this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2023
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Social media politics is confirmation bias by design.
A few of my opinions that are less popular here:
I have no desire to debate any of those here. I talk politics with friends and in person and I try to remain skeptical especially of facts that happen to go my way.
One factual point: we haven't tried communism, we tried socialism. Communism was more of a faraway ideal.
Not debating substance of the claims, as debate not asked for.
And most communist states have actually just been fascists. Like, the USSR and China didn't really have the people owning the means of production, or anything near equality, egalitarianism, or fair wealth distribution.
Actually, I don't have numbers on China, but in USSR throughout most of properly recorded economic history 10% of the wealthiest people owned about 20% of all money in the country, give or take depending on the year. In modern Russia, it is about 65% from what I remember, and that doesn't include offshore funds of the oligarchs.
Also, they weren't fascist by any definition. Authoritarian - yes. Fascist - no.
Not arguing for anything here, both countries could be way better, but your claims are wrong.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1364368/average-wealth-by-percentile-russia/
Thank you! Even worse than I remember.
It doesn't make sense to call a semantic claim factual. I'm fine with trying to push a different definition for Communism, but by the common understanding of the word, the USSR, (past) China, Cuba, Vietnam, etc., were or are all Communist states.
The word "communism" is clearly and explicitly stated by original commenter as an economic system ("Bridled capitalism is a better system than communism") and not ideology, as per definition you try to give.
USSR, China, Cuba, Vietnam etc. had socialism as their economic system, and that's an encyclopedic fact, not semantics.
Communist-ish.
Also Dictator-ish.
A perfect solution does not exist. I don't see anything too controversial about this unless you're implying that unions are somehow the problem. I would agree that trade unions would be better. But more ideally workers owning the means of production would be best. Though possibly still not perfect.
Good landlords exist. That however does not mean that landlords are generally good. Or that the sentiment against them is undeserved. Or that we should have landlords in the first place. Far too many sit back and cash in, as you put it.
There is no such thing as unbridled capitalism. Capitalism is always serving someone. But it's never the laborers or workers. Also Leninism != communism. (Yes they like to call themselves that and democratic. But that's never made it true.) And no, capitalism hasn't been much more beneficial in practice than leninism. This is not a defense of leninists. Far from. Just pointing out the pot calling the kettle black. Realistically there's little to point to capitalism being any better than mercantilism that came before.
Sometimes views can be unpopular because they're uninformed. Which, not wanting to debate this sort of thing definitely points to. That said, I have a bigger issue with not being able to debate/defend my views, than how popular they are with group X.
Not debating is mostly about what is beneficial for me. Interpret it as you will, I'm a happier person not trying to convince Internet strangers that they haven't theorically solved the puzzle of how to organize society.
There's not much interpretation to be had. Though, thanks for permission I guess?
The problem with the first two things is the message seems to be that all bosses are bad and all landlords are bad and you should hate them all.
The owner of my company pays more than I've ever made in my life (like double), gives us a ton of freedom, has stated that if things are slow he's fine with people chilling. Half of the time I walk into the warehouse, everyone is playing on their phones. We've also got a pickleball court. He pays for 75% of health insurance and buys everyone lunch once a month. I also know that he payed for a coworker's legal fees when they were trying to get their kids back from their drug addicted mother.
All that, and a few weeks back some guy was trying to get people to unionize because he read something on the internet.
The problem with that entire message. Is that you're misrepresenting what was said, to the point of making a strawman. And then misrepresenting an anecdote as evidence to prove a trend far far larger than it. One that all actual evidence paints a completely opposite picture.
I literally said good landlords can and do exist. Similarly isolated good bosses and CEOs can exist. But they are very isolated. To the point that they're not representative. Where I work, my direct boss happens to be generally great. It goes heavily downhill the further up you go. Our CEO is feckless. 3rd generation. More interested in investing and financing with the money his inheritance provided him than running the business his family built. Which is much more the norm.
If your companies owner is really that great, you should stop taking them for granted. They aren't representative in any way. Definitely not of any larger companies. I'm guessing yours is positively tiny. That tends to be where the better ones are. Because power corrupts.
When I said the problem with the first two things, I was referring to the concepts laid out by the person you replied to. I wasn't saying the problem with the first two things you said.
Our revenues are about $20m/mo, we're not massive but not tiny. I don't take anyone for granted, not sure where you got that notion.
My point is that while there is a clear problem with both, it doesn't represent everything. Social media tends to boil things down to oversimplifications and people will charge forward without thinking critically.
