In a just universe, Henry Kissinger would be dead. Henry Kissinger is proof that a) God hates us and wants us to suffer or b) There is no god and the universe is a dark and cold indifferent place.
The Nobel prize is a joke. They gave Europe the prize for going several years without burning down the whole world. They gave it to Obama for being black.
They gave the chemistry prize to a chemical weapons guy, the medicine prize to the guy who invented the lobotomy.
People Magazine’s “sexiest man alive” has more credibility because at least all the winners were good looking.
Economics is just a shit prize, it devalues the rest of the prizes, and should never been allowed to be awarded among the others.
The litterature prize started as a good idea, but these days it has lost a lot of presteige, just looks back at when Bob Dylan was forced to get the prize.
He didn’t want the prize, but the organizers still awarded him the prize, looking like a weirdly obsessive fan club.
It’s as though Dems are critical of presidents. It doesn’t matter who is in office. It’s like Dems aren’t fanatic like Republicans. And my supporting evidence is Biden’s approval rating.
Wow, they must have changed the meaning of 0. An 11 point drop in approval from Democrats since he made his stance clear on Israel. There are even protests following him around
You know tons of “Dems” have tons of criticisms for Obama and Biden?
Also you both sides people ignore that one side is mostly incompetent while the other literally wants to actively harm minorities, LGBTQ+, immigrants etc. Biden has been getting a ton of shit for his Israel/Palestine response as well as his union issues. In addition, some of his stances in the past.
Yeah most non-native speakers never get this wrong. I wonder if it’s because non-natives learn the language in a structured environment like school, whereas native speakers learn it by absorption, and everyone speaks english long before starting school?
Or maybe it’s just because the American education system is absolutely fucked
the American education system is absolutely fucked
I’ve always felt it’s a cultural issue. Just about every kid I knew thought that school was the worst prison imaginable. It was something to hate. If you disagreed with that, you were a “nerd” and should be mocked and bullied for it. That was reflected in the media at the time I grew up too.
What I don’t really get though is how people can read plurals every day 100 times with their own eyes and still not internalize how they work.
Yes, out of hundreds of people who read horrible spelling and grammar, 2 or 3 might complain. If you ask me, the ratio is pretty low. For example, often posts will have a very short title but still manage to contain at least one obvious mistake. If people are going through the trouble of posting at all, you’d think they could be bothered to read back over the three words they wrote instead of mashing the post button without doing so.
this is an excellent point. perhaps the slowness of the content here is helping those of us who’ve been on reddit forever and are used to just doom scrolling through endless content.
i spend less time here but I feel I get more direct ‘value’ when I do. it’s more small business feel than condy nast breathing margins down the user community’s throats(pre and post gold eras)
I quit the R word cold turkey re: API and now toggle between this and kbin but lemmy with eternity app has been the best baconreader withdrawal breaker for me.
Another big point is that it’s a rejection of the profit motive, ie there’s not even a “small business” feeling like you say for me, but a far more genuine feeling. Nobody has tried to sell me anything here yet.
So true, lemmy provides me with just enough stuff to feel like I saw enough memes, got some news, etc. but then I can just put it down and do other stuff. My interneting / doomscrolling is waaay lower than it was before.
Coulda fooled me, the content quality has continued to climb, and that’s all that matters. Look at this post, it’s an original meme only relevant to this community, and it’s blowing up.
I get a bit annoyed with a hit meme being reposted 5+ times across instances, it clogs the main feed with repetition and only artificially increases the post numbers while making the whole experience less good. I did enjoy the comment-stacking meme yesterday where everyone added their own take. There are a few news-posting bots that post the exact same articles and cause the clogging repetitive main feed that makes the app far less interesting as well. It gets a bit depressing seeing the same inflammatory headlines 3-4 times, ie “35 blind fingerless coal-mining orphans bombed in Gaza strip hospital, why isn’t Joe Biden doing anything?” While reporting is important, the repetition of some themes seems astroturf-y. I also get really annoyed with the bots posting NSFW/ extremely explicit sex content/ads on main feeds. I have been here less because of these things.
It really doesn’t bother me tbh. The fediverse isn’t for everyone and I’d rather people just use whatever platform they prefer than endlessly complaining on Lemmy when it’s clearly simply not for them. And that’s okay, use whatever platform suits you.
The whole “populist” mindset of modern social media is trash anyway. I miss the age of forums and boards instead of monolithic megacorp run social media
I don’t think it was total hot garbage like most. I dislike most of everything to do with the final battle, but the time travel shenanigans are fun as fuck
So if one person picks 1000 apples per day and the second picks 2 apples, then they split apples 501 to each. Good luck convincing the first person that this is good for them
But that’s not the point, the point of this approach is that like in cooperatives, there are minimum productivity goals and many roles to play, and so on. Obviously like you point out, no one is that stupid.
