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On February 02 2026 17:44 Legan wrote:Show nested quote +On February 02 2026 04:27 Acrofales wrote:On February 01 2026 17:43 RvB wrote:On January 31 2026 18:09 Acrofales wrote:On January 31 2026 17:37 maybenexttime wrote:
But China is neither communist nor socialist. It's a capitalist single-party dictatorship, authoritarian and verging on totalitarian. It didn't prosper economically until it adopted capitalism under Deng. What exactly would modern socialists be pointing at here? That's kinda the point ChristianS is making. China is an example of how communism failed. Anybody serious about trying again will have studied these examples in order to learn lessons of what not to do (e.g. Cultural Revolution = bad). Just like anybody serious about liberal democracy in the 19th century would've studied the French Revolution in order to learn what not to do (e.g. guillotining everyone = bad). His point was simply that just because some countries tried it and failed doesn't mean it can't work. There's nothing fundamentally flawed about the economics. There are, however, problems. Problems that Soviet Russia, Maoist China, Albania, Cuba and all the other communist experiments faced and failed to overcome. So the same way later revolutionaries learned from the French Revolution about what is and isn't a good idea, modern communists have learned from the failed communist revolutions. A detractor would point to the failures and try to make the point that all those failures means humans just aren't capable of creating that kind of society, but that is a flawed argument when we have communist systems in small scale. It's a weak point in the case of communism. The communist revolutions didn't all happen at the same time yet all of them have devolved into poor authoritarian states. Somehow none of them seem to be able to learn from previous attempts. When they start liberalising their economies they're suddenly capable of growing rapidly. but that is a flawed argument when we have communist systems in small scale. Your counter argument is the flawed one. What works on a small scale does not necessarily work on a large scale. There's a reason why we're not hunters and gatherers anymore. One of the primary reasons markets work is because it's able to accumulate and transfer a large amount of information rapidly via the price mechanism. The command and control type economies we see in communist states aren't capable of replicating that. Besides that we have an academic discipline dedicated to studying economics. No prominent economist is a communist despite the fact that many sympathize with or are even inspired by someone like Marx. The only Marxist economists are fringe ones that never properly engage with the mainstream like most other heteredox economists. Didn't actually want to go there, but fine, I'll bite. Regarding the first point, I think it's a bit disingenuous. I don't disagree that communism is an order of magnitude harder to "get right" than liberal democracy, but there's plenty of countries that have massive problems with that too, and keep reverting to authoritarian rule shortly after their democratic government fails at something. Also, not all attempts at communism failed from the get-go. Fernando Allende's Chile was doing rather well. So well in fact that the CIA got rid of him and instead put fucking Pinochet in power. Another place communism was starting to work was 1930s Spain. That also ended badly. So clearly the transition to communism is a very hard problem. Move too fast (e.g. Bolshevik Russia) and you end up with horrors like the Holodomor and Stalin rising to power. Move too slow and the established elite use their warning power to stage a coup (possibly with outside help). But we've managed such transitions of power before. One of those times is when we moved from autocratic monarchies to liberal democracies. We should be able to figure it out for communism too, if there's enough people willing to try. And that brings me to your second point: scaling it up. I fully agree that this is probably the more intractable problem of communism. The small communities where it works are mostly opt-in: only people who actually want to participate do participate. The rest fucks off and does capitalism somewhere else. That obviously doesn't work when we're talking about the entire nation's economy. So how does communism deal with the not-insignificant part of the population who don't opt-in. I'm not a communist and I don't really have an answer. People who don't want to follow the rules are not unique to communism, but I suspect the number of them is. Still, I don't think it's an impossible and unsustainable way of running society, just a difficult one to get right. Social democracy is far easier and gets most of the benefits, imho. I find it a bit odd that the problem of how to treat people not wanting to opt-in seems to me, at least, to get more focus with socialism and communism than with other ideologies. Only land not currently lived on is on other planets, so all systems and ideologies will be formed in places with existing people who may not agree with the new system or ideology. Current countries mostly laugh at people trying to create any kind of separate entity within them. They expect the entity to confine itself to existing laws and rules and not create parallel ones, as their jurisdiction would not be recognised. Thus, people who do not want to opt in to capitalism, democracy, monarchy, religion, slavery, the rule of law, and so on have a hard time everywhere.
It is worth recognizing that the liberal democracy—which all other liberal/social democracies have depended on economically and for defense—has been at war and maintained legal slavery (among a long list of crimes against humanity) for basically its entire existence. In part, to deal with parts of the population that don't want to opt in.
Surely if people can rationalize that for liberal/social democracy, they could do the same for socialism?
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On February 03 2026 00:46 Yurie wrote:Show nested quote +On February 03 2026 00:44 Gorsameth wrote:On February 03 2026 00:33 Yurie wrote:On February 02 2026 17:44 Legan wrote:On February 02 2026 04:27 Acrofales wrote:On February 01 2026 17:43 RvB wrote:On January 31 2026 18:09 Acrofales wrote:On January 31 2026 17:37 maybenexttime wrote:
But China is neither communist nor socialist. It's a capitalist single-party dictatorship, authoritarian and verging on totalitarian. It didn't prosper economically until it adopted capitalism under Deng. What exactly would modern socialists be pointing at here? That's kinda the point ChristianS is making. China is an example of how communism failed. Anybody serious about trying again will have studied these examples in order to learn lessons of what not to do (e.g. Cultural Revolution = bad). Just like anybody serious about liberal democracy in the 19th century would've studied the French Revolution in order to learn what not to do (e.g. guillotining everyone = bad). His point was simply that just because some countries tried it and failed doesn't mean it can't work. There's nothing fundamentally flawed about the economics. There are, however, problems. Problems that Soviet Russia, Maoist China, Albania, Cuba and all the other communist experiments faced and failed to overcome. So the same way later revolutionaries learned from the French Revolution about what is and isn't a good idea, modern communists have learned from the failed communist revolutions. A detractor would point to the failures and try to make the point that all those failures means humans just aren't capable of creating that kind of society, but that is a flawed argument when we have communist systems in small scale. It's a weak point in the case of communism. The communist revolutions didn't all happen at the same time yet all of them have devolved into poor authoritarian states. Somehow none of them seem to be able to learn from previous attempts. When they start liberalising their economies they're suddenly capable of growing rapidly. but that is a flawed argument when we have communist systems in small scale. Your counter argument is the flawed one. What works on a small scale does not necessarily work on a large scale. There's a reason why we're not hunters and gatherers anymore. One of the primary reasons markets work is because it's able to accumulate and transfer a large amount of information rapidly via the price mechanism. The command and control type economies we see in communist states aren't capable of replicating that. Besides that we have an academic discipline dedicated to studying economics. No prominent economist is a communist despite the fact that many sympathize with or are even inspired by someone like Marx. The only Marxist economists are fringe ones that never properly engage with the mainstream like most other heteredox economists. Didn't actually want to go there, but fine, I'll bite. Regarding the first point, I think it's a bit disingenuous. I don't disagree that communism is an order of magnitude harder to "get right" than liberal democracy, but there's plenty of countries that have massive problems with that too, and keep reverting to authoritarian rule shortly after their democratic government fails at something. Also, not all attempts at communism failed from the get-go. Fernando Allende's Chile was doing rather well. So well in fact that the CIA got rid of him and instead put fucking Pinochet in power. Another place communism was starting to work was 1930s Spain. That also ended badly. So clearly the transition to communism is a very hard problem. Move too fast (e.g. Bolshevik Russia) and you end up with horrors like