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OwlFancier posted:It is difficult to imagine that anybody capable of leading the USSR through the second world war wouldn't have ended up with some... novel... interpretations of socialism as a result. A leader less dedicated to own-goals than Stalin pre-1941 probably would have faced a war much less challenging of...pretty much any set of principles really.
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Jul 5, 2018 22:25
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OwlFancier posted:I'm not super sure about that either, sure Stalin didn't help the Red Army any, but it's difficult to imagine that a massive attack on that sort of scale and the subsequent switch to all out war economy wouldn't have elicited a similar response, even if it was over quicker. The simple change of Russia not hitting Poland from behind when they had a large army digging into defensible (from Germany) terrain could have meant France never falling in the first place, let alone if the Soviets had actually treated the Nazis as an inevitable enemy. Sure, it also would have meant Russia not getting a bunch more vassal states through the rest of eastern Europe long-term, but given the end of the real war just meant them looting a blasted hellscape and still coming out behind where they started, it's hard to see that being worse for socialism in the long run.
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Jul 6, 2018 01:53
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Why can't we have a movie about robots without fighting? Maybe a sitcom but robots instead. 
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Jul 3, 2019 21:37
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vincentpricesboner posted:Correct me if I'm wrong , but I thought Bernie has said a few times in interviews he is more of the Nordic Model socialist (which is still capitalist) than real Marx socialism or any other model. It's pretty simple. Bernie is a social democrat to the core, but in a country with a Democratic Party an independent using that branding would have confused people. Vermont is weird and lefty enough in the important ways that a proven property being vocally a -democratic- socialist wasn't a death knell even when the cold war was still on. Now his popularity has a lot of other social democrats calling themselves democratic socialists, and the long-term socialists outside Vermont have to choose between arguing or assimilating the new blood.
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Nov 24, 2019 18:59
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Panfilo posted:When the topic of roads get brought up they like to point out when Domino's covered up potholes, as though this magically proves that private businesses are better at maintaining roads than the govt. Most individual libertarians and libertarian organizations I've known are open borders types, like more than many on the left. They just also love poison pills on the open borders. Like they hate all the deportations, sure, but they hate it even more when the government goes after employers of immigrants rather than immigrants themselves. They also don't want easy paths to citizenship. As it turns out they just want an underclass which can drive down wages..
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Dec 20, 2019 23:48
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Mr Interweb posted:so it's come to my attention that some of the biggest companies in the world, such as netflix, amazon, uber, etc. have never made a profit and many are millions (even BILLIONS) in debt. how is this a thing? and why aren't libertarians more angry at these companies for being so irresponsible and bad at business? Amazon's famous for pouring its massive revenues into building infrastructure and market share rather than profits, and have been since before the dot-com crash. If investors had demanded it at any point in the last 20 years they could have cut back on that to pay dividends, buy back stock, build cash reserves, or whatever the cool kids do with corporate profits these days. This was actually much of why Amazon survived the dot.com collapse: they spent all that investor capital securing a long-term future. Investors haven't demanded such a change since the business model's success has also kept the share price growing and kept it a good investment even in the era of "gut the company to boost next quarter's results" companies. I mean, some of those other tech companies are VCs pouring money into unsustainable business models, but Amazon not generating profits on paper has been a very calculated strategy which for the most part works how libertarians say markets should work. Even if it's awful in other ways libertarians tend to ignore, like worker exploitation, regulatory meddling, and anti-competitive effects.
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Feb 12, 2020 10:11
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Mr Interweb posted:wait, can you explain this gross profit vs. net profit thing a bit further? cause net profit sounds pretty similar to gross in that expenses for both would include rehiring and reinvestment, wouldn't it? Gross profit is a simple revenue over cost of goods sold thing. It only counts direct material and labor costs for your products/services. It doesn't include operating expenses, rent, marketing, shipping fees, payroll costs not directly involved in your product/service, interest expenses or any other overhead. Subtract all of those and you get your net profits. A high gross profit and a low net profit can be pretty bad since it might indicate a company with a lot of overhead costs, too many high interest loans, or other things that mean you're operating inefficiently. It can also mean you're putting a lot of money into effectively growing the business, which is fine as long as you remain solvent and don't have your shareholders demanding change. A whole lot of Amazon's generation of dotcom businesses were in the first category. They treated venture capital and gross profits like free money and frittered it away on things that didn't help grow the business, or which translated into static overhead they couldn't reduce. If revenue slowed down their gross profits would drop, but overhead wouldn't, and everything came apart. Between 1999 and 2008, they're not around any more.
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Feb 15, 2020 08:52
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SlothfulCobra posted:The UK's "upper house" is unelected and still lacks much pretense to democracy. There's also a number of differences that come from having a powerful independent executive branch, but it's also nice to have a nationally elected office for the sake of having some kind of broad legitimacy leading the government. At the time of the American Revolution, for example, Parliament had a bit problem with the "rotten boroughs" that had parliamentary seats despite having almost no residents. Which is part of why regularly holding a census and reapportioning Congress was an important concern. And as I always understood it, the important part was the distinction against direct democracy, right. Even with historic democracies only giving voting citizenship to a minority of people, and even with the early American fantasy of military and legislature alike being temporary community service rather than a profession, putting every decision up to a popular vote is always going to be capricious and easy to manipulate, as we can see with on the state level or in the UK. Even if sometimes it gives better results than actively evil elected officials.
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Feb 21, 2023 18:20
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The real question is whether he'll move to Florida when he gets voted out again.
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Nov 20, 2023 19:02
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Vahakyla posted:Yeh, Falklands is a pretty rare British W because Falklanders are basically unanimous in how much they think their life owns under British protection, and how much say they have in their own governance. Probably not unrelated that it's also a rare case of Europeans discovering and settling new lands since the islands, though visited by South Americans in antiquity, were entirely uninhabited when the British first landed there.
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Nov 21, 2023 17:50
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Rappaport posted:There's slavery (historically) of varying degrees of brutality, but partial slavery seems novel. Is it like, part-time slavery? Has that existed? It's hardly unusual outside of libertarian circles to describe "slavery" as most properly used to refer to "full ownership of one person by another" systems including a range from full-on chattel slavery to a number of historical models where slaves had significantly more legal protections and conditions. And then from there to define a spectrum of exploitation where you don't use "slave" to literally describe serfdom, prisoner labor, residents of company towns, or people who can't quit a bad job because they'd lose their health care, but you recognize the similarities and how one can flow into the other. "Partial slavery" is a weird way to phrase it, but wouldn't stand out in such an argument. Libertarians just turn it into nonsense because they pluck out literally anything that involves exploitation of labor by capital and replace it with any sort of "government does thing I don't like."
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Apr 10, 2024 04:47
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) forcibly abduct people to work for him.