I thought credit for both of those usually goes to unions. Which anarchists or groups of anarchists made the most significant contributions to the 40 hour work week or 8 hour days?
How did a philosophy of minimized government involvement contribute to the regulations and enforcement mechanisms around our labor laws?
What is the best example of something built by anarchists?
For the sake of curiosity I’d leave this quite broad. Buildings, institutions, inventions, art. What’s the showcase example of what anarchy has created for us?
The fundamental definition of capitalism is that all means of production are privately owned.
The reason I say that it’s theoretical and hypothetical is that you won’t find any real economies where that’s the case. Just like we don’t find any instances of the platonic ideal of Communism the way Marx described it.
What we have instead is a set of systems with varying degrees of public vs private ownership and various implementations of what should and shouldn’t be considered a public vs private resource.
I’m not sure why you would site “product stratification” as a requirement of capitalism. That literally just means that you sort products into different categories. It has nothing to do with any particular economic system.
Most modern economic theory does involve marginalization, but probably not the way you think. The requirement is just that either consumers have different preference curves or producers have different production abilities. That’s it and there’s nothing particularly sinister about it. Communism makes the same assumptions since those differences are a requirement for, “From each according to their ability, to each according to their need,” to make sense.
Deprivation isn’t a requirement of capitalism either. It’s a basic assumption of economics. The idea is that we have unbounded capacity to consume but bounded capacity to produce. If that isn’t the case you don’t need an economy, everyone just gets everything they want. The difference between Communism and Capitalism is in how they prioritize using limited resources.
You can cite a single statistic on food scarcity but the data is very clear that we’re living in an era of unprecedented food excess. If you look at data sets that cover more than a few decades you’ll see strong trends of decreased malnutrition, both within the US and around the world.
One of the chief problems with getting these facts wrong is that they lead us to making bad decisions. Food donations are a prime example. The US subsidizes food production. That’s generally a good thing since it improves food security. However that screws food prices. The US deals with this by having the government buy up excess food at guaranteed minimum prices. It then has a bunch of food that nobody wants so, in an effort to kill to birds with one stone, it ships a lot of that food to poor countries at below market prices. That feeds some people but it also massively undercuts the local agriculture industry. There’s no way a near-subsistence farmer can come close to competing on price against a modern mechanized farm. That’s theoretically OK if we came up with some alternative economic activity but we don’t.
There are some very serious problems with various economics systems around the world. None of theses systems is actually capitalism and all of them feed people.
“Capitalism” is a theoretical extreme form of a market economy which nobody practices. In particular, all the larger economies are heavily regulated and have a lot of social programs.
Food scarcity has been so thoroughly beaten that in “Capitalist” countries the problem is reversed. Poor people can easily get all the calories they want. In many developed countries, poverty tracks with obesity.
The FCC has a lot of regulations on it. From what I remember active jamming within the home is still wildly illegal. Depending on the size of your house/room, a far as at cage wouldn’t be too difficult, especially if you did it during construction. If you’re on a budget and don’t mind looking crazy you can line a closet with tinfoil and connect it to ground.
I can’t guess what individual people will do but, as a group, shoppers end up spending more this way. Supermarkets and grocery stores typically sell many things besides food; toys, magazines, beauty products, etc.
The store also doesn’t need you to eat all the food you buy. If you throw out a bunch of food, as many people frequently do, the store still gets paid for all of it.
They do it to make you spend more time browsing. Shoppers typically get the same stuff every time they get groceries. Over time people learn the layout of their local store and develop efficient patterns to move through it and get everything they want. When the store shuffles everything around they force shoppers to wander around the store and to look at all the shelves carefully for the stuff they actually want. Some percentage of them end up finding new things to buy and spend more money.
I have to applaud David Nolan on some next level marketing for this one.
He invented the predecessor of that chart as a way to promote libertarianism. It’s very clever in how subtly it introduces a loaded question.
The phrasing asks the viewer to consider if they want more or less political freedom and if they want more or less economic freedom. Obviously, most people want more freedom. Therefore Libertarianism is the best form of government. QED!
But that makes two big assumptions that are almost certainly incorrect:
It’s a little frustrating that unabashed marketing is so frequently trotted out as though it were an established fact.
Primarily because it’s really difficult to move countries. Even when an other country is “better”, by whatever metric you may choose, the high switching cost makes the move worse for individuals unless staying in a country is really really bad. That threshold is typically when subsistence in the country of origin becomes untenable, often due to war or famine.
