No, I actually do want some of these. I think housing should be a right, not a privilege. Basic universal income is going to be very important when suddenly AI takes half of our blue-collar jobs bcz rich assholes think they can get by without workers. And actually, I do want corporations to be unprofitable. They’re currently profiting off the backs of their employees labor, and i think that should belong to the employees.
I don’t disagree, and everything should be clean energy etc. but, y’know. First things first. Save Democracy, Constitutional right of women to their own bodies, tax billionaires, and such. We’ll meet back here afterwards for next steps
I’m not opposed to corporations being profitable. I just want those corporations to be worker-owned
P e r f e c t
I could get behind that too
I want to share something to provide us with some perspective. There’s the story of the first time two Xavante tribe leaders in Brazil got brought to São Paulo in 1974, as told by Mário Sérgio Cortella, today one of the foremost philosophers of the country.
They eventually were brought to one of the biggest bulk produce markets in the country. The amount of high quality food around them was astonishing, and they were struggling to come to terms with such abundance. Then, one of them turns and asks what a kid was doing. It was a destitute kid collecting spoiled food. “He’s grabbing food”, the hosts answered.
After mulling over the answer and looking around for some 15 minutes, he inquired: “I don’t understand. Why is that kid getting spoiled food when there’s an abundance of good food all around?” They told him you need money to get food from the good pile, and the kid had none. “Why not?” “He’s a child.” “And his parents don’t have it?” “No.” “Why not?” Unable to dodge the questions and unable to bridge the cultural gulf and explain how the capitalist system worked, they waved their hands and just declared “Well, you see, it’s just the way things work here.”
After that exchange, the tribe leaders looked at each other and then requested to leave. Not the market, not the city, but the society entirely. They wanted to go back to their tribes and wanted nothing to do with any of that society that was ok with a starving kid eating garbage right next to a pile of good food.
They should have showed them the yatch they could own if only they pull themselves up by their boot straps.
No joke, works for 99% of the population.
Our society runs on the 1,000,000 arcade tickets model. Keep whacking the moles and you too can have the $10 stuffed animal that cost you $1000 in tokens.
I agree, sort of.
Housing should sort of be like UBI, where there should be a basic apartment block or section of smaller homes for families to fall back on. These tend to be pretty dangerous places though, no body “wants” to live there. If anyone thinks that they have a “right” to a house in any neighborhood that they want, they are unrealistic. Demand and availability is real, there is no world in which people are guaranteed a nice home, with a nice yard, in a nice part of town.
UBI should absolutely be a thing for everyone.
Companies need to generate more than their overhead, or they can’t pay their workers. If they are not profitable, they can not grow, if they can not grow, then their only outcome overtime is to shutdown. Why would anyone ever want to risk everything to start a new business then?
I’m all for change and fixing things, but people’s “wants” need to be realistic.
Turns out I don’t believe in capitalism anymore. That ship has sailed for me when I realized the only thing corporations and the government care about is making sure they make piles and piles of money off my work (hint im an engineer), while they try to offer me a piddley two weeks vacation bcz life is about working until you’re dead unless you’re rich.
AI isn’t going to take half the blue collar jobs in your lifetime.
Most likely, it will take over menial coding, buercratic and management tasks. Anything that requires manual labor is going to take AI and a robot. Imagine an AI + an Autonomous truck trying to pick up a load of pallets, drive cross country, back up/park the trailer and unload the pallets. Or try to imagine how expensive a suite of robots and an AI would be that could do oil changes on just 50% of the cars on the road.
We got plenty of time.
I don’t expect elections to deliver the result I want, I want my vote to count
Although a lot of the other points deserve (more?) attention, I just want to share this because I never thought how hard this would feel.
I’m in my early 30s and come from a very apolitical family. About 1.5 months ago I voted for the first time in my life. At an embassy in the fraudulent Russian election.
Of course I knew my vote would not count. I always knew that every Russian election since I was a kid was a fraud. I did it for a statement and to partake in an event that resembled a demonstration, to do the limited thing I can do. But I would have never imagined that feeling that would hit me once I had actually voted.
