If a CEO finds out that he can get slaves to do the work for free instead of spending money on it they have an obligation to the shareholders to do what makes the company the most money.
I just heard an NPR story about US Steel Corp using chattel slavery less than a hundred years ago. They worked people to death and buried them in unmarked graves.
(only way to get rich is to work more hours than someone else)
In our current system, this is not how you get rich, AT ALL.
Billionaires aren’t people who worked 3 jobs and lived with roommates until they made it. They’re not even in the same class as these people.
I don’t understand your point. The most important feature of capitalism is the private ownership of capital. Capitalism isn’t “hustle, fuck bitches get money” or whatever. Money and wage labor goes back to the founding of civilization. It isn’t a new invention.
In the wealth of nations Smith talks great lengths about the labourer being king of the market not the landowners and that with advancement in technology costs should go down except land owners prevent that
The whole system is supposed to favour the labourer compared to Mercantilism where the rich got richer because they owned the production
It also praised the American colonies for open immigration saying they could double their population faster than anyone in Europe and that would double their economy
And we know now that his analysis on the outcome of capitalism is incorrect. Capitalism exists for the private property holders to extract as much wealth and power as possible from their privileged position. That unrelenting pursuit of profit has led to even worse inequality, and is collapsing entire ecosystems. It’s a disaster of an economic system full of contradictions. Those contradictions are now causing capitalism to collapse in on itself.
money isn’t necessary in a library economy, because there’s nothing to purchase. You go to the library for all non-consumable items. The library is incentivized to produce highly repairable and durable goods to reduce waste and minimize demand on the supply line. Consumable goods are gotten at locations similar to a food bank, all members of the community are responsible for producing food for the community.
I think one of the main problems with Smith’s conception of capitalism is that he didn’t account for how huge and pervasive and intrusive advertising would become. He naively assumed that the best product would dominate the market when actually people will buy whatever is thrust in front of the their eyes a thousand times a day.
And of course corporate lobbying wasn’t such an issue in his time.
No, the problem with Smith’s capitalism is that he’s constantly misrepresented
He was descriptive, not prescriptive. He was not an advocate of capitalism, he was explaining it - and if you read the wealth of nations and your takeaway was “Lassie Faire capitalism is a good idea”, reread it
I appreciate your critique but I’ve got to be honest and say that I’m not going to spend any more time in my life trying to justify late stage capitalism. It will eventually be replaced and pass into history like every other economic system, if it doesn’t kill us first. 💣
The UN sponsored report uses a pretty liberal definition of slavery to include things like wage theft (which forces workers to stay at a job until they’re fully compensated), sex trafficking, and domestic servitude where the servant’s documents are confiscated so that they can’t flee.
However, there’s still a hell of a lot whips and chains slavery in Africa and South East Asia. Those slaves serve the excavation and manufacturing industries.
Okay, this may come off as unemphatetic but I love the fact that slavery doesn’t give a shit about your sex or wealth. Like, the percentages are almost fully equal, save for actual low income that is almost double what the other percentages are. Other than that, all are equal in the eyes of slavers.
Shit’s wild. What’s also wild is that these numbers still exists…especially when thinking about Americas or Europe. :|
That’s the only way I remember it. I guess I had stopped drinking it before they switched to plastic. It’s probably my fault they stopped making it. Sorry.
I remember the firefighters that lived on my street would poke a hole in the top of an empty Sobe bottle cap and fill it halfway with gasoline before nestling the glass bottle inside their fire pit. They did this pretty much every weekend. The fireball was always impressive.
I’ve got a wicked scar on my right hand that can attest to that! I was riding my bike home from my supermarket job as a teenager without a light… While holding my Sobe drink in my hand… I didn’t see a retaining wall log that had fallen down onto the sidewalk so I hit it, tire-first. I flew over the handlebars and my hand landed on the bottle as it broke. Severed a nerve in the hand and damn-near hit an artery. Surgery to repair that, and I still have some numbness in it. Live and learn, but I’ll always think of that when someone mentions Sobe!
I watched it on Halloween. It was so boring and predictable. It was also slow and pretentious which some people seem to like that is even I admit for a horror movie it had good cinematography but it felt pretentious non the less.
We’re the Terminators of the animal kingdom. We’re slow and deliberate, able to stalk our prey for days or weeks at a time, and can often come back from injuries that would be a death sentence for other animals.
