Hahaha i read the 102 current comments and basically 90% of those that name the absurdity is just “capitalism” or its consequences.
Unfortunately, a lot of people don’t think about the root causes of these problems. So there’s a lot of focus on the symptoms without thinking about the underlying dynamics of capitalism that cause these issues.
How taxes are dealt with in North America. Just send me how much I owe. Don’t have me go through a service to figure it out
You largely have intuit/turbotax/quickbooks/mailchimp/whatever other name they use for that process. Or at least the paying for it part
Intuit is the sole reason our taxes are so obtuse. They lobby for it to be this way.
Not the sole reason. They play a part, same with H&R Block, but it’s more the people working for the ultra-wealthy who keep bribing politicians to create laws that allow their clients to avoid paying taxes. The companies that have tax software for the small people benefit from the tax system getting more complex, but they don’t directly lobby for those rules, they just want any kind of complexity. Their big fight is against any kind of free tax preparation for the poor and middle class.
It’s pretty disgusting what they do though. They make say $20 from someone filing their taxes. They take say $3 from that $20 and spend it to ensure that their customers are never offered a free alternative. They’re basically making their customers pay to lobby the government to keep taxes so complex that the customer has no choice but to use them again next year.
That’s absolutely not the case. They lobby to prevent the IRS making their own version of TurboTax, not lobbying to make the tax code more complex. Taxes are complex because we have little real oversight but a lot of deductions and credits. The IRS literally cannot track everything they offer deductions for, so it goes largely on the honor system until something seems fishy.
If you have a house, you have deductions. If you added solar to your house, you have deductions. If you bought an electric car or a hybrid, you had deductions for a while there. If you rent you have deductions in some states. You have to list your dependents for credits.
The IRS is incapable of tracking all of this.
But like I feel like this system of deduction taxes is more difficult than any other country and it reinforces the need for americans to use software or an accountant. Am I wrong? Are other countries putting up with this shit? The biden admin is the first in my lifetime to give us credits rather than a rebate or deductible.
That’s… Not at all true. There has been a child tax credit for decades. EV credits have existed for quite some time.
And yeah, other countries have some, but iirc they do it because they already track everything for VAT purposes, so it’s just an extension of that.
I should have used more precise language. There’s so much jargon! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_tax_credit_(United_States) To my understanding this is the first time it’s ever been paid directly “in advance” rather than served as a credit against your tax payments, awarding money at the end of the year - or even worse when it was non-refundable. This in advance, far higher amount, fully refundable child tax credit is fucking radical compared to what we had and what we’re going back to.
But that’s only really makes sense in like the simplest of cases. The government doesn’t know if you had a kid this year, or maybe you bought an EV, or maybe you started renting out a room in your home.
If all you have is a single W2 income; then by all means go to your local library, grab a 1040-EZ form, fill it out, and drop it in the mail. Will probably only take you 10 minutes or less.
So offer it for simple cases. If you don’t like the way it’s done, you can always go and do the simple process you’re describing
Sure, that would be simple enough for them to mail you a letter with like “we’re aware of these incomes from these employers” and any failure to file additional income on your part makes you liable. And of course not filing to claim any credits/deductions on your part just screws your out of your own money.
But then that also assumes the IRS knows your address. Does your employer even report your address when your taxes are withheld from your paycheck? And what if you move in the time between then?
I would be very surprised if they didn’t know the address of every taxpayer, and I do believe it’s reported by the companies you work for. If you move, you can fill out a change of address form with the postal service today, which makes the new address generally available. If they really don’t have any way of knowing currently, it would be worth every penny of my taxes to just make an online portal available where you can enter that information yourself.
They didn’t have my new address until I filed my taxes with my new address.
Pretty sure it was sarcasm.
HAHAHA yah, they don’t know those things about you……sure……
You seem to have a very optimistic view of the efficiency of governments. I mean the IRS is basically running on a budget of table scraps after being defunded for decades.
