Yeah. I'm aware, and it makes me sick.
But not as much as the fact that the Republic is over. Strap your survival pants on, pal.
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What does seem to be a point of agreement for Europeans that live in the States for years is that the US is so huge that for most people, there's no reason to leave. Whatever landscape you want can be had, from the tropics to the Arctic Circle. Geography makes it easy to never have a passport and experience 20 lifetimes of places. It actually is an amazing and diverse place.
That being said, getting an outside perspective of the world is an entirely different thing. Until an American gets their exceptionalism challenged by someone, it's an internal emotional paper tiger. It typically benefits Americans to leave the country.
I won't touch your point about most dangerous. I don't agree, but won't engage because I don't want to end up in a Palintir database. Delete this post unless you want CBP searching your phone next time you re-enter the country.
Off hand, I would say an iPad or tablet, maybe with the accessibility settings to max. Load books all you can, a few movies. If you did a large format eink tablet, movies are out, but audio and books are still in play, even apps for soduku or crosswords.
There are some bacteria that when they die, release toxins that are harmful. So cooking alone isn't enough to render them harmless.
From the Canadian food agency's website:
Staphylococcus aureus, Bacillus cereus, E. coli O157:H7, Clostridium botulinum, Clostridium perfringens and Clostridium difficile.
This is a thing pushed by American media. It's a Boomer-era panic over summertime picnics and somehow mayonnaise causing potato salad to immediately after 30 minutes outside a refrigerator to become fatal if consumed.
It's also the product of misunderstandings of buying meat at a supermarket, wrongly assuming that meat that is not refrigerated for more than 15 minutes will basically kill you.
Panicking about food poisoning is a moral panic about "bad parenting" and blaming people when it wasn't widely known what causes food poisoning: not washing your filthy hands, cross-contaimination, and poor hygiene overall.
I've lived in West Africa and bought and cooked and safely eaten meat that had sat on a wooden plank lightly covered in flies before I got there to buy it. I survived. Mayonnaise will outlive humanity before it molds or goes bad at room temp.
Heading for? Lol. Are in the.
OK, I will absolutely apologize for assuming you were American. I try not to creep on people's post history unless necessary, and didn't double check. That's on me, and I'm genuinely sorry for that.
Though, I'm not defending capitalism, other then to try and find the minimal threshold necessary to fulfill it in the original comment. I respect you sticking to whatever politicial or economic stance you want, and I was being a dick yesterday and I'll blame wine and sun for that. Mostly wine.
As a sorta-kinda economist, the point on which I have settled from seeing a lot of people on several continents live their lives, is that communal living and resource allocation is suitable for emergencies and basic survival in small and rudimentary settings. That is well documented in the anthropological record.
Beyond that, humans have a tendency towards transactionalism, often somewhat incorrectly termed capitalism, because transactions don't require saving money for capital to be used later. There's a great book called African Friends and Money Matters that is a frustrating look at a Westerner in Senegal trying to explain how the fundamentals of resource application work. It summarizes perfectly how most of African village level communities work, and I hope fascinating to someone who wants to start from a point of communal resource allocation.
But, my personal opinion is that we grow from that point outward to transactions while luxuriated and well-resourced, and capitalism past that in habitual abundance. So Marx proposing such limitation and hemming people in to a command economy seems counterintuitive simply from the perspective of trying to get people to participate willingly.
That's not a defense of capitalism, but simply pointing to where it naturally crops up. I can't abide Marx, so if there's a third option other then radical agrarian anarcho-syndicate communes and basic cooperatives, that has seen success, I would be interested to hear it. But those, much like Yugoslavia, are also very personality dependent and so not likely to last longer than 60-80 years or so.
All I see here is whining about "uh, guys, no one did it perfectly right 100% the first time, so it doesnt count." Like what a child says when playing a game.
Like how all y'all didn't vote for the nice Black lady because of not being perfect enough to your privileged liking on Gaza, then seem to not able to connect your actions to the repercussions which are what that one douche is enabling in Gaza.
