See, there are three kinds of people: dicks, pussies, and assholes. Pussies think everyone can get along, and dicks just want to fuck all the time without thinking it through. But then you got your assholes. And all the assholes want is to shit all over everything. So pussies may get mad at dicks once in a while, because pussies get fucked by dicks. But dicks also fuck assholes! And if they didn’t fuck the assholes, you know what you’d get? You’d get your dick and your pussy all covered in shit!

Yeah but that’s from curiosity, not ignorance

In other words, before a change can be made in the name of Progress, it needs to be demonstrated that the change actually is Progress. To progressives, this feels like standing in the way of Progress. To a conservative, this is safeguarding Progress, the Progress previous generations achieved, from changes that, again, are more likely to be bad than good.

That’s not what we see with Conservatism with, and is much more in line with 20th century Progressivism (i.e. leveraging empirical knowledge to moderate political change).

Conservativism in practice, as I’ve seen it almost invariably, says new is always bad, traditional is always good. It’s a bicycle that’s all brakes and no pedals.

Sometimes a system that took centuries to build, like chattel slavery, should be destroyed in months or years, and inaction does more bad than good. Progressivism took off after the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution because empirical data showed that traditional structures were ill-suited for the quickly evolving world.

Conservativism in the modern era is akin to trying to fill your gas tank with oats and hay. Cars aren’t horses, and the longer you drag your feet in updating your policies, the more damage you’re going to do to your engine.

Conservatism holds that if things are pretty good, most changes are likely to make things worse and not better

The problem is that things aren’t pretty good for most people. The system is in shambles and most suggested changes probably would make things better for everyone who isn’t a millionaire.

Jean Pierre Polnareff for me.

Unfinished 2x4s are actually 2in x 4in, which originally you would trim on all sides to get a nicer surface getting down to the “modern” dimensions. Nowadays, you pretty much only see pre-trimmed lumber.

Just like every “2D” object has thickness, every “3D” object has a temporal duration. Without duration, it wouldn’t exist.

So everything is at least 4D, 3D doesn’t exist.

I’ve taken to using footnotes when the parentheticals start getting complicated.

Me too, thanks

I would prefer a mix: keep the Senate composed of actual legal experts, but stock the House by sortition (also expand it to equalize the ratio of representatives to constituents).

I saw this at a club called The Closet

I think reasonable people can disagree on this point, on whether not tipping constitutes a secondary exploitation.

No, they cannot. Disagreement here is not reasoned, it is just another example of clever people using their cleverness to justify unreasonable prior beliefs.

You can boycott a business, and write them to express that your boycott is based on their tipping policy. That would be a reasonable strategy to support the workers.

By still giving the business owners money, knowing they pay their staff sub-minimum wages based on the convention of tipping, and then not tipping, you have not communicated any disapproval to management. You have in fact directly supported the business owner exploiting their workers, and joined that exploitation for personal benefit. That’s the opposite of supporting the worker.

The result of either choice – boycotting places that pay less than minimum wage, or not tipping at those places – doesn’t change the fact that the staff are being underpaid, which is the root exploitative practice.

Yes, but boycotting those places is justifiable. Going anyway and just not tipping is actively participating in the exploitation.

Burn a what now?

The way I see it, if the place requires tips for their staff to get by, then the staff are being financially abused and I would be propping up a system of exploitation. Prioritise places that pay their staff above the minimum wage.

Second sentence is fine, feel free to boycott places that pay below minimum wage. But if you do go to an establishment that pays based on the assumption of tips, and you don’t tip, you’re just joining in the exploitation.

I mean, I like Turkish delight, but I’m not sure I’d betray my family to an evil witch for it.

Women face different inequality than men. Where women are treated as valuable property, men are treated as disposable tools or dangerous threats. Feminism has done much to elevate women above valuable property, but men are still treated as disposable or dangerous.

Egalitarianism is a better term.

The thing about capitalism is that it excels at concentrating power into relatively few hands, which makes it much easier to direct resources for specific goals.

But that’s not really the point. The point is that the conditions of the world are what they are. If your system requires the conditions to be otherwise in order to succeed, you either need to secure those conditions first or abandon the system.

As we saw with the USSR, the opposition from the US helped turn it into a corrupt oligarchy. The efforts to secure a strong socialist state just made their resources easier to divvy up.

That’s not to say I disapprove of socialism and endorse capitalism. But we cannot ignore the material conditions in the world. Any improvement needs to take them into consideration, and have the ability to deal with them.

I feel like you might be confusing capitalism for market economies in general. A market economy is when private entities buy and sell things. Capitalism specifically is a market economy where the means of production, the equipment that makes things, are owned by investors who do not themselves participate in production.

What you describe in that last paragraph is called market socialism. You still have private entities buying and selling things, that’s the market part, but instead of being owned by investors those entities are collectively owned by the employees doing the production, that’s the socialism part.

This system preserves the strengths of markets, namely efficient specialization and price discovery, while eschewing the liabilities of capitalism, namely the siphoning of value from those who create it to investors.

If a system cannot defend itself from the influence of foreign interest, it can’t function on the world stage. That’s like saying a motor design would work without friction or thermodynamics sabotaging it. It implies there are still problems that need to be ironed out before the system is rolled out.