Maybe, and I really do mean maybe someone has a record somewhere that you have a child. That doesn’t mean it is shared with the IRS.
That’s my thinking.
Every large organization, private or public, that I’ve interacted has been basically just a bunch of different people in many different silos. I’m surprised to see so many people have this “well oiled machine” perspective of the government where apparently it is all seeing and all knowing.
It was more a statement about data mining. It’s cheap and easy and the government 100% does it
It’s not “governments”, it’s the “US government”. Here in Europe, it just works.
In all but the most niche cases, they do in fact know that you had a kid. That being said, most things they have a pretty good idea about (or could) and they could easily adopt the system that they do in a lot of other countries where the government sends to a tax form all filled out that says, “we think you owe this much.” Then you just provide the exemptions you listed.
This would save a considerable amount of time when I file my taxes by just being able to double check they got cost basis correct on stocks sold and applied appropriate credits for mortgage interest and what not.In all but the most niche cases, they do in fact know that you had a kid.
How would the IRS know that? The only way I could think of would be the Social Security department sharing the information with the IRS; and are they legally allowed to do that? But let’s even say that’s true; if the parents aren’t married and filing jointly, who gets to claim the child as a dependent? That’s a decision made by the parents (or local courts in case of custody battles), so not something the IRS would decide.
Basically what it seems to boil down to is that filing taxes is complicated because the tax law is complicated.
I was assuming social security could share that information since now there’s a new taxable citizen. The IRS could easily prepare tax amounts assuming married filing jointly, married filing separately, and single. You would just choose one. And like it currently is, if both people attempt to claim dependency, someone gets slapped with a fine.
Tax law is absolutely complicated, and I definitely won’t deny that, but the IRS can make things easier and could do the basic filings.
They don’t share that information unless absolutely necessary. All government agencies hold their cards pretty close to themselves for legal and liability reasons. The IRS will complain that you’ve both claimed a dependent because you have to include that dependent’s information and they can tell when you both try to claim the same one
Yes they do. See, scandinavian countries.
Okay but RIGHT NOW they don’t know. Sure it’s possible for them to track it, but they do not, and the infrastructure isn’t set up to do that.
Okay. I concede to your point, Ithink you’re more correct than I was.
deleted by creator
Likewise, the IRS already knows everything about me. If I qualify for, say, food stamps, just have the IRS send me the food stamps. Don’t make me jump through hoops when I’m already destitute, come on.
This would make tens of thousands of jobs redundant and make many social programs much more efficient.
And save trillions of dollars, especially if we extended this to Medicare for all
But using resources efficiently isn’t the goal, suffering is!
If Democrats actually wanted to win every election from now until forever, this would do it for them. Imagine worrying how you’re going to feed your kids and then the mail arrives “BTW you’ve qualified for food stamps for the last 18 months, here they are” instant loyal voter.
But they won’t
Materially improving people’s lives is authoritarianism sweaty it needs to be balanced against legalizing violence against marginalized people
Ads being everywhere.
I have so many measures in place to block them whenever I do see them it always catches me off guard. The volume of them is ridiculous
I want to block the ones irl. You know the billboard and stuff
Fuck billboards so very much.
It’s going to be a weird time when we hit that level of tech with AR
I heavily support any gas station that doesn’t have fucking video ads blasting at every pump.
Capitalism.
Tell us what makes it absurd. And please stick to demonstrable facts for proof of cause and effect.
Thank you
Very simply: how can it be fair that someone who contributes nothing to the process profits from my labour?
I am the skilled craftsperson who produces furniture. And yet someone takes from me the profit of my work. Beyond the cost of materials, workshop, arranging buyers etc.
After all those costs are accounted for there is still someone else who captures most of the profit instead of me. How is that not absurd?
