Astronomer & video game data scientist with repressed anger

  • 0 Posts
  • 60 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

help-circle
  • Not explicitly, maybe, but implicitly, absolutely, and in multiple ways:

    • Supporting the system that creates one over the other
    • Having ‘bootstrap’ attitudes about the poor
    • Worrying about property value over utilization
    • Complaining about the homeless rather than the lack of action on housing
    • Voting against people who run on public housing

    In so, so many ways, people say they prefer the latter over the former. Usually just with the caveat that the homeless people also be invisible.


  • That’s just the system. This is what happens when people confuse commerce with capitalism: They think that capitalism is being rewarded for doing commerce better. Instead, capitalism is about leveraging ownership of property and underpaying workers in order to get money for free.

    And the thing about money is that it’s really just a proxy for power. When you only have enough of it to eek out a comfortable life (or less), you don’t really notice, because all of your power goes in to achieving or maintaining that acceptably good life (or hanging on for dear life trying to survive), but once your needs are comfortably and handidly met, money is entirely about being able to make other people do whatever you want. And the more money you have, the more things you can get them to do, or the more of them that you can get to do what you want.

    And if you’ve managed to be one of the lucky ones who just get free money for owning shit, then you have the power at your fingertips to try to grow your power over others exponentially, while still doing no honest work in your days. And if you’re a shitty person who gets off on all of this, that’s exactly what you’ll do.

    The wealthy are insufferably greedy leeching assholes because one does not become wealthy without being greedy, leeching off of others, and being an insufferable asshole.




  • The entire factory industry, worldwide, uses the assembly line model invented by Ford, an American company. This system also brought prices down on cars, making them a staple of life rather than a luxury.

    Right, but if you have the motivation to make things affordable for people, you can and will get to the same place. The profit motivation and the centralization of wealth are not the key motivators here.

    They’re just the ones that made Ford rich and famous enough to aggressively publicize himself.


  • They make it obtuse on purpose, both to prop up the tax return industry, and to make it both possible to create loopholes for the rich to avoid taxes, and make it so that the rest of us can’t really benefit from those loopholes.

    It’s Byzantine on purpose. They could simplify it any time they wanted to.




  • Here’s the thing, though: Whenever you have a position like “Person for Group”, that Group is being singled out for a reason.

    And that reason is lack of representation.

    To put it another way, so have a Minister for Women is a tacit acknowledgement that the others operate as if men are the default person. All of the other ministers are Ministers for Men.