• BallsandBayonets@lemmings.worldEnglish
      6·
      1 day ago

      More than just a place to sleep; a place to call your own. And every place I’ve rented did not feel like my own; most corporate rental contracts make it very clear that this is their property, don’t you dare make it feel like home, you only get to temporarily reside there by the grace of their good will (and by paying out your nose, ears, eyes, and ass for the privilege).

  • NutWrench@lemmy.worldEnglish
    71·
    1 day ago

    If you’re working 40 hours a week and you STILL can’t afford basics like food, shelter and healthcare, then your economy (and your employer) sucks.

  • jeffhykin@lemm.eeEnglish
    4·
    19 hours ago

    Is this true even if a person on an island spends their whole life building a wooden mega yacht for themself?

      • jeffhykin@lemm.eeEnglish
        2·
        19 hours ago

        Hmm, so we could say the real problem is when someone has wealth disproportionately larger than what they contributed to the world?

        That makes sense to me

  • LillyPip@lemmy.caEnglish
    201·
    2 days ago

    Money hoarding is obscene. And worshipping money hoarders is gross.

  • NigelFrobisher@aussie.zoneEnglish
    423·
    3 days ago

    People can have mega yachts precisely because others don’t get 3 meals a day. That’s how the system is designed to work.

    • Urist@lemmy.mlEnglish
      30·
      2 days ago

      Not because the capital spared from denied meals (or production thereof) are going directly towards yachts, but because the capitalist mode of production requires the threat of starvation to force us into unfavourable compensation for our labour.

      Really, we could easily do both at this point (and more), but since greed knows no limits, there is also no limit to what pain the capitalist class will impose on us in order to extract surplus value.

      We already produce enough food for a billion more people than what exists, but still around a billion live in starvation to deter the rest of us.

  • UFO@programming.devEnglish
    48·
    3 days ago

    Everybody should have access to clean water. I mean everybody. If I was the President I’d happily enforce that with all powers available.

    Then I’d start working my way up the hierarchy of needs…

      • jeffhykin@lemm.eeEnglish
        1·
        19 minutes ago

        Elon can’t even save twitter. What makes you think he is single-handedly capable of ending world hunger.

        • LillyPip@lemmy.caEnglish
          1·
          1 hour ago

          Not with any skills he has – he’s an idiot. I just mean the money he has. He could donate billions and billions to organisations that can, and still be the richest person on the planet.

      • state_electrician@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        6·
        1 day ago

        Well, billionaires should not exist. But ending world hunger takes way more than just money. There is enough food already, it’s just not evenly distributed. And even in areas where we send aid, local power plays and corruption prevent the fair distribution. Ending world hunger is a hugely complex issue, unfortunately. Of course I’m not saying we shouldn’t try or try different approaches. It’s just not as simple as saying “feeding all hungry people costs x money, and some billionaire could pay for that”

        • LillyPip@lemmy.caEnglish
          1·
          23 hours ago

          Yes, but he’s a genius at business and logistics, and several forms of transportation. It should be easy for him to solve those problems, right? (Some /s in there)

          In any case, he could hire people to solve those problems if he wanted to. He’s certainly got the resources. Then again, if he approached it like his other ventures, trying to run things himself, he may only make it worse for everyone whilst doubling his own net worth.

          • state_electrician@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
            1·
            19 hours ago

            One huge issue are the situations that cause people to remain hungry. They are caused by war and widespread poverty. That’s not something an immature asshole like Musk is going to solve. After all, he is part of the problem.

    • CptOblivius@lemmy.worldEnglish
      91·
      2 days ago

      Wow, I did not know that. He could definitely drop the percentage he takes from Indy developers. I always thought his 30%, was scummy. Now moreso.

      • Kecessa@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        10·
        2 days ago

        From all developers honestly but just from indies would be great considering they already have it in their contract that the % goes down after X$ of sales (which benefits larger devs).

        Valve makes enough money to pay their employees more than the competition while also having surplus to have tons of side projects that will lead to nothing and making the boss a billionaire… I don’t mind the first two, but that last bit means money coming out of our pockets and going towards buying yachts…

        (Disclaimer: I hate all billionaires, this applies to all platforms, we overpay for games [and most other things] in general because there’s billionaires at the top of the creation/distribution chain)

  • kindenough@kbin.earth
    301·
    3 days ago

    It does make total sense.

    Bezos needed to de-construct a bridge in the Netherlands because his new build yacht wouldn’t go through. Fokker paid for it too, probably a fraction of that floating monstrosity. We did not like it one bit but the city of Rotterdam pulled their pants down and bended over.

      • SaharaMaleikuhm@feddit.orgEnglish
        15·
        3 days ago

        All I can find is articles about how they did NOT tear down the bridge because the locals were obviously outraged. The city would have done it.

      • ℍ𝕂-𝟞𝟝@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        3·
        2 days ago

        It’s a historic railroad bridge that has not been used for a while, steel construction, and it has been taken apart and put together many times before, sometimes for maintenance. IIRC the current mayor promised the people not to do it again, and then came Bezos, and then they didn’t take it apart, they installed the yacht’s masts downstream instead.

        This is the bridge in question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Hef

  • finitebanjo@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3012·
    3 days ago

    Cooking Mama has an ideal outcome - Great

    Cooking Mama’s idea of getting there was whatever the fuck the USSR was doing… - Not Great

    Just Tax the rich while maintaining a strong democracy, it’s not hard.

    • Allero@lemmy.todayEnglish
      1·
      1 day ago

      The core issue is that it actually is impossible to maintain full democracy under capitalism. Even under perfect direct democracy with no lobbies and full representation those with the means to promote their voice louder will do so.

