Max

Everyone thinks they know better and investor money has to go somewhere for taxation purposes.

As an aside, S&P500 index is the only investment worth making for USAmericans who aren’t in congress.

This is a LEGO advertisement, just so everyone is aware. I can’t find info on how the polling worked so it’s unclear how the job options were chosen. But, it doesn’t seem like the kids were allowed to input their own answers—rather there was a list of jobs and respondents were told to pick 3.

There are plenty of reasons to object to the US/UK education systems so we dont need to rely on something intended to sell LEGO model rockets. Not to mention, being pessimistic is a choice and begets inaction. We can’t fall victim to nihilism lest we become nothing but annoying gadfly social critics, talking about how obviously right we are as the world ends to climate change and open combat between multinational corporations.

Anyway, this advert is pretty clever. Creating a leading poll to convince parents they need to buy their kids legos to prevent the Chinese from taking over space managed to get them all sorts of free media coverage—not to mention random shares from people like us.

Maybe send an email then. Uploading any personal content to a public server has always been frowned upon at places I’ve worked so it’s not crazy to contact the guy—especially if your job is in anyway related to network security or other IT type work.

Consider if it’s worth having these conversations in the first place. Realize the best you can accomplish is to razz your conservative relatives a bit. If you think they can take it without it becoming a significant issue, the communist manifesto has brought more people around to socialism than anything else so start there. Don’t cite anything specific as that’ll just cause them to shutoff completely in most cases, play the rhetorical game foremost. If they act like they’re already super familiar with Marxism, ask them about their thoughts on historical materialism or maybe the tendency of the rate of profit to fall in capitalist economies—asking about specific core Marxist concepts is rhetorically useful since it’s impossible to learn about Marx and not have encountered these phrases, making it a good way to reveal their actual knowledge. Don’t take the debates too seriously and if people start to lose their cool consider just letting it go.

What’re you hoping to accomplish? I can’t imagine the guy reacting well to randomly being confronted by a stranger.

Ultimately optimism is a choice—pessimism begets inaction and should be resisted.

Since the objective is clear (stop watching porno) what do you see as stopping yourself from completing your goal? What brings you back to watching it?

You’re definitely not wrong. Admittedly my days of owning boxes of miniatures is long over, so my battletech knowledge does not extend beyond the late 2000s. Maybe it’s even worse now. Not to mention any sort of narrative lore controlled by a big business that hires working writers to fill out plot points will inevitably end up falling back on tired sci-fi tropes—many of which were solidified during the Cold War era.

is it a problem that all the various organizations in battletech are near uniformly morally detestable? I don’t think anyone is positively depicted outside of stories told from the perspective of individuals in the organizations, who of course view themselves favorably.

It’s not that long so I read through most of it. Typical annoying Maoist rhetorical strategies and psychologizing about the motivations of previous revolutionaries. The notion that China is an integral part of the capitalist system is frankly obvious and bizarre to deny. The predictions in the text largely haven’t had a chance to mature yet, so that remains to be seen. Military conflicts between Chinese proxies and U.S. proxies hasn’t taken place, and the Chinese allergy to aiding the Russians in Ukraine seems to undermine the idea that Russian and Chinese multipolarity is aligned. They seem to want to cast BRICS under China and NATO under the U.S. as the two imperial powers but I don’t think we’ve seen BRICS and NATO operate in analogous ways yet.

Good point. I was just curious if this was another instance of modern science borrowing from the eugenics movement. I don’t want people to think I was trying to defend the use of -oid or something.

Got some more info on that? The suffix certainly far predates modern (mid to late 1800s) eugenics. Did the Greeks use it to describe some ancient eugenics movement I’m not aware of? It’s root eidos is a common word—not to mention, newton discussed oblate spheroids in the 17th century.

Has there ever been a time when would it have been morally permissible to have children? Prior to modern obstetrics a huge portion of children died in childbirth for a whole host of awful reasons. At least having a kid doesn’t imply it’s probable immediate painful death anymore.

