I just think it's funny that JD Vance knows better than to anger the cats.
Capitalism was about economic ownership by capitalists—the class of people at the top of the economic hierarchy, who are wealthy enough to start their own businesses or buy shares from others and earn money without working
I think that's only true because in early capitalism, only the existing wealthy were able to participate in the system. That's still the case to a large degree, but it's not an intrinsic feature of capitalism. It was just an incidental aspect of capitalism in the world as it existed.
True capitalists believe that the more competition, the better. Giving ordinary workers a higher stake in their company promotes a much broader level of competition. I think it's totally fair to describe worker co-ops in terms of capitalism, and as you said it would really help the branding.
If they made me king of America, that would be my number one policy objective.
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Free masters degrees for anyone going into teaching. Eventually free college for all will be a goal, but first, teachers.
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Massive investments into schools. I want a single class to have a maximum size of 7 students. This will require a lot more teachers but also a lot more physical space. In the 6 years it takes to train up new teachers, also build new buildings.
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Hire all those teachers with masters degrees for very high salaries. Comparable with private industry. Be very strict with teaching credential requirements and require ongoing testing and studying to maintain a teacher's license. Hire 2-3 teachers aides per teacher.
How do we fund this? Nationalize all state education departments. School funding is no longer tied to how much the property in that neighborhood is worth. Base it purely on enrollment, with no incentives for helping kids graduate. Minimal restrictions on funding except strong oversight against administration hoovering up all the money for themselves.
I think if you get highly educated, well-paid teachers in small class settings with adequate funding and an assistant, the teachers will go above and beyond for students. You don't need so much top-down control. Hire very good teachers, and then give them the freedom and the ability to teach well.
One generation of this, and so many problems will fix themselves. The Republican party will collapse. Climate change will become the #1 priority (though hopefully by that point we've stabilized our GHG output and are in the sequestration phase). We'll be inoculated against misinfo. We'll have an explosion of new products and businesses.
What if the executives who make the choices to do all those unethical actions actually are answering to locals.
That's what I'm saying, dude. Sure, the locals have the voting rights. But there's also a huge pool of external investors who want to see the company make more money. They act as a leveraging effect on the value of the stock, for voters (employees) and non voters alike.
If the company decides to do something good like switch to 100% renewable energy, investors sell and everyone's stock loses value. The employees see their retirement fund tank.
If the company decides to do something bad like outsource all their labor to children in the 3rd world, investors buy and everyone's stock rises a lot.
Every decision that the company makes, they'll have the investors in mind.
More like helping fix a problem they caused in the first place, but yeah.
Ah, in that case I think you're looking at it the right way.
I'm sure there's been hundreds of studies on it, but it seems so obvious to anyone who knows any history that I don't feel like looking them up. Literally every society in the history of humanity, it's happened, as far as I'm aware. Power corrupts.
I mean someone who owns 4 houses just so he can visit them throughout the year should be paying a higher rate of property tax than someone who owns 4 houses but rents out 3 of them to long term tenants. Probably more in property tax than the landlord pays in property + rental income tax.
The boss of the post office would absolutely be tyrannical if they could lol. In fact they often are. "Going postal" is a whole thing.
But generally, the system keeps them in check.
It's usually not that much extra effort to take the carcass and bring it to a butcher, so they do that sometimes. But yeah. Often, just leave it.
It's actually not all that bad because we have a lack of natural predators (because we already hunted them almost to extinction) so hunting keeps the deer population from exploding.
Would only work if you also made them immune from lawsuits due to people getting sick from eating expired food.
If it's legally habitable, someone could be living there imo. Just price the rent adequately low for the value. I'm not saying it's morally evil for you to have it, but it's definitely a luxury.
progressively higher property taxes for every additional one (probably with an upper limit)
I agree in principle but I think we should clarify whether that additional house is intended for short term rental, lomg term rental, or an additional "vacation" house. I think all 3 should have different taxation schemes.
I'm making enough now that I hit the cap, and I'm annoyed by it. I don't need social security, but the less fortunate do. It's so backwards. I should be paying more into it.
The extent to which it happens depends on the structures in place to prevent it. That's all I'm saying. If left unchecked, power corrupts.
I think you're focusing too much on voting rights. Even if investors don't vote on the actions of a company, they have a financial interest in seeing that company grow, which incentivises unethical but profitable actions by the company. Worker owned or not.
How many people here actually know any African-Americans?
Not like "I went to school with one" but have had an actual friendship?
I've had a couple of conversations recently where people have confidently said things about the Black community that are ridiculously incorrect. The kind of shit where you can tell they grew up in a very white community and learned about Black history as a college freshman.
Disclaimer: I am white, but I grew up in a Black neighborhood. I was one of 3 white kids in my elementary school lol, including my brother.
Is the Imperium of Man HFY?
There's a whole genre of sci-fi that has a major premise as "humanity is the most powerful/dominating/victorious species in the cosmos...and that's not a compliment". I always understood that to be a facet of HFY, but per this sub's description HFY should be "uplifting".
Like, a story where aliens try to invade Earth and we kick their asses is definitely HFY. But what if we then enslave the survivors of the alien horde? What if we reverse engineer their tech, go to their homeworld, and nuke their planet? What if we tailor a virus to their genome and purge the galaxy of their entire species, and their little alien babies die screaming in their little alien cribs?
Is that HFY?
Don't harm your biome by "cleaning" it
The human body needs constant exposure to germs to keep its immune system healthy. Washing dishes, doing laundry, and taking showers all damage or destroy the bacteria that's keeping your immune system strong.
What's the story you would write if you were an author?
