Latest posts on Tales from the Vampire's Crypt: Capitalist Inefficiency ITT topichttps://rhizzone.net/forum/topic/14470/2019-08-18T04:06:51+00:00Discussion :: Laissez's Faire :: Tales from the Vampire's Crypt: Capitalist Inefficiency ITT (by Synergy)
2019-08-18T04:06:51+00:00388104so the janitor in our office lost the key to the big recycling bin outside, easy fix right? well management doesn't want to go through the "hardship" of replacing the key, so they've decided everything is going to be thrown away from now on... amazing
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<br/>in conclusion, to no one's surprise, even non-profit orgs can be wasteful under the culture of capitalism.
Discussion :: Laissez's Faire :: Tales from the Vampire's Crypt: Capitalist Inefficiency ITT (by Aspie_Muslim_Economist_)
2018-04-27T04:30:01+00:00367246One of the big justifications for free markets, from the old Adam Smith line onward, is that markets are a mechanism that transform self-interested behavior into prosocial behavior. However, when you move beyond just-so models of trade you find that guarantees of efficiency evaporate. Instead, massive inefficiency is the rule. In fact, much of the form and structure of modern business represents concessions to these incentive problems, where self-interested behavior does not transmute into altruism. More equitable social relations can actually dramatically increase economic efficiency by eliminating the costs of selfishness.
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<br/>I’ll illustrate just one of these sources of inefficiency—the hold-up problem—and its consequences. The hold-up problem occurs when individuals (workers, firms, etc.) have to make specialized investments in one another (time, effort, training, capital investment, etc.) in order to produce. If you think about it, this happens in almost every economic relationship. Workers need to learn the idiosyncrasies of a job. A part supplier may need brand-specific dies to stamp parts for an auto manufacturer. A customer has to invest time and effort to set up internet service from an ISP. The hold-up problem occurs when, because you’ve made a specialized investment in me—an investment that doesn’t have value with other potential partners—I know that I can “hold you up” or shake you down for the value of that investment.
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<br/>You can come up with examples in virtually any productive interaction, but I’ll focus on examples that workers and consumers directly experience. For your labor to be productive, you generally have to learn the particulars of your job, put effort into relationships with your co-workers, etc. However, while some of those investments may be transferable to a new job, many will not be. Because of this, your employer will often choose not to reward such efforts—notions of fairness might suggest that they should reciprocate your efforts, but once you’ve made them they’ve only tied to tighter to your employer, making it harder for you to leave and thus less able to bargain for better treatment. Instead, your employer will simply “hold you up” for the additional surplus you’re now generating, giving none of it back to you. Similarly, once you’ve invested time and effort setting up internet service, your ISP will generally screw you over, raising prices and providing extremely bad service, because they know that it’s hard for you to leave.
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<br/>Because of the hold-up problem, many potentially productive relationships are never pursued, because people know they’ll be screwed over. The solution for this under capitalism is contracts. Much of contract law can be seen as a means of dealing with hold-up problems. Similarly, vertical integration is often a concession to hold-up problems. However, contracts are costly to write, read, and enforce, and are usually incomplete—it’s impossible to write an agreement covering every possible contingency. This means that hold-up problems cause massive inefficiencies, both directly and via the imperfect solutions they require.
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<br/>This applies to incentive problems more generally. Incentive contracts often introduce new inefficiencies into production, but they’re necessary under capitalism to induce productive behavior, since the act of by itself doesn’t actually create good incentives in most cases. What is studiously ignored in all these cases—hold up, incentive contracts, etc.—is that these problems arise from selfish behavior, and thus a mode of production that valorizes selfishness and stigmatizes altruism (the fiduciary duty to rip people off, etc.) inherently generates inefficiency. If my relationship to you is not based on a grasping need to accrue as many resources as possible, but an interest in your wellbeing and that of society in general, then the universe of productive opportunities expands, and we can work together without so many costly safeguards against one another.
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<br/>So the discourse around efficient modes of production focuses on optimizing byzantine rules to overcome selfishness, when developing solidarity, eliminating alienation, and generally creating an environment where people see their own efforts as a meaningful contribution to society as a whole is vastly more effective.
<br/>Of course, capitalists do know this to some extent—the huge efforts put into corporate indoctrination serve as testament—but these attempts can’t replace a real change in relations as they always push you toward’s someone’s self-interest.
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Discussion :: Laissez's Faire :: Tales from the Vampire's Crypt: Capitalist Inefficiency ITT (by Flying_horse_in_saudi_arabia)
2018-04-27T00:47:49+00:00367236the watch thing is funny but it would be funnier if they charged huge amounts of money for the one dollar watches.
