she/they

  • 0 Posts
  • 39 Comments
Joined 6 months ago
cake
Cake day: December 31st, 2023

help-circle
rss








  • zeatomemes@lemmy.worldA bit late
    link
    fedilink
    -12 months ago

    You’re right, feelings do matter, and this post did not dispute that. It’s just that safety matters more.

    It saddens me that the default interpretation of this is accusatory and requiring of defense. Not to personally blame you, this is very common and clearly a systemic reaction, but I don’t know enough psychology/politics/sociology to understand why, just enough to know it’s bad.



  • zeatoProgrammer Humor@lemmy.mlgot him
    link
    fedilink
    202 months ago

    Indentation implies there’s some control structure causing it. Too many control structures nested gets hard to mentally keep track of. 3 is arbitrary, but in general more indentation => harder to understand, which is bad.





  • Plenty of people die daily in first-world countries that could have been saved in a different economic system, because saving them was not profitable. Even more die elsewhere, where the first-world countries have outsourced a lot of their miserable jobs. Cobalt mines in the Congo, used for certain lithium-ion battery chemistries for instance, have terrible working conditions and child labor. Another example is climate change: how many people will die this century from famine and water scarcity caused by a changing climate? Externalities don’t factor into capitalist profits, and the governments are usually under their control so they’ll just pay lip service to action or very slowly and reluctantly enact regulation.

    Revolution is a one-time cost. It’ll suck, I hate it, but it seems to me like it’d be worth it in the long run. I’d also love to avoid revolution entirely, but that threatens capitalist profit so I really doubt governments (again, controlled by the interests of capitalists) will make it easy.

    Another thing worth noting: revolution doesn’t mean financial markets have to immediately change. Companies can still act capitalist (at the start), they’d just be controlled by the workers now. Once workers own everything, and government infrastructure is set up to facilitate the sort of democracy and management communism would need, we can phase in changes. With control of the government, there could also be subsidies set up to help stabilize the market during transitions; for the US at least, there’s about ~$700 billion/year for the military as it stands, that seems like a sizeable fund to pinch from for such subsidies in the short term.


  • Seizing the means of production and putting it in the ownership of the workers will, realistically, require revolution or damn well near it. But, workers owning their work doesn’t require an end to our current markets. We can keep them mostly as is, besides, of course, the rich and powerful people who currently do no work and just “own” things. From that state, it can be a more gradual transition.


  • I’m not well read enough on communism to know smart people’s ideas there, but the way I see it it gives room for any system of experimentation the people want. Maybe you pitch your idea to the government instead of investors, and they give you resources. In a system with small markets, you can start in the market and, if it does well, get upgraded to governments operated. “Communism” doesn’t mean one thing, and there’s a lot of room for variety, do we could we decide to try one of these systems but then switch to another, allowing better adaptation than capitalism where profit is the only way.

    I take hormone therapy for transgender people (hi, I am transgender people) and I’m already at the whims of the government. Perhaps a communist government might not make it free for me if the political climate said no, but as long as it’s not outright banned and there is some alternate system to the government’s plan, I could still get it. That’s not far off where I am now, actually (Florida). Perhaps we could write this sort of going around other government to some degree (perhaps by small market) into the constitution as a layer of safety.

    I’ve been saying “let the government do [x]” a lot, and if you’re from a neoliberal country you might have heard “excessive bureaucracy”, but that’s a result of capitalism ruining your government. Government doesn’t have to be bad, nor even a monolith. Most forms of communism I’ve heard of have multiple levels, from committees covering broad country-level goals to committees on local-level details, each level getting a fair degree of autonomy. But also, you can talk to or even get on the committees! They’re made of citizens like you, and with no corporate interests or lobbying!