Omg, is the last story they mention in that article based on a story I read on reddit once, where [CW Body Horror]

!where someone sits on a pool drain and has their intestines sucked out of their rectum?!<

I remember someone saying it happened to a young girl that ended up dying from it, and it's still one of the most horrific things I've ever heard. I don't even care if they plagiarized it from that book, I carry that anxiety with me to every pool I go to.

if you continue to try { thisBullshit(); } you are going to catch (theseHands)

This is the most beautiful thing I've read all year

Right on.

I think lemmy is filled with a lot of people who (maybe) understand this in fewer words. Case-in-point: there are plenty here who are acknowledging this dynamic played out through landlords and ownership of private property.

Making the leap from understanding that type of authority to the authority utilized by AES countries takes some time for some. Similar in the way reactionaries interpret Foucault's description of institutionalized power as inherently negative, power exercised by the state isn't inherently bad, either, especially when the alternative is allowing capitalists to claim it for themselves.

Pointing out that suppressive authority exists even in the liberal democracies that nominally espouse 'freedom' is a good first step but far from the last. The Tienanmen square thing is.... well it definitely gets in the way of that conversation. It's a bit of a socialist's Godwin's Law.

This is a really weird interpretation of authoritarianism.... authoritarian regimes often enforce their authority through 'due' process.

I think the point op is making is that liberal democracies defer authority to capital and enforces it on their behalf. There's a temptation to consider liberalism to be less authoritarian because of this deferral but it's mostly just a slight-of-hand

There's maybe two problems with this:

• public housing is a part of the picture, and so are public libraries. The solution is certainly not to cut library spending just because there are homeless people using it
• Thinking there being homeless people around is an issue that needs solving is itself pretty bigoted. Like, maybe you have a problem with people who haven't showered for a while? or people who use the library for personal activities because there are no better places for them to do them? But 'these people are a problem' itself becomes problematic because you've consolidated those qualities you find objectionable into a class of person, and that makes it really easy to forget/misplace/dismiss the humanity those people deserve.

It's a common attitude, so don't feel like i'm picking you out personally to scold. More people should be aware of how that attitude dehumanizes people experiencing shelter insecurity.

I'm biased but I think everyone should do this. You can basically find the hardware you'd need out of a dumpster, and then you can slowly build your library from there.

If you find torrenting to be distasteful, you can get a cheap USB DVD reader and rip dvds instead.

It's still technically considered infringement, but at least it's completely private.

I honestly don't know why you wouldn't just do jellyfin, unless you're limited by your hardware and kodi somehow has less overhead?

They're both free I guess. You can try them on and see how well they serve tour use case

Lol, OK so what if this messaging was the state department's way of undercutting anti-israel sentiment so that they could protect their interests in the middle east from domestic opposition?

If only israel had prior knowledge, they could have taken defensive action

Maybe in a particular light, but I'm personally of the opinion that intellectual property and patent law is antithetical to good social policy... so idk. Ideally we'd all benefit from the knowledge and ingenuity of all mankind but in a capitalist economic world-view there's no place for egalitarianism so....

If they can take the same tech and make it better/produce it cheaper then I think that's great, go nuts.

But that's obviously just me.

"Look at me - we are the nazis now"

People shit on China all the goddamn time here but they've done a prolific job becoming the tech and manufacturing leader in a handful of decades.

Blame it on tech espionage if you want but there's a reason the US is deadset on targeting Chinese imports, and it's hardly for any of the security reasons they might be tempted to claim it to be. The US is about to be left behind and it's noones fault but our own.

I could get on board with some militant union organizing and class solidarity. But that's about as likely to be successful under our current government as a class revolution: police are armed to the gills and even a union-friendly administration isn't going to tolerate the kind of union action that we'd need to make a noticeable dent in our economic organization. Even a pretty light rail strike was quickly intervened on (I'm aware of the concessions won with the administrations assistance after the fact, you don't need to elaborate on it for me). The reason why that example isn't a good sign is that the kind of damage a strike like that threatens is kind of fundamental to all potential strikes in the future... That a union strike like that with real leverage couldn't even be tolerated for a moment is.... well it's not encouraging. Can you imagine something like an energy strike, or a roadworker strike in the form and style of the Pullman or Homestead Steel? An entire city's industry shut down by armed union workers? God forbid a general strike...

Idk. And I also really doubt that a new-deal economy would work today... Capital just isn't as reliant on labor as it used to be. It's my ardent belief that we're already way overproducing 'goods' (I like the marxist term 'treats' to describe most of what we produce now); how would unions help reverse that kind of overproduction and over-consumption? How do unions dissolve the kind of wealth that's accumulated around old-money industry and redirect it? The free market has distorted the capital landscape so much that the kind of action we need isn't achievable without an external pressure.... Unions work well to redistribute resources between industry and labor but aren't able to pump the breaks or redirect it elsewhere.

I think our economic options are just... really really bleak. And it's happening as we're entering into another cold-war style conflict with China.... Yea. I'm of the opinion that things will get way, way worse before they get noticeably better.

strengthen unions, bring domestic manufacturing back, and make corporations pay their fair share.