Discussion :: Laissez's Faire :: Tales from the Vampire's Crypt: Capitalist Inefficiency ITT (by drwhat)
2018-04-26T22:25:39+00:00367230</p><style type="text/css">.custom367228{color:#2FBA9F !important; background-color:#501A54 !important; }</style><blockquote class="custom367228"><em><a href="/forum/post/367228/">slipdisco</a> posted:</em><br/><p class="postbody_text"></p><blockquote><p class="postbody_text">Capitalism is making your own product and selling it. Capitalism isnt buying a piece of shit and telling people they're worth 25x the price, and lying to them about the actual value of the product.</p></blockquote><p class="postbody_text">
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<br/>lmao
Discussion :: Laissez's Faire :: Tales from the Vampire's Crypt: Capitalist Inefficiency ITT (by g7DKVpkTyXaZvn65)
2018-04-26T19:48:14+00:00367229</p><style type="text/css">.custom367222{color:#205214 !important; background-color:#7DC7FF !important; }</style><blockquote class="custom367222"><em><a href="/forum/post/367222/">littlegreenpills</a> posted:</em><br/><p class="postbody_text">well containerization and vertical integration wiped out most of these middlemen so the internal logic of capitalism ended up doing that job anyway...the real inefficiency is due to the fact that this hyper-efficient distribution system wastes energy in order to arbitrage labour and distribute plastic doodads and useless crap
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<br/>maybe the middlemen of this era aren't links in the supply chain per se but are the byzantine layers of contract labor, brands over contractors over contractors over primary production. for legal/tax reasons and brand insulation from scandal and etc. imo..
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<br/>edit-- sorry tbc i'm agreeing w/ you
Discussion :: Laissez's Faire :: Tales from the Vampire's Crypt: Capitalist Inefficiency ITT (by slipdisco)
2018-04-26T19:41:21+00:00367228</p><blockquote><p class="postbody_text">19.
<br/>Ultimately, it may be impossible to pinpoint where our watch was actually manufactured, since whoever is running these sites seems to source from a number of locations, which themselves might be wholesalers rather than manufacturers. One reviewer of Soficoastal on <a href="http://trustpilot.com" rel="nofollow">trustpilot.com</a> notes that his shipment came from Malaysia; another names Shanghai. An angry customer who paid $15 plus $7 shipping for a product from saveouroceansnow. com (a similar site that sells ocean-themed jewelry and tchotchkes) reports that his item came with a “Made in China” sticker on the back, inside a package that read, “Value $1.05.”
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<br/>21.
<br/>Whatever and wherever it is, the entity in question is using dropshipping, a method whereby a company merely forwards the order from the customer to the supplier / manufacturer, who in turn ships the product directly to the customer. Mentions of “Made in China” stickers, watches coming in clear plastic bags, the MOJUE box, etc. point to the fact that the company or entity is not actually handling (or branding) the watches before they arrive.
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<br/>25.
<br/>Maybe this explains what’s so galling to people about the Folsom & Co. not-really-scam: It simply lays bare the categorical deception at the heart of all branding and retail.
<br/><img class="postimg_inline" src="https://topic.imgix.net/usq/66c52c40-db23-41da-977e-5bf7c80b95c5/a6a60590-b9bd-4102-8a39-4122c1a48bb4.png"/>
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<br/>27.
<br/>Brands function to soften and mask the raw deal at the heart of every capitalist exchange, helping justify the otherwise-insane markup. As it turns out, whoever is running Soficoastal has a surprisingly frank and cynical view of this phenomenon, according to a conversation that Instagram user @effingasian had with them on Facebook.
