Not just that, Nordic sex workers have a combination of problems in the various countries, like not being able to rent private housing because that’s seen as profiting off sex workers (pimping) and various other ancillary limitations surrounding that.
You’re better off fully decriminalizing first, and then later probably creating some sort of government sanctioned organization made up of sex workers and customers, to regulate the industry.
It’s a good reminder that collective/democratic bargaining works. It’s about time we bring back unions and cooperatives.
I feel like communism has been conflated with ‘tankie’ (as in, the meaning, not the word) for a long while thanks to the red scares. “Tankie” seems to be a more recent (or at least, recently resurrected) term that is attempting to split the authoritarianism away from ‘communism’ and bring that latter term back to its roots as ‘classless, stateless, cashless society’.
But also, you can often avoid using loaded terms like communism. Personally I like to just double down on “democracy” since it literally means rule by people and has positive connotations. If you add more and more rule by people, eventually you get communism.
Under the (currently dominant) credit theory of money, the implication is that billionaires owe the government a lot of money… and it’s time to pay up.
communism-rebuild switch
Subsidies are an incredible tool when used well, like when they funded a bunch of utility cooperatives that electrified rural US. Maybe you’re asking why we should because propping up the car industry when public transit and bike infrastructure should be subsidized instead, rather than challenging subsidies, though.
But don’t services like Discord forbid third party clients?
Me waiting for inflation to slowly increase Discord’s yearly revenue until it tips into the legally defined Gatekeeper™ status under the EU Digital Markets Act so they’d be playing with fire if they banned people for using interoperability apps.
Freedom feels good and just so happens to, for the most part bring nations socially
This part I’d agree with
and economically, closer to the US
This part, much less so. The US has a pretty bad history of overthrowing democratically elected leaders and replacing them with US business friendly politicians, whether through hijacking the legal process as with delaying President Lula, or by backing a coup as with Pinochet.
Given the context of this conversation, I should probably note that I don’t support China taking over Taiwan, or meddling with our elections to sow instability either. I’m just challenging the point that the US is friendly to democracy - which has also had bad influence on European democracy (where I am).
Bidenomics is a mixture of things, but key among them is the recognition that MMT is already reality and doubling down on it to fund productive industries. Basically, government debt is not the same as household debt and strategic yet liberal usage of government debt can be very positive for an economy. MMT economists have made some pretty significant ‘discoveries’ that you can now find in the CORE macroeconomics textbooks in universities all over the world.
when we added socialist elements to capitalism (eg. social security, free healthcare, free education and so on) it didnt stop being capitalism.
This is a very black and white view of things, though. Norway is seen as capitalist, yet 2/3rds of Norway’s GDP is driven by its public sector, the government owns 30% of the domestic stock market, they have a massive government wealth fund that makes returns in hundreds of billions of dollars annually which they could singlehandedly fund UBI with, they apply Georgist taxes to natural resources (oil, hydro, aquafarms) to collectivize profits made off public land, 60% union density, 20% of housing is collectively owned (housing coops)…
Like, at what point do we call a country “socialist”?
(Not to call the US socialist, but Bidenomics might lean like 1% in that direction, and that’s my point - it’s going in a socialist direction if very slowly, and if we can maintain it)
IP is not a universal, objectively good thing. There are plenty of people who disagree with either a) how awful IP law is currently, or b) the mere existence of IP. You don’t even have to be a socialist like China supposedly is (although many would call it state capitalist) to be against IP, plenty of social democrats and libertarians are against it.
Intellectual Property is just a more abstract form of private ownership that wealthy people use to take advantage of us. Remember when they refused to give up COVID vaccine IP? They literally can’t sacrifice profits even during an insane pandemic that’s taking millions of lives. Remember when Canada, Sweden were kind of OK with piracy and then US politicians/lobbyists entered their country to ensure they would be cracking down on piracy? As a European I’m not happy that yet another form of welfare transfers (which piracy de facto is) was taken away just because the US isn’t content with being the wealthiest country on the planet - they need to maintain or even grow their obscene wealth.
Honestly, I could not give a rat’s ass about China “stealing” IP from literally the country that owns 30% of the world’s household wealth. More countries should follow suit so that we can break free from private IP holders delaying human technological and scientific progress.
My immediate concern with tags is descending into what Twitter has become: hashtags have been meaningless for a long while since there’s too much wrongly tagged stuff, different communities often use the same tag for different things, or there are ten tags all for the same thing. All of which means we’d need some form of moderator role that handles tags, and while I think it’s doable, it might take some trial and error to figure out how exactly we divide tags between moderators, how tags are proposed/created, and how tags are grouped/combined (e.g. food, foods).
So not only will you be able to get it, the people who get it to you can’t be big corporate shitheels.
Cannabis Social Clubs have existed in Europe for a while under a legal gray area, e.g. in Spain. I imagine that’s why Germany went with a non-profit cooperative model instead of the US’ (recent) for-profit corporate approach. Although Canada’s approach of a state monopoly is similar to what Norway does with alcohol, which is another way to socialize the profits of drugs.
I swear the “fuck cars” crew are completely deluded from reality.
I see people say what you’re saying (bus vs car road damage elasticity) in “fuck cars” communities, I don’t really see why you’ve decided to attack them collectively. But it’s a pop-community, they’re going to be wrong every now and then either way, please give them some slack. Their purpose is to make an average person aware of car dependency and that it’s generally a negative thing, so that actual urban planners with technical knowledge have an easier time arguing for and implementing realistic solutions, and they’ll take into account the variables you bring up. Think of “fuck cars” like a form of lobbying except it’s done by common people with good intentions - similar to how Japanese coops lobbied for better food safety standards decades ago - rather than wealthy corporations.
Personally there are a few UX issues with the controls. Like getting stuck after diving into prone (I believe it’s because you have to press run after you land to get back up, there’s no action queueing), climbing over stuff you didn’t want to climb over because of auto-climb, and a few other similar things. Both of the above have resulted in me and friends dying during intense moments, and because it’s caused by the game not listening to what you want to do, it doesn’t feel good to die that way.
This is it, notice how Google Trends[1] shows a rise in “30 year old boomer” not long before “boomer shooter” becomes more commonplace. It’s just the whole applying “boomer” to things like being stuck in their ways or boomer-like behavior, rather than age, that took off a few years back.
[1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=boomer shooter,30 year old boomer&hl=en
The average politicians may not present themselves as being smart, but the lobbyists, think tanks, advisors that interact with them and influence their behaviour are not dumb. Rather than assuming it’s either malice or ignorance, we can instead opt for a more middle ground assumption: it’s both malice and ignorance, symbiotically feeding off each other.
Ask yourself this: has Bitcoin had - or is it trending towards - a net positive impact on our world? In other words, is it worth investing in long term? If it isn’t you should treat it as a short term investment and get out as soon as you’ve made a profit - and you’ve literally 4x’d your investment. The fact that we’re talking about the price in c/News is already a bad bubble sign and reminiscent of all the other times we’ve had crypto bubbles.
How much electricity does the world banking system use? (Answer: a whole lot more)
Per capita or in total?
Lemmy technically doesn’t hide your likes - the interface might not show you, but all your likes are public in the Fediverse. Kbin, when I used it, would show which users upvoted/downvoted a post. That’s important because it means researchers and OSI people can still do fact finding - Twitter doesn’t like the idea of having to be open even if it’s a requirement (albeit to researchers specifically) in the EU now.