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[scriver]

There are benefits to being childless and unmarried, of course, but there are large amounts of resources out there for those with children in many countries. If I had no moral qualms about using children and keeping them in horrible (although technically legal) conditions, I could save money with a few "dependents" to add to my taxes.

Single and childless is a group that kinda gets screwed over. Medicaid is a big one where that occurs. (in states that didn't expand medicaid under the ACA provisions.)

Not really, the cost of living is offset by how you're not leaving anyone behind to continue supporting the system. This is especially true the bigger the welfare state you live in, in which case choosing to be childless is essentially saying "I'm expecting the rest of y'all to provide for me at when I get old, but I'm not going to participate in making sure the rest of y'all is provided for too".

[smjjames]

We lived this when my wife was fired for being pregnant.

Pfft, that's a completely BS reason to fire someone. Might as well fire someone for having a cold, it's that BS of a reason.

There are benefits to being childless and unmarried, of course, but there are large amounts of resources out there for those with children in many countries. If I had no moral qualms about using children and keeping them in horrible (although technically legal) conditions, I could save money with a few "dependents" to add to my taxes.

Single and childless is a group that kinda gets screwed over. Medicaid is a big one where that occurs. (in states that didn't expand medicaid under the ACA provisions.)

Not really, the cost of living is offset by how you're not leaving anyone behind to continue supporting the system. This is especially true the bigger the welfare state you live in, in which case choosing to be childless is essentially saying "I'm expecting the rest of y'all to provide for me at when I get old, but I'm not going to participate in making sure the rest of y'all is provided for too".

Besides, it'd be completely unreasonable to blame poor people for being poor just because they had children, it makes no logical sense at all. Not saying that anybody is actually doing that here, just that the logic doesn't work.

[SalmonGod]

As a legit poor person in the U.S with a kid where both parents work full-time, all of that is 100% true for us. We work 2 full-time jobs to live paycheck to paycheck. And we are not entry-level. I am a manager of 10/20-ish people, my wife is a nurse. I live in a country where access to a 800$ smartphone is almost guaranteed, and also my wife saves lives at work while needing state assistance to buy food for our kid.

Except in our area it's 2-bedroom, and we could barely scrape by if we had a one-bedroom with no kid unless we wanted to live in a place that has weekly shootouts. We lived this when my wife was fired for being pregnant.

Yeah, I should have prefaced my last post with I live in Indiana, where cost of living is fairly low.  I can't imagine how people do it in more expensive areas.

We lived this when my wife was fired for being pregnant.

Pfft, that's a completely BS reason to fire someone. Might as well fire someone for having a cold, it's that BS of a reason.

It's so common.  Plus, having a kid limits how devoted you can be to your employer.  So let's say in an interview you decide to be honest and admit that overtime is a problem because you have to coordinate work schedules with your significant other to take care of a kid.  That's a gigantic mark against you.  Opportunities gone.  My own boss loves kids and tries harder than most to work with people on family issues.  But even she will turn down an applicant on that basis alone.

In fact... someone in my office got fired once because a customer was trying to make arrangements that would require this guy to work on a holiday.  He asked the customer not to do that to him (admittedly, he was supposedly a little rude about it), because he had plans with his kids on that day.  He got fired over that.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

That's the funny thing about the way things are, it's never enough. There was once a time when we at least had bread and circuses. Now, it's "Is that...BREAD?! GIVE ME THAT, YOU FUCKING FREELOADER, IT'S MINE!"

I'm starting to suspect that Marx really was onto something with "historical inevitability", because late feudalism had some of the same living absurdities resulting from structural corrosion, and people knew it. See everything ever written by Voltaire or for a more specific example this scene from Henry V in which Henry's claim on the dukedoms of France is "explained" by way of a two minute long rambling speech about succession law nonsense that could go in any possible direction, which Henry asks to be given so he can feel better about getting thousands and thousands of people killed for his personal desires. "So it is as clear as is the summer sun!"

The weight of feudalism's years started showing, in the inbred mad monarchs and the logic bomb successions piling up, fractional corruption turning France's wide fertile fields into famine like magic and pretty much everybody but the people at the top of society suffering and giving warning after warning to no avail.