<br/><img class="postimg_inline" src="https://topic.imgix.net/usq/82793b08-e9c4-4bee-94d8-d4f95459aacd/dc9204cf-78aa-49e4-9cf4-815fac4a9404.png"/>
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<br/><a href="http://www.jennyodell.com/museumofcapitalism_freewatch.pdf">http://www.jennyodell.com/museumofcapitalism_freewatch.pdf</a>
Discussion :: Laissez's Faire :: Tales from the Vampire's Crypt: Capitalist Inefficiency ITT (by littlegreenpills)
2018-04-26T16:23:33+00:00367222</p><style type="text/css">.custom367162{}</style><blockquote class="custom367162"><em><a href="/forum/post/367162/">Caesura109</a> posted:</em><br/><p class="postbody_text">While it probably isn't this convoluted anymore, Engels made mockery of the claim that capitalist distribution is efficient
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<br/></p><blockquote><p class="postbody_text">Let us, however, discuss present-day trade in a little more detail. Consider through how many hands every product must go before it reaches the actual consumer. Consider, gentlemen, how many speculating, swindling superfluous middlemen have now forced themselves in between the producer and the consumer! Let us take, for example, a bale of cotton produced in North America. The bale passes from the hands of the planter into those of the agent on some station or other on the Mississippi and travels down the river to New Orleans. Here it is sold — for a second time, for the agent has already bought it from the planter — sold, it might well be, to the speculator, who sells it once again, to the exporter. The bale now travels to Liverpool where, once again, a greedy speculator stretches out his hands towards it and grabs it. This man then trades it to a commission agent who, let us assume, is a buyer for a German house. So the bale travels to Rotterdam, up the Rhine, through another dozen hands of forwarding agents, being unloaded and loaded a dozen times, and only then does it arrive in the hands, not of the consumer, but of the manufacturer, who first makes it into an article of consumption, and who perhaps sells his yarn to a weaver, who disposes of what he has woven to the textile printer, who then does business with the wholesaler, who then deals with the retailer, who finally sells the commodity to the consumer. And all these millions of intermediary swindlers, speculators, agents, exporters, commission agents, forwarding agents, wholesalers and retailers, who actually contribute nothing to the commodity itself — they all want to live and make a profit — and they do make it too, on the average, otherwise they could not subsist. Gentlemen, is there no simpler, cheaper way of bringing a bale of cotton from America to Germany and of getting the product manufactured from it into the hands of the real consumer than this complicated business of ten times selling and a hundred times loading, unloading and transporting it from one warehouse to another? Is this not a striking example of the manifold waste of labour power brought about by the divergence of interests?</p></blockquote><p class="postbody_text"></p></blockquote><p class="postbody_text">
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<br/>well containerization and vertical integration wiped out most of these middlemen so the internal logic of capitalism ended up doing that job anyway...the real inefficiency is due to the fact that this hyper-efficient distribution system wastes energy in order to arbitrage labour and distribute plastic doodads and useless crap
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Discussion :: Laissez's Faire :: Tales from the Vampire's Crypt: Capitalist Inefficiency ITT (by tears)
2018-04-26T10:02:04+00:00367219</p><blockquote><p class="postbody_text">Remember how Marx keeps insisting that the "real" capitalist business world of commodities flashing all over the globe is on a deeper level an illusion? Why should the destruction of capital solely be an "economic" activity? We are led to assume that manipulating capital and profits must be something safely confined to a civilian zone called "business" or "economics". Certainly, this does happen there. Capital pulled over to the side of the road is capital evaporating. Factories and houses become empty derelict buildings. Machinery becomes rusty scrap. Famous brand names and companies vanish from the material world into the history books. But as of New Years Day 2009, the capitalist crisis had already "burned up" well over $2 trillion in business capital; in suddenly worthless bonds and devalued stocks, in shut factories and bankrupt companies--and the economic plunge hasn't found bottom yet. If Marx's theory about value is a guide, no one knows how much capital must be destroyed for capitalism to come out of a real depression. Perhaps a qualitative level more than anyone usually thinks about.
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Discussion :: Laissez's Faire :: Tales from the Vampire's Crypt: Capitalist Inefficiency ITT (by swampman)
2018-04-25T19:08:06+00:00367184Movies... theres too many.. TV, too many.. you could never watch it all.. this capitalism is off the chain
Discussion :: Laissez's Faire :: Tales from the Vampire's Crypt: Capitalist Inefficiency ITT (by Fayafi)
2018-04-25T08:44:04+00:00367162While it probably isn't this convoluted anymore, Engels made mockery of the claim that capitalist distribution is efficient
