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Now that we have a new thread, in order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a complete and thorough read before posting! NOTE: When providing a source, please provide a very brief summary on what it's about and what purpose it adds to the discussion. The supporting statement should clearly explain why the subject is relevant and needs to be discussed. Please follow this rule especially for tweets.
Your supporting statement should always come BEFORE you provide the source.If you have any questions, comments, concern, or feedback regarding the USPMT, then please use this thread: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/website-feedback/510156-us-politics-thread |
On February 15 2024 06:48 WombaT wrote:Show nested quote +On February 15 2024 05:18 BlackJack wrote:On February 14 2024 17:17 WombaT wrote:On February 14 2024 15:49 Fleetfeet wrote:
I do love the theory that GH is some masked V-for-vendetta character frustratedly posting on the internet waiting for people to DM him saying "You know what, you're right, we SHOULD blow up the parliament building. How do we do that?". That's a funny image to me, and kinda sorta connected to reality? Not that I think GH wants to blow something up, but that V lives in a dystopian world where the a fascist authoritarian government has taken over and the idea of watching V have conversations on MSN messenger with people being like "The government is fascist and authoritarian, we need to do something" and people responding with "Nah it's not thaaat bad we can still vote" seems like a good skit.
I think that GH believes the US is broken beyond repair, and most people here don't. Most people believe it is broken, yes, but not beyond repair. Most of the disconnect comes from GH trying different angles to demonstrate that the US is broken beyond repair but people not being willing to accept that. He's listed getting people to accept that it's broken beyond repair as step one towards revolution, and this vote/not vote does feel like it's still just pushing people towards that idea.
(For clarity, I do not think the US is currently fascist and authoritarian.) Haha, the climax of V for Vendetta 2 Electric Boogoloo is just some really intensely shot, 20 minute long fight scene consisting of cutting back and forth between our hero GH and whoever the villain is as they exchange heated posts on TL. Done in the style of every single 90s ‘I’m in.’ hacking scenes. In a more serious but much, much less fun note I must say I share a lot of that fatalism, capitalism is as entrenched as it’s ever been and rather the root of many an issue, even as its flaws are biting pretty hard. Without going into TLDR territory, those flaws are nothing new, but for a pretty sizeable chunk of time ‘a rising tide raises all boats’ was somewhat true. It’s certainly not the case currently, and few parties anywhere, to my knowledge actually have policies, even on paper to deal with these issues, even within a redistributive capitalist framework, never mind the dreaded s word. Unless you have medical issues that your particular healthcare system is fucking you on, you’re an actively persecuted minority or you’re fuck off rich I’d wager that housing prices continuing on a decades-long trajectory of far outstripping both inflation and real wage increases is likely the absolute single most impactful issue of the day for almost everyone. Well, it suits landlords from the individual to the culture capital level I guess, but everyone else. And yet, remarkably few policy pushes here, you might get the odd house building pledge but that’s kind of a band aid as solutions go. There’ll be a few more houses going, it’s not going to meaningfully push prices back down. People may disagree with my assertion, but I’m pretty confident in it. A system is pretty fundamentally broken if it doesn’t even attempt to tackle what (I believe) is probably the single biggest socioeconomic issue of our time, at least in terms of a lived experience and quality of life. The other biggest issue, which is less immediately apparent, nor important for many is of course climate change, which were also doing a pretty shit job at dealing with. If not quite beyond repair, it does somewhat intrigue me as to why America in particular is fucked in an almost unique manner, and has problems unique to it. With the giant caveat that of course there were many, many issues regarding minorities, the US used to be ahead, or at least on par with European countries, Canada etc in quite a few respects. Much of it idealised of course, but it used to be a country many looked at as aspirational, to be envied even. But over the decades it’s sort of drifted on its own, particular trajectory of dysfunction. I’m curious as to why this is, and really can’t put a finger on it. Other countries have huge cultural differences between regions, or even households. Others have flawed political structures, ethnic tensions or any number of other commonalities, but yet the US somehow ends up with a lot of quirks that make it a special idiosyncratic snowflake amongst vaguely comparable countries. Bit of a ramble the last part, but it’s a question that continually exercises me and I’ve spent quite a bit pondering, I’m interested to hear what y’all think on that particular topic. A couple days ago I went into San Francisco and hailed a driverless taxi. A white electric Jaguar i-Pace pulled up with nobody in the car. I got into the back seat and the car drove itself to the restaurant I wanted to go to, found a safe spot to pull over and then let us out. We live in the best times and everything is amazing. People that want to insist that everything is shite and broken beyond repair are living in their own delusions. Are there some issues with wage stagnation, squeezing of the middle class, housing affordability? Sure, there's no such thing as utopia. It's also not true that housing isn't being addressed. For example in California there were 56 housing bills signed into law in 2023 designed to reduce burdensome regulations and permitting processes and increase production. We're also seeing an uptick in union activity with multiple high profile strikes. The UAW won a 25% raise over 4 years which is nothing to sneeze at. Anyway I never understood people that lament about so called "late-stage capitalism" and how everything is terrible and we need a revolution. Globally you can see decades long downward trends in poverty, hunger, infant mortality. A lot of it spurred on by new tech and innovation. The U.S. more than any other country contributes the most to new tech and innovation. Somehow I'm supposed to be sold on the idea that the U.S. is the worst offender in this capitalist nightmare and in dire need of massive reform. No thanks. I’d wager most people would happily trade sauntering over to a restaurant in a driverless car for not being economically crippled by rent. And I don’t think these measures ultimately deal with root causes of the problem On the flipside I do agree that the ‘everything is shit’ lens is way off too. Be it technological or social/cultural there’s been a hell of a lot of advancement in even my own lifetime, and it’s important to keep some sense of perspective. It can be simultaneously true that capitalism is having globally beneficial effects, while in countries where they’re more developed that that gradually stagnates, or indeed reverses, hence the ‘late stage’ part. The distribution element is less of a pragmatically pertinent factor when you’re getting a slice of a much bigger, and quickly growing pie. As I alluded to in my prior post.
The US probably experienced an extraordinary standard of living post WW2 as the one modern superpower to escape relatively unharmed. It's easy to see a slight pullback on that standard of living and proclaim it some doom and gloom late stage capitalism hellscape. It's all a bit ridiculous.
In California compensation for public employees is all public record and there is a website that compiles the salaries for every public employee. For example here's San Francisco - and I sorted the list by # of employees so it shows the most common jobs.
The "average total pay" for some of the most common jobs, nurse/police officer/firefighter, is all around $200,000 a year. If you click the job titles you will see some of the overtime fiends make $400-500k a year. I'm not trying to say there hasn't been any wage stagnation but this isn't exactly a pittance either. It's also probably not enough to buy an average home in San Francisco, but eventually mortgage rates should come back down and make home buying easier.
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United States24686 Posts
If you're trying to talk about how the country is doing, then studying the most expensive place to live in the country is probably not particularly representative of much...
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On February 15 2024 07:27 Fleetfeet wrote:Show nested quote +On February 15 2024 05:18 BlackJack wrote:On February 14 2024 17:17 WombaT wrote:On February 14 2024 15:49 Fleetfeet wrote:
I do love the theory that GH is some masked V-for-vendetta character frustratedly posting on the internet waiting for people to DM him saying "You know what, you're right, we SHOULD blow up the parliament building. How do we do that?". That's a funny image to me, and kinda sorta connected to reality? Not that I think GH wants to blow something up, but that V lives in a dystopian world where the a fascist authoritarian government has taken over and the idea of watching V have conversations on MSN messenger with people being like "The government is fascist and authoritarian, we need to do something" and people responding with "Nah it's not thaaat bad we can still vote" seems like a good skit.
I think that GH believes the US is broken beyond repair, and most people here don't. Most people believe it is broken, yes, but not beyond repair. Most of the disconnect comes from GH trying different angles to demonstrate that the US is broken beyond repair but people not being willing to accept that. He's listed getting people to accept that it's broken beyond repair as step one towards revolution, and this vote/not vote does feel like it's still just pushing people towards that idea.
(For clarity, I do not think the US is currently fascist and authoritarian.) Haha, the climax of V for Vendetta 2 Electric Boogoloo is just some really intensely shot, 20 minute long fight scene consisting of cutting back and forth between our hero GH and whoever the villain is as they exchange heated posts on TL. Done in the style of every single 90s ‘I’m in.’ hacking scenes. In a more serious but much, much less fun note I must say I share a lot of that fatalism, capitalism is as entrenched as it’s ever been and rather the root of many an issue, even as its flaws are biting pretty hard. Without going into TLDR territory, those flaws are nothing new, but for a pretty sizeable chunk of time ‘a rising tide raises all boats’ was somewhat true. It’s certainly not the case currently, and few parties anywhere, to my knowledge actually have policies, even on paper to deal with these issues, even within a redistributive capitalist framework, never mind the dreaded s word. Unless you have medical issues that your particular healthcare system is fucking you on, you’re an actively persecuted minority or you’re fuck off rich I’d wager that housing prices continuing on a decades-long trajectory of far outstripping both inflation and real wage increases is likely the absolute single most impactful issue of the day for almost everyone. Well, it suits landlords from the individual to the culture capital level I guess, but everyone else. And yet, remarkably few policy pushes here, you might get the odd house building pledge but that’s kind of a band aid as solutions go. There’ll be a few more houses going, it’s not going to meaningfully push prices back down. People may disagree with my assertion, but I’m pretty confident in it. A system is pretty fundamentally broken if it doesn’t even attempt to tackle what (I believe) is probably the single biggest socioeconomic issue of our time, at least in terms of a lived experience and quality of life. The other biggest issue, which is less immediately apparent, nor important for many is of course climate change, which were also doing a pretty shit job at dealing with. If not quite beyond repair, it does somewhat intrigue me as to why America in particular is fucked in an almost unique manner, and has problems unique to it. With the giant caveat that of course there were many, many issues regarding minorities, the US used to be ahead, or at least on par with European countries, Canada etc in quite a few respects. Much of it idealised of course, but it used to be a country many looked at as aspirational, to be envied even. But over the decades it’s sort of drifted on its own, particular trajectory of dysfunction. I’m curious as to why this is, and really can’t put a finger on it. Other countries have huge cultural differences between regions, or even households. Others have flawed political structures, ethnic tensions or any number of other commonalities, but yet the US somehow ends up with a lot of quirks that make it a special idiosyncratic snowflake amongst vaguely comparable countries. Bit of a ramble the last part, but it’s a question that continually exercises me and I’ve spent quite a bit pondering, I’m interested to hear what y’all think on that particular topic. A couple days ago I went into San Francisco and hailed a driverless taxi. A white electric Jaguar i-Pace pulled up with nobody in the car. I got into the back seat and the car drove itself to the restaurant I wanted to go to, found a safe spot to pull over and then let us out. We live in the best times and everything is amazing. People that want to insist that everything is shite and broken beyond repair are living in their own delusions. Are there some issues with wage stagnation, squeezing of the middle class, housing affordability? Sure, there's no such thing as utopia. It's also not true that housing isn't being addressed. For example in California there were 56 housing bills signed into law in 2023 designed to reduce burdensome regulations and permitting processes and increase production. We're also seeing an uptick in union activity with multiple high profile strikes. The UAW won a 25% raise over 4 years which is nothing to sneeze at. Anyway I never understood people that lament about so called "late-stage capitalism" and how everything is terrible and we need a revolution. Globally you can see decades long downward trends in poverty, hunger, infant mortality. A lot of it spurred on by new tech and innovation. The U.S. more than any other country contributes the most to new tech and innovation. Somehow I'm supposed to be sold on the idea that the U.S. is the worst offender in this capitalist nightmare and in dire need of massive reform. No thanks. This is why I don't weigh in on he actual question of whether not the US is shit. From the outside looking in, I can obviously see some issues (Healthcare, inflexible two-party system, gerrymandering etc) but without actually being in the system and feeling how inflexible or shit it actually is, all someone from the outside can do is listen to people on the inside about how conditions actually are.Functionally, I see unchecked capitalism as a problem - it's led to the issues we see between the cost of necessary medicines being exorbitantly more expensive than they should be. However, I do not think overall capitalism is wholly unchecked, and continued change going forward will continue to rein in some of the greater offences, as well as general anti-capitalist sentiment working its way into how companies operate. Ultimately, I don't think we can escape capitalism. If you were to 'delete capitalism' in a city as an experiment (like an ARPG starting a new season, wipe all bank accounts / corporations and start fresh) I cannot belive we'd see anything other than a reconstruction of the same general capitalist structure, just with different actors and names. It's the method we know for exchanging goods and services, and big players would still rise for providing their goods or services well, and then be able to use that market share to bully smaller players out. In my day-to-day life, I see socialist ideas creeping their way into capitalist structures, and can't help but think that is how things continue going forward. I do not see any revolution happening on a major scale unless something ACTUALLY breaks. People will not be motivated to fix it until then.
Yes and often people's perspective is what the media they are consuming is telling them. I think I see this firsthand as well as anyone as someone that has 'dual-citizenship' in California and Florida. People in Florida think if you go to California you'll trip over a mountain of human feces and used needles and people in California think if you go to Florida and you're gay the gay-stapo will round you up into the paddy wagons to take to prison. I've had LGBT friends in California unironically ask me if I think it's safe for them to vacation in Florida. Miami? Hell no, you're better off going to Uganda is what I told them, naturally.
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On February 15 2024 09:10 BlackJack wrote:Show nested quote +On February 15 2024 07:27 Fleetfeet wrote:On February 15 2024 05:18 BlackJack wrote:On February 14 2024 17:17 WombaT wrote:On February 14 2024 15:49 Fleetfeet wrote:
I do love the theory that GH is some masked V-for-vendetta character frustratedly posting on the internet waiting for people to DM him saying "You know what, you're right, we SHOULD blow up the parliament building. How do we do that?". That's a funny image to me, and kinda sorta connected to reality? Not that I think GH wants to blow something up, but that V lives in a dystopian world where the a fascist authoritarian government has taken over and the idea of watching V have conversations on MSN messenger with people being like "The government is fascist and authoritarian, we need to do something" and people responding with "Nah it's not thaaat bad we can still vote" seems like a good skit.