That's the historical period I think the one we're entering most resembles. We see shit like literally offering your flesh and blood to your boss and then getting fired for "poor performance" among an endless parade of more casual abuses in an environment where the people who do all the work are at the casual amusement of the people who manage and the people who own. As that enlightened self-interest plutocrat guy put it a few pages ago, there's a social contract to even the most ardent capitalist system, and it is very broken now. When you cheat those around you with technicalities and lobbyists you can usually get away with it, but each and every one of those marks, every last stolen wage and precautionary firing puts a hole in the overall system that can't easily be healed. That's what happened to feudalism and I'm pretty sure that's what's happening to capitalism now.

We'll work our way out of this species-wide rut eventually, but the way it happens is going to depend a lot on how willing the wealthy are to understand that what they've done in life is just win at a particular system, and that "winning" enough to have that system abolished is a loss for them if they don't manage the move to a new one.

[smjjames]

Then the Karl Marxes, Voltaires, etc of our era better start philosophisizing because there isn't really a good alternative to capitalism*. Full force socialism of the likes of communism doesn't work for various reasons and capitalism is capitalism. Sure, some hybrid of socialism and capitalism seems the best option, but the flaws of capitalism are still there.

*At least while we're still an almost completely planet-bound species.

[MrRoboto75]

In fact... someone in my office got fired once because a customer was trying to make arrangements that would require this guy to work on a holiday.  He asked the customer not to do that to him (admittedly, he was supposedly a little rude about it), because he had plans with his kids on that day.  He got fired over that.

"How did you end up working new year's day?"

-Man who wanted to buy 20 items on new year's day, 2018

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Then the Karl Marxes, Voltaires, etc of our era better start philosophisizing because there isn't really a good alternative to capitalism*. Full force socialism of the likes of communism doesn't work for various reasons and capitalism is capitalism. Sure, some hybrid of socialism and capitalism seems the best option, but the flaws of capitalism are still there.

*At least while we're still an almost completely planet-bound species.

Capitalism as a basic thesis is plainly avoidable. If you can't profit from capital you aren't personally responsible for, then you're outside capitalism. Everything else is so much cruft.

As is, I'm more than happy to place the ownership and leadership of all capital enterprises in the collective body of said enterprises, post haste. We can go from there.

No offense my dude, but your statement is dangerously close to "it's impossible to move away from capitalism because I don't believe we should try to move away from capitalism". As I've said a few times in AmeriPol, there has ceased to be an economic debate in this country for the past forty years or so. We can't know if we aren't even willing to try.

[smjjames]

Then the Karl Marxes, Voltaires, etc of our era better start philosophisizing because there isn't really a good alternative to capitalism*. Full force socialism of the likes of communism doesn't work for various reasons and capitalism is capitalism. Sure, some hybrid of socialism and capitalism seems the best option, but the flaws of capitalism are still there.

*At least while we're still an almost completely planet-bound species.

No offense my dude, but your statement is dangerously close to "it's impossible to move away from capitalism because I don't believe we should try to move away from capitalism". As I've said a few times in AmeriPol, there has ceased to be a healthy economic debate in this country for the past forty years or so. We can't know if we aren't even willing to try.

FIFY. There has been some, it's just that the Republicans keep plugging their ears to any ideas that aren't capitalism.

And I'm just not sure what economic theories besides capitalism and socialism would work, I'm not as knowledgeable on economics as you are.

[Egan_BW]

All-seeing orbital robot god, obviously.
Looks down on the earth, orders the collection of resources, building of structures, and construction of worker units. Stick the brains of a few korean starcraft players and you're golden.

[MrRoboto75]

All-seeing orbital robot god, obviously.
Looks down on the earth, orders the collection of resources, building of structures, and construction of worker units. Stick the brains of a few korean starcraft players and you're golden.

Ah, Factorio.

[McTraveller]

As is, I'm more than happy to place the ownership and leadership of all capital enterprises in the collective body of said enterprises, post haste. We can go from there.

You mean like a co-op?

[MetalSlimeHunt]

As is, I'm more than happy to place the ownership and leadership of all capital enterprises in the collective body of said enterprises, post haste. We can go from there.

You mean like a co-op?