Without context, this comment sounds like you’re against taxes, rather than against capitalism.
if someone makes a one word comment, they’re unlikely to want to write you a research paper justifying it. but i’ll give it a li’l go.
the whole core concept of capitalism is that some few people ‘own’ the ovens, and they get to tell other people to bake cookies, and even though these cookie-bakers bake all of the cookies, the oven-owners get to keep most of them, and the cookie bakers only get a small portion. also there aren’t any ovens that aren’t ‘owned’ by an oven-owner, so if you wanna eat cookies, you have to give most of the cookies you bake to an oven-owner. and this model is extended to everything.
i don’t know that this allegory will mean anything to you, and maybe you think of something different when you hear ‘capitalism’ (maybe you think of ‘markets’, or ‘money’, or, i don’t know, just seeing benefits from ones own hard work or something), but this is basically the usual meaning of capitalism, and probably what most people who oppose it, myself included, are talking about. there are a lot of other criticisms, of course, but that core scammy unfairness of it, i think, is most absurd.
The fact that we live in a land of plenty but people die due to malnutrition or lack of access to healthcare because it’s not profitable is pretty damning.
Capitalism is like a rabid dog. It has its uses, but you don’t just let it roam freely, you keep it on a tight leash.
The basic unit of production, where capital meets labour to produce goods and services, is the capitalist firm. And every profit-maximising firm is owned by a private capital.
Capitalists extract profits from firms. They can spend only a fraction of their profits on luxury consumption. Because if the rich spent all their profit on luxuries their capital will rapidly diminish and expire, compared to competing capitals who invest their profit in further profitable activities. Profit income must be reinvested in order to make more profit. This is the prime directive for anyone who possesses a capital sum of money.
Owners of capital — that is capitalists — can’t put all their eggs in one basket. That’s too risky because firms can go under, or assets that store value might depreciate. So capitalists spread their risk by owning a portfolio of investments with different risk profiles.
A typical portfolio will consist of cash held in different sovereign currencies, government, municipal and corporate bonds, shares in different companies, from risky start-ups to blue chips, and all kinds of income-producing assets, such as land and housing. Basically anything that might yield a higher than average return.
Each individual capital must aim to maximise the return over its portfolio. If it fails it will diminish in size relative to other capitals, and eventually cease being a capital at all.
And it’s right here that we again find the causal structure of a feedback control system. An individual capital — when we consider it as a social practice mediated by a privately owned large sum of money — also has its own goal state, sensory inputs, decision making, and ability to act upon the world in which it is embedded.
Let’s take each of these in turn. (i) The goal of an individual capital is to maximise the average return from every dollar (or pound) invested. (ii) The “sensory inputs” are the different profit-rates earned across the portfolio. (iii) The capitalist, or the financial experts they employ, compare the different profit-rates, and (iv) the feedback loop is closed by actions that withdraw capital from poorly performing investments, and inject capital into high performing investments.
This control loop manifests as an insatiable and ceaseless search for high returns.
Capital doesn’t care how its money is actually used in production. It entirely abstracts from all concrete activities. The only thing it can sense, compare and use is abstract value.
So the commanding heights of the global economy consists of an enormous ensemble of individual capitals, each manically scrambling for profit, reacting to the signals of differential returns received from its tendrils that extend to every productive activity under its rule, continually injecting and withdrawing capital to and from different industrial sectors and geographical regions. The entirety of the world’s material resources, including the working time of billions of people, are repeatedly marshalled and re-marshalled away from low and towards high-profit activities. In the space of months, entire industrial sectors may be raised up, relocated, or thrown down.
Capitalists are possessed, mere machine components of capital.
What about the individual people who participate in this social practice? Surely their individual consciousness, their ideas, and their behaviour matter, and make a difference?
To a certain extent they do of course. But individuals come and go, but capitals live much longer than any individual human. The people controlled by the capital — that is the workers that supply labour to firms, and capitalists that exploit them and extract profits — are mere replaceable components in the control loop, mechanically performing prescribed functional roles.
