Israel’s War on Gaza Is a War on Children
Israel’s War on Gaza Is a War on Children | Truthout
Children in Gaza are not merely collateral damage; they are often actively being targeted.Merula Furtado (Truthout)
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Billionaires want you to know they could have done physics
- YouTube
Auf YouTube findest du die angesagtesten Videos und Tracks. Außerdem kannst du eigene Inhalte hochladen und mit Freunden oder gleich der ganzen Welt teilen.www.youtube.com
Japan Is So Desperate to Increase Its Birth Rate That Tokyo Is Trying Out a New Idea: Free Daycare
Japan Is So Desperate to Increase Its Birth Rate That Tokyo Is Trying Out a New Idea: Free Daycare
Japan has been grappling with its demographic statistics with a sense of urgency, particularly regarding its declining birth rate. In 2023, the country...Carlos Prego (Xataka On)
Also...loosen immigration laws?
I know it's a very closed off nation with deep cultural roots that is very weary of outsiders...
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Now this is a racist idea I can agree with.
(Although, I actually bet aliens are shit as well at the equivalent stage of development)
I don't mind finding work in Japan...
...if it wasn't so hostile to workers
So far, Japan is near the bottom of my list for western countries to work at, and I would much rather find a job in Korea instead
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Japan is near the bottom of my list for western countries
Japan is an Eastern country. In fact, it's the farthest East county possible.
I think the words you were looking for were "first world countries".
Japan is an Eastern country. In fact, it's the farthest East county possible.
No love for New Zealand huh?
I know it’s a very closed off nation with deep cultural roots that is very weary of outsiders…
Europe doesn't get to use that excuse, and neither should they. I don't care how different whale meat shashimi seems from foi gras, or bonsai from tulip arrangements.
Low birth rates are obviously not sustainable
Please explain why this is obvious. Less people seems more sustainable, not less.
Maybe this ponzi. Unfunded state pensions use workers contributions to pay current pensioners.
Less workers = less pensions.
Hey, cost of living, without rent. I'm talking about rent though.
2 rooms flats start at around CHF 1300, if you're lucky.
Edit: ah, you meant Japan side is rent and living.
Old people can’t work and need someone to pay for their retirement.
If there are more old people than young people (population pyramid wrong way round) every young person needs to pay a crapton of taxes so that old folks don’t starve to death
Because Japan doesn’t do that.
There is an -ism they’re pretty big on, it starts with R
We have machines that can do the work of 100 people in the past
I'm sure that we could make it work without killing anyone
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"Unsustainable Society" No matter your opinion on current governments, humanity has been around for an awful long time, and it will likely continue to be around for significantly longer into the future of the universe. In my opinion, that's pretty cool.
In the grand scheme of things, just looking back over the past couple hundred years, the vast majority of humanity is in a better spot than we were, no matter how bad things may seem on a small time scale.
The two biggest issues off the top of my head are rural towns in Japan will continue to lose population and completely disappear, and there won't be enough young working people paying into health care and social funds to support the old non-working population. I think there are a lot of other major negative impacts Japan will face as a country but I'm just not that knowledgable on the subject.
I assume we just have fundamentally different views on this topic because I really wish humanity would change to a more scientific and explorative approach entirely, where we expand outward into space and become a multi-planetary species, which will need a huge sustained population growth to support. I assume you don't support that.
"Has almost made the planet uninhabitable" The Earth is definitely worse off since we have proliferated, but this is such a clickbaity untrue statement.
Humanity has and will continue to cause changes to the world that are negative, I agree, and that sucks. But like it or not, humanity is good at adapting and surviving, and we will be fine, even with the worldwide population overall continuing to grow for a very long time into the future.
I just disagree on the infinite growth being unsustainable thing. Humanity, in my opinion, is destined to expand to the stars where we will continue to grow Indefinitely on a time scale that actually matters to you and me.
Obviously, that could not happen if we somehow all die, but despite all the doom and gloom, I really don't think that's likely.
LoL. You think we’re gonna grow gills or something? How do you think we’ll adapt to food chain collapse?
I’m sure that life will adapt in some form, but most life in the history of this planet has not been human. And we would not be this planet’s first mass extinction event.
I think it actually fits quite well.
A Ponzi scheme is a form of fraud that lures investors and pays profits to earlier investors with funds from more recent investors.
Meanwhile, the current pension system in most countries depend on a growing population to spread out the payments for pensioners over multiple workers.
Ponzi schemes collapse when there aren't enough investors to sustain the dividends to be paid to the existing investors. Most countries' pensions rely on an increasing amount of working age inhabitants to pay retirees and are now having issues paying out pensions due to the shift in demographics, that's why many countries have been increasing the retirement age recently.
There are 2 solutions to this.
1. Increasing birth rates, this option is not sustainable in the long term but is commonly preferred for reasons mentioned below.
2. Migration. There are currently plenty of countries with a large working-age population and a weak economy. Letting those migrate would solve the demographic issue, but is political suicide.
While the alternative is everyone who is unable to wotk is killed anyway by the apathy of the system?
We are doing what you are describing already, in the system we currently live in.
I will never have a child if they have to work 5/7ths of their life away just to scrape by like me.
That's no way to live.
Who will work in the program if they have a worker shortage?
I don't think you guys thought this out.
We need to inhabit at least one other plant on a continuous basis before we encourage exponential population growth.
We are going to be resource constrained on this planet long before we expand to others.
Of course I understand that the money that is put in is invested, but that doesn't mean the problem goes away when the system relies on the "pot" growing at a certain rate.
EDIT:
Mismanagement/poorly built systems are not the same as Ponzi schemes. Unless you think, I don’t know, US Social Security is also a Ponzi scheme?
