It’s a good reminder that collective/democratic bargaining works. It’s about time we bring back unions and cooperatives.

Under the (currently dominant) credit theory of money, the implication is that billionaires owe the government a lot of money… and it’s time to pay up.

Subsidies are an incredible tool when used well, like when they funded a bunch of utility cooperatives that electrified rural US. Maybe you’re asking why we should because propping up the car industry when public transit and bike infrastructure should be subsidized instead, rather than challenging subsidies, though.

Freedom feels good and just so happens to, for the most part bring nations socially

This part I’d agree with

and economically, closer to the US

This part, much less so. The US has a pretty bad history of overthrowing democratically elected leaders and replacing them with US business friendly politicians, whether through hijacking the legal process as with delaying President Lula, or by backing a coup as with Pinochet.

Given the context of this conversation, I should probably note that I don’t support China taking over Taiwan, or meddling with our elections to sow instability either. I’m just challenging the point that the US is friendly to democracy - which has also had bad influence on European democracy (where I am).

Bidenomics is a mixture of things, but key among them is the recognition that MMT is already reality and doubling down on it to fund productive industries. Basically, government debt is not the same as household debt and strategic yet liberal usage of government debt can be very positive for an economy. MMT economists have made some pretty significant ‘discoveries’ that you can now find in the CORE macroeconomics textbooks in universities all over the world.

when we added socialist elements to capitalism (eg. social security, free healthcare, free education and so on) it didnt stop being capitalism.

This is a very black and white view of things, though. Norway is seen as capitalist, yet 2/3rds of Norway’s GDP is driven by its public sector, the government owns 30% of the domestic stock market, they have a massive government wealth fund that makes returns in hundreds of billions of dollars annually which they could singlehandedly fund UBI with, they apply Georgist taxes to natural resources (oil, hydro, aquafarms) to collectivize profits made off public land, 60% union density, 20% of housing is collectively owned (housing coops)…

Like, at what point do we call a country “socialist”?

(Not to call the US socialist, but Bidenomics might lean like 1% in that direction, and that’s my point - it’s going in a socialist direction if very slowly, and if we can maintain it)

IP is not a universal, objectively good thing. There are plenty of people who disagree with either a) how awful IP law is currently, or b) the mere existence of IP. You don’t even have to be a socialist like China supposedly is (although many would call it state capitalist) to be against IP, plenty of social democrats and libertarians are against it.

Intellectual Property is just a more abstract form of private ownership that wealthy people use to take advantage of us. Remember when they refused to give up COVID vaccine IP? They literally can’t sacrifice profits even during an insane pandemic that’s taking millions of lives. Remember when Canada, Sweden were kind of OK with piracy and then US politicians/lobbyists entered their country to ensure they would be cracking down on piracy? As a European I’m not happy that yet another form of welfare transfers (which piracy de facto is) was taken away just because the US isn’t content with being the wealthiest country on the planet - they need to maintain or even grow their obscene wealth.

Honestly, I could not give a rat’s ass about China “stealing” IP from literally the country that owns 30% of the world’s household wealth. More countries should follow suit so that we can break free from private IP holders delaying human technological and scientific progress.

So not only will you be able to get it, the people who get it to you can’t be big corporate shitheels.

Cannabis Social Clubs have existed in Europe for a while under a legal gray area, e.g. in Spain. I imagine that’s why Germany went with a non-profit cooperative model instead of the US’ (recent) for-profit corporate approach. Although Canada’s approach of a state monopoly is similar to what Norway does with alcohol, which is another way to socialize the profits of drugs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannabis_Social_Club

Personally there are a few UX issues with the controls. Like getting stuck after diving into prone (I believe it’s because you have to press run after you land to get back up, there’s no action queueing), climbing over stuff you didn’t want to climb over because of auto-climb, and a few other similar things. Both of the above have resulted in me and friends dying during intense moments, and because it’s caused by the game not listening to what you want to do, it doesn’t feel good to die that way.

The average politicians may not present themselves as being smart, but the lobbyists, think tanks, advisors that interact with them and influence their behaviour are not dumb. Rather than assuming it’s either malice or ignorance, we can instead opt for a more middle ground assumption: it’s both malice and ignorance, symbiotically feeding off each other.

Ask yourself this: has Bitcoin had - or is it trending towards - a net positive impact on our world? In other words, is it worth investing in long term? If it isn’t you should treat it as a short term investment and get out as soon as you’ve made a profit - and you’ve literally 4x’d your investment. The fact that we’re talking about the price in c/News is already a bad bubble sign and reminiscent of all the other times we’ve had crypto bubbles.

