Kapitalism
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Someone gets it.
Lets instead do this:
Every citizen, irrespective of their nationality, skincolor, gender has the right to:
- living quarters
- work
- maximum of 7 hours of work
- free healthcare
- paid vacation
- equal pay and treatment for women
- freedom of religion and speech
This is directly taken from a 1936 constitution. Today one could improve on it but we're so much worse, everywhere.
Now guess which one.
Go check those living quarters they had lol, and food queues, and how well the health care worked if you had nothing to bribe with. Those sweet shortages of everything.
You should talk to someone who actually lived in the "union" and stop slurping kremlin propaganda. But will you? I wouldn't bet on it.
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though usually stupid and fucky copyright laws have one advantage - if someone bigger than you steals your idea you can take them to court. without copyright laws we'd have giant corporations just taking shit and using their platform to sell stolen ideas without a single cent going to the original creator.......
which happens anyway, but uh, i guess it'd happen more?
honestly idk, let's do a test run of a year without any copyright laws and see if anything changes like at all
though usually stupid and fucky copyright laws have one advantage - if someone bigger than you steals your idea you can take them to court. without copyright laws we’d have giant corporations just taking shit and using their platform to sell stolen ideas without a single cent going to the original creator…
It's very difficult for some small independent creator to take a big corporation successfully to court. Imagine going up against The Mouse or someone similar with a lawyer paid for by your legal insurance. You might as well just not do it at all.
The same thing is even worse with patents. I made a few things that I could patent. But for that I'd have to cough up a few thousands per year, roughly 100k over the life-time of the patent, and in turn I only get the right to sue someone violating my patent. I don't even get the guarantee that my patent is valid.
Patents are designed exactly so that big corporations can use them excessively to suppress smaller competitors while they are too expensive and too uncertain for small inventors to use them.
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Capitalists say the free market is king then they go and make laws to stifle and restrict it so they can make monopolies and gouge everyone out of their hard-earned income.
Capitalism is an egotistic not an idealistic movement. Capitalists don't become capitalists because they think it benefits everyone, but because they think it benefits them. That's why someone like Elon Musk is only against government subsidies if he's not the recipient.
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though usually stupid and fucky copyright laws have one advantage - if someone bigger than you steals your idea you can take them to court. without copyright laws we’d have giant corporations just taking shit and using their platform to sell stolen ideas without a single cent going to the original creator…
It's very difficult for some small independent creator to take a big corporation successfully to court. Imagine going up against The Mouse or someone similar with a lawyer paid for by your legal insurance. You might as well just not do it at all.
The same thing is even worse with patents. I made a few things that I could patent. But for that I'd have to cough up a few thousands per year, roughly 100k over the life-time of the patent, and in turn I only get the right to sue someone violating my patent. I don't even get the guarantee that my patent is valid.
Patents are designed exactly so that big corporations can use them excessively to suppress smaller competitors while they are too expensive and too uncertain for small inventors to use them.
wrote last edited by [email protected]yeah at first i wanted to say "corporation" and "individual" but that's not an equal playing field at all. So i just switched my woring to "bigger" thinking of idk, a writer in the same field who has a bigger following than you
i didn't even get into the patents part because i'd be ranting about Adobe for hours again, and i already spend too much time thinking about them
edit: but then i said corporation anyway lol, i blame the fact i just woke up when i was writing that comment
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Patent laws are the reason why I'm reluctant to work on my idea for a mini-joystick (thumbstick) with force feedback, because even if I manage to get it through without violating any patents of the patent troll by the name of Immersion Technologies, I wouldn't want the technology to be locked to a single console manufacturer for a decade, then to be only available to certain manufacturers for yet another 5 years or so.
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Not just having capital, but got a hostage situation where their failure would collapse the economy therefore they are not allowed to fail and must be bailed out by the government they paid (often for far less) for earlier.
I don't buy into the "too big to fail" idea for individuals.
I really think it only applies to banks, mainly because they hold the money of common people. Anyone else should be allowed to fail. Probably the greatest financial policy fuckup of my life was bailing everybody out in 2008 and not holding anyone accountable for their actions. That gets back to risk and reward breaking down. Those companies should have been allowed to fail. The money, workers and demand for services don't disappear, they shift to more stable competitors.
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Go check those living quarters they had lol, and food queues, and how well the health care worked if you had nothing to bribe with. Those sweet shortages of everything.
