Yeah sounds very similar. And weird coincidence, but the guy I’m talking about is also German. Lives in the US now, but his parents don’t speak English, he came here as a kid I believe.
I’ve known a guy for like 20 years, currently in his 60s, who firmly believes that anthropogenic climate change is entirely false.
He has a bachelors degree in physics, a bachelors degree in mathematics, and a Ph.D in economics. He’s written a handful of high level Econ textbooks, he’s worked as a professor off and on at 3 or 4 respected universities here in the US. He was most recently employed at a supply chain consulting firm, making an ungodly amount of money.
By all accounts, he’s an extremely smart, well-educated, well-read guy. But holy shit if that boomer isn’t constantly reposting the most transparently fake anti-science nonsense on his Facebook page. Think, “New research proves that Climate Change is a liberal myth” - The Religious Conservative Storm.
Just demonstrates how it doesn’t matter how educated someone is if they don’t think critically about information that confirms their expectations.
Ahhh okay, thank you so much for clueing me in haha.
I’m just like this too, but you have to remember that for every person like us, there’s a person like my wife, who’s buying garbage that she sees on instagram ads nearly every week.
I beg her to at least search for the item and buy it directly so that the website she’s on isn’t getting revenue for ads. It’s petty but makes me feel better.
I’ve used arch for the past 10 years or so as my primary OS, and it only took 7 or 8 of those years to get the OS set up.
/s in all seriousness, I kind of get what you’re saying. But I don’t think that having a bad experience is the goal at all though. I think the goal is to provide an OS that lets users decide on exactly what collection of packages they want on their system, and to provide packages that are up to date and unmodified from their upstream.
Setting up your system additively comes with a cost, though. It’s way less convenient than just installing something that someone else has configured.
To me personally, I think the one-time upfront cost of setting up arch is less burdensome than dealing with configuration files that have been moved to non-default locations (transmission-daemon on Debian-based distros is one example), packages being seriously out of date and thus missing new features and bug fixes (neovim), and dealing with cleaning up packages if you prefer to use non-default software and don’t want a ton of clutter.
Definitely valid to prefer a preconfigured system, I just think it’s a misrepresentation to say that the point of arch is to be difficult, or that configuration takes a ton of time for users of arch. Maybe learning to use arch takes longer, but learning to use arch is just learning to use Linux, so it’s hard for me to see that as a bad thing. And it doesn’t take that long to learn, I was more productive in arch after a couple days than I’ve ever been on *buntu, Debian or Mint.
I think this answer misses the mark a little bit with regards to the context of what it is about capitalism that causes so much controversy.
People who critique capitalism aren’t usually advocating for an economic system completely devoid of private ownership (though some are). They’re often raising issue with a certain type of capital ownership.
Say you’re the owner of a sprocket manufacturing corporation, and I’m a worker. You yourself don’t work, you just inherited a sprocket empire from your grandfather, who founded that sprocket empire using funds from selling his emerald mines that were worked by slaves.
I put in an honest days work 5 days a week, and in those 5 days, I produce $2000 worth of sprockets. It costs $10 per week to maintain the sprocket machines, $10 per week for electrical power to cover my sprocket making activities, $30 per week to repay the loan that was taken to build the factory, and $50 per week in other miscellaneous expenses needed to allow me to make sprockets.
That means that of the $2000 worth of sprockets I produced, $1900 of profit was generated.
You pay me a salary of $500 per week, and collect $1400 per week from my (and each other laborer’s) work.
The point of criticism is that you’re accumulating wealth, which other people had to work to produce, without doing any work yourself. You’re simply a parasitic freeloader on society because of an arbitrary concept of “ownership” over something that you don’t use personally.
Some responses to these criticisms include the following:
“You should just negotiate for a higher salary, or go work somewhere that’s paying more.”
This is the example from classical economic theory, and there are a whole handful of reasons that it doesn’t work. The voluntary exchange between a worker and a capitalist (meaning one who owns the means of production) isn’t actually (fully) voluntary. A worker who finds his working conditions unsatisfactory can’t reasonably just choose not to work. The threat of financial ruin, homelessness, and starvation act as a metaphorical gun to the head of the laborer giving the capitalist a significant negotiating advantage.
Add to this the fact that it’s been theorized and demonstrated that capitalism tends toward regulatory capture and monopoly, and you have a situation where the means of production become more and more concentrated in the hands of a group of elites, while the workers’ bargenaining power becomes weaker and weaker due to less competition in the labor market.
“The capitalist deserves the profits that they extract because of [this work that they’ve done]”
If the owner of the factory is functioning as a floor manager, they should be paid a fair salary for being a floor manager. If they’re working as a director, they are entitled to a director’s salary. These critiques of capitalism aren’t saying that there should be no hierarchy in an enterprise (though some alternatives to capitalism do call for that). Just that the only people who are entitled to the wealth from something that’s produced are those who are working to produce it.
This same thing goes for other forms of capital ownership too, by the way. Landlords are a classical example. I’ve heard it claimed that landlords are entitled to their rents because many of them work so hard at repairs and managing their properties. They’re totally entitled to be compensated for any labor they engage in, but the wealth that they extract from tenants far exceeds the value of the labor that they supply. Which is kind of the whole point of rental property, if “investors” couldn’t extract a passive income (income in excess of work performed), they wouldn’t be buying homes and then renting them out.
How weird. My sample size is now 2, I think I’m ready to draw a conclusion and only consider evidence that confirms it going forward.