After standing in line and passing the security checkpoints and ruining the bulletin (which in theory should count as a vote against everyone in the percentages). Once it was done. I was… furious, enraged, desperate. Much more than I thought. On a rational level I knew my vote didn’t matter. The results were already calculated no matter what. Even before I got in line. No matter whether I had smuggled in my non erasable pen or not. But once I had actually voted for the first time, I didn’t want anything more than this vote to count. Not to win, just for someone to acknowledge that bulletin. I felt so angry and helpless and I wanted to scream until my lungs would start to bleed.
So, yes, this freaking matters. I hope none of you will ever feel this way after voting. And for the love of God, if you have a passport of a country who has somewhat fair elections, please go vote.
I want more than this. I want a single person in LA’s vote to count as much as a single person in Oklahoma. Right now, they don’t; because of the electoral college, people in densely populated states’ votes count for less in the general election than those in the bible belt.
I think your comment distracts from the point of theirs, but we’re already here, so: the bigger issue is single seat representation and “choose one” voting. Single seat means that no matter who wins, a large fraction of the population won’t have representation. Who do you go to if you’re a Democrat but the Republican won? Choose one voting means the voters can’t support everyone they like. There are lots of ways to fix these problems, but I like Sequential Proportional Approval Voting with 5 winners per district. It’s impossible to submit an invalid ballot, and the voting technique can be easily applied to single seat positions like mayor. With 5 members per district, plus the decay property of the counting method, trying to gerrymander the map is functionally impossible and it’s highly likely any given voter will have someone in office who is willing to listen.
Well, yeah. Changing from FPTP would be huge, and it’s necessary to deal with the strategic voting issue, but we also have to get rid of the electoral college. Majority rule, popular vote winner wins. Then we get approval, ranked choice, or literally almost anything but FPTP and things start to look sane.
Who do you go to if you’re a Democrat but the Republican won?
You mean your vote? At the risk of misunderstanding you, your vote goes into the Popular bucket with everyone else’s, and whoever wins that vote wins. Why does it need to be more complicated than that? The voting itself can be more nuanced than FPTP, but ultimately there’s (ideally) a mostly-Condorcet winner, and that’s the winner.
I suspect you’re thinking more about Congress than the single-seat Presidency, where There Can Be Only One. Or I’m utterly missing your point. That’s easily possible. Give me three choices of topics, and I’ll rank them in the order I think we’re discussing.
PS, I tacked on to their comment because it was specifically about the second-to-last point, wanting their vote to count. I thought it fell a little short as it didn’t address the fact that, if your live in a metropolis, odds are your votes mean less that others in rural environments. I hear you focusing on better proportional representation - anarchists getting a seat, however small, at the table with the Big Parties. I was focusing obviously on the fact that we do not have equal representation by virtue of 70 Oklahoman votes having as much weight as 100 Californian votes (I made those ratios up; I don’t know the exact proportion).
Yes sorry, maybe I wasn’t clear. I meant after the winner is found and is in office. If you’re a Democrat and the Republican is in office, you can talk to them about your concerns, but they’re unlikely to care that much since you’ve got very different opinions. With elections where there can only be one (E.G. mayor) this can’t be solved, but legislative districts can and should have multiple representatives.
But yes, I agree, fixing the electoral college is also important!
Thanks man. There’s too many people on this site telling one not to vote because of cocked up ideas of what america is and isn’t. It may be a flawed democracy, but at least it’s a democracy. I hope you live to see your vote count someday too
Thank you, I hope so too. The good thing about autocratic regimes is that they tend to die with their leaders, and Putin isn’t going to live forever. It’s a small consolation when you look at all the lives that are lost meanwhile, along with millions of people’s lives being destroyed and their futures taken.
And yes, America’s voting system is awful. But ffs please go vote. It’s something. It’s not great but it is something. It isn’t nothing.
