@CobaltVelvet
> given that the right side mostly stands for exploiting privilege

Nope

> discriminating freely against others

Nope

> and having no obligation to help others

That's right, i don't want to be forced to help others.

> and therefore support watching less fortunate people die while enjoying wealth

Far-right -- maybe. I don't support it and would just put myself on x≈3.

@breton then i'd like to know what you like/dislike in the right and left generally

i think i really shifted towards the left when I understood having to pay for your own healthcare is pretty much killing the poor. And, like, we could cure most sick people in the world by taxing more of Apple's profit.

@CobaltVelvet > then i'd like to know what you like/dislike in the right and left generally

My #1 thing is personal liberty. I don't want to be forced to do things (that includes paying for something). It's not about poor, rich or anybody, except me. I do accept that there are things that can will affect everybody, if they are not limited (ecology). I don't think that medicine is that thing.

@breton let's say you're born with something unpractical and you'll have to pay for it all your life and can't do anything about it.
isn't it fairer to make all humans share a load that is in the end required?

that's why i say the right wing is about exploiting privilege - it works for some, but it also means some people will just be born with a life-long random handicap and won't get much help (while it is perfectly possible and negligible for the giver).

@CobaltVelvet Apple people are smart people who do stuff. They are good in doing things, they started from not-so-many resources. It's up to them how to spend results of their smartness.

@breton that works, but : do we really want our civilization to make profit a goal and idolize conning people?
wouldn't it be better in every possible way if we took a share of Apple's profit to save dozens of millions of people? (= we both knows Apple's shareholders don't *need* that money as much as them, and they can even certainly be more useful to the world than a few bankers too if you assume an egoistical way of thinking)

@CobaltVelvet @cwebber profit being a goal is a good goal. I believe that when your actions determine your well-being, you produce the best thing.

In USSR your actions barely changed your conditions. Good engineers had no reason to try. After WW2, all western inventions felt alien.

Also, USSR took rich people's money and tried to distribute for better causes. They failed. And kept failing for 80 years. And i don't think new ways of distributing money were invented.

@breton @CobaltVelvet What do you think is going to happen when we've automated away enough work that a profit motive isn't even feasible for the majority of the population?

@CobaltVelvet @breton You could say "I don't think that's going to happen" but it's already happening; we were promised a Jetsons future, but instead we've automated away much of the work people could do and feel proud of, while wealth distribution has moved primarily to a few. Not much room for the majority of the population to *have* an effective profit motive even. https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/a-guide-to-statistics-on-historical-trends-in-income-inequality

@breton @CobaltVelvet I think that profit motive is hardly the only motivator; plenty of FOSS people and artists would be happy to keep hacking and authoring if their basic needs could be met.

Some periods of history we've seen people who didn't have to worry about their own income and they got a hell of a lot done (in the western wold esp in the "enlightenment era" thru victorian times). The promise of automation was to free the human soul; will it do so?

@CobaltVelvet @breton FWIW I'm not against money / currency. We need some sort of abstract "resource points" to be able to reasonably manage a game with finite resources in it, and a certain amount of auto-management is handled by letting people control their own resources to a good degree. But the distribution of the pieces in the game are highly uneven, and your "first roll" before the game even starts affects so much of the game in raw capitalism it's no fun for plenty to play.

@cwebber @breton i think that's exactly my thoughts on the matter

@cwebber @breton @CobaltVelvet There certainly is a first-player advantage and lousy catch-up mechanics in this game.

@cwebber @CobaltVelvet i think that "first roll" is overrated

@breton @CobaltVelvet well I agree, depending entirely on what you mean by that sentence ;)

@breton @cwebber if overrated as in meaningless: that's because you got a very decent one <3

@CobaltVelvet @breton BTW I should clarify, in those periods of history the people who were able to not worry about money were because society gave them an extremely privileged position at the expense of others. It certainly wasn't everyone, but we know what can be done when people have the freedom to explore creative and scientific endeavors.

However, we could achieve the same at the expense of machines that do not suffer for it. (If we add suffering to the machines, that's another matter.)

@breton @cwebber We have very good ways - proportional corporate taxes and a basic income would do that and even plug in nicely with capitalism. The goal still would be profit, but at least profit wouldn't mean infinitely more wealthy than average, just above average. For all we know, reducing that standard deviation would only make things better.

@breton @cwebber Also, many people aren't helped by profit, just by a good environment - there's a point where it just becomes accumulated wealth and people focus on finance instead of work.
I fucking hate it, for instance, I feel either I'm just hurting people to survive and it feels disgusting, or people are hurting me to survive and it feels even worse.
Last time i was sad about it, i wrote this piece: https://blog.xomg.net/meta-rant.html
(also, USSR did many things wrong. it's not a good example.)

@cwebber Is there a name for the thing with the 3+ axes?

@breton I don't know, but I remember being struck when I took the quiz a long time ago how good of a job it encouraged me to think of the world as being either big brother or libertarianism, with some confused sides of the world on the left and right. But there are very few questions on there that talk about resources as if resources are finite on our planet, which I always felt like was a warning sign; acknowledging resource constraints crib libertarian style