Comment on Profit over people is a failed system
CileTheSane@lemmy.ca 5 days agoeveryone contributes as best they’re able with no concern for getting value out of an exchange proportional to the effort put in
How much effort went into contacting your neighbor about their roof and how much value did you get out of it?
Bytemeister@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Maybe an hour of time between checking around the house to make sure no one was home, checking with my other neighbors to see if they had his contact info, calling the non-emergency police line, chekcing the country records for property info, digging up my neighbor’s linked in profile, calling the corporate office (getting stuck on hold) then thinking to check the Zillow listing and call the agent that last sold the house.
What was it worth to me? I didn’t have to spend the rest of my day wondering if he was going to come home from a day of work and find that his house needed major repairs that could have been mitigated if only he’d known a few hours earlier. He was able to get a crew out there the same day to get the tree out of his roof and get some temporary coverage up to weather then next few days of storms.
CileTheSane@lemmy.ca 5 days ago
So despite your earlier claim that expecting people to help others without getting something out of it themselves was “indicative of a failed home-school education and a lack of real world experience” you have a story where you spent an hour of your time and effort to help your neighbour without getting anything out of it yourself.
Did you do all that for your neighbour because of your failed home-school education? Or your lack of real world experience?
Bytemeister@lemmy.world 5 days ago
If you read a little slower, and tried a little harder, you might understand what I actually wrote. I’m gonna go ahead and lay it out here, since you seem to be struggling…
I am not everyone, you are not everyone. Everyone is not me, and everyone is not you. People are individuals, and as individuals, they have different experiences in life. Those different experiences cause those individuals to behave differently. Some people do like helping others, (like I me), but not everyone does. You’ll note in my story that not all my neighbors worked together to find this guy and let him know about his house, I doubt any of them did except me. I called the police about it, and they tried to help, because they are paid by my city (and by extension, me and my neighbors) to help if they can. I do not hold a social view that depends on everyone being as altruistic (if not more so) than I am. I have a personal philosophy that you should help people, and prioritize helping them based on how close they are to you. I put myself first, a little selfish, sure, but it’s the old “put your mask on first, then help others” logic. You can’t help others effectively if you need help yourself. After that, it’s my family first, then friends, neighbors, residents of my state, countrymen, neighboring countries, continent, and then the rest of the world. However, it would be foolish of me to think that everyone has this same willingness to help, or the same logical progression of altruism for their fellow man. That is why I as an individual can help others with no expectations of direct compensation without characterizing myself as a naive fool who flunked out of homeschool, because I didn’t actually state anything about the education of individuals that help others freely. Your comment is a strawman, where you build a different argument, and attack that, rather than debate what I have actually said.
Now, I’m asking you a question to make sure you are arguing in good faith. Please be sure to address it in your reply. Did you build a strawman intentionally, or did you do it accidentally?
CileTheSane@lemmy.ca 4 days ago
To start with, someone arguing in good faith does not open with: “If you read a little slower, and tried a little harder, you might understand what I actually wrote. I’m gonna go ahead and lay it out here, since you seem to be struggling…”
That’s a sign of someone lacking a good argument and trying to hide it behind insults. Either the person gets offended and doesn’t respond, or they focus on the insult instead of the argument. Either way it’s a weak attempt to get them to focus on something other than the actual argument you are making.
Secondly, speaking of Strawmen: you are insisting something cannot work unless 100% of the people are maximally altruistic, which simply isn’t true. If you have 100 people, 99 are altruistic and 1 isn’t, things will work out just fine. Now, what that minimum percent of autistic people needs to be is up for debate, but it does not need to be 100%. So I agree that not everybody is altruistic, but not everybody to be.
Which brings me to the third point: you going on about your own personal altruism while claiming people aren’t altruistic is a bizarre choice, and if you don’t see how that undermines your argument I can’t help you. My guess is you do see how obviously it undermines your argument and that’s why you’re trying to hide it under insults. You probably also want to feel like you’re very special and nicer than everyone else, but given how rude you present yourself to people who disagree with you this undermines your argument even further. Most people are not this unnecessarily rude to people who disagree with them. So if even someone like you who is below average on politeness can be altruistic, it would imply people who care enough about others to be civil during a disagreement would be at least as altruistic if not more.
You being altruistic while also being a dick implies the majority of people are altruistic; as the majority of people are not dicks, and even dicks are altruistic.
wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 5 days ago
Bytemeister’s anecdote related an example of his personal altruism. Which, I assure you, makes him the rare exception rather than the rule. Most people would not care or go out of their way to do that much or even think about it at all.
That does not contradict his statement that you cannot base a society entirely off of the expectation that everyone will always be that caring and altruistic to the point where we can all rely on and expect the altruism of others to always be able to meet our personal needs.
Bytemeister can simultaneously be altruistic himself, while acknowledging that the average member of society is not altruistic enough to make a system like that work for any length of time.
Bytemeister@lemmy.world 5 days ago
I don’t even think it was that altruistic. I have a saw, and a ladder. I could have risked myself to try to remove the tree and fix up the roof… Not to mention the potential lawsuits from screwing it up, since I’m not trained in tree removal or roof repairs, or getting arrested for trespass for messing around in a house I don’t own.
I put in an amount of effort to satisfy my own concerns about how devasted I would be if my house was destroyed and no one even lifted a finger to let me know about it before I got home.
CileTheSane@lemmy.ca 4 days ago
Using someone unnecessarily peppering insults into all their responses to people who disagree them as a “rare example of someone who cares” is an odd choice.
They don’t care enough to be civil with people they disagree with and even they can be altruistic. How much more altruistic can we expect all the people who don’t insult everyone who disagrees with them to be?