this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2023
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How's about a website that generates money, like Facebook or YouTube? Can you own that?
What about products that designed to create ongoing streams of revenue, like a patent on an invention or a piece of art you can collect royalties from every time it is displayed? The USSR famously took ownership of Tetris away from its creator.
Under communism, how does the stock market work? I'm not a big fan of it, but it's pretty hard to imagine getting rid of it now that the global economy is pretty much dependent on it.
Today, five countries exist that can be said to be communist: China, Russia, Vietnam, Laos, and Cuba. Of those five, none have achieved actual communism, and several have inarguably embraced capitalism to a great extent. All of them have essentially authoritarian governments. Which is unsurprising, since a dictatorship of the proletariat is central to the Marxist vision of how to create a communist society, and involves the creation of a single-party transitional government that forcibly suppresses all its critics and rivals.
I'm not big into capitalism and I think we should implement plenty of socialist reforms, but I will never understand why some people on the Left—or anyone for that matter—think communism is what we should be striving for.
Those websites are highly capitalistic and never brought any innovation, all technologies related to the internet were researched by public money.
Look into patent trolls. Patents are bad, publicly funded research is always better, but it doesn't prevent people from spending money to do research, but it doesn't entitle them for the profits.
I'm not advocating FOR communism, I'm just trying to dispel myths.
Socialism is soluble with capitalism.
Never brought any innovation? VP9, AV1, zstd, GraphQL, React, and many more were made/contributed to by Google/Facebook specifically to improve those services. We benefit from this as they release these programs/formats.
Programs and format are not research. Nothing new was invented, they're just alternative to existing things.
They're improvements on existing things, which is the basis for pretty much all research. A nuclear reactor is just an "alternative" to a coal power plant, but I'm sure everyone here would agree that the nuclear power plant is better. In the case of the video formats, image/video processing is literally part of computer science.
In the case of React, you could follow the breadcrumbs back to JavaScript, created by a capitalistic company.