ZzyzxRoad @ ZzyzxRoad @lemm.ee

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2 yr. ago

This does not come across the way you think it does.

Sounds like we need to get the sociologists and cultural anthropologists on it. Can't decide whether economists should be involved. Probably not.

Like how Japanese internment in America wasn't justified, even if involvement in WW2 was.

Now there's something that sounds like an insane conspiracy theory but actually happened.

Because the people who hate him aren't republicans.

I think their question is more about how we would implement that. Marx believed that proletariat uprising would be the "how," and that it is an inevitability of end stage capitalism. But the nature of capitalism keeps people from attempting that. This is a system that we are forced to participate in if we want to survive. We need food and shelter and we don't want to get arrested and/or murdered by cops for revolting. With that in mind, we have to get to a point where we collectively have nothing left to lose.

Just learned about faculty housing going in at one of the CSU campuses. Of course the marketing has all been positive because housing is such a commodity near universities, and because colleges often pay their teachers shit, even with unions and decent benefits.

This is the benefit of an uneducated population. So that we all forget what things looked like before the labor organizing of the early 20th century.

I fucking hate that they used the term "empty" land. The poll question posed to residents asked them if they would be more in favor if they knew it was "bad soil" that only contributed to 5% of CA agriculture, as though making money is all that land is good for.

Yes, Fairfield, CA is kind of a shit hole. But NorCal open land is absolutely beautiful, like all of California. Every single fucking time I go there, which is pretty frequently, there are new mcmansion housing developments and business parks and data centers that are starting to be built or have just finished. There are protected wetlands between Sacramento and the east bay (far east) where migratory birds come back every year. Just because they don't build on the fucking wetlands doesn't mean this constant building isn't going to affect what little nature is left. I'm so fucking sick of seeing my home paved over for profit and I feel so powerless to do anything. Because I am powerless.

As if that weren't enough, we all know this is going to be some walled-off rich-people city where they can escape from us proles, right? Sick shit.

Reddit is like a microcosm of American society

I get what you're saying, but I still think it's a seriously outsized response to someone asking to categorize memes better lmao.

Or some of us might have multiple sociology degrees and/or are in academia. But I'm sure if they wrote comments about Marx (or Weber or Gramsci or Veblen etc) you'd just assume they got it from wikipedia anyway. Though I'm not sure why that's a bad thing. It's not like it makes a difference whether someone read primary texts online or overpaid at the college bookstore. It's the same information. The fact that anyone has a desire to learn, better themselves, and then try to use that knowledge is admirable and a service to society at large. More people should try it.

As a Californian dealing with Feinstein, I am so sick of the "well you voted for them!" bs. We all know how fucked American elections are. We all know that we are not given any true choice of who gets in office. Why would state elections be any better? Even living in a state that's technically a direct democracy, it still comes down to whoever has the most money. Local elections tend to have more candidates, but less information available on them, and while anyone can propose a ballot initiative here, it again comes down to having enough money to do that.

The whole thing is a shit show that comes down to choosing democrats or fascists. And while democrats may not be the best choice, the "both sides" thing is also bs because there's an obvious right choice there.

They definitely have it in other California cities too. And not just in restaurants.

A chain resale/consignment hipster shop in NorCal started adding a percentage service charge years ago with the same excuse, and you'd only find out about it if you looked at your receipt. The fucked up part is that they also raised their prices so high that I couldn't shop there anymore. It's one of those buy/sell/trade clothing stores, so the whole point was to pay less for decent clothes. But if they're already raising prices significantly, why the fuck do they need yet another charge to pay their workers.

I also think they really must believe it makes them seem "progressive" somehow. Like "oh look, we're on the workers' side!" and they hope no one eating/shopping there will think about it any more deeply than that.

Here's a somewhat tangential counter, which I think some of the other replies are trying to touch on ... why, exactly, continue valuing our ability to do something a computer can so easily do for us (to some extent obviously)?

