I don’t think it’s about stupidity per se - and I am a working-class person myself, thus have to spend many hours of every day doing my work activities, with less time leftover to devote to such things, so possibly I might be recusing myself even from this? - and rather I think it is about people who are educated vs. not. e.g. those who can spot logical fallacies vs. not, and if some subject is about to be voted on, someone who can understand at least the bare minimum of what is being talked about (is trickle down good? bad? neutral?). Anyway, that ship has sailed… I was just saying that the founders DID warn us, and we DID ignore them, and there ARE alternatives other than restricting voting, i.e. making a liberal arts style of education free for anyone who wants it.
About hospitalizing people without a moral compass, I have a better idea: why don’t we put them in charge of literally everything, everywhere? :-P Unfortunately this is no joke, b/c that seems to be what tends to happen.:-( Shareholders vote with their dollars, and more often than not they seem to choose to invest into people who rise up and do WHATEVER IT TAKES to make profits.
“Stupid”, “immoral”, “evil”, these are not just words, but in another sense they are, b/c what matters is how the world truly works - one principle of that being survival of the fittest. If we killed off the top half of all people in the world after sorting them by IQ, the remaining people might be more “stupid”, but they would be alive, in comparison to the alternative. Conversely, people such as Robert Iger the current CEO of Disney who has run the company for almost two decades, tend to remain in power at the behest of the shareholders, who could vote to expunge him at any time if they wanted. You might say “evil” or “greedy”, but they say “me likey, and want to keep”.
What you are missing though it that it is not just those INDIVIDUAL PEOPLE who are “greedy” or “evil” or whatever, it is the entire SYSTEM - e.g. if Robert Iger ever were to die (he is getting older now…), he would be immediately replaced, by someone who similarly meets the expectations, nay the DEMANDS, of the stockholders. So no, I don’t think it is anywhere remotely close to as easy as you describe. The people who own stock in that company may not be okay with owning a slave personally, but they are quite happy to benefit/profit from the misery of the workers who are forced to churn out that assembly-line whimsey, under what you and I might call “evil” working conditions, but which they call “cost-effective”.
So be careful with what you wish for. You might want those people prevented from taking office, but in turn it is THEY who are likely to abuse their power in order to prevent US from holding office. Might makes right. I mean… it ABSOLUTELY does NOT, and yet if you are not willing to fight for what you believe, those who are willing to take action will win the day. In one sense “they” even have a semi-admirable trait then that you and I lack: humility, to bow before the rules of the universe and work according to its precepts, rather than attempting to impose their own particular brand of morality onto it.
There is nothing new under the sun - technology may be creating new avenues for people to rise up through, but the reasons for their actions remain the same. In Germany, it was the rise of radio that allowed Hitler to, for the first time in human history, bypass the established rule of that nation and talk directly to the populace, which he leveraged to become the ruling authority. At some point he was even banished, but managed to return. The similarities b/t him and DT are eerily similar, and yet those who do not know their history are doomed to repeat it.
But as for our economy, on that note I think we are following more along the lines of old Rome. Surely that worked well for them, with zero problems, and therefore we will be safe from any harm, forever… right? R-r-right!? :-P
What’s odd about it is that the founding fathers directly warned us that this would happen. We simply did not care. Specifically, they warned about opening up voting to the “uneducated masses”, rather than the intelligentsia who had sufficient leisure time to think through the issues as they voted, not needing to toil in a field for long hours in the hot sun every single day. Do we have the means to now convert EVERYONE into the intelligentsia, with mechanization e.g. robots can do the vast majority of effort to farm our crops, and tools like the internet that puts information at our fingertips without even having to so much as turn the page of a physical book? In any case, there are those who do not WANT knowledge, and yet still want the privilege of being leaders nonetheless - e.g. those who showed up on January 6 to “defend the Constitution”, while at the same time admitting that they had never in fact read it, not even so much as once.:-(
I get it. I have the same exact drives inside of me, as do you, as do we all. The difference is that some of us are aware, care about that, and even attempt to fight those dark impulses - to be lazy, greedy, and the like. Sometimes anyway:-). Whereas those behind the scenes seem hardened in their resolve, to intentionally go in the opposite direction… and since most of the people seem to either want to join them or at least not oppose them, they are winning. i.e. Elon Musk and Steve Huffman both.
And as a former mod, you KNOW - it takes ENORMOUS amounts of effort to fight against that. It is SO MUCH easier to destroy than it is to create, or even to maintain.:-(
The kind of person that would step up and mod your subs after first the protests and then you being booted… let’s just say that they would not be “random”. All across Reddit those people that mods were forced to ban for harassment of others, who REFUSED to follow the rules, are now sitting on top of the thrones - but not to serve the community, and rather to see how they can get it to serve them, just exactly in line with Huffman’s vision:-(.
Don’t worry about your subs though - those who decided to remain were warned, so it is on their own heads. Your subs essentially died, and what remains are their animated corpses:-(. At which point no wonder they seem a little “different” now!:-P - a little less usable, less friendly, less relevant.
Meanwhile, we seem to be doing JUST FINE over here on the Fediverse:-). I’m far happier with this than I ever was with Reddit (which I joined quite late, 4 years ago). Most niche topics are basically gone over here, but discussing general topics is actually possible now whereas with Reddit it was not (at least, not without a LARGE possibility of being hit with a veritable army of hostile commenters, almost regardless of what was said or where it was delivered).
