this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2024
2758 points (99.2% liked)
Lemmy Be Wholesome
6771 readers
510 users here now
Welcome to Lemmy Be Wholesome. This is the polar opposite of LemmeShitpost. Here you can post wholesome memes, palate cleanser and good vibes.
The home to heal your soul. No bleak-posting!
Rules:
1. Be Respectful
Refrain from using harmful language pertaining to a protected characteristic: e.g. race, gender, sexuality, disability or religion.
Refrain from being argumentative when responding or commenting to posts/replies. Personal attacks are not welcome here.
...
2. No Illegal Content
Content that violates the law. Any post/comment found to be in breach of common law will be removed and given to the authorities if required.
That means: -No promoting violence/threats against any individuals
-No CSA content or Revenge Porn
-No sharing private/personal information (Doxxing)
...
3. No Spam
Posting the same post, no matter the intent is against the rules.
-If you have posted content, please refrain from re-posting said content within this community.
-Do not spam posts with intent to harass, annoy, bully, advertise, scam or harm this community.
-No posting Scams/Advertisements/Phishing Links/IP Grabbers
-No Bots, Bots will be banned from the community.
...
4. No Porn/Explicit
Content
-Do not post explicit content. Lemmy.World is not the instance for NSFW content.
-Do not post Gore or Shock Content.
...
5. No Enciting Harassment,
Brigading, Doxxing or Witch Hunts
-Do not Brigade other Communities
-No calls to action against other communities/users within Lemmy or outside of Lemmy.
-No Witch Hunts against users/communities.
-No content that harasses members within or outside of the community.
...
6. No NSFW Content
-Content shouldn't be NSFW
-Refrain from posting triggering content, if the content might be triggering try putting it behind NSFW tags.
7. Content should be Wholesome, we accept cute cats, kittens, puppies, dogs and anything, everything that restores your faith in humanity!
Content that isn't wholesome will be removed.
...
8. Reposting of Reddit content is permitted, try to credit the OC.
-Please consider crediting the OC when reposting content. A name of the user or a link to the original post is sufficient.
...
Also check out:
Partnered Communities:
6.Jokes
...
Reach out to LillianVS for inclusion on the sidebar.
All communities included on the sidebar are to be made in compliance with the instance rules.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I don't think this hypothetical is about winning so much as never having to worry about your needs being met again. The calculus changes completely for a lot of people (not optimistic enough to say most) if that's not part of the equation.
Which is exactly why Capitalism keeps us barely holding on, by design.
What are you talking about? Capitalism is the system that focused on (in some countries even created) the "middle class", because it's beneficiary to have a whole group of people that have all their needs met and have disposable income to keep the machine running.
If you don't have money for iPads, cars, vacations, avocado toast and fancy lattes, capitalism grinds to a halt and crumbles.
The biggest companies and richest people of the world and not selling bread, water and shelter. They are selling fashion electronics, electric cars and ads on entertainment websites.
Did you just unironically say Avocado Toast?
No, I wrote it.
The middle class was created by the economic rights and protections provided by The New Deal and decades of unionization efforts. Crediting capitalism is not only disingenuous but also downright insulting to those who fought capitalists tooth and nail for what you're crediting those capitalists for.
The middle class existed long before the new deal or unions. Like a century before.
Actually the term was coined at the 1939 Worlds Fair and popularized in '44 with Roosevelt's signing of the GI Bill, but if you have even the smallest shred of evidence for your claims, go ahead, I'm humoring.
Go check the Wikipedia sources
That's not a source, that's a number. You have to link the sources, you can't just paste Wikipedia. In any case this is a discussion about specifically the American middle class.
Edit': Also I found the Wikipedia article you're citing and it directly contradicts your point: "The modern usage of the term "middle-class", however, dates to the 1913 UK Registrar-General's report, in which the statistician T.H.C. Stevenson identified the middle class as those falling between the upper-class and the working-class.[14] The middle class includes: professionals, managers, and senior civil servants. The chief defining characteristic of membership in the middle-class is control of significant human capital while still being under the dominion of the elite upper class, who control much of the financial and legal capital in the world."
See, you went to Wikipedia like a big boy and checked the sources yourself! Good job!
You also found, that it was not related to the new deal, nor to unions and it was defined in terms of capitalism. It must have been exhausting!
Right, but at cost to others, and attempting to minimize the cost to others trying to rationalize it. That's the point. Call it winning, call it succeeding, call it whatever you like, its me over us. The idea of accepting your benefit at the loss of numerous others tears people en masse down. Maybe another branch would become as popular, maybe not, but such choices are presented frequently in our civilization, and the choice is usually to take the win at other's expense.
Regardless, we are what we are and on a long enough time scale what we are will destroy us. That's not as sad to me as all the other creatures we'll take with us, but even we won't be able to sterilize all terran life, so the Earth will recover from us. Life will go on after we successfully fuck ourselves trying to fuck one another. I find solace in that.
There's virtually nothing that is not, at some scale, at a cost to others while benefitting oneself. Someone is always hungrier, sicker, whatever. However, the magnitude is what matters. Not every cost is equal. The creator of some free software putting in ads is a shame, but not a tragedy. Life will go on. We are not entitled to the fruit of their labor for free if they don't want to provide it any more.
It's all a symptom. We can't revolve our expectations around people giving us all free labor out of the kindness of their hearts with how our society is structured. It's great so many do, and extremely admirable, but I'd never fault any of them for going another way.
Here's another viewpoint supporting yours: if we all had Universal Basic Income, we might not even be having this conversation. If JBK had all his needs met financially, and everyone knew that, and everyone else had their needs met too, what he did would be the norm and not so exceptional that this picture keeps getting reposted for years and years. (He'd still be exceptional for making an astonishingly reliable player app, but not for forgoing the payday.)
If it was the norm, lots of people would donate their labor for free, because their needs are met and they are able to do what they love without a huge payout. Most people don't need the huge payout, the 8 figure bank account. They need guaranteed food and shelter and a little fun and a few nice things.
Agreed. UBI is probably the method to solve that issue we should be most aggressively pursuing right now.
Or you can see it the other way around. You and I are enjoying such a great piece of software at the expense of the developers who gave us their expertise, time and effort for free.
If you use Linux, vlc, Firefox, lemmy, gimp, etc without donating to the authors/maintainers, you are putting you over them, "winning" at the cost of others. You are getting a personal benefit at the loss of numerous others...
Well put.