They were faking it. When I was 12, I was pretty smart with tech, but I was not allowed to touch my grandpa’s projector. (It’s because if you didn’t turn it off properly, the bulb would burn out).
He also did some work with ibm back in the 80s, and he didn’t really like kids, so that might have something to do with it.
For real, I know there are exceptions, but I’ve worked with tons of doctors and not one gave two shits about someone’s ability to pay. They would often argue with administration to help people who couldn’t pay
The doctor has $375k in loans they need to start paying back pretty soon.
It’ll be 20 years before they’re in a cushy private office with (only) a 50hr work week.
The issue largely exists in the healthcare industry (administration/insurance) that has grown up around actual medical providers and serve as middlemen and gatekeepers.
The Cincinnati streetcar cost almost exactly $150m and it serves like 0.5% of the metro population. It runs a 3.6 mile loop, that’s just over a 1.5 mile walk from one end to the other. I can walk it in 20 minutes.
Don’t get me wrong, I agree with the sentiment of the post. We need to invest in public transit. Where I live there are zero non-car options. But don’t pretend you’re building comprehensive public transit for $150m.
If you’re in Cincy there’s Metro bus, and TANK bus in northern Kentucky comes up into Cincy as well. You can also buy combo passes that let you ride both. It’s admittedly a very lacking public transit system, especially after cuts made in the Covid era, but it’s there and gets me to and from work.
Unfortunately the doomed underground rail system has such an infamous reputation that the thought of getting such a system put in place these days is a far fetched dream.
I have a Cincinnati address but I’m in Clermont county just outside of Anderson, in the 45255 zip. There aren’t buses near my house, or sidewalks, or bike lanes. Just a ditch on the side of the road and 40+mph traffic with lots of construction trucks.
City street cars seem to be a waste of money now but more trains would be nice. They never invest enough in it.
I live in Atlanta. We have a shitty street car and a shitty train system. They don’t go to enough places to be useful most of the time. But if they got the same kind of funding our stadiums got it would be crazy good. I could ride the train instead of driving to most places if they just expanded to some more parts of the city.
Hopefully but I’m doubtful. My city (st Louis) has burned millions in a trash can of trying to get a singular, less than 5 mile, trolley working for more than a month and failed miserably. It’s been a major embarrassment that they’ve been entirely capable of getting it to run reliably down one mostly flat, straight street.
150m can do a whole bunch when you use properly rolled out busses, with their own lanes (and you can initially paint these if the budget is low). People driving their car on the bus lanes will nicely generate additional tax income (fines) and if the busses are good, the people will come.
Even in the Netherlands, where we have really good trains on even a European scale, we still have long-distance busses (comfy ones, for 1-2hr trips) and regional busses (still comfy, but those are 20-30 min trips). Custom infra doesn’t always cut it, especially when repurposing existing infra will serve the job just fine.
I’ve lived in the NL, we just have a different reality. Just the other side of my city is an hour away in a car with no traffic. Regional cities are 1.5-3 hrs away. There are some bus lines in the middle of the city but most of our metro area has zero non-car options.
It runs a 3.6 mile loop, that’s just over a 1.5 mile walk from one end to the other. I can walk it in 20 minute
Well fine if you want to brag I guess but most Midwesterners would need defibrillators and a fast food chain or two along the way to make this trek, and it ain’t taking 20min.
Okay you’re not wrong about most people. I saw a post in a couch to 5k thread recently about getting to running 14 minute miles. I can walk 13 minute miles. But the I-275 loop that circles Cincinnati is almost 90 miles around. The streetcar covering less than two miles of the city is still not helping the common person.
It’s also like this for many hobbies. I can run further and cycle faster than almost everyone I know, but would probably barely even be mid-pack in a local race for either.
I relate with this one. I cycle further and faster than my friends, so it feels like I have to slow down when I cycle with them, however I’m nowhere near professional level.
Shout out to my skinny guys: Girl clothes are cut for us, especially at the waist. Hoodies and jackets are the bomb. Try it. Wife about shit when I strapped on my new women’s jacket. “OH! SO sexy!”
Got plenty of casual clothes given to me by exes. That’s how I learned.
Buttons and zippers on the “wrong” side are a pain, still worth it.
(For context: I’m a middle-aged, white guy living in the South. No one so much as blinks.)
Not really. Good women’s clothing is cut differently then men’s clothing, so it fits our bodies better, mostly accomodating our narrower waists and wider hips. (And the zippers and buttons are on the opposite side too of course.)