While that is true. Everyone seems to let perfection be the enemy of improvement. If the portrayal of anything different isn't a utopia, people will scoff at it and say that it isn't worth it, even if it is lightyears ahead of the current shit system.
This is the frustration I had with so many people back when the ACA was the issue of the day.
Like, sure, there are issues with the ACA, single payer, universal healthcare, etc. but at the same time, look at privatized healthcare, where the wealthy have no issues and get the best care and want to maintain the status quo, the middle class are forced into lower classes by medical expenses, lower classes are just sort of expected to quietly poor themselves to death, and the actual poor get underfunded state provided care...that the upper classes loudly complain about having to fund with "their" taxes. It's a system that's been corrupted into a socio-economic instrument of control by ownership classes to maintain their grip on both the money of the country and the lives and upward mobility of everyone beneath them.
But yeah let's not try anything different because your wait time for your sore throat might be a few extra minutes.
I live in belgium where it is 4€ to see a doctor and maybe 50€ to see a specialist.
Wait times are 1 day max. Wait times for a specialist are usually a month.
When I was employed by a big hospital living in the US, my wait times were triple that even with "great health insurance" and I would pay $350 for a checkup with something routine like shot updates or an STD screen.
That's because there aren't so many people in Belgium (yet). In Germany there are specialists you come on a waiting list and tell you that you perhaps get a seat in 2 years. Some don't even have a waiting list anymore. For rheumatologist I wait for 3 months minimum, as a regular patient there.
That literally doesn't matter. What matters is the ratio between doctors and specialists to people.
If nurses and doctors are tightly controlled (like in the US) and refused entry to the profession on graduation on the basis of "keeping wages high" (and then reducing their wages anyway) like in the US with the licensing board, you will ALWAYS have horrible wait times because they purposely radically understaff hospitals.
For example, in Belgium, dentristry ia rate-limited by having extremely strict entry exams such that they have like a 5% pass rate purely to try to not flood the market with dentists. Now it is almost impossible to find a dentist without an "inside connectin." It means dentists are almost unanimously rich, but at the expense of the people. This is not so for doctors.
I don't know what the licensing system is in Germany or what the study requirements are. In america, this is purely a capitalism problem. Hospitals are almost all for-profit. This means that they will intentionally run on the most barebones crew necessary and work them past the bone in order to extract the maximum profit per-patient (same thing is happening in almost every single manufacturing industry). There are mass strikes and quitting by nurses and doctors because they essentially get 14 days off per year and have to work 12-16 hour shifts, 60 hours a week because the hospitals are so ridiculously understaffed to increase profit. Doctors are salaried and often don't get paid for their extra hours. The same waiting lists exist in america for certain specialists, by design. Whatever problems there are with the medical system in Germany, I promise you they are much worse in America.
I can only give the Pickard facepalm to this comment.
Confirmed
I haven't raised rent for my tenants for 3 years and dropped it during the pandemic. I repair everything in the house as fast as humanly possible. I added AC to the house and replaced my furnace with a heat pump to reduce the carbon footprint in efforts to increase my tenants comforts.
I will eventually move back into the house when I move back to the states. So I want to make sure anyone who stays there is happy and keeps an eye on my house.
People here call me a pig or scum. Good thing other peoples opinions don't matter to me. I just want to point out that some of us are not here to make a buck.
The criticism isn't really supposed to be about how nice or not nice you are anyway. The landlaird bad meme is just a good way to open people's eyes if need be and allow people to vent which they have the right to. The fundamental problem is with the ownership of an asset that is a necessity. And probably the fact that it even is so commodified.
Crazy how that information never comes through in these initial messages. It's almost like it's a bad message, and serves only to further polarize each side.
it's easy to just clump everyone into a single category and then point at it and say 'that box bad'. it's also a mental shortcut our kind has taken throughout our history and, for better or worse, it has served us.
the alternative would be to actually take a step back and do some thinking instead of just agreeing with the hivemind. that takes effort, and it's significantly harder to find someone to agree with you on a fine-tuned idea. hence 'me smash landlord'. it also introduces the risk of becoming to trusting and getting burned by a bad landlord you would have judged as good. human adversity to risk plays a big part in favouring heuristics as well.
it's way easier to catalogue the kind of landlord you present here as a corner-case, no true scotsman, in order to prop up the general idea. for what it's worth, I don't think anybody is doing it out of any explicit form of malice.
When you make the youth the proletariat, the proletariat is less mature, yeah.
Bridled capitalism only exists in the 1st world nations who exploit the rest of the planet. Ask africans, south americans and others about it. I have never personally seen this "good capitalism" you talk about.
It's even starting to show its ugly face to you guys. Good luck if you think it can stop fascism.