It’s a democracy as long as enough people vote that the results are clear cut. If it’s close, it’s easier to hide undemocratic behavior to nudge the results.
Thank you for writing this, I’m glad to read it
Your country will get better with more people like you, I hope it happens in your life time.
Thank you. I also hope it will. It surely will.
But once I had actually voted for the first time, I didn’t want anything more than this vote to count. Not to win, just for someone to acknowledge that bulletin. I felt so angry and helpless and I wanted to scream until my lungs would start to bleed.
I feel the same way after voting in Texas. Different method for caging and disenfranchising voters, but the outcomes are functionally the same.
I don’t think presuming my vote will be traunched and kettled and rendered meaningless through statistical manipulation feels any better simply because I know it will be counted. Its still a rigged game. The outcomes are overwhelmingly predetermined.
What I want more than anything is for my city of Houston to go its own way. To be independent of the corrupt cesspool of bigotry and fear that dominates the capital building. I don’t want to simply be counted in the minority. I want my independence.
Your vote is not just counted, but even meaningful. Shenaningans in Texas try to affect the outcome by playing with things to control the odds and making it more difficult for “the wrong people” to vote. It’s really an entirely different scale.
Texas Conservatives are manipulating the vote with “legal” actions and can only affect percentages. A likely result is very different than a predetermined result. A “legal” manipulation is subject to at least some checks and balances and can be changed, which is very different from something that can just be dictated by those in power
Texas Conservatives are manipulating the vote with “legal” actions and can only affect percentages.
It goes beyond that.
PoC districts often get voting machines that don’t work. Urban districts will have large pools of ballots that go uncounted because of deliberate delays in the vote count (similar to what Republicans managed in 2000 with the Brooks Brothers Riot). Judges remove candidates from the ballot for arbitrary reasons (Tom DeLay would routinely run uncontested because his opponents’ petitions to fill would get “lost” or “misfiled’” by the country clerk).
This is only legal in so far as local allied politicians allow it to be.
I already can guess it was Sunday and it was noon. Noon against Putin.
Exactly. It’s great to hear that other people have taken notice of Noon Against Putin! So far I haven’t met anyone on the internet or anyone apart from those who came to Berlin.
But I admit we got in line at 8:10 because we came from another city and we had an impatient toddler with us. This way we were done voting at 9:10. When we returned at noon, it was an insane line. Unfortunately our acquaintances who came at 11:30 didn’t get to vote before the embassy closed down. The embassy had created an impressive bottleneck with the security checks and cloakroom. But they stood in line until the end.
Not that surprising if you open my profile.
Also youtube comment section counts as meeting on the internet. I’m pretty sure you opened at least one ACF/Navalny/Navalny Live/Popular Politics video in last… Year already?
True, your profile is also a gold mine for new communities to add, so thanks for that!
As for the youtube comment section - that’s a valid point. I however never have written a youtube comment in my life, so I am not sure this outside perspective counts as “meeting”.
which in theory should count as a vote against everyone in the percentages
Only if ruined in correct way: more than one boxes are ticked. Or no ticks, but we all know who will receive vote in this case.
Yeah I would not choose to leave all the boxes unticked.
the only times i feel my vote counts is for local legislation. I don’t think my vote for people ever counted and I’ve been voting since 2000.
Number 1 is hitting super fucking hard currently, not just with healthcare but science. I’m so fucking angry to see year after year after year NASA gets a budget cut and the fucking military gets yet another massive increase…
It’s to the point now that NASA had to decide what currently running missions to cancel not just what future missions are now unfeasible… Chandra X-ray telescope is the only one we have and the entire global X-ray science community relies on it… We’re now forced to give it the axe so we can shovel more money at Boeing, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin…
My entire life this is all I’ve ever seen. More military, less science. More military, no healthcare.
Even 30% for housing is pushing it and based on lending limits instead of quality of life. Somewhere between 20-25% would be more reasonable.
It’s based on budgeting theory, that you should avoid rent/mortgage payments taking up more than 30% of your income.
