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Million dollar chat is stupid. Currency inflates unless something is way way more wrong than things are right now. Dollars will be worth a lot less in the future than now, and so there will be more millionaires, even if inequality gets way worse.
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Aug 24, 2019 03:24
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Edgar Allan Pwned posted:these are nipples So a boob like you would fit right in
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Aug 24, 2019 14:29
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“No millionaires” is relevant actually because the Amazon rainforest is currently burning to a crisp. For there to be a millionaire, many other people have to go without anything. “Millionaires aren’t class enemies, it’s ok to be a millionaire” only makes sense from a navel gazing, first world centric perspective. If you want there to be a planet to live on in a few decades, there will be no millionaires. Edit: and for the obnoxious centrist capitalist liberal about to post “but Bernie Sanders is a millionaire  ,” you’re right, and if we had the revolution tomorrow, Bernie Sanders at best would be a class traitor, at worst a class enemy the same as the rest.
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Aug 24, 2019 17:44
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This isn't Gurren Lagan where a counter in the Amazon hit a million and exploded.
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Aug 24, 2019 18:46
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If we changed everything that much "million" would lose all of it's current connotations.
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Aug 24, 2019 19:21
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In my little slice of the economy, if you’re a veterinarian and own your own dog/cat practice, after 20-30 years it should be worth a million+ for some other veterinarian to come buy you out (by getting a loan from the bank). If you’ve managed to grow it to have 3-4 veterinarians working for you, it could even be worth 2 million or more. Of course, with Mars buying up Banfield and VCA and Blue Pearl, and with corporate consolidators and investor groups looking to get into the action, the old veterinarians are getting 50-100% more money while the younger veterinarians are increasingly being employees of the companies who either actually offer benefits... or because we don’t want to work 60-80 hour weeks running a practice (full time practicing medicine, part time managing a business)... or because we can’t afford the combination of school debt ($180k+ average with salaries at 90-100k average) and practice debt.
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Aug 24, 2019 19:38
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The obvious solution is to inflate the currency so much that everyone is a millionaire. Alternatively, deflate it so much that no one is a millionaire.
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Aug 25, 2019 13:34
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HisMajestyBOB posted:The obvious solution is to inflate the currency so much that everyone is a millionaire. Alternatively, deflate it so much that no one is a millionaire. I can't tell if this is sarcasm or not but uhh neither of these historically have gone well.
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Aug 25, 2019 18:19
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sticksy posted:I can't tell if this is sarcasm or not but uhh neither of these historically have gone well. It's the reason why drawing the battlelines for class struggle around a specific dollar amount is dumb Dentists are workers just as much as plumbers; we could make a million dollars near worthless but the ultra-rich will still be ultra-rich
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Aug 25, 2019 18:50
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Xand_Man posted:It's the reason why drawing the battlelines for class struggle around a specific dollar amount is dumb It may be literally worthless, but it’s rhetorically powerful. David Koch died with enough money to end world hunger and he spent it instead on furthering fascism and electing Republicans (but I repeat myself). That’s a dramatic example, and yet for every person living in a McMansion in the suburbs with two cars, kids and a pet, literally thousands have to go hungry every night. What we conceive as normal living standards can and must change if you want there to still be a liveable planet, and that means even those at the relative middle of American wealth standards will have to change.
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Aug 25, 2019 19:13
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Lightning Knight posted:It may be literally worthless, but it’s rhetorically powerful. David Koch died with enough money to end world hunger and he spent it instead on furthering fascism and electing Republicans (but I repeat myself). That’s a dramatic example, and yet for every person living in a McMansion in the suburbs with two cars, kids and a pet, literally thousands have to go hungry every night. I don't totally understand your argument here—aren't those two examples contradictory? If David Koch had enough money to end world hunger, then why isn't giving that away enough to keep people from going hungry every night, without eliminating the suburban lifestyle? (My understanding going into this was that it's probably possible to modify the suburban lifestyle to make it sustainable, rather than eliminate it, so I'm curious to hear if that's not the case.)
