i’m torn about this. most of these things happened in the middle east, and then it’s self defense, kinda, since the US invaded these countries.

Yeah, you’re right. I think the author tried to contrast jobs that add real value to the economy against financial trickery, which he accused of only serving the rich.

But indeed, white-collar jobs have played a tremendous role in the economy in the last 50 years or so.

in general i would agree but many people were tricked into it.

are people in general for or against secession (i.e. splitting up the US into jesusland and the blue states)? poll by upvoting (pro secession) or downvoting (against secession) this comment.

that’s antisemitic. you should be ashamed, you want to kill all jews /s

Kolanaki, i guess you’re not really getting the point here. The point is intentional cruelty to demotivate these people to ever come to the US again.

i don’t really get why nobody besides me seems to freak out about how amazing it is that the “fire & water” dualism can be found in our households

Multiple things can be true at once.

I think that humanity only optimized for quantity of life, not quality of life in the last 200 years. That doesn’t really make sense. All of our needs can be fulfilled with 30% of the current workforce.

That girl is totally cute. Her hair is just like mine (well, mine is 20% longer but still)

is she a character from somewhere? Can i find more from her?

We could lose more than our democracy. We could lose the very idea of America and, with it, the peaceful world we’ve anchored since 1945.

This is essentially nationalism.

I’m just trying to understand people’s sentiments here. Is “preserving America” something that the people in general want? Just trying to understand the situation here. Or would people prefer to live in their own, local communities?

The article is very well written, IMO, and i encourage people to read it.

First, let’s get back to basics. There are only two primary ways to grow a nation’s wealth: by extracting resources from the earth or by manufacturing goods, adding value to those resources. Everything else — lawns getting mowed, nails getting done, stocks getting traded — may move money around or improve quality of life, but don’t grow the actual wealth of a nation.

I agree and i call that “actual wealth of the nation” the real economy, while painting nails and mowing lawns is entertainment.

The Democratic Party has largely understood this since the industrial revolution, as did the first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, who oversaw construction of the transcontinental railroad and funded over 70 free “Land Grant” colleges like MSU across the nation.

From FDR through Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Clinton, Obama, and Biden, Democratic presidents have consistently invested in the physical and human infrastructure that powers wealth creation. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the GI Bill, the WPA and CCC, the Clean Air and Water Acts, and most recently, the Inflation Reduction Act and CHIPS Act all fit this pattern.

Even Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican, got it, although he was his party’s modern exception. He built the Interstate Highway System and warned Americans against the possibility that the military-industrial complex could corrupt Congress. His vision was of a balanced, productive America, not one dominated by war profiteers and Wall Street gamblers.

But the Republican Party since the 1920s (with the exception of Eisenhower) has marched in the opposite direction. […]

In a healthy economy, windfalls get invested in productivity: roads, R&D, education, healthcare for working people. In today’s GOP-run economy, however, they’re getting funneled into yachts, stock buybacks, and political influence. Economists call this the “voracity effect”; a dynamic where powerful groups extract so much from the economy that they ultimately destabilize and then crash it. It’s economic cancer.

Exactly what i say. The rich skim so much wealth from the economy that it simply starves to death. A wealth tax would be a systemic counter-measure to that development, and it’s bitterly needed.

only a systemic treatment can help. treating individual cases isn’t enough.

we need a good social safety net, including wealth tax and UBI.

while most people in the west will think that trump is finally coming to his senses about ukraine,

to trump, it’s just a distraction scheme from his problems at home. he thinks that if he starts a war with russia, the people at home will forget about the bullshit policies he’s implemented domestically.

The headlines this week are wild

And it’s only Tuesday.

Trump desperately tries to distract from his internal problems at home.

This is a comedy these days. If human lifes weren’t at stake, i’d just lean back and watch 5 seasons of this comedy that the US is nowadays.

Hey that’s antisemitic. You implied that Israel has made a mistake, which is impossible and very antisemitic of you to say.

i think the verb was concentrate, concentrate them into a sort of city or other temporary housing.

I just want to throw in a general notice that both parties accuse the other party of doing something sexual inappropriately with children.

The republicans blame the “queer” people of somehow being pedophiles while the liberals blame the conservatives in the midwest to still practice child marriage.

This is a pattern that repeats ongoing not because it actually improves anyone’s lifes but because they realize that whenever children and something that could be seen as sexual are mentioned in the same sentence, it gets people very emotional and angry and that’s how they try to make people angry at the other side.

This epstein thing matches that scheme very well. It’s a single case but it gets blown up because it’s a mud throwing party, not trying to talk about actual economic policies.

is the defenestration supposed to be a metaphor for something? i.e., they took too many risks and “leaned out the window too far and fell over” or sth 🤔

tax the rich! (slight /s)

what i’m wondering is:

who exactly wanted this war? i.e., i guess it was not a single-person decision. probably a number of oligarchs are behind it because they think they can profit from either the conflict or the outcome of it.

everybody knows that wars are hella expensive. i guess most wars are decided by economic factors, i.e. who can stay solvent longer. what did the oligarchs think would happen to their wealth due to the war?