Lies! Deception! Women’s clothing rarely accomodates my wide hips. Swimming shorts at the men’s fit me better. Which it shouldn’t! Same goes for nice, loose clothing. Even the largest sizes just feel like they are trying to shape my shape into a more feminine shape, rather than accomodate my shape comfortably. Fuck women’s clothing. Flimsy, thin, short, cold, crawling, tight, garbage with stupid design. All of it.
Tried buying girl versions of those things? Not sure about T-shirts, haven’t tried that. But I have a small middle-aged gut, not much at all, but I think I might look silly in a woman’s T-shirt.
Mine (mostly) have pockets! But the obvious (to me) reason so many women’s clothes lack pockets is because pockets ruin the form. Wearing my zip-up jacket yesterday, looked great, cut tight, but if I carried stuff in the side pockets it would ruin the look.
And if women truly wanted useable pockets, they’d buy more such clothes. Not like these designers are clueless as to what sells and aren’t maximizing profit.
People always say that it’s just because the shows aren’t made for you anymore and that’s actually the problem but not the way you think.
The shows are quite literally dumber. Cartoons used to have content for parents as well as the kids. Like sneaking in adult jokes that would fly right over a kids head. Now cartoons are just about capturing attention through flashy colors and constantly changing scenes.
Put on a cartoon made decades ago and the whole family can enjoy it. Put on a modern cartoon and anyone over 12 can’t stand it
I distinctly remember all the cartoons I used to watch had some elements of maturity and sometimes even quite complex science as well, in fact I remember quite clearly when i was surprised how a bunch of friends ‘fell apart’ because of ‘ego’ and had to balance their friendships as well as their own desires, probably one of the best things that i have ever watched
Nowadays tho i see a lot of kids just browsing bullshit reels all along which serve no purpose other than kill time, and a lot of the ‘cartoons’ have just become some superhero and big flashy colours and whatnot
I think there’s a lot of element of nostalgia in my rant but I do genuinely believe that kids and people in general are just becoming dumber
Signs of the times, there was usually only 1 tv so they had to make the media touch everyone. Now a days they can actually make media just for kids, since the parents can watch something else.
Yeah it’s not the cartoonist. It’s the media corporation they operate through.
It’s not a secret that media outlets heavily influence what is aired on their channels. Hell they determine what they air in the first place. That and the FCC is a govt agency that determines what is or is not appropriate for public television. And with half our govt trying to strip education it’s not that far of a stretch.
The actual cartoonist is usually on the lower end of the power dynamic. You make what they tell you to make or you don’t work for them.
They used to do that, they still do too, but they used to too. You think they played the theme song to Cheers in Adventure Time for the kids? This has some real old man yelling at clouds energy.
Adventure Time is really underrated. As an adult it’s hard to watch the hallucinogenic drug addled animation, but if you close your eyes and put your hands over your ears for the screaming, you’ll find it’s very well written
I don’t know about anything being hard to watch in it, I find every season enjoyable. The entire team, including the offshore animators, did a wonderful job. You can feel their hearts in it. Idk about it being underrated either, its so popular they keep going back to the setting in miniseries.
I swore I was too, but I guess I was actually in high school during the first episode. It is without a doubt my favorite show. I run a dnd campaign set in future Ooo from the series I love it so much.
I personally find it was a hell of a lot better when they were getting to the end and things weren’t just Fin and Jake randomly screaming while on an adventure to do something absolutely random.
Listen old man, you’re just forgetting the forgettable cartoons of your generation. Nothing has changed. If anything there is simply likely more art being made now, but in the same proportions of high-vs-low quality as before.
I mean you remember the the greats of the 80s and 90s, that’s what makes them the greats! But how often do people talk about looks at Wikipedia The Little Lulu Show or Extreme Dinosaurs? As we go on, the good will be remembered and the rest will fade into obscurity.
Plus, kids have low standards. I remember begging my parents to take us to see Good Burger in theaters and I loved the hell out of it. Upon watching as an adult… yeah, it was terrible. That’s not too say that shows shouldn’t try to make good content for kids, but I do feel like a lot of adults don’t realize how little it took to entertain them as a kid.
Peppa pig is FILLED with jokes for the parents. It was one of the few shows I could watch with my toddlers because of all the jokes between the narrator and the parents. I wouldn’t watch it now because the sentences and narratives are meant to match the life experience of kids up to about gr 1-2, but it was a great show.
