241–250 of 328 posts
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Regulation is an assertion of authority over the property of others - I'd never tell you what colour to paint your roof, but if I could do it, it would be a dilution of your ownership.
Not saying we need 0% taxes and 0 regulations, but less is more here.
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People forget that there are many axes of the political compass. I think political scholars count over a dozen. Who knows how many there are, but it's definitely not a simple linear left/right dichotomy. One other important axis in this context is the authoritarian/democratic dichotomy. We know that the left/authoritarian (Soviets) quadrant of this space doesn't work, just as we know the right/authoritarian (Nazis) q…
Ideals cannot be mapped to numerical axes. At least in present day, it's impossible to for the left/democratic quadrant to exist. If you want to limit seize the means of production from the likes of Elon Musk, you need a position more powerful than him. Guess where the next Elon Musk is end up in such a system? With the absence of monetary capital, greedy people seek to maximize political capital instead, creating co…
For example, a person with ten titles to ten houses can only live in one of them at a time; their control of the other nine comes from the ability to call the police who'd evict any squatters - which then makes it possible to rent them out. But suppose the police wouldn't show up?
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I think you do not have basic notions of economy and what you just said is just propaganda. There's no two kinds of humans - from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs. The doctors will get free healthcare too, if they need it. Trying to put market value on medical care is inhumane and prioritizes an economic system over human life. I'm not sure why you're talking about rich people here, but b…
>the accumulation of capital is what's truly exploitative When I think of "accumulation of capital" in modern society, semiconductor fabs are the ultimate example. I can't imagine disagreeing that the building of such factories encompasses most of the world via supply chains and most of the exploitation in it. But I feel like there's an ambiguity and I don't understand what is to be our goal. Should we not have "accu…
In this case, this could either be through a coop (e.g. those factories are directly owned by the workers working in them, decisions are made democratically) or through a worker's state (the factories are owned by the state as a representation of the workers - this is what the USSR tried to do, but failed miserably at).
I think any other scenario has people leeching off the work of the folks actually producing those semiconductors - e.g. exploitation.
Index funds don't do anything to help this - just cause it's a bigger group of strangers stealing the products of the worker's labor doesn't make it any less exploitative.
And nobody's saying we should tear down the factory, we just shouldn't let it be owned by people who have nothing to do with the work being done so they can make money from nothing but the fact they had money already.
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>Every country does good things and bad things. You just choose to ignore the bad things one country does and solely focus on them for another one. I agree. Comparing two countries in an unbiased way is very difficult. >people are dying because they can't afford life-saving insulin If I develop type 2 diabetes, do you think my life expectancy would be longer in Cuba? Who can I trust for relevant statistics and inform…
> If I develop type 2 diabetes, do you think my life expectancy would be longer in Cuba? I think that depends on your socioeconomic class and your insurance in the US. I'd say for the median citizen, life expectancy in Cuba with diabetes is probably higher as insulin cost isn't an issue and they do very frequent health check-ins that would be prohibitively expensive for a lot of Americans. But seeing how you post on…
A family member with the condition relied on Medicare. That seems like the most likely scenario.
>Consensus internationally seems to be that the Cuban healthcare system is legit, but I must admit i haven't dug all that deep.
Neither have I. But this is interesting. A little over ten years ago, there were reports of "mass deaths" of patients of a mental hospital in Cuba due to the cold.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cuba-trial/cuba-tries-doc...
I guess it's due to my imagination, and the things I read when I was younger, but the more something is understated, the more it's downplayed, and the more details that are left out, the more horrifying it can be. Sometimes I have the impression that other people don't ask questions, either out loud, or in their mind. That they know where to stop, as if there were a nice neat line that separated us from what's beyond the pale.
How can you die of cold in Cuba is one question I think of. Well, it was down to about 38F, and reportedly the glass from the windows and doors was missing. Also the blankets.
Next question would be why was that stuff missing? Perhaps it was taken and sold?
Why would it be sold? Perhaps because it was worth vastly more on the open market than the staff were paid in salaries?
All rhetorical questions in my head, not questions for you particularly.