the Holodomor and Stalin rising to power. Move too slow and the established elite use their warning power to stage a coup (possibly with outside help). But we've managed such transitions of power before. One of those times is when we moved from autocratic monarchies to liberal democracies. We should be able to figure it out for communism too, if there's enough people willing to try. And that brings me to your second point: scaling it up. I fully agree that this is probably the more intractable problem of communism. The small communities where it works are mostly opt-in: only people who actually want to participate do participate. The rest fucks off and does capitalism somewhere else. That obviously doesn't work when we're talking about the entire nation's economy. So how does communism deal with the not-insignificant part of the population who don't opt-in. I'm not a communist and I don't really have an answer. People who don't want to follow the rules are not unique to communism, but I suspect the number of them is. Still, I don't think it's an impossible and unsustainable way of running society, just a difficult one to get right. Social democracy is far easier and gets most of the benefits, imho. I find it a bit odd that the problem of how to treat people not wanting to opt-in seems to me, at least, to get more focus with socialism and communism than with other ideologies. Only land not currently lived on is on other planets, so all systems and ideologies will be formed in places with existing people who may not agree with the new system or ideology. Current countries mostly laugh at people trying to create any kind of separate entity within them. They expect the entity to confine itself to existing laws and rules and not create parallel ones, as their jurisdiction would not be recognised. Thus, people who do not want to opt in to capitalism, democracy, monarchy, religion, slavery, the rule of law, and so on have a hard time everywhere. The problem for socialism and communism is that they are based on the ideal that everybody should have a minimum standard of living. Most other formats of running a society is fine with a few people here or there falling outside and dying or having a hard time making a living. So in socialism and communism you need a mechanism to get people to do things that are beneficial for society that isn't starving to death or getting beaten up by the police for it to work. Nobody has solved that on a large scale, how do you get the teenager that would prefer going out for drugs into society instead? In capitalism they die off and is thus not a burden. In a dictatorship they are killed or sent to a work camp. You make it sound like social democracies around the world haven't already solved a minimal standard of living. Sure its not perfect and people fall through the cracks but it already exists. The rumblings of Universal Basic Income further expand on this. Even America isn't just letting useless people die off. They just take the extra expensive route of saving people when they come into the ER instead of catching them beforehand. Social democracies apply a lot of pressure to get people to work or they get no support. They also don't have enough money to catch everybody. A lot of people live on an amount of money that means they don't have enough money for rent, utilities and food for themselves and their kids. A social democracy has the same stance but only does it to the level it can afford. It doesn't guarantee it for citizens if it runs out of money. It also doesn't even try to promise a good standard of living if you don't work. If you want a society where no one needs to work unless they want to and everyone lives in relative comfort on a nation/global scale the answer is skynet because the problem is people.
There was once a golden dream of robotics and artificial intelligence creating value out of basically nothing and labour being unnecessary. Just like there is no food shortage only unequal distribution there is no wealth shortage, just unequal distribution.
We by now know how that turned out, as productivity goes up pay actually goes down except for the person at the top who just keeps all the gains.
The problem is always the people and so long as people are involved its not going to get fixed.
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On February 03 2026 01:04 Gorsameth wrote:Show nested quote +On February 03 2026 00:46 Yurie wrote:On February 03 2026 00:44 Gorsameth wrote:On February 03 2026 00:33 Yurie wrote:On February 02 2026 17:44 Legan wrote:On February 02 2026 04:27 Acrofales wrote:On February 01 2026 17:43 RvB wrote:On January 31 2026 18:09 Acrofales wrote:On January 31 2026 17:37 maybenexttime wrote:
But China is neither communist nor socialist. It's a capitalist single-party dictatorship, authoritarian and verging on totalitarian. It didn't prosper economically until it adopted capitalism under Deng. What exactly would modern socialists be pointing at here? That's kinda the point ChristianS is making. China is an example of how communism failed. Anybody serious about trying again will have studied these examples in order to learn lessons of what not to do (e.g. Cultural Revolution = bad). Just like anybody serious about liberal democracy in the 19th century would've studied the French Revolution in order to learn what not to do (e.g. guillotining everyone = bad). His point was simply that just because some countries tried it and failed doesn't mean it can't work. There's nothing fundamentally flawed about the economics. There are, however, problems. Problems that Soviet Russia, Maoist China, Albania, Cuba and all the other communist experiments faced and failed to overcome. So the same way later revolutionaries learned from the French Revolution about what is and isn't a good idea, modern communists have learned from the failed communist revolutions. A detractor would point to the failures and try to make the point that all those failures means humans just aren't capable of creating that kind of society, but that is a flawed argument when we have communist systems in small scale. It's a weak point in the case of communism. The communist revolutions didn't all happen at the same time yet all of them have devolved into poor authoritarian states. Somehow none of them seem to be able to learn from previous attempts. When they start liberalising their economies they're suddenly capable of growing rapidly. but that is a flawed argument when we have communist systems in small scale. Your counter argument is the flawed one. What works on a small scale does not necessarily work on a large scale. There's a reason why we're not hunters and gatherers anymore. One of the primary reasons markets work is because it's able to accumulate and transfer a large amount of information rapidly via the price mechanism. The command and control type economies we see in communist states aren't capable of replicating that. Besides that we have an academic discipline dedicated to studying economics. No prominent economist is a communist despite the fact that many sympathize with or are even inspired by someone like Marx. The only Marxist economists are fringe ones that never properly engage with the mainstream like most other heteredox economists. Didn't actually want to go there, but fine, I'll bite. Regarding the first point, I think it's a bit disingenuous. I don't disagree that communism is an order of magnitude harder to "get right" than liberal democracy, but there's plenty of countries that have massive problems with that too, and keep reverting to authoritarian rule shortly after their democratic government fails at something. Also, not all attempts at communism failed from the get-go. Fernando Allende's Chile was doing rather well. So well in fact that the CIA got rid of him and instead put fucking Pinochet in power. Another place communism was starting to work was 1930s Spain. That also ended badly. So clearly the transition to communism is a very hard problem. Move too fast (e.g. Bolshevik Russia) and you end up with horrors like the Holodomor and Stalin rising to power. Move too slow and the established elite use their warning power to stage a coup (possibly with outside help). But we've managed such transitions of power before. One of those times is when we moved from autocratic monarchies to liberal democracies. We should be able to figure it out for communism too, if there's enough people willing to try. And that brings me to your second point: scaling it up. I fully agree that this is probably the more intractable problem of communism. The small communities where it works are mostly opt-in: only people who actually want to participate do participate. The rest fucks off and does capitalism somewhere else. That obviously doesn't work when we're talking about the entire nation's economy. So how does communism deal with the not-insignificant part of the population who don't opt-in. I'm not a communist and I don't really have an answer. People who don't want to follow the rules are not unique to communism, but I suspect the number of them is. Still, I don't think it's an impossible and unsustainable way of running society, just a difficult one to get right. Social democracy is far easier and gets most of the benefits, imho. I find it a bit odd that the problem of how to treat people not wanting to opt-in seems to me, at least, to get more focus with socialism and communism than with other ideologies. Only land not currently lived on is on other planets, so all systems and ideologies will be formed in places with existing people who may not agree with the new system or ideology. Current countries mostly laugh at people trying to create any kind of separate entity within them. They expect the entity to confine