moate

...only because the company is committing wage theft to subsidize costs. I don't think it feels reasonable to say "Your employer has to meet certain wages, but they didn't so you're a sucker".

If you can't pay the wage you're required to then the whole house of cards starts coming down because now you can't create a large enough network to meet demand, which shrinks demand, which increases costs, which makes it accessible to fewer and fewer high paid consumers.

Like a lot of capitalism "it's better than starving to death in the streets" is the appeal of the job and nothing more. Anything else is a paid message brought to you by UberDoorHub.

I mean, that's what the State tells you to stop uprising, but there has never in history been a state that served the people it governed, it serves the people who govern. It's all just big gangs with weapons, and sometimes one gang takes over another's territory. Everything else is window dressings to prevent other gangs from forming.

If you want to split hairs as to what the responsibility of the Chairman of the Board of Directors does, you win.

IDK, maybe I'm a mushbrain but it seems like if someone said they're the chairman of the board, and you told them to their face "well it's not like you run the company..." they'd finish their drink and go talk to someone else for the rest of the night.

Me personally? No. The labor whose value he extracted and hoarded through his investing? Yes, they are.

That it's a lot cooler saying noble things than actually DOING noble things.

Exactly! They elected a 71 year old nepo baby to run the company. Vastly different.

Your story was literally about your inability to recognize a message within media. That was the point you were making, that you were too young to realize what the adults in the room were talking about. Then you grew up and probably realized something incongruent between what you value in a society and what your favorite media was saying. People love the OG Star Wars trilogy and can enjoy it without recognizing that the Empire is the USA, but that doesn't mean that's not literally the point of the story. Right wing idiots can read 1984 and think "this guy is talking about how bad leftists politics are specifically and how only conservatism makes sense" despite points vaguely at the entire life of Orwell. I'm aware that you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him literate.

As I said somewhere else in this boondoggle of willful media illiteracy: the people who complain about "there's too much politics in my entertainment", to a person, actually mean "I don't like the point of view that's being expressed by this media". Entertaining isn't objective. People used to pack picnic lunches to go watch a lynching. The thought of that makes me want to puke, but I can't say those people weren't entertained. The thing is, I don't need to appeal to a vague majority without citation to support my thoughts. I can stand on my own statements without throwing in logic fallacies (or junk statistics, I really don't know what you were trying to do there) and accept that, to paraphrase PK Dick , reality cannot be perceived uniformly by all individuals and to pretend as such is folly.

Being unable to recognize a theme in media is not the flex people think it is…

I’ve found when people complain about something being “political” 9 out of 10 times they’re complaining that they dislike the author’s politics.

The dictionary definition of “politics” (as in, what the word actually means) would support the statement that “everything is political” to be at worst a smidge hyperbolic. No motte, no bailey, no rhetorical fallacy.

Thing is, most art has ideology, it’s the weirdo reactionaries that try to pretend otherwise.

Don't forget the Twilight Zone. The whole show existed because Serling wanted to make political statements and felt sci-fi might give him enough cover to make them. It's almost like...that's the point of the genre, to give enough of a fig leaf that the reactionaries will be lulled into allowing it...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Twilight_Zone

The LITERAL definition from the dictionary?

Again, I get it: you don't want to engage in the politics of the writing you like. That's fine. But you don't get to say the politics don't exist in the text.

I promise, the authors you speak of would not respect your analysis of their text (and you're probably fine with that) but your narrower point is...not worth making? Anyone can like or dislike whatever they want for whatever reasons they want, what they can't do is say "that red barn can't actually red because I hate red barns but I like that one, and my analysis is valid". I mean I guess a P.K Dick character could, but I don't think we're ready to have that discussion.

Sci-fi and Speculative fiction, are, always political. Just like how romance is always about love, and mysteries are always about solving a puzzle. You were responding to my point, so I get to set the terms of engagement. Thems the rules of discourse.

I'll just come out and say it, your ability to analyze texts really comes into question when you say CYBERPUNK (of ALL the subgenres) can be anything but political. Again, if you really only want "political" to mean "involving governments" and not the LITERAL definition of the word, I don't know how we can talk to each other because we're speaking different languages (or rather, using language in entirely different ways).