Granted these budget theorists also state you should be putting 10/15% to investments, which may be true theoretically, but is not in any way practical for many misfortuned folks.
Yeah, I was gonna say. At 30% you better be paying off your own house.
Just to be clear. I don’t want the Soviet Union. I want workers co-ops to be the default form of employment followed by government employees, and a small portion of unionized companies with private ownership and self employed folks to fill in the gaps here and there with an understanding that over time the unions will buy out the private owners of their shares.
I don’t want the Soviet Union. I want workers co-ops to be the default form of employment followed by government employees
So you don’t want a Soviet Union. You just want a… an elected local, district, or national council of workers to control the economy… but, like, a bunch of them in a kind of amalgamated political body?
with an understanding that over time the unions will buy out the private owners of their shares.
Damn. Nobody tell this guy about Lenin’s NEP.
Yes, I want what the Soviet Union claimed they wanted not what they got. You know, like any syndicalist worth her salt.
I’m not claiming that communism is bad, I’m saying that over centralization in the hands of a single party has done more harm to communism than MLs would like to believe.
Yes, I want what the Soviet Union claimed they wanted not what they got.
The original USSR was predicated on peaceful coexistence with European neighbors. Lenin’s climb to power came on the back of an enormous anti-war movement, protesting the catastrophic loss of life during WW1.
What they got, instead, was a western sponsored counter-revolution via the White Terror, followed by a decade of border wars, and climaxing in a Second World War thanks to an unprompted invasion by Germany. By the time the wars were over and a lasting (abet tense) peace had been brokered with western nations, the Khrushchev Era of the USSR largely was this.
Workers soviets prospered immensely during the 60s and 70s. The Soviet block finally got to taste the fruits of the industrial revolution, complete with cheap nuclear power and high speed mass transit and surplus agricultural produce thanks to industrial fertilizers. Quality of life in the USSR easily rivaled western peers in England, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain. And their exports spared populations from Bangladesh to Cuba to Cambodia to Korea from engineered famines.
I’m saying that over centralization in the hands of a single party has done more harm to communism than MLs would like to believe.
I would argue feuding partisan factions in western states have done more to harm than anything a unified worker’s government has ever inflicted.
What good is a two-party system when each party claims the other is going to end democracy if their rival wins?
i actually do want corporations to be unprofitable. profit is theft, not viability.
not really. a small profit accounts for the risk and work involved in obtaining it. Problem is to often its way outsized and if not the secondary objective is massive loss for the public sector to shoulder.
yes really.
accounts for the risk
what risk? the risk of losing control of the business and becoming a laborer just like you and me?
no the risk of losing money. are you talking a system where money does not exist as a means of trade?
nice straw man im just gonna ignore that.
turns out that the ultra wealthy losing 99% of their money is actually not going to hurt them nearly as much as you or i losing even 25% of our savings.
calling that “risk” is like saying i took a “risk” walking outside without an umbrella today, and using the fact that i got wet as an excuse to firehose like 800 other people.
moving further into nuance, i do believe that investment should be rewarded when successful under capitalism. we probably agree on this point.
however, “rewards” in the form of long term fuck-you-money profit hundreds to thousands of times the magnitude of the non-owning laborer at the expense of those who built the business with their lives, is unacceptable and outright theft.
you know at first I thought you were way wack but I did reread and you did say corporations and I was looking it at more generally. ie. owning a business. that being said what I was arguing really was your last line about profit being theft which as a generality is wrong but yeah large corporations making obscene profit is wrong.
bruh okay 🗿 🤝 i guess
yeah, while there is crossover, profit is not the same thing as meet and appropriate compensation for investment. profit is strictly defined as revenue minus costs. businesses that pocket huge sums of profit in the form of executive compensation or stock buybacks are evidence that costs are far too low, that there is theft of cash that should rightfully be reinvested to the creators of that revenue value, that is, the laborers.
you have some other weird definitions of what being a corporation means going on, but it’s not altogether important to my point so i’ll leave us at this weird fortunate agreement lol.
