Yeah, there’s no problem with a meritocracy as long as the top and the bottom of the gradient aren’t (literally can’t pay bills -> more money than you could ever spend.)
Like in no sane world would people willingly become surgeons for the same pay as a sanitation worker, that’s just fucking stupid. Why spend a decade going through school to be a doctor when you could just go pick up trash and make the same money? We have to have some kind of variation in pay scale or society wouldnt function.
Like you said, how much difference between the top and the bottom definitely doesn’t have to be what it is.
Yeah but in the current form of meritocracy both the surgeon and the sanitation worker are relatively poor compared to the upper class. And that exactly is the problem: you cant get rich just by working.
The problem is that the ‘middle class’ doesn’t exist. It is a series of cultural affectations, that do not apply to the majority that supposedly make up ‘the middle class’. If the ‘middle class’ can or can’t make up welders pulling 55 hours a week on overtime and an accountant working 40 hours a week, then the distinction is arbitrary. That is why Marxist distinctions of class are superior. They are dictated instead by your relationship to your means of production, and how you acquired the rights to that relationship.
Right… you do understand that most politicians in western countries are career politicians that have been there for decades, right?
A good example is Biden himself. He’s been there in politics for like 50 years. It’s a geriatric club at this point it’s become a common joke.
Same delusion as the poster of the meme. People believe in the same ideals that created the problem without looking at what it has become. Not everything that sounds good is good. Life is more complex than the simple model that simple people keep believing in. People will always find a way to abuse a system for their own benefit. That’s the result of “power corrupts”.
would be nice, but doesn’t seem to really happen, (incumbancy advantage). Also the bigger problem that isn’t solved by voting them out or even term limits. Access to money is important to win an election. Same people have money, those people pick candidates that are loyal and see to it that they win. When one old corrupt politician dies we’ll get a new one pushed by the corporate media.
I don’t get why the only solution is to trust others to take care of you. I have some bad news: No one gives a crap about you. The sooner you realize this the better. You should be responsible and learn more on how to manage your assets, investments, money, etc. In my opinion, this idea that we have to keep trusting the elite to run our lives is ridiculous. People should be more responsible and manage their money in an independent way.
I like cryptocurrency for this, because I have full control on my money and no government will be able to rehypothecate my money for whatever risky nonsense they’re doing. But you don’t have to be like me or like cryptocurrency. All you have to do is start thinking of a solution that works for you. You can start saving now, diversify in the world economy, and take risks that are appropriate to you, and prepare for your retirement. No need to act as if you have zero power when there are enough tools to give you power over your own money.
I’m the kind of guy that takes all my matters into my own hands, because I trust no one. I even run my email server, my cloud, my VPNs, my everything. I don’t need anyone, company or government, and I have calculated risks in all my endeavour. I can migrate whenever I want. I believe everyone in the world should strive towards that. But we’re living in a centralized world where google alone can just block almost everyone’s life. I’m not in that club.
I don’t get why the only solution is to trust others to take care of you.
Society is built around people “taking care” of you in different ways. Like being a doctor, a teacher, an employer, the police, etc.
That’s why we grew out of being caveman, because we’re built to be cooperative with each other in our DNA. If we didn’t, we’d either be small tribes or individuals and probably die out really fast. It’s because we need others to rely on or we’d literally be extinct.
I don’t think you understand what trust means. There’s almost zero trust with doctors, teachers, etc. You don’t trust doctors out of the blue, but you build an informed decision from the reviews of such a doctor by seeing if they’re good at what they do. This hunky dory delusion that everyone trusts everyone is not real. The doctor, teacher, etc, will be punished if they misbehave and that’s what the free market is about. Keeping them in line as a kind of incentive to behave well.
On the other hand, what you guys want to do is hand all your wealth and power to elites that don’t give two craps about you, have zero consequences in the case they mess up, and have zero incentive to do the right thing (as opposed to make it look like they’re doing the right thing), and then expect them to not steal your hard earned money, and then cry about it when they do it. Well, guess what? I don’t trust the fed has my best interest when they printed 80% of the US dollar money supply over the last 3 years. Why should I store my wealth in USD? Now you go ahead and trust them and do that, and keep complaining on lemmy that the rich are getting richer (NOT because of the printing) when someone tries to talk sense into you. I guess everyone will pay for their decisions after all.
Doctors are doctors because they passed their doctorate.
Someone more knowledgeable than you set the minimum bar of skill they require to practice their craft.
You don’t get to make trust based decisions on doctors because you don’t know what a good doctor looks like. You lack the knowledge to do so. Unless you are yourself a doctor.
I have even less trust in corporations than the government.
If you let those, they would bring slavery back if they could. Since that improves their bottom line.
Dude everything you said is wrong… doctors don’t have doctorates… PhDs do. Also you didn’t invalidate my point, which is that trust isn’t blind. You sound like a teenager. When you grow up you’ll understand what accountability means and how governments have none.
In general, there are three categories of doctorate degrees that apply to the health professions: the professional doctorate, the clinical doctorate, and the research doctorate. In the science-based professional doctorate, the M.D. and D.O are the most well known.
So not only do you have no idea what you are talking about, you also fall back to ad hominem fallacies because you are unable to debunk the stuff I said.
Your knowledge is lacking, so your opinion on who you can trust is worthless.
What kind of logic is that? You’re confusing “taking care of you” with “making trades”. My life doesn’t depend on one person making clothes for me. I can switch them whenever I want, unlike your monopoly government, or Google for that matter.