My theory prof said there would be paper exams next year. Because it's theory. You need to be able to read an academic paper and know what theoretical basis the authors had for their hypothesis. I'm in liberal arts/humanities. Yes we still exist, and we are the ones that AI can't replace. If the whole idea is that it pulls from information that's already available, and a researcher's job is to develop new theories and ideas and do survey or interview research, then we need humans for that. If I'm trying to become a professor/researcher, using AI to write my theory papers is not doing me or my future students any favors. Ststistical research on the other hand, they already use programs for that and use existing data, so idk. But even then, any AI statistical analysis should be testing a new hypothesis that humans came up with, or a new angle on an existing one.

So idk how this would affect engineering or tech majors. But for students trying to be psychologists, anthropologists, social workers, professors, then using it for written exams just isn't going to do them any favors.

I agree. I once forgot the book I was reading when I went on a trip, so I found it on internet archive for the time I was traveling. Reading a novel on there is just obnoxious, because they have short time limits for borrowing, which I forget if it's an hour or half hour. Either way, it's good for reference books, not so much for novels.

https://www.nationalpriorities.org/budget-basics/federal-budget-101/spending/

By far, the biggest category of discretionary spending is spending on the Pentagon and military. In most years, this accounts for more than half of the discretionary budget. In 2020, because some discretionary spending passed through supplemental appropriations went to pandemic programs, the share of the discretionary budget that went to the military was smaller – even though the amount that went to the military was just as high as in previous years.

Most "welfare" falls under discretionary. Medicare, medicaid, and social security (also "welfare") fall under mandatory spending. Social security and medicare make up the largest categories. This organization explains how "welfare" spending increased in recent years due to pandemic spending on things like stimulus checks and increased unemployment.

The bottom line thoughis that people pay into it for years so that it's available when it's their turn to need it. If they never do, then great. It can help someone else, god forbid.

So where are all of the conservative "if Biden actually wanted to cancel student loan debt he would just do it" people now

That image, carefully crafted to be as extremely negative as possible, is the only experience most people have with California.

That's the thing. No one I've ever heard who says this kind of shit has ever lived here for any length of time or knows anything about the state beyond what the "news" has told them to believe. There are issues here like there are issues everywhere. So people want to focus on homelessness. Of course we have more homeless people, we have more people. We have two of the largest and most well known metro areas in the nation with an up and coming third.

The bitching takes away (maybe intentionally) from the homeless issue that is rapidly increasing throughout the rest of the country. This is an issue of inflation and greed masquerading as inflation. Of corporate property owners buying up rentals and raising rents. Of workers not being paid a living wage. Of food and essentials becoming increasingly unaffordable by the month. Of course people are losing their homes and stealing from walmart. But this is a national problem. It gets worse all over the country for the same reasons and at the same time that it gets worse in California.

But what I will say is, we do have reproductive rights. Reasonable firearms regulations. More tenant regulations that most places, though still never enough. Some cities have social worker response teams instead of sending cops to kill people having mental health problems. We have homeless outreach and a statewide homeless census. Our schools and colleges still have diversity programs and sex ed. The state provides tuition waivers and grants for low income and marginalized students. We have drag shows and pride parades. And our libraries aren't being purged by fucking nazis. So there's that.

if the US has any hope of protecting its democracy.

I don't think that's a priority as far as our leaders are concerned. The facade of democracy is just getting in their way now.

You're right. But I also think their point definitely calls out the utter hypocrisy of all of this being "for the children" though. It's such transparent bullshit.

I guess I'm not understanding all the comments saying "why is anyone buying printers anymore? What do you need to print at home? Just buy a Brother or don't buy one at all."

Do you really need to understand why someone wants or needs a printer? Do people need to be explaining their purchases so we can all decide if they deserve to get scammed by HP or not? It doesn't matter why they bought it, whether it's a want or a need, whether it's the "right" brand, etc. They still don't deserve to get scammed out of their money by some bullshit company that can brick their device whenever they feel like. If you pay for something, it should belong to you. Period.