Do you maybe mean snap?

Docks of New York and The Cabinet of Dr.Caligari are also really cool silent age movies

Is there fantasy that isn’t like this

And here’s some reality of over a decade of right-wing rule https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5aJ-57_YsQ

Really? Where? When I visited the whole place was full of dead dogs, couldn’t even take two steps before hearing the squishing of a decaying carcass.

I’m proposing replacing minimum wage w/ something like UBI (my preference is a Negative Income Tax for more of a direct replacement). That way that $100 isn’t being added to peoples’ means, but instead it’s replacing wages

So it will just accomplish nothing, as people will work the same (more if we follow current trends) for $9.00 and hour instead of $12.00, but will have an extra $3.00 from taxes on the middle class (the rich will avoid taxes always).

This is certainly a proposal.

which can keep total inflation stable

Ah yeah, like right now where inflation is low and even decreasing, but things keep getting more expensive, jobs more and more scarce and actual value is ever smaller, while building true wealth through home ownership is ever more unreachable, while being poor is only more and more expensive and social mobility is at an all time low? Lol.

Measures of inflation are like COVID cases being low before we started testing more people.

That gives employees the freedom to say no to poor working conditions and inadequate pay without worrying about where their next meal is coming from.

That’s the thing - it won’t. Capitalists won’t like this, and competing with one another by offering better working conditions will only make them worse off - they will instead band together and price fix the market, or simply complete the ongoing switch to using gig economy “contractors” instead of employees.

Capitalism is a race to the bottom. This is ofc a hypothetical, IRL they would never allow any such laws with actual teeth to pass unless a dictatorship of the proletariat showed them to the guillotines.

Sure, and moving to socialism won’t change that, all it does is replace “the rich” with “the well-connected.”

This is an argument so old Marx debunked it himself. But I’ll say this: even if this is true, corruption is indeed possible in any system, but only in capitalism we worship it and call it “lobbying”.

People being rich isn’t a problem, especially since generational wealth is often gone after 3 generation

So just because it hasn’t been 3 generations yet, Musk isn’t a problem? Bezos? Zucc?

The important thing is that who “the rich” are changes periodically so we don’t get into a Russian oligarch situation.

The Russian oligarchs are actually new rich too, most of them got wealthy by picking the corpse of the Soviet Union, during western enforced shock therapy, while the poors were left to heroin and dying of AIDS. What a woopsie that turned out to be with fascist Russia now eh?

As long as that’s improving year-over-year, things are getting better. Whether some people have tens or hundreds of millions doesn’t really impact me day-to-day.

Things have declined since the 1980s in terms of buying power of the middle income young people of today across the board, and that’s before we get into the fact life itself got more expensive (e.g. now a starter crappy job needs an MSc, used to be they hired barely literate lead eaters, who are now bosses).

It’s slightly offset if you measure happiness by socially-funded scientific and technological progress (internet was a government project) but even that is now debatable, as capitalism has sunk its teeth into that also, and more and more social services of the 20th century are privatized into oblivion.

And that’s just the local, street-level stuff. What about the global evil of capitalism? Israel? Afghanistan? Iraq? Neo-colonialism of the global south, American corporations licking dictatorial boots the world over? the blockade of Cuba? Police racism and brutality? Sexism? Ableism?

The neoliberal imperialism of the United States through it’s client-state in Israel alone is enough to wonder, whether this system should be left as-is.

Now the USSR did a fair bit of shit too, and China does a lot even worse, all of it is deserving of critique, but US’s (and it’s western vassals’) issues are precisely as a result of its system. The US is very much an oligarchy, and is three corporations in a trenchcoat, and occasionally, when whistleblowers, whether corporate or military wind up dead, people look up, and it’s important that they blame the right people, because otherwise, they’ll blame each other, and fascism - the final form of neoliberal capitalism - wins.

where

Trump World, the world’s leading alternative to Disney World for nightmare enthusiasts.

Read pretty much any story from those who left the USSR to get a better picture of how life was there.

