Girzo

Actually, it was a very real possibility 50 years ago. Republican president, Nixon, almost had implemented it, but his Ayn Rand-loving, liberal adviser had talked him out of it. So they added conditions, that it's only for working families, etc, to make it appealing to conservatives, yet the Democrats then blocked it, saying the bill doesn't go far enough. The whole propsal had lost momentum over time and was to be forgotten. This moment marked a pivotal point at which the policy direction changed towards neoliberal, pro-capitalist one we know today.

We are people first, gender second. To understand women you first have to understand people in general.

Organizations like Buurtzorg (Dutch home-care organization, working in self-managed teams) or companies like Haier (Chinese giant home appliance manufacturer, also organizing its workers in self-managed teams) work. I think it's the most possible vector of change, coming from grass-roots organizations and entrepreneurs themselves. The government has just to curb the "too big to fail" players who abuse and lobby the system. The government should also only take control of parts of crucial infrastructure like healthcare, information, food, housing, education, transport. A lot of challenges coming in the next 30 years for sure with all that space mining, global warming, AI and shit. Do I believe we will have in that time an AI that could become our machine overlord? Nope. Do I believe we will have an AI that wipes out need for 90% of truck drivers, graphic designers, coders, etc.? 100% yes.

The thing is: neoliberal policies and ideas currently at work in our current economic system are also castles in the sky, they belong to fantasy land. They simply don't work as advertised, none of the big heads implementing them have predicted the 2008 crisis. Here's Alan Greenspan who has been guiding US monetary policy for 18 years, deregulating banking industry: And considering that looking at the statistics the relative situation for an average worker in the US has been getting worse, I would be suspicious of the "it was working exceptionally well for 40 years or so" claim. But to be fair, Neoliberals has gotten a few things right, so it's not like this ideology is all bad. They have predicted effects like recession-inflation, but on the other hand they stripped Americans of a chance to get Universal Basic Income implemented by Nixon. So sad guys, you were so close to becoming more communist than communists, haha. Instead you have got privatized healthcare and unregulated banking sector.

Who really cares about these labels? Socialism, capitalism, it says nothing, every normal person has their own imagination of what these words mean and they don't care about educating themselves. What we should really focus on is policy. Because policy is what is actually implemented and advertised to people. Whether you could call a policy socialist or capitalist is not important, because there are both good and bad socialist policies and good and bad capitalist policies, so you can't even use these terms to easily differentiate what you should support.

Sorry everyone on earlier pages for being full of bull. I am experimenting with plugged DPT, upping the doses and it really seems that this compund is resistant to plugging. 85 mg plugged was like 45 snorted, 110 mg was like 50 mg snorted. I am gonna try 150 mg and if it's still weak-ass improvement, I will go into 200 mg territory, but no more as it can cause irritation and slight bleeding. Also, has any one digested it orally and can share an experience? I might as well try this ROA with the rest of this compund, because I don't think I will try plugging such big amounts more than once and snorting is a no-go zone for me.

Vaping is healthier to smoking, but you have to consider what you are vaping. In terms of cigarretes, you smoke the tobacco, so vaporising dry herb as in IQOS will be way healtier, but if you instead choose to vape some e-liquid with nicotine - that has nothing to do with tobacco. It's a different product, so you can't automatically compare it to cigarretes and say it will be healtier. In that case you have changed not just the method of ingestion, but the product itself, too.

Feeling like everyone is wrong, including me, but that's okay, haha.

@Rilles Ok, so to give context: when I was Orange I had been reading about a single book per 2 weeks, then going into green I was reading a book or less a month. Transitioning into Yellow I have started to read 2 books/week. So that's the dynamic, you can adjust it to your own ratio of books read in time and see if something similar has happened.

Reading a lot of stuff, like 2 books a week at least.

I wish him to do well in those elections!!! I have finished reading his book "War on Normal People" today and he seems like a cool, well-informed, grounded guy. He has my trust.

