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Wengy posted:I visited the city of Taranto last summer and read up on its history on Wikipedia and it just blew my loving mind that this level of pollution and environmental destruction was allowed to happen. And of course the corporation that owned all the polluting steel plants and the like - ILVA - and was criminally lax in handling environmental protection measures leading to thousands of deaths hails from the north. When I read about these stats and saw the dilapidated old town I sort of understood for the first time why a person from the south might hate the rich northerners. I'm actually from the place, unuckily, and can shed some light into what went on with ILVA. Basically, it was an off-site steel plant of a giant state-owned steel corp (Italsider) which set up shop a long while ago and made Taranto one of the richest industrial cities in the South. Now, this being giant heavy industry, it fostered a lot of growth for supporting industries as well, so the city, which also was gifted with a fairly important commercial harbor, also became host to petroleum refineries, a regional hub for the energy which was needed to fuel the giant plant which is as large as the entire city itself basically. Pollution doesn't really come into the picture because we're talking periods of time where nobody gives a gently caress, plus everyone is getting rich and working class people in Taranto are actually among the most well off in the South, to the point where there is significant migration from neighbouring regions. Over time concerns over pollution start to grow in the North, so Italsider slowly shuts down its plants in Northern Italy and brings the blast furnaces down to Taranto, where nobody still gives a gently caress about the environment. The end result is that, by the 90s, Taranto has the largest steel plant in Europe. Fast forward a bit, the entire corp is sold for a pittance to political cronies in the era of privatization. The industrial city was already declining but here it just nosedives, the private management stops buying their supplies from the neighbouring plants, instead privileging other sources they could secure better deals with. Supporting industries just loving die, and Taranto is left with the horrifying pollution of the steel plant and the refineries. Plus the private owners start crushing the trade unions until only one is left, one that is actually fostered and organized by the company itself. Now being ILVA-employed pays only a little more than low-skill job anywhere else on the planet. At the same time, the plant owners use the fact that they employ some 12k people to successfully lobby the weak devolved regional governments to turn a blind eye on the pollution and on the lack of measures being taken to address it, despite being contractually obliged basically since the sale to install filters and underground coke storage and such. This continues, funnily enough, not only under the insanely corrupt right wing regional governments but also under the two terms of ecologist party government that came afterwards. Anytime ILVA is threatened with sanctions for its pollution, it just waves its 12k employed 'at risk' of losing their jobs, has its company-sponsored union organize a march through the center, and authorities relent. To put into context why the lobbying is so successful, we're talking 'large employer in a 20% structural unemployment rate region." Youth unemployment is around 40%. More recently, the owners of the company were finally arrested for their rampant corruption, and the state briefly took over, on the assumption that it would undertake the production modernizations that ILVA hadn't done, and invest significantly in order to reduce pollution. What actually happened is that the state did none of that, while emitting law decrees that essentially made Taranto into a special production zone where environmental laws do not apply, increasing pollution limits to such levels that even ILVA with its 20+ year old production facilities could run basically undisturbed. Fast forward to our days, the company was auctioned off to another global steel conglomerate, which promised investments into pollution reduction and modernization of facilities, but as a first step laid off 2k employees. Prospects look bleak. The short of it is, Taranto has been failed spectacularly by just about all of the political forces in the country. The 5-star movement won the city in the general election on a platform of shutting down ILVA, and instead got it sold off to a global steel corporation with a not-so-stellar record on employment and got 2k layoffs just off the bat. But the left-wing ecologists didn't do that much better either, and the right, well, was the right. mortons stork fucked around with this message at 21:17 on Jan 3, 2019 |
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Jan 3, 2019 21:03
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It's also really funny in a dark kind of way how the development of polluting industry there made sure that Taranto gets short-shrifted for loving ever on any project of note that involves pollution or environmental damage. It's how we got immediately 'volunteered' to host the regional landfill site, and any future landfill probably, plus the incinerator, and any future incinerator as well. The state energy company needs a larger plant somewhere? Might as well enlarge Taranto! And so on. I'm really glad Italy doesn't maintain nuclear power plants, since beyond the obvious risks of letting Italians build and staff some of the most delicate and dangerous technology in the history of the world, Taranto would 100% percent guaranteed have been selected for hosting the nuclear waste disposal site. When it rains, it pours (dioxine and heavy iron dust) All of the poo poo and none of the benefits, basically. Enjoy dusting off red and grey iron dust from your grandma's gravestone when you visit the cemetery so you can at least read the name and see the picture, shitlord!