A very unbiased account indeed

but I find real stories of people trying to flee more valuable in understanding life in an area than books with economic figures.

I don’t. People for the most part are morons that gulp down ivermectin and bleach enemas by the truckload to make their healing crystals work in time for Sunday church, so they can pray away the gay. People are fickle, and are often at odds with facts. As a trans person I know this well.

If life was so good there

That’s the neat part, I never claimed that. The USSR was a shithole, but the user I originally responded to was wrong as well. Two things can be true at once.

UBI

Or just nationalize necessities to cut out capitalist middlemen taking a cut. All a UBI of $100 will do is raise prices by $100 because people now have $100 more, and landlords et al. will want those $100. Under capitalism and neoliberalism the rich will always be at the top of the food chain in this manner.

Socialist policies should be limited, imo, to voluntary associations, like co-ops and private unions.

So they can be easily crushed by capitalist lobbying in western “”““democracies””".

I admire neolibs who genuinely want to make things better, and you have my respect for that, but I think you’re just a bit naive and haven’t quite thought everything through.

In reality, their education system was overly focused on technical skills, neglecting essential life skills like critical thinking, creativity, decision-making, and many others.

The US is the only country in the western world that teaches strictly extra-curricular matters at a university level, afaik. I went to uni in the UK for computer science, all of my classes were only about computer science and it’s subdomains only, there are no “life skills” classes.

This became apparent in the 90s when many supposedly ‘highly educated’ individuals were involved in fraudulent schemes, failed to build and stand for democracy

As opposed to the low levels of fraud and extremely healthy democracies of which countries exactly?

As for the rest of your claims I would like to see direct sources. The “essential items” tidbit in particular I find suspect because the definition is quite fickle and the idea is subjective and depends on circumstances. Cars were famously not very common amongst USSR citizens. What was though is public transport, and we’re now in the west finding out that neglecting public transport and shifting towards personal vehicles has been a huge mistake, so that’s that.

Lolwut? USSR recovered from being a devastated bomb crater of a country faster than Europe did on American dollar while waging a cold war against the rest of the world. They beat the US to space time and time again too.

Come the 80s, their manufacturing was well ahead of the west, and there weren’t any food issues either, so I’m not sure what you mean? The horrors of Stalin’s collectivisation efforts were a good bit before the cold war, and that wasn’t really an issue of food manufacturing.

Nobody was forced to do any type of work more than anybody is under capitalism, if anything under capitalism as it is today - you take what you are given.

In the USSR, higher education being free (as is the socialist tradition) gave people a lot more choice, no need to balance student debt against future potential earnings and as such ability to pay health expenses, like we see in the US today.

They suffered from consumer goods issues because things like game consoles and tamagotchi can’t exactly be planned in a planned economy.

It’s why I personally believe in a dual-economy, where necessities are planned centrally, from housing to infrastructure to utilities and independent worker co-operatives do the rest, I think that’s the lesson there ultimately. Oh and fuck the Russian Federation.

Enough with the goddamn thinness soon that shit is gonna snap if you breathe on it

I’ve never seen spongebob

That’s so nice! I’m so happy for US folks! Here in the UK only 12% support Gender-affirming care for trans minors, most want it banned, most actually don’t support it for adults either 😢

https://yougov.co.uk/society/articles/43194-where-does-british-public-stand-transgender-rights-1 (you need to see the full results to see that)

Yeah bud Steam having decent game sales is literally like a corrupt government contract boss gets a pay rise at a corpo dumping sewage into rivers and polluting drinking water and making people sick.

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Okay, but is Gaben more deserving of this than white replacement supporter, anti-trans fearmonger and apartheid diamond mine baby Musk? Than makes people piss in bottles in warehouses Bezos?

Is what steam does more predatory than basically every major music publisher (the big three), than MPAA? Than OpenAI? Than Meta? Than the streaming services? Than Nintendo? Than Apple? Than Google? Uber?.. And so on and so on.

So why pick on Valve? I’d go after fucking taco bell before Valve. Make it make sense.

Average sh.itjust.works IQ be like