Sorry, but it's just a bunch of tankie apologist BS, and a perfect example of why no one takes full communism or socialism seriously in any country that isn't already a single party state, corrupt to the maximal extent possible and unable to waiver from the party line. The Communist Manifesto might as well be some conceptual only scifi fictional government document, like the Star Trek reference to the Fundamental Declarations of the Martian Colonies or the United Federation of Planets Constitution. Plot devices for the individual, wholly useless to society as a whole.
Which also does a huge disservice to anyone pushing for a blended system that is known to work well in limited circumstances.
what ideas exactly?
Well, let's take 3 non-standard examples:
Yugoslavia nationalised industry and introduced worker self‑management after it broke away from Stalin and the USSR. Loads of collaboration with post-colonial Non-aligned Movement African nations that wanted to dabble in socialism but didn't have a popular movement or resources or planning to back it. Taking refugee in capitalism, like China recently started to do as well, is what let thinks work for a time. Tito, however, was the only thing that held the county together, and once he was gone, the whole place collapsed slowly over a decade. There was no evidence that the "best" socialism in the region (best, as in least totally shit) was worth keeping on its own or valuable enough to try and keep.
Albania imposed strict state ownership, collectivised agriculture (the gulags are basically Woofing, yaay!), and a hard‑line Stalinist-style paranoia-fueled regime. It assigned jobs; no one not official given the job of "driver" by the state could operate a vehicle. And it fucking shows still to this day. Hoxha held the county together with fear alone because nothing of socialism was worth keeping on its own, or valuable enough to the average person to keep.
Bulgaria did a decent job replicating Soviet central planning, collectivisation, and political control. It all sucked and the Yugoslavs loved to leverage economic disparity over them because it was so fucking bleak in Bulgaria for theor entire stint as socialists. Which is part of why Bulgaria is shitting on their neighbors now about EU accession, they finally have the advantage and a grudge that survived 40 years because of socialists caused economic disparity. They happily joined the EU a generation after realizing that nothing of socialism was worth keeping on its own, or valuable enough to the average person to keep. But they have decent freeways now.
Despite three very different attempts to try socialism as a means to the end of communism, only Belgrade and it's immediate suburbs really had a decent quality of life. Everyone else had a well-documented traumatizingly bad time.
And while I'll happily admit that I haven't needed a more than cursory remembrance of Marx since 2002, that literally billions of people have proven time and again that Marx's ideas are pure fantasy, and that 19th century ideals about economies that have just stated industrialization are not needed in the 20th century any more than Adam Smith has been relevant once advertising manipulated simple supply and demand, because humans are not rational actors.
Well, I doubt we were ever going to agree, even to disagree.
I will say that Marx's ideas have been tried and tested and have never held up to real world application. Bemoan capitalism all you like, then explain how the Holodomor happened.
Anyways, have a pleasant day.
I understand Marx fine. He was an academic who grew up the privileged son of a lawyer, and never spent a day of his life worrying about how he was going to feed his family by working on a farm or in a factory.
His ideas about land alone being enough to be considered "means of production" are informed by 19th century feudalist-cum-post-feudaliast Europe, and the transition point between the Prussian Kingdom and a unified and nascent German state as it industrialized.
His view of industrialization is like that of Upston Sinclair: "Holy shit, WTF? This is terrible." Trauma and secondary trauma informed by other people. But as an academic his understanding of how the economy works at the level of what was a rapidly changing factory scene. 21st century economics don't fit 19th century ideals.
And you as a lumberjack is the perfect example. You might own a saw and live near a forest. Cut all the trees you want. Who will buy them without access? So now you need a road. But your 19th century horse cart can't drag a 400kg log anywhere to sell it, so you now need to buy a truck and loading system. Only now too you have an actual logging setup that gets your product of raw timber to a mill for sale. Marx calls all these things the means of production, which is cute, but he assumes that the social whole is different.
The road needs to be graded and maintained, your saw oiled and sharpened, your truck maintained. Which all also needs labor to happen. As was the cries of trucking unions when the Teamsters formed, you are just part of the machine. Which means that when you get down to it and nitpick, everything and everyone is a part of the means of production of something else. There are no gaps and no bourgeoisie locking up every critical aspect of the social whole, and small businesses as the largest employer in the US mean that Marx's theory doesn't stand up to reality anymore. The end user and end consumer provides demand, which is as necessary as the road and truck and mill for you as a faux lumberjack. Demand is a human non-labor aspect of the social whole we all have, which is more important than the means of production. Just ask the bourgeois board of Blockbuster Video, or a small local newspaper.