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Jan 3, 2019 22:08
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quote:“When they come campaigning they talk about reclamation, restoration or closing it. But when they get into power, they don’t remember who you are,” D’Andria said. “Sailors’ promises, as we say here in Taranto.” The endless cycle of Tarantine politics. Truth be told, there is an unspoken law in both city and national politics, and that is 'don't gently caress with the steel mill' They've been talking reclamation, restoration, modernization for 20 years now. They only do that for the elections though.
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Jan 3, 2019 22:37
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I'm in favour of English only. We're trying to get out the message of how our incredibly depressing politics can be made understandable to a wider audience, if it's supposed to be the Bar Sport I can just go down the street for that with the added bonus that I can drink heavily there.
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Jan 3, 2019 23:11
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It's true, Lega ran elections with Berlusconi in coalition since the latter hoped to have a junior partner to bolster the ranks for his failing party. Instead Salvini started out at 18%, much higher than berlusconi's 15% or whatever, then combined with the 'neither right nor left (but especially not left)' M5S to form the government and just loving ran the show for the past 6 months. You can see his electoral consent skyrocket, from 18 to like 35%, and his allies are desperately trying to play catch-up, since they've lost like 5% in the meantime and run the risk of being only second best next election. They can't really catch up because they're incompetent jackasses but that's a thing for another day. The policy is a weird frankenstein mishmash. Lega's main platform hook was a 'flat tax,' for all income brackets which Salvini placed at around 15%, and M5S ran on implementing 'citizenship income,' which was depicted in the campaign to be kind of like UBI (up to 780€/month for jobless in exchange for some free work at the municipality) but then was turned into something more similar to Germany's Hartz IV. All of these programs take loving huge amounts of cash, so they went to the EU hat in hand asking to up the annual deficit/GDP to around 2.4%, to which the Commission said lolno, and ultimately ended up being a 2.04%, which was cited as a victory anyway in hopes their electorate is completely mathematically illiterate. The actual implementation of the policies has suffered in turn, 15% has been implemented only for self-employed workers below a certain threshold, while the citizenship income is likely to be a pittance. It is unclear, but it looks like you need like 4 kids to even break over the low 3 figures/month. They capped it all off with a horrible lovely tax pardon for both small and large evaders before 2018 year's end. The gist of it is, each of the coalition parties is about to wreck our public finances for basically 0 gain in hopes of securing enough electoral consent to break off the coalition and run next elections as winner by itself. There is 0 space for infrastructural investments the South desperately needs, they're cutting funds for research, culture and education. mortons stork fucked around with this message at 20:48 on Jan 5, 2019 |
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Jan 5, 2019 20:39
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SlowBloke posted:You are forgetting another public hire freeze which will gently caress up the miur(which was already bleeding) and every public office with the new 100 quota pension customers(which won't see the severance in a long loving time to avoid INPS going bankrupt lol). I think that the first proper shakeup will be due to this(long before the EU crying for blood after failing the spread quota), the schools are already with the staff roster in temp mode since loving decades and with the new daspi or whatever the gently caress they are going to call the unemployment benefit being better than your average school janitor/secretary pay who the gently caress is going to apply? Yeah, like we needed another loving hemorrhage in our public school system, god knows it wasn't banged up enough already. But with the cuts to public schools they're just keeping continuity between this admin and previous ones, so I'm almost not angry about that. What I am unfathomably angry about is the citizenship income, on two levels: on the one hand, we are facing tremendous pushback from the EU for trying to give a handout to the poor and jobless because it might 'threaten our balanced budget', which just signals how badly neoliberal the institution has turned. On the other, the citizenship income is shaping up to be another workfare bullshit which will forever poison the wells for this kind of policy, meaning that in the future, when this inevitably fails, we'll never ever get to discuss something resembling a social programme for the poor. In other news, the lega vice-mayor of Trieste just threw a homeless man's clothes and cover into the trash and made a smug facebook post about 'keeping the city clean'. Luckily he's facing a righteous shitstorm for it, but I just wanted it to be a note on how cartoonishly evil these people are, and how despite that they are the first political force in my country, receiving eager transversal support across society. mortons stork fucked around with this message at 10:52 on Jan 6, 2019 |
