“Some of you may die, but that is a risk I am willing to make”
When can we feed Elon to a dragon?
I wonder if when he says “necessary” he’s referring to some longtermism weird BS.
I mean, he’s definitely referring to some weird BS. But I wonder whether specifically it’s longtermism BS.
He is, though he’s wrong about Trump’s plans being anything beneficial in the long term. But even what he’s saying about any part of it being harmful is a contradiction of Trump’s claims about the economy
He’s not wrong, he’s bald faced lying. The two are not equivalent.
I only heard the clip from here… but it sounded like he said for long term prosperity, not necessary.
I assume what he was saying is that people will suffer while we force the market to move into isolation.
What he doesn’t want to admit to the populous is that to have long term benefits of cheap labor, you have to have cheap labor.
So either you have that by being richer than other countries and outsourcing the labor, or isolating the country and subjugating a portion of the population so much that they are the cheap labor. That portion… Isn’t going to be small if it’s going to be able to provide everything for the rich who blast through resources like crazy.
I read recently “On Freedom” by Timothy Snyder and he mentions that. Billionaires are sucking or wealth and when we suffer, we are told that this is temporary and toward a greater good (which never comes).
Sadly it is successful and a lot of Americans believe that.
It opened my eyes seeing how we are set up to fight each other (blaming minorities) while oligarchs are making our lives more miserable by hoarding country’s wealth.
Shut up, shut up, shut up please just shtfu already elon. How are people like him and bezos controlling the world? I swear we celebrate and praise mediocre morons in the US.
As a nation we have lost 30 years of progress because we the loudest most idiotic people to ever live a platform to spew their collective nonsense. Take me back to 2010 where the internet was still fun and not just some massive propaganda machine for the uber wealthy and political nut jobs
He’s never going to shut up. But people keep amplifying his pathetic voice by sharing what he says. There’s a very large group of society that needs to stop sharing outrage fodder.
The United States has always been the best place for the mediocre white man.
How are people like him and bezos controlling the world?
Capitalism
Which is now, very very obviously, not a system design to promote it’s own fitness, a la Darwinism…
I wonder what happens to piles of sand placed in the path of high-flowing rivers?
But without capitalism we wouldn’t have (insert something that has nothing to do with capitalism but that I completely attribute to it). And that would mean no trade.
My ancestors wouldnt have pushed at least one Southern plantation owner to suicide.
I believe this is what they call based
They werent John Brown style abolitionists, they just got pissed off by a business associate and took it about as far as you would expect from a family who still consider themselves American-Scots.
In trump’s case, we praise exceptional morons
Wait till he hears how necessary it is for life to get harder for billionaires.
Harder - lol. He’ll have to settle for two 180 foot yachts instead of three.
The worst part is–it’s really not. These guys could all stay millionaires and we could still solve our system’s worst distribution issues. Their biggest hardship could be dealing with not being The Guy With The Biggest Number when they go to their rich guy parties.
Personally I’m in favor of making them destitute and/or imprisoning them, but going that far really isn’t strictly necessary.
These guys could all stay millionaires and we could still solve our system’s worst distribution issues.
UBI actually makes billionaires richer, even with higher taxes. Money trickles back up to them. The problem with UBI is that it redistributes power, and the powerful want all of their power. Wealth “needs” to buy power.
That’s why they’re trying to take power. Billionaires would rather destroy the world and drive all life to extinction than to give up their private jets and yachts.
The French found a solution some time ago, maybe history really repeats.
There are now a lot of people who think we should be nice to billionaires because they also could become one sometime in the future
just wait till they outlaw protests and impose curfews
do i tell him?
That’s so 2020. Oh, that was under trump rule. Just a small sample of what’s to come if he gets into office again.
Wouldn’t be the first civilization that disappeared because the elite doesn’t want to compromise and give up status. It’s a constant in history.
WHY DO YOU MAKE ME HURT YOU WHEN YOU KNOW I LOVE YOU SO MUCH?
Fascist cunt
What’s up with upper class trying to destroy middle class all the time? Are middle class a threat to them? Has to be, otherwise this wouldn’t matter.
