• rockSlayer@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    121
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    9 days ago

    Thatcher said that with 0 irony as she defunded public hospitals to get replaced by charity from rich child rapist Jimmy Sevile

  • ragepaw@lemmy.ca
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    90
    ·
    9 days ago

    Go back into the history of capitalism, and every “scare” that capitalists use to maintain the system as is, happens under capitalism. The irony being that most capitalists see the end results of their greed and project it onto other systems.

    Every accusation is an admission.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      18
      arrow-down
      5
      ·
      edit-2
      9 days ago

      $40t in debt

      In debt to whom?

      It’s something of a joke to talk about credit expansion in a closed economic loop. Especially when the loop tightens and you end up with…

      If I owe you a million dollars and you owe me a million dollars dollars, are we collectively $2M in debt?

      We’re entirely too zeroed in on the fictitious credit balances and totally divorced from real material conditions. How many labor hours are we spending? How much of our fossil fuel energy reserve have we committed? What is the growth/contraction rate of potable water and arable land?

      I don’t really give a shit about $40T in IOUs. I care about the actual managed decline of the capital stock. The actual number of skilled laborers in a given profession. The long-term burn-down of natural resources relative to our ability to conserve, recycle, and reproduce them.

          • Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            3
            arrow-down
            1
            ·
            9 days ago

            Yeah but they are not indebted like a govt like you showed in your first post. I hate how stupid that circular “borrowing” is, but it has nothing to do with usa govt borrowing. NVidia are lending, and can choose to sell it off if/when they want to. The usa govt cannot sell off its debt if that makes sense.

            • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              5
              ·
              edit-2
              9 days ago

              they are not indebted like a govt

              No. They’re much worse off, as they don’t control their own currency or have sovereignty within their own borders.

              I hate how stupid that circular “borrowing” is, but it has nothing to do with usa govt borrowing.

              Governments (ostensibly) borrow money to provide economy-growing amenities and economy-preserving hedges against adversity. All of these loans can be described as investments, with an ROI tied back to national GDP growth and liabilities mitigation. The circular debt patterns of these mega-corps have a similar rationale. Oracle, NVIDIA, and OpenAI are effectively partners in a project to create a value-adding service. Their debt is an accounting tool to allocate future profits, not a drag on their economic activity. Just the opposite. Credit expansion allowed a party to bring more natural, capital, and labor resources to bare in a shorter time frame, in order to obtain profits sooner than otherwise.

              NVidia are lending, and can choose to sell it off if/when they want to.

              To whom?

              Nobody else is in the business of producing microprocessors at this scale. NVIDIA extends the loans entirely to incentivize OpenAI to consume more compute, which incentivizes Oracle to build more data centers, which incentivizes NVIDIA to produce more chipsets.

              Who else would want this debt? It doesn’t serve the same economic end-goal. Who else would have enough currency to assume the debt?

      • mirshafie@europe.pub
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        edit-2
        8 days ago

        You’re right to highlight the decline of tangible assets like skilled labor, value chains and natural resources, but I think you’re conflating the circular borrowing (and spending) between tech companies with the US Government’s ability to pay back their debts. The tech companies are using circular relationships to inflate their nominal revenue, but the US government actually owes money in a linear fashion. (And as you pointed out, the government has destroyed much of its domestic production capacity for the long term, with energy perhaps being the most worrying resource to have been squandered).

        The biggest problem is that the interest on the public debt adds about $1T per year, which means that 19% of all federal revenue (or 39% of individual income taxes) is needed just to pay off the interest.

        It is true that the Government could just essentially print money to wipe out their debts to domestic lenders, and that’s roughly 3/4 of the money that the government owes. But that would lead to massive inflation, and it leaves approximately $10T in foreign-held debt. Historically, the USA has been able to use the position of the USD as the global reserve currency to offload its inflation on the rest of the world (see how Europe stagnated after the 2008 subprime mortgage crash in the USA, or for that matter look at Japan).

        But the USD is now losing its position as the reserve currency. Foreign governments are selling off US treasuries. Foreign pension funds are selling off US stocks. The US is becoming increasingly isolated even to former close allies, and it is no longer seen as a safe place to park money. So if the government tries Quantitative Easing or any similar measure that has worked in the past, that inflation won’t be readily absorbed by the US’s allies, and it’s the US public that will have their investments and pensions wiped.

  • Fleur_@aussie.zone
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    38
    ·
    9 days ago

    Damn bro we spent all the billionaires money on public works and social security and now we don’t have any more billionaires and everyone is better off. What fools we’ve been.

  • fartographer@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    36
    ·
    9 days ago

    It’s so funny, because only one of those two systems is designed to invest back into itself. The other is a zero sum siphon that perfectly embodies what she described.

  • AlteredEgo@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    14
    ·
    8 days ago

    Neoliberalism has destroyed demand. At long last it’s finally done. Now they are complaining about China’s overcapacity.

    • mirshafie@europe.pub
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      8 days ago

      China is bringing the developing countries into the 21st Century with it, something that the West refused to do while they had the chance. So it’s not overcapacity, it’s just that the West isn’t the exclusive consumer.

  • dregan@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    12
    ·
    edit-2
    9 days ago

    “eventually you run out of other people”

    Incidentally, this is why they are pushing so hard for robots/AI to do what they need. Capitalism/money is nothing more than a complicated and thinly veiled facade for the power to make people do what they don’t want to do. It is NOTHING more than that

  • Absurdly Stupid @lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    11
    ·
    8 days ago

    Well, we can just print more money! That’s the solution for both capitalism and socialism, works every time.

    Don’t worry, the predatory bankers that are appointed to the Fed are surely looking out for our best interests, they would never, ever abuse their positions for the benefit of JP Morgan or anything like that, don’t be silly

    • VitoRobles@lemmy.today
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      8 days ago

      That’s how America is now currently $40 trillion in debt! Just shut up and keep printing!

      • Don_alForno@feddit.org
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        edit-2
        7 days ago

        If they just printed it they wouldn’t be in debt. The capitalists have successfully introduced a system in which the government has to borrow money from private banks who borrow it from the central bank that prints it. Instead of just printing money, we now print money and pay interest on it to private banks.

      • quarkquasar@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        8
        ·
        8 days ago

        The companies now being funded by the U.S. government, in other words the U.S. taxpayer, in other words, fucking me?

        In other other words, I’m footing the bill for a limp-dicked wanna-be pedophile who’s not only not from my country, but can pay to take control of it whenever he wants?

        This country, and Elon musk specifically, fucking sucks donkey dicks.

  • henchmannumber3@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    9
    ·
    8 days ago

    Thatcher was being disingenuous because socialism involves “our money,” in which everyone works together for mutual benefit. Capitalism can’t function without other people’s labor being exploited and under-compensated. I want my taxes to help pay for a portion of things I couldn’t afford by myself and for it to benefit others because then I’m not being price gouged by others who are only demanding more because more is being demanded of them by the greediest among us.

  • jtrek@startrek.website
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    8
    ·
    9 days ago

    I mean, capitalists seem like they would be happy to just have slaves and all the nice things for themselves.

    • DeathsEmbrace@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      7
      ·
      9 days ago

      They’re already at a point where its basically slavery with extra steps or my go to. How close can we get to slavery without taking everyone’s free will.

    • daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      9 days ago

      I would even remove the conditional there.

      They currently own common folk more than people who actually legally owned other people.

    • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      9 days ago

      Capitalists at that level transform into dictatorial oligarchs. Musk, Bezos, Zuck, Murdoch, and whatever other foreign and domestic counterparts they have…all similar.