Tying aid to cuts in IRS funding was absolutely asinine.
Republicans will run ads saying that Democrats refused to support Israel and Democrats will mumble about the violation of parliamentary principles. Then voters will ignore the whole thing and vote exclusively on how they feel about abortion.
The current GOP plan (which looks a lot like historical GOP plans) is to put up bills full of poisoned pills and then blame Democrats for refusing to pass them. Their donors get to spend a billion dollars on ads saying how Democrats are hypocrits. Cable news / national papers will do a bunch of “Both sides!” view-from-nowhere stories that wax nostalgic about bipartisanship. Mike Johnson will premier a NYT Bestselling book “Jesus Save America”, in which he advocates all liberals be subject to a state-financed exorcism. Fetterman will personally grab up and break a Palestinian migrant over his knee to prove how much the Senate supports Israel. The Government will shut down.
And, after six months of people screaming about how Social Security checks are not going out any minute now, you’ll be surprised to find out how much of this DOA bill gets included in the compromise they eventually settle on.
They fixate on what’s presented the loudest, because that’s the news most readily available to them.
Also, I won’t lie, I’ve had a lot of personal drama around women’s health in my own life. I’m a Texas resident who knows quite a few women who have miscarried or needed to terminate their pregnancy in the last ten years. I don’t know what any of them are expected to do over the next ten years. But I do know that my sister has told me straight up “I can’t move back to Texas to be with the family, because I want to have more kids”.
Why would wanting to have more kids discourage you from moving back to Texas? Because she’s at a high risk of miscarriage. And if she miscarries, there’s a real possibility that the local hospital will let her bleed out in the ER before they risk the liability of performing a life-saving operation.
I can’t ignore that impact on my immediate family, even as I recognize the shitty attempts by politicians to make Israel/Ukraine into a cash grab for their donor bases. All that becomes - for better or worse - a secondary concern beside the fact that my sister doesn’t feel safe living in Texas while pregnant.
Sitting my kids down and telling them that the only way to send them to college is to keep buying scratch-off lottery tickets.
Angrily insisting that the only other alternative is to tear up the entire higher education system. Its either gambling on scratchers or doing a bloody uprising. No other alternatives.
Sort of a joke, given how many oil leaks our infrastructure is already riddled with.
Doing a little light domestic terrorism would be a drop in the bucket beside the enormous amount of waste polluting our groundwater and riverways. But new media would fixate on it as the de facto reason why oil spills exist, for the next twenty years.
Its different because America and Israel are democracies. Therefore, they can kill as many people as they want and its okay actually.
Putin is an evil dictator leading a rogue state (That’s on the verge of collapse! Any day now!) And suggesting he is in any way like an Israeli or an American flags you as a Chinese Robot Antifa Fifth Columnist Hamas Affiliated Trump Supporter.
Let death take my enemies by surprise; let them go down alive to the realm of the dead, for evil finds lodging among them.
~ Psalms 55:15
For the one in authority is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for rulers do not bear the sword for no reason. They are God’s servants, agents of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer.
I’m not sure “act stupid” is an idiom that existed at the time the scriptures were written. But “do wrong” comes close enough. And the implication of the term is that you’re engaging in some kind of threatening behavior, which would qualify you as one of “my enemies”.
Do you support sustainability, social responsibility, tech ethics, or trust and safety? Congratulations, you’re an enemy of progress. That’s according to the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen.
Not a coincidence that folks with Ivy League degrees get showered with money, while kids from state schools end up doing all the drudge work that keeps infrastructure running.
VC is a poison pill. It’s not there to drive innovation but to filter down who has access to opportunities. Their ideas about what works or doesn’t are bad, and largely driven by the culture they are apart of. They worship elitism and credentials, but will the respect for those who are willing to do the work. It’s inherently extractive. They add nothing. Want to kill a business? Take VC money.
Its an excellent way to cash out of a mediocre idea. Also an excellent way to elevate a mediocre idea from a regional/niche/insider scam to a national stage.
We have some of the most naked and predatory methods of rent seeking imaginable. How on earth is this “barely” capitalism? It is quintessential capitalism. A near-perfect engine of consolidation, profit-seeking, and value growth.