>>I do think people in the bottom quintile should not have kids

I have some terrible news for you about birth rates and what this would do to society.

>>until they remedy their income issues I'd like you to define "work", "necessary work for society to function", "low-skill jobs" and "value" (as it pertains to a human life). I have a feeling we have very different definitions and that leads us to very different conclusions about what people can do.

>>I think we're far from "people cannot move classes if they want to" as well. Probably because you're not a social scientist/sociologist! We're talking about the bottom quintile, and it's very hard to become part of the upper crust, and it's very hard to leave American poverty[1,2]. But yea, some guy working a blue collar job can probably have kids that have white collar jobs.

1- https://harris.uchicago.edu/news-events/news/has-class-mobil... 2- https://web.archive.org/web/20091003184000/http://www.americ...

^ this one gets it.

I think we're disagreeing on what "politics" means, perhaps. I'm going with something to the effect of "Politics is the process by which people and groups make decisions, rules, and laws to govern society and share resources" and you seem to be thinking "the affairs of nation-states and how they, specifically, govern". For example, Frankenstein being "social commentary" firmly makes it political to me, but seems to somehow exclude it for you.

Also, the idea that "there's politics in the source, but you can enjoy it without engaging with them" is sort of proving my Rage Against the Machine example from my original post (I picked the most overtly political band I could think of for the ad absurdum of it): Just because you don't CARE or agree with the politics, doesn't mean it's not there. I'm not saying you need to like, or engage with the politics in anything, but denying that they exist is...a political act!

As for your refutations of the people I picked, I didn't see you citing an example of a story Asimov had without politics/social commentary (the man was prolific and I haven't ready everything he wrote, I picked him because his best known works are Foundation and Robots series which are both very very political), if you felt The Man in the High Castle and Do Androids... (or Flow my Tears, or A Scanner Darkly) were just "being weird" and not political, again, I think we're just using different definitions of the word.

In H2G2, Adams says that Vogons, the galactic bureaucrats and face of the space government, make the 3rd worst poetry in the Universe. Now if one wanted to, one can make that a silly joke, or one could interpret that as people who are dedicated to maintaining the systems of government are the among least creative creatures in existence . And the weird thing is, somehow, even if one came to the 2nd conclusion, one could still think Adams wasn't making a political statement. Now why am I suddenly thinking about Claude...

If you didn’t actually want to give examples you can just say “no”.

As someone else pointed out: you’re complaining that some media is poorly written and other media is well written.

There are past and current examples of overtly opinionated shows that people love and message-less media that nobody cared about.

There are so many examples of pro-athletes* (not just, some dude "training") who are plant based.

Define "inferior" I guess? If the goal is "ingest as much usable protein as your body needs" plants can do it at levels beyond whatever you're going for. Is this a cost value analysis situation? Is it about taste/texture/enjoyment?

*Lazy source: https://www.greatveganathletes.com/

Sorry to necro-post this, but, you're wrong.

Hit me up with some citations please, mine are below.

https://notice.co/c/impossiblefoods https://robinhood.com/us/en/stocks/BYND/

speak for yourself, I have def been bopping along to The King Beetle and tripped over something at some point :D

As someone with "Don't Panic" tattoo'd on my left forearm, and as I pointed out in another comment: Adams' Magnum Opus is in no avoiding its messaging, the politics/author's opinion is extremely clear.

Can you give an example of the old, subtle (that's the word you were looking for, it's a subtle reference/theme) sci-fi show that was a "story with a disguised message" instead of the current "message with a disguised story"? I'm just trying to level set here.

Can someone give me examples of beloved, well written and respected sci-fi that was not overt political/social commentary to go along with all the discoloration of the above comment or is this just the standard "I like Rage Against the Machine because they're angry, but hate that they get political" nonsense?

Frankenstein: Political AF. Asimov: So fucking political. Dick: It's nothing BUT politics. Anything in the cyberpunk genre: Why do you still need me to spell this out?

IDK what "never worked" means here, the market cap for Impossible/Beyond alone is still over a billion dollars. You can still get an Impossible Whopper at any Burger King in the US.