itself to existing laws and rules and not create parallel ones, as their jurisdiction would not be recognised. Thus, people who do not want to opt in to capitalism, democracy, monarchy, religion, slavery, the rule of law, and so on have a hard time everywhere. The problem for socialism and communism is that they are based on the ideal that everybody should have a minimum standard of living. Most other formats of running a society is fine with a few people here or there falling outside and dying or having a hard time making a living. So in socialism and communism you need a mechanism to get people to do things that are beneficial for society that isn't starving to death or getting beaten up by the police for it to work. Nobody has solved that on a large scale, how do you get the teenager that would prefer going out for drugs into society instead? In capitalism they die off and is thus not a burden. In a dictatorship they are killed or sent to a work camp. You make it sound like social democracies around the world haven't already solved a minimal standard of living. Sure its not perfect and people fall through the cracks but it already exists. The rumblings of Universal Basic Income further expand on this. Even America isn't just letting useless people die off. They just take the extra expensive route of saving people when they come into the ER instead of catching them beforehand. Social democracies apply a lot of pressure to get people to work or they get no support. They also don't have enough money to catch everybody. A lot of people live on an amount of money that means they don't have enough money for rent, utilities and food for themselves and their kids. A social democracy has the same stance but only does it to the level it can afford. It doesn't guarantee it for citizens if it runs out of money. It also doesn't even try to promise a good standard of living if you don't work. If you want a society where no one needs to work unless they want to and everyone lives in relative comfort on a nation/global scale the answer is skynet because the problem is people. There was once a golden dream of robotics and artificial intelligence creating value out of basically nothing and labour being unnecessary. Just like there is no food shortage only unequal distribution there is no wealth shortage, just unequal distribution. We by now know how that turned out, as productivity goes up pay actually goes down except for the person at the top who just keeps all the gains. The problem is always the people and so long as people are involved its not going to get fixed.
It is true that we produce more than we need on a global level. But good luck telling people that you get to buy 1 car per life, 10m2 per person is the expected size of an apartment and that meat is a twice yearly event. As tech improves those levels could increase but it is all built on the vast majority of people working. As productivity increases we can get more things or less people working. We picked getting more things instead of less people working.
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On February 03 2026 01:06 Yurie wrote:Show nested quote +On February 03 2026 01:04 Gorsameth wrote:On February 03 2026 00:46 Yurie wrote:On February 03 2026 00:44 Gorsameth wrote:On February 03 2026 00:33 Yurie wrote:On February 02 2026 17:44 Legan wrote:On February 02 2026 04:27 Acrofales wrote:On February 01 2026 17:43 RvB wrote:On January 31 2026 18:09 Acrofales wrote:On January 31 2026 17:37 maybenexttime wrote:
But China is neither communist nor socialist. It's a capitalist single-party dictatorship, authoritarian and verging on totalitarian. It didn't prosper economically until it adopted capitalism under Deng. What exactly would modern socialists be pointing at here? That's kinda the point ChristianS is making. China is an example of how communism failed. Anybody serious about trying again will have studied these examples in order to learn lessons of what not to do (e.g. Cultural Revolution = bad). Just like anybody serious about liberal democracy in the 19th century would've studied the French Revolution in order to learn what not to do (e.g. guillotining everyone = bad). His point was simply that just because some countries tried it and failed doesn't mean it can't work. There's nothing fundamentally flawed about the economics. There are, however, problems. Problems that Soviet Russia, Maoist China, Albania, Cuba and all the other communist experiments faced and failed to overcome. So the same way later revolutionaries learned from the French Revolution about what is and isn't a good idea, modern communists have learned from the failed communist revolutions. A detractor would point to the failures and try to make the point that all those failures means humans just aren't capable of creating that kind of society, but that is a flawed argument when we have communist systems in small scale. It's a weak point in the case of communism. The communist revolutions didn't all happen at the same time yet all of them have devolved into poor authoritarian states. Somehow none of them seem to be able to learn from previous attempts. When they start liberalising their economies they're suddenly capable of growing rapidly. but that is a flawed argument when we have communist systems in small scale. Your counter argument is the flawed one. What works on a small scale does not necessarily work on a large scale. There's a reason why we're not hunters and gatherers anymore. One of the primary reasons markets work is because it's able to accumulate and transfer a large amount of information rapidly via the price mechanism. The command and control type economies we see in communist states aren't capable of replicating that. Besides that we have an academic discipline dedicated to studying economics. No prominent economist is a communist despite the fact that many sympathize with or are even inspired by someone like Marx. The only Marxist economists are fringe ones that never properly engage with the mainstream like most other heteredox economists. Didn't actually want to go there, but fine, I'll bite. Regarding the first point, I think it's a bit disingenuous. I don't disagree that communism is an order of magnitude harder to "get right" than liberal democracy, but there's plenty of countries that have massive problems with that too, and keep reverting to authoritarian rule shortly after their democratic government fails at something. Also, not all attempts at communism failed from the get-go. Fernando Allende's Chile was doing rather well. So well in fact that the CIA got rid of him and instead put fucking Pinochet in power. Another place communism was starting to work was 1930s Spain. That also ended badly. So clearly the transition to communism is a very hard problem. Move too fast (e.g. Bolshevik Russia) and you end up with horrors like the Holodomor and Stalin rising to power. Move too slow and the established elite use their warning power to stage a coup (possibly with outside help). But we've managed such transitions of power before. One of those times is when we moved from autocratic monarchies to liberal democracies. We should be able to figure it out for communism too, if there's enough people willing to try. And that brings me to your second point: scaling it up. I fully agree that this is probably the more intractable problem of communism. The small communities where it works are mostly opt-in: only people who actually want to participate do participate. The rest fucks off and does capitalism somewhere else. That obviously doesn't work when we're talking about the entire nation's economy. So how does communism deal with the not-insignificant part of the population who don't opt-in. I'm not a communist and I don't really have an answer. People who don't want to follow the rules are not unique to communism, but I suspect the number of them is. Still, I don't think it's an impossible and unsustainable way of running society, just a difficult one to get right. Social democracy is far easier and gets most of the benefits, imho. I find it a bit odd that the problem of how to treat people not wanting to opt-in seems to me, at least, to get more focus with socialism and communism than with other ideologies. Only land not currently lived on is on other planets, so all systems and ideologies will be formed in places with existing people who may not agree with the new system or ideology. Current countries mostly laugh at people trying to create any kind of separate entity within them. They expect the entity to confine itself to existing laws and rules and not create parallel ones, as their jurisdiction would not be recognised. Thus, people who do not want to opt in to capitalism, democracy, monarchy, religion, slavery, the rule of law, and so on have a hard time everywhere. The problem for socialism and communism is that they are based on the ideal that everybody should have a minimum standard of living. Most other formats of running a society is fine with a few people here or there falling outside and dying or having a hard time making a living. So in socialism and communism you need a mechanism to get people to do things that are beneficial for society that isn't starving to death or getting beaten up by the police for it to work. Nobody has solved that on a large scale, how do you get the teenager that would prefer going out for drugs into society instead? In capitalism they die off and is thus not a burden. In a dictatorship they are killed or sent to a work camp. You make it sound like social democracies around the world haven't already solved a minimal standard of living. Sure its not perfect and people fall through the cracks but it already exists. The rumblings of Universal Basic Income further expand on