I'm not implying that it's the same, just that the comparison fits better than you might expect.
Mismanagement/poorly built systems are not the same as Ponzi schemes
"Tell me the difference between stupid and illegal and I'll have my wife's brother arrested"
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how these funds work.
This misunderstanding is on your side. There is a method of funding pensions refered to as pay as you go (PAYG).
The goal is not to pay people with the money from new people paying into the pot.
This is exactly how many unfunded, state sponsored pension schemes function. No pot of money exists. Only the ability to collect taxes.
They invest the money and then the pot grows and that money is used to pay out.
This is true for private pension schemes run by companies and individual pension schemes. Funded pension schemes are (usually) not ponzis.
Why should it?
That's asinine, you're treating periphery countries like they're glorified breeding-stock for the developed world's work-force.
Edit: To make my point more clear, the whole reason why developing nations have higher birthrates than developed ones is because they're developing/underdeveloped. They lack access to contraceptives, and substantive access to women's healthcare; and they also oftentimes have economies that still rely to some extent, or a large extent on non-mechanized smallholder, or subsistence agriculture. That, or they otherwise have social institutions that allow for, or require children to enter the workforce. This means that having children in those countries is often an economic boon to a family (because they can contribute to household incomes through work), and avoiding having them can be very difficult for women.
If you solve their problem of being underdeveloped, & hyper-exploited (which you should be doing if you're a "queermunist"), then that means that they are likely also going to be in a position where they have declining birthrates because there will no longer be an object material incentive to have children, and women who don't want to would be able to prevent it.
The idea of shoring up a declining population "through immigration" only works so long as you have an underdeveloped periphery of peoples who want to come flock to the West, or to developed nations in search of higher wages & a higher standard of living (or just avoiding Imperialist political meddling), rather than staying at home.
You need people who can actually do work to take care of all the old people & sustain human society. "Less People" is not by-default "more sustainable" especially not if it happens all at once; that was in fact a huge problem with cyclical famines & political turmoil in the days before mechanized agriculture.
If some asshole went around raiding hamlets for plunder, or whatever reason, yeah that would mean fewer mouths to feed in that particular area, but it also means fewer hands to bring food to harvest. Which means other regions have to contribute larger proportions of their own food-stock to sustain the needed intake of urban centers. Which means that they have less food to eat for themselves, and less to replant for the next harvest. Which pushes people on the margins of the the agricultural economy into banditry to sustain themselves, which causes us to return to the beginning of our story.
Eventually this cycle of regional depopulation leading to productivity shortfalls, leading to further regional depopulation becomes self-reinforcing & before you know it you have a country-wide catastrophe on your hand & the total implosion of existing society.
Now we aren't dependent on mass manual agriculture these days, so famine specifically is an unlikely cause of cyclical societal collapse, but the modern world still requires that a shitload of manual physical labor get done in order to maintain the basic infrastructure that gets everything from where it is, to where it needs to be in order for us to all not die. If you don't have people to fill those positions, then that's work that needs to get done, that isn't being done.
Hm. There is a difference.
Once crapitalists run out of "new horizons" to "expand" into, they start cannibalizing their current workforce and raise prices while lowering quality for customers.
Do not be fooled. Quality is going down because profits are going up.
You do understand that just dumping a bag of produce at grandmas door isn’t enough?
She needs to pay rent, get medical treatment and maybe even help around the house because she isn’t as nimble as before
otherwise the system will fall apart and the people at the bottom will suffer.
Don't you mean "suffer more"?
Well, no, birth rates are low because the reproduction of labor is unpaid labor. Yes, development is associated with lower birthrates, but only because no developed country has ever seriously tried to make reproductive labor a real job. Doing so would decrease the size of the workforce for production of commodities.
Now you're totally right that the people migrating from the Global South are fleeing underdevelopment from imperialism, and that this is itself a factor of underdevelopment. What you haven't considered is why the imperial core limits migration.
Racism is part of it, but only part of the larger structural base. If they allowed unlimited migration the imperial core would be filled with people from the periphery as they flee underdevelopment. This would at once reduce the availability of labor in the periphery and raise the contradictions of imperialism by making peripheral concerns into domestic concerns.
Migrants influence the society they're part of, causing agitation against imperialism. This would, ultimately, destabilize the core and allow for development to resume without imperial meddling.
And not get molested the whole way home by some guy that thinks he's in the old boy's club. And not get fired because they're a married woman now, and need to stay home (literally normal there).
Like, people are losing interest in kids everywhere, but in the core Western countries nobody's nervous to get married because they get socially demoted in the process. That's a theme I've definitely heard from women over there, and probably why it's happening faster.
Early ~~investors~~ pensioners are paid off with money put in by later ones.
Sounds like a ponzi to me.
I specifically didn't mention SS and somehow you still bring the US into it in a thread about Japan.
I meant most of the world in general which is why I didn't name any such programs by name.
Your misunderstanding of the process and confusion with private pensions doesn't make it false.
PAYG funded State pensions fit the definition of a ponzi. Therefore they are a ponzi. The fact it is government approved and transparent does not negate the fact that current investors are directly paying early investors.
It has two sources of funding
Taxes is the same source of funding. Workers.
there isn’t a middle man skimming a cut
Er. The government.
The entire point of a Ponzi scheme is you are pretending there is money being generated that isn’t.
Exactly. State Pensions are promised but there is no money held aside for them.
It is literally not a Ponzi scheme by definition.
I've already given you the Ponzi literature, and shown that PAYG pensions satisfy the description.
I’m done man.