Edit: this is not relevant in any way shape or form but… I wanted to add it anyway, enjoy:-). JO
Yeah but you are not the average customer. It is the same logic for spam (& chain) emails: so long as it works on a sufficient (even if small) number of people, it makes it worth their while. And then like every conflict situation ever, most people just put up with it and remain neutral. Hence, they continue to do it - b/c they can (get away with it).
Especially given the scabs mods (no, actually scabs was right the first time:-) that they brought in. Shudder - it’s foxes running the henhouse now, there will be blood.
por qué no los dos? Punch him in the mouth and do whatever you want.:-P
Or just stare deeply into his eyes until he blinks, then turn around and leave the room. You’re F-ing Neo, you don’t need to play these kids games - if there’s something you want, you just materialize it, easy.
Ofc… if this were a more irl scenario, I don’t think I’d be taking pills from some random dude offering me to either “get rich quick” or turn me into a 6-yr-old, pudding or no. Maybe this is how he gets rich, by selling my organs or some such.:-P
True, if you had researched the charity in advance and knew that, or at least trusted the intermediary who told you about it to have done that due diligence. I said “some” and I put the word charities in double quotes b/c not everything that passes itself off as a charity is worthwhile… though that ofc does not mean that the converse is true and that none of them are. I remember when a charity - I think it was the Salvation Army? - collected an enormous amount of funds for Puerto Rico after it was hit with an extremely bad storm, and it made a big fuss about all the houses it was going to build there, but even a year (or maybe it was multiple years?) later it had barely made any (something like 10 houses total, or some ridiculously low amount compared to what they had claimed they were going to do). There are so many stories like this. Another one I have previously donated to are CareNet pregnancy centers - they offer potential mothers neonatal health screenings and such, free of charge, plus diapers and what-not, sometimes even cribs when they have them… thereby being (I thought) authentically “Pro-Life” rather than merely “Anti-Abortion” by offering these people real options to work with, not just heaping heavy burdens on others without lifting a finger to help, b/c these people provide that finger, even if it is not a full-on hand up. Although more recently they have been caught lying to the mothers, telling them about horrific health consequences of having abortions that are simply not medically factual, thereby being more “Anti-Abortion” after all.
So, not all charities are honest. Many are outright scams. Some politicians even set them up as a way to attempt to avoid taxes, while giving themselves perks like Donald Trump used people’s donations to commission a painting made of himself, claiming that by doing so he was “supporting the arts”. Technically that was even true, as the funds did end up going to an artist. And yet supporting millionaires like Trump to have yet another portrait - of himself no less! - does not necessarily align with my own idea of what a “charity” is, or at least I mean one that I should send my own funds to. Though I have heard of fantastic ones that I would consider giving to even now. So I am not anti-charity, b/c some true charities I am for (and some I am not), I was just saying that sometimes it is so hard to distinguish fact from fiction.
And even if the charity itself is honest, often the people attempting to take from it are less so. So the efficacy of their own screening process comes into question too - yes a food bank can feed people, but how many of those were truly in need? Tbh, mostly I am setting that thought up as a caricature rather than realistic argument, as a bolster for my next point that does manage to stand all on its own, yet is strengthened by this thought experiment:-).
Workers at least you can see with your own two eyes that they are working, plus you consumed the food/drink product even if it was made out of sight in the kitchen. Oftentimes in the past, these are the people who are attempting to work their way through or up to college and may need the most help going through that process. In the last several years that might no longer be true, though it still leaves open the thought that these are the people who struggle the most, and could use a bit of “trickle down”. These aren’t people who have just given up and looking for others to take care of them, they will accept the wage they are given, but they HOPE for more? At the very least, I identify with that struggle. The owners may be a different matter entirely, but the workers… at the very least they are not evil corps like Disney.
But also, how is what you said any different? Aren’t charities doing the same thing for the needy as tipping does for workers? Governments do not take care of people, so giving to charities is like telling the government “Don’t worry about making sure that your citizens get paid a living wage. I got you fam.” Socialism has its downsides, but people don’t seem to realize that capitalism does too - i.e. the end stage of a purely capitalistic society is slavery for the masses along with a few at the top who own everything. The reason the USA did not devolve to that stage is b/c of HEAVY checks & balances in the system, e.g. detection & punishment of fraud & other similar events such as product safety - whereas in a purely capitalistic society, that is a “shared resource” hence disallowed, so every consumer would need to test every product by themselves?!? Police, firefighters, teachers, heck even roads are all “shared” hence socialism (government controls the means and production of e.g. roads), or at least capitalism & socialism existed side-by-side (e.g. both socialistic shared resources alongside capitalistic private ones - police/bodyguards, schools, roads, and so much more), but we were more socialist in the past whereas today the spectrum has shifted more towards the capitalist end of the continuum. Hence fewer protections in place - e.g. there is still a minimum wage, but that wage has not been kept updated to what is livable for decades now. So the whole idea of charity then is to circumvent the need for socialism to exist in the USA in order to balance things out, and instead to use the capitalist approach by allowing your money to become your speech and say “I want these people to be helped in this manner”. Exactly like tipping?
There is so much more to add but no time or space. One thing I’ll say briefly is that enlightened self-interest also seems like it falls on the side of tipping? People when they do not get enough may steal, so offering them a way to earn enough helps prevent that - or if not fully “earn” (like $3 tip on a <$5 meal) then at least you would incentivize good behavior? As opposed to a safety net that helps people regardless of how they act, which I am not saying that is you but some people feel that that is improper, hence the reasoning behind some of my phrasing - e.g. “there at least you can be 100% certain that they work”.
Perhaps you knew all this already and it is only I just catching up. In any case this discussion is fun:-).