I’ve seen this sentiment being repeated in the replies, yet this also applies to private companies that are run by absolutely powerful people. It’s true that Lord Acton wrote this about the monarchy, but some execs in multinational corporations today are just as powerful as old-timey monarchs.
And unfortunately he's also a pretty damn good singer.
Like my hackles were up the whole time I was listening to the song because I knew this is some sort of like Republican redneck protest song against the liberals, but at the same time I had to admit the guy can fucking sing and it was a good song.
Yeah that first verse about how we struggle, etc. I was very interested. Then look out for miners, not minors…oook easy dunk, we can all get behind protecting kids. Then the welfare thing. Oh it’s republican talking points not a new uprising of classic country like Cash
I love AJJ, they are a mainstay on my playlists. Their songs are good to great in the lyrics department. But musically they’re not super amazing. Their lead singer also has not a great singing voice. I don’t think any of their songs could be called “catchy” - and none of them are going to get the attention this guy’s song did, and a big part of that is their songs aren’t as good - again, simply from a music standpoint.
“The mine owners did not find the gold, they did not mine the gold, they did not mill the gold, but by some weird alchemy all the gold belonged to them!” - Big Bill Haywood, 1929
They convinced investors to buy into the mining company, they bought the land, they paid the prospector, they bought the mining equipment, they paid the miners
The gold paid them back.
How else could it work?
Edit. Interesting that no one has an answer on how else it could work… For example, in Bolivia there are mining cooperatives, but they still use all the tools of capitalism to extract the gold, and the co-op members are no different to investors really. The hours worked and conditions are no different. Mining is hard and dangerous.
They bought the land? They paid the miners?? Mining has a history of forcing native people out of their lands through threats or worse killing people, making slaves out of poor people and forcing them into 12+ hours shifts in horrible and unsafe conditions.
They do have an extension that forces the new search results page, but I’ve noticed it freezes the browser if I tap on an image result, so I have it disabled.
I completely forgot I had added that extension (back when Google actually looked ugly on Firefox on Android without it) just disabled and oh my god not only does it not freeze it actually feels usable again (I hate the weird AI suggested tabs at the top in the chromium UI).
Thats why you can’t give every party a fair chance. After what happened last time, Germany now practices what’s called “Defensive Democracy” where parties that are considered anti-democratic can be banned (including banning all successor parties).
It’s simply not right enough, considering there’s free speech etc. laws. Even though some (many) members are straight up Nazis and openly express this, the party itself is technically not “too far”-right
You’re right. One of the most famous politicians of the AfD Björn Höcke can be called a Nazi/Facist without any consequences for you, since it isn’t an insult because it’s based on true evidence.
It’s more complex than that. Simply banning it could make everything worse. First of all, banning a party is something that’s very hard. It only happened twice in the history of Germany(except for the banning during the third Reich). Trying to bam them could make everything worse than it currently is, since it would look like the older parties are scared and try to keep their power. This could give the AfD a big boost. Another thing is, that in the case of a failure the AfD could use the fact they weren’t banned to promote themselves as “Democrats” that don’t want to do anything illegal. In the case it would be banned it would take exactly 2 weeks and you have at least 2 or three parties that do exactly the same and maybe would transform into one big party and we have the exact same problem. More effective would be to stop them from receiving money from the government(every party does that so that they can focus on their political work), or to not give the the possibility to enter the Bundestag(or to hold any other form of political office) as its the case with the NPD.
If you ban a party in Germany, it’s automatically bans all „clones“ of that party, and all of its members in high functions can’t participate in these clones. Failure to comply would lead to an immediate ban of the clone. While I agree that eventually, a new far right with other people will probably form, it would take years for them to reorganize and they would have to be extremely careful. I believe that a ban would probably yield at least 10 years of far-right free politics.
Appeasement of the far right has failed every time in history, they will cannibalize every attempt to include them in any sort of „rational“ discourse. Banning parties is a lever that exists precisely because of Germany‘s history. IMHO it sends a strong message to all the non-far-right people (of which there are approx. 60-70%) that bullshit will not be tolerated.
In contrast, doing nothing signals that what the AfD is doing is fine and will move the discourse farther and farther right.
Stopping funding and preventing them from entering the Parliament is precisely what a ban would do, so I am not sure why the difference is between that and what you are suggesting.
It was pretty great going to high school when the interesting fashion trends were low rise jeans and thongs. I mean, the rest of high school was awful, but at least there were whale tails.
Well you’re in luck because this meme is completely wrong. Low rise jeans are in style and have been starting to go on trend for a couple years, they’re everywhere now.
It should be:
Late 90’s to 2000’s low rise jeans
2010’s high waisted jeans
2020’s low rise jeans
2030’s Best Jeanist?
Whoever made this is a full decade out of touch with fashion.
That can't be sanitary. I mean, who knows what kind of drugs these people take, what kinds of places they have been. People get worried about eating animals that have been given antibiotics, so I can't imagine that billionaire-meat will get approved for human consumption any time soon. We should probably just euthanize the poor souls and recycle the remains... \s
IF you want to switch to an alternative instance use the tool Lasim to synchronize your accounts: synchronize subscriptions, settings and/or blocks. Tool is available for Windows, Linux and MacOs.
just pick another instance and create another account. same email. not complicated. can’t migrate stuff you can’t get to, meh lemmy instances fediverse.observer
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