Cos, like your PAYG error, you just can't admit being wrong.
US State Dept gives nod to $5bn in potential arms sales for Egypt
US State Dept gives nod to $5bn in potential arms sales for Egypt
Huge sale likely to go through despite ongoing concerns over Egyptian government’s human rights breaches,Al Jazeera
The vents are still accessible though? And you have these nifty mannequins to hang your stuff?
Edit: honest question, possibly unnecessary joke.
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how do these things make it less [comfortable]?
You already answered your own question:
weird human-shaped things added on top of the vents
It’s hard to believe you’re not trolling.
azuremagazine.com/article/unpl…
I also came across some inventive designs that I haven’t seen elsewhere, such as metal silhouettes soldered on top of warm ventilation exhausts at a CTrain station (below), a place where you could consider camping for the night.
Metal silhouettes prevent homeless people from sleeping over these CTrain grates in Calgary.
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It’s hard to believe you’re not trolling.
I swear I'm not. It's entirely possible that I'm being slow, but I'm really just trying to understand so I can identify these things better in the future. Because I seriously don't get it, there's still plenty of room to lie down between them?
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I assume what you're implying is that you can't put a tent there. Okay, why not fucking say that then? Homeless people around here rarely use tents, for reasons that I do not know because I am privileged enough to not be homeless, and they could probably just arrange their stuff around those shapes, put their mattress between them and go to sleep - which is why "tent" isn't the first thing that popped into my head.
Thank you for making me jump through hoops to understand a thing.
A lot of unhoused people I have seen don't have tents either.
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Part of the hostile architecture is the hostility you receive by asking about how it is hostile.
I immediately wondered the same thing so, it's not you. The angry replies are because some people are just always looking for something/someone to be mad at.
I really doubt they're trolling, it's a real question. A person can clearly fit between the gaps and sleep.
It would block things like tents and mattresses, but it's reasonable [edit: even if ignorant] to ask how it works if it doesn't obstruct a sleeping person. For what it's worth, in my city, it's rare to see tents or even mattresses, usually just blankets and shopping carts.
Try sleeping on them and report back to us.
No need for that kind of talk, it's as pointless as saying "Go there and prove you can't sleep on them".
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You'd probably have to lie between them instead of just looking at a photo, to assess if it's still possible.
Clearly they were put there with the intention of making it difficult/uncomfortable to lie down on the subway vent. If they were installed incompetently that doesn't make them unhostile though, it just makes them ineffective for their obviously intended purpose.
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That's a gish gallop, and the core premise that people believing it's democratic makes it so is incorrect.
~Edit: added link~
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The very first article yogthos showed you, had a poll that showed half of usonians don't think their country is a democracy (they're right)
The US congress, its highest governing body, hasn't gotten over a 20% approval rating for many years.
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Okay then, here are some articles showing how china's people's democracy works, and why they intentionally avoid the capitalist dictatorship model common in western countries.
Is China a Democracy?
- Is China a democracy?
- Workplace democracy in action in the CPC.
- What kind of democracy does China have, and how is it different from the west?
- In contrast to low US political approval ratings, 96% of Chinese are satisfied with the national government (Edelmans 2016). World Values Surveys says that 83% think the country is run for their benefit rather than for the benefit of special groups. A Harvard research center study of long-term public opinion survey finds that > 95% of Chinese citizens approved their government. How is this possible in a one-party state? (TED talk by Eric X Li)
- How does China’s political system work?
- How are Chinese leaders elected / chosen? How meristocratic is the system? How do elections differ from those in western bourgeois democracies?
- Who runs China? Makeup of the national people's congress.
- US policy-makers are misjudging popular support China's Government.
- The american dream is alive... in China.
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Because China is capitalist, despite being formally led by a communist party. It has private property on means of production, and it is defining Chinese economy just like any other capitalist one. Socialism, by definition, requires social ownership of means of production, which is not the case in China; the term was appropriated and wrongfully used by US and several other countries to define economies with more state control and/or social policies, but this is simply not what socialism is.
Interestingly, China has entire ghost towns full of homes ready to accept people in - but, as in any capitalist economy, homes are seen as an investment, and state subsidies are low, pricing out the homeless. They have more than enough homes, they just chose to pursue a system that doesn't make homes and homeless meet.
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China is demonstrably not capitalist, and people who keep repeating that it is are utterly clueless. If China was capitalist then it would be developing exactly the same way actual capitalist countries are developing. You will not see any of the following happening in a capitalist country ever
The real (inflation-adjusted) incomes of the poorest half of the Chinese population increased by more than four hundred percent from 1978 to 2015, while real incomes of the poorest half of the US population actually declined during the same time period. nber.org/system/files/working_…
From 1978 to 2000, the number of people in China living on under $1/day fell by 300 million, reversing a global trend of rising poverty that had lasted half a century (i.e. if China were excluded, the world’s total poverty population would have risen) semanticscholar.org/paper/Chin…
From 2010 to 2019 (the most recent period for which uninterrupted data is available), the income of the poorest 20% in China increased even as a share of total income. data.worldbank.org/indicator/S…
By the end of 2020, extreme poverty, defined as living on under a threshold of around $2 per day, had been eliminated in China. According to the World Bank, the Chinese government had spent $700 billion on poverty alleviation since 2014. nytimes.com/2020/12/31/world/a…
Capitalism is not defined by how the poor are treated, but by the economic relationships and mode of ownership.
Nordic countries have low poverty and generally good social support. Like it or not, this is achieved with private property on means of production, hence they are capitalist.
China has private property on means of production, hence it too is capitalist.