I think that GH believes the US is broken beyond repair, and most people here don't. Most people believe it is broken, yes, but not beyond repair. Most of the disconnect comes from GH trying different angles to demonstrate that the US is broken beyond repair but people not being willing to accept that. He's listed getting people to accept that it's broken beyond repair as step one towards revolution, and this vote/not vote does feel like it's still just pushing people towards that idea.
(For clarity, I do not think the US is currently fascist and authoritarian.) Haha, the climax of V for Vendetta 2 Electric Boogoloo is just some really intensely shot, 20 minute long fight scene consisting of cutting back and forth between our hero GH and whoever the villain is as they exchange heated posts on TL. Done in the style of every single 90s ‘I’m in.’ hacking scenes. In a more serious but much, much less fun note I must say I share a lot of that fatalism, capitalism is as entrenched as it’s ever been and rather the root of many an issue, even as its flaws are biting pretty hard. Without going into TLDR territory, those flaws are nothing new, but for a pretty sizeable chunk of time ‘a rising tide raises all boats’ was somewhat true. It’s certainly not the case currently, and few parties anywhere, to my knowledge actually have policies, even on paper to deal with these issues, even within a redistributive capitalist framework, never mind the dreaded s word. Unless you have medical issues that your particular healthcare system is fucking you on, you’re an actively persecuted minority or you’re fuck off rich I’d wager that housing prices continuing on a decades-long trajectory of far outstripping both inflation and real wage increases is likely the absolute single most impactful issue of the day for almost everyone. Well, it suits landlords from the individual to the culture capital level I guess, but everyone else. And yet, remarkably few policy pushes here, you might get the odd house building pledge but that’s kind of a band aid as solutions go. There’ll be a few more houses going, it’s not going to meaningfully push prices back down. People may disagree with my assertion, but I’m pretty confident in it. A system is pretty fundamentally broken if it doesn’t even attempt to tackle what (I believe) is probably the single biggest socioeconomic issue of our time, at least in terms of a lived experience and quality of life. The other biggest issue, which is less immediately apparent, nor important for many is of course climate change, which were also doing a pretty shit job at dealing with. If not quite beyond repair, it does somewhat intrigue me as to why America in particular is fucked in an almost unique manner, and has problems unique to it. With the giant caveat that of course there were many, many issues regarding minorities, the US used to be ahead, or at least on par with European countries, Canada etc in quite a few respects. Much of it idealised of course, but it used to be a country many looked at as aspirational, to be envied even. But over the decades it’s sort of drifted on its own, particular trajectory of dysfunction. I’m curious as to why this is, and really can’t put a finger on it. Other countries have huge cultural differences between regions, or even households. Others have flawed political structures, ethnic tensions or any number of other commonalities, but yet the US somehow ends up with a lot of quirks that make it a special idiosyncratic snowflake amongst vaguely comparable countries. Bit of a ramble the last part, but it’s a question that continually exercises me and I’ve spent quite a bit pondering, I’m interested to hear what y’all think on that particular topic. A couple days ago I went into San Francisco and hailed a driverless taxi. A white electric Jaguar i-Pace pulled up with nobody in the car. I got into the back seat and the car drove itself to the restaurant I wanted to go to, found a safe spot to pull over and then let us out. We live in the best times and everything is amazing. People that want to insist that everything is shite and broken beyond repair are living in their own delusions. Are there some issues with wage stagnation, squeezing of the middle class, housing affordability? Sure, there's no such thing as utopia. It's also not true that housing isn't being addressed. For example in California there were 56 housing bills signed into law in 2023 designed to reduce burdensome regulations and permitting processes and increase production. We're also seeing an uptick in union activity with multiple high profile strikes. The UAW won a 25% raise over 4 years which is nothing to sneeze at. Anyway I never understood people that lament about so called "late-stage capitalism" and how everything is terrible and we need a revolution. Globally you can see decades long downward trends in poverty, hunger, infant mortality. A lot of it spurred on by new tech and innovation. The U.S. more than any other country contributes the most to new tech and innovation. Somehow I'm supposed to be sold on the idea that the U.S. is the worst offender in this capitalist nightmare and in dire need of massive reform. No thanks. This is why I don't weigh in on he actual question of whether not the US is shit. From the outside looking in, I can obviously see some issues (Healthcare, inflexible two-party system, gerrymandering etc) but without actually being in the system and feeling how inflexible or shit it actually is, all someone from the outside can do is listen to people on the inside about how conditions actually are.Functionally, I see unchecked capitalism as a problem - it's led to the issues we see between the cost of necessary medicines being exorbitantly more expensive than they should be. However, I do not think overall capitalism is wholly unchecked, and continued change going forward will continue to rein in some of the greater offences, as well as general anti-capitalist sentiment working its way into how companies operate. Ultimately, I don't think we can escape capitalism. If you were to 'delete capitalism' in a city as an experiment (like an ARPG starting a new season, wipe all bank accounts / corporations and start fresh) I cannot belive we'd see anything other than a reconstruction of the same general capitalist structure, just with different actors and names. It's the method we know for exchanging goods and services, and big players would still rise for providing their goods or services well, and then be able to use that market share to bully smaller players out. In my day-to-day life, I see socialist ideas creeping their way into capitalist structures, and can't help but think that is how things continue going forward. I do not see any revolution happening on a major scale unless something ACTUALLY breaks. People will not be motivated to fix it until then. Yes and often people's perspective is what the media they are consuming is telling them. I think I see this firsthand as well as anyone as someone that has 'dual-citizenship' in California and Florida. People in Florida think if you go to California you'll trip over a mountain of human feces and used needles and people in California think if you go to Florida and you're gay the gay-stapo will round you up into the paddy wagons to take to prison. I've had LGBT friends in California unironically ask me if I think it's safe for them to vacation in Florida. Miami? Hell no, you're better off going to Uganda is what I told them, naturally.
I love that you simultaneously mock people for believing what media has told them AND just straight lie to your misled friends asking arguably legitimate questions. I can relate, though I will usually follow with an "I'm fucking with you. They might be homophobes but not the "form a lynch mob" sense, just the usual "think less of you from a safe distance" sense."
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On February 15 2024 11:23 Fleetfeet wrote:Show nested quote +On February 15 2024 09:10 BlackJack wrote:On February 15 2024 07:27 Fleetfeet wrote:On February 15 2024 05:18 BlackJack wrote:On February 14 2024 17:17 WombaT wrote:On February 14 2024 15:49 Fleetfeet wrote:
I do love the theory that GH is some masked V-for-vendetta character frustratedly posting on the internet waiting for people to DM him saying "You know what, you're right, we SHOULD blow up the parliament building. How do we do that?". That's a funny image to me, and kinda sorta connected to reality? Not that I think GH wants to blow something up, but that V lives in a dystopian world where the a fascist authoritarian government has taken over and the idea of watching V have conversations on MSN messenger with people being like "The government is fascist and authoritarian, we need to do something" and people responding with "Nah it's not thaaat bad we can still vote" seems like a good skit.
I think that GH believes the US is broken beyond repair, and most people here don't. Most people believe it is broken, yes, but not beyond repair. Most of the disconnect comes from GH trying different angles to demonstrate that the US is broken beyond repair but people not being willing to accept that. He's listed getting people to accept that it's broken beyond repair as step one towards revolution, and this vote/not vote does feel like it's still just pushing people towards that idea.
(For clarity, I do not think the US is currently fascist and authoritarian.) Haha, the climax of V for Vendetta 2 Electric Boogoloo is just some really intensely shot, 20 minute long fight scene consisting of cutting back and forth between our hero GH and whoever the villain is as they exchange heated posts on TL. Done in the style of every single 90s ‘I’m in.’ hacking scenes. In a more serious but much, much less fun note I must say I share a lot of that fatalism, capitalism is as entrenched as it’s ever been and rather the root of many an issue, even as its flaws are biting pretty hard. Without going into TLDR territory, those flaws are nothing new, but for a pretty sizeable chunk of time ‘a rising tide raises all boats’ was somewhat true. It’s certainly not the case currently, and few parties anywhere, to my knowledge actually have policies, even on paper to deal with these issues, even within a redistributive capitalist framework, never mind the dreaded s word. Unless you have medical issues that your particular healthcare system is fucking you on, you’re an actively persecuted minority or you’re fuck off rich I’d wager that housing prices continuing on a decades-long trajectory of far outstripping both inflation and real wage increases is likely the absolute single most impactful issue of the day for almost everyone. Well, it suits landlords from the individual to the culture capital level I guess, but everyone else. And yet, remarkably few policy pushes here, you might get the odd house building pledge but that’s kind of a band aid as solutions go. There’ll be a few more houses going, it’s not going to meaningfully push prices back down. People may disagree with my assertion, but I’m pretty confident in it. A system is pretty fundamentally broken if it doesn’t even attempt to tackle what (I believe) is probably the single biggest socioeconomic issue of our time, at least in terms of a lived experience and quality of life. The other biggest issue, which is less immediately apparent, nor important for many is of course climate change, which were also doing a pretty shit job at dealing with. If not quite beyond repair, it does somewhat intrigue me as to why America in particular is fucked in an almost unique manner, and has problems unique to it. With the giant caveat that of course there were many, many issues regarding minorities, the US used to be ahead, or at least on par with European countries, Canada etc in quite a few respects. Much of it idealised of course, but it used to be a country many looked at as aspirational, to be envied even. But over the decades it’s sort of drifted on its own, particular trajectory of dysfunction. I’m curious as to why this is, and really can’t put a finger on it. Other countries have huge cultural differences between regions, or even households. Others have flawed political structures, ethnic tensions or any number of other commonalities, but yet the US somehow ends up with a lot of quirks that make it a special idiosyncratic snowflake amongst vaguely comparable countries. Bit of a ramble the last part, but it’s a question that continually exercises me and I’ve spent quite a bit pondering, I’m interested to hear what y’all think on that particular topic. A couple days ago I went into San Francisco and hailed a driverless taxi. A white electric Jaguar i-Pace pulled up with nobody in the car. I got into the back seat and the car drove itself to the restaurant I wanted to go to, found a safe spot to pull over and then let us out. We live in the best times and everything is amazing. People that want to insist that everything is shite and broken beyond repair are living in their own delusions. Are there some issues with wage stagnation, squeezing of the middle class, housing affordability? Sure, there's no such thing as utopia. It's also not true that housing isn't being addressed. For example in California there were 56 housing bills signed into law in 2023 designed to reduce burdensome regulations and permitting processes and increase production. We're also seeing an uptick in union activity with multiple high profile strikes. The UAW won a 25% raise over 4 years which is nothing to sneeze at. Anyway I never understood people that lament about so called "late-stage capitalism" and how everything is terrible and we need a revolution. Globally you can see decades long downward trends in poverty, hunger, infant mortality. A lot of it spurred on by new tech and innovation. The U.S. more than any other country contributes the most to new tech and innovation. Somehow I'm supposed to be sold on the idea that the U.S. is the worst offender in this capitalist nightmare and in dire need of massive reform. No thanks. This is why I don't weigh in on he actual question of whether not the US is shit. From the outside looking in, I can obviously see some issues (Healthcare, inflexible two-party system, gerrymandering etc) but without actually being in the system and feeling how inflexible or shit it actually is, all someone from the outside can do is listen to people on the inside about how conditions actually are.Functionally, I see unchecked capitalism as a problem - it's led to the issues we see between the cost of necessary medicines being exorbitantly more expensive than they should be. However, I do not think overall capitalism is wholly unchecked, and continued change going forward will continue to rein in some of the greater offences, as well as general anti-capitalist sentiment working its way into how companies operate. Ultimately, I don't think we can escape capitalism. If you were to 'delete capitalism' in a city as an experiment (like an ARPG starting a new season, wipe all bank accounts / corporations and start fresh) I cannot belive we'd see anything other than a reconstruction of the same general capitalist structure, just with different actors and names. It's the method we know for exchanging goods and services, and big players would still rise for providing their goods or services well, and then be able to use that market share to bully smaller players out. In my day-to-day life, I see socialist ideas creeping their way into capitalist structures, and can't help but think that is how things continue going forward. I do not see any revolution happening on a major scale unless something ACTUALLY breaks. People will not be motivated to fix it until then. Yes and often people's perspective is what the media they are consuming is telling them. I think I see this firsthand as well as anyone as someone that has 'dual-citizenship' in California and Florida. People in Florida think if you go to California you'll trip over a mountain of human feces and used needles and people in California think if you go to Florida and you're gay the gay-stapo will round you up into the paddy wagons to take to prison. I've had LGBT friends in California unironically ask me if I think it's safe for them to vacation in Florida. Miami? Hell no, you're better off going to Uganda is what I told them, naturally. I love that you simultaneously mock people for believing what media has told them AND just straight lie to your misled friends asking arguably legitimate questions. I can relate, though I will usually follow with an "I'm fucking with you. They might be homophobes but not the "form a lynch mob" sense, just the usual "think less of you from a safe distance" sense."
Don’t worry, my sarcasm picks up better in real life than it does on here. If you think this is an arguably legitimate question then it sounds like you’ve bought into the negative trope about Florida as much as they have.
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On February 15 2024 12:41 BlackJack wrote:Show nested quote +On February 15 2024 11:23 Fleetfeet wrote:On February 15 2024 09:10 BlackJack wrote:On February 15 2024 07:27 Fleetfeet wrote:On February 15 2024 05:18 BlackJack wrote:On February 14 2024 17:17 WombaT wrote:On February 14 2024 15:49 Fleetfeet wrote:
I do love the theory that GH is some masked V-for-vendetta character frustratedly posting on the internet waiting for people to DM him saying "You know what, you're right, we SHOULD blow up the parliament building. How do we do that?". That's a funny image to me, and kinda sorta connected to reality? Not that I think GH wants to blow something up, but that V lives in a dystopian world where the a fascist authoritarian government has taken over and the idea of watching V have conversations on MSN messenger with people being like "The government is fascist and authoritarian, we need to do something" and people responding with "Nah it's not thaaat bad we can still vote" seems like a good skit.
I think that GH believes the US is broken beyond repair, and most people here don't. Most people believe it is broken, yes, but not beyond repair. Most of the disconnect comes from GH trying different angles to demonstrate that the US is broken beyond repair but people not being willing to accept that. He's listed getting people to accept that it's broken beyond repair as step one towards revolution, and this vote/not vote does feel like it's still just pushing people towards that idea.
