jizzy [any]
Economist/YouGov poll does not inspire confidence in the reality that USians live in: https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/aa58ig9d3b/econTabReport.pdf
Page 70 has the question… in question… And only 11,% of respondents identify Russia as a capitalist economy. Which it indisputably is.
I don’t imagine the US will forgive any amount of student loans. It’s obviously only near the table when Dems are in power, which they won’t be for much longer and then for a while afterwards. There’s a big focus on “fairness” in public handouts in the US, warranted or not, and forgiving debt for people who have it at some point in time ignores people who did repay it. I don’t see how politicians square the circle with the domestic constituency, people will go apeshit if someone’s loans are forgiven and someone else just finished paying it off while forgoing x,y,z to do so. There will be 10.000 media accounts of such unfairness aimed at turning every Gen X and older millennial who did pay off their student loans away from such radical leftism…
Put me in the camp of people who opted not to go to school because of the costs, I absolutely do not regret that as I’ve been doing the work-from-home multiple-jobs scam for the whole pandemic but I’ll always wonder what could have been.
Big Wal-Mart parking lot energy
Love the “could be literally anywhere in the American South West” landscape of big box/strip mall combo shopping center with huge US flag
:meemaw:
I’ll ignore planned obsolescence even though it’s a massive part of the problem, since others addressed.
It’s definitely possible to have fair compensation and not slavery and sentencing people to brutal lifelong health complications for mining and handling in manufacturing the kinds of minerals necessary for modern microprocessors and other electronic components. It’s also definitely possible to recycle components and materials to build newer electronics, but all of this adds to the cost. Ultimately the reduced expenses from slavery and exploitation account for why it’s done this way. Nobody could realistically compete on cost while ethically producing microelectronics, if everything from supply chain to factory assembly to shipping were devoid of slavery or things worse than slavery you’d see a $1000,USD laptop today at least quadruple in price, and honestly I’d expect that to be more like a ten-fold increase because every company and paid off bureaucrat along the way needs to grift some off the top (efficiencies of capitalism yada yada). With neoliberal markets being entirely transnational, except when sanctions divide them and create proxies and the need for misdirection, any national attempts to regulate supply chains to discourage exploitation will just make your economy less productive. Every “service” economy needs microprocessors, kneecapping your domestic information industry will just shift the demand elsewhere, but the demand will never slow down. We need more and more software developers to write more and more highly abstracted code, which runs worse and requires more memory and processing power to crunch, so that the boss gets paid and the shareholders are happy. The server farm can move to anywhere that fiber optics and relatively reliable electricity are available. The states managing the mines and factories have little interest in reducing exploitation, for a lot of reasons. Multinationals use their power and money and their influence over states they control like the US to weaken the regulatory capacity of those places that are rich in mineral and human resources, specifically so that they can exploit them.
For context, I’ve designed and manufactured PCBs for various projects, like FrankenPads, with a friend from Guangdong and a friend from Finland. These are older (10-11 years) IBM/Lenovo ThinkPads that we repurpose and equip with modern engineering sample CPUs like i5-10500U, DDR4 memory, NVMe hard drives, and even displays from Microsoft Surface tablets. And we’re doing this with recycled components, prototype boards, engineering samples of components that would otherwise just end up in the ocean or landfills.
The downsides are mostly cost. We’re still able to make these cheaper than equivalent modern Lenovo products because we don’t suck and there’s such an abundance of components… But their origin was unethical to begin with so accounting for that I’m certain the prices would skyrocket if people digging it up and processing weren’t dying destitute at 40.
Idk, I got fired for not getting jabbed (from a remote job in the US where I would conceivably never go to an office) and I’m still very much a leftist. I never told HR directly that I’d already been pozzed up at some point in the past, since I had antibodies already when I had routine blood work done, as early as Jul 2020 I knew I’d already had covid but no symptoms so no idea when, but I don’t think they would have cared.
They denied my religious exemption, an earnest and deeply held opposition to intellectual property that prevents me from taking any patented medical products. I had explained there were upcoming vaccines that would likely be compatible with my beliefs, but that didn’t interest the corporate masters there so I ghosted them and they ended up paying 4 months severance in exchange for my silence. Considering the lack of labour protections in the US preventing employers from requiring their employees receive totally unnecessary medical procedures, I took the money and took a month off having two jobs. Now I once again have two jobs, but this one pays a lot more and I now own 2,% of an airline after my shares vest.
Just a couple days ago for that one yeah
It’s very melodramatic. Either wear the mask and do whatever you had planned or don’t wear the mask and do something else. Why the author would think anyone would care, why any editor would think this is worth publishing, etc is baffling.
And yes, masks are laughably ineffective unless it’s something like a KN95 or N95. At least countries with wide access to those masks fared much better than ill-equipped populations like the US and UK during the same periods, and with neighbouring countries as well. I still wear them because it makes stealing a breeze.
My 59 year old Chinese lover gets really happy when the succulents in the house are doing well.
" Allll meat~ "
PRC, in some cities at least, is back in lockdown. My partner is Chinese and her daughter-in-law keeps us in the loop on Pudong. She works in hospital so she has a little card to get out and about, but everyone else is limited to since extent in what they’re allowed to do at the moment.
We’ll see how long they can keep the zero-COVID strategy up.