this. Even America isn't just letting useless people die off. They just take the extra expensive route of saving people when they come into the ER instead of catching them beforehand. Social democracies apply a lot of pressure to get people to work or they get no support. They also don't have enough money to catch everybody. A lot of people live on an amount of money that means they don't have enough money for rent, utilities and food for themselves and their kids. A social democracy has the same stance but only does it to the level it can afford. It doesn't guarantee it for citizens if it runs out of money. It also doesn't even try to promise a good standard of living if you don't work. If you want a society where no one needs to work unless they want to and everyone lives in relative comfort on a nation/global scale the answer is skynet because the problem is people. There was once a golden dream of robotics and artificial intelligence creating value out of basically nothing and labour being unnecessary. Just like there is no food shortage only unequal distribution there is no wealth shortage, just unequal distribution. We by now know how that turned out, as productivity goes up pay actually goes down except for the person at the top who just keeps all the gains. The problem is always the people and so long as people are involved its not going to get fixed. It is true that we produce more than we need on a global level. But good luck telling people that you get to buy 1 car per life, 10m2 per person is the expected size of an apartment and that meat is a twice yearly event. As tech improves those levels could increase but it is all built on the vast majority of people working. As productivity increases we can get more things or less people working. We picked getting more things instead of less people working. But we aren't getting more things.
For the first time in history children are poorer then their parents.
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On February 03 2026 01:04 Gorsameth wrote:Show nested quote +On February 03 2026 00:46 Yurie wrote:On February 03 2026 00:44 Gorsameth wrote:On February 03 2026 00:33 Yurie wrote:On February 02 2026 17:44 Legan wrote:On February 02 2026 04:27 Acrofales wrote:On February 01 2026 17:43 RvB wrote:On January 31 2026 18:09 Acrofales wrote:On January 31 2026 17:37 maybenexttime wrote:
But China is neither communist nor socialist. It's a capitalist single-party dictatorship, authoritarian and verging on totalitarian. It didn't prosper economically until it adopted capitalism under Deng. What exactly would modern socialists be pointing at here? That's kinda the point ChristianS is making. China is an example of how communism failed. Anybody serious about trying again will have studied these examples in order to learn lessons of what not to do (e.g. Cultural Revolution = bad). Just like anybody serious about liberal democracy in the 19th century would've studied the French Revolution in order to learn what not to do (e.g. guillotining everyone = bad). His point was simply that just because some countries tried it and failed doesn't mean it can't work. There's nothing fundamentally flawed about the economics. There are, however, problems. Problems that Soviet Russia, Maoist China, Albania, Cuba and all the other communist experiments faced and failed to overcome. So the same way later revolutionaries learned from the French Revolution about what is and isn't a good idea, modern communists have learned from the failed communist revolutions. A detractor would point to the failures and try to make the point that all those failures means humans just aren't capable of creating that kind of society, but that is a flawed argument when we have communist systems in small scale. It's a weak point in the case of communism. The communist revolutions didn't all happen at the same time yet all of them have devolved into poor authoritarian states. Somehow none of them seem to be able to learn from previous attempts. When they start liberalising their economies they're suddenly capable of growing rapidly. but that is a flawed argument when we have communist systems in small scale. Your counter argument is the flawed one. What works on a small scale does not necessarily work on a large scale. There's a reason why we're not hunters and gatherers anymore. One of the primary reasons markets work is because it's able to accumulate and transfer a large amount of information rapidly via the price mechanism. The command and control type economies we see in communist states aren't capable of replicating that. Besides that we have an academic discipline dedicated to studying economics. No prominent economist is a communist despite the fact that many sympathize with or are even inspired by someone like Marx. The only Marxist economists are fringe ones that never properly engage with the mainstream like most other heteredox economists. Didn't actually want to go there, but fine, I'll bite. Regarding the first point, I think it's a bit disingenuous. I don't disagree that communism is an order of magnitude harder to "get right" than liberal democracy, but there's plenty of countries that have massive problems with that too, and keep reverting to authoritarian rule shortly after their democratic government fails at something. Also, not all attempts at communism failed from the get-go. Fernando Allende's Chile was doing rather well. So well in fact that the CIA got rid of him and instead put fucking Pinochet in power. Another place communism was starting to work was 1930s Spain. That also ended badly. So clearly the transition to communism is a very hard problem. Move too fast (e.g. Bolshevik Russia) and you end up with horrors like the Holodomor and Stalin rising to power. Move too slow and the established elite use their warning power to stage a coup (possibly with outside help). But we've managed such transitions of power before. One of those times is when we moved from autocratic monarchies to liberal democracies. We should be able to figure it out for communism too, if there's enough people willing to try. And that brings me to your second point: scaling it up. I fully agree that this is probably the more intractable problem of communism. The small communities where it works are mostly opt-in: only people who actually want to participate do participate. The rest fucks off and does capitalism somewhere else. That obviously doesn't work when we're talking about the entire nation's economy. So how does communism deal with the not-insignificant part of the population who don't opt-in. I'm not a communist and I don't really have an answer. People who don't want to follow the rules are not unique to communism, but I suspect the number of them is. Still, I don't think it's an impossible and unsustainable way of running society, just a difficult one to get right. Social democracy is far easier and gets most of the benefits, imho. I find it a bit odd that the problem of how to treat people not wanting to opt-in seems to me, at least, to get more focus with socialism and communism than with other ideologies. Only land not currently lived on is on other planets, so all systems and ideologies will be formed in places with existing people who may not agree with the new system or ideology. Current countries mostly laugh at people trying to create any kind of separate entity within them. They expect the entity to confine itself to existing laws and rules and not create parallel ones, as their jurisdiction would not be recognised. Thus, people who do not want to opt in to capitalism, democracy, monarchy, religion, slavery, the rule of law, and so on have a hard time everywhere. The problem for socialism and communism is that they are based on the ideal that everybody should have a minimum standard of living. Most other formats of running a society is fine with a few people here or there falling outside and dying or having a hard time making a living. So in socialism and communism you need a mechanism to get people to do things that are beneficial for society that isn't starving to death or getting beaten up by the police for it to work. Nobody has solved that on a large scale, how do you get the teenager that would prefer going out for drugs into society instead? In capitalism they die off and is thus not a burden. In a dictatorship they are killed or sent to a work camp. You make it sound like social democracies around the world haven't already solved a minimal standard of living. Sure its not perfect and people fall through the cracks but it already exists. The rumblings of Universal Basic Income further expand on this. Even America isn't just letting useless people die off. They just take the extra expensive route of saving people when they come into the ER instead of catching them beforehand. Social democracies apply a lot of pressure to get people to work or they get no support. They also don't have enough money to catch everybody. A lot of people live on an amount of money that means they don't have enough money for rent, utilities and food for themselves and their kids. A social democracy has the same stance but only does it to the level it can afford. It doesn't guarantee it for citizens if it runs out of money. It also doesn't even try to promise a good standard of living if you don't work. If you want a society where no one needs to work unless they want to and everyone lives in relative comfort on a nation/global scale the answer is skynet because the problem is people. + Show Spoiler +There was once a golden dream of robotics and artificial intelligence creating value out of basically nothing and labour being unnecessary. Just like there is no food shortage only unequal distribution there is no wealth shortage, just unequal distribution.
