postingpals

From your website:

"Admit Nothing. Deny Everything. Make Counter-Accusations"

Why am I not surprised to see this kind of instinctive reaction. I don't want to debate your points because that is way out of scope for this thread and I don't want to be chased out.

Why do you have to make work fun, shouldn't you already be enjoying it if you are doing what you want to do? Are you not doing what you want to do? See, that's the kind of problem that creates the infantilisation.

This is Capitalism. Everything has to be family friendly so it can reach as wide an audience as possible. When you're waiting for customer support, you have to hear a fun jingle so you don't get upset. People have to be talked down to like children so they know their place in the wealth hierarchy. It's an ideology, not in the sense of political beliefs, but rather false ideas that dominate society that we all subconsciously hold to maintain the social system we built on contradictory premises.

I don't think I've presented the full picture, but you asked where this trend is coming from, and to me this is the only common factor and starting point of investigation.

The idea that the alternative to copyright means artists working for free is an ideological conflation not even the wealthiest, most cynical person on earth could have dreamt up.

The argument a layman would make in favour of this is:

"if people know they could rent seek with their intellectual property and potentially make millions of dollars charging people for licenses / gatekeeping their work, well that's going to motivate them to create really good work! Without this motivation, no one would create good work"

And it's like, ignoring all the well-established counter-arguments to this, it kind of seems to justify its own existence through contradiction. It says, in essence, "We have to coerce people into making really good work by not giving them the building blocks that they could use to make really good work"

The alternative is trusting corporations, who also give your data to the government. Who do you trust with power then?

I find the show to be incredible, not just in terms of rhetoric but actually just aesthetically, it's got very pleasing visuals and there is no overuse of edits and sound.

But sometimes i see the way david simon acts on twitter and i reconsider how good the show actually was. It's hard to believe it was even made by him.

Aren't teachers supposed to provide the annotations themselves with their english knowledge?

They saw no evidence of a crime and had no authority to enter his home or fenced property

Weird, this hasn't stopped the police before.

Are you suggesting you'd kill someone if they tried to tax you slightly more highly? Or if they took some of your child's inheritance according to a means tested solution? That is very weird.

This is a lot of odd, complex moral statements used to denounce a comparatively simple and separate idea, that wealth should be distributed somewhat more fairly. Inequality is going to persist in other areas and probably even in financial areas, but that doesn't make taxes robbery.

Liveable necessities like water, food, and housing, that are either wasted on inefficient food production methods or given to rent-seekers (by the economic definition of the term). No one is claiming we are post-scarcity and that everyone can have the standard of living of a millionaire, though I would argue that one having a standard of living like this could take away from other people's standard of living.

Basically my argument, since this thread is quite far down now, is that over-population is not robbing the globe of resources in any amount worth worrying about and therefore population control is not going to solve inequality since it's a distribution problem.

It's a big topic to get into, but what I really mean is there are certain resources that we either throw away or don't distribute that wouldn't require relocation, and could be given to people without needing to police them for having kids or whatever. Do you not think Nigeria and Bangladesh have this problem as well? It's not just the developed world. Underdeveloped countries have resource allocation problems and definitely have excess resources in some cases.

An example of a market failure is climate change, or at least many market failures are contained within this problem. Are you suggesting the government take a hands off approach to that? At the end of the day the government is necessary to the functioning of capitalism, we need to help people out of poverty so that among other things the economy can actually improve. That's all I'm arguing for, and I think there is undeniable proof of it at this point.

This is a logical leap i'm afraid. We have been trying to give people what they need using government welfare for a century now. It's not communism to correctly understand that some people need to be given opportunities to prove themselves in the market regardless of their race, wealth, etc.

It is the hereditary nature of wealth which is the largest contributor to long-term inequality.

Hereditary wealth is a specific form of rent-seeking which is something liberal economics has no explanation for. It's like one of those things that never left the feudal era whilst everything else did. But I wonder why some who follow this type of economics think this is the sole and most important issue? There are many examples of rent-seeking and this is far from the biggest contributor towards inequality.

China's policy wasn't all that successful

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_women_of_China

Population control is a very outdated idea, we have enough resources for the population, we just don't know how to distribute them using free market models.

For those that are inevitably about to argue and downvote the above... It seems the economy is returning, smartly, towards keynesian models because we've seen first hand how destructive the past 50 years of austerity and free market economics has become. Its clear to me that we need to have a strong government to save the economy from market failures, including but not limited to job guarantees echoing those of the new deal in the 30s. Don't have to be a marxist to see that.

This story is deeper than 'life crushed this one individual's childhood dreams'.

At any turn during the story, the author could have become something much worse. He could have become a drunk, he could have become homeless. The invisible hand of the economy dangled his future in front of him as a tease and then handed him a job in the end as a threat, telling him never to be ungrateful or else.

It's a retrospective on the ways in which average people can have their lives warped by externalities. At the end the author wonders about the version of himself that became beatnik, but what about those versions of himself that became drunk and homeless? Well, those don't exist in parallel universes. They exist in this universe, as other people in the same situation as him, the same situation shared by 90% of people.

It's like I'm reading a comic about my own life, except as it is happening in the 21st century.

As a wannabe beekeeper myself i can tell you honey bees aren't without their problems. Farming of honey bees has put other wild bee species into decline, and they make up a significant portion of pollinators of flowers bees don't go for. I don't think it's a huge deal and i'd rather more of them than no bees at all, but it's worth looking into because ecological diversity and natural ecosystems are very important.

I've been trying to get into this area of study.. what did you read to know all this stuff?

No, look, i'm generalising. I know some people with liberal views who voted republican simply for tax purposes. Ignoring that this itself may be considered a bad view, I don't look down on republicans like some of my fellow liberal 'elites' do. I see them as human beings who I want to give healthcare and education to, like any other.

But, just as republicans have generalised the motivations of democrats to justify certain destructive behaviours, I generalise the actions of republicans.

They resent being told what to do by what they perceive as elitist, out-of-touch folks in major coastal cities

They resent be told what to do by anyone. They were asked to wear masks by Dr Fauci, who is hardly a coastal elite, and many of them couldn't even do that.

I don't think republicans are necessarily bad people but their views are pretty bad and sure you can move to a red state for financial reasons or whatever but some people, especially minorities, can't just go and live with people who spread around covid or think cops are oppressed.

This too is a unicorn fantasy.

You claim the reason people are not selling their data is because they are too obsessed with culture or something. In reality there is an imbalance of negotiation power. A company can sell their data because they understand the game and have leverage over other companies. They can say "buy our data, it's valuable and there's only one of us". A citizen cannot do that.

Besides your data is already in circulation and they don't necessarily need it to be tied to you in order for it to be a generally useful human data point. How do you 'tax' that which has been stripped of your ownership and distributed far and wide?

Nevertheless I don't think you're going to get this put into law. Legislation is an unstable and unfair method of change that is biased towards people who can afford to partake in it.

I am trying to get people to come to that realisation themselves, that way they're more open to it.

You cannot get rid of money or imbalanced voting structures in politics because people aren't going to write in laws that cut out their own financial and popular gain.

They won a plurality, not a majority

You speak of this as if it's not a legitimate electoral structure in place in many countries today, especially America. When OP says they voted fascists into power it carries the same weight whether it was by majority or plurality, in the former case it means most people 'wanted' it, in the latter it means enough people were okay with letting it happen.

Someone made a business out of nerds talking about how they think business works, and you're in it. Pretty amazing too.

SV is not going to disrupt the sex industry because the part that needs disrupting is the unethical nature of it. Profit is not optimised to do that.