I just saw a TV ad for a class action lawsuit against Volkswagen for their environment data fraud
What stage of capitalism is this
lol i bet this is a exhilarating read
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Honestly, these sorts tend to overestimate the degree to which marketers are just being desperate.
Anonymous asked:
"God is sending you messages, but you aren’t checking your phone." Dude, you should've written the Bible.
anarchyinblack answered:
Perhaps one day a time will come when I will be bored enough to release my own version.
“And the LORD said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: Am I being detained?”
“Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life, and know the gate, and am the gate: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me, for I am the key and the guardian of the gate.”
“But Jesus beheld them, and said unto them, With central planning, this is impossible; but with the market all things are possible.”
Bet you they have central planning in heaven.
With businesses as well as employers as well as landowners, large entities are better at ruthlessly maximising profit and also are better at responding to regulations. Whereas small entities often go for something other than maximising profit, and if it’s “being decent”, great, but then for some reason sometimes it’s “being pointlessly petty and cruel”. So you get a situation where large entities are often worse on average in very specific ways, but the very very worst and most unfathomable are the small ones.
You Can’t Have It All (even in communism)
In past ages, communists, socialists, and anarchists were usually reacting to a world in which resources were scarce in general as well as in specific and in which the situation of the poor in general was one of miserable deprivation. Meanwhile, the future potential of automation and robotics – machines which might not merely reduce the amount of work that needed to be done, but largely eliminate it – was not really visible.
Today things are… different.
It’s pretty common that I see far leftists more-or-less promising the following after a Revolution:
1. That it will no longer be neccessary for everybody to work, and moreover that people will be permitted not to work, and yet to have enough to live on, without needing to justify not working to anybody.
2. That industry will change to vastly decrease damage to the enviroment
3. That material quality of life and industrial capacity will not catastrophically plummet, especially not in things like medical technology
I think that this is… very optimistic. The kind of optimistic that no wise person would ever bet on.
Some far leftists claim that communism is more efficient and will do better than capitalism. This is unlikely. The Soviet Union did great things – industrializing rapidly after everyone else had a head start and after having the Nazis burn half their country – but they were just catching up to others, and they were oppressive, enviromentally destructive, and didn’t let people not work by any means. It didn’t last.
(However, in the post-Stalin soviet union, there were some labor rights that would make Americans drool.)
If you combine this with confiscationism and the intersectionality thing where anybody’s position in the grand hierarchy of justified people can be questioned, you have a nightmare: a society that continually eats itself, finding new classes of “bourgeoise” and kulaks and “counter-revolutionaries” to force into slave labor or just murder and loot, so that the Beautiful People can have their gleaming solarpunk utopia and their communism of leisure.
I do not wish to suggest that I intend to be the enemy of hope; our current system is unjust and needs to be reformed. We can reform it in a way that will turn automation from a curse into a blessing, and which will improve peoples’ lives now and in the future. But this will not be revolution but counter-revolution, and will have no place for bloodstained red flags.
Endorsed.
“Capitalism with a Human Face”
“Movies will be free after the revolution!”
Movies take the work of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people. How will we decide where to allocate our resources for the best results?
Centralized committee!
Yes! The State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television smiles upon you!
The “war is good for the economy” meme just won’t die, even among people who should know better.
All we need to do is blow up Europe again, and also China and Japan and every other country with significant industrial capacity, and we’ll be good to go for another two or three decades.
I can actually see a possible argument here:
“War destroys an enormous amount of value in the form of lives wasted, resources burned, and infrastructure destroyed, but it can also break a political deadlock and allow reallocation of production within the economy that leads to increased efficiency after the war, as well as smoothing the way for redistribution programs to ex-soldiers that reduce inequality and boost demand.”
Like, maybe? But the fuckin’ annoying thing is that killing a few million people and sending millions of tons of shipping to the bottom of the Atlantic is a very indirect way of passing legislation and it would be nice to just do it directly.
Actually I meant that America was one of the very few countries with significant industrial capacity that had not been hit by strategic bombing campaigns reducing major cities to rubble. As such, it had a major competitive advantage in the aftermath of the war.
Most of the rival countries destroyed were already economically developed beforehand, so the survivors were able to reconstruct their advanced economies, which represented monumental growth - but only relative to the conditions caused by the war.
the idea that Trump/Brexit are purely a racism thing disregards the angst about globalisation that is taking place across the globe, not just in Anglo nations.
sure, people are racist, that’s unsurprising, but people are also exposed to economic dislocations without any sugar coating justification or vision of a hopeful future to come, it’s no surprise that they react with fear and anger.
Tried to get a twitter account, and about four seconds after signing up it was “We’ve detected some suspicious activity, can we have your phone number?“
Fuck no, twitter
“Aw, come now Squiddy honey-baby, you wouldn’t mind providing your number to lil’ ol’ me, would you?”
- Twitter, probably
Ain’t nobody gettin my number, I resent the very existence of phones.
Good. I saw Twitter collecting over eleven thousand phone numbers at a bar the other night. Can’t trust a woman corporation like that.
SAN FRANCISCO—In an effort to reduce the number of unprovoked hostile communications on the social media platform, Twitter announced Monday that it had added a red X-mark feature verifying users who are in fact perfectly okay to harass. “This new verification system offers users a simple, efficient way to determine which accounts belong to total pieces of shit whom you should have no qualms about tormenting to your heart’s desire,” said spokesperson Elizabeth James, adding that the small red symbol signifies that Twitter has officially confirmed the identity of a loathsome person who deserves the worst abuse imaginable and who will deliberately have their Mute, Block, and Report options disabled. “When a user sees this symbol, they know they’re dealing with a real asshole who has richly earned whatever mistreatment they receive, including profanity, body-shaming, leaking of personal information, and relentless goading to commit suicide. It’s really just a helpful way of saying to our users, ‘This fuck has it coming, so do your worst with a clear conscience and without fear of having your account suspended.’” At press time, Twitter reassuredly clarified that the red X was just a suggestion and that all users could still be bullied with as little recourse as they are now.