If you want to call it that. Regardless of what enterprises do, it's assbackwards that the control and the benefits of them are almost always top-heavy, and it probably has a lot to do with why so many world-spanning corporations that may have been around for generations have out of the blue just crashed straight into the ground in short order. Their mission becomes increasingly monomaniacal for stockholders and executives, gradually or not-so-gradually abandoning success as a business to success as a money maximizer.

It's like the difference between driving a car to the store and driving a car in a hypermiler competition. You drive a car to the store with a purpose outside the car itself, the car is a vehicle (pun pretended) for your store activities. A hypermiler needs that car to travel over the longest distance possible. Everything that weighs it down needs to be discarded and you had better have not even a drop of gasoline left when you finally coast to a stop. The car is then, of course, stuck wherever it stopped. That's the way investors and public stockholders treat businesses, businesses which in a less malignant time were understood to be providing a service to society with profit as an incentive. Now it's more that businesses make profit for stockholders, holding their noses at the temporary annoyance of having to provide things to people in lieu of demanding they deposit their bank accounts directly into the stock price before stacking up the chairs, turning off the lights, and asking for taxpayer money to restart or rebranding with their happy investor contacts.

That used to, by the way, be a strategy that was typically restricted to mob money laundering fronts. And sure, it doesn't reach that full length of burning all potential for the dividend every time, but it trends strongly in that direction if nobody is trying to stop it.

Labor is more important that capital, and the people who provide the labor should thus have the primary voice for determining who makes high-level decisions and who owns the company. The average person certainly wouldn't put their own workplace through that song and dance, they have no reason to.

[redwallzyl]

https://mobile.twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/948355557022420992

North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the “Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times.” Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!

...
...
...
...
Really...

[Starver]

Then he announces upcoming Fake News Awards in his next Tweet (then promotes one of his Fox-buddies in the one after that), I noted. I had resisted lurking over his Tweets for a week or two, and (just before you posted the above) gave in and checked again.

Phrases like "mental age" spring to mind. I'm more upset that there will be people who think these things he Tweets are good things (and not in a 'at least we know what his voices are telling him' way).

Is he just going all Nixon on the world? As in the equivalent of getting Kissinger to do the Foreign Policy negotiations by letting Kissinger claim that Nixon was a little unstable, but that if the negotiators worked with Kissinger then Nixon could probably be kept from doing too much crazy intervention... Nah, I just don't believe it's quite so Batman Gambit/4D Chess, unfortunately. Here's hoping it is, but I'm really not holding my breath. Not if I have to start holding it later, as the fallout drifts over my house...

[redwallzyl]

As is, I'm more than happy to place the ownership and leadership of all capital enterprises in the collective body of said enterprises, post haste. We can go from there.

You mean like a co-op?

If you want to call it that. Regardless of what enterprises do, it's assbackwards that the control and the benefits of them are almost always top-heavy, and it probably has a lot to do with why so many world-spanning corporations that may have been around for generations have out of the blue just crashed straight into the ground in short order. Their mission becomes increasingly monomaniacal for stockholders and executives, gradually or not-so-gradually abandoning success as a business to success as a money maximizer.

It's like the difference between driving a car to the store and driving a car in a hypermiler competition. You drive a car to the store with a purpose outside the car itself, the car is a vehicle (pun pretended) for your store activities. A hypermiler needs that car to travel over the longest distance possible. Everything that weighs it down needs to be discarded and you had better have not even a drop of gasoline left when you finally coast to a stop. The car is then, of course, stuck wherever it stopped. That's the way investors and public stockholders treat businesses, businesses which in a less malignant time were understood to be providing a service to society with profit as an incentive. Now it's more that businesses make profit for stockholders, holding their noses at the temporary annoyance of having to provide things to people in lieu of demanding they deposit their bank accounts directly into the stock price before stacking up the chairs, turning off the lights, and asking for taxpayer money to restart or rebranding with their happy investor contacts.

That used to, by the way, be a strategy that was typically restricted to mob money laundering fronts. And sure, it doesn't reach that full length of burning all potential for the dividend every time, but it trends strongly in that direction if nobody is trying to stop it.

Labor is more important that capital, and the people who provide the labor should thus have the primary voice for determining who makes high-level decisions and who owns the company. The average person certainly wouldn't put their own workplace through that song and dance, they have no reason to.

One of the problems is the myopic view of what capitalism is. Right now its mostly neoliberal capitalism is the only capitalism and pretend nothing else exists.