It’s another instance of capitalism being ultimately incapable of sustaining itself. Forgiving student debt would be a massive boon for the consumer economy, but naturally the system couldn’t help itself.

I’m thoroughly cosmopolitan. Being away from people, away from the hustle and bustle—all makes me deeply uncomfortable. I recently went on a trip with my wife to a small hotel about 2 hours outside the city. I couldn’t sleep with the silence, and the darkness felt oppressive. Seeing stars was cool though. I haven’t seen the night sky that well in the city since I was a young kid during the 2003 NE US blackout.

Just to further elaborate on your point: folks from outside the US who don’t follow US politics and USAmericans who have not yet been conscious for a couple US elections cycles, at times, take what members of either major party say far too seriously. They may see some ’new’ GOP anti-war talking point as novel when in reality it’a just further empty catering to the anti-war opinion generally held by the majority of USAmericans at any given time. But believing there is any separation between the two major US parties on ‘international affairs’ is incorrect. Those aren’t political decisions to be made with input from the public or the vast majority of politicians for that matter. In the US, people get to (indirectly by supporting some lizard who will undoubtedly say anything to get elected) vote on whether or not it’s appropriate for members of minority groups to be openly tortured, but that’s about it. Economics and international affairs are completely outside of the political sphere.

Look into the 1994 trilateral statement. Ukraine was flush with nukes and wasn’t willing to give them up until the UK, US, and Russia came in to cut them big checks and give security guarantees. This wasn’t a smooth process and wasn’t handled by the soviets as they were not a government for 3 years at that point so whatever systems they had in place were breaking down. Ukraine was at least as corrupt and incompetent then as it is now so anything was possible regarding the mishandling of nukes at that point as far as I’m concerned.

Though at this point it’s clear Ukraine couldn’t or didn’t want to hide them for whatever reason so you’re right that western oversight was capable enough to handle the situation.

While I guess i’m glad the situation went as it did, I’m shocked that the NPT and attempts to remove nuclear weapons from Ukraine post-1991 were so successful. I imagined they would have found a couple old Soviet warheads in a storage shed somewhere by now.

I’ve thought about this too and I don’t think a US backed false flag is an unreasonable concern but I keep coming back to my belief that the US doesn’t want open warfare with Russia. There’s no benefit to it. So much of this is money that no longer gets used on arm sales in Afghanistan needing a place to be parked. That said, Putin sees this war as an existential threat and has decided (rightfully so) that the west will not meaningfully negotiate with Russia under any circumstance. During the Cold War, the US consistently dominated soviet foreign policy by threatening to end the world with nuclear war. Threatening to be the bringer of the apocalypse has great strategic benefit. All the countries near Russia (eg Poland, Germany, Finland) know that they’re toast in the case of a nuclear war. They will significantly alter their policy in response and make every overture to prevent a meaningful US response in case of Russia using nukes. Breaking up the European block has value for Russia, and they may see that as the only way to do it, especially if cutting off energy to central europe this winter doesn’t do the trick. I’d say we’re as close to to seeing the use of nuclear weapons as we ever have been before, but I don’t see the US using an apocalyptic response strategy. It’s bad for business and the powers that be in the west ultimately don’t care about anything else

Maybe I’m misunderstanding. it appears you’re accepting the Austrian framing, but it’s simply not anthropologically accurate. Money did not emerge as a means to measure value.

Today, money is a poor means of measuring value precisely because it is abstracted from labor time. Society must use labor time credits in exchange to allow for rational economic planning. Kantorovich demonstrated that economic planning can be done in natural units. Paul Cockshott’s anti-lgbt+ shit is incredibly annoying but he’s done excellent work on this topic.

Additionally, social constructs necessarily have material impact. That’s what differentiates them from ideas people randomly have.

But again I might be confused by what you’re saying so apologies if I’m ham-fistedly rehashing a topic you already understand.