@Husseinisdoingfine All the normal people won't come, but I wouldn't be so sure about the psychos.

I am always scared right before the breakthrough. I don't know if it's the best solution, but I just force through it. I ignore being afraid, I treat it as the price to pay for the experience. No music, no fighting, letting the fear just be. It passes rather quickly.

@The Don You said in capitalism only highly needed business survive. I gave you a few counter-examples of parasitic businesses. You then proceed to tell me a discourse on life not being safe. What the heck man? I am not against capitalism if by capitalism you mean our current global economic system. It is what it is, an outcome of hundred of years of evolution of human labor organisation. It's not in it's ultimate form in any way and needs improvements to keep up with the tempo of technological change. What I am against is treating our economic system as it really was capitalism as described by liberals like Milton Friedman. Nope, the real world doesn't behave like that. It's liberals who actually live in a bubble by believing that market decisions are always right and profit is always justified. There was data even in their times that theses ideas might be wrong. There is even more data nowadays, proving most of liberal thought is bullshit. No-one says business owners don't work hard. And he fucking shouldn't. Why would someone think it's desirable for anyone to be constantly stressed? That's the point of introducing reforms like Universal Basic Income or Universal Basic Services, so no business owner is scared of losing their livelihood or causing difficulties for his employees if his business fails. Tell me, who has more freedom: a woman in our current system who has to slave 10 hours a day working under a sexist boss at a bottom of the barrel job, worried she might became homeless if she lost that job, OR a woman living in a country with UBI or UBS implemented, who can say "fuck you" to such offer and look for something better, because she doesn't have to worry about paying for food or health insurance? You see, I am the one who cares about real fredom in that conversation. Freedom to express yourself, create beauty and share love. Not a freedom to oppress, which you are an advocate of. And with space mining, fully-automated shopping, self-driving cars, 3D printing, cheap energy & battery revolution, progressing automation, smarter AI, etc. we don't really have a choice. A turn toward more sociallistic policies is needed, otherwise the whole system would collapse.

You mean like a 20-year old marketing company selling bogus penis enlargement pills, earning millions? Or maybe patent trolls who do nothing with their capital but buy intellectual rights and sue others? I will stop there for simplicity, there are countless other examples of "highly needed" products. What I am afraid of is that Jeff Bezos really beleieves this, but doesn't see that by pushing prices down 10% he pushes down benefits and wages of all hires in his supply chain by 20%, effectively still generating wealth by charging more, but it's more time, not money, that low-earning workers have to spend at their job to earn enough for basic neccesities. The thing is: what we have in reality is not capitalism, neither socialism. And it will never be any of these two. It would be great if the world behaved as Hayek or Friedmann have described. Their ideas would then work and they would be right. Yet, sadly, it doesn't. What we have now is more akin to Feudalism 2.0, rather than capitalism, with elements of both capitalism and socialism. The underlying systemic dynamics still mirror feudalism closely. You can read Piketty's "Capital" to see what I am alluding to. The thing is, to be a classic liberal in 2020, you have to lag behind on science, A LOT, mainly in fields of economics, sociology, history and anthropology. A lot of reasearch and development has happened in the last 50 years, liberalism is out-dated. Those people lived in different times so their blindspots are understandable, yet we need to move on from their faulty theories and rhetoric. I would recommend you to read some Kate Raworth for economic thought, or David Graeber for anthropology, his "Bullshit Jobs" book is a great read. You know, to really challenge yourself.

Radical Honesty - Brad Blanton

You talk as if there was any variety. The healthcare in the US is constantly getting centralized with every year into the hands of a few corporations. There is no real choice. Those few oligopolists or even monopolists in some niches make it worse for every party involved, the patients, workers they hire, and the government. The whole system is very ineffective. It's well-known that the American system costs more for the same results, compared for example to Canada or any European country really. Even Obama had admitted that the only reason Obamacare and his other health reforms had not been more radical is that he didn't know what to do with a few million workers who would lose their jobs if such reform was introduced. They would lose jobs because they are not needed in a properly working system. A few million workers who are not needed, but are employed in the private health industry right now to help leech value out of your pocket, working their bullshit bureaucratic jobs that drain their souls.

