Same experience here. It can be a nightmare.
1 karma · joined April 8, 2021
Wow, using such a list is pretty serious systemic discrimination in my eyes.
100% agree it's about money. I'd also add that it's about the money system itself, and the hoarding of 'Intellectual Property' (monopoly granted on technologies, creating artificial scarcity) by Western EU economies (together with the US) leading to a lack of full technology transfers, and limiting access to our rich shared inheritance. This method becomes a way for Western corproations to commodotize ideas and systems, and monopolize, leading to the slow technocratic takeover of the world that is currently going on:
"How did the rich countries really become rich? In this provocative study, Ha-Joon Chang examines the great pressure on developing countries from the developed world to adopt certain 'good policies' and 'good institutions', seen today as necessary for economic development. Adopting a historical approach, Dr Chang finds that the economic evolution of now-developed countries differed dramatically from the procedures that they now recommend to poorer nations. His conclusions are compelling and disturbing: that developed countries are attempting to 'kick away the ladder' with which they have climbed to the top, thereby preventing developing counties from adopting policies and institutions that they themselves have used" [1]
Instead we'll need to focus on creating a rich P2P commons of distributed tech. Protocol Cooperativism, mutual credit accounting using asset backed currencies - built using frameworks and systems like Ceptr and Holochain.
- the collective unconscious of Europe
A bulgarian friend told me many in Eastern europe say they feel like second class European citizens. That they are 'under' Western European countries like France, UK, Germany, the Netherlands, etc. and also the Nordics.
I see this pattern also in how the propertied + rentier [1] upper classes in the US (like Trump or anyone who wants to reopen the economy in the middle of a pandemic [2]), who don't care about the Precariat caring classes who subsidize their lifestyles in the first place. This sacrifice is now even coming close to being asked to pay with their lives.
[1] https://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-08-03/book-day-corru...
[2] https://twitter.com/davidsirota/status/1242110271490912256
[1] https://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/imperialism.html
So then you agree that capitalism with it's overly parasitic rentier/usury mechanisms is a ponzi scheme, waiting to collapse?
After collapse, hopefully we have a transition to a p2p mutual credit paradigm.
"They assert a belief in ‘free markets’ and want us to believe that economic policies are extending them. That is untrue. Today we have the most unfree market system ever created. It is deeply corrupt because its leaders claim it is the opposite of what it is becoming."
"How can politicians look into TV cameras and say we have a free market system when patents guarantee monopoly incomes for twenty years, preventing anyone from competing? How can they claim there are free markets when copyright rules give a guaranteed income for seventy years after a person’s death? How can they claim free markets exist when one person or company is given a subsidy and not others, or when they sell off the commons that belong to all of us, at a discount, to a favoured individual or company, or when Uber, TaskRabbit and their ilk act as unregulated labour brokers, profiting from the labour of others?
Far from trying to stop these negations of free markets, governments are creating rules that allow and encourage them. That is what this book is about."
"…today, a tiny minority of people and corporate interests across the world are accumulating vast wealth and power from rental income, not only from housing and land but from a range of other assets, natural and created. ‘Rentiers’ of all kinds are in unparalleled ascendancy and the neo-liberal state is only too keen to oblige their greed.
Rentiers derive income from ownership, possession or control of assets that are scarce or artificially made scarce. Most familiar is rental income from land, property, mineral exploitation or financial investments, but other sources have grown too. They include the income lenders gain from debt interest; income from ownership of ‘intellectual property’ (such as patents, copyright, brands and trademarks); capital gains on investments; ‘above normal’ company profits (when a firm has a dominant market position that allows it to charge high prices or dictate terms); income from government subsidies; and income of financial and other intermediaries derived from third-party transactions."
- Guy Standing
In my experience, this sounds like grandiosity talking.
Wall Street loves socialism for bankers!
Yay let's subsidize Wall Street using public funds! "We can't afford universal healthcare", but we can totally - yet unnaturally - bail out (mostly rentier) capitalist businesses that have been reckless and parasitical.
Why not just let them die?
Has anyone watched the movie Margin Call?
Did you see this recent thread? It is a paper on how to read papers and it was very useful and insightful for me.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21979350
From the linked pdf:
"Researchers must read papers for several reasons: to review them for a conference or a class, to keep current in their field, or for a literature survey of a new field. A typical researcher will likely spend hundreds of hours every year reading papers.