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Aug 25, 2019 22:39
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VikingofRock posted:I don't totally understand your argument here—aren't those two examples contradictory? If David Koch had enough money to end world hunger, then why isn't giving that away enough to keep people from going hungry every night, without eliminating the suburban lifestyle? I don’t think the suburban lifestyle is sustainable - certainly not for everyone on the planet, which is the only way it could be fair - if you want to avoid 2C. This discussion is entirely academic, white people will cling to their suburbs while we sail over 10C and burn.
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Aug 25, 2019 23:27
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Lightning Knight posted:I don’t think the suburban lifestyle is sustainable - certainly not for everyone on the planet, which is the only way it could be fair - if you want to avoid 2C. With good forest management wood frame construction is actually a way to sequester carbon. Designing around mass transit instead of everything oriented around single occupant vehicles you could make it pretty drat efficient relative to almost anything else out there. Still better to do higher density multifamily dwellings, but a case can be made for smaller homes (eg 1200-2k sqft) on small lots landscaped with native plants and/or non-water consuming features (both of which would make a huge difference if everyone did this instead of god drat grass yards). And that makes sense as an achievable thing compared to trying to get people to live in khrushchyovka There's no defending anything near 4000sqft mcmansions on 20,000 sq ft lots, as there's no way to make density that low at all efficient. That said, I don't really have much to say in support of american style suburban public planning on any level. At a core level it's a response to the question of 'how do you provide single family dwellings for tons of people' and I think that question is pertinent wrt how peoples' desire for housing works. Suburbia is just one answer to that question. Ironically, I've been involved in a lot of density infill and holy gently caress people hate it. People would literally choke to death on carbon dioxide before letting any kind of efficient multifamily dwelling go up within a thousand feet of them. Herstory Begins Now fucked around with this message at 00:43 on Aug 26, 2019 |
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Aug 26, 2019 00:38
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Sodomy Hussein posted:"Nobody should have a million dollars" is a bad take. Don't cast it negatively. The actual good take is "everyone should be able to retire and live comfortably," which is generally an aspiration everyone can agree upon, and not an arbitrary number meant to signify how much you despise the wealthy. The latter is just the lefty version of "he's hurting the wrong people!" The fact that providing a reasonable quality of life for all people is the highest priority does not in any way conflict with the fact that true equality is ideal. Currently there is no connection between merit and wealth, so the people in the top 5-10% or whatever are there for no good reason. There's no reason to defend that, even if it's not the highest priority thing to address. Basically, on a basic moral/ethical level, one should ask why some people deserve more than others. You might be able to come up with individual anecdotes where it feels "okay," but that's ignoring the fact that it's invariably easier to get into those well-paying careers with privilege, and that countless other people don't have the option of working a job like that (by necessity - only a limited number of people can work the careers that can accrue that amount of wealth). When justifying a person having $1M, you're also justifying someone else with far less not having some of that wealth. On a moral/ethical level, there should be a need to justify any wealth significantly above the wealth per capita, and even that is a questionable framework due to the US having disproportionate wealth relative to the rest of the world. If you have some people with $1M, you will by necessity also have people with less than they could have otherwise as a result. Again, these are ethical questions. It's not a question of whether it's a reasonable current priority or whether it's practical in the short-term, but whether it's ethically justifiable for a person to have that much wealth in the first place. (It should go without saying that when I say "$1M" I'm referring to the rough value that money has in the US in 2019; obviously it will differ with inflation)
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Aug 26, 2019 01:15
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Herstory Begins Now posted:There's no defending anything near 4000sqft mcmansions on 20,000 sq ft lots, as there's no way to make density that low at all efficient. That said, I don't really have much to say in support of american style suburban public planning on any level. At a core level it's a response to the question of 'how do you provide single family dwellings for tons of people' and I think that question is pertinent wrt how peoples' desire for housing works. Suburbia is just one answer to that question. tons of white, middle class people the suburbs were never even good for housing many people, you had to meet the selection criteria of socioeconomic status
