California governor Newsom vetoes bill to make free condoms available for high school students, citing cost
honey_im_meat_grinding @ honey_im_meat_grinding @lemmy.blahaj.zone Posts 0Comments 119Joined 2 yr. ago
honey_im_meat_grinding @ honey_im_meat_grinding @lemmy.blahaj.zone
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Yes, but "capitalist country" doesn't paint the full picture. You're not either capitalist or socialist, you can be both - you can have elements of both. Most of today's socialist countries are market socialist, e.g. Cuba allows small businesses, and that is a capitalist element within their socialist economy. Similarly the Nordics combine market socialist elements with capitalist ones, for example through worker board representation, unionisation, state owned enterprises, social wealth funds, taxing natural resources, and other forms of coops.
I'd say look into what you can vote on in your coop and make sure to partake in the democratic elements that it has, because it's more than just a loyalty programme. Finnish consumer coops are probably some of the best in the world - the UK's grocery coop pales in comparison in what rights you have and is closer to just a loyalty programme, but you can still vote on issues in the UK Coop.
When you look into the kind of stuff that happens worldwide, you'll quickly realise that the usual conspiracy theories become tame in comparison to the real world. There's a credible reason why an apartheid state would synthesise conditions for further oppression.
As a lesser known example, is Operation Car Wash in Brazil. You might remember a few years ago current President Lula was under investigation for corruption. Then the Car Wash leaks[1] happened and showed the whole thing was a right wing legal campaign with actual US agents involved.
It was reported that Mr. Dallagnol had called Lula da Silva's arrest “a gift from the CIA”.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Car_Wash#Leaked_conversations
A socialist system would also feature government officials vetoing spending on the basis of cost. If you think about it, there would be even more such instances, since a socialist government has a larger say on economic questions.
Not necessarily, allow me to give a different perspective. Market socialists usually argue in favour of socialised organisations like cooperatives and unions having more power. Socialism doesn't necessarily equal an all powerful control economy, you can marketise elements in a humane way. In Sweden, for example, the unions handle unemployment benefits through what's known as a Ghent system[1]. In Norway, 20% of housing is democratically owned through housing coops that were originally funded by the government (but that stopped a few decades ago) and it's still growing faster than the population itself is, so given enough time Norway will eventually be all democratically owned housing. In Finland, something like 90%+ of the population is a member in democratically owned grocery shops (consumer coops), where anyone can stand in elections for managerial positions - yes, you can literally be democratically elected a manager in a coop shop.
Also, anecdotally, when I went to high school in Norway I was offered free condoms. This is also the case in Sweden and Finland, now that I look it up.
Wealth is definitely a strong element. It's easy to forget that socialism is just democratic ownership of the economy, not just "workers owning the means of production" because that forgets all the people who can't work. In addition, these elements add to Norway's status as a mixed economy with market socialist elements:
- 30% of the domestic stock market is owned by the Norwegian state
- They operate 70+ state owned enterprises (SOEs), including a national bank and telecom
- Norway has 50% union density, which is pretty high compared to the rest of the world
- They have works councils where workers get 33%(?) of the seats on the board of larger corporations
- 20% of Norways population lives in democratically owned housing (housing coops), originally funded by the government but now growing their membership faster than the population is growing
- Norway uses Georgist-style taxes on land (natural resources - oil, aquafarms, hydropower, wind energy) because no one worked for the creation of those natural resources hence a good cut of the profits should belong to the people
When you compare these to China, you'll notice that a so-called communist country gets beaten on many of these in relative terms, which is a strong case for Norway being quite socialist (obviously they also have capitalism hence the "mixed economy" part, before someone goes "well actually")
The oil industry is on its death bed so I'm not against what you're saying, but we're currently subsidizing the green energy sector (a good thing) with nothing in return (a bad thing).
We should look to how Norway avoided Dutch Disease and taxed the hell out of private oil extraction. They subsidise the discovery (the risky part) and then slap a very heavy tax on the oil those companies then extract and sell, all the while having a national oil company they have to compete with it (crucial to keep oil expertise within the government).
Norway already taxes private wind energy and hydropower, because they know the oil industry will be dethroned by the green energy industry soon and don't want to simply subsidize their profits. Norway also owns wind energy both domestically and in other countries (hilariously, they own more UK wind energy than the UK government itself does), and massive amounts of their domestic hydropower.