You should talk to someone who actually lived in the "union" and stop slurping kremlin propaganda. But will you? I wouldn't bet on it.
Even if i dont check and just believe what you wrote, it still beats the shit out of the situation a ton of us are in right now (also that was literally 34+ yrs ago. Life was different then AND the country was recovering from tons of shit). Not to speak of the countries that make our ill gotten comfort possible too. And just to clarify, present day russia is not communist or socialist. they're as capitalist as the western states are. They are no better and no worse in terms of inequality.
The important part, will you have a respectful discussion or do I have to block you?
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And don't forget how one bakery could pay their employees only the bare minimum, cut corners where they can and use the profit to undercut the 'good' bakery until the 'good' bakery goes bankrupt and the 'bad' bakery can simply be a local monopoly and raise prices as they like.
Raise prises and if legally possible even lower wages, hey we are the only bakery in town so it's getting paid peanuts or have no job at al.
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Capitalism only works if it's regulated. Unregulated capitalism just becomes feudalism again. In your example, the owner of the bakery chain no longer has to innovate or compete. They simply own something and wait for money to be delivered to them.
Of course, for the government to be able to regulate things, it needs to be bigger and more powerful than the businesses it's regulating. You can't have Amazon being worth 2.3 trillion because it can easily make itself immune from competition and immune from regulators.
A mixed capitalist / socialist economy is the best solution we've come up with so far that actually seems to work in the real world. Only the most insane would want things like fire services to be fully privatized, or for every road to be a privately owned toll road. But, a fully state owned economy didn't really work either. Trying that caused the USSR to collapse, and it caused China to switch to a different version of a capitalist / communist / socialist setup. The real issue is where to draw the boundaries. Most countries have decided that healthcare is something that the government should either fully control, or at least have a very strong control over. Meanwhile, the US pays more and receives less with its for-profit system. In England, they privatized water, and it seems to have been a disaster, meanwhile the socialist utopia of USA mostly has cities providing water services.
Where do you draw the line? Personally, I think Northern Europe seems to have the best results. Strong labour protections, a lot of essential things owned by / provided by the government, but with space for for-profit private enterprise too.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Exactly, this is why strong laws are needed. In the end we (the people) all benefit. Maybe a small example but when the EU started to push for usbc as the only standard, it made things lot better. If you are older and still have a drawer with 15 chargers all with different plugs, voltages and amps you known what I mean. Back in the day before cheap chargers from aliexpress, just replacing a simple charger from the manufacturer could be a pretty expensive thing.
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My former boss was in a gulag for most of his teens. He was not paid and to this day he has no idea what crime he was convicted of.
Maybe your former boss was bullshitting you. Maybe he knew precisely why he was in prison, but didn’t want to admit his crimes to his employees. It’s pretty common for ex-cons to falsely claim innocence.
He just knows he served time and was targeted by guards because he was Jewish and the Soviets were very bigoted.
There were many prominent Jews in the Bolshevik revolution, and Jews continued to be active members of the Communist Party, in soviets, and in the Politburo.
My degree is in the downfall if the USSR. I have spent a lot of time reading accounts of prisoners. Many never knew because they were not present at their trial.
He has the numbers tattooed on his arm. I know people who knew him in Belarus that I knew separate of him who talked about it.
There were prominent Jews in the politburo. There was also a fuckload of antisemitism as anyone who lived in the USSR could tell you. The USSR was just as racist as every other European nation.
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It isn't common for people to be sent to slave camps as a punishment for years without knowing why they were charged
Ever heard of Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo?
That’sthe kind of evil unique to totalitarian shitholes like the USSR.
The Gulag episode lasted less than two decades, by the mid-50s it was a thing of the past and never resurfaced in the country. Almost as if it was a mass hysteria response to Nazi infiltration, and not born out of a desire to oppress people inherently. Again, at the peak of the Gulag system, the prison population was similar to that of modern USA. Much more authoritarian if you ask me
The same nation you are praising
Yes, I'm praising this nation because even if it did mistakes, by industrialising eastern Europe and by eliminating Nazis it saved hundreds of millions of lives.