We by now know how that turned out, as productivity goes up pay actually goes down except for the person at the top who just keeps all the gains.
The problem is always the people and so long as people are involved its not going to get fixed. I think something like a 21st century Cybersyn could go a long way in getting us much closer.
Someone want to remind us what liberal democracies did with that project?
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On February 02 2026 23:17 Biff The Understudy wrote:Show nested quote +On February 02 2026 19:58 oBlade wrote:On February 02 2026 19:46 KwarK wrote:On February 02 2026 19:31 oBlade wrote:On February 02 2026 05:31 LightSpectra wrote:On February 01 2026 15:21 oBlade wrote:Here is an accusation that the late George HW Bush raped someone after his feet were cut off by a scimitar. You do not have to debunk things that are self-evidently bunk. + Show Spoiler + That does sound outlandish. But let's imagine how this accusation would seem if George HW Bush was just a little bit more like Trump. Bush spent something like 20 years being best friends with a guy named Barry the Chopper. He excitedly tells news outlets that Barry loves cutting off people's feet as much as he does. There's a photo of Bush cutting a check to Barry for the right to someone's feet. Bush doodles a picture of detached feet with the message "To a bright future with a lot more chopping", signs it lovingly, and sends it to Barry. Bush's staff members remark about how much he loves snuff films. Bush brags about how he walks into the OR at hospitals in the hopes of seeing some leg amputations. Later it's revealed Barry was running a crime ring where he invites the rich and powerful to come chop off the feet of trafficked children with a scimitar. He's arrested once, but the prosecutor gives him a sweetheart deal that lets him stay free and continue chopping. Bush appoints that prosecutor to his cabinet. Barry is then arrested again. He's transferred to a prison where Bush's Attorney General has oversight. Barry commits suicide under mysterious circumstances. Around the same time, Bush is accused by someone of chopping their feet off in a civil suit. He loses the case because the burden of proof is met. Bush then promises to reveal the truth about Barry's crime ring if he wins his reelection. He is reelected. His new AG tells people the Barry files are on her desk waiting to be released. He then says the whole thing was a hoax and anyone who wanted the truth revealed is a fucking moron. Barry's chief of staff is in prison for assisting with the child trafficking. Bush transfers her from a supermax federal prison to a comfy one and blatantly, publicly suggests she'll receive a pardon if she only incriminates Bush's enemies. He does not even bother to suggest any reason whatsoever she deserves a pardon (unfair trial? New exculpatory evidence?), just that he can do it whenever he feels like it. Congress then begins the process to declassify the Barry the Chopper files. Bush gets on his hands and knees and begs, while weeping, his closest supporters in Congress to vote No on releasing the files. Congress votes to release the files. The FBI works around the clock to censor Bush's name from them but he's still mentioned hundreds of times, as are many of his closest allies. Bush, remembering how previous presidents used to distract from bad news by bombing whatever country, proceeds to make plans for war with Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, Nigeria, Denmark, whoever the fuck he can order bombed that doesn't result in an immediate mutiny or impeachment. But yes, that rumor was indeed salacious. Very Smart people would never believe it. There's a really easy to see reason why cutting people's feet off isn't a good analogue of an unfalsifiable conspiracy like systemic sexual assault of children and why no amount of cover-up would work. Otherwise volume of mentions is simply nothing. Millions of people have claimed ESP and supernatural powers. There's not a single credible case among them. Despite that you'd think the odds suggest at least one of them would be true. Comparing something fictional like ESP to something real like sexual assault is a weird take but okay, if we're going to be silly then let's be silly. Millions of people have claimed that Donald Trump definitely didn't rape any kids and yet it's not only not even slightly credible but additionally not a single one of those millions of people have managed to produce any evidence. Really makes you think. Of course you might suggest that that is a very silly argument to make but it is, unfortunately, your argument. 1) You cannot in general prove a negative, positive claims are different than negative ones 2) The number of people claiming the same event A is different than the number of claims of events A happening Like extraordinarily simply so. The millions of people having claimed ESP have each claimed it about themselves. That makes any one of them having ESP its own distinct, independent (ideally) claim, and yet none of them are true. If millions of people believed that Yuri Geller had ESP, that would only be one distinct claim, just put forth by many, and it would still be false. For reasons of me understanding the difference between these things and you volunteering the fact that you don't, your strawman of me is not a reflection of any argument of mine. The MAGA movement is built on conspiracy theories, starting with the notion Obama was born in Kenya, which is really how Trump gained traction. The baaaaalls you have to make that argument is really remarkable. Hats off.
That would be a super relevant thing to BTFO me with if... it's something I had ever maintained in my life. Like what do you think you're talking about? No Obama wasn't born in Kenya. No Pizzagate isn't real. Neither is standing 6 feet away from someone a vaccine for upper respiratory infections. All of these are years old. Obama hasn't been in office for almost a decade. Now show me your evidence for any actual thing you want to claim in the here and now.
On February 02 2026 22:34 LightSpectra wrote:
You can't prove without a shadow of a doubt that Trump raped anyone or that White House policy is focused on his personal enrichment. The standard of proof is just too high.
I mean you could presumably find corroborating evidence of SOMETHING you think is credible in the files that says he raped a child.
Or not just him, that someone else did and needs to be charged. This was a huge ring of conspirators, right? Find literally anyone else new who's guilty of something please. Let me know and I'll pitchfork them.