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Jan 6, 2019 10:50
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Yeah the ministries need a lot of work to get completely unfucked, but the big problem is that our funds for education and research are so strangled it's nearly impossible to get new blood in. That's why the hiring freeze will keep strangling the ministry, it's not that the olds will be holding the line, it's that we need those loving people out of there but we don't know who will cover their positions. And yeah, these people don't care about the coffers. They hope to get their chips in and then as soon as they feel they have an edge they will upturn the table in hopes of being sole winners. They will rule over the ashes, if necessary. forse vi eravate stancati che l'attenzione fosse tutta su Verona, che è praticamente diventata il Texas da un po'? :risatetristi:
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Jan 6, 2019 16:36
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Raspberry Jam It In Me posted:Oh hey, it's Hartz Quattro. Congratulations, child poverty is going up Up UP! How is child poverty related to the Hartz IV workfare stuff? I'm genuinely asking, I just thought it was Thatcherian neoliberalism trying its best to imitate Victorian policies, with the saving grace of only targeting adults.
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Jan 7, 2019 19:22
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Jesus loving Christ And it's being promoted by the 'left' soul of the M5S. And of course the rest of the 'center-left' in Italy are losing their loving minds 'cause this could increase the deficit. Nevermind the loving deficit, actually increasing child poverty in a developed country anyone? this makes me madder than words can express. Porco dio
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Jan 7, 2019 21:43
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It's a result of Catholic heritage I think. We Italians love our religious-themed swear, much like the Quebecois. But while the Quebecois take it out on the imagery and the rituals, we like to go directly for the religious figures. I just did that in my last post actually, calling god a pig, that's your bog standard porco dio, which my friends from Veneto like to use extremely frequently in the middle of a sentence, just to take up some dead air. There are endless possible variations, though, you can target any sort of figure (eg Mary, Joseph, the Evangelists) and any sort of attribute (up to and including clothing). Bonus points if you can fit it all in one sentence. It's way more common in the North, it's a good way to get yourself shunned in the South. mortons stork fucked around with this message at 22:37 on Jan 7, 2019 |
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Jan 7, 2019 22:34
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Tafferling posted:http://www.ansa.it/friuliveneziagiu...5546d2794f.html Liberalism.txt?
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Jan 11, 2019 12:56
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Spacewolf posted:A brief beg: What the heck is everybody saying in spoilered Italian? It makes this thread such that even if I could figure out something useful to say/ask, I'm kind of unsure if I'm welcome... Everyone's welcome, especially foreigners, obviously we'll be posting a lot from Italian sources or do some Italianposting but you can ask whatever you want and in case we'll be offering some translation of our sources so you're not left in the dark. Don't feel like you're being disruptive. The spoilers are just us whining in Italian and you can safely ignore, if it were something relevant for everyone we'd be saying it clearly.
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Jan 11, 2019 18:12
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Less deadly provided Macron doesn't decide to send back pregnant women on foot over the mountain pass in winter like he did last year, because god forbid they have children in France or something. Beyond that, there are some hotspots like Ventimiglia but nothing unmanageable. From what I've read Piedmont hasn't had its quality of life affected significantly. Other places with migrant hotspots, especially in the south, may have suffered more, but that is due to italian law enforcement being essentially failed-state-quality. We may be getting intensified troubles now though, since Salvini has abolished by decree both residency permits on grounds of humanitarian protection and holding centers with integrational activities, essentially making a huge number of people irregular and homeless virtually overnight. Combine that with the aforementioned quality of our law enforcement and we're likely to get large-scale troubles and stupidly unmanaged violent crackdowns.
