MAA-PIX

Pictures, quotes, and other stuff.

[cosmonautroger]

St. Bavo's Church, Haarlem, Netherlands

[empirical-perspective]

7/20/2026

[fast-moon]

Normally Michigan is pretty great, but we're kind of having a moment right now.

[haveyoureadthisbook-poll]

Have you read Make Way for Ducklings by Robert McCloskey (1941)?

yes

no

I've never heard of it

Voting ended onJul 19

[detroitlib]

View of interior of Aquarium on Belle Isle; visitors look at fish tanks along corridor walls. Potted ferns hang from tiled and barrel-vaulted ceilings. Printed on front: "Aquarium, Belle Isle, Detroit, Mich." Printed on back: "1577, the Aquarium on Belle Isle is one of the most popular attractions on the island. In it will be found all kinds of fresh and salt water fish. The Commission brings the water direct from the ocean for the latter. This card shows the interior view." Miller Art Co. and Metropolitan Metrocraft publisher trademarks on verso.

Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library

[songsformysons]

Penguin Cafe Orchestra - Music for a Found Harmonium (Live BBC 1989)

[maa-pix]

I love this piece. Always reminds me of this trailer, for a movie which I somehow never saw. But the trailer was on an old VHS tape for some other movie which I had watched many times (FBDO?) and it lodged in my memory.

[socialmaya]

Occasionally forget people genuinely think capitalism is thousands of years old

[sylestial]

One time I was talking about Robin Hood with some coworkers and one guy was like “he was bad because the people he helped learned to expect handouts” and I wanted to be like… okay can you explain how that flawed capitalist propaganda applies to feudalism

[scallioncreamcheesebagel]

reminder that capitalism was literally invented in the 16th century

[tayefeth]

That’s an exaggeration. What was invented in the 16th century was mercantilism. Capitalism really dates for the beginning of the nineteenth century, with the rise of industry and cash crops over artisans and merchants. Vulture capitalism, with the notion that companies have no duties other than generating profit, is even younger.

[antique-scarecrow]

Capitalism is only 200 years old and I have to say, they have not been an impressive 200 years

[downtroddendeity]

I think a lot of this comes from the fact that most people don’t know the formal definition of capitalism. We all know the word, we’ve all seen the jokes, but very few people bother to actually define it unless they’re talking about political theory and philosophy, so it’s easy to end up with the impression that Capitalism = Money Can Be Exchanged For Goods And Services.

Capitalism is the economic system where most of the means of production (i.e. everything people need to have to make the stuff that everyone wants) are owned by private individuals or corporations, who then hire people to provide the labor necessary to produce things, with the intent of selling the output at a profit. It’s the difference between “you’re a carpenter and you make a chair and you sell it” and “you’re Richard Q. Richington who owns a chair factory, and you pay people to sell the chairs you paid other people to make and then all the excess money goes back to you.” There have been Richard Q. Richingtons on and off throughout history, but that being the norm for every single industry is a pretty recent development.

[rostekhorn]

Yeah. Inserting a middleman in the transaction between the carpenter and the guy who buys the chair, and then elevating him so far that he overshadows the other two guys, is where it goes off the rails and into modern capitalism.

You’re not the person who’s making the chair, you’re not the person who bought the chair, but you nevertheless end up with all their money, because you’ve been allowed to gouge the buyer for as much as you can extract from him, and then pass on as little of his money as possible to the creator. Which is a lot more than just “an exchange of goods and services.”

It also means a weird, warped, self-defining measurement for “efficiency,” which isn’t calculated by whether the creator built the best chair on the market, which isn’t calculated by whether the buyer got a product that fulfilled his requirements as well as possible, but instead is calculated only by whether the middleman was able to extract the maximum amount of value out of the two of them. (And, in fact, whether the middleman was able to extract at least X% more out of the two of them than he was a year ago: being just as successful as you were last year is considered a failure). Before you know it, parts of society that have nothing to do with markets are now being judged according to that definition, and either get discarded or deformed to the point where they can’t fulfill their purpose anymore.

Way way more than just an exchange of goods and services.

[myjetpack]

My latest books cartoon for The Guardian. Many more here: www.theguardian.com/profile/tom-gauld

[ancientorigins]

Medieval Gravensteen Castle at Ghent Belgium

[lifesgrandparade]

[captain-price-returns]

they had 19 year old /pol/ users going through all federal spending and deleting anything where the words were too big to understand

[postcardtimemachine]

[maa-pix]

Projected smoke forecast for tomorrow morning. Yes, Michigan is hiding somewhere under that blob.

[nevver]

Sketch, Kevin Boyle

[theycantalk]

forever

[maa-pix]

[muddypolitics]

new boy in town