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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • The demand for construction workers? If so, it could, if there’s enough unemployment. Otherwise workers from some other industry would have to shift to construction. Creating a shortage in that industry. Switching industries is a more difficult process than getting an unemployed worker to work in construction though. But if there’s already a labour shortage in the construction industry, then that answers the question. There isn’t enough unemployment or shifting from other industries to fill the demand. And there seems to be one.

    If there’s underemployment in construction or higher unemployment, then yeah, the construction labour market would likely expand without much effect in housing and infrastructure.


  • When unemployment is low in the construction sector, we can’t have them pay. When they pay, they’ll outbid us for workers who were previously building homes and public infrastructure. We’d either have to outbid cloud for these workers, or we’d pay by having higher housing prices and crumbling infrastructure, which incurs other social costs. Real resources are finite. The only way for us to not pay is for them to not build the power plants and datacenters. In a truly democratic system we’d be able to say no. In this system, capital outvotes us.

    E: I’m not arguing that the corpos shouldn’t pay. They should. I’m arguing the economic effect doesn’t stop with that payment and we’re still fucked.










  • If you look at the history of capitalism you could observe the stage where capitalism does put profits into R&D is temporary. Eventually capitalists reach enough power that lets them generate profts without significant reinvestment and instead spend them on luxury goods. Happened in the late 19th/early 20th century. It’s happening now as well. In-between that there was a massive state intervention that took significant economic power from capitalist class and put it into the state. The period when capitalism worked well for the majority was a deviation from the mean. Relevant.


  • They knew they could be overlords and were that before The Great Depression too. We are just surpassing the level of wealth inequality that was reached prior to the system collapsing back then. What followed in the 40s and 50s was an abnormal period created by the imolementation of a significant number of socialist policies. These fuckers have been working to dismantle them. If we find a formula that allows for such reforms to stick for longer than several decades, that would be nice. There’s good reason for skepticism though.