Viewing profile — amw

This speculative nonsense adds nothing: > We know that state actors have invested heavily in understanding and exploiting these divisions. Russian active measures campaigns have be…

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…

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.

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 h…

They don't, this is a lie from the country that's been embargoing Cuba into oblivion for sixty years.

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 s…

> 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 an…

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 elimina…

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 co…

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 p…

> 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 co…

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 …

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 …

> 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, morall…

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 mu…

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 …

They're legendary to people mostly exposed to capitalist-owned media, that is.

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 wou…

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 …

> 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.

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 t…

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 bu…

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 …

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: Autom…

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…