>The point of being a hacker (in the traditional sense) is that your utility function is completely wack. You prefer to make the lights on the screen (and by proxy, the state of the registers)

Acquiring money is not the only way to profit; it's whatever your "utility function" is. Money is just an easy one to quantify and analyze.

If you spend 10 hours on Saturday freelancing for $130/hr versus spending 10 hour working on OSS versus fucking around with code, you are still applying your capital (time, skills, hardware/software) to obtain a profit (money, fulfillment, enjoyment).

That's what's great about capitalism: you get to choose how to apply your capital to obtain the outcomes you want, even those outcomes are not monetary.

How is this intrinsic to capitalism, exactly? It's true for any society in general where people are relatively free of coercion so as to devote time to their self-interest. The fact that you're speaking of capitalism in a mixed market economy shows this.

there actually is something wrong with profit: that desire never stops, never says enough, and is oblivious to human suffering.

there are plenty of lazy people, but in their midst are hardworking people trying to survive. Profit chooses to oppress.

The optimal system grows only for the sake of its own employees.

There's nothing wrong with profit. What's wrong is monopoly and oligopoly. Defining an activity as only being up to your ideological standards if it is done for free means that your ideology will never make a dent in a power structure that pays people for their labor. Free as in freedom, not free as in beer.

> means that your ideology will never make a dent in a power structure that pays people for their labor.

But it is fun!