Pepsi and Lay’s pulled from supermarkets in Europe over price increases

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[–]HugodeCrevellier 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

Yes, and corporations, more generally, are greed-driven organizations, systemically so, i.e. designed to be so.

And Adam Smith's Invisible hand is, of course, a myth.

And this myth provides the narrative for the plutocratic/sociopathic scam currently destroying civilization.

[–]binaryblob 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

And Adam Smith's Invisible hand is, of course, a myth.

It's not a myth in an infinitely large universe of perfectly rational consumers. I think the market works reasonably well for commodities like fertilizer. It's just that a lot of products and services are ultimately not really commodities. For example, oil has been (and still is) a geopolitical instrument; not a pure commodity. Hydrogen could be a real commodity once the oil runs out.

If you look at computer chips, there are just three entities in the world that can produce the smallest (and thus commercially viable ones) and the barrier to entry is impossibly big. Despite the appearance of competition, that's not a market anymore. Perhaps if we had a great Federation of Planets and there were hundreds of independent companies, then we could say there was a working market. In a way, the market was an invention for a time with unsophisticated products.

The supermarket business is also not really that competitive, because most people just go to the one that is nearest. Now, if there were 20 supermarkets stacked on each other and reaching every floor would take the time time (like happens on the ultra-low latency co-located computers at exchanges), then one could argue there was a fair competitive environment.

[–]HugodeCrevellier 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Sure, theoretically, in 'an infinitely large universe of perfectly rational consumers', Smith's magically benevolent invisible hand might arise.

But this is feels like some Capitalist version of that last bastion of Communist apologists, to claim that the reason it was so catastrophic towards human happiness is that all previously applied Communism was 'not true Communism!'

For societies to actually improve, where citizens can be freer and happier, we may want to start ignoring the two idiotic 'ism's that have plagued the 20th century (and certainly not to feel allegiance to them!) and to instead start looking for policies that actually make sense.

[–]binaryblob 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

and to instead start looking for policies that actually make sense.

That's basically what I implied, didn't I? A world without intellectual property would also be interesting from an academic perspective. That is, if Coca Cola can produce cola, but only if all everyone knows the recipe and all their processes. I am not saying that we should switch to such a system in one day, but there are a lot of companies that do things in sub-optimal ways where I would love to work for an hour to fix their broken stuff, which right now isn't really practical.

If AI ever becomes a thing, I imagine that everything humanity has invented will be considered trivial and worthless by these machines. (This is also the vision of Stallman, which is why the GPL exists. Ironically, he stole most of Emacs, however. )