Just going "mentioned" is why people didn't want these released to begin with. Jackie is "mentioned" in the JFK files, she didn't have her husband shot. Look he was "mentioned" when someone sends a link about the House investigating him and Deutsche Bank. Thousands of mentions? He must be guilty! Of... something or other. It's pure statistics. Lawrence Krauss was mentioned, how many did he rape? The files, when they aren't released, it's because it proves what you want, and when they don't prove what you want, it's because the things that do prove it are still secretly unreleased as part of Trump's master plan to make himself look just bad enough that you hate him but not give you the satisfaction of ever getting to see the proof.
On February 02 2026 22:34 LightSpectra wrote:
Now, unrelated, let me explain why someone looking a little too dark is enough justification for ICE to kick their door in and demand their papers.
It isn't. Stay focused.
On February 02 2026 20:57 MJG wrote:
If something looks like a duck, and it waddles like a duck, and it quacks like a duck, and it lost a civil suit confirming that it's a duck, and there are thousands of classified documents accusing it of being a duck, and there are thousands of photos of it hanging out with other ducks, then it's probably a duck.
What's your take on why the jury in the civil suit didn't find him liable for rape of the adult who accused him of raping her? Is it because... there wasn't even a preponderance of the evidence?
Or some other explanation?
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On February 03 2026 01:12 Gorsameth wrote:Show nested quote +On February 03 2026 01:06 Yurie wrote:On February 03 2026 01:04 Gorsameth wrote:On February 03 2026 00:46 Yurie wrote:On February 03 2026 00:44 Gorsameth wrote:On February 03 2026 00:33 Yurie wrote:On February 02 2026 17:44 Legan wrote:On February 02 2026 04:27 Acrofales wrote:On February 01 2026 17:43 RvB wrote:On January 31 2026 18:09 Acrofales wrote:
[quote]
That's kinda the point ChristianS is making. China is an example of how communism failed. Anybody serious about trying again will have studied these examples in order to learn lessons of what not to do (e.g. Cultural Revolution = bad). Just like anybody serious about liberal democracy in the 19th century would've studied the French Revolution in order to learn what not to do (e.g. guillotining everyone = bad).
His point was simply that just because some countries tried it and failed doesn't mean it can't work. There's nothing fundamentally flawed about the economics. There are, however, problems. Problems that Soviet Russia, Maoist China, Albania, Cuba and all the other communist experiments faced and failed to overcome. So the same way later revolutionaries learned from the French Revolution about what is and isn't a good idea, modern communists have learned from the failed communist revolutions. A detractor would point to the failures and try to make the point that all those failures means humans just aren't capable of creating that kind of society, but that is a flawed argument when we have communist systems in small scale. It's a weak point in the case of communism. The communist revolutions didn't all happen at the same time yet all of them have devolved into poor authoritarian states. Somehow none of them seem to be able to learn from previous attempts. When they start liberalising their economies they're suddenly capable of growing rapidly. but that is a flawed argument when we have communist systems in small scale. Your counter argument is the flawed one. What works on a small scale does not necessarily work on a large scale. There's a reason why we're not hunters and gatherers anymore. One of the primary reasons markets work is because it's able to accumulate and transfer a large amount of information rapidly via the price mechanism. The command and control type economies we see in communist states aren't capable of replicating that. Besides that we have an academic discipline dedicated to studying economics. No prominent economist is a communist despite the fact that many sympathize with or are even inspired by someone like Marx. The only Marxist economists are fringe ones that never properly engage with the mainstream like most other heteredox economists. Didn't actually want to go there, but fine, I'll bite. Regarding the first point, I think it's a bit disingenuous. I don't disagree that communism is an order of magnitude harder to "get right" than liberal democracy, but there's plenty of countries that have massive problems with that too, and keep reverting to authoritarian rule shortly after their democratic government fails at something. Also, not all attempts at communism failed from the get-go. Fernando Allende's Chile was doing rather well. So well in fact that the CIA got rid of him and instead put fucking Pinochet in power. Another place communism was starting to work was 1930s Spain. That also ended badly. So clearly the transition to communism is a very hard problem. Move too fast (e.g. Bolshevik Russia) and you end up with horrors like the Holodomor and Stalin rising to power. Move too slow and the established elite use their warning power to stage a coup (possibly with outside help). But we've managed such transitions of power before. One of those times is when we moved from autocratic monarchies to liberal democracies. We should be able to figure it out for communism too, if there's enough people willing to try. And that brings me to your second point: scaling it up. I fully agree that this is probably the more intractable problem of communism. The small communities where it works are mostly opt-in: only people who actually want to participate do participate. The rest fucks off and does capitalism somewhere else. That obviously doesn't work when we're talking about the entire nation's economy. So how does communism deal with the not-insignificant part of the population who don't opt-in. I'm not a communist and I don't really have an answer. People who don't want to follow the rules are not unique to communism, but I suspect the number of them is. Still, I don't think it's an impossible and unsustainable way of running society, just a difficult one to get right. Social democracy is far easier and gets most of the benefits, imho. I find it a bit odd that the problem of how to treat people not wanting to opt-in seems to me, at least, to get more focus with socialism and communism than with other ideologies. Only land not currently lived on is on other planets, so all systems and ideologies will be formed in places with existing people who may not agree with the new system or ideology. Current countries mostly laugh at people trying to create any kind of separate entity within them. They expect the entity to confine itself to existing laws and rules and not create parallel ones, as their jurisdiction would not be recognised. Thus, people who do not want to opt in to capitalism, democracy, monarchy, religion, slavery, the rule of law, and so on have a hard time everywhere. The problem for socialism and communism is that they are based on the ideal that everybody should have a minimum standard of living. Most other formats of running a society is fine with a few people here or there falling outside and dying or having a hard time making a living. So in socialism and communism you need a mechanism to get people to do things that are beneficial for society that isn't starving to death or getting beaten up by the police for it to work. Nobody has solved that on a large scale, how do you get the teenager that would prefer going out for drugs into society instead? In capitalism they die off and is thus not a burden. In a dictatorship they are killed or sent to a work camp. You make it sound like social democracies around the world haven't already solved a minimal standard of living. Sure its not perfect and people fall through the cracks but it already exists. The rumblings of Universal Basic Income further expand on this. Even America isn't just letting useless people die off. They just take the extra expensive route of saving people when they come into the ER instead of catching them beforehand. Social democracies apply a lot of pressure to get people to work or they get no support. They also don't have enough money to catch everybody. A lot of people live on an amount of money that means they don't have enough money for rent, utilities and food for themselves and their kids. A social democracy has the same stance but only does it to the level it can afford. It doesn't guarantee it for citizens if it runs out of money. It also doesn't even try to promise a good standard of living if you don't work. If you want a society where no one needs to work unless they want to and everyone lives in relative comfort on a nation/global scale the answer is skynet because the problem is people. There was once a golden dream of robotics and artificial intelligence creating value out of basically nothing and labour being unnecessary. Just like there is no food shortage only unequal distribution there is no wealth shortage, just unequal distribution. We by now know how that turned out, as productivity goes up pay actually goes down except for the person at the top who just keeps all the gains. The problem is always the people and so long as people are involved its not going to get fixed. It is true that we produce more than we need on a global level. But good luck telling people that you get to buy 1 car per life, 10m2 per person is the expected size of an apartment and that meat is a twice yearly event. As tech improves those levels could increase but it is all built on the vast majority of people working. As productivity increases we can get more things or less people working. We picked getting more things instead of less people working. But we aren't getting more things. For the first time in history children are poorer then their parents.
