They should make batteries that swap out completely so you can load a fully charged one in in a few seconds and let your old one charge while you’re off driving somewhere else. Or you just exchange the battery permanently like with some propane tanks.

Is it more anti competitive than McDonald’s only selling McDonald’s burgers or preventing you from bringing Taco Bell tacos in from outside?

The current US Federal Trade Commission is quite agressive compared to other FTCs historically.

People getting richer doesn’t automatically make someone else poorer. The total amount of resources the human species has access to is constantly growing as our productive power increases. In fact, most of the time the total productive power increase is directly linked to someone getting richer.

Wealth doesn’t generate itself, and no human can generate a billion dollars in value alone, even by working 170-hour weeks.

Sure they can. J.K. Rowling is a billionaire. How many people did she exploit by writing 7 books? The people who worked on the trains or in the coffee shops she hung around and bought coffee from? The idea that people only collect wealth by depriving someone else of it is a pre-modern understanding. Same with the idea that value is related to hours worked.

People don’t want to hear that. They want to keep believing that they’re poor not because they made a suboptimal choice but because the system conspired against them. My advice is pretend rich people aren’t real and make your life and the people’s around you the best you can.

Why don’t we send more people to private school then? Start with the easy one.

I don’t think anyone means literally one person did all the work when they say “self made.” Also, you as an individual pay for most of the things you get from the rest of society. You’re still earning it, more or less.

If your argument is basically just conspiracy theory, than I don’t know what to tell you.

I do believe productivity has increased quite a bit more than wages, but that makes sense if you think about it. Productivity gains in the last few decades are not due to workers getting more skilled or working harder (which may still be a factor), they’re because of technology, automation, information science, and global trade networks. If my boss upgrades my computer such that I can produce things twice as fast, why should I get paid more?

Other person here.

I’d say destructiveness of humans is kind of a Bell curve shape where the X axis is wealth. Cavemen don’t affect the environment that much mostly because there can’t be that many of them. Their production methods can’t sustain large or dense populations. Then people in 1900 are quite destructive because they can sustain billions of people while spewing pollutants, etc. Then people today are less destructive because we have the wealth to care about such things. Wealthy countries are doing pretty well.

90% of the stuff you encounter day to day would have been considered science fiction only a few decades ago. That doesn’t answer whether capitalism actually requires growth, which it doesn’t, or where the meme came from.

Our production efficiency, production per inputs, is larger now than in the past. That’s doing more with less.

Which societies

These countries tend to be the most capitalist, meaning private ownership of the means and subsequent free exchange of goods and services, and they also tend to be the most wealthy with low poverty. That distribution matches fertility fairly closely. Link

that’s a good thing, is it?

It is if the thing you’re worried about is the impact of the human species on the rest of the planet. Fewer people means less impact with the same per person impact.

we could just achieve that easily by giving women reproductive rights

The capitalist west is the most abortion permitting part of the world. Legal rights are a luxury good, unfortunately. Kinda seems like capitalism is in fact required.

Yes, really.

And poverty is many many times lower today than it was a few hundred years ago before capitalism. Even entertaining the idea that it’s not is completely insane. Capitalism correlates extremely strongly with low poverty country to country within a single time period, as well. 2023, for example.

Where did this meme of “capitalism requires infinite growth, therefore it’s impossible and bad” come from? Capitalism doesn’t require infinite growth, the universe has basically infinite resources, modernity which is largely but not exclusively caused by capitalism has allowed us to do so much more with fewer resources than generations previous, and as societies get richer in material wealth they produce fewer children and have the luxury to pay attention to things like the environment and their impact on it.

I don’t know about greed, but self interest is the least disorderly instinct a creature can have. Your genetic line will die off very quickly if you constantly sacrifice yourself for society, which would mean the self sacrificing instinct would never propagate. Of course humans are social, cooperative, and self sacrificing under some circumstances, and that’s good because we are often better off sacrificing occasionally. Maybe investing would be a better word. But some base level self interest is good. Kinda like how you’re supposed to put your own oxygen mask on first in a plane emergency. If you try to get someone else’s first, you’ll both go unconscious and then you’re both screwed.

We never had barbarians pillaging for millennia before the existence of capitalism? Not to mention monarchic governments, conqueror empires? Capitalism is like 400 years old. That other stuff predates it by tens of thousands of years.

Yeah, but if everyone decreases work, you get less production and less stuff, and then increased poverty. It’s easy to say more stuff isn’t always better from the comfort of the Internet, but the truth is that abundance of material production is responsible for the relative extreme wealth we do have today.

Handing out new rain to the trees in the canopy may or may not increase rain at the lower levels, but reducing rain at the canopy for sure reduces rain at lower levels.

Is it possible that alternatives are not widely used because most people don’t want to use alternatives in the first place?

Engineering design.

Maybe turn your hostility dial down a notch. Lol

There are plenty of industries where people are generally less productive WFH than in an office with other people. My coworkers distract me all day, but it's a lot easier to get or give help when we're in the same place. WFH was nice for a couple months, but I'm glad it's mostly over. Once we setup the capabilities to WFH we did keep them, so now we can WFH in an emergency or something.