Everyone loves when mr bull digs up the road zooms out to all the cars in the traffic jam honking.
You mean shitty remakes made to capitalize on the parents that want to share their nostalgia with their kids, there are plenty of excellent shows for kids nowadays and frankly I’m jealous, there’s plenty of variety of shows that don’t treat you like you’re dumb (there’s still pepa pig style of crap tho).
It’s like the marvel garbage, they make it for people who are addicted to their stuff and so will buy it regardless of quality and even buy more into it when they can complain about a brown character or something.
Edit: I wanted to add: shitty reboots don’t magically make the originals disappear, yet people treat it like that. Find new stuff, don’t be old man yelling at cloud.
I think they often have earbuds but those usually have built in microphones so I don’t really know either, I think it’s popular when recording voice messages too.
A couple weeks ago I saw a high schooler asking friends to grab his phone, but they couldn’t hear him. So he mimed typing with his thumbs.
…
How did we lose holding a handset to your ear as the pantomime for phone??? I’ve heard Nirvana on the classic rock station and it didn’t make me feel as old as this.
I don’t like getting oils and sweat on my screen. I also don’t like putting my dirty screen on my face.
I can still talk to someone and do other stuff on my phone. If I want privacy or I’m in an area where speakerphone would be annoying then fine I’ll use it the old way, but generally I have headphones to bridge that gap anyways.
Yeah, I’m with you. Speaker mode is much more comfortable. But I do have some common courtesy while in public though. Nobody needs to be forced to hear your conversation.
You think your fingers don’t generate oils/sweat? You can have the phone next to your ear without having it pushing against the side of your head lol Multi-tasking makes sense though.
Yeah, and my tiny Nokia from 15 years ago also had a mic next to charger very very far from my mouth. Worked completely fine though, since it’s designed to do that.
google pixel 6 pro user here, nope, at the top, because fuck the consumers, that’s why
on a more serious note, normally it doesnt pick up too much external audio but if i’m in a crowded place i have to turn it upside down and back up constantly to speak and then hear
I don’t know where you got that idea, there’s definitely a mic on the bottom. The top mic hole is just for noise cancellation. Google even has an interactive diagram here support.google.com/pixelphone/answer/7157629?hl=e…
welp, turns out i was wrong, thanks for the heads up
after some fiddling, i found that the voice recorder app i used to test where the microphone was only utilized the top microphone, while calls and voice messages (at least on signal) use the bottom one
I think the point is that the microphone should be close to your mouth, but not in the direction of your breath, so as to avoid pops. That’s why headsets have the microphone a few inches away from where your breath would go through.
Hence, the preferred holding position would have both the speaker and microphone in optimal spots.
Litteraly everyone I know will call me for questions that could easily be a text because they know that on average it takes me 2 days to reply - and that’s if I reply at all!
My phone calls are all 5 seconds or less “hey Dilly, are you free Saturday for lunch at ours?” “yeah sounds good” “okay bye”
Saturday is 5 days away, could that have been a text? Yes. But I probably would have only seen it on Sunday if they’d texted me.
If people did this I’d just go back to muting calls too, at least from those not respecting it… I’ve clearly established to use calls only if it’s important, and if I miss it I will call back asap. Honestly I think the only way you can get them to stop is by ignoring them.
Oh, I think I miscommunicated. I like receiving calls. If someone wants to ask me a question and talk to me, they can physically talk to me, instead of texting me and demanding the same level of attention from a text as they would expect from a real time conversation.
If they call and I don’t answer they know I’m busy and to try again later. If I call and do answer, it’s easy to say “hey, I gotta make this quick” or “I’m not doing anything, let’s have a chat” which is harder to do via text. It makes it easier to lay out the expectation for the interaction. If someone is texting me thinking we’re going to be having a long text based chat like we’re both sitting down in a live chat forum for the evening, but I’m busy and only occasionally looking at my phone because I don’t treat text like it’s AOL/MSN/IM, we’re going to have a bad time. But if they call me, then it’s just easier.
The latest estimates show that in 2021, more than 5,500 people were killed or maimed by landmines, most of them were civilians, half of whom were children. More than two decades after the adoption of the Mine Ban Treaty, about sixty million people in nearly 70 countries and territories still live with the risk of landmines on a daily basis.
memes
Top
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.