Marx's definition of "the means of production" is both not in tune with how anything has ever worked, and ignores that Marx basically used real estate as the definition because he was closer to European feudalism than us. Marx grew up and spent his uni years as a subject of the Prussian Kingdom, and industrialization and land ownership were entirely different in his time.
Context matters. And apologies for being condescending, but it pisses me off to no end when people wax poetic about some pastrolaist socialist agrarian sunshine butterfly state when if you've never experienced it, actually sucked and everyone hated it who was in it, even in the modern era.
You don't need to argue anything, because there is no universal definition of capitalism. Were not trying to define it.
But the term itself requires capital to be involved, and for a business to exist, that capital needs to be reinvested in the business. That doesn't require growth. The absolute minimal state simply requires pricing a good sold at a net profit. That's all. Growth isn't a requirement.
- Because you're leaning on Marx for definitions, who was famously out of touch with reality as well,
- because ALL small business owners need inputs, and labor is only one of them, so inventing the vendor as now a farmer to attempt a workaround is disingenuous,
- you also had made the tomato vendor into a farmer in hopes of having a point that fits into a poorly crafted 19th century framework, and don't know enough about how farms anywhere on earth to realize how blatantly wrong you are,
- your definition of capitalist is factually incorrect,
- read my edited comment above, which I edited while you wrote this,
- a farmer is no different, functionally in a minimalist sense, from a person making jam as a cottage industry, who buys fruit and processes it at home, making a farmer's field not magic but simply a location where work is done,
- I said tomato seller, which is someone that spends their labor time buying tomatoes from farms as a risk and selling them in the market. They own means of logistics, which for anyone not stuck in 1862, would consider essentially a means of production as well, as it takes an input and renders is viable to trade for a medium of exchange. Does a fisherman owning a boat mean she owns the means of production when it's fish spawning grounds that make fish? It's a stupid argument to cling to one you've already written your first PoliSci paper about it and get it.
Look, everything is connected, and there is no terminal point of anything from which anarcho-socialist magic can magically arise and flow down to make some post-consumption utopia. It's a circle with no beginning and no end. You can't force economic change to change human behavior, and Marx's ideas have famously failed hard. Over and over. Spectacularly.
You're taking about a 30 generation cultural change that you won't ever see.
And publicly traded companies are the also the minority of the total number of companies in the US. So this is a niche issue with outsized effects, meaning a policy solution is out there that
If you want to nitpick, I never said farmer. Also, farmers have inputs, so your comparison is wholly removed from reality.
Edit: also, Marx? JFC, Thoreau is a better example of 19th century philosophy about labor, as he actually did real work in life which is why he manged to influence Tolstoy, who the eurdite Soviets tried to retcon into being a socialist because they were arrogant tools who didn't understand his work well enough to realize that his critiques were often of people just like them. And just like Marx who also had very little contact with real life.
Marx can suck a fuck at the tomato stand, my friend.
In the strictest definition, they don't.
Capitalism is minimally fulfilled when a business sells something for a profit and reinvests the profit (now capital) in the business. Hence the term. It doesn't have to grow the business, make new products, or do anything beyond maintenance of its processes, be that fixing or updating machinery or training employees. A single person selling tomatoes in a market in Madagascar that fixes of their tomato table with profits is perfectly capitalist.
Expecting constant growth is not a requirement of anything.
It's a good call to post, but waaay too soon IMO too bother with it. It might simply be flash in the pan marketing for VC funding and not work. It might be a total scam. It might be legit and poorly run. It might be the real deal. It's hard to say without more data.
100% yes.
I am privileged to be able to travel for fun, but also live in and get immersed in other cultures thanks to work.
The Americans that spend 5 days in Cancun, an all-inclusive in DR, or "went to Africa" by touching Morocco on a day trip from Spain...ugh. Y'all look bad saying box-ticking is anything else than that. It's not a competition; what did you actually personally gain from the experience? What makes you grow as a person with greater understanding of our world? Sometimes the answers surprise you, but largely, it's about saving money and being a dick to people you wrongly assume don't speak English.