(For clarity, I do not think the US is currently fascist and authoritarian.) Haha, the climax of V for Vendetta 2 Electric Boogoloo is just some really intensely shot, 20 minute long fight scene consisting of cutting back and forth between our hero GH and whoever the villain is as they exchange heated posts on TL. Done in the style of every single 90s ‘I’m in.’ hacking scenes. In a more serious but much, much less fun note I must say I share a lot of that fatalism, capitalism is as entrenched as it’s ever been and rather the root of many an issue, even as its flaws are biting pretty hard. Without going into TLDR territory, those flaws are nothing new, but for a pretty sizeable chunk of time ‘a rising tide raises all boats’ was somewhat true. It’s certainly not the case currently, and few parties anywhere, to my knowledge actually have policies, even on paper to deal with these issues, even within a redistributive capitalist framework, never mind the dreaded s word. Unless you have medical issues that your particular healthcare system is fucking you on, you’re an actively persecuted minority or you’re fuck off rich I’d wager that housing prices continuing on a decades-long trajectory of far outstripping both inflation and real wage increases is likely the absolute single most impactful issue of the day for almost everyone. Well, it suits landlords from the individual to the culture capital level I guess, but everyone else. And yet, remarkably few policy pushes here, you might get the odd house building pledge but that’s kind of a band aid as solutions go. There’ll be a few more houses going, it’s not going to meaningfully push prices back down. People may disagree with my assertion, but I’m pretty confident in it. A system is pretty fundamentally broken if it doesn’t even attempt to tackle what (I believe) is probably the single biggest socioeconomic issue of our time, at least in terms of a lived experience and quality of life. The other biggest issue, which is less immediately apparent, nor important for many is of course climate change, which were also doing a pretty shit job at dealing with. If not quite beyond repair, it does somewhat intrigue me as to why America in particular is fucked in an almost unique manner, and has problems unique to it. With the giant caveat that of course there were many, many issues regarding minorities, the US used to be ahead, or at least on par with European countries, Canada etc in quite a few respects. Much of it idealised of course, but it used to be a country many looked at as aspirational, to be envied even. But over the decades it’s sort of drifted on its own, particular trajectory of dysfunction. I’m curious as to why this is, and really can’t put a finger on it. Other countries have huge cultural differences between regions, or even households. Others have flawed political structures, ethnic tensions or any number of other commonalities, but yet the US somehow ends up with a lot of quirks that make it a special idiosyncratic snowflake amongst vaguely comparable countries. Bit of a ramble the last part, but it’s a question that continually exercises me and I’ve spent quite a bit pondering, I’m interested to hear what y’all think on that particular topic. A couple days ago I went into San Francisco and hailed a driverless taxi. A white electric Jaguar i-Pace pulled up with nobody in the car. I got into the back seat and the car drove itself to the restaurant I wanted to go to, found a safe spot to pull over and then let us out. We live in the best times and everything is amazing. People that want to insist that everything is shite and broken beyond repair are living in their own delusions. Are there some issues with wage stagnation, squeezing of the middle class, housing affordability? Sure, there's no such thing as utopia. It's also not true that housing isn't being addressed. For example in California there were 56 housing bills signed into law in 2023 designed to reduce burdensome regulations and permitting processes and increase production. We're also seeing an uptick in union activity with multiple high profile strikes. The UAW won a 25% raise over 4 years which is nothing to sneeze at. Anyway I never understood people that lament about so called "late-stage capitalism" and how everything is terrible and we need a revolution. Globally you can see decades long downward trends in poverty, hunger, infant mortality. A lot of it spurred on by new tech and innovation. The U.S. more than any other country contributes the most to new tech and innovation. Somehow I'm supposed to be sold on the idea that the U.S. is the worst offender in this capitalist nightmare and in dire need of massive reform. No thanks. This is why I don't weigh in on he actual question of whether not the US is shit. From the outside looking in, I can obviously see some issues (Healthcare, inflexible two-party system, gerrymandering etc) but without actually being in the system and feeling how inflexible or shit it actually is, all someone from the outside can do is listen to people on the inside about how conditions actually are.Functionally, I see unchecked capitalism as a problem - it's led to the issues we see between the cost of necessary medicines being exorbitantly more expensive than they should be. However, I do not think overall capitalism is wholly unchecked, and continued change going forward will continue to rein in some of the greater offences, as well as general anti-capitalist sentiment working its way into how companies operate. Ultimately, I don't think we can escape capitalism. If you were to 'delete capitalism' in a city as an experiment (like an ARPG starting a new season, wipe all bank accounts / corporations and start fresh) I cannot belive we'd see anything other than a reconstruction of the same general capitalist structure, just with different actors and names. It's the method we know for exchanging goods and services, and big players would still rise for providing their goods or services well, and then be able to use that market share to bully smaller players out. In my day-to-day life, I see socialist ideas creeping their way into capitalist structures, and can't help but think that is how things continue going forward. I do not see any revolution happening on a major scale unless something ACTUALLY breaks. People will not be motivated to fix it until then. Yes and often people's perspective is what the media they are consuming is telling them. I think I see this firsthand as well as anyone as someone that has 'dual-citizenship' in California and Florida. People in Florida think if you go to California you'll trip over a mountain of human feces and used needles and people in California think if you go to Florida and you're gay the gay-stapo will round you up into the paddy wagons to take to prison. I've had LGBT friends in California unironically ask me if I think it's safe for them to vacation in Florida. Miami? Hell no, you're better off going to Uganda is what I told them, naturally. I love that you simultaneously mock people for believing what media has told them AND just straight lie to your misled friends asking arguably legitimate questions. I can relate, though I will usually follow with an "I'm fucking with you. They might be homophobes but not the "form a lynch mob" sense, just the usual "think less of you from a safe distance" sense." Don’t worry, my sarcasm picks up better in real life than it does on here. If you think this is an arguably legitimate question then it sounds like you’ve bought into the negative trope about Florida as much as they have.
It's a question borne of ignorance and thereby arguably a legitimate question. It would be an illegitimate question if they knew Florida was a-okay and they were just fucking with you. Presuming they were not, I'd argue it was a legitimate question. Borne of ignorance, but a legitimate question.
It's presumptive of you to think I know much of anything about Florida, or have much of an opinion on it. It's real far away from me. I hear they get hurricanes sometimes, that's gotta be wild.
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Northern Ireland25396 Posts
On February 15 2024 08:45 BlackJack wrote:Show nested quote +On February 15 2024 06:48 WombaT wrote:On February 15 2024 05:18 BlackJack wrote:On February 14 2024 17:17 WombaT wrote:On February 14 2024 15:49 Fleetfeet wrote:
I do love the theory that GH is some masked V-for-vendetta character frustratedly posting on the internet waiting for people to DM him saying "You know what, you're right, we SHOULD blow up the parliament building. How do we do that?". That's a funny image to me, and kinda sorta connected to reality? Not that I think GH wants to blow something up, but that V lives in a dystopian world where the a fascist authoritarian government has taken over and the idea of watching V have conversations on MSN messenger with people being like "The government is fascist and authoritarian, we need to do something" and people responding with "Nah it's not thaaat bad we can still vote" seems like a good skit.
I think that GH believes the US is broken beyond repair, and most people here don't. Most people believe it is broken, yes, but not beyond repair. Most of the disconnect comes from GH trying different angles to demonstrate that the US is broken beyond repair but people not being willing to accept that. He's listed getting people to accept that it's broken beyond repair as step one towards revolution, and this vote/not vote does feel like it's still just pushing people towards that idea.
(For clarity, I do not think the US is currently fascist and authoritarian.) Haha, the climax of V for Vendetta 2 Electric Boogoloo is just some really intensely shot, 20 minute long fight scene consisting of cutting back and forth between our hero GH and whoever the villain is as they exchange heated posts on TL. Done in the style of every single 90s ‘I’m in.’ hacking scenes. In a more serious but much, much less fun note I must say I share a lot of that fatalism, capitalism is as entrenched as it’s ever been and rather the root of many an issue, even as its flaws are biting pretty hard. Without going into TLDR territory, those flaws are nothing new, but for a pretty sizeable chunk of time ‘a rising tide raises all boats’ was somewhat true. It’s certainly not the case currently, and few parties anywhere, to my knowledge actually have policies, even on paper to deal with these issues, even within a redistributive capitalist framework, never mind the dreaded s word. Unless you have medical issues that your particular healthcare system is fucking you on, you’re an actively persecuted minority or you’re fuck off rich I’d wager that housing prices continuing on a decades-long trajectory of far outstripping both inflation and real wage increases is likely the absolute single most impactful issue of the day for almost everyone. Well, it suits landlords from the individual to the culture capital level I guess, but everyone else. And yet, remarkably few policy pushes here, you might get the odd house building pledge but that’s kind of a band aid as solutions go. There’ll be a few more houses going, it’s not going to meaningfully push prices back down. People may disagree with my assertion, but I’m pretty confident in it. A system is pretty fundamentally broken if it doesn’t even attempt to tackle what (I believe) is probably the single biggest socioeconomic issue of our time, at least in terms of a lived experience and quality of life. The other biggest issue, which is less immediately apparent, nor important for many is of course climate change, which were also doing a pretty shit job at dealing with. If not quite beyond repair, it does somewhat intrigue me as to why America in particular is fucked in an almost unique manner, and has problems unique to it. With the giant caveat that of course there were many, many issues regarding minorities, the US used to be ahead, or at least on par with European countries, Canada etc in quite a few respects. Much of it idealised of course, but it used to be a country many looked at as aspirational, to be envied even. But over the decades it’s sort of drifted on its own, particular trajectory of dysfunction. I’m curious as to why this is, and really can’t put a finger on it. Other countries have huge cultural differences between regions, or even households. Others have flawed political structures, ethnic tensions or any number of other commonalities, but yet the US somehow ends up with a lot of quirks that make it a special idiosyncratic snowflake amongst vaguely comparable countries. Bit of a ramble the last part, but it’s a question that continually exercises me and I’ve spent quite a bit pondering, I’m interested to hear what y’all think on that particular topic. A couple days ago I went into San Francisco and hailed a driverless taxi. A white electric Jaguar i-Pace pulled up with nobody in the car. I got into the back seat and the car drove itself to the restaurant I wanted to go to, found a safe spot to pull over and then let us out. We live in the best times and everything is amazing. People that want to insist that everything is shite and broken beyond repair are living in their own delusions. Are there some issues with wage stagnation, squeezing of the middle class, housing affordability? Sure, there's no such thing as utopia. It's also not true that housing isn't being addressed. For example in California there were 56 housing bills signed into law in 2023 designed to reduce burdensome regulations and permitting processes and increase production. We're also seeing an uptick in union activity with multiple high profile strikes. The UAW won a 25% raise over 4 years which is nothing to sneeze at. Anyway I never understood people that lament about so called "late-stage capitalism" and how everything is terrible and we need a revolution. Globally you can see decades long downward trends in poverty, hunger, infant mortality. A lot of it spurred on by new tech and innovation. The U.S. more than any other country contributes the most to new tech and innovation. Somehow I'm supposed to be sold on the idea that the U.S. is the worst offender in this capitalist nightmare and in dire need of massive reform. No thanks. I’d wager most people would happily trade sauntering over to a restaurant in a driverless car for not being economically crippled by rent. And I don’t think these measures ultimately deal with root causes of the problem On the flipside I do agree that the ‘everything is shit’ lens is way off too. Be it technological or social/cultural there’s been a hell of a lot of advancement in even my own lifetime, and it’s important to keep some sense of perspective. It can be simultaneously true that capitalism is having globally beneficial effects, while in countries where they’re more developed that that gradually stagnates, or indeed reverses, hence the ‘late stage’ part. The distribution element is less of a pragmatically pertinent factor when you’re getting a slice of a much bigger, and quickly growing pie. As I alluded to in my prior post. The US probably experienced an extraordinary standard of living post WW2 as the one modern superpower to escape relatively unharmed. It's easy to see a slight pullback on that standard of living and proclaim it some doom and gloom late stage capitalism hellscape. It's all a bit ridiculous. In California compensation for public employees is all public record and there is a website that compiles the salaries for every public employee. For example here's San Francisco - and I sorted the list by # of employees so it shows the most common jobs. The "average total pay" for some of the most common jobs, nurse/police officer/firefighter, is all around $200,000 a year. If you click the job titles you will see some of the overtime fiends make $400-500k a year. I'm not trying to say there hasn't been any wage stagnation but this isn't exactly a pittance either. It's also probably not enough to buy an average home in San Francisco, but eventually mortgage rates should come back down and make home buying easier.
Will they? Even temporary dips caused by a global economic crisis like 2008 are swallowed up by a general direction of travel that goes back decades.
This isn’t a particular US-centric problem, it’s pretty universal in any locale I’ve got some familiarity with. Belfast is somewhat affordable relatively, partly because Northern Ireland is the basket case of the UK. Dublin? For all of Ireland’s nominally high GDP per capita housing is preposterously expensive. My other half’s friend group and siblings you’ve still got most people living with parents, or multiple roommates, of a group in their late 20s thru mid 30s, with prestigious/well-remunerated professionals being the majority.
While it has knock-on impacts I am really discussing this particular issue in isolation. If we just wave a magic wand and strip housing back to prices inflation equivalent to those of a few decades ago, many of the other advancements and QoL improvements we enjoy really come into focus. Imagine having all this fancy smancy technology, and also having any full-time worker be able to aspire to own a house. It’s not some crazy, never-achieved theorycrafting it was something that was viable just a generation or two ago.
Outside of the perpetually negative, of which, (surprisingly) I am not one, a lot of this doom and gloom doesn’t come from nowhere.
While not exactly Mr Capitalism, there are problems it solves very well indeed, hence me segmenting this off and conceding that yes, it’s certainly not all been bad these few decades I’ve been alive. But it’s not particularly well-equipped to deal with every problem, and housing ticks both the ‘basically require this commodity’ and ‘meaningful competition isn’t really possible’ boxes
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The housing market is a textbook case of government failure. Supply is artificially restricted by excessive zoning laws and at the same time demand is subsided via things like rent control and tax breaks for home ownership. Markets can certainly fail but the housing market is not a good example.
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On February 15 2024 16:25 RvB wrote:
The housing market is a textbook case of government failure. Supply is artificially restricted by excessive zoning laws and at the same time demand is subsided via things like rent control and tax breaks for home ownership. Markets can certainly fail but the housing market is not a good example.
