Re: ::scr gene djinni

[Arvid Gidhagen <arvgi575@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> 
> My opinion? Well, looking at only the benefits, it's easy to say yes,
> it's a great idea. But the thing is, it has to be done out of
> humanitarian motives, with a view to being applied to *everybody*,
> not just a rich elite. My old man made a point about man fecking with
> nature usually being bad, and I pointed out the usual rebuttals:
> medicine, agriculture, domestication of animals etc. He pointed out
> a load of other examples where the results were less than desirable.
> There seems to be a pattern: when humanity mucks about with nature
> for greed reasons, the results tend to be pretty shitty.

This ties in to something I've been thinking about for a while.
Basically I think that Gordon Gecko's motto of "Greed is Good" is
wrong and also dangerous.

The problem with greed is that it is essentially short-sighted.
Once you start doing something out of greed, you do it for greed
and greed only, without actually caring about what the results are
for others or in the long run.

I think that free competition is good, even essential, for the
development of new and better ideas/products/art/culture - but
only if applied in such a way that the competitors actually strive
for an improvement and not only for short-term profit.

Greed is probably an innate human quality - stay alive at all costs -
so what would be needed is some way to channel or reshape greed into
the ability to be satisfied with your work, knowing that you (either
as an individual or as a part of a team/group) did something good,
not just for the sake of your own achievement or for money but for
a purpose.

So I think the basic idea of capitalism (in the sense of "a society
based on free competition") is good, but it has to applied in a
sensible way to work. It is dangerous, but it can be used in a good
way, just like fire - only much more complex. I have a feeling that
at the moment, capitalism runs very much on greed and short-term
payoff, taking all of society down with it. Even a country like
Sweden that on paper is social-democratic and therefore basically
socialist has taken a lot of ideas and impressions from capitalism,
which leads to a very undesirable situation where capitalist ideas
are mis-applied in sometimes totally Byzantine ways. A good example
would be Akademiska Hus, which is the company that owns almost all
the buildings that Swedish universities and colleges use. Akademiska
Hus is a state-owned company, and the universities are also state-
owned and state-financed. So the universities pay their rent - money
that they have received from the government - back to the governemnt,
who cunningly add a fair bit of tax on the rent. And they can't
actually rent buildings from anyone else, because no other buildings
are suited for university purposes, and conversely Akademiska Hus
can't rent the houses out to anyone other than universities because
the houses are custom-built... A long side-track perhaps.

The bottom of it all was this, though: Sometimes you hear companies
or financial analysts saying that the only function of a company
is to make money. This is almost revolting - surely the function
of Microsoft should be "making computer software", not "making
money"?

Do you think I'm contradicting myself? Is greed good after all?
Am I being untenable and unrealistic?

- Arvid