You wouldn’t be supporting their evil actions in this case if you had any empathy
I'm not supporting the excesses of the Gulag repression, it's something that we can and should criticise. I'm supporting the rest of things of the country, which led to the saving of hundreds of millions of people from hunger, disease and Nazi genocide. The Gulag repression seems horrible until you realize the Nazis murdered 27 million Soviets at that time. It was an extreme measure carried out in extreme times.
You are making a lot of apologies for overt racism
I'm not. If he was jailed for his race that's wrong. You're just making too much criticism of the country thst saved Europe from fascism and which saved hundreds of millions of lives in the process.
I am not talking about WWII at all because it is irrelevant to the discussion at hand. WWII was over for years by the time he was imprisoned for no apparent reason without a trial he attended.
You are bringing up WWII because there is no moral ground for you to support and justify the USSR’s evil actions otherwise so you keep hamming your irrelevant claim because otherwise you’ll have to accept the USSR wasn’t a good moral nation bit was really quite racist, evil and oppressive (all of which are true).
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No one is in a US prison who has not had the opportunity to be present at their trial or know why they are charged.
The nation I am talking about ceased to exist decades ago so whatever “your country” is it isn’t the USSR which is what we are talking about.
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Even if i dont check and just believe what you wrote, it still beats the shit out of the situation a ton of us are in right now (also that was literally 34+ yrs ago. Life was different then AND the country was recovering from tons of shit). Not to speak of the countries that make our ill gotten comfort possible too. And just to clarify, present day russia is not communist or socialist. they're as capitalist as the western states are. They are no better and no worse in terms of inequality.
The important part, will you have a respectful discussion or do I have to block you?
Man, it Ended 34 years ago, check out how life was in the eighties in URSS. Or seventies. The gulag vas so nice.
Today it's an autocracy, people earn 200€ a month and goes to prison for nothing, what a glorious place.
But I'm probably talking in the wind here, you don't seems to be interested in knowing right or wrong:
Even if I dont check...
If you want to know, do check.
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I thought it was the nazis who said that, so I checked it with FuckDuckGo assist:
This phrase, "He who does not work, neither shall he eat," originates from the New Testament, specifically 2 Thessalonians 3:10,
Also love that people try to make it morally acceptable because of reasons.
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Man, it Ended 34 years ago, check out how life was in the eighties in URSS. Or seventies. The gulag vas so nice.
Today it's an autocracy, people earn 200€ a month and goes to prison for nothing, what a glorious place.
But I'm probably talking in the wind here, you don't seems to be interested in knowing right or wrong:
Even if I dont check...
If you want to know, do check.
And thats what I meant.
Respect means you acknowledge my arguments. Just backing off on the insults a bit (but not fully) isnt cutting it. Respectful discussion is addressing people's arguments as well as not insulting them or their intelligence.
I will definitely take the time and check things that are brought forward. Saying "just because shit was bad back then means exactly that, not that the system it was in was shit." isnt the same as sticking fingers in ones ears and singing lalala. Doing as if that were the case is just abusive rhetoric.
Because shit is horrendous today as well: Fentanyl hordes, people freezing to death on the streets, protesters shot, people deported to concentration camps, genocide, media spewing propaganda, most of the population living paycheck to paycheck, guantanamo. Most of the examples are US but the EU is only marginally different and catching up fast.
There is no such thing as a perfect system. Gulags alone are no sole cause for dismissal same as guantanamo is.
Here's a video about the reason why people hate socialism so much https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mhYS59egWQc
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And thats what I meant.
Respect means you acknowledge my arguments. Just backing off on the insults a bit (but not fully) isnt cutting it. Respectful discussion is addressing people's arguments as well as not insulting them or their intelligence.
I will definitely take the time and check things that are brought forward. Saying "just because shit was bad back then means exactly that, not that the system it was in was shit." isnt the same as sticking fingers in ones ears and singing lalala. Doing as if that were the case is just abusive rhetoric.
Because shit is horrendous today as well: Fentanyl hordes, people freezing to death on the streets, protesters shot, people deported to concentration camps, genocide, media spewing propaganda, most of the population living paycheck to paycheck, guantanamo. Most of the examples are US but the EU is only marginally different and catching up fast.
There is no such thing as a perfect system. Gulags alone are no sole cause for dismissal same as guantanamo is.
Here's a video about the reason why people hate socialism so much https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mhYS59egWQc
I don't acknowledge your arguments because the boil down to whataboutism, "it was a long time ago" and other fallacies.
