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As people said, you can backup your private keys to a flash drive. You can put them in a safe deposit box. You can give them to your lawyer or other fiduciary with a legal responsibility to act in your best interests (who also knows how to protect digital property if they keep digital copy). You could write it with lemon juice onto the back of the Declaration of Independence at the National Archives. You could have a laser thingie that displays it on a wall surgically implanted into your arm. Pretty much all the ways people protect gold or cash in the real world you can do with a piece of paper with your private key.

Well, if those licenses are entries on the blockchain, they could be transferred on the blockchain. You could sell your game used when you’re bored of playing it. You can’t play it after you sell it but someone else can. Publishers hate resale markets though, when people buy used games they don’t make any money. So they’ll probably never go for this.

If we controlled the world government, then what are all these politicians who run on a platform of exposing the secret government that already controls the world going to do?

Spider Mastermind is a pushover, Cyberdemon is the best boss in Doom.

Why would being a good leader be easy?

I don’t know whether that would help as much as you think it will. I just got out of the military, and there are definitely certain people who started out taking a lot of shit from people just like you did at that rank, but their motivation to rank up was because they couldn’t wait to become the people giving people shit.

Last year I could cast episodes of DS9 I get from Paramount+ through Amazon Prime to my parents’ TV. This year I can’t, likely as an anti-piracy measure. So I hooked my device up via HDMI. Still couldn’t watch it on the TV. You know what? I’m gonna go complain to them before I stop subscribing.

Usually when a customer talks to a customer service agent, that’s the only customer service agent they’re going to interact with that week. So they treat the customer service agent as though the converse is true, that they are the only customer the customer service agent will interact with that week, forgetting that they are actually the 10,000th.

Compared to those pain points building a modern PC should be a breeze. CPUs go in Zero Insertion Force sockets so as long as you remember to lift the little lever you won’t bend any pins. People don’t even wear static discharge wrist bands anymore (all though it couldn’t hurt) or worry about shorting things out. And power connectors only fit one way unlike the AT power connector.

Speaking of breeze your only pain point might be making sure you have enough air circulation for cooling all that gear.

AFAIK the only reason one would rather fight extradition to the U.S. in the UK than fight extradition to the U.S. in Sweden is because one committed a heinous crime in Sweden.

He ran out the clock for the rape charge against him in Sweden? What a scumbag.

We don’t have a lot of records of what speakers of the Proto-Indo-European language were thinking because they lived c. 4500-2500 BC and didn’t have their own writing. I think the for the earliest writing we have of an Indo-European language gendered nouns had already been invented.

Some of them are, some are not. Probably most are not, I think the overall probability of “doing OK” is less than 50%.

Is someone with the power to grant promotions or dock pay not a representative of the owner, who has all those powers? Sure if the workers all own shares then they are also owners, but hiring and firing are actions performed by owners or their representatives. Workers perform labor.

It’s a socialist model of organization, but if it’s operating in a capitalist economy, it benefits capitalism as a model to run an economy, not socialism.

Also no, not everyone is a worker. Not everyone is equal. Someone (or a group of someones) has the power to hire/fire, or dock pay to discourage poor performance, or grant promotions to incentivize superior performance. Someone has the power to alter the distribution of resources, because once a group of humans reaches over 150 or so they form hierarchies because it’s just too difficult to keep peer relationships with more than about 150 people. So someone is given power to speak for more than oneself, they speak for the group, and therefore have more power than a person who speaks for only oneself. That person is not a worker, now they are a politician, or a bureaucrat, or a manager, or a chieftain, or something, they are not like the others, they have more power.

No, I completely acknowledge capitalists largely care about their investments in capital and don’t really care so much about workers as long as they are working. But at least I know where their incentives are, what they’re trying to do. It’s difficult to predict how people are going to act if you don’t know what their incentives are, and if you can’t predict how people are going to act then your life is less stable.

And “direct ownership” meaning like a co-op or whatever, nothing wrong with that. Collective ownership of a business is totally fine within a capitalist economy. There’s still a concept of ownership. I wish more businesses were run that way. Well, a lot of start-ups kinda are now that I think about it. People get some pay in stock options and the like. I think unions should own more shares in a company so the incentives of both the union and management are aligned to make the company money, but it’s hard to get the right balance.

Yes, tools don’t make things, people using tools produce things. And capitalism as a tool has been used to produce a lot of things, a lot more than socialism. But like any tool, you don’t want to use the same one all the time for everything. Economics is about incentives, and different systems put the incentives in different places. You don’t want to run a prison on capitalism because it incentivizes imprisoning people. But if you’re running a country on a planned economy it’s difficult to incentivize people to work harder just because the government said so, even if it was a democratic decision that people should work harder.

Workers do have a say. They own their labor. If they are educated and organized enough they can bring a corporation to its knees, because corporations can’t do anything with their capital without labor. Just because I’m arguing capitalism has merits doesn’t mean I don’t think there should be strong unions, or shared ownership of companies, or regulation of markets.

I don’t want to do a job I don’t want to do just because the majority voted that I should do it either, really. I can count on people to vote for their own self-interest, but I can’t count on them to vote for mine.

In order for things to be a product of capitalism, you have to show they can’t be made outside of it.

OK then, what has socialism produced? Remember you have to show what it produced can’t be made under capitalism, or any other economic system.

Anyone can tell someone they’re wrong, but if you can’t explain why, why should they believe you?

I’m not saying it gets you the job you want, I’m saying no one can make you do a job you don’t want to do. People can incentivize you, with money. And I think collective organizing and bargaining is important to make things fair. I hear German firms have a union representative on the board, that seems pretty smart.

And it needs to be regulated. The government needs to force firms to pay to mitigate harmful externalities as well as incentivize positive externalities. And there should be social programs to take some of the edge off market fluctuations, like free or cheap training, help finding employment, cushioning some of the effects of market fluctuations for the average person.