amw

5 ms·

1.
by amw 8mo ago
This speculative nonsense adds nothing: > We know that state actors have invested heavily in understanding and exploiting these divisions. Russian active measures campaigns have been documented doing exactly this kind of work: identifyin
2.
by amw 8mo ago
Donating to reduce the government debt is such a wildly dumb thing to exist. The US is currency sovereign! It has no risk of default on any debt denominated in USD! The only reason a site like this exists is for politicians to distract from
3.
by amw 2y ago
OP, if you're reading this, the animation pegs my CPU. Relying on your readers to engage reader mode is going to turn away a lot of people who might otherwise enjoy your content.
4.
by amw 3y ago
There is more authoritarianism in your life in the US than there is for the average person in Cuba. I know it's hard to believe, but it turns out spending almost half your waking hours selling your labor for a wage to a much richer per
5.
by amw 3y ago
They don't, this is a lie from the country that's been embargoing Cuba into oblivion for sixty years.
6.
by amw 3y ago
Absolutely. I feel like the most important infographic for understanding the last fifty years or so of our economy is the one where productivity skyrockets to the moon while wage stays put. And the most important _book_ for understanding th
7.
by amw 3y ago
> Most of us are raised from a young age to not steal, the existing environment encourages those who do that get away with it, at the expense of those that follow ethics, morals and rules. Cheating and academic dishonesty is rampant beca
8.
by amw 3y ago
I don't think it's demonstrated that at all, simply that it was better than feudalism. But China has built 15000 miles of high speed rail in ten years, and has functionally eliminated homelessness by the admission of the World Ban
9.
by amw 3y ago
What horror that it might be on the market to be bought as an owner-occupied residence instead. When people justify landlords as providing housing, it always seems to be without consideration to the particular financing/market circumst
10.
by amw 3y ago
It is not useful to individualize this. Even if you could make a solid argument that being a landlord might sometimes take more effort than working a job does for someone else to pay your mortgage for you, corporations holding many properti
11.
by amw 3y ago
> It's also the only thing that produces new construction It's not, though. People constructed housing for thousands of years without landlords. There are plenty of ways to fund constructions without markets. We have built a so
12.
by amw 3y ago
My logic is that just as you don't change the movement of a cloud of gas by changing the velocity of individual molecules one at a time, you also do not change society by imputing moral weight to individual actions. People constantly l
13.
by amw 3y ago
The term that applies here is "petite bourgeoisie". They are nominally rentiers, but without the scale of economic control given to the actual bourgeoisie by their relationship to the means of production.
14.
by amw 3y ago
> but anytime you buy stock, the goal is to benefit from the profits of the company without doing any work yourself. Which is arguably also bad for the same reason. Not bad, morally, though, and that's kind of the key thing. When yo
15.
by amw 3y ago
Individual landlords can be moral, upstanding people, and the incentive structure around deriving your income from rents can systemically produce inhumane outcomes. They are not mutually exclusive.
16.
by amw 3y ago
In Marx's usage (the common usage of the time), dictatorship just means "leadership", and doesn't have the same connotation of "ruling over others without their consent". Which is his point, really: socialism e
17.
by amw 3y ago
They're legendary to people mostly exposed to capitalist-owned media, that is.
18.
by amw 3y ago
These responses are the worst of bad-faith every time I see them. If you live in a place, with family and friends and social ties, but it has some stuff you want to change, why would the solution ever be "move away" rather than &q
19.
by amw 3y ago
Trump wasn't particularly special for this. In fact, by tanking TPP, he actually stopped at least one massive tool for curtailing IP sovereignty. Not making a flattering statement about Trump here, just that _he_ wasn't _the probl
20.
by amw 3y ago
> is something that might be defensible. I would like to propose that it never is, and only seems so sometimes because our society is insane.
21.
by amw 3y ago
The West invests money in things that it expects to see generate a return. Sometimes this results in the Marshall Plan, a massive development effort whose main strategic goal was to isolate newly allied Russia and China in the post-WWII era
22.
by amw 3y ago
Demand doesn't really drive supply, not the way we're told it does. The manufacturers want to make devices that give them a further income stream, and they just have a marketing budget for making sure demand doesn't drop too
23.
by amw 4y ago
Because chasing those quarterly returns will always trend toward taking money out of the comfort of the workers. Certain individual companies at certain individual times might get a temporary advantage by actually investing in themselves, b
24.
by amw 4y ago
Sorry, I missed this reply when you made it 11 days ago. Happy to respond: Automation of manual labor _should_ result in a _lot_ of benefits to workers. But here's the thing: Automation is, largely, capital. And under capitalism, owner
25.
by amw 4y ago
It's worth reading the response from a person in China. That's not to say you should believe it _more_, but that you should hear what the objections are and whether they make sense (and whether that critique calls into question an
26.
by amw 4y ago
Not the way America is, no. China gives loans with minimal terms to build infrastructure, and has a record of forgiving the debts when they become unpayable. The US (via the IMF) lends money for infrastructure under terms that require conce
27.
by amw 4y ago
Most of those "actions" are reported to us by our government, whose ability to report objective fact has not been demonstrated. To take Xinjiang, in particular: do a deep dive into the reporting and see where it comes from. You&#x
28.
by amw 4y ago
Update since i posted: chinese foreign ministry has confirmed, says it's for scientific purposes
29.
by amw 4y ago
Not that China needs to be contained anyway. The only worldwide threat to national security is the country with 800 military bases worldwide and a hundreds-of-years-long history of invading someone every few years.
30.
by amw 4y ago
I understand why the State Department hyperventilates over "Chinese offensive capabilities" but no normal person ever needs to. China is not a threat to everyday Americans.

More ›