extracting rent

That’s their right

lemmy.ml

Have I discovered a rare pro-capitalist user of lemmy.ml?

I remember when I had been fooled into believing it was.

Some people are, it’s called antitheism. I confess when I was an edgy 16yo I was like that, but I had just left a religious cult so don’t judge me too harshly.

Hyperindividualism and car culture explains it all. Americans don’t trust each other (especially not their neighbors) and want to put as much distance between themselves as possible. We’re also mostly NIMBYs (Not In My Backyard) and have very strict zoning laws that prevent commercial and residential buildings from coexisting in the same area. This is great for the auto industry because it means you can’t do anything without driving, and they lobby the government to block any attempt to change things.

Our suburbs are liminal spaces that more closely resemble purgatory than actual communities, which is why everyone who grew up in them is at least slightly insane.

This is a small town. We don’t call them villages, we call them towns for some reason.

The word village implies community, and we don’t do that kinda thing in the states.

Take this quiz and see if you can tell the difference between Nazism and Zionism. I bet you can’t.

• You can criticize Zionism as an ideology, but you can’t call for its end.

• You can refer to the current Israeli government as “criminal,” but you can’t call for the dissolution of the state of Israel as it currently exists.

You see the problem, surely?

The sedentary office lifestyle is genuinely disastrous for your health, both mental and physical. It’s especially insidious owing to the fact that the effects are largely invisible, just massively increasing your risk of heart disease, stroke, and cancer. That’s not to say that the other extreme of constant manual labor isn’t also disastrous for your health, just that I don’t think the health effects of a sedentary lifestyle are taken seriously enough by institutions and people in general.

I’m sure the velociraptors helped you stay focused too.

It’s more like a cross between RimWorld and Stardew Valley, with a bit of Terraria-like RPG mechanics.

I have the version that was made for the OG Switch and the build quality is garbage tier. Developed stick drift in both sticks in less than a month.

It never fails to baffle me how media has managed to gaslight Americans into thinking that creating pointless busywork jobs for their own sake is some sort of moral imperative.

Campism is Trotskyist criticism and not a term we use.

That’s not a response to the criticism, just a dismissal of it based on who it originated from. I personally think it’s a valid criticism of many who consider themselves marxist-leninists, and I am not a trotskyist. People I’ve spoken with in the past have had a tendency to dogmatically subscribe to a campist mindset in total disregard for the particulars of any given situation, and for how much shit MLs give liberals for practicing lesser-evilism, many sure seem to love their own version of it.

Accelerationism is an edgelord meme that some baby leftists might subscribe to, but is generally a very dumb concept.

It’s far more prevalent than you’re giving it credit for, and in my experience many MLs’ understanding of revolutionary defeatism tends to boil down to accelerationism when questioned.

However, I’ll give props for knowing about revolutionary defeatism, which is a factor in our analysis. It was, pretty indisputably, the correct position to take in WWI, when it was developed.

Indisputable suggests it’s largely undisputed now, which you must know is absolutely not the case. I am currently disputing it. There is no significant historical pattern of countries that faced a military defeat becoming socialist or even having better revolutionary conditions afterwards.

Only in Russia did the socialists stay true to their promise and used the opportunity to turn the imperialist war into a civil war, and eventually managed to nope out of the meat grinder everyone else was stuck in.

Starting a civil war while the country is in the middle of an imperialist war is not an example of revolutionary defeatism working. If Russia had been defeated in their imperialist war and then had a socialist revolution that would be an example, but even then one example is not a pattern.

Furthermore, history cautions us to be skeptical when our country tells us a war is justified, as we see many examples throughout history where people fell in line behind narratives that did not hold up, whether it was WWI or Vietnam or Iraq - whenever any country goes to war, there is a strong pressure and lots of propaganda that is able to convince the vast majority of people to support it, everyone always thinks, “but this time, it’s different,” and more often than not, they’re wrong.

I agree completely, but this is just an argument for being anti-imperialist and anti-war, not an argument for revolutionary defeatism.

Generally speaking, arguments that are grounded on things like territorial integrity or national sovereignty don’t really have traction with us. Revolution involves aggressively violating national sovereignty, after all.

Those sorts of arguments don’t have any traction with me either, I’m an anarchist. I don’t believe I have made any such arguments, unless you conflate collective self-determination with national sovereignty.

What happens if they need to employ someone new, taking the number of employees, obviously, to 73091? Would that new person have to buy their $2,794,051 share before they start working? Or is that share simply taken off the 73090 and given to the new guy?

In your hypothetical the workers have collective ownership of the company and would have some kind of democratic or consensus-based decision-making process. They would manage their assets through that process, rather than simply dividing things up into equal shares. If - through whatever decision-making process they happen to have - they decide that they need more workers then they would simply recruit more workers.

Or what if one of the 73090 decides now they’re a multimillionaire that they don’t ever need to work again and cash their share in? They walk away with $2.7m in their pocket. Where did that money come from? Did the 73089 all have to buy their share off them?

If someone wants to quit then they can quit, and take whatever severance package was decided on by whatever decision-making process the workers happen to have. Collective ownership doesn’t mean everyone has an equal slice of the pie that they can just take as they please, it means everyone has a say in what happens with all of it. You have an incredibly individualistic view of the world and its sabotaging your understanding.

What people tend not to realize is they don’t support Russia because they think it’s still communist, but because of a combination of campism, accelerationism, and revolutionary defeatism. If you want to argue with someone in good faith you should try to understand their position first, otherwise they will just see you as a reactionary and dismiss what you say. I still occasionally get my comments removed from .ml but I’ve been able to get through to people somewhat by leading with an actual understanding of where they’re coming from.

They might not know all the details. Even between people who’ve known each other for a long time it’s not common to know their precise legal status, and that goes double for family/friends of a friend.

I sorta prefer the lower quality tbh. It hides some of the big tells that it was AI generated.

You forgot to mention that it’s watered down. That’s what the emulsifier is for, to make the oils in the cheese mix well with the added water. The concept is fine - for some applications - if it were only that, but this is hyper-processed American food we’re talking about here. Gotta pad out that ingredient list:

CHEDDAR CHEESE (CULTURED MILK, SALT, ENZYMES), SKIM MILK, MILKFAT, MILK PROTEIN CONCENTRATE, WHEY, CALCIUM PHOSPHATE, SODIUM PHOSPHATE, CONTAINS LESS THAN 2% OF MODIFIED FOOD STARCH, SALT, LACTIC ACID, MILK, SORBIC ACID AS A PRESERVATIVE, OLEORESIN PAPRIKA (COLOR), ENZYMES, CHEESE CULTURE, ANNATTO (COLOR).

The above is the standard Kraft singles ingredient list, and at a glance is the shortest one I saw on their website.

Of course it isn’t just sitting around unused, it’s being reinvested to make more money. Billionaires typically put most of their net worth into assets and stocks and then live off of loans, just like the comic I posted alludes to. Just because they don’t have literal piles of cash sitting around doesn’t mean they aren’t absurdly wealthy.

And let’s be honest, if a billionaire wanted a Scrooge McDuck style gold pile they could have it arranged within a week at most.