[brigadier132]

Economic transactions only happen if there is a mutual benefit. Typically one side of the transaction has more market power than the other and captures more of the surplus but the transaction doesn't happen if one side is worse off from it.

The entire idea of economic transactions being exploitative is literal Marxist propaganda. If you read the word "exploit" in some news article and it's referring to economic transactions, you are reading propaganda.

[Incipient]

"exploit" has two perfectly usable definitions in this context, essentially. One is negative, one is not.

    To employ to the greatest possible advantage.

    To make use of selfishly or unethically.

[brigadier132]

Yes, they are always using the second definition.

[pdntspa]

I don't usually ask for citations on comment threads, but assserting that 'exploitation' is Marxist propaganda is gonna need some citations for me to take even remotely seriously. Otherwise, talk about room temperature IQs...

> Economic transactions only happen if there is a mutual benefit.

There are all sorts of coercive circumstances that may appear mutually beneficial on a superficial level, but may actually not be the case, whether due to contract details, opportunity costs, strategic mistakes, or otherwise. Perhaps this is true given perfect information and execution, but the real world is much more messy.

As an example, consider Spotify or Adobe's transition to a subscription model. There are a lot of people for whom those models are a very bad deal compared to what was.

[BestHackerOnHN]

> I don't usually ask for citations on comment threads

No - please do!!! It'll ensure we have robust discussions on this great site!

[brigadier132]

It's a dog whistle. There are no studies on this, why would academia (which for the field that would study this is 100% composed of leftists) have a study on leftist dog whistles?

Also, putting any value on "studies" when they almost universally fail to replicate outside of hard sciences is dumb.

[dang]

You've broken the site guidelines badly in more than one place in this thread. Can you please not do that? Regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are, it destroys what HN is for, and we have to ban such accounts.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

p.s. I'm not banning your account immediately because I didn't see any other cases of this in your recent history. That's good. Please make sure it doesn't happen again.