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Aug 26, 2019 01:26
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Ytlaya posted:When justifying a person having $1M, you're also justifying someone else with far less not having some of that wealth. Maybe it's because my petit-bourgeois rear end lives in a high-CoL area, but here's what I see a million dollars as getting you: - A small home you can call your own - A ~$40k/year ongoing income - yes, derived from the surplus value of others' labor - that's there throughout disability, retirement, or anything else that keeps you from working - Enough resources to weather almost any ugly life event and come through it without worrying about how you're going to eat or put a roof over your head A strong social safety net should be able to guarantee that "millionaire lifestyle" to everyone. A just society could provide those benefits to every person on the planet and still tackle global warming. Most of it comes from just letting government assume large-but-rare risks, instead of telling every person that they have to build up enough capital to take it on themselves. There's a huge qualitative difference between that and what "millionaire" originally meant: roughly $20M in 2019 dollars. That's enough to give you an $800,000 (2019 dollars)/year income just sitting on your rear end scraping a 4% withdrawal rate off the labor of others - or, more likely, enough to plow most of your earnings back into exponential growth that lets you control more and more of society. That, and the constant demand for a higher and higher return, are what's poisoning us and the planet.
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Aug 27, 2019 02:39
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https://twitter.com/jkbjournalist/status/1166311793117061120?s=21 https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/programs/victim-witness-services/united-states-v-jeffrey-epstein-19-cr-490-rmb Scheduled for 10:30 AM, New York Edit: have some extremely predictable news https://twitter.com/thehill/status/1166322734806310912?s=21 LordSloth fucked around with this message at 13:50 on Aug 27, 2019 |
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Aug 27, 2019 13:38
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Space Gopher posted:Maybe it's because my petit-bourgeois rear end lives in a high-CoL area, but here's what I see a million dollars as getting you: This is a good post. Also keep in mind there is a big difference between having a million and making a million a year. Your average GOP voter has conflate the two.
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Aug 27, 2019 15:51
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HisMajestyBOB posted:The obvious solution is to inflate the currency so much that everyone is a millionaire. We basically did that, but concurrently we gave everyone's wages to billionaires, so it didn't quite work. If wages had kept pace with productivity, most Americans would be retiring as one-millionaires. Of course, POC in this hypothetical would probably encounter some other not-strictly-financial social obstacles requiring further reform.
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Aug 27, 2019 16:15
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Space Gopher posted:Maybe it's because my petit-bourgeois rear end lives in a high-CoL area, but here's what I see a million dollars as getting you: That's fine and good, since that poster didn't even say that someone couldn't have a million dollars. They talked about a cap of a million dollars. You seem to be agreeing that a million dollars is plenty of money to live comfortably, and justifying more than that inevitably ends up tackling with the question of why you don't give that extra money to some of the people with a lot less than a million dollars (since a million dollars is about double the per capita wealth in the US, and the US is a country with disproportionately focused wealth so with some sort of global equality it would be even lower). Also (and I probably should have started with this point), CoL is only that high to begin with because super wealthy people exist who can drive up the cost of housing so dramatically. If no one has that much wealth, the cost of housing wouldn't get driven so high in the first place because no one would be capable of affording it. The question of whether there would be significant negative side effects to implementing this sort of restriction is separate from the question of whether it's ethically acceptable. Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 17:16 on Aug 27, 2019 |
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Aug 27, 2019 17:14
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Ytlaya posted:Again, these are ethical questions. It's not a question of whether it's a reasonable current priority or whether it's practical in the short-term, but whether it's ethically justifiable for a person to have that much wealth in the first place. It remains an arbitrary number that is actually less than what most Americans will need to retire comfortably at this point, based on common financial planning (hence most people won't be able to retire comfortably or at all, despite the world's wealth being concentrated in this nation). Mansplaining basic socialist doctrine doesn't change any of this, but it is a problem that politicians should be grappling with and largely aren't.