Zoning laws are "artificial restrictions"? Do you agree that space on land is a limited resource? If so, then it is a natural restriction. Zoning just defines other uses for land as well, and restricts the land available for housing further, but if we let urban sprawl all over Central Park, Yellowstone, prime farmland or other natural resources better used for other purposes we'd still have a housing crisis. There's plenty of land *currently* available for building houses under the current zoning laws. You could build apartment blocks instead of single story homes. You could revitalize deteriorating areas (of which the US has plenty). You could use housing zones for housing rather than each house having a private swimming pool. You could restrict second home ownership rules. But while zoning is often arbitrary and incoherent, the mere existence of zoning rules is not an artificial limitation, it's simply a consequence of a very natural limitation.
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Northern Ireland25396 Posts
On February 15 2024 16:34 Acrofales wrote:Show nested quote +On February 15 2024 16:25 RvB wrote:
The housing market is a textbook case of government failure. Supply is artificially restricted by excessive zoning laws and at the same time demand is subsided via things like rent control and tax breaks for home ownership. Markets can certainly fail but the housing market is not a good example. Zoning laws are "artificial restrictions"? Do you agree that space on land is a limited resource? If so, then it is a natural restriction. Zoning just defines other uses for land as well, and restricts the land available for housing further, but if we let urban sprawl all over Central Park, Yellowstone, prime farmland or other natural resources better used for other purposes we'd still have a housing crisis. There's plenty of land *currently* available for building houses under the current zoning laws. You could build apartment blocks instead of single story homes. You could revitalize deteriorating areas (of which the US has plenty). You could use housing zones for housing rather than each house having a private swimming pool. You could restrict second home ownership rules. But while zoning is often arbitrary and incoherent, the mere existence of zoning rules is not an artificial limitation, it's simply a consequence of a very natural limitation.
Aye I usually point to rail as one such area afflicted with similar issues. Sure we could have competition with parallel additional rail networks, but space is a factor. So you end up with private companies competing using the same critical infrastructure, and if you’re going to do that you may as well just have the state run it at cost, or even subsidised.
In other areas without certain innate limitations then sure free enterprise can keep prices reasonable by competing, and drive genuine life-improving innovation.
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On February 15 2024 12:41 BlackJack wrote:Show nested quote +On February 15 2024 11:23 Fleetfeet wrote:On February 15 2024 09:10 BlackJack wrote:On February 15 2024 07:27 Fleetfeet wrote:On February 15 2024 05:18 BlackJack wrote:On February 14 2024 17:17 WombaT wrote:On February 14 2024 15:49 Fleetfeet wrote:
I do love the theory that GH is some masked V-for-vendetta character frustratedly posting on the internet waiting for people to DM him saying "You know what, you're right, we SHOULD blow up the parliament building. How do we do that?". That's a funny image to me, and kinda sorta connected to reality? Not that I think GH wants to blow something up, but that V lives in a dystopian world where the a fascist authoritarian government has taken over and the idea of watching V have conversations on MSN messenger with people being like "The government is fascist and authoritarian, we need to do something" and people responding with "Nah it's not thaaat bad we can still vote" seems like a good skit.
I think that GH believes the US is broken beyond repair, and most people here don't. Most people believe it is broken, yes, but not beyond repair. Most of the disconnect comes from GH trying different angles to demonstrate that the US is broken beyond repair but people not being willing to accept that. He's listed getting people to accept that it's broken beyond repair as step one towards revolution, and this vote/not vote does feel like it's still just pushing people towards that idea.
(For clarity, I do not think the US is currently fascist and authoritarian.) Haha, the climax of V for Vendetta 2 Electric Boogoloo is just some really intensely shot, 20 minute long fight scene consisting of cutting back and forth between our hero GH and whoever the villain is as they exchange heated posts on TL. Done in the style of every single 90s ‘I’m in.’ hacking scenes. In a more serious but much, much less fun note I must say I share a lot of that fatalism, capitalism is as entrenched as it’s ever been and rather the root of many an issue, even as its flaws are biting pretty hard. Without going into TLDR territory, those flaws are nothing new, but for a pretty sizeable chunk of time ‘a rising tide raises all boats’ was somewhat true. It’s certainly not the case currently, and few parties anywhere, to my knowledge actually have policies, even on paper to deal with these issues, even within a redistributive capitalist framework, never mind the dreaded s word. Unless you have medical issues that your particular healthcare system is fucking you on, you’re an actively persecuted minority or you’re fuck off rich I’d wager that housing prices continuing on a decades-long trajectory of far outstripping both inflation and real wage increases is likely the absolute single most impactful issue of the day for almost everyone. Well, it suits landlords from the individual to the culture capital level I guess, but everyone else. And yet, remarkably few policy pushes here, you might get the odd house building pledge but that’s kind of a band aid as solutions go. There’ll be a few more houses going, it’s not going to meaningfully push prices back down. People may disagree with my assertion, but I’m pretty confident in it. A system is pretty fundamentally broken if it doesn’t even attempt to tackle what (I believe) is probably the single biggest socioeconomic issue of our time, at least in terms of a lived experience and quality of life. The other biggest issue, which is less immediately apparent, nor important for many is of course climate change, which were also doing a pretty shit job at dealing with. If not quite beyond repair, it does somewhat intrigue me as to why America in particular is fucked in an almost unique manner, and has problems unique to it. With the giant caveat that of course there were many, many issues regarding minorities, the US used to be ahead, or at least on par with European countries, Canada etc in quite a few respects. Much of it idealised of course, but it used to be a country many looked at as aspirational, to be envied even. But over the decades it’s sort of drifted on its own, particular trajectory of dysfunction. I’m curious as to why this is, and really can’t put a finger on it. Other countries have huge cultural differences between regions, or even households. Others have flawed political structures, ethnic tensions or any number of other commonalities, but yet the US somehow ends up with a lot of quirks that make it a special idiosyncratic snowflake amongst vaguely comparable countries. Bit of a ramble the last part, but it’s a question that continually exercises me and I’ve spent quite a bit pondering, I’m interested to hear what y’all think on that particular topic. A couple days ago I went into San Francisco and hailed a driverless taxi. A white electric Jaguar i-Pace pulled up with nobody in the car. I got into the back seat and the car drove itself to the restaurant I wanted to go to, found a safe spot to pull over and then let us out. We live in the best times and everything is amazing. People that want to insist that everything is shite and broken beyond repair are living in their own delusions. Are there some issues with wage stagnation, squeezing of the middle class, housing affordability? Sure, there's no such thing as utopia. It's also not true that housing isn't being addressed. For example in California there were 56 housing bills signed into law in 2023 designed to reduce burdensome regulations and permitting processes and increase production. We're also seeing an uptick in union activity with multiple high profile strikes. The UAW won a 25% raise over 4 years which is nothing to sneeze at. Anyway I never understood people that lament about so called "late-stage capitalism" and how everything is terrible and we need a revolution. Globally you can see decades long downward trends in poverty, hunger, infant mortality. A lot of it spurred on by new tech and innovation. The U.S. more than any other country contributes the most to new tech and innovation. Somehow I'm supposed to be sold on the idea that the U.S. is the worst offender in this capitalist nightmare and in dire need of massive reform. No thanks. This is why I don't weigh in on he actual question of whether not the US is shit. From the outside looking in, I can obviously see some issues (Healthcare, inflexible two-party system, gerrymandering etc) but without actually being in the system and feeling how inflexible or shit it actually is, all someone from the outside can do is listen to people on the inside about how conditions actually are.Functionally, I see unchecked capitalism as a problem - it's led to the issues we see between the cost of necessary medicines being exorbitantly more expensive than they should be. However, I do not think overall capitalism is wholly unchecked, and continued change going forward will continue to rein in some of the greater offences, as well as general anti-capitalist sentiment working its way into how companies operate. Ultimately, I don't think we can escape capitalism. If you were to 'delete capitalism' in a city as an experiment (like an ARPG starting a new season, wipe all bank accounts / corporations and start fresh) I cannot belive we'd see anything other than a reconstruction of the same general capitalist structure, just with different actors and names. It's the method we know for exchanging goods and services, and big players would still rise for providing their goods or services well, and then be able to use that market share to bully smaller players out. In my day-to-day life, I see socialist ideas creeping their way into capitalist structures, and can't help but think that is how things continue going forward. I do not see any revolution happening on a major scale unless something ACTUALLY breaks. People will not be motivated to fix it until then. Yes and often people's perspective is what the media they are consuming is telling them. I think I see this firsthand as well as anyone as someone that has 'dual-citizenship' in California and Florida. People in Florida think if you go to California you'll trip over a mountain of human feces and used needles and people in California think if you go to Florida and you're gay the gay-stapo will round you up into the paddy wagons to take to prison. I've had LGBT friends in California unironically ask me if I think it's safe for them to vacation in Florida. Miami? Hell no, you're better off going to Uganda is what I told them, naturally. I love that you simultaneously mock people for believing what media has told them AND just straight lie to your misled friends asking arguably legitimate questions. I can relate, though I will usually follow with an "I'm fucking with you. They might be homophobes but not the "form a lynch mob" sense, just the usual "think less of you from a safe distance" sense." Don’t worry, my sarcasm picks up better in real life than it does on here. If you think this is an arguably legitimate question then it sounds like you’ve bought into the negative trope about Florida as much as they have.
If Governor DeSantis's anti-LGBTQ+, anti-DEI, anti-woke rhetoric is taken seriously;
If his Florida election support and approval ratings are considered;
If the Orlando gay nightclub mass shooting (Pulse) is remembered;
If advocacy groups are cautioning the LGBTQ+ community about coming to Florida + Show Spoiler +
...Then I'm not surprised that people might be concerned.
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On February 15 2024 18:20 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:Show nested quote +On February 15 2024 12:41 BlackJack wrote:On February 15 2024 11:23 Fleetfeet wrote:On February 15 2024 09:10 BlackJack wrote:On February 15 2024 07:27 Fleetfeet wrote:On February 15 2024 05:18 BlackJack wrote:On February 14 2024 17:17 WombaT wrote:On February 14 2024 15:49 Fleetfeet wrote:
I do love the theory that GH is some masked V-for-vendetta character frustratedly posting on the internet waiting for people to DM him saying "You know what, you're right, we SHOULD blow up the parliament building. How do we do that?". That's a funny image to me, and kinda sorta connected to reality? Not that I think GH wants to blow something up, but that V lives in a dystopian world where the a fascist authoritarian government has taken over and the idea of watching V have conversations on MSN messenger with people being like "The government is fascist and authoritarian, we need to do something" and people responding with "Nah it's not thaaat bad we can still vote" seems like a good skit.
I think that GH believes the US is broken beyond repair, and most people here don't. Most people believe it is broken, yes, but not beyond repair. Most of the disconnect comes from GH trying different angles to demonstrate that the US is broken beyond repair but people not being willing to accept that. He's listed getting people to accept that it's broken beyond repair as step one towards revolution, and this vote/not vote does feel like it's still just pushing people towards that idea.
(For clarity, I do not think the US is currently fascist and authoritarian.) Haha, the climax of V for Vendetta 2 Electric Boogoloo is just some really intensely shot, 20 minute long fight scene consisting of cutting back and forth between our hero GH and whoever the villain is as they exchange heated posts on TL. Done in the style of every single 90s ‘I’m in.’ hacking scenes. In a more serious but much, much less fun note I must say I share a lot of that fatalism, capitalism is as entrenched as it’s ever been and rather the root of many an issue, even as its flaws are biting pretty hard. Without going into TLDR territory, those flaws are nothing new, but for a pretty sizeable chunk of time ‘a rising tide raises all boats’ was somewhat true. It’s certainly not the case currently, and few parties anywhere, to my knowledge actually have policies, even on paper to deal with these issues, even within a redistributive capitalist framework, never mind the dreaded s word. Unless you have medical issues that your particular healthcare system is fucking you on, you’re an actively persecuted minority or you’re fuck off rich I’d wager that housing prices continuing on a decades-long trajectory of far outstripping both inflation and real wage increases is likely the absolute single most impactful issue of the day for almost everyone. Well, it suits landlords from the individual to the culture capital level I guess, but everyone else. And yet, remarkably few policy pushes here, you might get the odd house building pledge but that’s kind of a band aid as solutions go. There’ll be a few more houses going, it’s not going to meaningfully push prices back down. People may disagree with my assertion, but I’m pretty confident in it. A system is pretty fundamentally broken if it doesn’t even attempt to tackle what (I believe) is probably the single biggest socioeconomic issue of our time, at least in terms of a lived experience and quality of life. The other biggest issue, which is less immediately apparent, nor important for many is of course climate change, which were also doing a pretty shit job at dealing with. If not quite beyond repair, it does somewhat intrigue me as to why America in particular is fucked in an almost unique manner, and has problems unique to it. With the giant caveat that of course there were many, many issues regarding minorities, the US used to be ahead, or at least on par with European countries, Canada etc in quite a few respects. Much of it idealised of course, but it used to be a country many looked at as aspirational, to be envied even. But over the decades it’s sort of drifted on its own, particular trajectory of dysfunction. I’m curious as to why this is, and really can’t put a finger on it. Other countries have huge cultural differences between regions, or even households. Others have flawed political structures, ethnic tensions or any number of other commonalities, but yet the US somehow ends up with a lot of quirks that make it a special idiosyncratic snowflake amongst vaguely comparable countries. Bit of a ramble the last part, but it’s a question that continually exercises me and I’ve spent quite a bit pondering, I’m interested to hear what y’all think on that particular topic. A couple days ago I went into San Francisco and hailed a driverless taxi. A white electric Jaguar i-Pace pulled up with nobody in the car. I got into the back seat and the car drove itself to the restaurant I wanted to go to, found a safe spot to pull over and then let us out. We live in the best times and everything is amazing. People that want to insist that everything is shite and broken beyond repair are living in their own delusions. Are there some issues with wage stagnation, squeezing of the middle class, housing affordability? Sure, there's no such thing as utopia. It's also not true that housing isn't being addressed. For example in California there were 56 housing bills signed into law in 2023 designed to reduce burdensome regulations and permitting processes and increase production. We're also seeing an uptick in union activity with multiple high profile strikes. The UAW won a 25% raise over 4 years which is nothing to sneeze at. Anyway I never understood people that lament about so called "late-stage capitalism" and how everything is terrible and we need a revolution. Globally you can see decades long downward trends in poverty, hunger, infant mortality. A lot of it spurred on by new tech and innovation. The U.S. more than any other country contributes the most to new tech and innovation. Somehow I'm supposed to be sold on the idea that the U.S. is the worst offender in this capitalist nightmare and in dire need of massive reform. No thanks. This is why I don't weigh in on he actual question of whether not the US is shit. From the outside looking in, I can obviously see some issues (Healthcare, inflexible two-party system, gerrymandering etc) but without actually being in the system and feeling how inflexible or shit it actually is, all someone from the outside can do is listen to people on the inside about how conditions actually are.Functionally, I see unchecked capitalism as a problem - it's led to the issues we see between the cost of necessary medicines being exorbitantly more expensive than they should be. However, I do not think overall capitalism is wholly unchecked, and continued change going forward will continue to rein in some of the greater offences, as well as general anti-capitalist sentiment working its way into how companies operate. Ultimately, I don't think we can escape capitalism. If you were to 'delete capitalism' in a city as an experiment (like an ARPG starting a new season, wipe all bank accounts / corporations and start fresh) I cannot belive we'd see anything other than a reconstruction of the same general capitalist structure, just with different actors and names. It's the method we know for exchanging goods and services, and big players would still rise for providing their goods or services well, and then be able to use that market share to bully smaller players out. In my day-to-day life, I see socialist ideas creeping their way into capitalist structures, and can't help but think that is how things continue going forward. I do not see any revolution happening on a major scale unless something ACTUALLY breaks. People will not be motivated to fix it until then. Yes and often people's perspective is what the media they are consuming is telling them. I think I see this firsthand as well as anyone as someone that has 'dual-citizenship' in California and Florida. People in Florida think if you go to California you'll trip over a mountain of human feces and used needles and people in California think if you go to Florida and you're gay the gay-stapo will round you up into the paddy wagons to take to prison. I've had LGBT friends in California unironically ask me if I think it's safe for them to vacation in Florida. Miami? Hell no, you're better off going to Uganda is what I told them, naturally. I love that you simultaneously mock people for believing what media has told them AND just straight lie to your misled friends asking arguably legitimate questions. I can relate, though I will usually follow with an "I'm fucking with you. They might be homophobes but not the "form a lynch mob" sense, just the usual "think less of you from a safe distance" sense." Don’t worry, my sarcasm picks up better in real life than it does on here. If you think this is an arguably legitimate question then it sounds like you’ve bought into the negative trope about Florida as much as they have. If Governor DeSantis's anti-LGBTQ+, anti-DEI, anti-woke rhetoric is taken seriously; If his Florida election support and approval ratings are considered; If the Orlando gay nightclub mass shooting (Pulse) is remembered; If advocacy groups are cautioning the LGBTQ+ community about coming to Florida + Show Spoiler +...Then I'm not surprised that people might be concerned.