How much electricity does the world banking system use? (Answer: a whole lot more)

Per capita or in total?

No surprise that a housing cooperative is doing a 4 day work week. It’s so sad that the 2010s’ political push for more cooperatives died with the change to Kier’s Labour in the UK. We could’ve had far more democratic businesses today that would be more open to trialing 4 day work weeks - actual risk taking, unlike our current dictatorial bosses who have to be dragged into the future while they wait for others to take the risks they’re too cowardly to take.

Putting someone in a home is more important than getting them socialized medical care

I get your point and I agree, but allow me to reframe this dichotomy a little: housing is health care - it literally saves lives. These issues are intertwined, and socialized housing should be part of a socialized health care strategy.

By ‘both’ I mean we don’t have to either not solve this (climate hell) or just subsidize private hydropower, we can overcome both of those.

But… the point you brought up does lead me to talking about the Norwegian oil strategy that you might be interested in! Norway is doing exactly that: subsidizing private discovery of oil, tax the sale of oil heavily - and it has been very successful (to the detriment of the environment…). The US can learn from that by subsidizing private hydropower development (to incentivize building more of them) and then using targeted taxes when they’re actually operating. It’s the strategy that is often touted as “how Norway avoided Dutch disease / the resource curse”.

I didn’t actually mean subsidizing private hydropower above, though, I meant the government doing it themselves so that the profits are socialized rather than privatized. That’s mostly what Norway has done with its hydropower strategy. The case for taxes for hydropower, and natural resources in general, is basically the Georgist case: nobody invented or created the nature/land that allowed for that hydropower station, it was already here long before we were, so taxes make sense in that they socialize profits extracted by private companies.

We can just do both? Look at Norway’s hydropower strategy: the government owns and operates most of it, and they tax private hydropower. That’s significantly better than handouts. There are valid critiques of what the Dems are doing, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take the small victories we can (like this) nor does it mean republicans aren’t worse (they’ll just do even worse handouts to the rich).

This is about specific sites’ abnormally high methane pollution, and China is in the data set but does not have as many “super-emitters” according to this. Here’s an example where China’s listed in the linked Sky article:

Coal is also a problem with one facility in Shanxi, China, peaking at around 181 tonnes an hour last February.

However, they go on to rank the countries in the article as such:

Kayrros’s data shows Turkmenistan had higher methane emissions than any other nation, followed by the United States, India, Russia and Pakistan.

So the answer is simply that China, along with the EU, does not have as many “super-emitters” to worry about. Other regions do, and that means they can target those sites specifically to reduce their methane emissions now that the data clearly highlights them.

For the record, government debt isn’t bad. What is bad, is how that debt is used. If you use it to fund productivity boosting infrastructure projects, then it pays for itself. If you use it to invest in successful companies in return for shares then it pays for itself… unlike when Tesla got a $400 million gov. loan and gave nothing in return - which meant tax payers had to take the hit when Solyndra (which got money from the same scheme) bankrupted itself into the toilet, tax payers took all the risk and got shafted both when a company failed and when one succeeded.

The Norwegian government, for example, owns 30% of the domestic stock market. One of many strategies the US government should probably be looking to if they want a healthier way to invest in companies.

Using debt to back tax cuts on the other hand, like Trump did according to this article, is an awful strategy.

John-Burn Murdoch wrote an article about this (you may have to access it via Google or an Archive, I believe FT has a soft paywall), but this graph from the article is basically the tl;dr. The same applies to a couple of other wealthy nations, but I only remember Norway (I think he posted an addendum to the article on Twitter), but it’s certainly not the trend in every country in the “west”.

What is it with corporations just buying stuff up for excessive amounts of money and then firing a bunch of people?

Probably because they’re unelected descendants of upper middle class to straight up wealthy people, assigned by a wealthy board of more wealthy individuals (if it’s a public company), rather than a competent leader the workers with actual knowledge of how work is being done on the floor have decided is the best.

When you don’t leave managing the business to an incompetent nepo baby, this happens:

[…] the UK Office for National Statistics showed that in the UK the rate of survival of cooperatives (read: democratically owned organisations) after five years was 80 percent compared with only 41 percent for all other enterprises.[6] A further study found that after ten years 44 percent of cooperatives were still in operation, compared with only 20 percent for all enterprises.

Fakhfakh et al. (2012) show that in several industries conventional firms would produce more with their current levels of employment and capital if they adopted the employee-owned firms’ way of organising