Ah, i see now that i was simply defining the word “shame” a bit differently, as i’ve observed it used in everyday life:

I’ve held shame to mean “a painful emotion caused by group-pressure that indicates guilt, shortcoming, or impropriety”.

What you’ve been describing as “shame”, i’ve called it insight in practice. Insight is a good thing because it bring with itself reflection and thought, which i also like to call meditation and contemplation. That’s what society needs.

What society does not need is group-pressure, because it leads to people behaving right, but for the wrong reasons. Such behavior is short-lived and tends to bite you in the ass when you’re most vulnerable. Compare that to college kids who have always been told “no alcohol”, and then at college the first thing they do is to enjoy the absence of their parents and drink so much alcohol they go into a coma and to the hospital. Had they been taught the implications that alcohol has on your near-term health and consciousness instead, they might have been wise enough to not drink too much out of themselves. :)

In my experience, shame is not a natural emotion at all.

Rather, i’ve observed shame exclusively stems from somebody saying “shame on you, you shouldn’t do that”. Thus i infer that shame is a social construct, similar to gender.

Shame should be abolished after all. It is irrational. If there is a good reason for/against something, we should use that reason instead, and create a culture of habits around it.

it also works the other way around, interestingly:

• future is shit
• no vision
• nobody wants to have kids anymore
• women abstain from dating
• we have a loneliness crisis?!?

you’re joking but birthrate in china is falling as well.

step 1: send your men to a pointless war
step 2: potential mothers realize their sons would only be meat in the meat grinder
step 3: nobody wants to have children anymore
step 4: be confused??

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Well yeah, it’s the job of the political process to figure out in which direction the bus should drive …

Would it really? My understanding was it only took off because so many people went along with it.

I agree with you that AI will probably replace a lot of white-collar jobs by 2035, which is not that far away, and it will necessitate political change.

I also consider that UBI (Universal Basic Income) is probably the most natural way forward. It pays a constant amount to each person per month, based on money collected through a wealth tax. It does not have to be implemented all-at-once, but can be gradually introduced. I.e. only provide $200/(person*month) in the beginning, and then continuously scale up as needed.

The wealth tax is needed simultaneously because the money has to come from somewhere. Printing money anew is not great because it leads to steep inflation.

quick question - what the hell do you do with a modern computer without internet access anyways?

i’d like to be a labor leader, but i’m not (yet). Yet here’s my opinion:

Knowledge was meant to be free since the beginning. I look at ideas as human-cultivated, carefully cultured viruses. They’re packages of information that live within a host.

They’re a lot less aggressive than their feral counterparts, but they’re still individual beings who want to spread. Holding back knowledge is unnatural, and the internet should be free.

Ich

Life is too short to learn german :D

No shit sherlock.

But the decline in real (inflation-adjusted) wages is a broader phenomenon and not constrained to gig-works, and that’s what deserves attention.

Background:

For years, inflation has been under-reported. Inflation should be measured mostly based on food-items, as the production methods don’t change over time in these areas, so prices there (inflation-adjusted) should stay constant. But if you look at official inflation rates, they are much lower (approx. 1% annually). Since wages barely keep up with official inflation, they fall behind on “food”-inflation. And that principle is basically at the core of the current “cost-of-living”-crisis.

The basic issue is that wages are dropping because progress is ending. Progress creates demand for human labor, and that keeps wages up. Since progress worldwide is slowing down, that depresses wages. That’s why we need fundamental reform, or revolution.

Or we need to find new progress. I’m all for mars settlement btw, just that many people here can’t imagine it happening (yet). But we’ll see.

Efficiency standards are a two-sided thing:

• on the one hand, they reduce energy and water consumption, which saves on resources.
• on the other hand, they increase engineering complexity and thus the cost of the machine.

Now, the engineering complexity requires able engineers to design and build the machine, which creates a stronger demand for engineers. That would be good for blue-collar workers.

well i guess it’s good for you to spit these facts but i gotta make my own judgement, and i can see the things around me, and saying “They have been doing well because they are Imperialists. To say they are doing well is to say the Trust Fund kid working at his father’s investment firm is doing well, he does so on the backs of actual laborers and did not earn his vast wealth, but inhereted it from former and current Empire.” does not make me believe your point, just fyi

There’s a reason that the “violent” and “authoritarian” communists have actually won and seized power while the utopian eurocommies have never accomplished a single thing.

Well yeah i can tell you what the communists have achieved in the Sovjet Union, and that’s 20 million people dead due to stalinistic terror. So much for “winning”. No thank you.

Meanwhile, lots of european economies (and people!) have been doing well since after the second world war. Maybe they have accomplished something.

wait until they self-destruct, mostly.

i say this as an european

I’m really struggling to find a party that i fully agree with.

For one, i like true leftist ideals, but i don’t like guns, so i guess the left parts of the image doesn’t apply to me.

On the other side, i think the long-standing support for Ukraine is an atrocious mistake, because it prolongs the suffering unnecessarily (after all, the uproar in Ukraine is mostly an CIA-inspired action after all i believe, and diplomatic solutions were not sought). But shitting on that pink hat (which is clearly a symbol for queer/trans people) is just unacceptable. just leave the people live their own private life as they want. What’s so difficult about that?

Edit: as per the comments, i stand corrected and am sorry for my half-assed take. i’ll leave it up anyways, because i guess it’s a chance to learn for any reader.