I think that is a really interesting idea, and I wonder how much impact that really is having.
2 Likes
Sometimes WalMart is simply the sensible choice around here. I can get headlight bulbs for the Mrsâ car there, and that needs doing more than it should.
Smithâs/Kroger is at least Regional if not strictly Local, and that along with Harmonâs make up most of the purchasing we do grocery-wise.
{Aside: Itâs been fun to watch the grocers around here try to out-class one another.}
2 Likes
2 Likes
Every big business started as a small business.
2 Likes
In company scrip?
2 Likes
Every developer I know there except one says it is a horrible place to work.
1 Like
Uhm. No.
4 Likes
Because the Democratic Party is a friend of the people?
Ha ha ha
ha ha ha ha
ha ha ha ha
ha ha
ha ha ha ha
ha ha ha ha
ha ha ha ha
ha ha ha ha
ha ha ha ha
ha ha
1 Like
Weâll use these guns they keep letting us haveâŚ
3 Likes
As long as your share of the tax burden is directly proportionate the the wealth you earn in any given year.
1 Like
I dunno. It worked for Eisenhowerâs era to tax the highest at 90%.
15 Likes
Most people cannot conceive that amount of wealth, what it enables the wealthy to do, and how the discrepancy in wealth limits their opportunities. They are generally content to aspire to what politicians and their corporate buddies will allow.
5 Likes
Commonly attributed to Steinbeck, but apparently said by Ronald Wright:
âSocialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.â â Ronald Wright, A Short History of Progress
11 Likes
Ominously the welfare state used to be called social security in the UK. It always seemed pretty blatant to me what it was really all about. Now politicians have a different agenda and prefer the term welfare.
2 Likes
No, because if people register as Democrats and vote for Bernie, heâll reform the party along with the whole shitfight. You think all the folks who signed up with the UK Labour party to vote Corbyn in did so because they loved what Labourâs been up to lately?
Forty years ago, the Democratic party actually was a friend of the people to a large extent, and Sanders is like a Democrat from forty years ago.
4 Likes
The scope of Oxfamâs study was global and not restricted to the US, they place the wealth of the top 1% at 48% in 2014.
4 Likes
I think itâs a bit of a tragedy of the commons type situation, or maybe comparable to the demise of the passenger pigeon. When people heard that passenger pigeons were going extinct they turned out armed in numbers for their last chance to bag one.
Now, itâs the last chance to get you and your family on the right side of the wealth gap. Grab those dollars.
I think âself-interestâ is an oversimplified and fundamentally wrong model for human motivation and identity, as evidenced by the repeated failure of actual human beings to behave like the optimizing rational agents that economists and fanatical capitalists like to posit. Itâs a model that fits psychopaths and people who have spent a bit too long studying the model, but really nobody else. I want you to burn it from your mind, and replace it with another idea that is slightly less succinct but more accurate:
Human beings identify themselves as individuals that are a part of one or more groups. Group identity is more dynamic than individual identity; groups can be nested, overlapping, or entirely disjoint, and identifying with a group is not the same as mere participation, but do not take that to mean that group identity is somehow weaker than individual identity. In fact individual identity is in very large part a product of group identity. Observe that one of the first questions many people ask each other when they meet is, what do you do? What is your group and what is your role in it? Loneliness, exclusion from group, is traumatic to the psyche.
People will readily collapse a group of people into a single individual to simplify reasoning. Countries, corporations, cultures, ethnicities, sports teams and their fans. We will happily reason about all of these pretty much as if they were an individual person with their own character, largely because thatâs the only relevant mental machinery we have to work with.
The human brain readily conflates group and individual. It also readily conflates self and other, as per self-perception theory. It will also conflate self with group. That is to say, people will often think to themselves âI will do whatâs good for the group, because I am in the group and whatâs good for the group is good for me.â Iâm sure thatâs not too controversial and maybe what youâre about to argue is that sounds a whole lot like self interest. All Iâm saying is that you can model it from the point of view of group interest as well, and humans will really, fundamentally start to do that at the level of basic self perception. Basically your brain is equipped with one processor for objective/goal based reasoning (with maybe weaker secondary capacity depending on the brain) and if following group-reasoning is judged to be better than selfish reasoning then it can become the primary working model.
Sooooo * inhales * in that context, the failure of the Soviet Union comes out of the same broken model of humanity that has spawned so much terrible economic policy. They also believed that the individual and the group are incompatible, adversarial concepts rather than compositional and participatory. They sought to eradicate individual spirit and the controlling group they replaced it with was exclusive and inscrutable. The people were never given the chance to participate in any sense meaningful to building a shared identity, and so after an initial willingness ultimately they dissociated, falling back to older national identities when the whole thing fell apart.
A pretty typical example of soviet thinking was to measure a factoryâs productivity by sheer output. A nail factory that produces lots of nails is a good factory. That the workers then produce billions of tiny, useless nails shows that they are not as dumb as their rulers thought but can also be seen as a failure to engage them in a shared identity. Instead of targets, first give the workers a share of company value or profits, suddenly they are solving a different problem and one that requires âthinking like the company.â This is a similar concept to democracy as a means of building identity through participation.
Or to put it another way the ruling soviet class treated their citizenry with contempt so the whole thing was doomed from the start. Iâm not sure what wider ideological conclusions you can draw from that. I would say that the incredible year-on-year progress in our ability to organise groups in all kinds of sophisticated manner is probably a relevant thing to think about here.
11 Likes
I think this just goes to show that some people would rather be king of the shit-heap, than work with others to get everybody out of the cess-pit.
19 Likes
And as each new generation of execs sees the long-term damage already done, they work even more furiously to maximize short-term profits and squirrel away even money in offshore accounts, which accelerates the decline.
7 Likes
Hey Iâm selling those! Iâll give you the Boing Boing discount for the upcoming revolution!
2 Likes
