>I was again, arguing about work on reddit. Someone said that even animals "work" to survive. I found that the comparison was not really good.
Seems like a good comparison to me. Society is not post-scarcity. People in society must produce a surplus and contribute that surplus. Economics is how we measure how much contribution happened.
>Food and shelter are abundant.
Food prices are climbing and housing is in bubble territory. Abundance is complicated.
>I guess that's what people criticize about current capitalism.
Marx has many valid arguments against capitalism. It's very obvious today that socialism is dead. It officially died in 1989. Though that doesnt solve the problems with capitalism.
>In earlier times, in hunter gatherer societies, food was scarce and work was important. But today, you cannot tell people that working in fast food or in customer support is mandatory to eat and have a roof on your head.
Nobody is saying they must work the mcjob. Many many other jobs out there. Entrepreneurship is important to capitalism.
However we absolutely are saying you must contribute something to society in order to eat and have a roof over their head. If you don't, that's your decision, you deal with the consequences. Our society is not at the point where work is optional. Perhaps getting people out of the mcjobs and building a fully automated factory where food just comes out at no cost. Where housing can be 3d printed in a weekend anywhere in the world. We get to the point where maslow heirarchy of needs is solved and you can decide to not-work as much as you like.
I think the issue is we are not in a post scarcity world and do not work towards such a thing. If it is cheaper to hire a human instead of automatic a job - we do that. Eventually exporting jobs to the poorest countries where people suffer creating useless crap or fast fashion.
What we are doing is not reasonable if you had the greater good of humanity and planet in mind. The return on investment alone is a bad compass that will make more and more people suffer.
Never criticize. It will never work or be beneficial at all. No point even going to your manager. It's not your problem and you haven't been asked to help. Furthermore, it's your manager's job to fix this and they too aren't doing their job. When you criticize you will be criticize them as well.
I've been in your position many times. The big problem arrives is when incompetent and useless coworkers start unloading their work onto you. I have been in this situation many times as well. The best advice here is to never lie. Never 'cover'/lie for said coworkers.
Oh another rule, never let any coworkers know how much work you do. You arent just avoiding bragging, tons of benefits down this line. Could be the case of what's happening here.
This is what this is all about. It's not so much the money but also militaristic strategic assets. Moldova and Georgia doesnt have Russian war to deal with.
Russia has lots of land all over the black sea. They could build a gigantic base near rostov-on-don. So why dont they? To strike from and base at Rostov would be foolish. So many tight bottlenecks to get in and out. Maybe Novorossiysk instead? but no crimea is obviously important to them. Except novo is happening. They are building a naval base there. It will take time. In probably about 10-15 years crimea will go back to ukraine and this will be all over.
What's unsaid here. Why is it so important for russia to maintain such a huge naval presence in the black sea? This fleet isn't going past istanbul. Navy isn't even useful in war anymore really. An F35 from 40,000ft is practically untouchable by the russian navy and could probably sink their entire fleet from 300km away.
So what is it? Romania? Bulgaria? Turkey? Who on the black sea is Russia so afraid of?
Putin doesn't want to lose power. All these propaganda, military moves are to give poor people something to take their eyes and minds off the reality - him robbing the country for 30 years. If you have absolute power for long time you know what happens.
>Putin doesn't want to lose power. All these propaganda, military moves are to give poor people something to take their eyes and minds off the reality - him robbing the country for 30 years. If you have absolute power for long time you know what happens.
I dont see this as the answer. If it's really power, march to Kyiv and take it all. They could do it. Crimea is more or less the only annexation because that's all they want.
Even the syrian conflict and russia is the same story. They are really just preserving their military base.
Then also look at Turkey's financial woes and it sure does look like Russia doing it.
Turkey seems to understand this and has been making diplomatic efforts to repair relations. The irony is that it seems they are coming back together more recently because they hate the USA.
I mean his only goal is to stay in power. If you "match to Kyiv" - you are guaranteed casualties and it's not going to help him with his ratings - now you have poor people with dead relatives. Russian army/people can fight well - but so can Ukrainians and Chechens - but there is zero motivation for the ordinary Russians to fight at the moment. He will always send private military groups but there is only that much you can do. There is no ideology to fight for, no grand ideas, no grand leader - a bunch of crooks living in palaces with their offspring living in London/Paris/Florida mansions.