For example, Marx writes in Capital, that:
“to classical economy, the proletarian is but a machine for the production of surplus-value; on the other hand, the capitalist is in its eyes only a machine for the conversion of this surplus-value into additional capital.”
We often say that a capitalist possesses capital. But it is more accurate to say that capital possesses them. Capitalists are the human face of an inhuman intelligence with its own logic and its own goals.
“In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality” (Communist Manifesto).
Bigger capitals enjoy the advantage of larger portfolios, which spreads risk. In consequence, capital tends to concentrate in a few hands. So we find a large number of small capitals, and a very small number of astronomically large capitals, which earn profits that dwarf the GDP of many nation states. The scale and power of some capitals is truly titanic.
And these titans are so much in control, that they are out of control. Again, a quote from the Communist Manifesto:
“Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.”
Every day millions of workers, around the globe, have no choice but to sacrifice their time, and their vitality, to produce new profit for the autonomous controllers. No matter how hard, long or efficiently we work, the imperative to work remains.
Why? Because every labour-saving technical innovation takes the form of profit, which is then captured by individual capitals, and immediately re-injected into the material world to animate new activities for further profit. This is why, despite huge advances in automation, the working day remains as long as ever.
Take another example: the logic of capital demands maximum profit extraction from firms, and that means minimising wages. Those possessed by capital live an exalted existence. But the world’s dispossessed must feed, clothe and maintain a home with an average income of about 7 pounds a day.
Another example: it’s better to be exploited than not exploited. We are subject to the whims of the business cycle and periodic crises of accumulation. Recessions regularly throw large numbers of people out of work, through no fault of their own. Suddenly bills can’t be paid. Families are thrown onto the street, as happened in the US during the 2008 mortgage crisis, and is happening again now.
Why? Because individual capitals are almost blind. They see only differential returns across their portfolios. And returns may be good even if unemployment is high, or human misery spills onto the streets. Capital does not care.
Another example: capital deals in abstract value, and things that are not owned, which aren’t bought and sold, therefore have no value to it at all. So the material wealth of nature — the land, the oceans, and the atmosphere — is relentlessly plundered without any regard for the consequences.
Capital destroys us, and the environment. The endless production and profit-making cannot stop, because each individual capital must compete to survive. Marx summarised the prime directive of capital as:
“Accumulate, accumulate! … reconvert the greatest possible portion of surplus-value … into capital! Accumulation for accumulation’s sake, production for production’s sake: by this formula classical economy expressed the historical mission of the bourgeoisie”.
So all the autonomous control loops have the single-minded goal of extracting profit from the world’s activities. If an activity fails to satisfy this goal, then the controller withdraws its capital, and the activity stops.
So at the apex of the economy we have a competing collection of identical controllers — with an atavistic, low level of demonic intelligence — which inject and withdraw a social substance that appears to possess the magical power of animation, of bringing things alive, of creation; but also appears to possess the power of annihilation, of suffocation, of bringing things to an end, of destruction.
We are definitely not in control. And something else definitely is in control.
So what are we really talking about now?
We’re saying that a new kind of supra-individual control system emerged, quite spontaneously, from our own social intercourse, and then — in a very real sense — has taken on a life of its own, turned around, and started controlling us.
Capital in a scientific, not a metaphorical sense, is a control system. And it is capital, as a control system, that ultimately creates and maintains the abstraction we call exchange-value. Capital is the abstractor.
more here: https://ianwrightsite.wordpress.com/2020/09/03/marx-on-capital-as-a-real-god-2/
That is an interesting read. Thank you for the effort, it is honestly appreciated.
I feel compelled to point the author is hardly unbiased.
I know it is a difficult request. I just don’t have it in me to accept anything at face value because someone says so.
That being said, you took time to present discourse far beyond what most people do. Again, thank you for that
I feel compelled to point the author is hardly unbiased.