I disagree. You see that on a localized level due to wealth disparity and money spreading a bit more evenly globally. Take a few examples of produced goods on a global level.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automotive_industry#By_year
Concrete seems stable after massive increases historically.
https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/global-cement-production-has-plateaued-over-the-last-decade
As the goods on average last longer as technology has slowed down a bit and there are few wars that is a large increase. The thing is that they are spread over more people. If people were willing to go back to pre WW1 levels of luxury we could cut a large fraction of the global work force right now.
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oBlade, once again demonstrating the intellectual prowess of fascists decided to drop the name of Lawrence Krauss, a guy who was forced into retirement before any of the Epstein shit came out and the guy who vehimently defended Epstein over his 2008 conviction:
"As a scientist I always judge things on empirical evidence and he always has women ages 19 to 23 around him, but I've never seen anything else, so as a scientist, my presumption is that whatever the problems were I would believe him over other people...I don't feel tarnished in any way by my relationship with Jeffrey; I feel raised by it."
There is a whole section of his WiKi article covering his relationship with Epstein but of course, this doesn't construe any wrong doing for oBlade, based on the same type of viewing and analysis which makes him conclude that Renee Good viciously attacked that murdering piece of shit with her car which he pointed away from him.
He also came here to fling shit about the very sketchy shit that (in my estimation) got pushed by right wing bot network before the release of this latest batch of documents, which included some truly insane shit like the Bush shit he's now using to try to discredit the rest of the files, again, because oBlade is a person who spends A LOT of his time protecting pedophiles. Because oBlade is a pedophile lover, which, you know, makes you ask yourself what kind of a person would be this passionate about defending pedophiles, hm?
To me, the most interesting part of this new batch is the timing of Epstein's contact with Moot, the founder of 4chan who created the most infamous 4chan board, /pol/ shortly after meeting with Epstein.
Given that there is plenty of evidence of Bannon hanging out with Epstein, strategizing and such, given all the rest of the crazy connections Epstein had to many people in the RW and Billionaire circles, I find the timing of this extremely interesting.
Since the whole philosophy of MAGA and most of the conspiracy culture behind it arose from this board, along with so many other very influential movements of the 2010-s, including shit like GamerGate and QANON, it's very interesting to consider how these people work together and to what goal.
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On February 03 2026 01:13 oBlade wrote:Show nested quote +On February 02 2026 20:57 MJG wrote:
If something looks like a duck, and it waddles like a duck, and it quacks like a duck, and it lost a civil suit confirming that it's a duck, and there are thousands of classified documents accusing it of being a duck, and there are thousands of photos of it hanging out with other ducks, then it's probably a duck. What's your take on why the jury in the civil suit didn't find him liable for rape of the adult who accused him of raping her? Is it because... there wasn't even a preponderance of the evidence? Or some other explanation?
Glad you asked.
"New York’s legal definition of “rape” [...] requires forcible, unconsented-to penetration with one’s penis. But [Judge Lewis A. Kaplan] said that the conduct the jury effectively found Trump liable for — forced digital penetration — meets a more common definition of rape."
Judge clarifies: Yes, Trump was found to have raped E. Jean Carroll
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On February 03 2026 01:23 Yurie wrote:Show nested quote +On February 03 2026 01:12 Gorsameth wrote:On February 03 2026 01:06 Yurie wrote:On February 03 2026 01:04 Gorsameth wrote:On February 03 2026 00:46 Yurie wrote:On February 03 2026 00:44 Gorsameth wrote:On February 03 2026 00:33 Yurie wrote:On February 02 2026 17:44 Legan wrote:On February 02 2026 04:27 Acrofales wrote:On February 01 2026 17:43 RvB wrote:
[quote]
It's a weak point in the case of communism. The communist revolutions didn't all happen at the same time yet all of them have devolved into poor authoritarian states. Somehow none of them seem to be able to learn from previous attempts. When they start liberalising their economies they're suddenly capable of growing rapidly.
[quote]
Your counter argument is the flawed one. What works on a small scale does not necessarily work on a large scale. There's a reason why we're not hunters and gatherers anymore. One of the primary reasons markets work is because it's able to accumulate and transfer a large amount of information rapidly via the price mechanism. The command and control type economies we see in communist states aren't capable of replicating that.
Besides that we have an academic discipline dedicated to studying economics. No prominent economist is a communist despite the fact that many sympathize with or are even inspired by someone like Marx. The only Marxist economists are fringe ones that never properly engage with the mainstream like most other heteredox economists.