Syria was easy - fighting against people with no modern weapons. But when Turkey shot down Russian jet - what was the reaction? It was a joke. How about helping Armenia recently with all "Collective Security Treaty" agreements? Nothing, again!
So Russia backs down against Turkey's aggression on a fair "casus belli" but is going against NATO on Ukraine? Please.
A strong leader has a strong country behind him - Putin's Russia is not, it is mostly frustrated population with weak economy and not much hope for the bright future. And whatever Putin is doing is not good for Russia, not improving its economy and not improving lives of ordinary people but doing exactly the opposite.
Putin is all about propaganda, illusions, dreams and nightmares - he knows propaganda works and he pumps billions into it. The reality will hit hard if he believes (or will believe) in his own picture of the world.
Putin, Lukashenko, Nazarbaev - their only agenda is to stay in power. There is no crime they will not do for this. If it means gas chambers - we are going to get gas chambers. Unfortunately this is the new reality of this era. But the good news is - they are old and don't understand or appeal to the younger generations. There is still a chance.
>It's fascinating to me that Donald Trump's message was horrifying, but when biden's message is just the same, we're totally ready to ignore this because it's just the flu and the economy is more important than our lives.
Covid response has been entirely 100% political. Medicine/Science was never involved.
The division of lockdown or not to lockdown, wearing masks, etc. These have all came down nearly perfectly along political lines in many countries. It shouldn't be like that at all. There should be lots of right-wingers who gladly wear a mask and get locked down. There should be lots of left-wingers who would not.
It was also not risk assessment. If you are under 50, the risk of covid was always known to be far less than the flu. Meanwhile people who were scared shitless of covid are also the cigar smoking, drunk driving, 100km/h in a 30km/h school zone type people.
I'm pretty sure it has everything to do with yellow journalism. The yellow journalists have convinced their filter bubble group that covid is far worse than it ever was considered to be.
For unvaccinated hospitalization risk, 2% of Democrats responded correctly, compared with 16% of Republicans. In fact, 41% of Democrats replied that at least 50% of unvaccinated people have been hospitalized due to COVID-19.
Let's put it more accurately. 98% of democrats answered wrong with higher risk than is in reality. There is a <1% chance of hospitalization with covid if you're unvaccinated.
It's all political and the political divide in the USA has never been wider.
Pleasure is fleeting. It must be or else you'd still be glowing from your first orgasm.
Inevitably the search for pleasure will require variety and inevitably that variety brings you to inflicting pain on others.
We do it publicly. The romans fed people to the lions. We have lots of violent sports. Nascar isn't about driving left. It's about the crashes. Hockey is about the fights and checking. Lets not even evaluate violent videogames.
The real trick is understanding what's happening in your brain and controlling this before it gets to the need to inflict pain.
Out of the hockey fans I know, only the really casual watchers are interested in fights and checking at all. The big fans are way more interested in the strategy and statistics and many of them are annoyed when a big fight breaks out and wastes time in the game. If what you were saying was true, way more people would just be watching videos on the internet of people getting into street fights than professional sports.
It's way easier to find videos of car crashes than it is to watch hours of cars driving in circles. I don't understand the appeal of NASCAR, but it's clearly not about the crashes.
> Lets not even evaluate violent videogames.
Why not? You might find that long-term players of games are more interested in good gameplay than bloody effects or the violence itself. I've noticed that games in general are tending toward less violence and blood than a decade or so ago.
I think you are being unfairly judgemental about things that you don't understand.
>Out of the hockey fans I know, only the really casual watchers are interested in fights and checking at all. The big fans are way more interested in the strategy and statistics and many of them are annoyed when a big fight breaks out and wastes time in the game. If what you were saying was true, way more people would just be watching videos on the internet of people getting into street fights than professional sports.
To be fair I havent watched in quite some time but as the saying goes... I went to a fight, and a hockey game broke out!