Back in the good old days of the Stone Age we used to work 4-6 hours per day, based on the anthropological evidence we have (as Historia Civilis points out[1]). That seems to be the amount of work humans naturally slot into when left alone. Instead we work 8+ hours per day per 5 day work week. In European countries like the Netherlands, and the Nordics, for example, that's slightly below 7 hours per day (on average, assuming a 5 day work week), so they're getting close to the range we used to work. But a 4 day work week still seems like an almost utopian idea to achieve politically, despite all the insane productivity gains we've made over the last 100 years thanks to automation that makes even a four day work week seem laughable - we should probably be thinking of a three day work week at this point.
When I was in kbin and could see who voted because voting metadata is visible there, almost always left wing comments (e.g. supportive of trans rights) received downvotes from someone on lemmy.world while the upvotes were from multiple, varied instances. So I'm not sure kbin is the biggest problem unless things have changed since then
"Crazy expensive" doesn't really matter when you're a government and can borrow or print to make investments that have investment returns in the form of efficiency gains that go on to improve the economy, much like what corporations do to grow (borrow, reinvest profits gained from growth). There isn't really any good macroeconomic evidence that inflation is to blame because of said funding strategies, as explained by PhD Joeri Schasfoort in multiple of his videos[1], much to the behest right wing populist politicians who lie about not being able to invest in infrastructure. In the UK, Rishi Sunak is cancelling our HS2 railway falsely citing costs and even sabotaging it by sidestepping the democratically elected House of Commons by selling off gov. owned land so that the incoming Labour government will have a hard time un-cancelling HS2 - even our old conservative Brexit-causing PM David Cameron is criticising it publicly (ex-PMs rarely criticise their own party's contemporary government).
Is it fair to call people stupid when they're facing a literal corporate propaganda campaign? I'd sooner reach for "corporations are evil" than "people are stupid" in that case. Remember how people used to treat you if you were against the Iraq war? And today, we know that thing was unnecessary and awful. Sometimes powerful people just manage to convince us of things that aren't true.
The reason they're going through layoffs is because they hired unsustainably and chose to do layoffs instead of reducing salaries. This is something that is far more often avoided with democratically owned and community driven projects like Godot, or even better, worker cooperatives and unionised workplaces, where e.g. Mandrogon chose to be more careful, and unionised auto-workers in Germany chose a temporary pay-cut during a recession to avoid having to fire people.
I'm not happy that these people got fired, but there's a systemic problem here and Godot and other democratic structures of ownership help to alleviate that. Which is related to the first bit of good news today: Brackeys, the de-facto Unity YouTuber with a direct line of communications to Unity who retired 3 years ago - curiously 1 day after Unity went public through an IPO - rose from his grave to champion democratic ownership and is now learning Godot.
The second good news for Godot today and I'm here for it
What would be cool is adopting the system they use in the Faroe Islands - it's an incredibly efficient system. Neither individuals nor corporations handle taxes, instead corporations pay into a publicly owned automatic tax withholding system that does the taxes for you both and then forwards your income post-taxes into your bank account.
The Faroes haven’t just set up a centralized system that automatically collects tax revenue and disburses welfare payments; they also continuously monitor all of your labor income and adjust your withholding as necessary if you lose a job or get a new one. Ordinary businesses and employees never have to even think about TAKS—no tax return is required.
What’s more, the system almost automatically produces the best possible economic statistics—virtually an identical and contemporaneous picture of the whole economy, down to the last krone—instead of relying on the kinds of laborious and inaccurate surveys used in the U.S. That automation, in turn, has allowed TAKS to cut its budget and staffing while increasing audits on large, rich companies.
Reminder that non-democratically (i.e. not 1-person-1-vote) elected CEOs are not only unnecessary, they're lazy and less productive:
In general terms, research shows that productivity in worker's cooperatives is higher than in conventional firms. For example, Fakhfakh et al. (2012) show that in several industries conventional firms would produce more with their current levels of employment and capital if they adopted the employee-owned firms’ way of organising
People are still allowing non-democratic, unelected CEOs to run businesses, all this silliness, right?
I hope unity’s shareholders are happy with what they hoped for. This is the result of driving a company too far. Let’s makes this a guideline to follow for other companies not to make such shady decisions.
I don't think that's going to happen as long as the ownership structures surrounding shareholders remains the same. It's not the average person who invests in Unity that's doing this, it's the wealthy equity firms with significant holdings that are pushing for this unsustainable behaviour. After the 2008 crash, the EU, the US, Canada, and the UK all did studies on the economic stability of coops (1-person-1-vote democratically owned businesses) versus traditional companies and found that the coops were considerably more sustainable:
The cooperative banking sector had 20% market share of the European banking sector, but accounted for only 7 percent of all the write-downs and losses between the third quarter of 2007 and the first quarter of 2011.
