I agree somewhat, in the sense that climate change will have happened slow enough and on a wide enough scale that its impact on human geographic dispersion, social organization, and reproductive patterns will be imperceptible to those feeling its effects.
It won’t be a catastrophe simply by nature of lacking the sudden violence necessary to qualify. Will it suck, will it transform things for the worse, and will our successors envy us, if not outright loathe and resent us? Definitely.
It’s not the way, it’s a way. Life-saving notices are often redundant to reach as wide of an audience as possible, e.g. public radio, commercial radio, sirens.
My grandparents had church, social clubs, mutual aid organizations, and unions which all helped (paid for) support of one kind or another during their hardships.
Working together and accommodating others is probably one of the strengths we’ve actually failed to foster in the contemporary context, to our detriment. The atomization of the individual and the cult of silent suffering is something they’d balk or pity us for.
My grandparents were dustbowl survivors and veterans who humbly attribute their survival and later success to their neighbors, friends, and colleagues that helped them, and whom they spent their later lives trying to pay back in kindness and friendship.
The influence of our relationships, and who we know, on our worldview is certainly fascinating.
Aye, neighbours, friends and colleagues are exactly who we should be building relationships with and relying on. No additional intervention required from governments via employers.
They counted their friends and colleagues among their employers, actually. And the government’s GI Bill and veterans’ administration’s work placement and employee advocacy programs were among their most cherished programs.
Yep, we owe a debt to veterans for putting their lives on the line in defence of our values (especially WWII vets). We don't owe the same debt to everyone else though do we? It's in fact everyone else who owes the veterans.
Also, there's nothing stopping anyone today from making friends with their colleagues and employers, and relying on those relationships in times of need. I'm still not seeing why we need an intervention.
Why would we pay people for the labor, not the product? I don't care if something took you 1 minute of 10 years, it's value to me doesn't change (except in the case where the 1 minute version is reproduced a lot by you and it's scarcity gives it value)
Because creators are scarce and finished products are not. It's simple.
We're in the 21st century, the age of information and networked computers, and these people are trying to sell bits. It makes no sense. If your work is making bits, you need to figure out a way to get paid for the labor of discovering those bits, not the bits themselves.
Because god knows how easy it is to copy those bits after they've been found.
We've already figured out a way to compensate creators for their work—it's called copyright. You say you don't like it, but you don't propose any alternative either, which makes you sound like an entitled brat.
Copyright is not necessarily the best way for creators to get compensated. For example, for most musicians in the US it's only a small part of their income [1]. Study is from 2013, could be different in the Spotify era, but it found that on average 12% of musicians' income came from copyright-related sources. 22% if you count session recording. Top-earners made a higher percentage from copyright. It isn't terrible, but it's not exactly the main way musicians are making money.
Writers make basically all of their money from copyright-related sources, but the median income from writing for full-time authors in the US is 20k [2].
My point is, copyright is a way to compensate creators for their work, but it's not the only way, and in practice for most people it doesn't do a stellar job.
I have issues with your interpretations of both papers. High level: The paper on authors says it's Amazons monopoly rent seeking as why writers don't get paid more Music is also famously an industry where artists rarely own the copyright for their (recorded) music, instead selling it to cover production and advertising costs. Also, the music study suffers from and the paper on musicians has a good deal of classical performers and teachers in the mix skewing the sample. These are not professionals that interact with copyright in any meaningful sense, but they are also not professionals that would be classified as creators.
Of course, because music can be performed. People will pay to see a live performance, which means music performers aren't entirely reliant on selling recorded performances. Live readings, on the other hand, don't attract large crowds and therefore aren't a great source of income, making writers more dependent on IP rights. It's pretty obvious.
Oh please. I cared enough to propose some alternatives up above but the truth is I don't really need to fix their broken business model for them. How they get paid is literally their problem. If they insist on selling bits, they're free to seethe endlessly when people copy those bits with complete impunity. I'm done feeling sorry for these monopolists.
I read it as saying, “there are state economies that, even surrendering all of the goods and services they’ve created and provided in a year, cannot exchange them for the full market value of some companies.”
Hasn't that been the case for at least a hundred years? I'm no economy historian, but I'd expect e.g. Liechtenstein's or San Marino's economy to be smaller than some company's market value since essentially their independence.
All that comparison really does is acknowledge that there are countries of vastly different size and wealth. Large companies from a giant nation will be much larger than a tiny country.
The size of some companies can be taken for granted. Living in a western industrialized country with many large companies, it’s easy to lose a sense of scale. The comparison widens the lens and grounds business organizations within the context of other human organizations e.g. the state. The comparison is also a setup for the next paragraph:
> One reason that’s significant: if many multinational companies actually were countries, they would be authoritarian dictatorships more ruthlessly efficient than any in existence. At many such companies, managers wield virtually unchecked power over subordinates and, thanks to modern technology, increasingly practice advanced techniques of monitoring and surveillance as well.
Yeah, but it compares companies from a state/economic zone of 300m or 450m people to a state of 4m people.
Sure, yeah, but that's like comparing a city of a 1million to one of 10k inhabitants and pointing at the much larger usage of construction material in absolute terms. Technically correct but ultimately useless.
If there's a company in the US that has a larger market cap than the US, that would make it more interesting. But even Apple is barely a tenth of it, and that's comparing the expected total future wealth of Apple to a year's worth of output of the US.
I'm not sure what comparing a year's amount of oranges to all future apples really tells us.
It’s useful in the argument that (1) states, as they’ve grown in size have also been reigned-in due to the power that comes with their size, and (2) that companies, as they grow in size, must be reigned-in due to the power that comes with their size (anti-trust, anti-monopoly).
Metaphors are useful but they can also just confuse the issue through unnecessary abstraction. The fundamental question is already there at the surface: it’s not about market capitalization or about gdp, but about the power that size in either metric represents. That’s the characteristic binding these two dissimilar ideas together.
The missed distinction, of course, being that companies like Amazon don't send workers to penal colonies for forced labor, don't built walls to prevent them from leaving, and don't kill dissenters.
So not much like an authoritarian dictatorship at all.
Using those three characteristics as necessary conditions for authoritarian dictatorship excludes many actual historical authoritarian dictatorships as well.
Of course, in the context of layoffs, Amazon does effectively deport workers who are on employment-tied visas. In a sense, Amazon is sentencing them to "transportation if you can't find a job in a bad job market."
That may be an accurate way to read it, but I’d bet that people just casually reading through it will breeze past that comparison and take away “these companies are bigger than most countries”.
Which, of course, is a comparison that Jacobin is more than happy to let slide. Jacobin’s own description of itself is “Jacobin is a leading voice of the American left, offering socialist perspectives on politics, economics, and culture.”
Maybe, but I’m cautious about assuming my own superiority, i.e. that my lonely cohort and I are the only ones able to read and infer the proper meaning from writing, and that others are too easily misguided.