      And if you have big money (which some will, because the more money you already have, the easier it becomes to hoard even more), you can fund projects that will have to promote you in return, skewing the voting process.

      In reality though, political lobbying, corruption, etc. are omnipresent, and extremely hard to combat, because it’s in the logic of capitalism to accumulate wealth at all costs, legal or otherwise.

      Now, I’m not saying socialist societies are totally devoid of corruption and self-interest, but they at least have mechanisms in place to curb it.

      Capitalism is not aimed at increasing people’s wellbeing, it’s aimed at pursuing profit, and people’s wellbeing is fundamentally secondary. If putting people in worse conditions increases profits, this will eventually be done. Socialism, on the other hand, declares people’s equality and wellbeing as the core priorities. Resources should be spent in a way that benefits most people.

    • алсааас [she/they]@lemmy.dbzer0.comMEnglish
      255·
      3 days ago

      you don’t get to communism through “social democracy” XD

      any concessions given by the rich in bourgeois “democracies” are funded by outsourcing some of the exploitation to the imperial periphery/global south

      • finitebanjo@lemmy.worldEnglish
        144·
        3 days ago

        You definitely don’t get to a public owned means of production and redistribution of goods through Autocracy for vwry obvious reasons.

        The rich need not make concessions when the poor can help write the laws.

        • алсааас [she/they]@lemmy.dbzer0.comMEnglish
          1412·
          2 days ago

          1st of all, great whataboutism 👍

          but I will indulge you:

          Autocracy?! That’s not what that word means. Tsarism was autocracy, Chiang Kai-shek was basically an autocrat.

          What you are talking about is a revisionist degenerated workers state (or bourgeois state of a new type in the case of contemporary China) in which the bureaucracy grew too strong to a quasi caste-like status above the rest of the population. There were attempts to correct this in both the USSR (workers/left/united opposition) and in the PRC (Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution) but both were crushed

          So it’s definitely smth we should learn from, to not repeat those mistakes. But that does not mean turning to the snake oil that is social democracy/democratic socialism which believe that somehow we can magically convince the ruling classes of systemic change and that they will give up power voluntarily. (And even if you manage somehow to wrestle significant concessions, they will either be rolled back after 30yrs or you’ll get the bullet in a fascist coup)

          EDIT: Even under bureaucratic state socialism, there still was collective rule. Yes cults of personality were established around key figures (e.g. Stalin and Mao) but you can look up CIA documents where they dismiss that Stalin had abolished collective leadership (though ofc he still was the figurehead of the bureaucracy and the dominant force). Mao had an even stronger cult of personality, but a far “weaker” position than Stalin and the leadership was far more collective (just an fyi: this is why Mao called for a cultural revolution, which was a grassroots movement btw. The capitalist roaders (party bureaucrats who wanted to get back to capitalism but keep their privileged party posts) where gaining more and more power and he was not in a dictatorial position to stop them at will. So he had to organize a mass students and youth movement. Ofc there were excesses and errors there as well)

          And despite the corrupt character AES brought forth massive progress in all fields of society. Free education up to university for everyone who didn’t slack at school. Millions of emancipated people learned to read for the first time ever. Massive scientific progress. Access to culture for millions. Making things like theatre, operas, ballet, cinema and chess accessible (and affordable !) for the masses. Making sure everyone had a place to work, sleep, smth to eat and clean water. Giving women the right to work, vote, choose whom or even if to marry, to go through life unveiled and just generally choose their own lives.(but this is one of the errors again. Patriarchal social structures were still kept and social conservatism took hold, which is why women rarely if ever had the rly high positions and were barred from the military f.e.) Making sure every child had a place at a crib or kindergarten. Making good quality healthcare accessible to all free of charge. Including vaccinating even the furthest regions, that had never even seen a doctor before.

          This might not seem all that impressive to the priviliged liberal, but you have to look at the state the regions where in before: semi-feudalism at best (and/or bombed into the 3rd world after WW2)

          Ofc there were excesses and mistakes, as already stated. But that does not negate their achievements.

          TL;DR: dismissing state socialism as “something that didn’t work for the people” is disingenuous and disregards the fact that it did work and that, despite its flaws, it worked for hundreds of millions of people. We should not demonize previous socialist experiments, neither should we glorify them, but constructively learn from their mistakes when striving for a class-, state-, and moneyless society (aka communism, which is materially possible in todays world and not an idealist utopia, but a historic necessity if humanity is to progress as a species and not devolve into barbarism/fascism)

          good short clips of Parenti talking if anyone’s interested (he put it rly well imo)

          https://youtu.be/JSpVB_XXXBQ?si=NdbBBRJfhglQo1ez

          https://youtu.be/npkeecCErQc?si=oAh8jj_WYCAtoUKB

          https://youtu.be/BeVs6t3vdjQ?si=1obub_-e-vLi9ubG

          and also a rly good Parentiwave edit https://youtu.be/3-PHYj1vb-w?si=0WTNxg43xIAdnFck

          • finitebanjo@lemmy.worldEnglish
            815·
            3 days ago

            Wow we get it, you would suck a dictator’s cock. Say more with less, dictator cocksucker.

            • squid_slime@lemm.eeMEnglish
              33·
              2 days ago

              You know ‘dictator’ has a different meaning in socialist rhetoric. The ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ is tongue-in-cheek, as in, the dictatorship of the proletariat is the reverse of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, which is the system we live under. A CIA document even mentioned the misconception of the Western world in regards to the USSR’s dictatorship.