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Jan 15, 2019 18:13
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Well, it's not like anything he said about the French is untrue. It's just that it's probably useless blustering with 0 strategy, in an attempt to reinforce the idea that they aer speaking truth to power, and could you please please vote us again and not salvini????
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Jan 21, 2019 21:33
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I think this is kind of a case of the emperor's new clothes, so diplomacy and aggression are equivalent: you're pointing out a rival's predatory unethical poo poo, there's really no two ways about it. Which is why the French get insanely pissed immediately and call our ambassador in, but that is of basically no consequence as of yet. The issue is why they did it, and for that as I said I have few answers, one of them being to yank out the crown of the bluster king from salvini. Another hypothesis: the leftie part of their electorate isn't exactly happy with them going full fash alongside salvini, and going ultra-right on the immigration debate. Attempting to refocus the debate on European colonialism in order to reframe their anti-immigration position as a leftie fight against colonial oppression could be a way to preserve their image as a left party willing to speak truth to power. It could also be that the M5S is being the usual poisoner of wells for any good and decent thing (like basic income) and they're saying this so it can never be said again. I'm oscillating between outright conspiracy theorism (the latter answer) and the former.
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Jan 22, 2019 07:44
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Toplowtech posted:The real thing is those kind of complains are normal coming from an African country or Haiti. Italy (or LOL America), not so much. Complaining that France is a pillaging imperialist country is such a super fresh take coming from Italy, considering from whom we learned the trade. Some guy called Julius, i think: he came, he saw, he killed around 10% of the population, enslaved the rest, destroyed the religion and culture and took all the gold out of the mines. Do you guys know whatever happened to him? So yes, you are right it's idiotic and a pure political distraction to make you look elsewhere. You could have at least brought up Italy's own invasion of Lybia and Ethiopia in a bid for colonial power status, but you actually had to dredge up Julius loving Caesar and the Roman Empire to show that Italy are being hypocrites by calling out France for its continued colonial imperialism in Africa lol. I mean, di Maio is wrong, in that the CFA is not the cause of the migrant crisis, whereas France helping gently caress up Lybia for no good reason actually is (partially). But you know, an imperialism callout is an imperialism callout, and we should take it when we can.
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Jan 23, 2019 10:09
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I'm not sure how reminding Italians of our atrocities, which we are trying extremely hard as a whole to whitewash from textbooks and our collective history could be construed as using corpses like political props. It would be doing a service to their memory, given that I don't think anyone ever even apologised for it.
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Jan 23, 2019 11:12
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Tesseraction posted:Italy now officially in recession. Although one analyst says it's technically never not been since 08: This is the correct take. I'm going from memory from analysis I read a while ago, but it goes like this: Italy was stagnating throughout the '90s, after a decade of government spending financed by strong export growth + a weak currency and high public deficits that were not necessarily well invested, faced a series of exchange rate and budget crises in the '90s, stabilized after introduction of the euro but grew sluggishly in the lead up to the great recession. Then we got a debt crisis due to speculative attacks based on our high debt to gdp ratio, which worsened the state of our already terrible public finances + we had lost the ability to balance with expansionary monetary policies and instead our bond yields went through the roof. Also ECB policies somewhat helped contain the damages and prevent the crisis from going terminal, but there wasn't much they could do for us with inflation targeting alone, so welp. And finally countercyclical gov't spending was constrained due to aforementioned issues with debt, with the Greek crisis fresh in everyone's memories and worries of lending to an unsustainable debt and about the default of the 4th largest economy in the bloc, so we got austerity forever, which actually increased our debt burden during the height of the crisis, which may warrant the consideration that it actually is unsustainable now. This recession isn't gonna make things better either.