I see an extra-big picture and... ...that's why I want to live simply. I know where this money ultimately comes from, it's either raping the Earth or your fellow humans. There's a small percentage of conscious profitable businesses, and most multi-million dollar comapnies are not that. They are keeping in place a system that pushes down wages of everday people, forces them to work 8 hours per day when we already have the technology to lower that to 4 hours per day and exploits the commons, resources we all own collectively. I aim for impact not personal income. Being uber-wealthy is not sustainable in the long-run. What would do more good in the world, funnelling the income of the company to your own personal account or using it allow your employees work shorter hours, freeing up their time for creative endeavours? I believe in our collective power, individuals are over-rated

You have said that and later talked about ultra-wealthy billionaires and multi-millionaires. I am not sure if you meant for that statement to apply for them too, or just normal entrepreneurs. I will assume you did. Yes they pay themselves 1-5%, but give out to charitable cases only like 0.1%, the rest of the money they use to lobby, stay in power and keep their fortunes intact. There are statistics that relatively billionaires are donating to charitable causes much less of their wealth than the poorer citizens.

@Hello from Russia we differ in values, for sure, haha. No-one forces to live you in the States, in most countries in the world $2000 is an income level of a programmer or a doctor with a few years of experience, far away from scraping by. If you up it to $4-5k there's really no reason to have more. It's enough to have family, car, modern housing, vacations abroad, etc. You don't get qualitatively better stuff for more, just more pricey. You call bullshit on my desire to live frugally and say that an $1 million in art is a good investment purely for the reason of inspiring one self. I call bullshit on that, there is no way that you having a $1m piece of art would do more good in the world than donating $998 000 to a non-profit fighting malaria.

Because they both were paid and lobbied by the same companies with the same agenda. If they don't do that they will lose their campaign budgets in the next elections. On the other hand, Justice Democrats get most of their money from individual donors, who support them on the base of values they represent, so they have freedom to push for progressive, enivronmental and anti-monopoly policies.

I think some of you guys are missing the point. One can be paying themselves humbly and live simply, while still having a lot of capital on command. For example, let's say I have a business and am a humble yogi. I pay myself a maximum of $2000 per month and the rest of the profit stays in the business and can be used towards realizing the purpose of the organization. Just because my personal income is low doesn't mean the company has to have low margins, etc, it can still be a very profitable venture. Yet, the extra profit wouldn't be used towards satisfying personal needs, other than doing good in the world of course. And yes, one still has to be careful to make sure that his business is doing more good to the world by fulfilling its mission than harm by extracting the resources of people and the planet.

They do, and both parties are so to speak "bought". But this particular kind of support, big corporations' money from SuperPACs, Republicans get more. Source: https://www.opensecrets.org/outsidespending/summ.php?cycle=2020&chrt=P&disp=O&type=S Dems also need more money to win anything, because they have to win by bigger margins, due to the electoral college and other weird solutions in their voting system.

@Hardkill Nowadays, it's often not the parties that campaign, but coroporate SuperPACs. Sometimes those PACs finance both sides at the same time to make sute they have some politician enthusiastic to them regardless of who wins. Yet the corporations tend to finance Republicans more often, as they are more lax on tax regulations and don't push progressive policies that moght hurt the bottom-line. If Republicans hurt corporate profits then it's probably a result of a mistake caused by them being stupid. So yeah, Republicans campaign better because they don't actually campaign. Big corporations with access to your data do it for them. Republicans also love to undermine voting rights of minorities, so that also helps to keep them in power once they get there.

The Evangelion anime movie. It covers topics of life and death, focusing on the ultimate meaning of life. There are 4 parts of the movie, the last one set to be released in the January 2021. Here's the credits song from the movie. "It's only love..." I think it really nails the point.