Make things hard for billionaires and spread their wealth amongst the lower class to start evening shit out. Who tf needs almost a trillion unspendable dollars?
Removed by mod
There’s no such thing as the middle class. You either own means of production, you sell your labour to those who do, or you belong to the criminal class that doesn’t contribute to the growth of capital. The middle class is a fairy tale capitalists tell us to keep us in the labour class instead of the far more sensible criminal class.
I always wanted to ask this so might as well now, feel free to answer if you want: what are the means of production? In $cureent_year, that is.
We are not in 1870 Germany. We don’t all work in huge factories owned by Rockefellers. I work in IT. My means of production is a laptop. I do own a few. I sell my labor to whoever needs IT services. Am I a capitalist or a communist? In the past I work for a big company and used their laptop. Was I being exploited?
The painter that is coming to fix my walls owns his ladder and spraygun. I assume he bought the paint with his own money. I don’t know about the van, he might own it too. He sells his labor to me, who don’t own anything of his. Is he a capitalist?
“what are the means of production?”
The ways in which you produce goods and services for transactions in a market.
Using a laptop (/server) to produce IT services is no different to a cobbler using a machine to produce a shoe, or a bard using a lute to produce a song.
The more you dig into it though, the more hardware and infrastructure you’ll find: router, servers, storage, switches, cables, management systems (both technical and HR). Even if you work alone you still use the internet which is made up of physical computers owned by someone, and telephony infrastructure, and you’ll still use a service to find work, and you’ll still take payments using a bank…
It’s equally applicable now to an IT worker as it was to a draughtsman at an architect firm in 1840.
Are you a capitalist or a communist? You’re certainly not a communist, I believe what you are hinting at is “socialized” vs “individual” labor, and it is a historically progressive development of capitalism. How a software developer fits into the means of production is they aid in the exchange of money from the sale of commodities, and make the transactions possible. But at the end of the day some product is being sold to some end user and you help to make that possible. Without the transaction there is no sale, which means no exchange of commodities for more money than they cost to produce and bring to market (profit or surplus value) which is the basis for the whole system, it is the point where the exploitation occurs.
Everyone is always “exploited” by the system, its part of what drives competition. But to be more specific, everyone is alienated from the system of production. we are all very individuated in our thinking, which bears out in our alienated experience. In more advanced or more advantaged countries, with a higher outlay of financial or investment capital, the class character of any individual is more specific and hard to suss out. In developing or economically repressed nations, where the factories of 1870s Germany still exist, alongside the factories of 1840s England, if not in capital than in conditions, the class character of any individual might be more clear and concise. Our “class character” is determined by our relationship to production, and it is not altogether straightforward. I’ve seen many fights like “are cops workers” and even “are baristas workers” that have sent me.
All that to say, capitalism promotes cooperation through competition, it socializes production, so that the product of your labor is just one part of a very complex whole. Even the painter has to pay for insurance on his van, probably has a couple loans for his business. The fact that your labor is socialized doesn’t make you a communist. Communism is the struggle for a classless, moneyless society. It too will presumably also have socialized production, but also socialized ownership of the means of production whereas under capitalism the MoP is privatized. This is the fundamental contradiction within capitalism and it is right that you found yourself wondering about it.
The company is and always has been the means of production. Shared distribution of the profits of a company, no owner taking it all and distributing wages.
So everybody should be a contractor? I have done both and I honestly appreciate the benefits of a salary without all the risks and overhead of contracting. Or founding and managing a cooperative.
The “means of production” is a very abstract and fundamental concept. I think its right for you to question it, and how it relates directly to you. Its a very general concept, and everything you are asking of of applies to is very specific. The means of production has been well defined it seems elsewhere in the discussion, but its basically “everything that is used in human production” which is the driving force of history from a Marxist/sorta Hegelian perspective. So it is a big deal.
