it's just occurred to me that capitalism stans are behaving exactly according to our broken instinctual model of failure/success
y'all probably know about this phenomenon. in a nutshell: you put a rat in a box with a piece of cheese, it goes for the cheese, gets shocked. it'll do it once or twice, then give up. but if it gets the cheese once, it'll shock itself over and over trying to get it again
capitalism mostly fails. it fucks up almost everything it tries, and every single year we're treated to multiple highly public displays of catastrophic and unnecessary failure caused by clueless, cowardly businessmen making extremely bad decisions
99.999% of attempted ventures are failures. Most products don't work. That remaining, tiny sliver of success, that one in a hundred thousand chance of getting it right, propels and fuels this shitty machine despite it being the most inefficient system ever devised.
The entire concept of competition improving things, or *happening at all*, is basically an observation of a curious and vanishingly rare phenomenon that seemed like such a good idea that people blew it up and claimed it was a universal, natural principle.
Competition doesn't do fuck-all. Companies continue to sell products that have been outmatched by other products for decades because the public is incapable of being properly informed about what to buy or what the bare minimum functionality they should expect is.
Competition occurs only in windfall industries, markets that have so much throughput that they constantly dominate the front page of newspapers - cars, computers, phones - but *also* have consumer-affordable prices.
There is no meaningful competition in the business-to-business sector. Businesses buy one product every 5-10 years. They move incredibly slowly and are more likely to paper over the flaws in the things they buy than change vendors.
Competition also only happens - note I didn't say 'works', but happens *at all* - in markets that have tremendous numbers of customers and where the product is optional. If people need the thing, there is no meaningful competition.
Capitalism is buoyed entirely by its fantastic successes, which are incredibly few compared to the gobstopping number of failures, which you hear about, then brush off, because that's how animals work. We are designed by nature to pursue even a distant glimmer of hope.
We are also designed to ignore the piece of cheese that's twenty feet away in favor of the one that's two feet away but shocks the shit out of us, because this one's here, and the other one is "less certain" because we've *never* seen it succeed.
Our float values are way down in the heavy decimals, we're comparing a 0.001% chance of success with a big question mark and going "hmm, well, the first one seems more better." we're unadventurous. we are too cowardly to become socialists.
You can pick lots of example cases but they seem petty. Capitalism has failed to produce a working VoIP analog terminal adapter. After fifteen years, *nobody* was willing to make a fresh one. Every model on the market is decades old and laughably broken.
But that's just it - capitalism has managed to deliver some interesting accomplishments in a few *big* areas, but consistently fails in countless thousands of smaller ones. Meanwhile it churns through gouts of oil, steel and silicon making those failures.
