by ninetyninenine | 2025-08-03 15:38:32+00:00
>When construction is driven by a desire for profit, you get shoddy buildings that, if you're unlucky, kill people. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grenfell_Tower_fire, or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyatt_Regency_walkway_collapse – the latter is twice relevant, since the response also challenges your thesis. When buildings are built well, it's because they're built by people who care about their work. Cutting corners (a directly profitable activity, in many situations – and repeatedly profitable, if you play your cards right) is not what I call "progress".

You get this everywhere. All corruption all corporations suffer from this problem. Shortcuts are everywhere and corporations are abstracted to the point where morality is diluted through shareholder division and all you get is a machine that cares about making more capital. The reason why we don't get shoddy buildings everywhere is because that still affects profits. When a plane crashes that affects things and companies will still think in terms of long term consequences as well as short term.

A better example is global warming or microplastics. The negative consequences aren't clear and the long term result is so far away it doesn't affect profits.

But to your point. All of society is driven by profit, and the negative consequences of it are everywhere.

>I'm not certain you know what profit is. What do you mean, when you use that word?

Look it up in the dictionary. Revenue minus costs = profit. Please don't go into a pedantic diatribe over this like you did for the "abstract concept of money".

>Thank you for stating your thesis so clearly. While these things are a major driver of war, they are not a significant driver of human progress.

It's the major drive for civilization itself. Are you blind? In fact opposite of what you say War in modern times actually destroys progress and business. In modern times society is less prone to go to war than in the past because of this. While the news frequently implies that the world is a dangerous place, the statistics show we've never been more capitalist and at peace.

>I've noticed a lot of unjustified assertions from you, which are presumably also appeals to "common sense". How does your "common sense" explain Wikipedia?

I missed what you meant by this. You mean "Why does wikipedia exist if society is driven by profit".

Yeah why does open source exist?

Good question. because a extremely small minority aspect of society is driven by altruism but this minority aspect is so small one can confidently say that society Is driven by money and profit and this statement is generally true.

There's another factor at play here which makes the generality even more true. It's the fact that only people who have a lot of money "aka profit" and leisure time (because they have money) can afford to spend their time doing charity work. Like how can you just spend your life giving away shit and expect to be alive? At the end of the day you need beneficial utility coming in. Profit is not just something we desire in excess. We desire money to SURVIVE.

This crazy stuff like altruism and charity ONLY exists when people have an excess amount of money and are able to spend those extra dollars on other things. However EVEN when this is the case it's still rare. People with money just want to make more money and most people don't want to give that shit away, that's why this country is loaded with billionaires that rarely give away their money.