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Jan 31, 2019 12:41
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One thing I love about the Italian government today is how through their obtuse, contorted logical processes that lead them tot he most monstrous poo poo imaginable they also inexplicably run into good takes completely by accident (calling macron a piece of poo poo, holding off on helping the US do its foreign policy in venezuela etc). This poo poo literally never happened when the guys in power were your bog-standard political professionals in the neoliberal era, to the point that I actually think they tried to correct themselves before doing a good by accident.
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Feb 8, 2019 21:39
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Also the way the question was formulated was some convoluted confusing bullshit made deliberately so to ensure people either don't know what to vote or vote the 'right' way. Like, the only thing it was lacking was to have the 'good' checkbox be huge and the other one tiny like in that nazi germany referendum on giving or not power to the nsdap.
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Feb 20, 2019 14:11
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Yeah but I wouldn't sweat it too much about that platform, a.because it's already the death of democracy (there's like 60k people eligible to vote on decisions affecting 60m people in the country) and b. 'cause even if, against all possible odds, the vote should go the 'wrong' way, we'll ~mysterious server outages~ and in the end the vote will be the right way.
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Feb 20, 2019 14:17
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Cat Mattress posted:Look, if the will of the people isn't an obscure software blackbox that you control where only your die-hard fans are allowed to express themselves and nobody can tell whether or not you fudge the numbers, then I don't know what it is. I'm sorry, but maybe you haven't heard of the concept of direct democracy, and furthermore,
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Feb 20, 2019 20:33
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Yeah, and to add a bit more nuance - Spin Time is not a housing project. At least, not officially. The unofficial history of the building is that it was state property, with a state agency operating inside it, which then through some very weird gimmicky auctions and passages of hands ended up in the hands of a local realtor and big time fund entrepreneur, from whom the state agency that resided there had to loving rent the building. It ended up being too expensive, so it was abandoned for quite a while. After several years of prime real estate in the middle of one of the best-placed areas of Rome sitting empty and abandoned, it ended up being illegally occupied by a series of commie collectives, who then invited in the residents and refashioned it as a cultural, entertainment etc centre as well. That's why they can't pay the bills, the utility company is legally not allowed to accept money from the occupiers as the occupation is illegitimate. The owner of the building would very much like it to be emptied to redevelop it as a hotel, but nobody's gonna throw out some 400 people (I guess, if they were migrants then they would), most of them families with children, on the streets. So the stalemate continues. And by the way, this is in no way shape or form an extraordinarily thing. Occupation in Rome are an everyday occurrence, as the housing situation is abysmal. There is a severe shortage of affordable housing, what little affordable housing there is has access to it curtailed through means-testing and a decade-long waiting list, so what usually happens is that people break in, occupy the house, and tell the cops to gently caress off because they have children who can't be thrown out on the streets. There are more than a few occupied housing complexes and projects. The latest round of investments in public housing by the municipality was an appalling cover for a comically corrupt system of kickbacks, where builders got public funds and exemptions to straight up build new housing zones outside the limits of the city, which would then be sold at below-market rates to would be tenants. What actually happened is that the builders took the money and ran off with it, they extorted tenants into paying way higher than market rate for garbage housing outside the city that was served by 0 public utilities (in many cases, not even attached to public sewers), delivered more often than not unfinished, and nobody faced the slightest consequence for it. mortons stork fucked around with this message at 14:18 on May 23, 2019 |
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May 23, 2019 14:00
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In other fun news, Di Maio just fired off a nice volley when presented with a law proposal by Salvini that would abolish the crime of abuse of office for elected officials, esp. mayors, allegedly to prevent them from being paralysed by fear of legal action (we all know why he wants that law passed). He answered, live on tv, and I am translating as literally as possible: "[lega] should be focusing more on work, less on bullshit".
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May 23, 2019 18:25
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I think it's more nuanced than that: her arrest has not been confirmed by the investigative judge, who has deemed her actions warranted and mandated by obligations in international law, which naturally take precedence over internal Italian law, thus also putting into doubt the effectiveness of Salvini's new rules. But she still needs to be heard by magistrates over a charge of 'facilitating illegal immigration.' Salvini had ordered the Sicilian prefecture to draft an expulsion order for her, but it was blocked by the judiciary over this fact.