I should clarify, I don't find it surprising either. The last few years should tell us that all kinds of people have irrational fears about all kinds of things when they get sucked into a media echo chamber that loves to sensationalize and terrify people for ratings and profit.
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On February 15 2024 08:45 BlackJack wrote:Show nested quote +On February 15 2024 06:48 WombaT wrote:On February 15 2024 05:18 BlackJack wrote:On February 14 2024 17:17 WombaT wrote:On February 14 2024 15:49 Fleetfeet wrote:
I do love the theory that GH is some masked V-for-vendetta character frustratedly posting on the internet waiting for people to DM him saying "You know what, you're right, we SHOULD blow up the parliament building. How do we do that?". That's a funny image to me, and kinda sorta connected to reality? Not that I think GH wants to blow something up, but that V lives in a dystopian world where the a fascist authoritarian government has taken over and the idea of watching V have conversations on MSN messenger with people being like "The government is fascist and authoritarian, we need to do something" and people responding with "Nah it's not thaaat bad we can still vote" seems like a good skit.
I think that GH believes the US is broken beyond repair, and most people here don't. Most people believe it is broken, yes, but not beyond repair. Most of the disconnect comes from GH trying different angles to demonstrate that the US is broken beyond repair but people not being willing to accept that. He's listed getting people to accept that it's broken beyond repair as step one towards revolution, and this vote/not vote does feel like it's still just pushing people towards that idea.
(For clarity, I do not think the US is currently fascist and authoritarian.) Haha, the climax of V for Vendetta 2 Electric Boogoloo is just some really intensely shot, 20 minute long fight scene consisting of cutting back and forth between our hero GH and whoever the villain is as they exchange heated posts on TL. Done in the style of every single 90s ‘I’m in.’ hacking scenes. In a more serious but much, much less fun note I must say I share a lot of that fatalism, capitalism is as entrenched as it’s ever been and rather the root of many an issue, even as its flaws are biting pretty hard. Without going into TLDR territory, those flaws are nothing new, but for a pretty sizeable chunk of time ‘a rising tide raises all boats’ was somewhat true. It’s certainly not the case currently, and few parties anywhere, to my knowledge actually have policies, even on paper to deal with these issues, even within a redistributive capitalist framework, never mind the dreaded s word. Unless you have medical issues that your particular healthcare system is fucking you on, you’re an actively persecuted minority or you’re fuck off rich I’d wager that housing prices continuing on a decades-long trajectory of far outstripping both inflation and real wage increases is likely the absolute single most impactful issue of the day for almost everyone. Well, it suits landlords from the individual to the culture capital level I guess, but everyone else. And yet, remarkably few policy pushes here, you might get the odd house building pledge but that’s kind of a band aid as solutions go. There’ll be a few more houses going, it’s not going to meaningfully push prices back down. People may disagree with my assertion, but I’m pretty confident in it. A system is pretty fundamentally broken if it doesn’t even attempt to tackle what (I believe) is probably the single biggest socioeconomic issue of our time, at least in terms of a lived experience and quality of life. The other biggest issue, which is less immediately apparent, nor important for many is of course climate change, which were also doing a pretty shit job at dealing with. If not quite beyond repair, it does somewhat intrigue me as to why America in particular is fucked in an almost unique manner, and has problems unique to it. With the giant caveat that of course there were many, many issues regarding minorities, the US used to be ahead, or at least on par with European countries, Canada etc in quite a few respects. Much of it idealised of course, but it used to be a country many looked at as aspirational, to be envied even. But over the decades it’s sort of drifted on its own, particular trajectory of dysfunction. I’m curious as to why this is, and really can’t put a finger on it. Other countries have huge cultural differences between regions, or even households. Others have flawed political structures, ethnic tensions or any number of other commonalities, but yet the US somehow ends up with a lot of quirks that make it a special idiosyncratic snowflake amongst vaguely comparable countries. Bit of a ramble the last part, but it’s a question that continually exercises me and I’ve spent quite a bit pondering, I’m interested to hear what y’all think on that particular topic. A couple days ago I went into San Francisco and hailed a driverless taxi. A white electric Jaguar i-Pace pulled up with nobody in the car. I got into the back seat and the car drove itself to the restaurant I wanted to go to, found a safe spot to pull over and then let us out. We live in the best times and everything is amazing. People that want to insist that everything is shite and broken beyond repair are living in their own delusions. Are there some issues with wage stagnation, squeezing of the middle class, housing affordability? Sure, there's no such thing as utopia. It's also not true that housing isn't being addressed. For example in California there were 56 housing bills signed into law in 2023 designed to reduce burdensome regulations and permitting processes and increase production. We're also seeing an uptick in union activity with multiple high profile strikes. The UAW won a 25% raise over 4 years which is nothing to sneeze at. Anyway I never understood people that lament about so called "late-stage capitalism" and how everything is terrible and we need a revolution. Globally you can see decades long downward trends in poverty, hunger, infant mortality. A lot of it spurred on by new tech and innovation. The U.S. more than any other country contributes the most to new tech and innovation. Somehow I'm supposed to be sold on the idea that the U.S. is the worst offender in this capitalist nightmare and in dire need of massive reform. No thanks. I’d wager most people would happily trade sauntering over to a restaurant in a driverless car for not being economically crippled by rent. And I don’t think these measures ultimately deal with root causes of the problem On the flipside I do agree that the ‘everything is shit’ lens is way off too. Be it technological or social/cultural there’s been a hell of a lot of advancement in even my own lifetime, and it’s important to keep some sense of perspective. It can be simultaneously true that capitalism is having globally beneficial effects, while in countries where they’re more developed that that gradually stagnates, or indeed reverses, hence the ‘late stage’ part. The distribution element is less of a pragmatically pertinent factor when you’re getting a slice of a much bigger, and quickly growing pie. As I alluded to in my prior post. The US probably experienced an extraordinary standard of living post WW2 as the one modern superpower to escape relatively unharmed. It's easy to see a slight pullback on that standard of living and proclaim it some doom and gloom late stage capitalism hellscape. It's all a bit ridiculous. In California compensation for public employees is all public record and there is a website that compiles the salaries for every public employee. For example here's San Francisco - and I sorted the list by # of employees so it shows the most common jobs. The "average total pay" for some of the most common jobs, nurse/police officer/firefighter, is all around $200,000 a year. If you click the job titles you will see some of the overtime fiends make $400-500k a year. I'm not trying to say there hasn't been any wage stagnation but this isn't exactly a pittance either. It's also probably not enough to buy an average home in San Francisco, but eventually mortgage rates should come back down and make home buying easier. I love how your sinking your own argument by pointing at how big the number is and how great that must be, and then immediately follow it by telling that its not enough to actually buy a home in the area.
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On February 15 2024 18:32 BlackJack wrote:Show nested quote +On February 15 2024 18:20 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On February 15 2024 12:41 BlackJack wrote:On February 15 2024 11:23 Fleetfeet wrote:On February 15 2024 09:10 BlackJack wrote:On February 15 2024 07:27 Fleetfeet wrote:On February 15 2024 05:18 BlackJack wrote:On February 14 2024 17:17 WombaT wrote:On February 14 2024 15:49 Fleetfeet wrote:
I do love the theory that GH is some masked V-for-vendetta character frustratedly posting on the internet waiting for people to DM him saying "You know what, you're right, we SHOULD blow up the parliament building. How do we do that?". That's a funny image to me, and kinda sorta connected to reality? Not that I think GH wants to blow something up, but that V lives in a dystopian world where the a fascist authoritarian government has taken over and the idea of watching V have conversations on MSN messenger with people being like "The government is fascist and authoritarian, we need to do something" and people responding with "Nah it's not thaaat bad we can still vote" seems like a good skit.
I think that GH believes the US is broken beyond repair, and most people here don't. Most people believe it is broken, yes, but not beyond repair. Most of the disconnect comes from GH trying different angles to demonstrate that the US is broken beyond repair but people not being willing to accept that. He's listed getting people to accept that it's broken beyond repair as step one towards revolution, and this vote/not vote does feel like it's still just pushing people towards that idea.
(For clarity, I do not think the US is currently fascist and authoritarian.) Haha, the climax of V for Vendetta 2 Electric Boogoloo is just some really intensely shot, 20 minute long fight scene consisting of cutting back and forth between our hero GH and whoever the villain is as they exchange heated posts on TL. Done in the style of every single 90s ‘I’m in.’ hacking scenes. In a more serious but much, much less fun note I must say I share a lot of that fatalism, capitalism is as entrenched as it’s ever been and rather the root of many an issue, even as its flaws are biting pretty hard. Without going into TLDR territory, those flaws are nothing new, but for a pretty sizeable chunk of time ‘a rising tide raises all boats’ was somewhat true. It’s certainly not the case currently, and few parties anywhere, to my knowledge actually have policies, even on paper to deal with these issues, even within a redistributive capitalist framework, never mind the dreaded s word. Unless you have medical issues that your particular healthcare system is fucking you on, you’re an actively persecuted minority or you’re fuck off rich I’d wager that housing prices continuing on a decades-long trajectory of far outstripping both inflation and real wage increases is likely the absolute single most impactful issue of the day for almost everyone. Well, it suits landlords from the individual to the culture capital level I guess, but everyone else. And yet, remarkably few policy pushes here, you might get the odd house building pledge but that’s kind of a band aid as solutions go. There’ll be a few more houses going, it’s not going to meaningfully push prices back down. People may disagree with my assertion, but I’m pretty confident in it. A system is pretty fundamentally broken if it doesn’t even attempt to tackle what (I believe) is probably the single biggest socioeconomic issue of our time, at least in terms of a lived experience and quality of life. The other biggest issue, which is less immediately apparent, nor important for many is of course climate change, which were also doing a pretty shit job at dealing with. If not quite beyond repair, it does somewhat intrigue me as to why America in particular is fucked in an almost unique manner, and has problems unique to it. With the giant caveat that of course there were many, many issues regarding minorities, the US used to be ahead, or at least on par with European countries, Canada etc in quite a few respects. Much of it idealised of course, but it used to be a country many looked at as aspirational, to be envied even. But over the decades it’s sort of drifted on its own, particular trajectory of dysfunction. I’m curious as to why this is, and really can’t put a finger on it. Other countries have huge cultural differences between regions, or even households. Others have flawed political structures, ethnic tensions or any number of other commonalities, but yet the US somehow ends up with a lot of quirks that make it a special idiosyncratic snowflake amongst vaguely comparable countries. Bit of a ramble the last part, but it’s a question that continually exercises me and I’ve spent quite a bit pondering, I’m interested to hear what y’all think on that particular topic. A couple days ago I went into San Francisco and hailed a driverless taxi. A white electric Jaguar i-Pace pulled up with nobody in the car. I got into the back seat and the car drove itself to the restaurant I wanted to go to, found a safe spot to pull over and then let us out. We live in the best times and everything is amazing. People that want to insist that everything is shite and broken beyond repair are living in their own delusions. Are there some issues with wage stagnation, squeezing of the middle class, housing affordability? Sure, there's no such thing as utopia. It's also not true that housing isn't being addressed. For example in California there were 56 housing bills signed into law in 2023 designed to reduce burdensome regulations and permitting processes and increase production. We're also seeing an uptick in union activity with multiple high profile strikes. The UAW won a 25% raise over 4 years which is nothing to sneeze at. Anyway I never understood people that lament about so called "late-stage capitalism" and how everything is terrible and we need a revolution. Globally you can see decades long downward trends in poverty, hunger, infant mortality. A lot of it spurred on by new tech and innovation. The U.S. more than any other country contributes the most to new tech and innovation. Somehow I'm supposed to be sold on the idea that the U.S. is the worst offender in this capitalist nightmare and in dire need of massive reform. No thanks. This is why I don't weigh in on he actual question of whether not the US is shit. From the outside looking in, I can obviously see some issues (Healthcare, inflexible two-party system, gerrymandering etc) but without actually being in the system and feeling how inflexible or shit it actually is, all someone from the outside can do is listen to people on the inside about how conditions actually are.Functionally, I see unchecked capitalism as a problem - it's led to the issues we see between the cost of necessary medicines being exorbitantly more expensive than they should be. However, I do not think overall capitalism is wholly unchecked, and continued change going forward will continue to rein in some of the greater offences, as well as general anti-capitalist sentiment working its way into how companies operate. Ultimately, I don't think we can escape capitalism. If you were to 'delete capitalism' in a city as an experiment (like an ARPG starting a new season, wipe all bank accounts / corporations and start fresh) I cannot belive we'd see anything other than a reconstruction of the same general capitalist structure, just with different actors and names. It's the method we know for exchanging goods and services, and big players would still rise for providing their goods or services well, and then be able to use that market share to bully smaller players out. In my day-to-day life, I see socialist ideas creeping their way into capitalist structures, and can't help but think that is how things continue going forward. I do not see any revolution happening on a major scale unless something ACTUALLY breaks. People will not be motivated to fix it until then. Yes and often people's perspective is what the media they are consuming is telling them. I think I see this firsthand as well as anyone as someone that has 'dual-citizenship' in California and Florida. People in Florida think if you go to California you'll trip over a mountain of human feces and used needles and people in California think if you go to Florida and you're gay the gay-stapo will round you up into the paddy wagons to take to prison. I've had LGBT friends in California unironically ask me if I think it's safe for them to vacation in Florida. Miami? Hell no, you're better off going to Uganda is what I told them, naturally. I love that you simultaneously mock people for believing what media has told them AND just straight lie to your misled friends asking arguably legitimate questions. I can relate, though I will usually follow with an "I'm fucking with you. They might be homophobes but not the "form a lynch mob" sense, just the usual "think less of you from a safe distance" sense." Don’t worry, my sarcasm picks up better in real life than it does on here. If you think this is an arguably legitimate question then it sounds like you’ve bought into the negative trope about Florida as much as they have. If Governor DeSantis's anti-LGBTQ+, anti-DEI, anti-woke rhetoric is taken seriously; If his Florida election support and approval ratings are considered; If the Orlando gay nightclub mass shooting (Pulse) is remembered; If advocacy groups are cautioning the LGBTQ+ community about coming to Florida + Show Spoiler +...Then I'm not surprised that people might be concerned. I should clarify, I don't find it surprising either. The last few years should tell us that all kinds of people have irrational fears about all kinds of things when they get sucked into a media echo chamber that loves to sensationalize and terrify people for ratings and profit.