This is very simple to evaluate. What would happen to the NHL is fighting and checking was banned. Any physical violence is an immediate contract break and players thrown out of the league? Dont get another $.
Obviously violence would go away but how'd the sport work out? I'm thinking hockey would suck pretty hardcore. NHL viewership would be at all-time lows without question.
Also yes, street fighting videos are ridiculously popular but also why they were banned on so many platforms.
>It's way easier to find videos of car crashes than it is to watch hours of cars driving in circles. I don't understand the appeal of NASCAR, but it's clearly not about the crashes.
I mean no offence against nascar. F1 has nothing but crashes as well. Every highlight reel is about the crashes. So it is about nascar. Nascar highlights are all about crashes.
>Why not? You might find that long-term players of games are more interested in good gameplay than bloody effects or the violence itself. I've noticed that games in general are tending toward less violence and blood than a decade or so ago.
The violence is the point being made. Pleasure is fleeting. Violent video games are fantastic because it lets you chop someone's head off when you cant do it in person. When you have gone so far as to needing that level of pleasure, the next step in solving boredom will be more extreme.
>I think you are being unfairly judgemental about things that you don't understand.
Not judgmental at all. I've got my TF2 and skyrim installed. I watch violent sports. Im not judging people who do these things. I can see that's how people took my post by the heavy downvotes.
The point being made isnt about NHL being bad or good or that fights are or arent part of it. Its that this pleasure seeking constantly increases.
Pleasure seeking increases, sure, I just don't agree that violence is the prime focus or end goal of any majority of the participants or viewers of any of the things you brought up. Violence might be a part of it, but it's clearly not the main part of any of it, otherwise violence would be increasing rather than decreasing in every single one of those, and more people would just turn to the simpler sources of violence. Why would anybody watch Hockey for the fights when many games don't have any fights at all? Nobody who really just wants to see car crashes is going to sit through hours of cars driving in circles for the chance to occasionally see a car hit a wall and spin out.
> Every highlight reel is about the crashes. So it is about nascar. Nascar highlights are all about crashes.
Looking up "Nascar highlights" on YouTube, I can see that it's not all about crashes, it seems to be all about turnarounds, where somebody suddenly overtakes somebody else, or somebody loses their position quickly, so crashes are a part of that, but it doesn't seem to be "about crashes", but rather about changes in the standings of a race in progress.
>Pleasure seeking increases, sure, I just don't agree that violence is the prime focus or end goal of any majority of the participants or viewers of any of the things you brought up.
no, not prime focus yet. If hockey is a fresh pleasure, the fighting or violence isn't important. The end goal however is that you must have this violence or the pleasure seeker moves to the next thing which will have it.
>Violence might be a part of it, but it's clearly not the main part of any of it, otherwise violence would be increasing rather than decreasing in every single one of those, and more people would just turn to the simpler sources of violence.
That's my point and why i picked my choices. Violence isn't the prime focus. Afterall go watch boxing or MMA. Which some people have gotten their pleasure seek onto this for sure.
>Why would anybody watch Hockey for the fights when many games don't have any fights at all? Nobody who really just wants to see car crashes is going to sit through hours of cars driving in circles for the chance to occasionally see a car hit a wall and spin out.
Fighting is but 1 violence. Checking is another. Elbowing and slashing are others.
>Looking up "Nascar highlights" on YouTube, I can see that it's not all about crashes, it seems to be all about turnarounds, where somebody suddenly overtakes somebody else, or somebody loses their position quickly, so crashes are a part of that, but it doesn't seem to be "about crashes", but rather about changes in the standings of a race in progress.
Lets not even go into derbies where the goal is to literally crash into each other until you're the last working car.
Or monster trucks which crush other cars.
This is all about pleasure seeking and constantly need to increase which leads into sadism.
I love violent video games and media as much as the next gal (Doom, ME3, Hellsing as an anime, etc) - but I can absolutely see the connection of trying to work out that pleasure/boredom with fiction.
IMHO multiplayer toxicity is orthogonal to game type, you get that both in "violent" shooting games and also in abstract strategy or card games; harming or griefing someone, or verbally abusing them is a thing no matter if the gameplay itself is violent or fluffy.
