Deme

It wasn’t about George Floyd as an individual. It was about what that case represented. People weren’t rioting to get him back alive, they were angry at the system which caused his death among many others. Police killing black people is a thing that keeps happening over and over again in the US. It’s a systemic issue that is never fixed. Floyd just ended up being the face of a movement born out of a lot of frustration about police brutality in general, possibly because of the way that situation was filmed. If he hadn’t died, then some other case would’ve served as the catalyst for the same movement.

Oh and the exact manner of death was quite irrelevant. Either he suffocated due to having a boot on his neck, or then he OD’d and the officer killed him by omission, failing to provide medical attention. Most likely it was a bit of both.

Hydrostatic equilibrium yes, but equal? No. We agree that centrifugal force is a factor. Now ask yourself, why would gravity suddenly strengthen at the equator to get the surface acceleration to stay equal to that of the poles?

It doesn’t. As a result the Earth seeks a new hydrostatic equilibrium, bulging out at the equator. This in turn strengthens the centrifugal force a bit while also slightly diminishing the force of gravity (because more of the planet’s mass is farther away). So the same effect is taken even further. Local differences add a layer of noise on top of this, but the end result is that the net surface acceleration is measured to average slightly less at equatorial regions than at the poles, with for example Singapore getting 9.7639 m/s2 of downward acceleration, while Helsinki gets 9.825 m/s2.

There’s also an unlocked bootloader, if you didn’t notice.

Ok sorry for the snide in that other comment. I think we’re talking slightly past one another. A society without banking or finance is a primitive one, but a society nonetheless. Now, all modern countries are advanced societies, but only current and former colonies started out that way.

I suppose the question comes down to whether the meme is talking about rebuilding complex society, or just society in general. You seem to be talking of the former, while I speak of the latter. I also think the meme was referring to the latter.

I’ll end by saying that while historical precedent is a very solid basis for how societies operate, I think it lacks imagination. Who knows what other ways there could be to build complex societies? I think that this is a powerful part of why people are fascinated with post-apocalyptic stories.

deleted by creator

Societies did exist before the renaissance, and were a prerequisite for it. Societies existed before the Hanseatic league could conduct trade between them.

A very USA-centric comment. While it is true that countries that were former colonies have their roots tied to those imperialist projects which definitely involved finance, this is not the case for countries that didn’t start as colonies. The sweat of the subsistence farmer or the feudal peasant/slave was what built the foundations of most countries.

In a truly post-apocalyptic setting there definitely would not be any need for finance of any sort. Job titles such as the one in the meme above are bullshit jobs that only exist to serve modern consumer capitalism. That is to say, they are not necessary. That’s what this meme is about in my opinion.

The soviets were constantly trying to grow their economy to stay competitive with the US and to demonstrate affluence. They switched out the old capitalist factory owners for the new class of government bureaucrats and party elite, who then carried on running the system for themselves. The state owned the means of production. They pretended that everyone owned the state, but we know this wasn’t the case. The soviet union was a state capitalist system.

If we stopped seeking profit, our economies would stop growing and subsequently our emissions would as well. Our system is built to rely on infinite growth. No bank gives out a loan without expecting that money to grow with interest. Infinite growth is incompatible with the material reality of a finite planet. What we would need to do now, would involve purposeful economic degrowth. I have no hope that this will ever happen since it would require a lot of people to consume less and we are used to a lot of bread and circuses. Whatever you define as “economic activity” is secondary to the survival of the species.

“Rentism” is just the end state of that same game of Monopoly. Some own everything and everyone else just goes around spending what little they have on rent. The game didn’t change name just because some people already won and it wasn’t us. We sell our labour to the capitalists to buy the necessities of life from them, while they enjoy the surplus value generated by our labour. That’s straight up the marxist definitions of working class and capitalist.

Just for a start, making a lot of stuff won’t make you rich. If you just get capital, invest in some random production, and go to market, you’ll almost certainly fail.

I fail to see how this isn’t a feature of capitalism. Just “making a lot of stuff” never worked even in the haydays of capitalism. You need a valid business case and customers etc…

But also, the state hands capital down everywhere

That’s the money you get every time you pass the starting square. It exists solely to keep the system functioning without the need for dramatic reform. If the tenants have no money to pay with, the landlords don’t get their profits.

freedom of initiative is severely restricted everywhere

That’s because the capitalists (people who own the means of production) have no intention to share their positions of power with the plebeians. Doing so would be against their rational self-interest. The state is a tool among many they use to perpetuate the status quo. Lobbyists and campaign funding are the most direct examples of this, but it goes a lot deeper than that.

most of what we call “capital” isn’t past produced value

Anything that can be traded for money counts as capital when even money itself can be used to manipulate the markets to generate even more money. Yeah it may well be some NFT or other such scam, but scamming is just a profitable business among others. To stick with the allegory about tenants and landlords: Owning a house is a profitable endeavour that generates passive income. The money generator box has some person inside who may at times complain about a kitchen appliance not working, but most of the time the thing just keeps generating capital for you despite the annoying whining noise coming from within. You may then invest this capital, for example in purchasing additional money generator boxes.

How is this not capitalism? It may not be free market capitalism since an increasingly small bunch of rich people at the top have way too much power over everything, but that’s just what happens when the game of Monopoly nears its inevitable end.

That song went too hard for Illumination Entertainment to greenlight it.

I understand your point. But I also feel that it needs to be taken in the wider context that our consumerist lifestyles were manufactured by those same corporations in order to sell more stuff. A good article about this. The individual can always try to consume as little as possible, but to truly break this vicious cycle at the societal scale, drastic measures would have to be taken in order to limit advertising (which is quite literally just propaganda to convince the masses to consume more) and other forces perpetuating the current situation. People can live without consumer capitalism, most corporations cannot. That’s why they’re hell bent on keeping the populace thirsty for their products through whatever means necessary.

A problem of definitions. The word ‘liberal’ has a whole bunch of meanings depending on who you ask. Someone farther on the left usually uses the term to describe people who claim to support freedoms and rights for everyone, but only as long as they themselves don’t have to sacrifice a thing. People who go out to riot and get arrested for it definitely fall outside of that group.

Liberals don’t know how to organize precisely because the Democratic party dominates the elections. No need to organize when the organization already exists. All they need to do is to “vote blue no matter who”.