honey_im_meat_grinding

@honey_im_meat_grinding@lemmy.blahaj.zone

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No right wing wave in Finland as Left Alliance take record result in EU elections ( yle.fi )

Finland's results in the European election bucked a continent-wide trend of rising support for parties on the outer fringe of right-wing politics, with the Left Alliance and the National Coalition winning big at the expense of the nationalist Finns Party....

honey_im_meat_grinding ,

Allow me to gas Finland up a bit more. They're higher than Germany in terms of innovation (triadic patents per capita), they have semi-democratically owned grocery stores with 90% of the country being a member/co-owner, they have 60% union density and a Ghent system (like Sweden, unlike Norway), their housing prices were among the few in Europe falling - after the government started their Housing First initiative and built social housing for the poor, their education system being so good (despite being relaxed unlike e.g. Singapore) and state-funded instead of private... life is pretty good in Finland.

honey_im_meat_grinding ,

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.

honey_im_meat_grinding ,

But don’t services like Discord forbid third party clients?

Me waiting for inflation to slowly increase Discord's yearly revenue until it tips into the legally defined Gatekeeper™ status under the EU Digital Markets Act so they'd be playing with fire if they banned people for using interoperability apps.

honey_im_meat_grinding ,

This is funny when you just look at your profile's first page and see you've made comments like these:

I hate this rhetoric. It implies that this a refular occurence. It is just a man hating comment. If this is happening to you frequently, maybe you are the problem. I am tired of being assumed an asshole just because I am a man. It is sexist. Plain and simple.

So you deny "unproblematic" women regularly experiencing unsafe behavior from men who are entitled and you're also denying people's gender identity - otherwise, why would it be a waste of time for a woman's fight for her right to access women's spaces? So you're hateful towards people you perceive to be "men" while complaining about "man haters" elsewhere. Logical inconsistencies in favor of hate is a hallmark sign of right wing extremist views.

honey_im_meat_grinding ,

This world’s pretty fucked up. I remember being disillusioned of socialism back in the day (still am) but shit like this makes me wish there was some magical better system than our shitty capitalism.

I mean there is something better than "shitty capitalism". You can call it what you want, market socialism, social democracy, cool capitalism, but look to Norway for a pretty good example of what we could have:

2/3rd of Norway's GDP is driven by the public sector, most of the hydropower is owned socially, trains are socially owned, 20% of housing is socially owned through housing coops, gigantic social wealth fund that could singlehandedly fund UBI from like half the returns it makes every year, they have almost 60% union density without a Ghent system like Sweden and Finland, very low income inequality, low on the hours worked per week by country list, high GDP per hour worked... I could go on.

And there's more cool stuff like that in other countries around Europe too, Vienna's approach to social housing, Italian and Spanish worker cooperatives, most of the electricity companies in Denmark being socially owned through cooperatives, 90% of Finland being a member in their grocery coops... like, there are so many examples of good things spread out everywhere - we just need the political will to do them more.

honey_im_meat_grinding ,

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).

honey_im_meat_grinding ,

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.

honey_im_meat_grinding ,

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)

honey_im_meat_grinding ,

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.

honey_im_meat_grinding ,

Trying to instill FOMO just because the Chinese are coming for it!!!

Take a look at the posts OP makes – they seem obsessed with posting negative articles about China.

honey_im_meat_grinding ,

You're basically making the "I have black friends so I can't be racist" argument. Your post history is like 90% articles like these:

  • Chinese Communist Party-Backed Businessman in Fiji is a Top Australian Criminal Target
  • Calls for sanctions against China after Beijing accused of cyber espionage in US and UK
  • China's Private Property Developers Face Persistent Funding Constraints, Fitch Ratings Says
  • UK lawmakers claim 'harassment, impersonation, and attempted hacking' from China
  • Millions of U.S. citizens' online accounts have been caught up in a "sinister" Chinese hacking plot that targeted US officials, officials say
  • Threats, fear and surveillance: Chinese students in the UK say they are scared to return home and worry for their families in China after being followed and harassed by the regime in Beijing
  • Oxford University held training sessions attended by Chinese doctors accused of illegally harvesting organs

Like, this is not a normal amount of articles about China. This feels like an obsession. If I was posting a similar amount of pro-China articles, I'd rightfully be called a shill.