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Jul 4, 2019 10:39
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To be honest, the only bumps in his road have been put there by the judiciary, which has been the case for every other idiot fucker rightwinger Italy decided to repeatedly elect for some reason for the past 20 years. It's like the opposition relies on the judiciary to do the work they need to be doing, and has done so for the past 20 years. They're looking for judicial power to substitute for effective political checks and balances, and some judges have in fact taken the burden gladly. Not all of them, and it's not a healthy system by any metrics regardless, as politicizing the judiciary is not conducive to an improved political system, as they lack the sort of accountability (or any, for that matter) politicians are supposed to have. So Salvini is now spinning this as politically activist judges protecting a criminal (which is in itself a grave ethical violation for a minister of internal affairs, as it is not his responsibility to ascertain whether someone actually is a criminal, and he should be shutting the gently caress up as an authority figure) and both our spineless media and our invertebrate trilobytes that pass as the opposition refuses to call him out on it, attempting instead to incompetently egg him on to greater temper tantrums, and getting provoked into having one themselves. mortons stork fucked around with this message at 11:15 on Jul 4, 2019 |
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Jul 4, 2019 11:09
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Zingaretti is a man of the DC, through and through. For those unfamiliar with the idea, the DC, the Christian Democratic party which dominated Italian politics for 40 years, was the stereotypical huge cartel party, with tons of internal strife, different currents and the like. Traditionally DC men have been characterised by an almost perfect art of transformism, being able to unite internal currents who disagree bitterly with each other into a sort of coordinated front. Zingaretti is one such man, but he is hamstrung by the fact that his party is dying, has basically no ideas beyond 'market good, social programs bad,' (while he represents the leftier wing, which actually still has some remnants of the old Communist party ideas, and actually believes in state intervention and welfare) and he is as charmless as one of those Moscow-trained gray bureaucrats Eastern Europe got to head their Communist parties after the war. He is a competent administrator, and an overall uncontroversial figure of the party, which means he can hold a facade of the party still existing, but he is hamstrung by lack of political initiative, and a party that has no will and no ideas, and therefore no concrete answers to the issues faced by the Italian population today beyond business as usual.
mortons stork fucked around with this message at 12:15 on Jul 5, 2019 |
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Jul 5, 2019 12:12
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Forza Nuova are openly neofascist and have been for like 20 years now, they were one of the splits from the old MSI (the basic neofascist party since post-war era) who didn't agree with the latter's decision to moderate its ideas and collaborate with the centre-right. There are grounds in the Constitution to come down hard with the hammer on both, but for some reason nobody has ever lifted a finger on them.
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Jul 15, 2019 12:56
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Can we really count the north as frozen anymore in this post-global-warming world of ours? My friend near Milan routinely reports it being like 18°C. Also quite unluckily, warmer and warmer temps helps the spread of disease.
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Feb 25, 2020 19:45
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Also there are limits to the subsidiarity principle in regional governance, compounded by regional inequalities and overall uneven resource distribution. Health care is where those limits show more starkly, as exemplified by Southern regions shutting down hospital after hospital, and having their health care budget still mired in debts due to residents seeking treatment in the North. That poo poo is paid by the resident's original regional health service. The long and short of it is that we desperately need to go back to central state admin planning and investing into our NHS, and we need financial transfers to even out the inequalities or we'll get a loving tragedy if an actually dangerous epidemic rolls around.