This story plants in my mind the idea of doctors to whom blankets and pieces of glass are such wealth.
Whenever I read a comment about the Cuban health care system, I will think of it.
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>Every country does good things and bad things. You just choose to ignore the bad things one country does and solely focus on them for another one. I agree. Comparing two countries in an unbiased way is very difficult. >people are dying because they can't afford life-saving insulin If I develop type 2 diabetes, do you think my life expectancy would be longer in Cuba? Who can I trust for relevant statistics and inform…
If you develop type-2 diabetes, you may be able to cure it by not eating any sugar for a few weeks. And, keep it off after, if you never eat sugar except with enough fiber. I.e., apples ok, donuts & froot loops not. That is good advice for all of us: there is never a good reason to give yourself type-2 diabetes. For many people, cinnamon is a good temporary treatment for type-2 diabetes. But some people have a bad re…
Developing type-2 diabetes will be a process that happens over several decades. So which few weeks is it that I need to stop eating sugar? I need to know because I was going to make cookies.
>there is never a good reason to give yourself type-2 diabetes
I've taken medication that progressively leads to type 2 diabetes for about 17 years. You don't think I have a good reason? Or you just never imagined one?
>Probably few Cubans have type-2 diabetes. It is a 1st-world problem; another name is Processed Food disease.
Being able to get medication that causes type 2 diabetes as a side effect might be a first world thing too. I would be concerned about that.
>Type 1 diabetes is much bigger trouble: you need to inject insulin
People inject insulin for type 2 diabetes; I'm not sure what you are referring to.
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I don't know that having a high abortion rate is "manipulation", they are of course going to have a high rate relative to the rest of Latin America. I cannot find a sourcing for the specific rate of abortion they cite. The first "manipulation" identified would not impact Cuba's position as 1st in life expectancy in Latin America, as they concede in their article.
> I don't know that having a high abortion rate is "manipulation" It is because if you cannot take care of a kid with some kind of problem and dies young, it lowers the life expectancy. So they encourage abortion and remove it from the count.
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South Korea - has elections - has a free press - allows people to leave etc
It does now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwangju_Uprising >South Korean universities were shut down, newspaper offices were closed, and any political activity that went against the policies of General Chun Doo-hwan were strictly banned. In further details, all public gatherings that included more than three party were forbidden with an only exception for funerals. With the Korean news media muzzled by martial law,…
If North Korea suddenly decided to stop being oppressive I'd be 100% in favor.
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If communism was a real thing, it would have worked as predicted. It did not happen. I think one of the worst contributions of marxism (as in incorrect) is the theory of objective value (translating from spanish, I hope I am doing it right), which basically says how much you are being stolen. In fact, there is no such thing as objective value and this is very easy to demonstrate in the experience of any of us. It is…
This is not what Marx believed, he painfully toils through literally thousands of pages arguing for his theory of value, and is not that there is one objective value, which translates to the exploitation of the worker. In fact, his theory is grounded in the profound complication of what we consider 'value', specifically its duality under capitalism: "use value" and "exchange value". What you are most likely referring…
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Well one thing about going to a poor communist country is you still notice that a lot of people are doing regular people things like sending their children to school or dance lessons, having weddings, playing music, dancing, and drinking alcohol. The corollary to random consumer goods being in constant shortages is that other things are much more “affordable” than they’d be in a market economy. Cuba is not really in…
> The corollary to random consumer goods being in constant shortages is that other things are much more “affordable” than they’d be in a market economy. No way for their wealth, to begin with, and why you should choose how people choose? They are animals? Everything that is cheaper than its possible price is literally being paid by someone, with their labour or by others. Free things, literally, do not exist. And thi…
If free things don't exist, what are for-sale things made of?
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The market is the will of people. Any alternative thing is going to be more incorrectly adapted to the demand from people.
The market is one-dollar-one-vote. If you start with an equitable distribution of wealth, then sure, it's the will of the people. But if you start with wealth being disproportionally skewed towards a very small class - as is the case in every real-world developed economy today - the result is oligarchy, not democracy. The problem with mainstream economic right is that it ignores that, or assumes that markets will eve…