51–60 of 191 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That would generally be the goal of pieces like this.
I think the goal of this piece is closer to reducing the importation of seafood that is the result of forced labor.
Government officials carefully select workers to send to China, screening them for their political loyalties to reduce the risk of defections. To qualify, a person must generally have a job at a North Korean company and a positive evaluation from a local Party official. “These checks start at the neighborhood,” Breuker said. Candidates who have family in China, or a relative who has already defected, can be disqualif…
That would generally be the goal of pieces like this.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>all that's broken at the moment in our end-stage capitalist societies That's a weird way to spell "the most prosperous time/space ever, where borderline poor people live like kings 200 years ago, and there are fewer and fewer poor people as time goes on and poverty threshold goes up".
Yes, poor people are better off in absolute terms than 200 years ago. No one is denying this. The question is more that, given how prosperous we are, and how much capital we have at our disposal, why do we still have so many poor people? Why is income inequality so bad?
We dont need less capitalism but rather more and faster.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Multiply 30000 a year (a lower end US wage) by the number of people living in what the UN defines as poverty. That’s about two billion. You get 60 trillion dollars a year. That’s close to world GDP. If you gave that out and those two billion people tried to spend it, you’d just get hyperinflation because there isn’t enough supply to match that demand. We have a lot of abundance but not that much. Still fewer people a…
Living on 30kUSD/yr is a lot different in London than it is in Buenos Aires. To set a universal safety net ensuring everyone had adequate food, shelter, education, medical care, transportation etc would be a lot cheaper than 60tUSD/yr.
There needs to be a law that, for any kind of Chinese seafood to be imported, foreign officials must be allowed to inspect the conditions. They already do it for food safety. When espionage laws make other monitoring impossible, there can be zero trust in these companies to do the right thing. Allow detailed, random inspections, or your imports are blocked and you make no money.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That would generally be the goal of pieces like this.
Could your comment be any more indicative of how self-centered American tech workers are? Bad things happen in other parts of world, regardless of what anyone in America thinks about "RTO".
I don't think their goal is improving people's work conditions in far away poor countries.
"Why we fight" Even with all the problems in the West, with all that's broken at the moment in our end-stage capitalist societies, never forget that the alternative, in almost all instances, is pure terror.
North Korea isn't an alternative to technofeudalism we have now, let alone the only alternative.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That would generally be the goal of pieces like this.
Could your comment be any more indicative of how self-centered American tech workers are? Bad things happen in other parts of world, regardless of what anyone in America thinks about "RTO".
But I’m also beyond believing that the goal of media outlets which shape people’s perceptions is to present objective reality out of the goodness of their hearts.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, poor people are better off in absolute terms than 200 years ago. No one is denying this. The question is more that, given how prosperous we are, and how much capital we have at our disposal, why do we still have so many poor people? Why is income inequality so bad?
Poverty is the default state. We shouldn’t ask why we have poor people but rather how can more wealth be generated to have fewer poor people. Our system has redefined what it means to be poor. So much that we’ve forgotten that abject poverty is the default state. We dont need less capitalism but rather more and faster.
There is no clean spectrum. We need more good capitalism (free trade, free movement of labor, entrepreneurship) and less bad capitalism (negative externalities, money in politics). Just like we need more good regulations and less bad regulations.
We shouldn't force heterogeneous things into a single conceptual basket (called "capitalism") and then conclude more is better, or less is better. Components of the system should be separated out and analyzed on their own merits.