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Feb 28, 2020 19:20
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Tesseraction posted:So I just heard in passing that the 500k covid tests that flew from Italy to the US were because Trump bribed one of your local companies to screw you all over? Is that true? Yes but afaik it's not reactants, just physical swabs? Which I don't know why they couldn't get it in the US but welp. Also the thing I truly, truly dislike, is how powertrippy local authorities have been trying to steal the show of handling the crisis from government. Rome closed off its parks almost immediately, despite no governmental indication to that effect. Most mayors are happy to chase around citizens breaking curfew or whatever, but they conspicuously have enacted basically 0 ordinances regarding enterprises staying open. Guess what dipshits, contagion spreads easier if you lock people in an office for 8h a day, rather than if they walk in a park for 1. They enact draconian poo poo that serves no purpose, or content themselves with shouting in a Youtube video like they're an early 2010s persona. I hate hate hate that they're getting more attention, and I have even harder that we have modern day flagellants shouting obscenities from their windows down to people they see in the street in a sort of irrational frenzy about people spreading contagion by walking their dogs. In Bergamo, by far the worst hit by contagion, local authorities deliberately and expressly refused to closed down production of its myriad factories. The "union" for industrialists lobbied hard for the city not to shut down. Result: military trucks have to carry out corpses from the overwhelmed hospitals, people by now are dying in their homes. Number was more important than all those people. The industrialists' union has blood smeared on its hands, and even when the gov't finally approved a bill to shut down production, they got two concessions to neuter even that provision: up until 25 March to shut down facilities, and basically if you argue with the local prefect that your facility is a vital one because it's part of a crucial supply chain, you get to stay open until a decision is reached to the contrary. Good poo poo. Gotta go on killing people and spreading that contagion to absolutely everyone possible so some fucker can watch a higher number on his stocks or whatever. Which brings me back to the original point: gently caress those mayors. gently caress those guys, all of them, for doing fascist, draconian, ineffectual poo poo and then failing to lobby for the one thing that would actually help stop contagion. People are still going to work. They have nothing else to do during the day except grocery shopping, and now there's military checkpoints to ensure people don't deviate from their home-work-store routes at all. Even drone surveillance for fucks sake. Gotta love that feeling of the rehearsals for a fascist dictatorship under martial law, gotta be a big show coming up soon. Thanks for reading my rant, I'll gently caress off now and try to do something more productive.
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Mar 24, 2020 19:08
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People working off the books are barely making ends meet, let alone saving up any significant amount of cash, hth. Also if you're living in a big city, count that avg salary is 1,2k/month, and rent averages to 60% of that. If you are anything other than a childless couple you're not saving any money from that. mortons stork fucked around with this message at 11:25 on Mar 28, 2020 |
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Mar 28, 2020 11:23
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TorakFade posted:Oh I know. I spent the best part of the last ten years making between 700 and 1000€/month, basically until my current job started last year that luckily pays more. Things are tough, but not as tough as some make it out to be (I personally know many people that "struggle to make ends meet" but smoke and drink for more than 200€/month that could easily be saved...)
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Mar 29, 2020 09:05
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People spending money is the way the economy runs. People need to be socialised into spending as much money as is possible, even if it is "beyond their means" because if they don't the whole castle of card collapses, as you're seeing right this goddamn second, in this economy that has zero loving safety buffers anywhere. It's not just the poors who have no savings. It is, like, all the goddamn companies, and we all know: when we shutter them for the pandemic, most of them aren't opening up again. And those actors actually have the theoretical power to save some money for emergencies, as opposed to some rando living hand to mouth and enduring a 2h+ per day commute just so he can afford more than a hole dug in the apartment complex basement and converted into a €800/month studio by some vulture fucker. It's not poor people's fault for wanting entertainment, or things, or spending money in any way you don't approve, which by the way you don't get to dictate. You get a constant barrage everyday of advertising aimed at making you spend every single loving penny you have, and society collectively shits on you for not having enough money to buy even more. And now it turns around and shits on you for not having saved the money that they wanted you to spend, or for not having spent money the "right" way. There's just no way to win. Cornuti e mazziati in ogni caso. So how about you find a different target for your anger, rather than people with 0 power? mortons stork fucked around with this message at 09:39 on Mar 29, 2020 |
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Mar 29, 2020 09:37
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Just a heads up, but the logical conclusion of that train of logic is a literal massacre. Shoulda had some personal responsibility not to be paid like a pleb in preparation of the global pandemic eh? Also, you don't get to claim that people are 'falling' for societal pressure to consume. Consumerism is the literal basis of our society. Frugality is a heavily discouraged trait. People aren't 'falling' for consumerism, they are making society work as it is intended. Which is why you can't then make the inconsistent claim that they should actually have done the literal opposite of what every force in society tells them to. That is not how human beings are socialised to function, and the stronger the societal pressures the less tenable your argument is. Now consider: pressure is so strong, both in a structural economic and social sense, that loving businesses, the one actor with substantial power in capitalism, have no safety buffers. That is simply a result of how society is made to work. You can argue that with the bailout should come a reform of how we think in terms of consumption goods, production decisions and enterprise management. You can not argue that people should be left to the wolves for making the E: who's dogpiling? I'm having a conversation, there's literally only me and they.