Oh, so it for sure is a legitimate question because you could reasonably expect people to have heard stuff about shootings and the governor being anti-LGBTQ+, and then wonder whether that information was worth anything! Got it!
The defense of "Yeah but their fears are irrational" doesn't exactly do much either.
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On February 15 2024 18:56 Fleetfeet wrote:Show nested quote +On February 15 2024 18:32 BlackJack wrote:On February 15 2024 18:20 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On February 15 2024 12:41 BlackJack wrote:On February 15 2024 11:23 Fleetfeet wrote:On February 15 2024 09:10 BlackJack wrote:On February 15 2024 07:27 Fleetfeet wrote:On February 15 2024 05:18 BlackJack wrote:On February 14 2024 17:17 WombaT wrote:On February 14 2024 15:49 Fleetfeet wrote:
I do love the theory that GH is some masked V-for-vendetta character frustratedly posting on the internet waiting for people to DM him saying "You know what, you're right, we SHOULD blow up the parliament building. How do we do that?". That's a funny image to me, and kinda sorta connected to reality? Not that I think GH wants to blow something up, but that V lives in a dystopian world where the a fascist authoritarian government has taken over and the idea of watching V have conversations on MSN messenger with people being like "The government is fascist and authoritarian, we need to do something" and people responding with "Nah it's not thaaat bad we can still vote" seems like a good skit.
I think that GH believes the US is broken beyond repair, and most people here don't. Most people believe it is broken, yes, but not beyond repair. Most of the disconnect comes from GH trying different angles to demonstrate that the US is broken beyond repair but people not being willing to accept that. He's listed getting people to accept that it's broken beyond repair as step one towards revolution, and this vote/not vote does feel like it's still just pushing people towards that idea.
(For clarity, I do not think the US is currently fascist and authoritarian.) Haha, the climax of V for Vendetta 2 Electric Boogoloo is just some really intensely shot, 20 minute long fight scene consisting of cutting back and forth between our hero GH and whoever the villain is as they exchange heated posts on TL. Done in the style of every single 90s ‘I’m in.’ hacking scenes. In a more serious but much, much less fun note I must say I share a lot of that fatalism, capitalism is as entrenched as it’s ever been and rather the root of many an issue, even as its flaws are biting pretty hard. Without going into TLDR territory, those flaws are nothing new, but for a pretty sizeable chunk of time ‘a rising tide raises all boats’ was somewhat true. It’s certainly not the case currently, and few parties anywhere, to my knowledge actually have policies, even on paper to deal with these issues, even within a redistributive capitalist framework, never mind the dreaded s word. Unless you have medical issues that your particular healthcare system is fucking you on, you’re an actively persecuted minority or you’re fuck off rich I’d wager that housing prices continuing on a decades-long trajectory of far outstripping both inflation and real wage increases is likely the absolute single most impactful issue of the day for almost everyone. Well, it suits landlords from the individual to the culture capital level I guess, but everyone else. And yet, remarkably few policy pushes here, you might get the odd house building pledge but that’s kind of a band aid as solutions go. There’ll be a few more houses going, it’s not going to meaningfully push prices back down. People may disagree with my assertion, but I’m pretty confident in it. A system is pretty fundamentally broken if it doesn’t even attempt to tackle what (I believe) is probably the single biggest socioeconomic issue of our time, at least in terms of a lived experience and quality of life. The other biggest issue, which is less immediately apparent, nor important for many is of course climate change, which were also doing a pretty shit job at dealing with. If not quite beyond repair, it does somewhat intrigue me as to why America in particular is fucked in an almost unique manner, and has problems unique to it. With the giant caveat that of course there were many, many issues regarding minorities, the US used to be ahead, or at least on par with European countries, Canada etc in quite a few respects. Much of it idealised of course, but it used to be a country many looked at as aspirational, to be envied even. But over the decades it’s sort of drifted on its own, particular trajectory of dysfunction. I’m curious as to why this is, and really can’t put a finger on it. Other countries have huge cultural differences between regions, or even households. Others have flawed political structures, ethnic tensions or any number of other commonalities, but yet the US somehow ends up with a lot of quirks that make it a special idiosyncratic snowflake amongst vaguely comparable countries. Bit of a ramble the last part, but it’s a question that continually exercises me and I’ve spent quite a bit pondering, I’m interested to hear what y’all think on that particular topic. A couple days ago I went into San Francisco and hailed a driverless taxi. A white electric Jaguar i-Pace pulled up with nobody in the car. I got into the back seat and the car drove itself to the restaurant I wanted to go to, found a safe spot to pull over and then let us out. We live in the best times and everything is amazing. People that want to insist that everything is shite and broken beyond repair are living in their own delusions. Are there some issues with wage stagnation, squeezing of the middle class, housing affordability? Sure, there's no such thing as utopia. It's also not true that housing isn't being addressed. For example in California there were 56 housing bills signed into law in 2023 designed to reduce burdensome regulations and permitting processes and increase production. We're also seeing an uptick in union activity with multiple high profile strikes. The UAW won a 25% raise over 4 years which is nothing to sneeze at. Anyway I never understood people that lament about so called "late-stage capitalism" and how everything is terrible and we need a revolution. Globally you can see decades long downward trends in poverty, hunger, infant mortality. A lot of it spurred on by new tech and innovation. The U.S. more than any other country contributes the most to new tech and innovation. Somehow I'm supposed to be sold on the idea that the U.S. is the worst offender in this capitalist nightmare and in dire need of massive reform. No thanks. This is why I don't weigh in on he actual question of whether not the US is shit. From the outside looking in, I can obviously see some issues (Healthcare, inflexible two-party system, gerrymandering etc) but without actually being in the system and feeling how inflexible or shit it actually is, all someone from the outside can do is listen to people on the inside about how conditions actually are.Functionally, I see unchecked capitalism as a problem - it's led to the issues we see between the cost of necessary medicines being exorbitantly more expensive than they should be. However, I do not think overall capitalism is wholly unchecked, and continued change going forward will continue to rein in some of the greater offences, as well as general anti-capitalist sentiment working its way into how companies operate. Ultimately, I don't think we can escape capitalism. If you were to 'delete capitalism' in a city as an experiment (like an ARPG starting a new season, wipe all bank accounts / corporations and start fresh) I cannot belive we'd see anything other than a reconstruction of the same general capitalist structure, just with different actors and names. It's the method we know for exchanging goods and services, and big players would still rise for providing their goods or services well, and then be able to use that market share to bully smaller players out. In my day-to-day life, I see socialist ideas creeping their way into capitalist structures, and can't help but think that is how things continue going forward. I do not see any revolution happening on a major scale unless something ACTUALLY breaks. People will not be motivated to fix it until then. Yes and often people's perspective is what the media they are consuming is telling them. I think I see this firsthand as well as anyone as someone that has 'dual-citizenship' in California and Florida. People in Florida think if you go to California you'll trip over a mountain of human feces and used needles and people in California think if you go to Florida and you're gay the gay-stapo will round you up into the paddy wagons to take to prison. I've had LGBT friends in California unironically ask me if I think it's safe for them to vacation in Florida. Miami? Hell no, you're better off going to Uganda is what I told them, naturally. I love that you simultaneously mock people for believing what media has told them AND just straight lie to your misled friends asking arguably legitimate questions. I can relate, though I will usually follow with an "I'm fucking with you. They might be homophobes but not the "form a lynch mob" sense, just the usual "think less of you from a safe distance" sense." Don’t worry, my sarcasm picks up better in real life than it does on here. If you think this is an arguably legitimate question then it sounds like you’ve bought into the negative trope about Florida as much as they have. If Governor DeSantis's anti-LGBTQ+, anti-DEI, anti-woke rhetoric is taken seriously; If his Florida election support and approval ratings are considered; If the Orlando gay nightclub mass shooting (Pulse) is remembered; If advocacy groups are cautioning the LGBTQ+ community about coming to Florida + Show Spoiler +...Then I'm not surprised that people might be concerned. I should clarify, I don't find it surprising either. The last few years should tell us that all kinds of people have irrational fears about all kinds of things when they get sucked into a media echo chamber that loves to sensationalize and terrify people for ratings and profit. Oh, so it for sure is a legitimate question because you could reasonably expect people to have heard stuff about shootings and the governor being anti-LGBTQ+, and then wonder whether that information was worth anything! Got it! The defense of "Yeah but their fears are irrational" doesn't exactly do much either.
Sure, it's a legitimate, albeit ignorant question. I stand corrected.
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Northern Ireland25396 Posts
On February 15 2024 18:56 Fleetfeet wrote:Show nested quote +On February 15 2024 18:32 BlackJack wrote:On February 15 2024 18:20 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On February 15 2024 12:41 BlackJack wrote:On February 15 2024 11:23 Fleetfeet wrote:On February 15 2024 09:10 BlackJack wrote:On February 15 2024 07:27 Fleetfeet wrote:On February 15 2024 05:18 BlackJack wrote:On February 14 2024 17:17 WombaT wrote:On February 14 2024 15:49 Fleetfeet wrote:
I do love the theory that GH is some masked V-for-vendetta character frustratedly posting on the internet waiting for people to DM him saying "You know what, you're right, we SHOULD blow up the parliament building. How do we do that?". That's a funny image to me, and kinda sorta connected to reality? Not that I think GH wants to blow something up, but that V lives in a dystopian world where the a fascist authoritarian government has taken over and the idea of watching V have conversations on MSN messenger with people being like "The government is fascist and authoritarian, we need to do something" and people responding with "Nah it's not thaaat bad we can still vote" seems like a good skit.
I think that GH believes the US is broken beyond repair, and most people here don't. Most people believe it is broken, yes, but not beyond repair. Most of the disconnect comes from GH trying different angles to demonstrate that the US is broken beyond repair but people not being willing to accept that. He's listed getting people to accept that it's broken beyond repair as step one towards revolution, and this vote/not vote does feel like it's still just pushing people towards that idea.