Both of them feature strong state oversight, which allows them to direct more of the capitalist profits to help the poor - which is good! But this doesn't make them "socialist".
Capitalism is defined by which class holds power in society, and in China it's demonstrably the working class. The reason the economy works in the interest of the poor is a direct result of that.
All the core economy in China is state owned, and the role of private sector continues to decline piie.com/research/piie-charts/…
You might want to learn a bit about the subject you're attempting to debate here.
What your data shows is that the share of state in the economy has partially recovered in 2020's from ~30 to ~50%, after falling from 80% to 30% in the previous decade. Impressive, indeed, and way ahead of most capitalist countries - but China is home to numerous giant private megacorporations, and allows many companies from abroad to build in the country.
"Who holds power" is very abstract and is not part of definition of socialism or capitalism. Even still, we just talked about homelessness - if workers held all the power, would there be homeless? Would there be any poor at all? Would there be overheated markets, including housing, which is one of the craziest in the world? Would there be Tencent, Alibaba, etc.? Would there be billionaires? Etc. etc. What defines "workers holding power" for you?
What is it about some leftists desperately trying to put socialist label on capitalist China - a desperate attempt to demonstrate a mighty socialist economy in the modern world? Socialist countries have lost the Cold War and are mostly not on the map anymore; there are objective reasons to that, including the fact most of the world never moved away from socialism and capitalist forces had greater capital to work with, and this does not mean socialism is bad, but currently, socialism is not represented by any large economy. That's just the fact.
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“Who holds power” is very abstract and is not part of definition of socialism or capitalism.
Power isn’t abstract, and who holds it is definitional to socialism and capitalism, and to feudalism before them.
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictator…
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictator…
- hamptonthink.org/read/bourgeoi…
if workers held all the power, would there be homeless?
Not for the most part, no. In your imagined “capitalist” China, did you just assume that they have a homelessness crisis, without even checking? Because you’re unintentionally making our case for us.
Would there be any poor at all?
You can’t go from one of the poorest, least developed countries in the world to universal wealth overnight. But they have made unprecedented progress.
- Helping 800 Million People Escape Poverty Was Greatest Such Effort in History, Says [UN] Secretary-General, on Seventieth Anniversary of China’s Founding
- China’s Energy Use Per Person Surpasses Europe’s for First Time
- At 54, China’s average retirement age is too low
- China overtakes U.S. for healthy lifespan: WHO data
China is not capitalist, its a mixed economy with the state-owned-and-planned sector dominating the heights of the economy.
Is China state capitalist?
- The backbone of the economy is state ownership and socialist planning. 24 / 25 of the top revenue companies are state-owned and planned. 70% of the top 500 companies are State-owned. 1, 2 The largest bank, construction, electricity, and energy companies in the world, are CPC controlled entities, subject to the 5 year plans laid out by the central committee.
- Workplace democracy in action in the CPC.
- Is modern day china communist? Is it staying true to communist values?
- Didn't China go Capitalist with Deng Xiaoping? Didn't it liberalize its economy? Is China's drastic decrease in poverty a result of the increase in free market capitalist policies?
- Is the CPC committed to communism?
- The Long Game and Its Contradictions. Audiobook
- The myth of Chinese state capitalism. Did Deng really betray Chinese socialism?
- Tsinghua University- Is Socialism with Chinese Characteristics real socialism, or is it state Capitalism?
- Isn't China revisionist for having a capitalist sector of the economy, and working with capitalists? Why isn't it fully planned like the USSR was?
- Castro on why both China and Vietnam are socialist countries.
- Roderic Day - China has billionaires.
- What is socialism with Chinese characteristics (SWCC)?
- How is SWCC not revisionist? How is it any different from Gorbachev's market reforms?, 2
- Domenico Losurdo - is China state capitalist?, 2
- Did Lenin say anything about Market Socialism, or productivism?
- Vijay Prashad - Is China capitalist?
- Why do Chinese billionaires keep ending up in prison? Why are many billionaires and CEOs going missing? China sentences Ex-Chairman of a major bank, guilty of embezzling ~$100M USD, to death in 2019.
- China cracks down on billionaires - Ben Norton interviews Ian Goodrum
- Do capitalists control the communist party? No, pic
- How the State runs business in China.
- 50% of the economy is in the socialist public sector and directly follows the plan (40% if you ignore the agricultural sector). 20 to 30% is inside the state capitalist sector, which is the sector partially or totally owned by domestic capitalists but run by the CPC or by local workers councils. The rest is made up of the small bourgeois ownership like in the NEP.
- China pushing forward Marxist training in colleges, attracts 1M students.
- China tells the US that it has no plans to weaken the role of its State-Owned-Enterprises, one of the US's main demands in the trade war. "Beijing plans to make the state economy stronger, bigger, and better."
- Unlike the US, China refuses to bail out over-leveraged property developers, and lets them go bankrupt.
- A China misinformation Megathread.
- A China misinformation Megathread.
🚫 Sorry, this post was removed by Reddit’s filters.
Thoughtcrime. web.archive.org/web/2020072715…
Love how you respond to a bunch of information from the World Bank, NYT, and the National Bureau of Economic Research with a definition from Wikipedia.
Consider that you could learn more here.
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Do any of the sources define socialism?
All of this could be true - none of this makes China socialist.
You said:
China is capitalist... It has private property on means of production, and it is defining Chinese economy just like any other capitalist one.
The response was a well-souced refutation of the idea that the Chinese economy is developing like a capitalist economy. You replied with Wikipedia. All I'm saying is that you're not looking at this in a whole lot of detail and you might have some things to learn.