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Mar 29, 2020 10:25
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It's an intersectional issue. Wealth and income inequality meets consumer culture, perpetuated by advertising and compounded just-in-time production and decades of stagnant growth of salaries. You get a social stratus that can weather any storm pretty much any storm without eroding its social position while the vast, vast majority is operating on margins so thin that the tiniest external shock can cause a cascade failure, let alone a global pandemic forcing the country into lockdown. And the thing is, it is clearly a distributional issue: there is more than enough to go around. It just doesn't seem to find its way to those who need it. E: I should also add that the previous generations hadn't had their linguistic, conceptual etc horizons completely defined by capitalism to the point anything different was utterly unimaginable. That slow erosion of the world outside capitalist realism is very much a product of the last 30 years. mortons stork fucked around with this message at 10:46 on Mar 29, 2020 |
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Mar 29, 2020 10:39
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That is still the same problematic mentality that brought us here though. Like, there is nothing wrong in principle with farmers squeezing extra from a web shop, but the broader picture is a system built with no safeguards when poo poo goes wrong. That extra bit of income does not insure you from external shocks of any significance. Public infrastructure does. To me it seems like an extension of those arguing what if your job doesn't pay enough you should get one more. Yes, that will help in the short term, but it doesn't solve the roots of the issue. You are still extremely precarious, one shock away from disaster. And the world tends to present you with lots of shocks. The problem remains of an arrangement with no safety margins. And when it comes to assigning responsibility for that, then it isn't your average joe schmoe spending on cigarettes and then having no savings for the pandemic who caused the collapse.
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Mar 29, 2020 10:56
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SlowBloke posted:One glaring example is on how the protezione civile reacted, in some places they stayed idle until the corpses started piling up in others they were quick to act, honestly having similar structures working within the region envelopes instead of the state makes them too disparate in quality/materiel/training/etc. They should go back under the umbrella of the EI or the interior ministry. Not just civil protection corps imo are the issue. I was watching Report a couple nights ago on the preparedness of Southern health infrastructure to the crisis and I actually got scared. I'm originally from a Southern region, and our infra is barely above developing-country levels. Federalism has made sure to offload all capacity in the north, and concurrent cuts in health care in the south have ensured that if Covid gets there there is nothing in place to prevent it being a total slaughter. PD leaders have been floating the idea of returning health care decisions in the hands of state through constitutional amendments. Hopefully that will be a first step. Overall we're seeing how regional emergency response is disunified and ranges from excellent to lacking. Not really an acceptable range to have.
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Apr 2, 2020 13:33
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Fair Bear Maiden posted:I'm gonna need a source on this because every newspaper I read keeps reporting that movement is still mostly restricted and you'll still need to carry papers around with a new form (which, uh, why doesn't the police just carry those and make people compile them on the spot? I can't imagine the first option is any less risky, given you'd still be handing over documents to a police officer). You can, in fact, compile your autocertificazione on the spot afaik. All police checkpoints are supposed to have the modules since they are effectively asking you to take full penal responsibility of what you say. You are in effevt rendering a declaration of compliance on the spot.
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Apr 27, 2020 16:16
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 22:08 |
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well what is the catholic church if not the ultimate literal megachurch all other megachurches aspire to be
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Apr 27, 2020 20:40
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