(For clarity, I do not think the US is currently fascist and authoritarian.) Haha, the climax of V for Vendetta 2 Electric Boogoloo is just some really intensely shot, 20 minute long fight scene consisting of cutting back and forth between our hero GH and whoever the villain is as they exchange heated posts on TL. Done in the style of every single 90s ‘I’m in.’ hacking scenes. In a more serious but much, much less fun note I must say I share a lot of that fatalism, capitalism is as entrenched as it’s ever been and rather the root of many an issue, even as its flaws are biting pretty hard. Without going into TLDR territory, those flaws are nothing new, but for a pretty sizeable chunk of time ‘a rising tide raises all boats’ was somewhat true. It’s certainly not the case currently, and few parties anywhere, to my knowledge actually have policies, even on paper to deal with these issues, even within a redistributive capitalist framework, never mind the dreaded s word. Unless you have medical issues that your particular healthcare system is fucking you on, you’re an actively persecuted minority or you’re fuck off rich I’d wager that housing prices continuing on a decades-long trajectory of far outstripping both inflation and real wage increases is likely the absolute single most impactful issue of the day for almost everyone. Well, it suits landlords from the individual to the culture capital level I guess, but everyone else. And yet, remarkably few policy pushes here, you might get the odd house building pledge but that’s kind of a band aid as solutions go. There’ll be a few more houses going, it’s not going to meaningfully push prices back down. People may disagree with my assertion, but I’m pretty confident in it. A system is pretty fundamentally broken if it doesn’t even attempt to tackle what (I believe) is probably the single biggest socioeconomic issue of our time, at least in terms of a lived experience and quality of life. The other biggest issue, which is less immediately apparent, nor important for many is of course climate change, which were also doing a pretty shit job at dealing with. If not quite beyond repair, it does somewhat intrigue me as to why America in particular is fucked in an almost unique manner, and has problems unique to it. With the giant caveat that of course there were many, many issues regarding minorities, the US used to be ahead, or at least on par with European countries, Canada etc in quite a few respects. Much of it idealised of course, but it used to be a country many looked at as aspirational, to be envied even. But over the decades it’s sort of drifted on its own, particular trajectory of dysfunction. I’m curious as to why this is, and really can’t put a finger on it. Other countries have huge cultural differences between regions, or even households. Others have flawed political structures, ethnic tensions or any number of other commonalities, but yet the US somehow ends up with a lot of quirks that make it a special idiosyncratic snowflake amongst vaguely comparable countries. Bit of a ramble the last part, but it’s a question that continually exercises me and I’ve spent quite a bit pondering, I’m interested to hear what y’all think on that particular topic. A couple days ago I went into San Francisco and hailed a driverless taxi. A white electric Jaguar i-Pace pulled up with nobody in the car. I got into the back seat and the car drove itself to the restaurant I wanted to go to, found a safe spot to pull over and then let us out. We live in the best times and everything is amazing. People that want to insist that everything is shite and broken beyond repair are living in their own delusions. Are there some issues with wage stagnation, squeezing of the middle class, housing affordability? Sure, there's no such thing as utopia. It's also not true that housing isn't being addressed. For example in California there were 56 housing bills signed into law in 2023 designed to reduce burdensome regulations and permitting processes and increase production. We're also seeing an uptick in union activity with multiple high profile strikes. The UAW won a 25% raise over 4 years which is nothing to sneeze at. Anyway I never understood people that lament about so called "late-stage capitalism" and how everything is terrible and we need a revolution. Globally you can see decades long downward trends in poverty, hunger, infant mortality. A lot of it spurred on by new tech and innovation. The U.S. more than any other country contributes the most to new tech and innovation. Somehow I'm supposed to be sold on the idea that the U.S. is the worst offender in this capitalist nightmare and in dire need of massive reform. No thanks. This is why I don't weigh in on he actual question of whether not the US is shit. From the outside looking in, I can obviously see some issues (Healthcare, inflexible two-party system, gerrymandering etc) but without actually being in the system and feeling how inflexible or shit it actually is, all someone from the outside can do is listen to people on the inside about how conditions actually are.Functionally, I see unchecked capitalism as a problem - it's led to the issues we see between the cost of necessary medicines being exorbitantly more expensive than they should be. However, I do not think overall capitalism is wholly unchecked, and continued change going forward will continue to rein in some of the greater offences, as well as general anti-capitalist sentiment working its way into how companies operate. Ultimately, I don't think we can escape capitalism. If you were to 'delete capitalism' in a city as an experiment (like an ARPG starting a new season, wipe all bank accounts / corporations and start fresh) I cannot belive we'd see anything other than a reconstruction of the same general capitalist structure, just with different actors and names. It's the method we know for exchanging goods and services, and big players would still rise for providing their goods or services well, and then be able to use that market share to bully smaller players out. In my day-to-day life, I see socialist ideas creeping their way into capitalist structures, and can't help but think that is how things continue going forward. I do not see any revolution happening on a major scale unless something ACTUALLY breaks. People will not be motivated to fix it until then. Yes and often people's perspective is what the media they are consuming is telling them. I think I see this firsthand as well as anyone as someone that has 'dual-citizenship' in California and Florida. People in Florida think if you go to California you'll trip over a mountain of human feces and used needles and people in California think if you go to Florida and you're gay the gay-stapo will round you up into the paddy wagons to take to prison. I've had LGBT friends in California unironically ask me if I think it's safe for them to vacation in Florida. Miami? Hell no, you're better off going to Uganda is what I told them, naturally. I love that you simultaneously mock people for believing what media has told them AND just straight lie to your misled friends asking arguably legitimate questions. I can relate, though I will usually follow with an "I'm fucking with you. They might be homophobes but not the "form a lynch mob" sense, just the usual "think less of you from a safe distance" sense." Don’t worry, my sarcasm picks up better in real life than it does on here. If you think this is an arguably legitimate question then it sounds like you’ve bought into the negative trope about Florida as much as they have. If Governor DeSantis's anti-LGBTQ+, anti-DEI, anti-woke rhetoric is taken seriously; If his Florida election support and approval ratings are considered; If the Orlando gay nightclub mass shooting (Pulse) is remembered; If advocacy groups are cautioning the LGBTQ+ community about coming to Florida + Show Spoiler +...Then I'm not surprised that people might be concerned. I should clarify, I don't find it surprising either. The last few years should tell us that all kinds of people have irrational fears about all kinds of things when they get sucked into a media echo chamber that loves to sensationalize and terrify people for ratings and profit. Oh, so it for sure is a legitimate question because you could reasonably expect people to have heard stuff about shootings and the governor being anti-LGBTQ+, and then wonder whether that information was worth anything! Got it! The defense of "Yeah but their fears are irrational" doesn't exactly do much either.
Aye I mean we only personally experience a minute fraction of the world so, failing the media being representative you should at least be able to rely on personal anecdotes from folks you know to fill in gaps. But I’m assuming BJ was just being sarcy with his post.
I mean my partner/future long, long-suffering wife had heard a shitload of bad press about Belfast life in certain areas, as a very obviously Irish person. Having grown up in an area with a giant mural extolling the virtues of British loyalist terrorists and delightful ‘kill all Taigs’ (Catholics) graffiti I mean I am pretty damn aware that sectarianism is still an issue here, but in most of the city it’s basically not an issue that will ever escalate to one being actually subject to any violence or overt hostility.
Equally, there’s a bar where she’s currently situated til her house purchase goes through that I’m pretty comfortable to pop in to if I wanna grab a beer and watch some football, but I’m never inviting her to join given some of the hints I’ve picked up from the clientele
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On February 15 2024 18:47 Gorsameth wrote:Show nested quote +On February 15 2024 08:45 BlackJack wrote:On February 15 2024 06:48 WombaT wrote:On February 15 2024 05:18 BlackJack wrote:On February 14 2024 17:17 WombaT wrote:On February 14 2024 15:49 Fleetfeet wrote:
I do love the theory that GH is some masked V-for-vendetta character frustratedly posting on the internet waiting for people to DM him saying "You know what, you're right, we SHOULD blow up the parliament building. How do we do that?". That's a funny image to me, and kinda sorta connected to reality? Not that I think GH wants to blow something up, but that V lives in a dystopian world where the a fascist authoritarian government has taken over and the idea of watching V have conversations on MSN messenger with people being like "The government is fascist and authoritarian, we need to do something" and people responding with "Nah it's not thaaat bad we can still vote" seems like a good skit.
I think that GH believes the US is broken beyond repair, and most people here don't. Most people believe it is broken, yes, but not beyond repair. Most of the disconnect comes from GH trying different angles to demonstrate that the US is broken beyond repair but people not being willing to accept that. He's listed getting people to accept that it's broken beyond repair as step one towards revolution, and this vote/not vote does feel like it's still just pushing people towards that idea.
(For clarity, I do not think the US is currently fascist and authoritarian.) Haha, the climax of V for Vendetta 2 Electric Boogoloo is just some really intensely shot, 20 minute long fight scene consisting of cutting back and forth between our hero GH and whoever the villain is as they exchange heated posts on TL. Done in the style of every single 90s ‘I’m in.’ hacking scenes. In a more serious but much, much less fun note I must say I share a lot of that fatalism, capitalism is as entrenched as it’s ever been and rather the root of many an issue, even as its flaws are biting pretty hard. Without going into TLDR territory, those flaws are nothing new, but for a pretty sizeable chunk of time ‘a rising tide raises all boats’ was somewhat true. It’s certainly not the case currently, and few parties anywhere, to my knowledge actually have policies, even on paper to deal with these issues, even within a redistributive capitalist framework, never mind the dreaded s word. Unless you have medical issues that your particular healthcare system is fucking you on, you’re an actively persecuted minority or you’re fuck off rich I’d wager that housing prices continuing on a decades-long trajectory of far outstripping both inflation and real wage increases is likely the absolute single most impactful issue of the day for almost everyone. Well, it suits landlords from the individual to the culture capital level I guess, but everyone else. And yet, remarkably few policy pushes here, you might get the odd house building pledge but that’s kind of a band aid as solutions go. There’ll be a few more houses going, it’s not going to meaningfully push prices back down. People may disagree with my assertion, but I’m pretty confident in it. A system is pretty fundamentally broken if it doesn’t even attempt to tackle what (I believe) is probably the single biggest socioeconomic issue of our time, at least in terms of a lived experience and quality of life. The other biggest issue, which is less immediately apparent, nor important for many is of course climate change, which were also doing a pretty shit job at dealing with. If not quite beyond repair, it does somewhat intrigue me as to why America in particular is fucked in an almost unique manner, and has problems unique to it. With the giant caveat that of course there were many, many issues regarding minorities, the US used to be ahead, or at least on par with European countries, Canada etc in quite a few respects. Much of it idealised of course, but it used to be a country many looked at as aspirational, to be envied even. But over the decades it’s sort of drifted on its own, particular trajectory of dysfunction. I’m curious as to why this is, and really can’t put a finger on it. Other countries have huge cultural differences between regions, or even households. Others have flawed political structures, ethnic tensions or any number of other commonalities, but yet the US somehow ends up with a lot of quirks that make it a special idiosyncratic snowflake amongst vaguely comparable countries. Bit of a ramble the last part, but it’s a question that continually exercises me and I’ve spent quite a bit pondering, I’m interested to hear what y’all think on that particular topic. A couple days ago I went into San Francisco and hailed a driverless taxi. A white electric Jaguar i-Pace pulled up with nobody in the car. I got into the back seat and the car drove itself to the restaurant I wanted to go to, found a safe spot to pull over and then let us out. We live in the best times and everything is amazing. People that want to insist that everything is shite and broken beyond repair are living in their own delusions. Are there some issues with wage stagnation, squeezing of the middle class, housing affordability? Sure, there's no such thing as utopia. It's also not true that housing isn't being addressed. For example in California there were 56 housing bills signed into law in 2023 designed to reduce burdensome regulations and permitting processes and increase production. We're also seeing an uptick in union activity with multiple high profile strikes. The UAW won a 25% raise over 4 years which is nothing to sneeze at. Anyway I never understood people that lament about so called "late-stage capitalism" and how everything is terrible and we need a revolution. Globally you can see decades long downward trends in poverty, hunger, infant mortality. A lot of it spurred on by new tech and innovation. The U.S. more than any other country contributes the most to new tech and innovation. Somehow I'm supposed to be sold on the idea that the U.S. is the worst offender in this capitalist nightmare and in dire need of massive reform. No thanks. I’d wager most people would happily trade sauntering over to a restaurant in a driverless car for not being economically crippled by rent. And I don’t think these measures ultimately deal with root causes of the problem On the flipside I do agree that the ‘everything is shit’ lens is way off too. Be it technological or social/cultural there’s been a hell of a lot of advancement in even my own lifetime, and it’s important to keep some sense of perspective. It can be simultaneously true that capitalism is having globally beneficial effects, while in countries where they’re more developed that that gradually stagnates, or indeed reverses, hence the ‘late stage’ part. The distribution element is less of a pragmatically pertinent factor when you’re getting a slice of a much bigger, and quickly growing pie. As I alluded to in my prior post. The US probably experienced an extraordinary standard of living post WW2 as the one modern superpower to escape relatively unharmed. It's easy to see a slight pullback on that standard of living and proclaim it some doom and gloom late stage capitalism hellscape. It's all a bit ridiculous. In California compensation for public employees is all public record and there is a website that compiles the salaries for every public employee. For example here's San Francisco - and I sorted the list by # of employees so it shows the most common jobs. The "average total pay" for some of the most common jobs, nurse/police officer/firefighter, is all around $200,000 a year. If you click the job titles you will see some of the overtime fiends make $400-500k a year. I'm not trying to say there hasn't been any wage stagnation but this isn't exactly a pittance either. It's also probably not enough to buy an average home in San Francisco, but eventually mortgage rates should come back down and make home buying easier. I love how your sinking your own argument by pointing at how big the number is and how great that must be, and then immediately follow it by telling that its not enough to actually buy a home in the area.
Well it could have bought a home pre-COVID. We're coming out of a one-in-a-100 year black swan event that probably has more to do with home prices being pushed out of reach for many as opposed to some general indictment of capitalism.
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Northern Ireland25396 Posts
On February 15 2024 19:12 BlackJack wrote:Show nested quote +On February 15 2024 18:56 Fleetfeet wrote:On February 15 2024 18:32 BlackJack wrote:On February 15 2024 18:20 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On February 15 2024 12:41 BlackJack wrote:On February 15 2024 11:23 Fleetfeet wrote:On February 15 2024 09:10 BlackJack wrote:On February 15 2024 07:27 Fleetfeet wrote:On February 15 2024 05:18 BlackJack wrote:On February 14 2024 17:17 WombaT wrote:
[quote]
Haha, the climax of V for Vendetta 2 Electric Boogoloo is just some really intensely shot, 20 minute long fight scene consisting of cutting back and forth between our hero GH and whoever the villain is as they exchange heated posts on TL. Done in the style of every single 90s ‘I’m in.’ hacking scenes.
In a more serious but much, much less fun note I must say I share a lot of that fatalism, capitalism is as entrenched as it’s ever been and rather the root of many an issue, even as its flaws are biting pretty hard. Without going into TLDR territory, those flaws are nothing new, but for a pretty sizeable chunk of time ‘a rising tide raises all boats’ was somewhat true. It’s certainly not the case currently, and few parties anywhere, to my knowledge actually have policies, even on paper to deal with these issues, even within a redistributive capitalist framework, never mind the dreaded s word.
Unless you have medical issues that your particular healthcare system is fucking you on, you’re an actively persecuted minority or you’re fuck off rich I’d wager that housing prices continuing on a decades-long trajectory of far outstripping both inflation and real wage increases is likely the absolute single most impactful issue of the day for almost everyone. Well, it suits landlords from the individual to the culture capital level I guess, but everyone else. And yet, remarkably few policy pushes here, you might get the odd house building pledge but that’s kind of a band aid as solutions go. There’ll be a few more houses going, it’s not going to meaningfully push prices back down.