For instance, you say Nordic countries have low rates of poverty and good social supports despite private ownership of the means of production. But in reality a lot of that is due to sovereign wealth funds, like Norway's Government Pension Fund Global, which is owned by the government and managed by a state-owned bank.
This is all true - state intervention and state-owned businesses and funds bring about a positive change for the majority, and they should be there, but seriously calling those economies socialist would be missing the definitional mark, which is what I have highlighted.
I do believe that moving entire economy under public control would be beneficial, and that, actually, will be what can be called "socialism". Virtually no country, except for heavily sanctioned and blatantly tyrannical North Korea, is currently there.
What we have right now, with heavy state intervention, is certainly better than "free" market economy though, and it reflects in quality of life for the economically disadvantaged - this very intervention leads to these economies following a different path compared to traditional capitalist societies. I do not argue there is no difference between China and, say, US in that regard - the difference is big, it's just not what it takes to call the economy socialist.
The point about Norway wasn't that it's socialist (it's not). The point was that Norway's low rate of poverty and generous social supports come directly from parts of the economy that are publicly owned.
The notion that a country's entire economy must be under public control otherwise it's not Real Socialism is too idealistic. China in 1949 was a late-feudal/pre-industrial country that had just been through a century of colonial invasions and civil wars. It needed to attract capital and expertise in pretty much every field, and it needed to build an effective, modern administrative state. How was it supposed to do all of that at once, wholly through the government? The Soviets ran into the same problem and the result was the New Economic Policy, which, like China today, involved markets and some private ownership, but ultimately subjected both to real state control. You need a transitory period to go from pre-revolutionary society to whatever your vision of Real Socialism is.
For me, China is socialist because the state is ran to the benefit of the working class (see massive poverty alleviation), that state really does control the capitalist class, and China seems to be doing more of both as time goes on.
There are historical examples of completely and actually socialist countries, so it's not some impossible idealistic notion for me.
The transitory period of New Economic Policy lasted only a few years in USSR, and China under Mao was much closer to actual socialism than later under Deng Xiaoping.
And the trend of expanding government control over the economy only comes alive in the 2020's, roughly since the COVID-19 outbreak (just a milestone, not saying they are related). Previously, the trend was strongly on privatization of industries, with the share of state-owned enterprises falling from 80% to 30% in the previous decade, and it's too early to make any conclusions.
There are historical examples of completely and actually socialist countries
Such as?
They have more than enough homes, they just chose to pursue a system that doesn't make homes and homeless meet.
This is demonstratably false. China has one of the highest home ownership rates in the world, at ~90%. The US is at ~66% for comparison (and most of that isn't actually full ownership, but a debt to mortgage brokers).
Why do you white supremacists think its okay to spout any unsourced nonsense because it fits your racist biases?
This link does not disprove the point. Home ownership isn't the same thing, you can have families that rent, they aren't homeless either.
Using the same source there is twice as many homeless (relative to population) in china than in spain, for example.
I'm not trying to prove that the number is high in China, I don't know what's the average for all countries. However, claiming that there isn't a lot of homeless because 90% of the non homeless own their house is wrong.
The source for that appears to be this article from 2011 : web.archive.org/web/2016093001…
Most of the poverty alleviation campaigns were well underway by 2012, so I'd be interested to see what those numbers are now.
But also, China is responsible for ~3/4ths of the reduction in world poverty via these campaigns.
Not to mention that if you've visited any Chinese city in the past few years, you won't see any of the slums or homeless that you see in the neoliberal countries.
I just used the same source out of simplicity, I didn't double check as that wasn't my point. It would indeed be better to have more recent numbers.
Not seeing homeless people doesn't mean they don't exist, seems like Japanese streets are mostly devoid of homeless people, but a lot of people seem to be living in cafes, to avoid ending up in jail as as far as I've understood, the government has a harsh policy towards that. Might be wrong on japan, but again, I'm not trying to point fingers to a country saying they are bad or good, it's the argument itself that I find "weak".
PS: just to be clear, I do feel that first of all, the OP should be the one trying to prove their saying. Nice of you to try and debunk it though
huh?
However, the people of China can afford to buy these extremely expensive properties. In fact, 90% of families in the country own their home, giving China one of the highest home ownership rates in the world. What’s more is that 80% of these homes are owned outright, without mortgages or any other leans.
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If China is socialist then Lipton is tea.
Look into the country on the shallowest level. They have socialist programs but, honestly...
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It doesn't, I have no idea where you're getting that from. China eliminated urban poverty over a decade ago (~2013), and rural poverty is nearly eliminated. Source.
Over the past 40 years, the number of people in China with incomes below $1.90 per day – the International Poverty Line as defined by the World Bank to track global extreme poverty– has fallen by close to 800 million. With this, China has contributed close to three-quarters of the global reduction in the number of people living in extreme poverty. At China’s current national poverty line, the number of poor fell by 770 million over the same period.
Another anti-China western source because we know white supremacists wouldn't accept any Chinese source about their poverty alleviation campaigns.
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darktable 5.0.0 released
darktable 5.0.0 released
We’re proud to announce the new feature release of darktable, 5.0.0! The github release is here: https://github.com/darktable-org/darktable/releases/tag/release-5.0.0.Pascal Obry (darktable)
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I've tried to main it on a few occasions most recently on 4.1. It's immensely powerful and I really think it surpasses Lightroom on ability to create pleasing tones. I have it installed on my home and laptop photo editing setup and I do use it on occasion.
Uortunately, even as an Adobe hater, I still use Lightroom CC 99% of the time. Why? Because speed and cross-platform compatibility. CC is less powerful* but I can do all of my editing in 30 seconds per photo and I have roughly the same experience accross Mac, Linux, and Android.