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<br/></p><blockquote><p class="postbody_text">Let us, however, discuss present-day trade in a little more detail. Consider through how many hands every product must go before it reaches the actual consumer. Consider, gentlemen, how many speculating, swindling superfluous middlemen have now forced themselves in between the producer and the consumer! Let us take, for example, a bale of cotton produced in North America. The bale passes from the hands of the planter into those of the agent on some station or other on the Mississippi and travels down the river to New Orleans. Here it is sold — for a second time, for the agent has already bought it from the planter — sold, it might well be, to the speculator, who sells it once again, to the exporter. The bale now travels to Liverpool where, once again, a greedy speculator stretches out his hands towards it and grabs it. This man then trades it to a commission agent who, let us assume, is a buyer for a German house. So the bale travels to Rotterdam, up the Rhine, through another dozen hands of forwarding agents, being unloaded and loaded a dozen times, and only then does it arrive in the hands, not of the consumer, but of the manufacturer, who first makes it into an article of consumption, and who perhaps sells his yarn to a weaver, who disposes of what he has woven to the textile printer, who then does business with the wholesaler, who then deals with the retailer, who finally sells the commodity to the consumer. And all these millions of intermediary swindlers, speculators, agents, exporters, commission agents, forwarding agents, wholesalers and retailers, who actually contribute nothing to the commodity itself — they all want to live and make a profit — and they do make it too, on the average, otherwise they could not subsist. Gentlemen, is there no simpler, cheaper way of bringing a bale of cotton from America to Germany and of getting the product manufactured from it into the hands of the real consumer than this complicated business of ten times selling and a hundred times loading, unloading and transporting it from one warehouse to another? Is this not a striking example of the manifold waste of labour power brought about by the divergence of interests?</p></blockquote><p class="postbody_text">
Discussion :: Laissez's Faire :: Tales from the Vampire's Crypt: Capitalist Inefficiency ITT (by z0h983qy5g)
2018-04-25T00:17:51+00:00367158I figured out my job could reduce time spent on cleaning from 10% of all labor hours to 1% with a set of portable air filtration devices and the COO just told me to shut up. it would’ve cost them $1000 max, it’s a fucking joke
Discussion :: Laissez's Faire :: Tales from the Vampire's Crypt: Capitalist Inefficiency ITT (by littlegreenpills)
2018-04-24T16:57:50+00:00367152</p><style type="text/css">.custom367147{color:#000000 !important; background-color:#E4B5FF !important; }</style><blockquote class="custom367147"><em><a href="/forum/post/367147/">tears</a> posted:</em><br/><p class="postbody_text">theres a big group of people who could do useful shit but instead we just murder them. whats up with that</p></blockquote><p class="postbody_text">
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<br/>*troll voices* million aborted every year
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Discussion :: Laissez's Faire :: Tales from the Vampire's Crypt: Capitalist Inefficiency ITT (by tears)
2018-04-24T14:41:27+00:00367147theres a big group of people who could do useful shit but instead we just murder them. whats up with that
Discussion :: Laissez's Faire :: Tales from the Vampire's Crypt: Capitalist Inefficiency ITT (by Aspie_Muslim_Economist_)
2018-04-24T13:01:39+00:00367142Another story for y’all. This is from a factory in a middle-income country. Not a worst-of-the-worst sweatshop by any stretch of the imagination, but worse then what people in the core have to deal with.
<br/>Company A does semiconductor fab. They run the plant 24/7, and have two 12 hour shifts a day. Workers have five shift = 60 hour weeks. They have three teams of workers and 14 shifts per week, and labor laws say they can’t make anyone work more than 60 hours a week or 24 hours straight. What you find if you try to schedule shifts is that, with three teams, you can’t fill the 14 slots and keep every team in only first or only second shift. So to deal with this, company A forces every factory worker to alternate between first and second shift every week. Because of this, they have huge turnover—way over 100% as year.
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<br/>It’s pretty well known now that human beings can’t function normally with highly erratic sleep schedules, and mistakes are extremely costly in the semiconductor industry. If you forget to add diced onions to a burger at McDonald’s it doesn’t really matter that much, but if you fuck up a wafer the company’s out thousands of dollars. So this is one of the handful of cases where profitable management and basic humanity are actually aligned. All you need to do is bring in one more shift worth of workers, and, with four teams, you can keep everyone on a stable schedule. However, company A won’t do this. It’s slightly more expensive to train and support a 33% larger workforce, and that cost is immediate, easily quantifiable, and certain. The exact benefits of having non-impaired workers that stick around, by contrast, are uncertain, so because of their extreme risk aversion and cognitive biases they torture their workers AND produce inefficiently.
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<br/>Interesting side note: one of the main arguments for free trade and the exploitative industrialization it engenders is that it’s usually voluntary. People choose to leave sharecropping or w/e they were doing before to move to the city and work in the sweatshop, so it must be an improvement for them. What you realize if you look at these factories is that they have insane turnover and their employees have no idea what they’re getting into. Factories don’t have to provide a better alternative to previous forms of production, they simply need access to a constant stream of uninformed young people who they can run ragged for a few weeks or months, then spit out.
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Discussion :: Laissez's Faire :: Tales from the Vampire's Crypt: Capitalist Inefficiency ITT (by tears)
2018-04-23T21:08:15+00:00367122<img class="postimg_inline" src="https://i.imgur.com/D1njTaW.png"/>