Learning to efficiently read a paper is a critical but rarely taught skill. Beginning graduate students, therefore, must learn on their own using trial and error. Students waste much effort in the process and are frequently driven to frustration.
For many years I have used a simple ‘three-pass’ approach to prevent me from drowning in the details of a paper before getting a bird’s-eye-view. It allows me to estimate the amount of time required to review a set of papers. Moreover, I can adjust the depth of paper evaluation depending on my needs and how much time I have. This paper describes the approach and its use in doing a literature survey."
re-ranking based on his interests
Yet at the same time I think dang has the ability to move any post up or down/re-prioritizing or re-ranking based on his intellect, instead of a natural, organic ranking. It becomes a forced therapy session by dang. We also cannot know if this happens, since those moves would be invisible to everyone else on the site (except to other admins/moderators). I do not think it’s far fetched to think he has this power, seeing as karma scores are conveniently hidden for all posts (except for the author of each individual post).
I’m a little disturbed that dang seems to ‘steer’ conversations based on his own interests. There’s a bunch of smart people here and I don’t understand why he goes past his role as administrator to interject into certain threads. It’s ‘bad hosting’ in my eyes.
With my questions I’m trying to understand what the rules of the game are, to see whether I like them or not and whether I want to keep playing (engaging on HN).
In other words, I no longer think I am weird for not feeling joyful or being grateful for things for which I have not yet been given the chance to ask myself if I actually am grateful for them, or if I actually personally value them at all. Being stuck in someone else's narrative, or a cultural narrative, is to me like being in a jail, because the narrative will not correspond to my feelings, because it's not mine.
I now use the Nonviolent Communication set of strategies to listen to my own feelings, and use them to learn which of my human needs are unmet.
I also had Compassion Focused Therapy, which brought me back from the dead.
The writing of Francis Weller has inspired me beyond belief. If you're interested, this is a taster: https://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/478/the-geography-of-s...
Or if you prefer listening, I love this podcast with him: http://charleseisenstein.org/podcasts/new-and-ancient-story-...
Have you read any Guy Standing?
“ …today, a tiny minority of people and corporate interests across the world are accumulating vast wealth and power from rental income, not only from housing and land but from a range of other assets, natural and created. ‘Rentiers’ of all kinds are in unparalleled ascendancy and the neo-liberal state is only too keen to oblige their greed.
Rentiers derive income from ownership, possession or control of assets that are scarce or artificially made scarce. Most familiar is rental income from land, property, mineral exploitation or financial investments, but other sources have grown too. They include the income lenders gain from debt interest; income from ownership of ‘intellectual property’ (such as patents, copyright, brands and trademarks); capital gains on investments; ‘above normal’ company profits (when a firm has a dominant market position that allows it to charge high prices or dictate terms); income from government subsidies; and income of financial and other intermediaries derived from third-party transactions.”
What are some of your go to authors, areas of interest? Or in other words, who are you grateful for, for their influence on you?
Those dorms are going to be sitting empty after the students move out. Seriously, what is the logic behind this mess?
Platforms offer a way for individuals or small businesses to get started in a new sector without doing a lot of marketing for themselves. It's a bit like being part of an alliance.
I am not arguing for the continued domination and rent-seeking practices of Silicon Valley middle-men corporations. I'm arguing that the existence of any online bazaar/marketplace and the ability to search and compare, makes for excellent dynamics.
To go even further, I advocate for an emerging alternative that has been termed 'Protocol Cooperativism':
Instead of monopolistic rent-seeking platforms, it focuses on open source economic protocols that allow full negotiation between peer to peer users. Check out Ceptr.org, MetaCurrency and Holochain. It provides the frame and framework for ever evolving protocols (comprehensive versioning tech).
I wrote this before and then edited, without realizing that now my main argument has become for the opposite of what I intended it to be for. Now I can't edit it. Original post:
"Wow very selective mind you've got there. Please tell me this is a joke?
In the digital age, information is everything. And information usually precedes action, so in my eyes your argument is wilfully ignorant to the larger reality of a complex globalized world.
I think the US and other Global North countries have a massive shadow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j800SVeiS5I
Guide to Jung and the shadow: https://highexistence.com/carl-jung-shadow-guide-unconscious...