Didn't actually want to go there, but fine, I'll bite. Regarding the first point, I think it's a bit disingenuous. I don't disagree that communism is an order of magnitude harder to "get right" than liberal democracy, but there's plenty of countries that have massive problems with that too, and keep reverting to authoritarian rule shortly after their democratic government fails at something. Also, not all attempts at communism failed from the get-go. Fernando Allende's Chile was doing rather well. So well in fact that the CIA got rid of him and instead put fucking Pinochet in power. Another place communism was starting to work was 1930s Spain. That also ended badly. So clearly the transition to communism is a very hard problem. Move too fast (e.g. Bolshevik Russia) and you end up with horrors like the Holodomor and Stalin rising to power. Move too slow and the established elite use their warning power to stage a coup (possibly with outside help). But we've managed such transitions of power before. One of those times is when we moved from autocratic monarchies to liberal democracies. We should be able to figure it out for communism too, if there's enough people willing to try. And that brings me to your second point: scaling it up. I fully agree that this is probably the more intractable problem of communism. The small communities where it works are mostly opt-in: only people who actually want to participate do participate. The rest fucks off and does capitalism somewhere else. That obviously doesn't work when we're talking about the entire nation's economy. So how does communism deal with the not-insignificant part of the population who don't opt-in. I'm not a communist and I don't really have an answer. People who don't want to follow the rules are not unique to communism, but I suspect the number of them is. Still, I don't think it's an impossible and unsustainable way of running society, just a difficult one to get right. Social democracy is far easier and gets most of the benefits, imho. I find it a bit odd that the problem of how to treat people not wanting to opt-in seems to me, at least, to get more focus with socialism and communism than with other ideologies. Only land not currently lived on is on other planets, so all systems and ideologies will be formed in places with existing people who may not agree with the new system or ideology. Current countries mostly laugh at people trying to create any kind of separate entity within them. They expect the entity to confine itself to existing laws and rules and not create parallel ones, as their jurisdiction would not be recognised. Thus, people who do not want to opt in to capitalism, democracy, monarchy, religion, slavery, the rule of law, and so on have a hard time everywhere. The problem for socialism and communism is that they are based on the ideal that everybody should have a minimum standard of living. Most other formats of running a society is fine with a few people here or there falling outside and dying or having a hard time making a living. So in socialism and communism you need a mechanism to get people to do things that are beneficial for society that isn't starving to death or getting beaten up by the police for it to work. Nobody has solved that on a large scale, how do you get the teenager that would prefer going out for drugs into society instead? In capitalism they die off and is thus not a burden. In a dictatorship they are killed or sent to a work camp. You make it sound like social democracies around the world haven't already solved a minimal standard of living. Sure its not perfect and people fall through the cracks but it already exists. The rumblings of Universal Basic Income further expand on this. Even America isn't just letting useless people die off. They just take the extra expensive route of saving people when they come into the ER instead of catching them beforehand. Social democracies apply a lot of pressure to get people to work or they get no support. They also don't have enough money to catch everybody. A lot of people live on an amount of money that means they don't have enough money for rent, utilities and food for themselves and their kids. A social democracy has the same stance but only does it to the level it can afford. It doesn't guarantee it for citizens if it runs out of money. It also doesn't even try to promise a good standard of living if you don't work. If you want a society where no one needs to work unless they want to and everyone lives in relative comfort on a nation/global scale the answer is skynet because the problem is people. There was once a golden dream of robotics and artificial intelligence creating value out of basically nothing and labour being unnecessary. Just like there is no food shortage only unequal distribution there is no wealth shortage, just unequal distribution. We by now know how that turned out, as productivity goes up pay actually goes down except for the person at the top who just keeps all the gains. The problem is always the people and so long as people are involved its not going to get fixed. It is true that we produce more than we need on a global level. But good luck telling people that you get to buy 1 car per life, 10m2 per person is the expected size of an apartment and that meat is a twice yearly event. As tech improves those levels could increase but it is all built on the vast majority of people working. As productivity increases we can get more things or less people working. We picked getting more things instead of less people working. But we aren't getting more things. For the first time in history children are poorer then their parents. I disagree. You see that on a localized level due to wealth disparity and money spreading a bit more evenly globally. Take a few examples of produced goods on a global level. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automotive_industry#By_yearConcrete seems stable after massive increases historically. https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/global-cement-production-has-plateaued-over-the-last-decadeAs the goods on average last longer as technology has slowed down a bit and there are few wars that is a large increase. The thing is that they are spread over more people. If people were willing to go back to pre WW1 levels of luxury we could cut a large fraction of the global work force right now. A random worker in America now is more productive, basically regardless of what job he is doing, then 20-30-50 years ago. But he makes relatively less.
'if we use less goods we need less workers' doesn't change inequality.
(and goods lasting longer is kind of a joke, "they don't build them like they used to" is very real. Planned obsolescence and all that).
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On February 03 2026 01:49 LightSpectra wrote:Show nested quote +On February 03 2026 01:13 oBlade wrote:On February 02 2026 20:57 MJG wrote:
If something looks like a duck, and it waddles like a duck, and it quacks like a duck, and it lost a civil suit confirming that it's a duck, and there are thousands of classified documents accusing it of being a duck, and there are thousands of photos of it hanging out with other ducks, then it's probably a duck. What's your take on why the jury in the civil suit didn't find him liable for rape of the adult who accused him of raping her? Is it because... there wasn't even a preponderance of the evidence? Or some other explanation? Glad you asked. "New York’s legal definition of “rape” [...] requires forcible, unconsented-to penetration with one’s penis. But [Judge Lewis A. Kaplan] said that the conduct the jury effectively found Trump liable for — forced digital penetration — meets a more common definition of rape." Judge clarifies: Yes, Trump was found to have raped E. Jean Carroll
Come on, you’re gonna’ accuse him of rape when he didn’t even get the tip wet? Fuckin’ TDS over here
/s
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On February 02 2026 20:07 Hat Trick of Today wrote:
I can’t say that I’ve purposely chosen to hang out with someone who has pled guilty to procuring a child for prostitution and of soliciting a prostitute. You mean you haven’t purposefully chosen to hang out with somebody that has pled guilty to either of those yet? The logic of this statement is that you potentially hang out with several of these, but you’ll only find out if you did in the future when and if they plead guilty to the crimes.
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On February 03 2026 04:17 dyhb wrote:Show nested quote +On February 02 2026 20:07 Hat Trick of Today wrote:
I can’t say that I’ve purposely chosen to hang out with someone who has pled guilty to procuring a child for prostitution and of soliciting a prostitute. You mean you haven’t purposefully chosen to hang out with somebody that has pled guilty to either of those yet? The logic of this statement is that you potentially hang out with several of these, but you’ll only find out if you did in the future when and if they plead guilty to the crimes.
That's a good point. It should would not be weird or suspicious at all if Hat Trick of Today fawningly said "he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side" of someone that turned out to be a child sex trafficker, because how could they have known?
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On February 03 2026 04:34 LightSpectra wrote:Show nested quote +On February 03 2026 04:17 dyhb wrote:On February 02 2026 20:07 Hat Trick of Today wrote:
I can’t say that I’ve purposely chosen to hang out with someone who has pled guilty to procuring a child for prostitution and of soliciting a prostitute. You mean you haven’t purposefully chosen to hang out with somebody that has pled guilty to either of those yet? The logic of this statement is that you potentially hang out with several of these, but you’ll only find out if you did in the future when and if they plead guilty to the crimes. That's a good point. It should would not be weird or suspicious at all if Hat Trick of Today fawningly said "he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side" of someone that turned out to be a child sex trafficker, because how could they have known?
More TDS again? If his friend told him they were 18, why’s it his fault when it turned out his friend was lying? He got duped just like the rest of us #UckFepstein #MAGA
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United States43542 Posts
On February 03 2026 05:16 Ryzel wrote:Show nested quote +On February 03 2026 04:34 LightSpectra wrote:On February 03 2026 04:17 dyhb wrote:On February 02 2026 20:07 Hat Trick of Today wrote:
I can’t say that I’ve purposely chosen to hang out with someone who has pled guilty to procuring a child for prostitution and of soliciting a prostitute. You mean you haven’t purposefully chosen to hang out with somebody that has pled guilty to either of those yet? The logic of this statement is that you potentially hang out with several of these, but you’ll only find out if you did in the future when and if they plead guilty to the crimes. That's a good point. It should would not be weird or suspicious at all if Hat Trick of Today fawningly said "he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side" of someone that turned out to be a child sex trafficker, because how could they have known? More TDS again? If his friend told him they were 18, why’s it his fault when it turned out his friend was lying? He got duped just like the rest of us #UckFepstein #MAGA
Guiffre was trafficked to Epstein from Mar-a-Lago. Trump wasn’t downstream of Epstein getting tricked, his links to Guiffre predate Epstein’s.
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EPT![[image loading]](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/G_-r82KWMAApC51.jpg)