Darktable is slow to update, you have to be methodical, and there are so many ways to do the same thing. I know the devs are trying to make the best tool possible and I think they've built a gem. But I'm not invested enough to learn best practices for my photo editing software. I want a tool which gives me the happy path to the basics.
*ai masking, ai noise reduction, and ai object deletion are insanely useful. I feel bad every time I use them... But I do. Darktable doesn't have these
Personally, I'm grateful this tool exists.
I have used Adobe Lightroom 5 the one you could get on a disc, like, when owning things was actually possible. Adobe has systematically pissed me off over the last decade. Lightroom was great, non-destructive edits, import into year with sub directory sorted by months. Quick copy and apply edits. Lr5 was great.
I'm just a hobbyist photographer, I'm not doing pro level anything or charging anyone anything. I would love to use the student edition. I refuse to though, because it requires Adobe to upload them online, use them for ai training, it's not private. I take photos on a camera to NOT have them on the Internet.
To be honest I'd be upset if a photographer used any ai or cloud storage for my personal photos. Sadly, it's so baked in a photographer might not even know. Not everyone cares or is tech savvy(which is totally fine) it's not their fault the company is shady.
That was a first issue, second they won't support the version I have any longer, ok that's how software/hardware works, but it's a subscription model now and that sucks. I upload 6 months of photos at a clip, I didn't need a monthly sub. Because of that I'm tied to an old laptop that's on death's door to edit my pics.
Darktable provides everything I need that Lightroom did, sans a small bit of import magic to organize photos, and it's a little tricky to use but after about an hour, I understand how to get things going. Anything has a learning curve.
With darktable I know my pics are mine, they are on my laptop, I won't be paying a subscription. That small amount of frustration is worth it to tell Adobe to piss off.
Forget Chrome—Google Starts Tracking All Your Devices In 8 Weeks
Forget Chrome—Google Starts Tracking All Your Devices In 8 Weeks
Digital fingerprinting is suddenly back and it will be everywhere—here's what you need to know.Zak Doffman (Forbes)
Bird flu update: Maps show states most affected
Bird flu update: Maps show states most affected
The bird flu outbreak has spread to all 50 states, infecting dairy cattle, poultry farms and 61 humans across the country., USA TODAY (USA TODAY)
Is using an HDD with an SSD as cache on Linux a good idea?
I currently have a 1 TiB NVMe drive that has been hovering at 100 GiB left for the past couple months. I've kept it down by deleting a game every couple weeks, but I would like to play something sometime, and I'm running out of games to delete if I need more space.
That's why I've been thinking about upgrading to a 2 TiB drive, but I just saw an interesting forum thread about LVM cache. The promise of having the storage capacity of an HDD with (usually) the speed of an SSD seems very appealing, but is it actually as good as it seems to be?
And if it is possible, which software should be used? LVM cache seems like a decent option, but I've seen people say it's slow. bcache is also sometimes mentioned, but apparently that one can be unreliable at times.
Beyond that, what method should be used? The Arch Wiki page for bcache mentions several options. Some only seem to cache writes, while some aim to keep the HDD idle as long as possible.
Also, does anyone run a setup like this themselves?
...depends what your use pattern is, but I doubt you'd enjoy it.
The problem is the cached data will be fast, but the uncached will, well, be on a hard drive.
If you have enough cached space to keep your OS and your used data on it, it's great, but if you have enough disk space to keep your OS and used data on it, why are you doing this in the first place?
If you don't have enough cache drive to keep your commonly used data on it, then it's going to absolutely perform worse than just buying another SSD.
So I guess if this is 'I keep my whole steam library installed, but only play 3 games at a time' kinda usecase, it'll probably work fine.
For everything else, eh, I probably wouldn't.
Edit: a good usecase for this is more the 'I have 800TB of data, but 99% of it is historical and the daily working set of it is just a couple hundred gigs' on a NAS type thing.
I used to run an HDD with an SSD cache. It's deffo not as fast as a normal SSD. NVMe storage is also very cheap. You can get a 2tb NVMe for the same price as SATA.
In all honesty, I'd just keep things simple and go for a SSD.
Apple tried it a decade ago. It was called the Fusion Drive. It performed about as well as you’d expect. macOS saw the combined storage, but the hardware and OS managed the pair as a single unit.
If there’s a good tiered storage daemon on your OS of choice, go for it!
Currently have 2 1tb NVME's over around 6 tb of HDDs, works really nice to keep a personal steam cache on the HDD's in case I pick up an old game with friends, or want to play a large game but only use part of it (ie cod zombies).
Also is super helpful for shared filesystem's (syncthing or NFS), as its able to support peripheral computers a lot more dynamically then I'd ever care to personally configure. (If thats unclear, I use it for a jellyfin server, crafty instance, some coding projects - things that see heavy use in bursts, but tend to have an attention lifespan).
Using bcachefs with backups myself, and after a couple months my biggest worry is the kernel drama more than the fs itself
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Back when SSDs were expensive and tiny they used to sell hybrid drives which were a normal sized HDD with a few gigs of SSD cache built in. Very similar to your proposal. When I upgraded from a HDD to a hybrid it was like getting a new computer, almost as good as a real SSD would have been.
I say go for it.
If it's all Steam games then you could just move games around as needed, no need for a fancy automatic solution.
I haven't, I'll try that
EDIT: I've tried it and it had little effect (< 1 GiB)
L2ARC is not a read cache in the conventional sense, but something closer to swap for disks only. It is only effective if your ARC hit rate is really low from memory constraints, although I’m not sure how things stack up now with persistent L2ARC. ZFS does have special allocation devices, though, where metadata and optionally small blocks of data (which HDDs struggle with) can go, but you can lose data if these devices fail. There’s also the SLOG, where sync writes can go. It’s often useful to use something like optane drives for it.