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Aug 27, 2019 18:07
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A pretty long Twitter thread, I’ll only link the first, and a few excerpts (it’s practically an article in tweet form) https://twitter.com/newsweek/status/1166433973842657280?s=21 quote:Epstein's defense attorneys, however, sought to prolong the case's remaining proceedings, asking U.S. District Judge Richard M. Berman to use the court's "inherent authority" to probe the death of their former client.
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Aug 27, 2019 21:47
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LordSloth posted:A pretty long Twitter thread, I’ll only link the first, and a few excerpts (it’s practically an article in tweet form) How many minutes of footage do you need? If guy died at time X and footage shows he's alone, it wouldn't matter if it's nine or nine hundred minutes right?
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Aug 27, 2019 22:25
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HootTheOwl posted:How many minutes of footage do you need? If guy died at time X and footage shows he's alone, it wouldn't matter if it's nine or nine hundred minutes right? Gonna go full tinfoil hat, but nobody says you have to leave immediately after a murder. You could go in, talk to the guy for half an hour, murder him, hang out for another 1/2 an hour playing Candy Crush and walk out. (Realtalk, why pay someone for murder when it's much cheaper to just have a couple of guards take a nap?)
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Aug 27, 2019 22:41
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HootTheOwl posted:How many minutes of footage do you need? If guy died at time X and footage shows he's alone, it wouldn't matter if it's nine or nine hundred minutes right? Well, if the video shows him hanging for 9 minutes, but doesn't show how he came to be hanged, then it doesn't prove anything either way.
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Aug 28, 2019 00:45
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HootTheOwl posted:How many minutes of footage do you need? If guy died at time X and footage shows he's alone, it wouldn't matter if it's nine or nine hundred minutes right? Depends. Maybe only his legs are in frame. Maybe there's weird static. Maybe it doesn't show the whole cell. Etc. I mean, poo poo, make the video public. Given that the report is "multiple bones" were broken, and it takes sixty pounds of pressure to break the hyoid alone . . . You just don't get broken bones without a significant drop, and the story so far doesn't allow for a sufficient drop.
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Aug 28, 2019 00:55
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Relentless posted:Gonna go full tinfoil hat, but nobody says you have to leave immediately after a murder. You could go in, talk to the guy for half an hour, murder him, hang out for another 1/2 an hour playing Candy Crush and walk out. The easiest explanation is that a couple guards decided to close a pedophile case early. "Sorry I was asleep the whole time". If it was a murder, jail staff had to be in on it, so if there was a murder jail staff are the most likely culprits. Would explain everything and doesn't require a larger scale conspiracy.
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Aug 28, 2019 00:57
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:The easiest explanation is that a couple guards decided to close a pedophile case early. "Sorry I was asleep the whole time". If it was a murder, jail staff had to be in on it, so if there was a murder jail staff are the most likely culprits. Would explain everything and doesn't require a larger scale conspiracy. You got parsimony in my conspiracy!
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Aug 28, 2019 01:36
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At this point in American society, it's definitely possible to have a family stock of wealth a bit north of 1mil without owning any serious capital beyond assorted equities you have little control over, so it wouldn't exactly put you in the proper bourgeois class. But that almost certainly means you live an unsustainable lifestyle and would, in a socialist society, be consuming a bit less than you do under capitalism.
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Aug 30, 2019 01:19
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Flip Yr Wig posted:At this point in American society, it's definitely possible to have a family stock of wealth a bit north of 1mil without owning any serious capital beyond assorted equities you have little control over, so it wouldn't exactly put you in the proper bourgeois class. But that almost certainly means you live an unsustainable lifestyle and would, in a socialist society, be consuming a bit less than you do under capitalism.
