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As someone from the USA, don’t you know how this works? Congress votes for stuff without worrying about how to pay for it all the time. When there are hard years, you issue more debt. When there are easy years, you issue less debt but still don’t really reign in debt because your constituents demand more stuff and less taxes.

If we controlled the world government, then what are all these politicians who run on a platform of exposing the secret government that already controls the world going to do?

Spider Mastermind is a pushover, Cyberdemon is the best boss in Doom.

Last year I could cast episodes of DS9 I get from Paramount+ through Amazon Prime to my parents’ TV. This year I can’t, likely as an anti-piracy measure. So I hooked my device up via HDMI. Still couldn’t watch it on the TV. You know what? I’m gonna go complain to them before I stop subscribing.

The headline about the mayor of New York ordering the NYPD to shoot floodwater if it doesn’t disperse was funnier.

Also recruiters can’t or don’t want to recruit teens on ADHD or mood meds. If you can’t be an effective fighter without medicine they don’t want to find that out in the middle of a fight.

When I was in high school our home phone number was published in the phone book and military recruiters called it a few times when I was getting close to finishing high school.

I’m not giving my kid a cell phone if I think them having it would endanger them. If unsolicited phone calls endanger them they shouldn’t have a cell phone. They should know what information shouldn’t be given out to strangers over the phone, on a call or via message. They should know how to block numbers and recognize calls that are best left to voicemail, &c.

At least you can’t get drafted before you’re old enough to vote anymore.

I guess they probably do now because like 90% of high school grads have or did something that makes them ineligible to join and if they want more recruits they need to get students to not do things that make them ineligible and that might mean reaching out more than six months before they’re old enough to join.

Spent 14 years in the Navy, and they don’t care much for their people either, just in a different way from the Army and the Marines. Imagine the Air Force but like 1/3rd as much money to spend on its people because they spent the rest on ships.

So they’re old enough to decide to join the military but not old enough to handle receiving an unsolicited message on social media?

We don’t have a lot of records of what speakers of the Proto-Indo-European language were thinking because they lived c. 4500-2500 BC and didn’t have their own writing. I think the for the earliest writing we have of an Indo-European language gendered nouns had already been invented.

I think he just didn’t exist when he “left”. Their rings don’t summon him from another place, they form him. When the mission is over, he ceases to be. There was an episode where the fire guy goes back in time and prevents himself from getting his ring and creates an alternate timeline where Captain Planet never existed at all, because the other planeteers can’t “cast” him without fire.

Is someone with the power to grant promotions or dock pay not a representative of the owner, who has all those powers? Sure if the workers all own shares then they are also owners, but hiring and firing are actions performed by owners or their representatives. Workers perform labor.

It’s a socialist model of organization, but if it’s operating in a capitalist economy, it benefits capitalism as a model to run an economy, not socialism.

Also no, not everyone is a worker. Not everyone is equal. Someone (or a group of someones) has the power to hire/fire, or dock pay to discourage poor performance, or grant promotions to incentivize superior performance. Someone has the power to alter the distribution of resources, because once a group of humans reaches over 150 or so they form hierarchies because it’s just too difficult to keep peer relationships with more than about 150 people. So someone is given power to speak for more than oneself, they speak for the group, and therefore have more power than a person who speaks for only oneself. That person is not a worker, now they are a politician, or a bureaucrat, or a manager, or a chieftain, or something, they are not like the others, they have more power.

Sounds like what you need is a droid that understands the binary logic of moisture vaperators.

No, I completely acknowledge capitalists largely care about their investments in capital and don’t really care so much about workers as long as they are working. But at least I know where their incentives are, what they’re trying to do. It’s difficult to predict how people are going to act if you don’t know what their incentives are, and if you can’t predict how people are going to act then your life is less stable.

And “direct ownership” meaning like a co-op or whatever, nothing wrong with that. Collective ownership of a business is totally fine within a capitalist economy. There’s still a concept of ownership. I wish more businesses were run that way. Well, a lot of start-ups kinda are now that I think about it. People get some pay in stock options and the like. I think unions should own more shares in a company so the incentives of both the union and management are aligned to make the company money, but it’s hard to get the right balance.

Yes, tools don’t make things, people using tools produce things. And capitalism as a tool has been used to produce a lot of things, a lot more than socialism. But like any tool, you don’t want to use the same one all the time for everything. Economics is about incentives, and different systems put the incentives in different places. You don’t want to run a prison on capitalism because it incentivizes imprisoning people. But if you’re running a country on a planned economy it’s difficult to incentivize people to work harder just because the government said so, even if it was a democratic decision that people should work harder.

Workers do have a say. They own their labor. If they are educated and organized enough they can bring a corporation to its knees, because corporations can’t do anything with their capital without labor. Just because I’m arguing capitalism has merits doesn’t mean I don’t think there should be strong unions, or shared ownership of companies, or regulation of markets.

I don’t want to do a job I don’t want to do just because the majority voted that I should do it either, really. I can count on people to vote for their own self-interest, but I can’t count on them to vote for mine.

In order for things to be a product of capitalism, you have to show they can’t be made outside of it.

OK then, what has socialism produced? Remember you have to show what it produced can’t be made under capitalism, or any other economic system.

Anyone can tell someone they’re wrong, but if you can’t explain why, why should they believe you?