You’ll never win, they will never get what risk is in this context.
Oh I get it, don’t underestimate me.
In the context of capital owners, financial “risk” only refers to the potential loss of excess capital beyond what’s necessary for survival. Meanwhile, for laborers, it can mean risking everything, including basic needs like shelter, food, and healthcare, in case of financial setbacks. There is incredible disparity in consequences between the two groups when facing financial challenges, both in raw value and in the number of lives at stake.
Guess why I find one to be more of a problem than the other. 🙄
For some business owners it can mean financial ruin, even when tools like an LLC are used.
Yes, and I believe in the rights of those ruined business owners to a liveable wage when their business fails.
The solution to financially ruined people is not to redistribute wealth away from them for the sake of the only ones who are doing fine.
What risk? That a Capitalist may become a Worker like everyone else?
no the risk of losing money. are you talking a system where money does not exist as a means of trade?
If a Capitalist loses money, they risk becoming a Worker like everyone else.
if a worker loses money they risk becoming a poorer worker. is the worked paid? do they have money? what level of money makes one a capitalist? in your world. I had someone else come along with similar concerns but they seemed to just be talking about corporations which I kinda get then but commerce happens on all levels.
Workers work for wages, Capitalists recieve profits off of ownership. This isn’t “my” world, this is the world.
so workers do not own anything they make profit off of? Like a car they use to do uber rides? in this world. that is what you think? you think that is reality?
Profit isn’t a bad thing if the employees are the shareholders.
yes. arguably if profit is actually paid out to employees it’s no longer profit as it’s reinvestment into the laborers and thereby becomes a cost. but yes, that’s just semantics and i agree :)
Fuckin y’all bootlickers downvoting this fuckin forgot you’re closer to the gutter than the bank pick a fucking side
the propoganda is real.
CEO pay soared 1,209.2% since 1978 compared with a 15.3% rise in typical workers’ pay but hey that seems totally fair and proportional to the work done 👅🥾
That’s a different meme.
I don’t want money for nothing music starts playing
I want my MTV
I want my DJ Sugar C
really obscure reference nobody will get
I want everyone to be given what they need to live comfortably so they don’t get so fucking pissed off about the glaring unfairness of the world that they do a bunch of antisocial shit to cope.
I don’t want my money for nothing; I want a job that pays for my basic needs
Nah fuck that. We live in a time where technology allows for universal material luxury and plenty of time off. If you’re working, you deserve both to have your basic needs met and luxuries.
This is great - it’s high time we set the framing straight, just like this. For far too long public discourse has defaulted to conservative framing of issues, and it’s only served to drag the Overton window right. I agree with other commenters that things are more nuanced, but the least we can do is begin discussions from a more left-leaning frame of mind.
This all began almost a half-century ago, when conservatives began pouring billions of dollars into researching language and ideas. They wanted to ensure that they would forever dominate political discourse in the USA by making words mean what they wanted them to mean.
I agree that framing is important. For example, I don’t support new taxes or making drugs legal.
I DO support repealing tax cuts and repealing cannabis prohibition.
Still, I suspect that conservatives oppose many of these things regardless of framing, due to an “I got mine” mindset. The trick is to frame these issues in a way that appeals to their self interest.
For example, instead of “universal healthcare is the right thing to do for the dignity of our population”, we need to frame it as “universal healthcare will save taxpayers money”.
Eh, I think corporations should be banned. Make everything individual and worker co-ops. These huge businesses and huge governments do more damage than good.
I want everything that’s written in black letters.
Sad that I no longer agree with this. I’ve become so radical. Socialism or barbarism. I won’t be happy until every landlord is in prison.
While a lot of these would be extremely nice, if Capitalism remains so will Imperialism, and so will exploitation and a further eroding of the safety net as wages stagnate with respect to productivity.
I just wanna be happy.
Justice is important independently of happiness
but me too bro
It’s sad that if we actually got all of these, it would basically upend the entire broken system in America