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Aug 31, 2019 13:28
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34 people dead in a boat fire off the coast of socal 
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Sep 2, 2019 14:45
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Mummy Xzibit posted:34 people dead in a boat fire off the coast of socal A lot of these people haven't been declared dead yet - they're just missing. I don't want to be pedantic but I also don't want to make the news worse than it is, in case someone here is involved personally
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Sep 2, 2019 19:44
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Civilized Fishbot posted:A lot of these people haven't been declared dead yet - they're just missing. I don't want to be pedantic but I also don't want to make the news worse than it is, in case someone here is involved personally Not looking hopeful
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Sep 3, 2019 01:50
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I'd been following a scanner feed of the sinking, the ship had sunk before the first news crew arrived in Oxnard for a live feed.
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Sep 3, 2019 02:26
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I don't know how to put into words the amount of like fearful reverence that people who have spent years at sea have for boat/ship fires.
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Sep 3, 2019 05:07
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Herstory Begins Now posted:I don't know how to put into words the amount of like fearful reverence that people who have spent years at sea have for boat/ship fires. As someone who professionally tries to prevent these sorts of events what I try to do is this: communicate the connection between the regulations and the historical events. I can tell one what they are doing is wrong and cite regulation. But what is compelling is to be able connect historical events like these: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PS_General_Slocum https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Morro_Castle_(1930) To specfic regulations and good practices they led to. The regulations are from blood and death and mothers watching in horror as thier childern sink to the bottom fleeing fire wearing life vests filled with sand. There are people who have dedicated their proffesional lives to keeping these sorts of things from happening and all of thier sucesses will never be known.
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Sep 3, 2019 05:41
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There's a reason that I keep coming back to the Gordon Lightfoot song Yarmouth Castle over the song Wreak of the Edmund Fitzgerald. Stories about ship fires always got to me as a kid. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dX0EX3Xkmvw
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Sep 3, 2019 07:16
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BrandorKP posted:As someone who professionally tries to prevent these sorts of events Do you know why the doors on the boat might have been locked? I really hope it was just the operator making a leap of logic and not actually the case, because, drat that's horrifying. quote:“What is the emergency? Over. … Conception, what is the emergency? Over!” the operator says, referring to the diving tour boat.
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Sep 3, 2019 07:52
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Megillah Gorilla posted:Do you know why the doors on the boat might have been locked? There's a lot of info getting out right now that contradicts other reports. Apparently the ship's safety meeting was typically conducted in the galley right below the escape hatch, which was thoroughly described and pointed out. If the hatch was locked I don't know what to say. But if the fire started in the galley then the narrow stairs would have been the only way out, and if they were blocked... Always have an exit strategy when you're in a confined space. I'm not saying that would have saved any of these poor people, but the least you can do is be prepared for the worst case scenario if you're in a position like this. I'm truly terrified by the idea that plenty of the more experienced passengers did actually have exit strategies and just weren't able/were too injured to successfully implement them. A few folks made it overboard but were already too burned for it to make a difference and drowned as a result. I hope asphyxiation took everyone else before the flames got to them. Zisky fucked around with this message at 08:53 on Sep 3, 2019 |
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Sep 3, 2019 08:51
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/\ if it was an electrical fire or if it burned up some wiring early, in all likelihood the interior was pitch black, possibly smoky and hot, with people panicking and screaming and most people probably didn't clearly know the exits even under normal conditions.BrandorKP posted:As someone who professionally tries to prevent these sorts of events what I try to do is this: communicate the connection between the regulations and the historical events. I can tell one what they are doing is wrong and cite regulation. But what is compelling is to be able connect historical events like these: Yeah ship fires are lethal on a level that almost nothing else on the planet approaches. like 5 generations of men in my family were at sea and the extent that experienced sailors will just abandon a ship if its on fire is absolute. No one on a ship is getting paid enough to take the very large chance of burning alive and ships are basically always well insured anyways. No fire department is coming. 99.99% of the time, no ship is in position to assist within a timeframe that is relevant to individual survival and even if they are, all they can do is fish survivors out of the water. I told a friend as soon as I heard about this that watch, it's going to come out that a fire got started and the crew just instantly got the gently caress off while a bunch of non-sailors didn't realize that the survival window on naval fires to get topside and disembark is measured in seconds or single digit minutes, at best.
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Sep 3, 2019 10:47
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