Back in the day, companies actually competed
Competition isn’t the goal of existing capitalist enterprises. It raises unit costs and dilutes profit. Competition is only a means by which a large enterprise temporarily undercuts a smaller local enterprise, until it is starved of revenue and fails. To quote Peter Thiel, “Monopoly is the condition of every successful business.”
If there’s no competition, markets can’t work.
The purpose of markets is to marry nodes in the supply chain at an auction rate. But once the marriages are made, the market no longer serves a purpose. Markets are only a transitory vehicle leading to full vertical integration of the supply chain.
Once you’ve achieved a vertical monopoly, your business model pivots to maximizing margins by raising prices and lowering costs. That’s how you maximize profits. And maximizing profits is the only real goal of a private business enterprise.
you need a robust safety net so people aren’t destitute when some idiot like Musk drives a company into the ground
You don’t want a robust safety net in a capitalist system. Safety nets create a subsidy for unemployment - functionally a wage floor, beyond which people would prefer to be unemployed. Without the threat of poverty hanging over a worker’s head, you won’t get the lowest possible wage rate for their labor. This drives up costs and cuts into profits, which is antithetical to the goals of a capitalist enterprise.
Musk driving his business into the ground serves the end goals of a capitalist system overall (even if it marginally inconveniences Musk and his lenders in the moment). The failure of his firm releases workers into the unemployment pool and allows competitors to hire them at a discount - potentially displacing existing workers who command a higher salary. While Musk’s business flounders, the overall auto market prospers. The profit generated in an individual vehicle sale rises, as supply of vehicles contracts - driving prices up - and cost of labor falls - driving unit costs down.
This is good for the surviving pool of capitalists. Its even good for Musk, over the long term, as a higher rate of profit means more cheap money in the investment pool that he can borrow from in order to pursue his next project.
You’re confusing capitalism with industrialization.
The development of modern modes of production came about nearly two centuries after the foundation of modern marketplace practices. The Dutch East India Company did not bring people out of poverty. Just the opposite. It served as a means of rapidly conquering and subjugating large indigenous populations, by using the speculative bubbles created during periods of looting to construct large militaries capable of further conquest. The rapid militarization and trans-continental looting/pillaging of the 17th and 18th centuries resulted in the increased spread of contagious disease, the worst genocides committed since at least the Roman era, and the formalization of Colonial Era chattel slavery.
Industrialization, which was a product of the mathematical and material sciences renaissance of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, produced huge surpluses in commercial goods and services. Revolutions in textile manufacturing, fertilization, fossil fuel-based transportation and electrification, materials sciences, and medical innovation brought hundreds of millions of people out of the agricultural economy and brought a functional end to a litany of common causes of death. The industrial era was not specific to the capitalist economic mode, but it was practiced most aggressively early on by capitalist states.
But the Industrial Revolution had a huge knock-on effect. Mass media and modern communication reoriented traditional class hierarchies and formed new models for social organization. The seed of socialist theories that had been planted in the 17th and 18th centuries blossomed into massive revolutionary labor movements during the 19th and 20th centuries. This, combined with the industrial collapse of the imperial core in the wake of the First and Second World Wars, signaled the beginning of the end of capitalism as a hegemonic economic force.
By the 1950s, numerous socialist political experiments produced successful industrialized civilizations, some of which even persist into the modern era. Meanwhile, rising standards of living from industrial surpluses in food, fuel, and living space raised living standards globally without regard to one’s economic mode.
The real test of capitalism as an enterprise has kicked in during the last 50 years. By the 1970s, the era of cheap fossil fuel was coming to an end and various economic models were forced to contend with a declining rate of new surplus goods and services. Forced to choose between economic conservation/improved efficiency and a new wave of imperial aggression, the capitalist states have attempted to backpedal into their old traditional colonial models of business. The end result has been a new generation of major military conflicts - from the Vietnamese Jungle to the Iraqi desert - alongside a number of ugly civil wars and domestic insurrections in former capitalist strongholds.
Without a continuous industrial surplus to drive profit, modern capitalist economic models are failing. Quality of life in capitalist states is beginning to decline. And capitalist leaders are turning to more militant methods of seizing natural resources, forcing low-wage labor, and wrecklessly disposing of excess waste.