Personally, I’d just keep separate drives. A lot of caching methods are afterthoughts (bcache is not really maintained as Kent is now working on bcachefs) or, like ZFS, are really complex are not true readback/writeback caches. In particular, LVM cache can, depending on its configuration, lead to data loss if a cache device is lost, and LVM itself can occur some overhead.
Flash is cheap. A 2TB NVMe drive is now roughly the cost of 2 AAA games (which is sad, really). OP should just buy a new drive.
L2ARC only does metadata out of the box. You have to tell it to do data & metadata. Plus for everything in L2ARC there has to be a memory page for it. So for that reason it’s better to max out your system memory before doing L2ARC.
It’s also not a cache in the way that LVMCACHE and BCACHE are.
At least that’s my understanding from having used it on storage servers and reading the documentation.
You can do it but I wouldn't recommend it for your use-case.
Caching is nice but only if the data that you need is actually cached. In the real world, this is unfortunately not always the case:
- Data that you haven't used it for a while may be evicted. If you need something infrequently, it'll be extremely slow.
- The cache layer doesn't know what is actually important to be cached and cannot make smart decisions; all it sees is IO operations on blocks. Therefore, not all data that is important to cache is actually cached.
Block-level caching solutions may only store some data in the cache where they (with their extremely limited view) think it's most beneficial. Bcache for instance skips the cache entirely if writing the data to the cache would be slower than the assumed speed of the backing storage and only caches IO operations below a certain size.
Having data that must be fast always stored on fast storage is the best.
Manually separating data that needs to be fast from data that doesn't is almost always better than relying on dumb caching that cannot know what data is the most beneficial to put or keep in the cache.
This brings us to the question: What are those 900GiB you store on your 1TiB drive?
That would be quite a lot if you only used the machine for regular desktop purposes, so clearly you're storing something else too.
You should look at that data and see what of it actually needs fast access speeds. If you store multimedia files (video, music, pictures etc.), those would be good candidates to instead store on a slower, more cost efficient storage medium.
You mentioned games which can be quite large these days. If you keep currently unplayed games around because you might play them again at some point in the future and don't want to sit through a large download when that point comes, you could also simply create a new games library on the secondary drive and move currently not played but "cached" games into that library. If you need it accessible it's right there immediately (albeit with slower loading times) and you can simply move the game back should you actively play it again.
You could even employ a hybrid approach where you carve out a small portion of your (then much emptier) fast storage to use for caching the slow storage. Just a few dozen GiB of SSD cache can make a huge difference in general HDD usability (e.g. browsing it) and 100-200G could accelerate a good bit of actual data too.
According to firelight I have 457 GiB in my home directory, 85 GiB of that is games, but I also have several virtual machines which take up about 100 GiB. The / folder contains 38 GiB most of which is due to the nix store (15 GiB) and system libraries (/usr is 22.5 GiB). I made a post about trying to figure out what was taking up storage 9 months ago. It's probably time to try pruning docker again.
EDIT: ncdu says I've stored 129.1 TiB lol
EDIT 2: docker and podman are using about 100 GiB of images.
I also have several virtual machines which take up about 100 GiB.
This would be the first thing I'd look into getting rid of.
Could these just be containers instead? What are they storing?
nix store (15 GiB)
How large is your (I assume home-manager) closure? If this is 2-3 generations worth, that sounds about right.
system libraries (/usr is 22.5 GiB).
That's extremely large. Like, 2x of what you'd expect a typical system to have.
You should have a look at what's using all that space using your system package manager.
EDIT:ncdusays I've stored 129.1 TiB lol
If you're on btrfs and have a non-trivial subvolume setup, you can't just let ncdu loose on the root subvolume. You need to take a more principled approach.
For assessing your actual working size, you need to ignore snapshots for instance as those are mostly the same extents as your "working set".
You need to keep in mind that snapshots do themselves take up space too though, depending on how much you've deleted or written since taking the snapshot.
btdu is a great tool to analyse space usage of a non-trivial btrfs setup in a probabilistic fashion. It's not available in many distros but you have Nix and we have it of course ;)
Snapshots are the #1 most likely cause for your space usage woes. Any space usage that you cannot explain using your working set is probably caused by them.
Also: Are you using transparent compression? IME it can reduce space usage of data that is similar to typical Nix store contents by about half.
What I personally have is an NVME SSD for the games that need the maximum performance and/or I play a lot, and a slower SATA SSD for the other games where it doesn't really matter.
Also, depending on the games you are playing, many expect to be able to stream assets and other data at SSD speeds, so your experience might be really bad.
I used to do this all the time! So in terms of speed bcache is the fastest, but it’s not as well supported as lvm cache. IMHO lvm cache is plenty fast enough for most uses.
Is it going to be as fast as a NVME ssd? Nope. But it should be about as fast as a SATA ssd if not a little slower depending on how it’s getting the data. If you’re willing to take that trade off it’s worth it. Though anything already cached is going to be accessed at NVME speeds.
So it’s totally worth it if you need bigger storage but can’t afford the SSD. I would go bigger in your HDD though, if you can. Because unless you’re accessing more than the capacity of your SSD frequently; the caching will work extremely well for both reads and writes. So your steam games will feel like they’re on a SSD, most of the time, and everything else you do will “feel” snappy too.
So, having a cache drive of around 10% of the main drive seems like a good size to cost compromise. Having a cache 50% size of the basic storage feels like a waste to me.