No author is unbiased. If you think they’re unbiased it’s just their biases are the same as yours or those of the status quo (whatever you might consider that to be).
I just don’t have it in me to accept anything at face value because someone says so.
Thankfully, you don’t have to! You have a brain in your head, so you can read the arguments being made, think about them, and critically evaluate them. You can try to come up with counter-arguments, or failing that, look around for counter-arguments other people have made and critically evaluate those too.
The commenter above gave you sources for the quotes, so you can find copies of them and read the complete argument being made in those works.
This put words to thoughts and feelings I have had for a long time, but have not been able to express accurately. Thank you, well written.
Here’s an interview with the author of the blog, Ian Wright.
https://piped.video/watch?v=gjIXcp0_gw4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjIXcp0_gw4
I just pulled together a few relevant parts of his writings to answer the question asked, but the full works are very informative.
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Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Excellent write-up of the evils of corporatism and the danger of meta-human entities. Samuel Butler would be proud.
Your comment is textbook sealioning.
It’s really not. Sealioning involves inserting oneself uninvited into a discussion, e.g. an anti-feminist showing up in a feminist forum to demand that participants defend feminism from junk challenges.
And your comment is classic avoidance and redirection.
It’s convenient how some people have invented a word that allows them to avoid having to back up any claims they make…
“The Earth is flat.”
“What evidence do you have for that?”
“Sealioning!”I see you ignored the other comments in the subthread. Someone did provide an extremely thorough answer which the commenter dismissed as not believing the author was credible…rather than exploring the numerous valid claims and arguments. My comment was not only a perfect description of what was happening, but also turned out to be prophetic about what would happen next. Their original challenge was not in good faith and was intentionally designed to cause someone to have to go out and do a ton of work only to be dismissed.
Tipping.
In Norway, restaurants started to implement applications or websites to order at the restaurant. Scan a QR code or download an app (yuck) to order the food and preemptively pay for it. While that might be fine, I find it really strange when I’m asked about tipping when I place my order. I have literally not seen a waiter, I have just sat down and looked through a website, and now I’m asked if I want to tip? Why? What for?
Luckily, 0% tip is very common in all services in Norway, so it’s not considered rude to refrain from tipping.
Tipping isn’t an issue if it’s a bonus from satisfied customers. The American system of it making up your minimum wage is nonsense.
Tips = To Insure Prompt Service It’s a slavery term
I feel like that’s a hard one. Whenever I argue against tipping with coworkers (we don’t currently work in the service industry) they will mention how they are all for it and mention how during peak times they made double their usual amount. I feel like it’s really been drilled in that it’s good for the workers
Absolutely, those who get high tips stay in the industry. Those who get low tips are fired. Places don’t keep those who aren’t tipped well because it means they have to pay more out of the budget. If you aren’t getting high tips you are seen as lazy or not doing enough as a waiter. In reality tipping has more to do with who you get as customers (and what they find attractive) than quality of service. https://scroll.in/article/860274/does-tipping-really-ensure-better-service-probably-not
Just another way to divide. Typically FOH staff get all or most of the share, while cooks get screwed, in my experience.
That element of it — when the restaurant is doing well, the windfall is shared with the waitstaff — could be preserved by simply giving the staff a percentage of the price of each meal they work on. Structure it as a bonus, the way salaried professionals can receive a bonus when the company is doing well.
It may be worth noting that worker-owned restaurants, like Cheese Board Pizza here in Berkeley, typically do not solicit tips. (Well, except for the live musicians, who are not worker-owners.) If tipping was really all that great for the workers, then places where the workers literally control company policy would encourage it.
Not necessarily. I don’t know about New York, but in Illinois it’s illegal for owners or management to receive tips.
It is not illegal for owners or managers to receive tips for work they perform. If the manager is waiting a table, they can receive that table’s tips.
Where the restaurant is owned by the workers, an individual worker-owner will still collect the tips for the work they perform. An owner who is not working that day has no claim to tips earned that day.