But what is also relevant, is how production is defined, and namely who owns its products. You work in IT (so do I) so in that example you own your work laptop? That laptop is MoP, same as the painter tools, and you sell your product to the company, who uses it to run how ever millions of transactions. Or making those transactions possible for that company, integrating some new feature. So more specifically, those tools are Capital, which is an essential mean of production under capitalism. But a ton of the infrastructure for those transactions was publicly funded, paid for with taxes. But now most if not all of that infrastructure is privately owned.
So in that way you are like the painter, in that you sell directly the product of your labor to the capitalist. Both you and the painter are workers in the same way, but youre an intellectual worker vs he is a physical laborer. but the paint and personal items in your personally owned house is for your personal use, whereas the software you sell to a company is for commercial use, in effect the software is capital, whereas the paint on your walls is not. But if the painter painted the walls at your company’s office, that would be capital. The painter “bought the paint with his own money”? But you are paying him, so you are buying the paint.
“There is no middle class only virgin workers and chad lumpen proles” is an incredible bit
Decimation of the middle class is a natural tendency of capitalism, but politically its highly desirable to have a middle class. So the middle class in a highly capitalist society ends up being somewhat precarious. Billionaires aren’t attacking the middle classes more than laboring classes, but the “answer” to almost every problem caused by overproduction bubbles is to somehow suppress wages. The government, which needs a strong middle class for political stability, now has to find a way to lower wages or ,in the case of business owning/managing middle class, make new capital investment difficult. There are different kind of middle class, so there are different ways of accomplishing this. But as a result, middle class people are class conscious to the extent that they feel always threatened, but often aren’t able to link it to the economic system, or if so then they might not be able to link global economic problems to the actions that actually caused the problems.
They have all the money. Now they want more.
🗡️🫨
… there’s no guillotine emojis yet
What even is that face emoji doing?
I like how you improvised.
Edit: 🗡️🫠. I wanted to try and I like this.
That was my other choice
Nothing about trump is necessary
…is that the “Dark MAGA” bullshit he’s throwing out there?
What middle class?
Add this to the news that Mike Johnson said they will end Obamacare and I can’t believe anyone would vote for Trump. He’s going to raise your costs, reduce government services, kill healthcare as we know it, the list goes on and on.
They literally want to end government. Aka, services for anyone who isn’t wealthy.
The only government service they want is the police, and it to be funded by civil forfeiture.
Also the military.
“Some of you may die, but it’s a sacrifice I am willing to make”
Why do we only seem to get the bad outlandish things from books and movies? :/
Honestly, aggressive climate change would have a similar short-term impact, even if the net result is good, which is a large part of the reason we don’t do aggressive changes like this.
That said, I’m not convinced the net result is good, so we’ll instead have short-term suffering followed by longer-term suffering, all for a bit of protectionism for American businesses (which will probably leave them worse off in the long run anyway).
Electively suffering hardship? Billionaires first, set a good example for the rest of us, and the hardship can trickle down.
No, some of US will need to suffer, but that’s a sacrifice he’s willing to make. Him suffering isn’t acceptable.
Bro we couldn’t even get people to wear masks and get free tests and vaccines without triggering white outrage, how you think actual financial hardship is going to go over with these people?
They’ll scream for blood, but it won’t be the blood of billionaires.
They own the largest communication networks across the globe, both traditional and digital. They have access to the most cutting edge AI technology that’s fast becoming indistinguishable from reality. They’re cooperating with the man in charge of the most elaborate troll farm ever created.
They’ll use that power to keep breeding angry, violent reactionaries who blame minorities and swallow whatever their cult leader tells them to. But that will be rookie shit a decade from now. Forget social media sock puppets, our entire chain of knowledge is about to be undermined. Bullshit, agenda pushing academic papers will be published, filled with bullshit, agenda pushing statistics, fawned over by bullshit, agenda pushing media and cited in bullshit, agenda pushing books. It will spew out at a rate far faster than anyone can possibly debunk and even if they try, they’re indistinguishable from the AI-powered, sock puppet “experts” they’re arguing with.
Laws, regulations and life-altering punishments are the only way to stop them so they’re working hard to ensure that never happens.
He’ll immediately blame Biden for all the suffering he causes.