Now, consider the needs of people who are old or need help. Like helping your old man, I’m sure you don’t mind getting more apples. I wouldn’t. Like you, I would get angry if I’m the only useful one hahaha, but that what productivity and organization is for. No one lives in a bubble.
Now… What you said, I’ve seen it happen in capitalism. Not in small businesses, normally the owner is in the store too. I mean when we talk about the big bucks like a better example. They expect you to handle of those apples, and ain’t offering you a comfy home neither.
So Instead, one person picks 1000 apples, gives them all to the property owner, and then receives enough money to buy 50 apples, yet you’d prefer that over having to split the 1000 apples evenly.
Except we aren't talking about two people, are we? We're talking about entire populations of people.
And when people have their needs met, they are more able to be productive. And they are more likely to believe in the good of the system that supports them, as they can see the tangible results of that system in their daily life. They can see how their contribution to the system benefits them. Making them more likely to be happy to contribute.
Will some percentage of people under-contribute because of laziness? Sure. But who cares? That percentage is small. And we have the technology to compensate many times over now.
Why the hell do we make society more miserable for everyone, forcing everyone to live under the threat of poverty if they don't work, just to force this small percentage to work against their will? Not to mention completely screw over anyone who cannot work for reasons beyond their control, because we subject them to this insane level of scrutiny because we're paranoid that they might just be lazy.
We can choose a cooperative system, or the antagonistic one we currently have, where we are all at each others' throats because of suspicion that someone might be getting something that they "don't deserve".
You still have the problem of misaligned incentives together with the fact that the only way to mitigate it is through coercion. This is why all communism inevitably leads to authoritarianism. The strength of capitalism is that it can absorb and indeed is designed to allow for the fact that humanity’s cooperative impulse --due to the fact that we evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to live in small bands of about 30 to 150 people-- cannot work at the level of the modern nation state.
You still have the problem of misaligned incentives
Not really sure what you mean by that. Socialism leads to better alignment of incentives. If everyone is benefitting from the system, contributions to the system are incentivised.
That is the opposite of capitalism, where the individual tries to gain any advantage they can, even at the expense of everyone else. And broad advances and contributions of work benefit very few people, by design. That leads to lower trust, which further entrenches the idea that the individual has to look out for themselves, and is thus incentivised to game to system.
together with the fact that the only way to mitigate it is through coercion
And for both situations I would need ask at least one of them “Why do you need so many apples? Why not give some of them to those who need them instead of accumulating them?”
Think about it, you’re already living the situation you presented but the person picking two apples is in a managerial position and gets to keep the thousand apples you picked in exchange for the two apples they picked.
This is disingenuous: the fundamental principle of socialism and Communism is democracy. And, credit where credit is due, capitalism forced us to socialize the production of goods and services (it now takes many people to “produce” anything). Currently, there is no discussion about who gets the profit of socialized labour, it goes to the people who own the workplace, which are rarely the workers.
So, to make your example realistic, you and this other person are part of a community that grows apples (pick any rural community). Together, you all own the fields.
How do you decide what each person gets? You come to a consensus. There are so many variables; is the other person injured?young?sick?old? Or really bad at picking apples? Maybe you are on some apple picking super serum. How do you decide who gets what? The same way people usually do; you decide together.
In your example, having a blanket rule as you suggest would never work, and would be unfair, but it is what happens now in our advanced capitalistic economies. If you pick 1000 apples for a company, how many do you keep? Or more realistically; once the apples are sold, how much of the.profits go to you? You have no choice. You work, get paid, and go home. You work harder and you end up with just about the same amount at the end. The only saving grace is if you work hard enough, one day you might be promoted by the generous owner to a position where you are no longer the poor schmuck who does all the work. But that poor schmuck will always still exist, it’s just no longer you.
This is under the assumption that there is a surplus in society that can satisfy the needs of everyone. Marx’s point is that technological development and industrialization could make this possible. As such, the need to motivate people to work harder is not necessary.
Prior to such a surplus existing, the distribution of goods would be more akin to “From each according to their ability, to each according their contribution”. That ensures people are motivated to maximize their productivity as long as that’s still necessary.
No duh, they were built to be very affordable so you wouldn’t have as many homeless people. It’s incredible that you thought that answer was somehow insightful
They were built to be affordable for working class and had nothing to do with homelesness… Communists/socialists did not acknowledge existence of homelessness because it would mean party admitting of making a mistake or system being flawed.
Affordable and available housing has everything to do with homelessness though, it’s one of the best ways to actually keep people from becoming homeless in the first place. If more people can afford a place to live, less people will be homeless. Won’t fix all of it but a huge chunk anyhow
I have no idea if or how much old Eastern Bloc countries lied about the number of homeless. I wouldn’t be surprised at all, but I haven’t seen any studies or statistics about this so I can’t assume they were all lying or that the situation was universally worse than in Western countries.
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