I’m no economist, but I’m pretty sure what we have now is 100% capitalism. It’s exactly how many people predicted capitalism would look like if given enough time.
Many years ago, a libertarian classmate asked me how I think the world would look like if corporations were unregulated. I told him (again, without being an economist) that corporations would probably become the new countries, that they would own everything like monarchs used to, as a few corporations monopolized everything. (I still find his answer funny: “And wouldn’t that be better?”. I just told him “Of course not!” thinking “WTF?”).
My point is that this idea that the current system is “worse than capitalism” and “capitalism is dead”, stems from some kind of idealization of what capitalism is supposed to be like, and not from the realities that many people have been pointing out throughout the XX and XXI centuries about how capitalism works and what its end-goal is. This is exactly what capitalism looks like. “Technofeudalism” seems like yet another way of not addressing the issue, like when people say “the problem is not capitalism! it’s crony capitalism!”. As if there is some form of capitalism that has ever put people over money.
Also:
It might look like a market, but Varoufakis says it’s anything but. Jeff (Bezos, the owner of Amazon) doesn’t produce capital, he argues. He charges rent. Which isn’t capitalism, it’s feudalism.
Again, I’m no economist, so someone correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure the capitalists (i.e. the owners of the means of production) have never produced capital. The workers do. The capitalist have always taken the profits of their worker’s labour in exchange for using those means of production. You could call that “charging rent”.
There is nothing new about what’s going on right now, except on the superficial level, the specific tech that’s being used to achieve the monopolistic goals of any corporation. Given enough time, the inevitable concentration of power that capitalism leads to, will always look like feudalism.
I still find his answer funny: “And wouldn’t that be better?”
libertarians man, I swear
feels like every other one I meet just repeats what the rest of them say without even thinking about it. Reminds me of the video I saw where a leading libertarian presidential candidate said he supported driver’s licenses and the entire room booed him.
Every libertarian I’ve ever met is convinced that actors will somehow be way more rational and benevolent when laissez-faire economics allows the market to act freely, as though ‘zero regulations’ is not already the goal of every major corporation, in order to more completely fuck over everyone they touch.
Either that, or they’re convinced they’re a good enough prepper to avoid being killed or captured by the inevitable PMC armies that arise from the libertarian apocalypse.
Every libertarian I’ve ever met is convinced that actors will somehow be way more rational and benevolent when laissez-faire economics allows the market to act freely
But then they’ll use the exact opposite reason as to why forms of socialism won’t work; that people are selfish, greedy and exploitive.
The crazy thing here is that she wasn’t even traveling to Dubai. It was a layover! And all she wanted was help putting on some sort of medical device they made her remove. The whole thing was basically an extortion scheme.
I don’t see how this is much different from u.s. police. You could easily be charged with “assaulting a police officer” in the u.s. if a cop wanted to be a jackass. You could get thrown in jail for months or years until it gets sorted out even if you are found not guilty.
Yes, that’s why we should always call it out in all forms about how any person of authority can extort people and the importance in ensuring it doesn’t happen.
Presumably they’ve ruled out prisons in northern European countries perceived to be too humane; imagine the Sun/Daily Mail thundering about “hardworking taxpayers’ money spent to give criminal scum holidays in luxury Finnish prisons”, along with a photo of a cell that looks vastly better than the typical London rental opportunity. So I’m guessing they’ll be asking around, say, Turkey, Morocco and various former Soviet republics. Possibly the US as well, though that may involve leaving the ECHR.
They do, right up until a government decides to do as it pleases.
Every single right was hard fought for, and though some people will put in huge effort to resist the introduction of this measure, most of those who agree it is terrible won’t do a thing.
Meantime the rest of the population harbour very dark thoughts on the matter. If anything, even Tory governments are far more liberal than the general UK public.
The title is really burying the lede, considering one of the Chinese athletes got disqualified, then was allowed to race, and then disqualified again afterwards for her false start. Think that’s kind of weird…
The article is confusing. Are they saying COVID causes long colds? In other words now that COVID is like the common cold when you get it, they are just saying you have mild long COVID I think?
The visibility of long-COVID has led people to reevaluate whether other viruses cause “long” syndromes. It looks like rhinovirus (aka “the common cold”) can, too.
There are other viruses that were already known to cause “long” symptoms, often due to damage caused to the nervous system by the virus or the immune response. Post-polio syndrome has been known for a long time, for example.
Oh man. This caused a flashback to that time I had a 3 day long cold that caused me to cough non-stop for the next month until I went to the doctor for steroids to make it stop.
So, the team that I’m seeing at Brigham & Women’s in Boston has a testing protocol called invasive cardiopulmonary exercise testing or iCPET, which involves putting a tube into a large vein in the neck, putting a heart catheterization through that, then putting a tube in an artery in the wrist. This allows monitoring and comparison of blood pressures inside the heart vs. outside the heart as well as comparison sampling of arterial blood vs. venous blood. In addition to this, they apply EKG heart monitoring and respiratory monitoring via a gadget you hold in your mouth and breathe through. With all this insanity in place, they put you on an exercise bike until you can’t stand it anymore.
What they find on this test is a combination of two things. First, the pressures inside the ventricles of the heart do not increase in response to increased physical activity the way that they should. “Low ventricular filling pressure caused by preload failure.” And second, the DEoxygenated blood returning to the heart has too much oxygen in it, indicating poor oxygen uptake on a cellular level, which they hypothesize is caused by mitochondrial problems.
The treatments include a drug called pyridostygmine, which increases acetylcholine neurotransmitter to increase autonomic nervous system response to physical activity (and therefore increase blood return to the heart). Or a drug called midodrine, which also supports blood pressure. Plus supplements to support mitochondrial function like CoQ10, creatine, and ALCAR.
I’m not cured and back to where I was prior to getting sick by any means, but I’m able to hold down a full time job, which prior to treatment I most definitely would not have been able to.
Thank you very much for your answer. Very interesting therapies they are testing and I’ll have a look if there are similar studies done here in Germany. I wish you all the best for your future and really hope, that they will find a way to completely treat it.
Thanks for the well wishes. Also last year I participated in a clinical trial with this same team at the Brigham. The drug trialed there is called bocidelpar. It targets a mitochondrial receptor called PPAR-δ. We’re still waiting on the results of that trial to be released and it’s probably a good 3-5 years away from FDA approval in the US if all goes well. So here’s hoping for the best
theguardian.com
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