There's plenty of issues with selling meat alternatives, I don't think you're the person to speak to them for some reason...

Yea, they're really hoping that the 2% will help make up an outsized share of the revenue and that brand recognition will keep them going with the plebs.

I have never heard of a cloud service of ISP actively taking corporate data and shoving it into other users inbox. If my company has a proprietary solution to a math problem that nobody else knows about but the AI service that we have been working with has access to it and Billy Main Competitor ALSO has that service and asks "how would one solve this math problem" the second the AI spills the beans, the suits in the c-suit would lose it and sue the AI.

If however, our internal IT group didn't read the manual correctly and set up our cloud service access parameters incorrectly so that anyone who was trying to probe our defenses could access the formula, Jim from IT is looking for a new job.

See the difference?

"The 'smart but lazy' adults who stayed that way, who I've encountered IRL have been maliciously manipulative work avoiders, or straight up losers with superiority complexes."

Counterpoint, the "I had to work twice as hard for my A" people are prudish buzzkills who think that working hard has inherent value.

"Being smart won't get you a date, wont get you fit, play an instrument, learn to draw, program, wont allow you to fix the crooked cabinet door etc." I mean...it could? The whole article is about how "intelligent" isn't exactly one thing.

Obvious Smart and Lazy here: Life is easy, and I've been BSing my way through it for over 40 years. I work at one of the largest companies in my field on the planet, I'm well respected by my supervisors and coworkers, I make enough money to keep the lights on (and my artist wife and I both fed). I have friends I see regularly, love an affection, and time to garden and play video games.

There's no "right" way so there can be no "wrong" way, only ways that don't work for your skillset. Also, understanding how to navigate society/hierarchy is a skill and a lot of the try-hards don't realize that so they just brute force for results.

>>Reading the material before the test/exam and then getting high enough marks that everyone leaves you alone so you can go play with computers/chess was not an effective long term strategy.

Don't tell my boss, but yes it is.

You're right, it's not just that people opposing it are stupid or brainwashed: Some of them, to your point, are selfish and don't want others to have access to the nice things that they have.

Can you explain why those people DESERVE access to better care? Do they have more complex/rare diseases that require specialized treatment? Are there specialists who only work at that hospital? Those feel like warranted needs. But "I can pay more so I should have better things" is a ruinous worldview that, at its end, is just Might Makes Right.

It sounds like you have issues with people telling you what to do. Would you like a pamphlet on the virtues of Anarchy as a way of building community to survive in a terrifying world?

Because none of the things you said have ANYTHING to do with "universal healthcare" and everything to do with "bad actors worming their way into positions of authority to enrich themselves". Surly you can't believe that "let every induvial person figure it out themselves in an unbalanced capitalist system" is a better answer, right? This isn't just about "if too many people are in the system then MY healthcare quality goes down", right?

You go far enough on fiscal tracking and you just wind up back where we've always been: barter. All currency is as useful as the regime backing it, and when that regime falls, barter always comes back in. Everything else is just rent seeking scaffolding to reduce barter friction (cash let's me store all the value I've created, but so could gold bars, or bitcoin, or vodka).

This is to say: All currency is about control and convenience (you trade "invisible transaction" for "easily able to resolve payment") because those in power want to know/control the money and everyone else wants convenience.

>> They're expenses are most likely scaling with their revenue

A unique phenomenon that only exists in this industry and is clearly the reason you feel opposed to people performing the same sort of analysis they would on other businesses...

Also, nobody would assume a company with 1.4B in rev is "making billions" as that would be impossible based on their revenue being less than 2 billion.

As someone who hates the government and the megacorps, I loathe statements like the OPs because there are so many legit and real reasons to hate shit before we come up with "KFC doesn't call themselves Kentucky Fried Chicken anymore because there isn't enough chicken in their product" type of conspiracy nonsense.

Also, based on the statement, you're buying shit pizza from trash restaurants/frozen garbage. That's why the crust is bad. Pizza is one of the cheapest things you can make, that's why when I worked in restaurants I always said if you can't make money selling pizza you need to get out of the industry.