A lot of people worldbuild when they daydream and have the bones of a story kicking around in their brain, but have to pay the bills and raise the kids etc so they never flesh it out and write it down. What's your story's premise? Fantasy, sci-fi, alternate history, mystery, western, whatever genre.
What do you think the Great Filter is?
>The Great Filter is the idea that, in the development of life from the earliest stages of abiogenesis to reaching the highest levels of development on the Kardashev scale, there is a barrier to development that makes detectable extraterrestrial life exceedingly rare. The Great Filter is one possible resolution of the Fermi paradox.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter
>The Fermi paradox is the discrepancy between the lack of conclusive evidence of advanced extraterrestrial life and the apparently high likelihood of its existence. As a 2015 article put it, "If life is so easy, someone from somewhere must have come calling by now."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox
Personally I think it's photosynthesis. Life itself developed and spread but photosynthesis started an inevitable chain of ever-greater and more-efficient life. I think a random chain of mutations that turns carbon-based proto-life into something that can harvest light energy is wildly unlikely, even after the wildly unlikely event of life beginning in the first place.
I have no data to back that up, just a guess.
TIL about the TRAPPIST-1 Star System
(it's not a solar system because Sol is our star, specifically; we're the only Solar system)
>TRAPPIST-1 is a cool red dwarf star[c] with seven known exoplanets.
>Up to four of the planets – designated d, e, f and g – orbit at distances where temperatures are suitable for the existence of liquid water, and are thus potentially hospitable to life.
The red dwarf star TRAPPIST-1 has an estimated lifespan of pretty much the entire lifespan of the universe. If any of those planets are habitable, and humanity goes there, we could live there until the end of the whole universe, no worrying about our sun going out in about 5 billion years. It could be our forever home.
The planets in the TRAPPIST system are extremely close to each other, so the night sky on any of them would be awe-inspiring, with multiple bodies bigger than our moon rising and setting every night.
Have you ever been punched in the face as an adult? What's the story?
I was a non functioning alcoholic and ran with some rough types in my late teens/early 20s and have both kicked ass and had my ass kicked. Mostly drunken barfights.
One time someone legitimately mistook me for someone else and started cussing at me, so I started cussing back and pushed him to the ground. He got up and did a really neat move actually where he faked a kick and then socked me right in the cheek, knocked me on my ass. I apologized, got up, we figured out the misunderstanding and he bought me a beer.
Have you got any weird questions FROM the opposite gender?
Misread the title of the other post which made me think of this question.
I, as a male, have had multiple women ask me how we ride bikes without smashing our balls.
Red Wing boots
Three years ago, I bought a pair of Red Wing Irish Setter boots with steel toes. Two years ago, I got a new job that requires me to go through metal detectors pretty often, and it's a pain. I've been waiting for these boots to wear out so I can justify getting new ones with a composite toe. I generally wear through boots in about a year.
These fucking boots WILL NOT DIE. They are still WATERPROOF. I haven't had to so much as replace the laces. They're incredible. I bought a size larger than needed and made up the difference with a couple of insoles and it's like walking on a cloud plus I seem a couple of inches taller. My feet don't even hurt after a 12 hour shift.
Look, having nuclear—
my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart—you know, if you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, OK, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I’m one of the smartest people anywhere in the world—it’s true!—but when you’re a conservative Republican they try—oh, do they do a number—that’s why I always start off: Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune—you know I have to give my like credentials all the time, because we’re a little disadvantaged—but you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me—it would have been so easy, and it’s not as important as these lives are (nuclear is powerful; my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power and that was 35 years ago; he would explain the power of what’s going to happen and he was right—who would have thought?), but when you look at what’s going on with the four prisoners—now it used to be three, now it’s four—but when it was three and even now, I would have said it’s all in the messenger; fellas, and it is fellas because, you know, they don’t, they haven’t figured that the women are smarter right now than the men, so, you know, it’s gonna take them about another 150 years—but the Persians are great negotiators, the Iranians are great negotiators, so, and they, they just killed, they just killed us.
Zoomers: how are Millenials hypocrites?
In my observation, a big part of social progress is each generation pointing out the hypocrisy of the previous. "All men are created equal" so how can you enslave black people? If men can vote, why can't women? How come straight people can marry but gay people can't? How is it fair to send an 18 year old to war but not let him vote?
A lot of these hypocrisies were so internalized that a lot of people of previous generations never even thought about them. It was like a mental blind spot. It took young people with fresh thinking to point them out and fight to fix them.
So, speaking as a Millenial, I'm asking what my generation's blind spots are. What injustices are we perpetuating without even thinking much about it?
For reference, Millenials are currently in their late 20s to early 40s. Not running the world, but also not fresh eyed college grads.
Bridge International Academies was in the midst of a key financing round when allegations of child sex abuse emerged. They fought back hard.
TL;DR: There is a company called Bridge International Academies trying to improve education in 3rd world countries by bringing in completely untrained teachers. They are following the typical start-up path, trying to scale up rapidly.
One of their main investors is the World Bank.
The World Bank has an internal team that investigates its investment for ethics, called the CAO (Compliance Advisor Ombudsman).
The CAO found evidence of large amounts of child abuse (sexual and otherwise). The World Bank responded by not renewing the contract of the head of the CAO, by attempting to fire the lead investigator into Bridge, and by signing a NDA with Bridge that makes it very difficult if not impossible to release any discovery of wrongdoing.
As a personal note, The Intercept is one of the last remaining news outlets that actually does meaningful investigations and shines light on the corrupt. If you can spare anything, send them a donation.
Just days after ousting former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) from the top leadership position, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) signaled he’d be willing to raise the threshold for a future motion to vacate — but only if Republicans agree to vote on a number of political reforms.
Have we entered the twilight zone?