I vividly remember as a kid in the 1980s seeing coverage of strikes in Korea. They seemed absurdly violent. The image that stands out to me was a striker had fashioned some giant burner/flame thrower thing out of (I suppose) an Lpg tank and was driving the cops back with it. Hilarious and exciting to a 10yo boy.
Half a million South Korean workers walk off jobs in general strike
201–210 of 260 posts
Re: Half a million South Korean workers walk off jobs in general strike
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
Silicon valley and western semi conductor supremacy was build by US military spending in ww2, 1950s and 1960s. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo Its was only in the late 1970s that wallstreet got their money into silicon valley. Given the channel I did not do any fact checking and just assume the presentation is historically correct.
If we are to take that loose an interpretation of military funding (they invested in companies that did things for others later), I will also accept that because the military defines the state , everything that happens in a state can be counted as happening by military funding.
Internet was from DARPA
Turing machine was from WWII to crack Enigma
NASA advances (including CPU chips) were from the Cold War
I love private development such as SpaceX, but we'd be nowhere w/o developments we gained from warfare. Turns out you can really put your mind to something if it's life or death.
Re: Half a million South Korean workers walk off jobs in general strike
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
And yet account for all of that and divide it across remaining population and it will come out to nothing. The majority of their wealth is super inflated assets that would not change anyones life if divided across the population.
According to Wikipedia, in 2016 the Top 500 richest Germans, owned a combined wealth of 692 Mrd. €. That's around 8500 EUR per German citizen (infants and kids included) in 2016 - more today. For some people that is an amount that substantially affects their life. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_der_500_reichsten_Deutsc...
Yes, but you are liquidating the companies they own. If you consume them, they become much smaller, which means they have less employees, less work, less income, etc.
This is consuming capital for expenditures, which will in a macro view reduce wages in the long term.
Re: Half a million South Korean workers walk off jobs in general strike
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why on earth would anyone “trust” the media or any other group. That’s like believing Facebook has your best interest in mind. Figure out what a group wants to understand how they are spinning story.
It is more about having a slightly more sophisticated and realistic view of the world than a binary "they are good/bad". Everyone has biases, everyone is frequently imprecise in "something", and everything is political, but that does not mean you should distrust everyone and assume they are malicious/incompetent.
> It is more about having a slightly more sophisticated and realistic view of the world than a binary "they are good/bad"
That was not my take on treeman's comment. They didn't say distrust everyone, but that motives are usually far from altruistic and more selfish in nature. That people have selfish reasons for doing what they do is worth recognizing. A corporation offering you something most likely does not have your best interests in mind, but their bottom line.
Re: Half a million South Korean workers walk off jobs in general strike
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
It creates real jobs and wealth. A friend of mine has 200 people employed in his family office.
What wealth does a yacht crew member create? A private guard? Or a private chef? These are all luxuries wholly consumed by the individual rich person, and whatever "wealth" may have been created vanishes the next day under the spin of the hedonic treadmill. The labor of these employees could have instead been directed towards build infrastructure, nursing, childcare, or any other number of jobs which generate real an…
>The labor of these employees could have instead been directed towards build infrastructure, nursing, childcare, or any other number of jobs which generate real and persistent wealth which compounds across generations.
Yeah, that's called investment, and rich people also get flak for that.
Re: Half a million South Korean workers walk off jobs in general strike
#206Meanwhile in the US John Deere is cutting off health insurance to strong arm them into ending the strike. Allowing employers to control health care is not a good idea.
> Meanwhile in the US John Deere is cutting off health insurance to strong arm them into ending the strike.
Is not providing benefits when you're not working considered "strong arming" now? Is John Deere also "strong arming" workers into ending the strike by not paying their salaries when they're on strike?
Re: Half a million South Korean workers walk off jobs in general strike
#207Maybe all these snowpiercer, squid games, parasite narratives are having an effect? Its like all these dystopic, zombie, monster, battle royale movies and shows are just expressing the never ending exploitaion and helplessness around people.
I can tell you from personal experience that pretty much every Kdrama show I can think of, has the same narrative of the "Elite" being corrupt and abusing it's power and influence to do what they want vs the middle and poorer classes. Maybe not always as the focus of the story, but it's a common element. And it's not just the popular shows that make it big internationally. I guess it's ingrained into their culture. I…
Its not unique to Korean shows either. There's plenty of shows with similar themes in the US. Billions, Succession, Mr. Robot, etc.
Re: Half a million South Korean workers walk off jobs in general strike
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wanted to comment with a snide "QED", then got really sad, because jumping from poor reporting on boat rallies to "never trust the media" feels way too real right now.
Why on earth would anyone “trust” the media or any other group. That’s like believing Facebook has your best interest in mind. Figure out what a group wants to understand how they are spinning story.
A similar take:
Don’t get your updates on X from someone trying to sell you some version of X. Get it from someone who has to explain X before selling you on Y.
Re: Half a million South Korean workers walk off jobs in general strike
#209This gave me good laugh, the Bolshevist paper unironically named "Pravda". Recommended reading: Robert A. Heinlein - "Pravda" Means "Truth" An urgent message from Truthout Trump or no Trump, the US is still reeling from coordinated right-wing attacks on democracy, human rights, and independent media. We must raise $20K by the end of today to keep publishing the truth
Coming soon - the battle of the truths:
>“I created TRUTH Social and TMTG to stand up to the tyranny of Big Tech,” Trump said in a statement.
Re: Half a million South Korean workers walk off jobs in general strike
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
If we are to take that loose an interpretation of military funding (they invested in companies that did things for others later), I will also accept that because the military defines the state , everything that happens in a state can be counted as happening by military funding.
Internet was from DARPA Turing machine was from WWII to crack Enigma NASA advances (including CPU chips) were from the Cold War I love private development such as SpaceX, but we'd be nowhere w/o developments we gained from warfare. Turns out you can really put your mind to something if it's life or death.
Turing published his paper in 1936, so well before the war. The idea of a computer itself is usually set at the analytical engine by Babbage, whose main motivation was to aid with nautical navigation (a mainly civilian use).
Even more fundamentally: the military picked up Turing after the war started, so they had a good idea of what he could so because of work he'd done for others than them.
Granted, without the military we wouldn't have had the specific computers the military built, but in this context that is about as interesting as saying that without the military we wouldn't have had the innovation of the 150 mm high explosive shell.
Likewise, Tsiolkovsky did his theoretical work in a log cabin because he wanted to reason about space travel. Robert H. Goddard invented the liquid fuelled rocket in the interwar years working largely alone and in any case without any military support. Again the military shows up after stuff is very clearly moving.
Like, how is it surprising that an organisation that needs to pay for guns and the training of the people to use them would mostly invest in already existing prototypes?