There’s a lot of different nuances to all sports. I used to find baseball boring. But after coaching little league and watching and help players grow, I’ve developed a an appreciation for the nuances of both the games and the plays by themselves.
>For me it was the masks. The masks were my tipping point.
Before covid we knew masks were effective. Doctors obviously wear them during surgery. masks are important when dealing with HIV and such.
So when Fauci and others came out and said masks didn't work. They were knowingly lying. Worse yet, there were instructions on how to turn a tshirts in masks as well as how to produce hand santizers. They took these down.
The correct decision would have been to say exactly the fear, 'we have supply issues, we recommend cutting up old tshirts.' Not only does it prevent spread, it solves all problems.
Then we went a week later and they talked about 'new normal' and '2 weeks to flatten the curve'. Their lying didn't stop. They lost any smidgen of trust they had. Then they came out with emergency approvals to use experimental medicine for something that clearly isn't a vaccine and they are lying and calling it a vaccine? Sorry but this amount of lying should make literally everyone question their motives.
>1. It was statistically extremely likely a virus like COVID would come along soon, and models have predicted such viruses arising naturally for a long time.
Yes, been seeing these predictions for a long time.
>It is at the same time perfectly possible it was engineered.
Occams razor clearly indicates it was engineered at this point. We have had years to prove it was zoonotic, it's not.
>It is a plain stupid move, politically, to outwardly entertain the idea that COVID was engineered - unless you've got proof so damning not even China could ignore it. Unlikely to exist. And even then it is only going to score you a few feel-good points with the plebeians at home.
Not sure I agree with this point. There's a wide gap at this point between 'engineered to release and attack the world' and 'lab leak because they were incompetent.' Which is exactly what was already established. Many sources clearly indicated they werent following basic safety procedures at that lab.
>Either possibility has no impact at all on shorter term decision making. It is stupid to burden people whose immediate goal it is to save lives with even more political minefields they have to navigate.
On the contrary. They cannot do their job effectively without doing exactly this. If we ignored reality like we did, they now will react inappropriately. Which is what happened.
> Occams razor clearly indicates it was engineered at this point. We have had years to prove it was zoonotic, it's not.
You and I have very different ideas of what constitutes a proof. Failure to prove A does not imply ¬A and how/if Occam's razor should be applied here is an open debate.
> > It is a plain stupid move, politically, to outwardly entertain the idea that COVID was engineered - unless you've got proof so damning not even China could ignore it. Unlikely to exist. And even then it is only going to score you a few feel-good points with the plebeians at home.
> Not sure I agree with this point. There's a wide gap at this point between 'engineered to release and attack the world' and 'lab leak because they were incompetent.' Which is exactly what was already established. Many sources clearly indicated they werent following basic safety procedures at that lab.
This is not addressing the paragraph you quoted at all. Was this supposed to address something else?
> On the contrary. They cannot do their job effectively without doing exactly this. If we ignored reality like we did, they now will react inappropriately. Which is what happened.
This sounds to me like you believe "people saving lives" is referring to Fauci and colleagues. It's referring to the tens of thousands of researchers and doctors sharing data on treatment, studies, and tracking the evolution of the virus and its variants around the globe. Fauci's job is to enable them to do their work, not make it harder. There is a very real threat that if accusations were levied against China on the political stage, cooperation would cease or become more complicated. Remember that China comprises about one fifth of the world's population.
Is it really a mistake to forego an opportunity to gloat and score some cheap political points at home, swallow some pride, contain the urge to point fingers, whatever it is, to save lives? And that's not even considering other ramifications. Just because you believe someone fucked up does not mean it serves to immediately rub their face in it.
>In conclusion, one can theorize that falling interest rates can be indicative of tight monetary conditions in the economy in the sense that demand for credit is falling (due to explanation one) and/or access to debt funding/financing is limited to just the largest and most creditworthy businesses (due to explanation two).2
Boomers are retiring or getting damn close. They are moving their investments to 'safe' options like bonds. In reverse the system has to match up those bonds with someone issuing a bond. This is typically cars and houses. So for a boomer to invest in a bond, someone had to have bought a house. If interest rates were high, then people wouldnt be buying houses. So interest rates must drop so that the investments can happen.