Are you sure? Even when I’ve been at places where the owner works, those owners haven’t taken tips, instead splitting any they receive among the other staff.
Employers, managers, and supervisors may not keep any portion of the employee’s tips, and may not participate in a tip pool. But yes, they can certainly accept their own tips.
Consider a small, mom-and-pop diner. Pop cooks, mom serves. They co-own the diner. They can certainly accept tips.
Hiring a part-time busboy as a worker doesn’t mean that he automatically earns all tips received during his shift. Mom still gets to collect tips for serving, pop still gets to collect tips for cooking. They don’t get to receive tips in their managerial capacity, only in their capacity as workers.
It is important to note: A traditional owner/manager only performs managerial work. This is the kind of scenario we are usually talking about when we hear about scummy managers stealing tips, but it is not the kind of scenario we are talking about here.
We are considering a restaurant that is owned by the workers. We are talking about a mom-and-pop diner with a whole lot of moms and pops doing the work.
Important distinction! All the places I worked where the owners also worked were pool houses, and as you said, owners can’t take from a pool.
One of the best guys I ever worked for used to say, “Those are your tips. When the restaurant does well, that’s my tip.”.
Religions.
This is one of the most obvious answers.
The American Healthcare system
My wife spent no less than 5 hours on the phone with just as many groups of people to organize a blood draw that took a grand total of three actual minutes.
That’s just the efficiency of the free market.
Totally normal for my life saving mediation to cost $28,000 per dose before insurance. Absolutely nothing wrong with that
Mine cost me 4k a dose and they gave me two. Absolutely remarkable.
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Destroying our only habitable planet.
I feel like this should have way more upvotes.
Trump
Normalised by America, maybe.
Outside of it, we’re all wondering what the fuck is going on.
A lot of us inside the US are wondering the same thing still
And still wondering if he might actually come back.
What do you think the odds are?
Despite the Capitol’s riot, a survey showed 1/3 of Americans thought Biden’s presidency was illegitimate. The conservatives see the lawsuits as political prosecutions.
I’d say unless the non-trump voters come out to vote in a historical number like the last election, he stands a good chance of becoming a president again. And a number of states have passed laws that would make it harder for some subsets of voters to vote.
After his arrest, probably 50/50.
I say this as a liberal with conservative family. They’ll vote for him again.
He’s a heckin’ cheeto!
Work to live.
Edit: we have built a world where we measure success by money. This has meant we are all in pursuit of it all the time, even if we don’t want to be. The rich get richer by driving us to do more with less, which marginalizes those who cannot be a productive part of that. We supress our compassion because it isn’t making money. People suffer. Those of us who can contribute subject ourselves to a different kind of stress so we can enjoy a few hours of leisure here and there but we never really are free of the shackles of our employer. If you advance to a management position you are forced to evaluate and possibly fire people you could be friends with. When hiring you are evaluating how well people bend the knee. It’s not a great world we’ve made for ourselves.
How is that an absurdity? Humans have needed to work ever since we evolved from other species.
Yeah, it would be more correct to say “work for others to live” is absurd.
People always had to do some work to survive, but in a world were all the land is owned, if you are one of the majority which is born landless you generaly can’t work for yourself (even to open your own business you need starting money) just enough to live by with (say, build your own house and do subsistence farming), so unless mommy and daddy have lots of dosh you’re going to have to work for others within the constraints of the existing system (or become a criminal, in which case the system will punish you) and unlike when just working to provide to yourself, working in this system means competing with everybody else - and were, again, how much support mommy and daddy can give you makes a massive difference - to such a level that you have to run just to stand still.
Compared to plain old subsistence farming the whole way work is done in the current system is absurd, mainly because it has to produce way more than what is actually needed to provide for all, since a tiny slice of the population are massive money hoarders leeching out of the rest so tons of extra wealth has to be created just for them.
