational planning.
First of all: what is 'good', what is 'bad', in what context, in what relation. 'good' and 'bad' are not fixed categories but subjective judgments based on ones position in a given context. since we started with talking about capitalists being short sighted, i have to assume we talk about what is 'good' or 'bad' for capitalists. lets assume we are talking about that.
>overregulation
yet another meaningless buzzword, mostly used by neo liberal propagandists to shill for 'deregulation'. in the context we are talking about, we have to assume that reducing 'overregulation' then is 'good' for capitalists and what drives, or to take your terminology, 'incentivises', capitalists is appropriating profits to amass ever more capital.
>and that evolutionary processes can result in better outcomes than rational planning
here is the first time i am truly at a loss. what is this shit even supposed to mean? what are 'evolutionary processes' and, the way you make it sound, why are they the opposite of 'rational planning'? this is, again, literally brain dead capitalist propaganda, repition of talking points for the poorly educated who do not know any better, to denounce 'rational planning' (as if any given corporation wouldn't 'plan rationally', even under neo liberalism). this bullshit is just anticommunist propaganda, nothing else.
we will now finally come to your 'case study':
>the airline industry demonstrates both cases
alright. first of all: what is the 'air line industry' anyway? first thing i think of is service providers whose business model is flying paying customers from A to B. Also you will give examples for both, 'deregulated evolutionary processes' vs 'rational planning'
>the fuel efficiency of planes has skyrocketed
Alright. Hold on for a minute. You said you want to talk the 'air line industry'. But what exactly are we talking now? Fuel efficiency is the result of the science, engineerng and manufacturing required to build air planes. So are we talking that now? Is that included in 'air line industry'? Besides - what is this a case for? 'Evolutionary processes' or 'rational planning'? I can't tell because you dont say. Guess you will elaborate.
>this has been complemented by a competitive environment encouraging airlines to actually fill their planes
Alright. How is the fact that airlines are not retards and trying to sell as many tickets as there is place in their planes 'complementing' fuel efficiency of air planes? How do you think industrial enginerring of highly complex machines works? What is this a 'case' for? Is trying to sell as many tickets as you have seats an 'evolutionary process' or 'rational planning'?
>ticket prices have fallen
Like the price of every commodity produced unter capitalism ever.
>and airlines have innovated new business models (like effectively becoming flying banks with their mileage systems) to make up for the fact that the airline industry as a whole is ironically chronically unprofitable
So the great thing about 'deregulation' is running companies on a loss, thus making them coming up with 'innovative business models' (as if customer loyalty programs were invented by unprofitable air lines).
>something which seems profoundly irrational but which has the real world effect of making travel cheaper than ever, which is a good thing.
Why is this a good thing? For whom? By your judgement? For capitalists? I can't tell.

Seriouly - what the actual fuck. Read Marx.

>>810131
>How is the system managed 'irrationally'? What are the 'incentives'? How do they lead to 'irrationality'?
i mean these are all pretty basic marxist stances though, arent they? thats one of marxs main points in capital

Tbh it doesn't matter the "style" of capitalist managemebt and how rational or irrational the capitalists are, the irrationality is in the "necessity" of an accumulation based economy and the way everything is set up to facilitate that.

Also tbh marx didn't deny the possibility of a peaceful transition to socialism in some countries if the capitalists wisen up

>>809839
Bourgeoisie are not in control capital itself is. Its the only entity with agency.

>>809865
not a meme, izza poast

>>810131
you expect things from a post that it was obviously never intended to deliver. e.g.
>There are 'incentives' for every fucking living being on this planet. Hot tip: it might have to do with material conditions
yes: but "material conditions" is familiar to every poster here, while i am quite possibly the only leftypol user who will tell you to look at incentives. part of my purpose is to invite people to look at the problem in a new way.
>Then you proceed to shift the topic entirely.
because that's a reply to an entirely different post! someone said Keynesianism was a better way of managing capitalism, so there was an extended digression about why this isn't the case.

i may return and do a fuller response, but i am not convinced it is a good use of time. first of all, you've replied "line by line" in a bad faith way which makes a well structured response impossible, second of all you're clearly not very good at it. there are "no concrete examples" of "overregulation" you say, right before getting mad at a concrete example about airline deregulation which - and i know this requires you to draw a very obvious inference - must have been overregulated if deregulating it was a good thing. "what are the incentives, how do they lead to irrationality" - this is answered at length if you keep reading! the incentives are for legislators to focus on tax cuts that benefit incumbent firms over deregulation which benefits new firms! this is like you reading an essay that goes "this paper will demonstrate x" and immediately going
>This paper will demonstrate x
<HOW? HOW WILL IT DO THAT?
read on! read for the year! read on! read a little! i'll read on!

given this, trying to address any of the complex points (like the distinction between an evolutionary and a planned process) would be a doomed endeavour. so the only points that feel worth addressing (because they are quite brief and easy) are:

• fuel efficiency: in a marketplace where the government sets ticket prices and restricts competition so that airlines are always profitable, the relative advantage of buying more expensive, more fuel efficient planes is lower than in one where airline competition is a bloodbath. e.g. airlines ask for more fuel efficient planes, rather than cheaper-to-manufacture planes. the value of an engine, as a share of the value of the plane as a whole, has skyrocketed over time. (e.g. the most valuable part is its highly efficient engine.) "science, engineering and manufacturing" are not some magical silver bullet. they will make you a less efficient vehicle if you ask for it! (look at US drivers shifting from normal cars to stupid trucks that aren't even useful as trucks.)
  

moreover: there is a direct case of deregulation here. the government used to require 3+engines for overwater passenger flights, necessitating a redundant third engine. this restriction has progressively been progressively relaxed until now, where you can (in theory) fly a twin engined plane around the world.

• "like the price of every commodity produced under capitalism": incorrect. as you recognise, the airline industry is a service industry, and service industry costs have risen just as often as they've fallen. airlines are anomalous. in the US, rail tickets were cheaper than plane tickets until ~1982, and since then plane tickets have been cheaper - bar one blip during coronavirus. the same is often true in the UK despite a much better passenger rail network. (and certainly, the cost of flying to europe is often lower than the cost of taking a train domestically.) now, some of this is due to the fundamentally different economics of railways vs airlines, but those economics were fundamentally different before deregulation as well.
  
• "how is the fact that airlines are not retards and trying to sell as many tickets": because they weren't doing this before! as mentioned: planes used to fly half empty!! they complement one another because not only is the fuel burn per-seat reduced by using a more efficient plane, but the fuel burn per passenger drops when you add more passengers. (e.g. if a flight uses 1kg of fuel per seat and has 100 seats but is only half full, that's 2kg of fuel per passenger. fill the plane, and you halve the fuel use per passenger!)
  
• "why is this a good thing, for whom": why? not worth my time. for whom? cheap travel is good for passengers. you claimed earlier that i am a moron unfamiliar with anything i'm talking about, but i cannot imagine how you put together "for capitalists?" if you are remotely familiar with the airline industry. quite famously it is a disaster zone for capitalists, such that warren buffet once joked
  

>if a farsighted capitalist had been present at Kitty Hawk, he would have done his successors a huge favor by shooting Orville down

given your difficulty with my writing (which i will admit is slightly disorganised but rarely difficult), i find it very hard to imagine you have read Marx and harder yet to imagine you have understood him.