Furthermore, it's also those same boomers who are selling their large house to 'downsize' or whatever. They cant sell unless someone is buying.
The even crazier thing, the real yields on bonds are negative right now. Interest rate is 0.25% in Canada while inflation is at 4.7%.
So retirement funds are effectively losing the difference. The boomers thought they could retire because they have some nice big numbers but it's double edged. They might have a big number but it doesnt grow much at 0.25% and their costs to buy things is 4.7% higher. So in a few years many boomers who retired may find out they cant afford to be retired anymore.
Caffeine is in so many things. Even more interesting is that it's a stimulant that is unique. Every other stimulant is controlled if not illegal. Amphetamines or cocaine for example. The problem is that it has a long history and government would not be successful in controlling it. Even though they clearly would if they could.
How many corporations literally provide coffee to their workers. Even to the point of paying you to drink it on a break? This drug is clearly beneficial to these corps. The increase in focus and productivity is obvious. This boost to cognitive function is what created the age of enlightenment.
>Tangentially, I recently moved to Canada and was surprised by the lack of quality healthcare..
This is very complex and absolutely hilarious when American democrats think of Canada as a better solution.
>Literally could not believe some walk ins have paper files and use fax, plus finding a GP apparently is a months long quest.
We have very good laws in place protecting health information. $10,000 tort damages for leaking health infos and then much larger fines for more problematic issues.
Some hospitals try to do the right thing and will have high security maturity. The other hospitals basically do the opposite. They forcefully will not secure their systems and save the money and put it in a fund to pay out the inevitable breach.
>Visiting a specialist took ages, and I wouldn’t say it was the best / most modern infrastructure there either.
Canada's healthcare system is tiered. You have the public single payer which is trash at best. Virtually all employers pay for health benefits which bring you to the 2nd tier. This gets you into a ward and such. There's a 3rd tier where you get good service, private rooms, skip lines. If you work in public sector or a big union you most likely are on this 3rd tier. The final tier is for the people whose names are on the wards. The "Such and such family ward" because they donated significant money to the hospital. These people get immediate access to everything you might expect. Nicest rooms. everything.
>(And I went in downtown Toronto, must be so much worse for more remote places I guess).
85% of Canadians live in urban areas near to the US border. If you choose to live somewhere else, you know you're living far from civilization and already accept the lack of service.
>In the end we kind of shunned the public system and decided to go private healthcare instead. But (luckily) have not really had to take advantage of it)
dont get me wrong. I dont mind our tiered system. ohip covers the basics which everyone should get coverage for. Break your arm? taxpayers/rich pay to fix it. 2nd tier is plenty for most people. 3rd tier is nice but most people dont realize it exists. Ive had a lady talking to me about how she has to wait many months to get in to a specialist, the same specialist that I waited a whole 3 days for. Also yes, the billionaire folks are going to get the best treatment, it's no surprise.
Seems like a good comparison to me. Society is not post-scarcity. People in society must produce a surplus and contribute that surplus. Economics is how we measure how much contribution happened.
>Food and shelter are abundant.
Food prices are climbing and housing is in bubble territory. Abundance is complicated.
>I guess that's what people criticize about current capitalism.
Marx has many valid arguments against capitalism. It's very obvious today that socialism is dead. It officially died in 1989. Though that doesnt solve the problems with capitalism.
>In earlier times, in hunter gatherer societies, food was scarce and work was important. But today, you cannot tell people that working in fast food or in customer support is mandatory to eat and have a roof on your head.
Nobody is saying they must work the mcjob. Many many other jobs out there. Entrepreneurship is important to capitalism.
However we absolutely are saying you must contribute something to society in order to eat and have a roof over their head. If you don't, that's your decision, you deal with the consequences. Our society is not at the point where work is optional. Perhaps getting people out of the mcjobs and building a fully automated factory where food just comes out at no cost. Where housing can be 3d printed in a weekend anywhere in the world. We get to the point where maslow heirarchy of needs is solved and you can decide to not-work as much as you like.