Whatever the optimal system is for “the greatest good for the greatest number” (which would be more than just everybody doing subsistence farming), mathematically it’s clear it can’t be one were some people have control over billions of times more resources than others.
For me it’s that for a culture that fetishizes “freedom” we sure are fucking willing to accept a reality where we have to give it up for most of our waking life just to be able to live and provide for our families. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
Having opinions about other peoples gender, sexual orientation, private matters. Also legislating about that.
Once got in a conversation about nuclear power that hit the point of “Yes nuclear is safer and more efficient but what about the jobs of the coal employees? Do you want them all to starve?”
Took a while to digest because there’s a lot of normalization surrounding it, but after a while I realized what I had been told was:
“We have to intentionally gimp our efficiency in both energy production and pollution generation in order to preserve a harder, more costly industry, because otherwise people wouldn’t have a task that they need to do in order to feed themselves.”
Kinda disillusioned me with the underpinnings of capitalism, just how backwards it was to have to think this way. We can’t justify letting people live unless they’re necessary to society in some way - which might’ve made solid sense in older, very very different times in human history, but now means that so much of our culture is tied up in finding more excuses to make people do work that isn’t really necessary at all.
New innovations happen, and tasks are made easier, and that doesn’t actually save anyone any work, because everyone still has to put in 40 hours a week. New tech lets you do it in 10 hours? Whoops, actually that means that you’re out of a job, replaced with an intern or something. Making “life” easier makes individual lives harder, what the fuck? That isn’t how things should be at all!
Not exactly an easy situation to crack, but to circle back to the point of the thread - I hate how normal it is to argue on the basis that we need to create jobs, everywhere, all the time. I wish we’d have a situation where people can brag for political clout about destroying jobs instead, about reducing the amount of work people need to do to live and live comfortably, instead of trying to enforce this system where efficiency means making people obsolete means making people starve.
Over-reliance on proprietary, closed-source products and services from megacorporations.
For instance, it’s really absurd that people in many parts of the world cannot function without WhatsApp, they can’t even imagine a life without it. It seems absurd that Meta literally has them by the balls, and these people can’t do anything about it.
Also the people who base their entire careers on say Adobe or Microsoft products, they’re literally having their lives dictated by one giant corporation, which is very depressing and dystopian.
It seems absurd that Meta literally has them by the balls, and these people can’t do anything about it.
I don’t get this sentiment. If anything happens to WhatsApp, they’ll just switch to another IM. WhatsApp wasn’t the first to come along, and won’t be the last. How exactly does Meta have them by the balls?
I remember listening to a podcast that talked of how in the Philippines (I think it was), Facebook is the internet, because Meta/FB effectively subsidised the carriers into allowing FB access to not use up any data allowance. As a result, if all you do is go on FB, you don’t pay a penny. If WhatsApp is included in this, then yeah, you’re locked in with no real alternative.
Oh right. Not quite nowadays, they get subsidised from multiple companies, including Google (YouTube) and such. I hate to say this, but WeChat would probably be happy to jump in and grab some market share if Meta does something egregiously dumb
In some of those countries, it’s not really a choice. Like, WhatsApp is the only way of contacting a company’s customer care (via chat bots that run on it), colleges and universities may have study groups on it and teachers may hand out notes etc in those groups, also apparently it’s also the only way to contact even some government agencies.
it’s a shame.
I know, I’m from those countries. Like I said, we used other IM apps before WhatsApp came along, and if something changes we can use a new app. WhatsApp currently leads the market due to the network effect, but it doesn’t have us ‘by the balls’.
(Though the most likely successor would be WeChat, which is arguably much much worse in many ways)
Do you require WhatsApp to contact certain government agencies? Do you require WhatsApp to get access to customer support? Do you require WhatsApp to get access to lecture notes? No? Then you’re not from one of those countries.