Capitalism rode the cresting wave of industrialization for a century. But now it is failing. And people in capitalist states - from the UK to Saudi Arabia to the Philippines - are seeing their quality of life erode away at a rapid pace.
Industrialization in the USSR didn’t happen? Damn. Where did all those nuclear power plants come from, then? What about that massive agricultural surplus? How did they develop their own computer technologies?
Modern Capitalism is more a product of the Dutch East India company, chartered in the early 17th century, than Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations which was written as a critique of the subsequent 200 years of capitalist practices.
I think it’s been several years in a row now Nordic countries have been rated the happiest in the world.
Those studies tend to be heavily Euro-centric.
Some of the happiest countries on earth are in East Asia. Bhutan, in particular, is the happiest country you’ve never heard about. Vietnam and Singapore also tend to rate very high. Bolivia also tends to punch well above its weight class.
But it should be noted that the Nordic states have historically been very far removed from war. With the Ukraine/Russia conflict, Fins are significantly more unhappy than they’ve been in prior generations. I don’t think you can blame that on their domestic policy or their economic model. As more refugees are forced through Europe in an effort to flee conflicts in Armenia and police crackdowns in Hungary and industrial sabotage through the Baltic Sea, happiness in the region is plummeting.
They literally stole their nuclear tech from the capitalists
Soviets had a hydrogen bomb before their Western peers.
What’s more the world’s first nuclear power station at Obninsk was connected to the Moscow grid in June of 1954. The Soviets outpaced their American peers in nuclear power, rocketry, and advanced electronics well into the 1970s.
did not believe in genetics, period
That’s flatly untrue. And it completely neglects their role in eliminating smallpox during the 1950s.
created famines from their poor understanding of environmental science and lack of flexibility
the average Soviet citizen consumes about 3,300 calories a day, as against 3,520 for an American. The report showed that the Soviet diet consists of far more grain and potatoes than the American diet, but less fish and meat and less sugar.
They ended famine in Asia. A continent that suffered mass famine every ten to fifteen years was fully fed through domestic agricultural production by the end of the 1960s.
Stalin was so stacked with grain in the 50s that he was bailing out the English colonies throughout India and Bangledish.
Everything is being automated. The Admins are automated. The mods are increasingly automated. The subs are filled with botspam. The comments (have always been, but are now overwhelmingly) filled with bot-chatter.
The end goal of Reddit is to automate away anything that might cut into the company’s bottom line. I’m convinced they’re going to functionally do away with the comments section sooner or later. Just set up a byzantine set of bureaucratic hurdles that no human can actually clear. Then all that’s left is the bots, and all you are allowed to do is look through the glass at the simulation.
“Officials said that Israel and Egypt were prepared to let foreigners leave the Strip which is under heavy Israeli bombardment, but Hamas had refused.”
deleted_by_moderator
Capitalism is killing our planet (lemmy.ml)
There has to be a name for this state of being (startrek.website)
Just Stop Oil smash glass on paintings at the National Gallery (www.theguardian.com)
Two activists arrested after Rokeby Venus artwork targeted, as dozens of others held after blocking Whitehall...
Putin Unleashes Record Bombing in Ukraine as the World Watches Gaza (www.thedailybeast.com)
Almost 90 bombs were dropped in one region in just 24 hours....
"Show up acting stupid and find out" (lemmy.world)
Hey tech billionaires, if you want to talk about radical change, let’s abolish venture capitalism (www.theguardian.com)
Do you support sustainability, social responsibility, tech ethics, or trust and safety? Congratulations, you’re an enemy of progress. That’s according to the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen.
... (i.postimg.cc)
One year after being bought for $44 billion, X is worth $19 billion (arstechnica.com)
Tried joining Reddit again because of lack of activity in very niche communities, got banned again ,_, (lemmy.world)
Reddit improved their anti-ban evasion system, cuz it’s the sixth or more failed attempt at evading a permanent ban. Never more, I am staying here....
Hamas blocks foreign nationals from leaving Gaza (www.telegraph.co.uk)
“Officials said that Israel and Egypt were prepared to let foreigners leave the Strip which is under heavy Israeli bombardment, but Hamas had refused.”