There are people who need more aid than the busses are equipped for and the bus line runs specially equipped shuttles out to them on request at no cost (back when the busses had fares it cost the same as a bus ride).
i don’t know how it is in most cities on the planet because i don’t live in them and haven’t looked into their public transit.
part of having a common good is defending and upholding it. usually when there’s a problem with the routes people show up and yell loud enough that something gets done. I don’t think they’ve cut a route and not replaced it with one that has more stops or split it into two that provide more coverage in like 20 years.
during covid here there were fewer busses running, but it was because of reduced ridership and they ran more on demand shuttles to make up the difference. they started installing big crazy air filters on the top of the busses too, so now you can’t even smell a fart on one.
when there’s more people than the route can handle you gotta wait, same as when there’s more traffic than the road can handle. here when that unexpectedly happens they redirect people to other routes when possible.
a lot of what youre talking about is disabled people getting equal access to what car drivers have, which is good when the disabled person lives in a place that expects everyone to have a car. if a place were to ban cars, expect people to use public transport and operate public transport with enough volume and coverage to replace them, it would be better for the disabled than expecting each individual disabled person to own a car with expensive modifications to accommodate them and become licensed to operate it or hire a driver or service in the case they cannot become licensed.
serving the disabled and elderly is what’s driven the expansion of bus routes and accessibility here. we don’t even have car bans and it’s a benefit for so many people!
Do you own the means of production and employ people to operate it, paying them a fraction of the value their labor produces?
Are you able to live comfortably without working for the foreseeable future? Do you exert outsized control over municipal, regional and state government far beyond your “vote” if you live in a place that claims to be a democracy? Does that control come from your power over the means of production that you control?
Supporting a society controlled by the people described above does not make you a capitalist, being one of the people described above does.
I don’t think you’re being disingenuous here and English is a crazy language, so here’s the definition google came up with:
noun: capitalist; plural noun: capitalists a wealthy person who uses money to invest in trade and industry for profit in accordance with the principles of capitalism.
In the sentence
I’m a capitalist who doesn’t defend billionaires and also doesn’t feel left out…
The word capitalist is a noun.
But even if you were to pull up a dictionary definition of the word that says otherwise, in the context of the economic and political system of capitalism there’s three hundred years of writing that define capitalists under capitalism as various groups of bourgeoisie.
I think we can dispense with petty arguments over the dictionary definitions of words given what we’re discussing. If it will make you feel better I can refer to capitalists as flying purple people eaters.
I think if we just go by that dictionary definition, you being a wealthy person who invests in trade and industry to make a profit in accordance with the principles of capitalism would by definition make you “rich af” and would align your interests against those of the people whose labor allows trade and industrial production.
The people whose labor allows trade and industrial production want to get the highest pay and best living conditions possible, you, as a wealthy investor in the concerns that employ and pay them want the most profit possible. The raw materials of trade and production are fixed quantities so any profit must come from paying the worker less than their labor produces.
Does that make you evil? I don’t know.
You used the example of an etf and I wanna talk about stock and securities trading briefly. A person with enough money can invest it in the market in such a way that it causes huge changes and can basically write their own ticket. Small time (retail, if you’re familiar with the lingo) investors take on quite a bit more risk and while they might hope their bag goes up or down they don’t generally have any control or say over what happens to laborers or industries and certainly not any power to control markets.
There’s an argument to be made that the move to replace pensions with invested retirement funds was explicitly intended to align retail investors and working people with the interests of the very capitalists who needed them to accept lower wages and reduced benefits, but this tea…
I do take issue with using dictionary definitions though, because they tend to be truncated and devoid of the background and context that allow for understanding and use of words in conversation or correspondence. This one, for example doesn’t explain what the principles of capitalism are, only that they must exist because capitalists are people who invest according to them. This definition doesn’t even describe capitalists as a class, which is fundamental to understanding the overwhelming majority of ink spilled in the last few centuries about them and the system they are in control of!
I’m sorry, but you’re deeply misinformed. I’m saying this not to start a fight, but in the hope that seeing it from someone outside hexbear (I’m banned from that instance!) will be received better.
What you’re saying is the us propaganda during and about the war after it ended. The consensus among even american historians stands in stark contrast to what youve posted.
I’m on mobile at the moment, so I can’t make the biggest post, but if you wanna know something in particular lmk and I’ll get to it as soon as I can.
there’s a lot youre leaving out. I don’t think it’s on purpose, but one of the only ways that the korean war can be made to look like a soviet invasion is by conveniently leaving out everything that happened before the norths army crossed the 38th parallel.
korea was one nation and people before it was divided roughly along a line of latitude by two american officers with no input from those knowledgeable about korea or its history. one of those officers, dean rusk, has said that he would have done things differently if he knew that forty years before, the tsarist russians and japanese had discussed dividing korea along a very similar line.
They divided the peninsula because the idea among the allies was to reunify it five years or so after china’s civil war ended and it was clear weather koreas only land border would be with the communists or the koumintang.
as the japanese retreated south, the korean people formed their own governing committees. the soviet forces integrated those committees into the provisional government, the american side integrated the collaborators from the japanese occupation into theirs. the north had a democratic election, the south became a military dictatorship.
both sides claim to have held elections, but while a majority of the north wanted to vote for kim il sung, the fighter who was an ally of the liberators that empowered koreans to kick out collaborators and do land reform, the souths election that would put syngman rhee in power were boycotted by the souths political parties and accompanied by what was reported on in even western papers as brutal repression. it’s worth noting that one of the leaders of a prominent political party would be assassinated a little later.
there’s plenty i’m glossing over, but the north didn’t cross the 38th parallel out of the blue for no reason but to impose their evil communist brainwashing on the kindly people of the south. in the south, the repression of jeju island, the military uprising against the government in response to that repression and the bodo league massacre are the backdrop for the norths invasion.
now think about those circumstances and history for a second.
the americans divide your country along the same line the russians and occupiers wanted to use before. lets say youre in the north: maybe you don’t trust these soviets, but they respect the peoples committees and theyre doing that land reform youve been wanting for decades. they’re supportive of you expelling the japanese collaborators and things feel like they’re getting better. how about if youre in the south? the americans put the collaborators back in charge, broke up the peoples committees and are putting the ever growing number of collaborators to work beating everyone into shape for the election.
when 30,000 koreans die on jeju island, there’s a failed military uprising and a massacre of south korean communists, what would any right minded person do? of course the north crossed the made up line keeping them away from their countrymen in peril!
since i’ve written enough already i’ll just address what you said about the state of the north being so bad: when and why was it so bad? why did it take a carpet bombing campaign and international blockade to make it so bad?
Public Transit my beloved 😍 (lemmy.ml)
If you're feeling left out it's probably because you defend billionaires who would mince you into fertilizer (lemmy.world)
Sure. Why not. Anything goes. (startrek.website)