I always somehow miss when it stops working and by the time I go to YouTube again it's already working again.
Blessings to Gorhill
Yeah I don't really care about value when it comes to giving money to the guys who work with the NSA and CIA to find ways to more thoroughly spy on every user 24/7, and turned every search into "You asked for x, here's a dozen pages of what the State Department thinks you should have searched for instead"
Not to mention their genocide profiteering: mintpressnews.com/project-nimb…
mintpressnews.com/national-sec…
I'd like to think they're advising on how to keep ISIS propaganda, gore / executions, child endangerment, etc, from popping up on clearnet results....
...but * sigh * , former (not ex, let's be honest lol) spooks...so, why wouldn't it include some kind of pro-employer propaganda plan, right?
I exaggerated for effect, in the way that 99% sure might as well be a fact in this case:
I have never given them to YouTube, and they have no financial incentive to acquire them AFAIK - holding that kind of PI is a liability so if anything they wouldn't want it without having a need for it. YouTube can't even know what countries I live in, my digital identity from the POV of their servers is too fluid and non-unique for my viewing habits to meaningfully correlate; I blend in with many other people also trying to stay hidden from them.
As for other Alphabet companies, like those engaged in surveillance capitalism who want to scoop up all of the datas, it's theoretically possible they've illegally acquired them from third parties and found a use for it, but there's just no feasible way they could associate that with most of my online activities, say, this account I'm using. The only people who have a chance at that are certain state intelligence agencies who are eavesdropping the wires, and they have much bigger problems they're paid to worry about. Hell, unless things have gotten better for them since Snowden, even they might struggle - most of their super cool hacker shit is only really useful if someone's worth active targeting.
Data gathering/brokering and payment information security are not really connected. PCI compliance standards are well standardized and fairly strict.
I would trust Google to handle payment information securely over any ‘media’ company.
If personal data was regulated at even the fraction of what payment data goes through we would all be better off.
I used to pay for it, for the same reasons. They stopped taking my money, i don't know why, and I noticed zero change in the quality of the service.
I'm paying for other google services, so I don't know why youtube specifically stopped. Oh well.
Yup.
Family plan is 22$ for ad free yt and music subscription for 5 or 6 people
I get that Google bad an all that, but it's a good deal
Google bad, $22 is a bad deal for me. I'd rather donate $20 to the groups helping us get around it, and spend the other $2 on jawbreakers!
NewPipe works perfectly for me for years now. I even use the Sponsorblock Fork to skip the sponsored segments from the Video Creators
What these morons don't count on is that everyone actually hates the technology deep down. We don't want it! But it gives us a dopamine hit. And when they stack on subscription prices and lock up content and shove ads down our throat... well, the dopamine stops hitting and just get pissed. So we leave.
yes video quality has dropped, video suggestion algorithms have become a weird uroboric/echo chamber even if you have dozens of subscriptions, and the YouTube shorts reel refuses to be trained (no matter what I do, if I dislike every video I don't want to see and like all the ones I do want to see and log off if it suggests too many bad videos in a row, it still feeds me an endless loop of unwanted brain rot after 5 or 6 scrolls). I hate YouTube.
At the same time, they've found a good way around the ad block situation which is to promote ads as thumbnails on your "for you" video main page. I don't know why they didn't just do that in the first place, because honestly I don't mind that. It's when they constantly interrupt my videos ever freaking minute and a half that I start to get pissed.
Could be, I don't know. I doubt that video creators would go through all of these old videos just to update them to a slightly higher bitrate; the other possibility is that YouTube kept the original uploads or higher bitrate variants without previously showing them (and only showed them now), but that seems like a huge waste of storage, so it seems unlikely to me. Again, we're talking about old uploads (2-3 or up to 10 years ago), not new ones.
The one thing I've seen that makes sense is updating old videos that were previously available at up to 480p and bringing them up to 720p or 1080p (with the idea of keeping the original published video with the views, comments and so on instead of uploading a new one).
After 14 months of Israel’s genocide on Gaza, conditions for the millions of displaced remain perilous and Israel’s airstrikes are unrelenting.
The genocide grinds on : Peoples Dispatch
After 14 months of Israel's genocide on Gaza, conditions for the millions of displaced remain perilous and Israel's airstrikes are unrelenting.Vijay Prashad (Peoples Dispatch)
Survey: Almost two-thirds of Malaysians hold favourable views of China, Malay perception improves significantly
Survey: Almost two-thirds of Malaysians hold favourable views of China, Malay perception improves significantly
KUALA LUMPUR, Dec 19 — Nearly two-thirds of Malaysians hold favourable views of the People’s Republic of China and believe that Malaysia-China relations are progressing well,...Kenneth Tee (Malay Mail)
Why China Isn’t Scared of Trump
Why China Isn’t Scared of Trump: U.S.-Chinese Tensions May Rise, but His Isolationism Will Help Beijing
U.S.-Chinese tensions may rise, but Washington’s isolationism will help Beijing.Yan Xuetong (Foreign Affairs Magazine)
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China is it the enviable position of not having to pretend that Trump is good for anything. He is a bad choice for a president, so why would anyone be afraid.
Edit: well, ok Ukraine and by extension Europe should be afraid or at least concerned. I would shit myself if I were a US citizen that is not a millionaire or wealthier tho.
I would shit myself if I were a US citizen that is not a millionaire or wealthier tho.
Do not be alarmed. Democrats don't care about the working class, either.
It's why they would rather have 2 trump presidencies than 1 Bernie.
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metaStatic
in reply to Garibaldee • • •bingbong
in reply to Garibaldee • • •It's a war on humanity
And humanity is losing