(UK) A further study found that after ten years 44 percent of cooperatives were still in operation, compared with only 20 percent for all enterprises.
(US) Credit unions, a type of cooperative bank, had five times lower failure rate than other banks during the financial crisis and more than doubled lending to small businesses between 2008 and 2016, from $30 billion to $60 billion, while lending to small businesses overall during the same period declined by around $100 billion.
A 2010 report by the Ministry of Economic Development, Innovation and Export in Québec found the five-year survival rate and ten-year survival rate of cooperatives in Québec to be 62% and 44% respectively compared to 35% and 20% for conventional firms.
There's also a study using 100 years of data on French wine coops vs non-coop wine companies showing similar results: not only do coops survive longer, the survival rate gap widens over time as more and more non-coops collapse [Cooperatives versus Corporations: Survival in the French Wine Industry. Journal of Wine Economics, 13(3), 328-354. doi:10.1017/jwe.2017.1]
This isn't a great summary, but with the article headings as context it makes a bit more sense:
- YOU CAN TURN OFF AI-RECOMMENDED VIDEOS
- IT’S EASIER TO FLAG HARMFUL CONTENT
- YOU’LL KNOW WHY YOUR POST WAS TAKEN DOWN
- YOU CAN REPORT FAKE PRODUCTS
- YOUR KIDS WON’T BE TARGETED WITH DIGITAL ADS
Kellogg’s is going to war over Mexico’s nutrition label rules. A similar fight is coming to the U.S.
Jump
If I'm seeing this right and the Mexican labels are just either-or "excessive" labels then check out the way the UK does it – the green/orange/red colouring makes it easy to tell how horrible something is at a glance
I agree with you, but in absence of a perfect policy I prefer this outcome to nothing. There isn't just one party being affected here: the effects of air pollution on life expectancy and early chronic illnesses is well known, in fact I am personally affected by a chronic illness that's known to be associated with air pollution. I'd rather we keep going forward and push for giving poorer drivers the things they need to adjust, e.g. grants for electric vehicles, public transportation links, or bike networks, depending on needs - rather than pushing for reverting this policy, because it's not flawed in and of itself, it's the lack of welfare that is flawed here.
The article doesn't really expand on the Reddit point: apart from the weapon trading forum, it's about the shooter being a participant in PoliticalCompassMemes which is a right wing subreddit. After the shooting the Reddit admins made a weak threat towards the mods of PCM, prompting the mods to sticky a "stop being so racist or we'll get deleted" post with loads of examples of the type of racist dog whistles the users needed to stop using in the post itself.
I don't imagine they'll have much success against Reddit in this lawsuit, but Reddit is aware of PCM and its role and it continues to thrive to this day.
It's a little bit more "legal" than decriminalisation in more European countries if you consider paying for membership in a CSC, where the buying is more a service fee than one-to-one sale. They're also non-profit cooperatives (democratically owned), which is pretty interesting.
Although the Nordics which are usually pretty progressive, have not even decriminalised recreational use yet - so they're definitely being weirdly conservative about it.
There are genuine disagreements within academic circles at which point you tip over into a market/democratic socialist economy. Maybe Finland isn't as socialist as Norway, but there are economists who argue that the tipping point is at 60-75% of wealth owned by a democratic government, and Norway currently sits at 65%.[3]
We keep being told the Nordics are capitalist, but we beat China on many of their "socialist" metrics, and yet they call themselves socialist. There's more nuance to it and I don't think we should so readily just label the Nordics as "capitalist". Especially not when "social democracy" itself was born out of Orthodox Marxism and was seen as a market-based wing of socialism focused on a peaceful transition to socialism[2]. The last socialist PM of Sweden (who was assassinated), Olof Palme, quite literally called himself a "democratic socialist" while championing "social democracy"[1].
Market socialism is also not in opposition to social democracy, it is just a descriptor of a specific kind of socialism, the Nordics have elements of social democracy, democratic socialism, and market socialism all at once.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQqZ8btcbyE
[2] "Social democracy is defined as one of many socialist traditions. As a political movement, it aims to achieve socialism through gradual and democratic means.", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_democracy
[3] I can provide a source here if you want it, but policy analyst Matt Bruenig covers it in one of his videos https://www.youtube.com/@Matt_Bruenig/videos