Imagine harassing the working class for deciding to spend a meager amount ($500 console that has typical life cycle of 7 years) on something that might bring them just a little bit of comfort after slaving away for a majority of their waking day
The opiate of the masses, but also you tell them pain is virtuous.
I still don’t comprehend how we have a system where you have to borrow money to make borrowing money cheaper, and you have to open random accounts at department scores to help you pay for your car better?
It never was explained very well to me but I hate it and want it to go away
Malcolm X's father puts it pretty well: ‘Credit is the first step into debt and back into slavery,’
That's about all you need to know, really.
It's so dumb that you also have to intentionally get into debt and pay it back to get a credit score so you can buy a house.
Assuming you have a monetary economy, credit is both necessary and good. You shouldn't be constrained by immediate cash surplus.
The problem is interest on credit (aka usury), particularly when that rate is higher than the household rate of income growth.
The Marxist take on this is "just abolish money". The Succ view is "just abolish debt". The Neoliberal view is "just lower interest rates". But, at the end of the day, you can't just not have credit in a monetary system.
The existence of money necessarily produces misery. By extension, while credit may suit the monetary system, it isn't good.
Money allows individuals to engage in commerce without a prior working social relationship. And it grants a fungibility to goods and services, such that you can gauge their exchange value relatively easily.
This is preferable to a Gift Economy, where one needs strong social bonds to discourage the free rider problem.
Credit allows a certain degree of Gift Economy to be incorporated into the monetary system, as individuals are able to obtain fungible monetary gifts. This grants them the ability to build capital stock and access seed money that would otherwise only be available to wealthy social circles. One of the big challenges of early 20th-century communism was in how to encourage entrepreneurship without falling back into a capitalist economic state. The East European Soviets leaned too heavily towards central control and produced a great deal of cronyism as a result. However, German Mittelstand and their 21st century East Asian peer systems get around the stagnation of a fully-centralized economy with a functional credit system that is not a perpetual financial obligation on the recipient.
Private for-profit credit systems become problematic, because they no longer employ gifts, but binding contracts enforced through state power. Rather than extending communal surplus to entrepreneurial individuals, we're establishing claims on their productivity potentially in excess of their capacity to produce. The western system's embrace of private credit causes western leftists to fear it too much.
Sorry. Here, let me try it this way.
Monetary Economy + Gift Economy make Communism Work Gooder
It never was explained very well to me but I hate it and want it to go away
The gist of the thing is that people who are going to lend money to others want a way to know how likely they are to pay it back. A credit score is [theoretically] a measure of how reliable someone is with paying back debt. Thus, in order to increase it you have to take on debt and pay it back. Having a low credit score means that you don't have a history of paying back debt, so they ratchet up the rates to make up for the increased risk. On an individual level it doesn't make any sense, but from a higher level statistical viewpoint, the higher interest rates balance out the risk of nonpayment amongst a group.
you have to borrow money to make borrowing money cheaper
technically it can just be few dollars, there are some neoliberal startups that offer cheap loans to build credit
The console is backward compatible (mostly), and the resale price of a PS4/pro would be pretty decent right now, so it's probably the cheapest you could get the console for a while. If you could secure a preorder.
It was people blowing vape vapor into the cooling vents.
So far as I can tell, it's the same drive that motivates people to upgrade their phones every year?
Because you're likely to keep it for 5-7 years and the price will stay the same for at least the next 2-3
"To the capitalist, every luxury of the worker seems to be reprehensible, and everything that goes beyond the most abstract need – be it in the realm of passive enjoyment, or a manifestation of activity – seems to him a luxury."
No, you see OUR scores are based on enigmatic black magic and controlled entirely by private interests so they're GOOD. In CHINA it's the COMMUNIST GOVERNMENT controlling the scores and making all their methods FREE AND OPEN so people know what effects their score which is BAD
In communist China, a nebulous score is used to turn citizens against each other
The PC is not the master race: that's reactionary nonsense. It is, however, the next obvious step in the dialectical march of historical progress. Consoles are the horse-drawn plows of our times.
you have to give that having mass produced pcs makes it better to make it available for a larger group of people
Entertainment is a need, absolutely. However a Playstation is only one specific form of entertainment out of many. I struggle to imagine many types of people who have a mental or physical need for a specific console as their only acceptable form of entertainment.
Thats not what I'm suggesting at all. What I'm saying is that while entertainment is a basic human need, specific forms of entertainment are merely preferences within a need.
Think about it this way. Food is a basic human need, but specific types of food preferences are not needs. If I really want a cheese pizza and someone gives me a roast dinner instead, my need for food is met but my preferences are not.
Poor people should be able to get things that they want, of course. But a specific gaming console is never really going to cross the line between want and need in my book.
I mean, there are other way to entertain yourself. Some of them are even cheaper than a $500 console you have to buy $50 games for.
I mean, who am I tell people how to spend their money, but the cheapest entertainment method? Come on now.
I've bought my $200 laptop like a decade ago and have been watching movies and shows, coding hobby projects ever since without paying a penny. Now that's cheap.
A $500 machine that locks you into buying games that cost like half of median monthly salary in India? That seems like first world entertainment to me.
It's the one thing I haven't tried, so it's worth a shot right?
gods what happened to games writing?
(well ok, outside of exceptions like Outer Worlds and Disco Elysium)
You can't even check the credit score without it taking a hit (apparently), so...