People may disagree with my assertion, but I’m pretty confident in it. A system is pretty fundamentally broken if it doesn’t even attempt to tackle what (I believe) is probably the single biggest socioeconomic issue of our time, at least in terms of a lived experience and quality of life. The other biggest issue, which is less immediately apparent, nor important for many is of course climate change, which were also doing a pretty shit job at dealing with.
If not quite beyond repair, it does somewhat intrigue me as to why America in particular is fucked in an almost unique manner, and has problems unique to it.
With the giant caveat that of course there were many, many issues regarding minorities, the US used to be ahead, or at least on par with European countries, Canada etc in quite a few respects. Much of it idealised of course, but it used to be a country many looked at as aspirational, to be envied even. But over the decades it’s sort of drifted on its own, particular trajectory of dysfunction.
I’m curious as to why this is, and really can’t put a finger on it. Other countries have huge cultural differences between regions, or even households. Others have flawed political structures, ethnic tensions or any number of other commonalities, but yet the US somehow ends up with a lot of quirks that make it a special idiosyncratic snowflake amongst vaguely comparable countries.
Bit of a ramble the last part, but it’s a question that continually exercises me and I’ve spent quite a bit pondering, I’m interested to hear what y’all think on that particular topic. A couple days ago I went into San Francisco and hailed a driverless taxi. A white electric Jaguar i-Pace pulled up with nobody in the car. I got into the back seat and the car drove itself to the restaurant I wanted to go to, found a safe spot to pull over and then let us out. We live in the best times and everything is amazing. People that want to insist that everything is shite and broken beyond repair are living in their own delusions. Are there some issues with wage stagnation, squeezing of the middle class, housing affordability? Sure, there's no such thing as utopia. It's also not true that housing isn't being addressed. For example in California there were 56 housing bills signed into law in 2023 designed to reduce burdensome regulations and permitting processes and increase production. We're also seeing an uptick in union activity with multiple high profile strikes. The UAW won a 25% raise over 4 years which is nothing to sneeze at. Anyway I never understood people that lament about so called "late-stage capitalism" and how everything is terrible and we need a revolution. Globally you can see decades long downward trends in poverty, hunger, infant mortality. A lot of it spurred on by new tech and innovation. The U.S. more than any other country contributes the most to new tech and innovation. Somehow I'm supposed to be sold on the idea that the U.S. is the worst offender in this capitalist nightmare and in dire need of massive reform. No thanks. This is why I don't weigh in on he actual question of whether not the US is shit. From the outside looking in, I can obviously see some issues (Healthcare, inflexible two-party system, gerrymandering etc) but without actually being in the system and feeling how inflexible or shit it actually is, all someone from the outside can do is listen to people on the inside about how conditions actually are.Functionally, I see unchecked capitalism as a problem - it's led to the issues we see between the cost of necessary medicines being exorbitantly more expensive than they should be. However, I do not think overall capitalism is wholly unchecked, and continued change going forward will continue to rein in some of the greater offences, as well as general anti-capitalist sentiment working its way into how companies operate. Ultimately, I don't think we can escape capitalism. If you were to 'delete capitalism' in a city as an experiment (like an ARPG starting a new season, wipe all bank accounts / corporations and start fresh) I cannot belive we'd see anything other than a reconstruction of the same general capitalist structure, just with different actors and names. It's the method we know for exchanging goods and services, and big players would still rise for providing their goods or services well, and then be able to use that market share to bully smaller players out. In my day-to-day life, I see socialist ideas creeping their way into capitalist structures, and can't help but think that is how things continue going forward. I do not see any revolution happening on a major scale unless something ACTUALLY breaks. People will not be motivated to fix it until then. Yes and often people's perspective is what the media they are consuming is telling them. I think I see this firsthand as well as anyone as someone that has 'dual-citizenship' in California and Florida. People in Florida think if you go to California you'll trip over a mountain of human feces and used needles and people in California think if you go to Florida and you're gay the gay-stapo will round you up into the paddy wagons to take to prison. I've had LGBT friends in California unironically ask me if I think it's safe for them to vacation in Florida. Miami? Hell no, you're better off going to Uganda is what I told them, naturally. I love that you simultaneously mock people for believing what media has told them AND just straight lie to your misled friends asking arguably legitimate questions. I can relate, though I will usually follow with an "I'm fucking with you. They might be homophobes but not the "form a lynch mob" sense, just the usual "think less of you from a safe distance" sense." Don’t worry, my sarcasm picks up better in real life than it does on here. If you think this is an arguably legitimate question then it sounds like you’ve bought into the negative trope about Florida as much as they have. If Governor DeSantis's anti-LGBTQ+, anti-DEI, anti-woke rhetoric is taken seriously; If his Florida election support and approval ratings are considered; If the Orlando gay nightclub mass shooting (Pulse) is remembered; If advocacy groups are cautioning the LGBTQ+ community about coming to Florida + Show Spoiler +...Then I'm not surprised that people might be concerned. I should clarify, I don't find it surprising either. The last few years should tell us that all kinds of people have irrational fears about all kinds of things when they get sucked into a media echo chamber that loves to sensationalize and terrify people for ratings and profit. Oh, so it for sure is a legitimate question because you could reasonably expect people to have heard stuff about shootings and the governor being anti-LGBTQ+, and then wonder whether that information was worth anything! Got it! The defense of "Yeah but their fears are irrational" doesn't exactly do much either. Sure, it's a legitimate, albeit ignorant question. I stand corrected.
Aye, ignorance is fine so long as it’s a ‘I don’t know the thing’ as opposed to ‘I resolutely refuse to know the thing’, I’m endlessly patient with the former and swing right over to ‘fuck off’ mode with the latter.
I feel it’s a certain gap in the English lexicon that there isn’t a snappy, one-word term to differentiate the former from the latter. Or perhaps there is and I’m just ignorant of it
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On February 15 2024 18:32 BlackJack wrote:Show nested quote +On February 15 2024 18:20 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On February 15 2024 12:41 BlackJack wrote:On February 15 2024 11:23 Fleetfeet wrote:On February 15 2024 09:10 BlackJack wrote:On February 15 2024 07:27 Fleetfeet wrote:On February 15 2024 05:18 BlackJack wrote:On February 14 2024 17:17 WombaT wrote:On February 14 2024 15:49 Fleetfeet wrote:
I do love the theory that GH is some masked V-for-vendetta character frustratedly posting on the internet waiting for people to DM him saying "You know what, you're right, we SHOULD blow up the parliament building. How do we do that?". That's a funny image to me, and kinda sorta connected to reality? Not that I think GH wants to blow something up, but that V lives in a dystopian world where the a fascist authoritarian government has taken over and the idea of watching V have conversations on MSN messenger with people being like "The government is fascist and authoritarian, we need to do something" and people responding with "Nah it's not thaaat bad we can still vote" seems like a good skit.
I think that GH believes the US is broken beyond repair, and most people here don't. Most people believe it is broken, yes, but not beyond repair. Most of the disconnect comes from GH trying different angles to demonstrate that the US is broken beyond repair but people not being willing to accept that. He's listed getting people to accept that it's broken beyond repair as step one towards revolution, and this vote/not vote does feel like it's still just pushing people towards that idea.
(For clarity, I do not think the US is currently fascist and authoritarian.) Haha, the climax of V for Vendetta 2 Electric Boogoloo is just some really intensely shot, 20 minute long fight scene consisting of cutting back and forth between our hero GH and whoever the villain is as they exchange heated posts on TL. Done in the style of every single 90s ‘I’m in.’ hacking scenes. In a more serious but much, much less fun note I must say I share a lot of that fatalism, capitalism is as entrenched as it’s ever been and rather the root of many an issue, even as its flaws are biting pretty hard. Without going into TLDR territory, those flaws are nothing new, but for a pretty sizeable chunk of time ‘a rising tide raises all boats’ was somewhat true. It’s certainly not the case currently, and few parties anywhere, to my knowledge actually have policies, even on paper to deal with these issues, even within a redistributive capitalist framework, never mind the dreaded s word. Unless you have medical issues that your particular healthcare system is fucking you on, you’re an actively persecuted minority or you’re fuck off rich I’d wager that housing prices continuing on a decades-long trajectory of far outstripping both inflation and real wage increases is likely the absolute single most impactful issue of the day for almost everyone. Well, it suits landlords from the individual to the culture capital level I guess, but everyone else. And yet, remarkably few policy pushes here, you might get the odd house building pledge but that’s kind of a band aid as solutions go. There’ll be a few more houses going, it’s not going to meaningfully push prices back down. People may disagree with my assertion, but I’m pretty confident in it. A system is pretty fundamentally broken if it doesn’t even attempt to tackle what (I believe) is probably the single biggest socioeconomic issue of our time, at least in terms of a lived experience and quality of life. The other biggest issue, which is less immediately apparent, nor important for many is of course climate change, which were also doing a pretty shit job at dealing with. If not quite beyond repair, it does somewhat intrigue me as to why America in particular is fucked in an almost unique manner, and has problems unique to it. With the giant caveat that of course there were many, many issues regarding minorities, the US used to be ahead, or at least on par with European countries, Canada etc in quite a few respects. Much of it idealised of course, but it used to be a country many looked at as aspirational, to be envied even. But over the decades it’s sort of drifted on its own, particular trajectory of dysfunction. I’m curious as to why this is, and really can’t put a finger on it. Other countries have huge cultural differences between regions, or even households. Others have flawed political structures, ethnic tensions or any number of other commonalities, but yet the US somehow ends up with a lot of quirks that make it a special idiosyncratic snowflake amongst vaguely comparable countries. Bit of a ramble the last part, but it’s a question that continually exercises me and I’ve spent quite a bit pondering, I’m interested to hear what y’all think on that particular topic. A couple days ago I went into San Francisco and hailed a driverless taxi. A white electric Jaguar i-Pace pulled up with nobody in the car. I got into the back seat and the car drove itself to the restaurant I wanted to go to, found a safe spot to pull over and then let us out. We live in the best times and everything is amazing. People that want to insist that everything is shite and broken beyond repair are living in their own delusions. Are there some issues with wage stagnation, squeezing of the middle class, housing affordability? Sure, there's no such thing as utopia. It's also not true that housing isn't being addressed. For example in California there were 56 housing bills signed into law in 2023 designed to reduce burdensome regulations and permitting processes and increase production. We're also seeing an uptick in union activity with multiple high profile strikes. The UAW won a 25% raise over 4 years which is nothing to sneeze at. Anyway I never understood people that lament about so called "late-stage capitalism" and how everything is terrible and we need a revolution. Globally you can see decades long downward trends in poverty, hunger, infant mortality. A lot of it spurred on by new tech and innovation. The U.S. more than any other country contributes the most to new tech and innovation. Somehow I'm supposed to be sold on the idea that the U.S. is the worst offender in this capitalist nightmare and in dire need of massive reform. No thanks. This is why I don't weigh in on he actual question of whether not the US is shit. From the outside looking in, I can obviously see some issues (Healthcare, inflexible two-party system, gerrymandering etc) but without actually being in the system and feeling how inflexible or shit it actually is, all someone from the outside can do is listen to people on the inside about how conditions actually are.Functionally, I see unchecked capitalism as a problem - it's led to the issues we see between the cost of necessary medicines being exorbitantly more expensive than they should be. However, I do not think overall capitalism is wholly unchecked, and continued change going forward will continue to rein in some of the greater offences, as well as general anti-capitalist sentiment working its way into how companies operate. Ultimately, I don't think we can escape capitalism. If you were to 'delete capitalism' in a city as an experiment (like an ARPG starting a new season, wipe all bank accounts / corporations and start fresh) I cannot belive we'd see anything other than a reconstruction of the same general capitalist structure, just with different actors and names. It's the method we know for exchanging goods and services, and big players would still rise for providing their goods or services well, and then be able to use that market share to bully smaller players out. In my day-to-day life, I see socialist ideas creeping their way into capitalist structures, and can't help but think that is how things continue going forward. I do not see any revolution happening on a major scale unless something ACTUALLY breaks. People will not be motivated to fix it until then. Yes and often people's perspective is what the media they are consuming is telling them. I think I see this firsthand as well as anyone as someone that has 'dual-citizenship' in California and Florida. People in Florida think if you go to California you'll trip over a mountain of human feces and used needles and people in California think if you go to Florida and you're gay the gay-stapo will round you up into the paddy wagons to take to prison. I've had LGBT friends in California unironically ask me if I think it's safe for them to vacation in Florida. Miami? Hell no, you're better off going to Uganda is what I told them, naturally. I love that you simultaneously mock people for believing what media has told them AND just straight lie to your misled friends asking arguably legitimate questions. I can relate, though I will usually follow with an "I'm fucking with you. They might be homophobes but not the "form a lynch mob" sense, just the usual "think less of you from a safe distance" sense." Don’t worry, my sarcasm picks up better in real life than it does on here. If you think this is an arguably legitimate question then it sounds like you’ve bought into the negative trope about Florida as much as they have. If Governor DeSantis's anti-LGBTQ+, anti-DEI, anti-woke rhetoric is taken seriously; If his Florida election support and approval ratings are considered; If the Orlando gay nightclub mass shooting (Pulse) is remembered; If advocacy groups are cautioning the LGBTQ+ community about coming to Florida + Show Spoiler +...Then I'm not surprised that people might be concerned. I should clarify, I don't find it surprising either. The last few years should tell us that all kinds of people have irrational fears about all kinds of things when they get sucked into a media echo chamber that loves to sensationalize and terrify people for ratings and profit.
Why do you consider mass shootings and anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric from the governor to merely be media sensationalism that doesn't warrant legitimate concern for one's safety? Why is it irrational for LGBTQ+ people to think twice before traveling to Florida, when DeSantis's hate has so much support in his state and when advocacy groups are advising their communities based on actual legislation and discrimination they experience?
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United States24686 Posts
I didn't see anybody mention it yet, but the special election to replace George Santos in New York completed on Tuesday, with the Democrats flipping the seat. I fully expected Suozzi to win, but the snow they had on Tuesday probably also helped since voting early seems to be discouraged by the GOP but not the democrats. Still, it was closer than it probably should have been judging from the campaign Pilip was running...
The republican margin in the House is even smaller now.
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EPT