Then you goalpoast-move and try to say I don't like socialism lol. If you think the USSR was socialist I have a bridge to sell you.
BTW what bout you acknowledge my arguments? Based on historical facts? Nah guess you doesn't like what you'd read.
URSS was an authororian crap "union" and Russia is trying to become as bad, hopefully Russian will go the same way and be dismantled ASAP so their citisens can finally live in a free country.
Also Europe is on the brink of collapse or something? ROFL I live here. But you don't seems to be interested in facts.
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I don't acknowledge your arguments because the boil down to whataboutism, "it was a long time ago" and other fallacies.
Then you goalpoast-move and try to say I don't like socialism lol. If you think the USSR was socialist I have a bridge to sell you.
BTW what bout you acknowledge my arguments? Based on historical facts? Nah guess you doesn't like what you'd read.
URSS was an authororian crap "union" and Russia is trying to become as bad, hopefully Russian will go the same way and be dismantled ASAP so their citisens can finally live in a free country.
Also Europe is on the brink of collapse or something? ROFL I live here. But you don't seems to be interested in facts.
Yeah, I didnt think you would be able to defend against any of it.
But since you're still being condescending, this conversation is now over.
I will check the stuff you mentioned because, unlike you, I have no issue with being corrected.
Good luck with your attitude mate.
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No one is in a US prison who has not had the opportunity to be present at their trial or know why they are charged.
The nation I am talking about ceased to exist decades ago so whatever “your country” is it isn’t the USSR which is what we are talking about.
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I am not talking about WWII at all because it is irrelevant to the discussion at hand. WWII was over for years by the time he was imprisoned for no apparent reason without a trial he attended.
You are bringing up WWII because there is no moral ground for you to support and justify the USSR’s evil actions otherwise so you keep hamming your irrelevant claim because otherwise you’ll have to accept the USSR wasn’t a good moral nation bit was really quite racist, evil and oppressive (all of which are true).
I am not talking about WWII at all because it is irrelevant to the discussion at hand
I brought up WWII because the peak of the Gulag system was starting on 1936, and by Stalin's death in the mid-1950s it had essentially disappeared, it was a system implemented during a time of extreme necessity due to dekulakization, maintained during WW2 and the Nazi hysteria of the late 1930s after the assassination of Kirov, and dismantled after Nazism had been eliminated from Europe.
really quite racist
The USSR was patently the least racist nation in Europe. While in my homeland of Spain education in Basque and Catalan was forbidden, the Soviet Union for the first time in history guaranteed the citizens of all the republics an education in the official language of their choice, leading for the first time to universal education in Ukrainian, Kazakh, Belarusian, or even minor languages such as Mari for those who spoke it and desired to be educated in such languages. In France, up to 1993, there were no public schools teaching children in Occitan language, and even now I don't think there's even one. Fuck, the "Union of Socialist Soviet Republics" doesn't even have a toponym or an ethnicity in its name, how many countries can claim the same?!
evil and oppressive
Look. I'm a Spaniard. In 1936, we had a fascist coup which resulted in a civil war between fascists and anti-fascists. The policy of the western world was to do nothing and to leave the war to itself while the Nazis and the Italian Fascists bombed the fuck out of my country's partisans (ever heard of Picasso's Gernika?). The only nation in the planet to help the antifascist struggle was the Soviet Union, which is the only source of Spanish antifascists of weapons, planes, tanks and military training against the fascists. It's crazy to tell me that the only nation that helped the fight against fascism in my homeland was "evil and oppressive". Your grandpa, a Jewish man, would have been murdered if it weren't for the Soviets. The very fact that you're here is because of the 27 million lives that the Soviet Union sacrificed in order to save Europe from Nazism.
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Exactly, this is why strong laws are needed. In the end we (the people) all benefit. Maybe a small example but when the EU started to push for usbc as the only standard, it made things lot better. If you are older and still have a drawer with 15 chargers all with different plugs, voltages and amps you known what I mean. Back in the day before cheap chargers from aliexpress, just replacing a simple charger from the manufacturer could be a pretty expensive thing.
I've been through at least 5 different kinds of phone chargers over the years. Starting with the olde-fashioned coaxial power connector, then going to various versions of USB, and at least 2 kinds of Apple proprietary connectors. Standardizing on USB-C is great. I just hope that they're able to update it in 10-20 years when USB-C is fully out of date.