Envisioning my Ideal Social Media Platform: Blending the Best of Reddit and Image Boards

I'm excited to see the new meme browsing interface feature in PieFed. I expected PieFed to be yet another Reddit clone using a different software stack and without any innovation. I believe there's an opportunity to take things a step further by blending the best elements of platforms like Reddit and image boards like Safebooru....

honey_im_meat_grinding ,

My immediate concern with tags is descending into what Twitter has become: hashtags have been meaningless for a long while since there's too much wrongly tagged stuff, different communities often use the same tag for different things, or there are ten tags all for the same thing. All of which means we'd need some form of moderator role that handles tags, and while I think it's doable, it might take some trial and error to figure out how exactly we divide tags between moderators, how tags are proposed/created, and how tags are grouped/combined (e.g. food, foods).

honey_im_meat_grinding ,

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

honey_im_meat_grinding ,

I swear the “fuck cars” crew are completely deluded from reality.

I see people say what you're saying (bus vs car road damage elasticity) in "fuck cars" communities, I don't really see why you've decided to attack them collectively. But it's a pop-community, they're going to be wrong every now and then either way, please give them some slack. Their purpose is to make an average person aware of car dependency and that it's generally a negative thing, so that actual urban planners with technical knowledge have an easier time arguing for and implementing realistic solutions, and they'll take into account the variables you bring up. Think of "fuck cars" like a form of lobbying except it's done by common people with good intentions - similar to how Japanese coops lobbied for better food safety standards decades ago - rather than wealthy corporations.

honey_im_meat_grinding , (edited )

Now they can set up a worker cooperative instead.

The Drivers Cooperative or Co-Op Ride is an American ridesharing company and mobile app that is a workers cooperative, owned collectively by the drivers.

The cooperative is owned by the drivers themselves, and takes 15% from each ride for business overhead costs, as opposed to the 25% to 40% ride hail apps like Uber or Lyft take per ride.

In addition to a larger percentage of the fees per ride driven, each driver as a part-owner will also receive a share of the company's profits after loans and other expenses are paid, in the form of weighted dividends.

The cooperative vets its owner-members further than what is already performed by the New York City TLC and gives a fixed price when a car is ordered and does not engage in surge pricing. [...] In 2021 that is $1.26 per mile which Uber and Lyft do not pay above; the cooperative pays a minimum mileage of $1.64. The cooperative intends to be able to set aside 10% of profits to community foundations and other non-profits and community organizations.

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

honey_im_meat_grinding ,

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.

honey_im_meat_grinding ,

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".

https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/pictrs/image/ed206d84-c69b-47a9-8588-a887295df0d6.png

honey_im_meat_grinding ,

Meanwhile Meta takes great pains to remove any glimpse of an erogenous zone like the most deranged Christian fundamentalist

honey_im_meat_grinding ,

I felt this a year ago when I got measles and all the medical staff I talked to were pretty surprised. Parents didn't give me the vaccine as a child, but I got vaccinated as soon as I could afterwards. The weirdest part is I work from home and don't leave my home too often, which means I was either really unlucky, or it was already pretty widespread in the UK then.

honey_im_meat_grinding ,

"A liberal* is someone who opposes every war except the current war and supports all civil rights movements except the one that’s going on right now."

* not to be confused with "left wing" as the term is often used in the US

honey_im_meat_grinding ,

I realize a lot of Republicans don’t give a shit about consent, but most of the rest of us do

I'm pretty sure the core goal of right wingers in their respective domains is preventing us from gaining the ability to consent to more stuff - or in their more extreme, for taking away our ability to consent to things - so yeah you're right about that. Democracy is a system of consent, and our progress towards that was being challenged during the Enlightenment. Today, for example, many right wing economists are against democratically elected managers/bosses, unions, democratic government owned enterprises, government welfare safety nets for the vulnerable, housing cooperatives as a solution to the housing crisis, the list goes on. The pattern being that all of those increase the average person's ability to consent to more stuff by leveling power asymmetries.

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