Yes, yes and yes. Yes I’m from one of those countries
Which means you can’t really switch to other apps then, which means Meta has you by the balls.
I suppose that depends on your definition of by the balls. Like I said, it’s not difficult for everybody to switch if they piss everyone off. On average people here have 2-3 IMs installed.
It’s an issue of userbase.
WhatsApp can and will get away with a lot before it drives users to a mass exodus, when messaging should have just been an open protocol from the start.
So many people use it, that the barrier to change to another application is high. They would need to fuck up on very large scale.
Yes, they currently have the market share, and network effect keeps them there. Nevertheless, my point was it’s not a monopoly, so how does Meta have everybody 'by the balls"?
Network effect might as well be a monopoly until the network kills itself.
I take issue with the concept of one company owning an entire communications network in the first place. Federation is a step in the right direction but it’s not enough yet.
I can happily live with any IM software, just happens that WA got on the market earlier and everyone else uses it. Me taking a stand by only using telegram does no good if I have no one to talk to.
There are plenty of free and open source messaging alternatives, they just don’t have the branding money to make sure a user base appears. To some degree the people using the apps are choosing the proprietary option.
We collectively need to be doing more to support and promote free open source software to avoid this issue. Secure peer to peer communication protocols should be more more ubiquitous than even http.
Talk to some older folks about what it was like when there was only one phone company and the alternative was snail mail.
I was there. It was fine. You didn’t need phones to be able to function in a society. Phones were something like an optional convenience that you had only at fixed places, like your home or office. If you were out and about, you typically didn’t have access to a phone, unless you were in the vicinity of a payphone, so you weren’t expected to be available on phone. Whereas in the countries where Meta has monopoly over, everyone expects you to be on WhatsApp, and you don’t really get a choice in the matter.
Whatsapp is just a text service that gained popularity because it bypassed expensive text messaging rates, and it’s superior to SMS in most ways anyways. If meta starts charging people will go somewhere else. It’s odd to hear this take that people are somehow dependant on it. It’s more replaceable than a pair of shoes.
That may be the case where you and I live perhaps, but these countries that I speak of, have an entire ecosystem built around WhatsApp. Many companies there no longer provide a customer support number that you can call for instance, they expect you to interact with a bot run on WhatsApp, which can further lead to chatting with an actual agent speaking to them, but that’s all done via WhatsApp. Also many teachers in schools and universities share lecture notes and study material via WhatsApp groups. Doctors and medical labs may share electronic copies of your reports via it. Some restaurants accept reservation requests solely via WhatsApp. It can even handle payments now, and besides using it as a means to send money to someone, some companies have even built entire e-commerce platforms around it, using interactive bots and the payment features. So for you and I, WhatsApp may be just another messaging service, but in these countries WhatsApp is quickly turning into an “everything” platform, and it’s not trivial for someone to just replace it, unless they want to go live in a cave and cut themselves off from modern society.
Wait, WhatsApp has payments too? I haven’t used WhatsApp in years, so I wasn’t aware they are basically becoming WeChat…
Wow, that’s news to me. I didn’t realize it had gone so far in some places.
This is an issue with the bourgeois character of American society and government. Monopolies are not a problem if workers control them.
And if they’re managed well on top of being worker controlled, but that’s usually been a mixed bag historically
It’s worse in China. WeChat is EVERYTHING.
At least WeChat is firmly under the state’s thumb. It’s basically a public service at this point. They should just nationalize it.
This is the thread that made me make an account and what a pain it was to find without having saved it anywhere. I’ve been holding out for someone to say it, but havwn’t seen it specifically.
Single use plastics. I still remember the weird feeling of doom when learning the world population and making the quick relation to disposable plastics, constantly being told “but it’s only a little bit.” A little bit for several thousand years, per billions, is too many bits.
Positive attitude towards billionaire philanthropists. First, they made a fortune on the result of labor alienated from workers, then they threw a pitch and became good guys