Didn’t know it had a name.
That once stopped me from registering a video game title.
I was feeling silly so I figured I’d go for a nonsensical contrast. “Evil Grape” got rejected. After several failed attempts it eventually dawned on me that some dumb algorithm thought it was a reference to sexual violence.
It kind of annoyed me but I just picked an other fruit. It wasn’t until later that I considered that “Evil Banana” was probably more sexually evocative but it was too late by then.
So if you’re ever playing a video game and shoot (or get shot by) “Evil Banana”, know that, if it weren’t for the Scunthorpe Problem, it could have been “Evil Grape,” but either way, it wasn’t intended as a sexual reference at all.
I could see that as fair as long as everyone agrees that a small symbol on their neck is an appropriate expression of their religion.
If I were to think of a Muslim country that officially embraces secularism in government what would that look like? What if they said that everyone can wear a discreet head covering. Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Daoists, Jains, etc are also allowed to wear small headscarves appropriate to their religion.
The problem is that headscarves just aren’t generally meaningful to those other religions.
I’m even more suspicious of the intent of the French law since they apparently went out of their way to create an exemption for non-Muslim head scarves. The law seems to be constructed and interpreted as, “If we can tell that its related to Islam, it’s out.” The case where a girl was sent home for wearing a skirt that was too long really just looks like they want to make Muslims (and Muslim girls, in particular) more uncomfortable.
I want to be very careful around judging the intentions of people who live 5000 miles away and speak a language I don’t understand. There’s a lot of room to misunderstand people’s intentions.
But from what I can see, it’s looking like there’s an intentional bias.
I read up on it a bit more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_law_on_secularity_and_conspicuous_religious_symbols_in_schools
It seems like regulations on religious attire are selectively applied. Small crosses and stars of David, some variations of Sikh turbans, Fatima’s hands are acceptable and the final decision is left up to school headmasters.
It also sounds like the legislators who created it specifically intended to target Muslim headdress.
It’s one thing to keep religion out of education. It seems that they’re disproportionately concerned about suprsesssing Islam in their schools.
Do they ban other forms of religious expression? Crosses/crucifixes? Yarmulke/kippah?
Or is it just Islamic symbols?
It’s been documented already. I guess the next question is if there’s any reason to think it’s stopped.
Update: I guess not. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/13/us/politics/us-spying-allies.html
Robespierre has entered the chat.
This isn’t about own vs rent, it’s about house vs apartment.
Open flames are dangerous and smoke is annoying to neighbors. Condos and coops typically won’t let you grill. Some of them have designated grilling areas and those often have restrictions on how you can use them. Even many apartments with fireproof balconies won’t allow them because not all the neighbors want a balcony full of smoke.
Every house I’ve ever rented, allowed grilling. Even the cheapest one, a row-house in Baltimore, let you grill in the back “yard”.
I don’t. When it comes up I argue in favor of staying federated with hexbear. There are some good ideas there and we’re worse off for eliminating them.
Hexbear does have a lot of posts that consist mostly of smack talk, pictures and memes though. I just block all of those posters individually for myself but I can see why a lot of people just consider it immature and want to block the whole instance.
It’s functionally close enough to a conglomerate though.
I’m not exactly sure what ‘“free market” cultist’ is or if you’re accusing me of being one. Modern economists don’t normally align themselves with simplistic ideologies like “free market”, “communist” or “capitalist”. They’re aware of the historical and modern usage of these terms but they tend to focus on areas that are far to specific for those terms to even make sense. You won’t find a lot of economists that argue for complete Laissez-faire capitalism any more than you’ll find real economists arguing in favor of classical Marxism.
There is general agreement that conglomeration benefits management more than shareholders. There’s general agreement that they are more likely to arise under some economic conditions and that those conditions usually aren’t associated with socially optimal economic policies.
If they actually did this correctly, it would be great. Whether or not it’s possible, or even desirable to eliminate all hate speech, it should be possible to minimize the harms.
When somebody mutters some hateful comment to themselves, do we care? Not really. We care that the hateful comment gets repeated and amplified. We care that someone might take that hateful comment. We care that someone might take harmful actions based on the comment.
If those algorithms successfully let these comments die in ignominy they’ve done their job. My fear is that they won’t really do this though. Instead they’ll mostly hide these comments and “accidentally” let them slip out when the company thinks they need an “engagement” boost.