• 0 Posts
  • 24 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 12th, 2023

help-circle

  • Some people who don’t know any better would say that poor Jeff innovated the world into a better place by inventing Amazon, that he’s being justly rewarded by the free market.

    But Amazon became so successful because it killed off all of it’s competitors - not through a better service, but using investor capital to artifically lower it’s prices, systematically targeting it’s rivals and taking them over.

    Amazon is so profitable because it has killed the market and replaced it with itself, and the tech giants and uber and so on are doing exactly the same thing.

    So turn it into a co-op, let it’s workers decide if they can piss on the clock or not. Give it’s sellers a say in whether they want to pay 40% markup and hidden fees to get pushed to the top of front page. Amazon abuses workers, businesses and the market - this is a great solution to a problem that everyone ought to have, regardless of politics.



  • Not only is the ruling wrong - it is the very thing it claims to be opposing. It is itself an act of terrorism, carried out with the intention of inspiring fear in the British public to further a political agenda.

    In every way, the British government is replicating the actions it accuses PA of - except that the scale of harm to British society and the terror inspired is magnitudes greater, and performed in service of the opposite political goal.

    This is a terror attack by the government against the British people.

    The British people’s opinion and will are the thing from which the goverment gains it’s only source of legitimacy - and they do not line up with the government on this issue.

    But evidently the government believes in a different model of legitimacy: they believe that legitimacy is derived from the mere fact that they hold power. In the mind of the government and it’s supporters, the difference between a terrorist organisation and a legitimate government is just power and only power. To them, right and wrong has absolutely nothing to do with it. They think that they are winning, and that they are going to get away with it. Nothing else matters.


  • Every major political event in history was once an unrealistic proposal. Whether it can happen next week or not has absolutely no bearing on the fact that it must be done.

    Reach out to your local political rep and tell them you support a wealth tax. Reach out to your local boomer FB page and tell them you support a wealth tax. Make the case. If public opinion and political opinion isn’t there then there is work to do. Put away minor nit picks and technical problems, they absolutely do not matter in the grand scheme of things. Build the momentum, tax the damn rich.







  • ‘no empathy’ people are wrong about cons. They have empathy but it is selectively turned off for certain groups because they have been conditioned to be afraid or disgusted by them. This isn’t an excuse but it is normal behavior - a lot of lefties don’t give a damn about the wellbeing of cops either. It’s not the same thing but it IS the same mechanism. Fear and hate stops people from feeling empathy. It’s human psychology and the cornerstone of all right-wing rhetoric.

    I believe that by learning to undermine that kind of hateful rhetoric we can kill the soul of the anti-trans movement.






  • Used to dismiss it out of hand because all the ‘socialist countries’ are complete authoritarian hellholes. But in hindsight this is a kind of thought-terminating cliche. I never really knew what the idea was apart from some vague notion about sharing or something that’s well intentioned but never works out in practice. I think most people share this belief.

    Turns out the idea is pretty simple: Worker ownership and control. Places like the USSR and China fail this definition because they don’t have any of that. Therefore they are not socialist. Those countries replicate the worker/owner dynamic of Capitalism, so it is ‘State Capitalism’. And they both have the same problem: A small group of people have all the power and they fuck over everyone else.

    I had to get sold on the specific idea of ‘market socialism’ / ’ workplace democracy ’ before I learned and realised this. The general idea is that if you can run a country like a democracy, you can run a business like one too. In fact, many are. So lets do that as much as possible in order to wrestle power away from the owner class who spend all of their money bribing politicians and ruining everything.


  • The Kurzgesagt climate videos explicitly encourage political action to combat climate change. I think they even encourage it as the most important thing an individual can do. They don’t push ‘let capitalism solve everything’ , they push ‘vote in green candidates + regulation’.

    I saw one of those videos taking them down for receiving Bill Gates money and frankly I think it’s a pretty empty hitpiece.

    Don’t get me wrong, the Gate’s foundation does push this ‘never question the market’ ideology, and any organisation that relies on their funding deserves to be scrutinized to hell and back. But Kurzgesagt does not push this ideology.

    ’ The problem with Kurzgesagt’ never found any factual issues with their content, AND the broad message of their videos is ’ lobby the government for regulation + here’s the technology’ . If Gate’s Foundation money has caused them to compromise their values, it’s not done a good job of it.

    Funding is not the same as editorial control, and the amount recieved from the gates foundation is not even a large portion of their income, so it’s not like they have much leverage.

    Gate’s Foundation and similar spend money literally everywhere, so I worry about people writing good orgs off so quickly.




  • The pollution from EVs is far lower than ICEs even if they are powered by 100% coal - the absolute worst electricity source. This is because a large generator is inherently more efficient than lots of small ones simply due to the efficiency of scale. And most grids are far cleaner - the UK uses almost ZERO coal.

    The problems that you’ve just described are real and I support your solutions to them - but they apply to the entirety of modern industrial society. Public investment should absolutely go to these things, but since people are spending their private money on EVs ( which in many cases makes economic sense AND are better on emissions ) , why push against that? They are two totally different revenue streams. Spending on one doesn’t detract from the other. A private individual can’t buy a bus. American suburbia is not going to become walkable any time soon.