this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2024
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The Internet in Ancient Times
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Welcome to the stone age... or the bronze age... or the iron age... heck, anything with an 'age' is welcome, except our modern age or any ages to come.
This is about what the internet was like thousands of years ago back when it all started. Like when Darius the Great hired mercenaries via Craigslist or when Egypt invented emojis.
CODE OF LAWS
1 - Be civil. No name calling, no fighting, keep your flint hand axes inside your leather pouches at all times.
2 - Keep the AI stuff to a minimum. It gets annoying and old fashioned memes are more fun for everyone.
3 - None of this newfangled modern 21st century nonsense. We don't even know what "21st century" means.
4 - No porn/explicit content. The king is sensitive about these things.
5 - No lemmy.world TOS violations will be tolerated. So there.
6 - There is no ~~rule~~ law 6.
Laws of justice which Hammurabi, the wise king, established. A righteous law, and pious statute did he teach the land. Hammurabi, the protecting king am I. I have not withdrawn myself from the men, whom Bel gave to me, the rule over whom Marduk gave to me, I was not negligent, but I made them a peaceful abiding-place. I expounded all great difficulties, I made the light shine upon them. With the mighty weapons which Zamama and Ishtar entrusted to me, with the keen vision with which Ea endowed me, with the wisdom that Marduk gave me, I have uprooted the enemy above and below (in north and south), subdued the earth, brought prosperity to the land, guaranteed security to the inhabitants in their homes; a disturber was not permitted. The great gods have called me, I am the salvation-bearing shepherd, whose staff is straight, the good shadow that is spread over my city; on my breast I cherish the inhabitants of the land of Sumer and Akkad; in my shelter I have let them repose in peace; in my deep wisdom have I enclosed them. That the strong might not injure the weak, in order to protect the widows and orphans, I have in Babylon the city where Anu and Bel raise high their head, in E-Sagil, the Temple, whose foundations stand firm as heaven and earth, in order to bespeak justice in the land, to settle all disputes, and heal all injuries, set up these my precious words, written upon my memorial stone, before the image of me, as king of righteousness.
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That's not what we would have to give up, what we would have to give up is a small portion of the population globe-trotting 24/7 on private jets and buying yachts for their yachts.
You're fellating robber-barons and buying into the bullshit propaganda that without our hugely unequal economic system you wouldn't be allowed to have a computer.
The numbers don’t add up. There are 2781 billionaires in the world with a combined net worth of $14.2 trillion. If you wiped them all out and spread that wealth evenly across the world’s 8.2 billion people that’s only $1731 per person.
Sure, that’s going to help immensely for people in very low CoL countries but it’s basically nothing for an average American.
The point isn't just to take their money and redistribute it it's to get rid of a profit driven and privately owned system in favor of a democratic economy where workers get the value of their labor.
Think of all the private enterprises that reproduce so much work between themselves. Why does every merger get followed by huge layoffs and restructuring? Because we have so much wasted redundant effort.
Consider also how much overproduction we have when it comes to basic needs. People don't go hungry because of lack of food, we waste food on an industrial scale. People don't go unclothed because of lack of clothes, we have dedicated landfills for "fast fashion" items that don't even get sold before being tossed let alone worn once. We have more houses than unhoused by a double digit factor.
All of this waste because we let profit guide production and let private ownership reap all of the value. An economy for the people and owned by the people would give you more benefit than $1000.
I'm proposing a cooperative economy rather than a competitive economy. I'm proposing socialism.
It costs far, far, more to support a billionaire class than the wealth they personally hold.
Do you have numbers on this?
For example: https://www.oxfam.ca/news/richest-1-emit-as-much-planet-heating-pollution-as-two-thirds-of-humanity/
That paper is mostly talking about the richest countries, not individuals, and I don’t buy it.
Norway has nationalized all of its oil profits into a sovereign wealth fund that comprises the pension fund for all its citizens. Yet that doesn’t change the amount of oil they produced.
If every oil producing country in the world did as Norway did we wouldn’t have any oil billionaires but we’d still have to deal with climate change. These countries would still be the richest in the world, they would just have less inequality inside them.
That’s not how that works either. Money is an artificial construct. Single billionaire doesn’t have any mythical wealth that could be redistributed because if it happened the wealth wouldn’t be created in the first place in the economic system where wealth gets redistributed.
Not to mention the wealth equals companies stocks. It is just paper, a database entry. It’s worthless but we all agreed that it isn’t.
Billionaire wealth is just imaginary situation maintained by sanctioned violence of police and state. There is no mythical wealth that would suddenly cure hunger or homelessness. There are just imaginary digits that would plummet to 0 the moment you want to take them out