Sarah Banet-Weiser argues that fan communities are just another part of capitalism. Fans post art and stories on websites, and site owners earn profit from fans’ unpaid labor. I’d like to congratulate Tumblr for proving her half wrong.

The idea of predators and prey unintentionally benefiting each other for selfish reasons is a lot like the idea of customers and corporations benefiting each other for selfish reasons.

People who come across this idea usually use it as an argument for why this model of economics is right. Personally, I think this is an argument for why this model of nature is wrong. Indirect benefit to other prey doesn’t matter to the prey who get eaten, and indirect benefit to wealthier customers doesn’t matter to poor people.

You know when people who don’t know shit about what historians do claim historians are lying propagandists who prop up power structures and ignore the wisdom of minorities? This is the same claim people make against economists.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/08/vampire-capitalism/

“Think of healthcare. Consolidation in pharma lead to price-gouging, where hospitals were suddenly paying 1,000% more for routine drugs. Hospitals formed regional monopolies and boycotted pharma companies unless they lowered their prices – and then turned around and screwed insurers, jacking up the price of care. Health insurers gobbled each other up in an orgy of mergers and fought the hospitals.

“Now the health care system is composed of a series of gigantic, abusive monopolists – pharma, hospitals, medical equipment, pharmacy benefit managers, insurers – and they all conspire to wreck the lives of only two parts of the system who can't fight back: patients and health care workers. Patients pay more for worse care, and medical workers get paid less for worse working conditions.”

It’s amazing how many economic issues that people talk about as if they’re complex and nuanced can be explained entirely by “companies fire union labor and replace it with non-union labor.”

In college, I studied Business Management Economics. The name’s a bit misleading, because it’s not really for business managers. It’s for folks who have to talk to business managers. Given the assumption that your audience has no economic knowledge, how do you explain economics to them in a way they’ll understand?

I get why philosophers are so tetchy about the value of philosophy degrees. But if you want philosophy to be relevant to how people in general live their lives, not just how philosophers live their lives, you need to teach yourself a sort of Business Management Philosophy.

I wondered who this Bryan Caplan guy even was and why he was so dumb, so I looked him up. He works for an economics think tank that was founded by a Koch to try to cut his taxes. This explains so much.

Pissed off some more people by making this argument, so I’ll make it again for good measure: if you don’t read or buy someone’s book, you are doing exactly the same amount of harm as if you pirated someone’s book. Since you don’t buy every book, you are always doing that amount of harm to everyone whose book you didn’t buy. Furthermore, the same issue applies to people who didn’t write a book, but still need money to survive, which is why this isn’t an issue that can be fixed through capitalist consumption alone. Someone who doesn’t have your money doesn’t benefit from your money. Somehow, people keep interpreting this as me saying that authors should starve, when my point is that people are already starving whether they’re authors or not.

Actually, as long as I’m frustrated, I’ll repost the other argument that got a ton of people to block me. People argued for abortion based on bodily autonomy. I thought about anti-vaxxers and their bodily autonomy arguments, and I decided anti-vaxxers are full of shit. This isn’t even an argument against abortion! I’m just saying I can’t reasonably claim bodily autonomy as the defense I’m using for abortion.

It’s frustrating how many of the people I reblog from also reblog from people who have me blocked and will presumably keep me blocked until the end of Tumblr. But at the same time, if I didn’t use anonymous Internet accounts to argue things I think are true, I would never argue them anywhere. I think about all the arguments people made to change my mind, and they just don’t seem very convincing to me.

Money can be exchanged for goods and services, but not everything can be exchanged for money. If you give someone your money for something you expect to go up in value, they now have money they can exchange for goods and services, and you do not.

True, it’s possible you’ll be able to exchange the thing for money. It’s also possible nobody will want it and you’d have achieved the same thing by buying a shiny rock. At the very least, one person thought it was time to get rid of the damn thing and take your money instead.

(Of course, if your country’s currency craters so badly that nobody wants it, you might be better off with goods that can be exchanged for some other country’s currency.)