That's what I mean though, those things aren't the problem. They fit within that neoliberal economic picture really well but it doesn't address the declining state of middle class' economic stability. We've been operating under the assumption that when our productive output is high, everyone benefits (which is why bringing manufacturing stateside is valuable), but over the last couple decades those jobs have had a steep decline in quality (it used to be that a manufacturing job could support a family of 5, but that's just not the case anymore) due to automation and the relative productivity of capital against the productivity of an individual worker. We'd have to continue consuming well beyond a sustainable level in order to produce enough manufacturing jobs for everyone, and those jobs just aren't as good as they used to be. Even union protections are ultimately just a finger in the dam, when fewer and fewer jobs are needed for higher and higher output. And none of that picture addresses home ownership and generational wealth transfer.

Things are as good as they can be without fundamentally challenging the neoliberal economic hegemony, but that's exactly the problem with the picture. Those metrics suit that way of thinking but they simply don't address the reasons why the American public is struggling.

I'm just so sick of seeing these accomplishments paraded around as if they address the problems normal people are actually facing. You're going to be chanting "things are really great actually!" as we all get chased out of the country by a nationalist movement driven by economic disenfranchisement. We can't keep doing this.

The broader problem with adhering to those metrics as a gauge for economic output is that it assumes things across the board move up or down together within a reasonable margin, when you and I both know that certain groups fair way better than the average, a big portion of economic growth not even reflected in wages at all, and some are falling off the bottom of the graph entirely. Taking an average wage doesn't tell you anything about the long-term stability of individuals. A greater and greater number of people are having to rent because they're being priced out of home ownership, and even if that isn't reflected in rent prices now it still means that asset-backed capital is being held by a smaller and smaller number of people. That doesn't mean much to CPI but it means everything to upward mobility and generational wealth transfer.

I'm not even trying to paint a bleak picture in service of saying it's all Biden's fault, it's been the default economic schema for decades. I'm saying its disingenuous to point to those metrics when you know they aren't the ones that of the most concern to individuals who see no future for themselves and their families. It's not all Biden's fault, but he's currently the one enacting those policies that have slowly degraded economic mobility for 80 years. "But you're wages are marginally higher!" doesn't mean much when the cost of home ownership has been outpacing median income since the 1970s..

Things being marginally better for the average American under Biden doesn't mean anything when the average American has been almost completely left behind over the course of 50+ years.

It looks like they sorted every metro area in the US by percentage increase, which yields a whole bunch of individual metro areas with oddball markets

This is the entire reason why people critique nationalized metrics on economic trends: they intentionally disregard figures that fall outside the norm so that they can apply a fed policy for the entire country, favoring the overall economic performance instead of addressing the localized economic shortfalls. It's like a doctor trying to diagnose constipation by reading someone's vitals; none of the experience of the patient can be seen on the metrics they're using until it's literally killing them. "You say you haven't shit for 8 days but your BP is 120/80 so you must be fine".

Like, sometimes those metrics overlook really important possibilities, like unemployment not accounting for people who need multiple jobs, or total job market numbers not accounting for ghost positions and high turnover. CPI is used for setting fed interest rates, and it tosses out specific categories because the prices move too fast to gauge the effect of interest rates on those prices. They're not trying to measure how well people are surviving, they're measuring how economic output is adjusting to the supply of cash. That's why they have CPI-U, it adds those categories back in so that they get a better picture of how people are experiencing the market. Notice, though, that even real wages doesn't have any way of reflecting anything about where those wages come from; whether people are taking on extra jobs or if their work hours are increasing without extra pay, or if a transient spike in COL depleted your savings and you're right on the edge of instability. Those numbers tell an extremely narrow story about the state of the economy, and if there are a bunch of people who are telling you 'this number isn't reflective of my experience' then maybe you need to take a more granular approach to the data.

It's exhausting watching this from the left, because depending on who is in office the chosen metrics for assessing the economy change. For 2016-2020 the metric was stock indexes and GDP, for 2020-present it seems to be CPI and unemployment. Neither party likes talking about high-interest credit, or job security, or retirement savings, or healthcare costs or realestate affordability, and that's infuriating. There are a growing number of ways people fall through the cracks of economic instability and the averages are designed to throw those out as exceptions. You lose your job and fall into drug addiction? Sorry, that's not the 'average' American. You get into a car accident and can't pay your medical bills? Sorry about that but that's not relevant to the bigger picture. All we can see is 'you should feel good/bad about the economy for these abstracted reasons', and then you get partisan fanboys yelling at you that you're wrong if your experience doesn't align with that national picture. It's even more frustrating when the same people are are telling you things are great are simultaneously acknowledging that things should be a lot better.

'You're just trying to make people feel bad about the state of things' - jesus can you just fuck off with that constant condescension? People feel shit about the economy because things are shit for a lot of people. More than a quarter of the country has less than $1000 in savings, maybe people are scared they're a single accident away from homelessness and your national metrics simply don't show that. My parents are talking about EOL plans and I'm realizing I don't make enough to support them. How does CPI account for that? It fucking doesn't.

"Things are relatively better through this narrow view of the world" - well why the fuck should I care if i'm not in that picture?

What an unbelievable battle that was. It was so much, and so interesting, and so vicious and horrible, and so beautiful in so many different ways.

'Never fight uphill, me boys, never fight uphill.' They were fighting uphill, he said, 'Wow, that was a big mistake,' he lost his great general teeth. 'Never fight uphill, me boys,' but it was too late

Weird, I'm getting the same argument from those who think liberals are too lazy to push their candidate away from indefensible foreign policy

I'm so curious about those two downvotes