Also i hate to say it but for some people, boyfriend/girlfriend feels a bit juvenile, say, if youre over 30, or perhaps youve been with someone for a very long time and are committed life partners but not married for whatever reason. Maybe husband/wife feels a little watered down to you and you want to establish the equal nature of your relationship.
Partner is a wonderful word and it should be normalized.
Fun side effect to this: Someone thought I was queer because I mentioned MY LAB PARTNER as "my partner." Are you gay? Are you a scientist? Do you just like the term partner? Are you a gay scientist who just likes the term partner? The world won't find out until a year later apparently.
i still can't fucking believe they gentrified lowrider hydraulics.
what was seen 20 years ago as a frivolity of the lower classes (distinctly due to its origins as a Mexican-American cultural artifact from the mid 20th century) is now a factory default for a high end formal luxury car. that's nuts to me. CEOs are riding around in fuckin bumper smashers.
who's driving their car they paid 120k for into sand and mud?
While I'm writing things that I've been intending to write for a while... one of the things that I think that a lot of people who haven't been involved in like... banking or corporate shenaniganry miss about why our economy is its current flavor of total fuckery is the concept of "fiduciary duty to shareholders."
"Why does every corporation pursue endless growth?" Fiduciary duty to shareholders.
"Why do corporations treat workers the way they do?" Fiduciary duty to shareholders.
"Why do corporations make such bass-ackwards decisions about what's 'good for' the company?" Fiduciary duty to shareholders.
The legal purpose of a corporation with shareholders -- its only true purpose -- is the generation of revenue/returns for shareholders. Period. That's it. Anything else it does is secondary to that. Sustainability of business, treatment of workers, sustainability and quality of product, those things are functionally and legally second to generating revenue for shareholders. Again, period, end of story. There is no other function of a corporation, and all of its extensive legal privileges exist to allow it to do that.
"But Spider," you might say, "that sounds like corporations only exist in current business in order to extract as much money and value as possible from the people actually doing the work and transfer it up to the people who aren't actually doing the work!"
Yes. You are correct. Thank you for coming with me to that realization. You are incredibly smart and also attractive.
You might also say, "but Spider, is this a legal obligation? Could those running a company be held legally responsible for failing their obligations if they prioritize sustainability or quality of product or care of workers above returns for shareholders?"
Yes! They absolutely can! Isn't that terrifying? Also you look great today, you're terribly clever for thinking about these things. The board and officers of a corporation can be held legally responsible to varying degrees for failing to maximize shareholder value.
And that, my friends, is why corporations do things that don't seem to make any fucking sense, and why 'continuous growth' is valued above literally anything else: because it fucking has to be.
If you're thinking that this doesn't sound like a sustainable economic model, you're not alone. People who are much smarter than both of us, and probably nearly as attractive, have written a proposal for how to change corporate law in order to create a more sensible and sustainable economy. This is one of several proposals, and while I don't agree with all of this stuff, I think that reading it will really help people as a springboard to understanding exactly why our economy is as fucked up as it is, and why just saying 'well then don't pursue eternal growth' isn't going to work -- because right now it legally can't. We'd need to change -- and we can change -- the laws around corporate governance.
Corporations today operate according to a model of corporate governance known as “shareholder primacy.” This theory claims that the purpose
This concept of 'shareholder primacy' and the fiduciary duty to shareholders is one I had to learn when I was getting my securities licenses, and every time I see people confusedly asking why corporations try to grow grow grow in a way that only makes sense if you're a tumor, I sigh and think, 'yeah, fiduciary duty to shareholders.'
(And this is why Emet and I have refused to seek investors for NK -- we might become beholden to make decisions which maximize investor return, and that would get in the way of being able to fully support our people and our values and say the things we started this company to say.)
Anyway, you should read up on these concepts if you're not familiar. It's pretty eye-opening.
Yeah, there's actually such a thing as "Criminal Mismanagement", and while it normally applies to corruption, it can, has, and will be used to say "You made a decision that was good for the public. You made a decision that was good for your workers. You made a decision based in ethics. That is the legal equivalent of stealing from the stakeholders."
Also, vastly more people are shareholders directly or indirectly than you might think. If your job offers a 401K plan invested in index funds? You deposit your money in a checking account and expect it to grow (however slowly)? You borrow the bank's money to buy a house?
All that makes you indirectly own or benefit from shares of perhaps hundreds of companies aggregated together. You never went to a broker and demanded to buy shares of McDonalds or Ratheon or Nestle, but you had better believe that the big institutional investors on Wall Street are, and they bundle them together to resell to individuals.
Your retirement fund is invested in mutual funds. Your bank deposits get invested in mutual funds to make them grow (hopefully). And your mortgage got funded by the bank investing in many shares and derivative financial instruments, and then loaning that money to you.
Its not just "Speculators are driving up prices!"
Its "Our entire modern economy is driven by passing around fractions of shares of companies like monopoly squares, and you have to play unless you're a self-sufficient subsistence farmer."
Its the financial equivalent of how we're all slightly complicit in climate change because damn near everything runs on fossil fuels. In both cases, its massive corporate investors causing most of the harm, but they distribute the costs--and a fraction of the benefits--to everyone to make their system so entrenched its almost impossible to tear out by the roots.
This is very very true & is the next thing people kinda have to learn, but like, we've gotta start with bite-sized pieces here, have you SEEN some of the notes?
Hey Wikipedia, what happened during the French Revolution after they got done murdering the King and a bunch of nobles? They stopped, and it fixed all the problems, right?
Uh huh, yeah, and if we projected the percentage of the population killed during just those two things onto the United States, what does that look like? Just a little back-of-the-napkin math, it doesn't need to be too precise.
Oh.
Whaddya think? We can just throw the population of Kansas on the fire for the revolution, right? Or maybe Maine + New Hampshire? Most of Oregon? Half of Minnesota?
It's fun, for certain values of fun, to think "we could just precisely target the Right People with mob violence."
That shit ain't what happens.
And if you think being at the head of the violent mob will protect you... well. I'd say you could ask Robespierre or the Hébertists but... well.
When violent mobs run out of Bad People to kill, they find more Bad People, and if they can't find them, they create them.
And for that matter,it's disgraceful to see wikipedia treated as anywhere near a veridical source in any regard,especially when dealing of matters that attract the attention of reactionaries. I know a lot of internet-using liberals are unimaginably and indescribably stupid so this might be very surprising to hear...but. my suggestion: if you want to be taken seriously or thought of as intelligent or serious by anyone outside of your unvirtuous associates on the internet,you should adopt a more "materialist" veiw of the world(look up historical materialism if you are unsure what this means) instead of one that focuses moreso on ideas and moral implications as the forces that determine historical events. The reason for this being that if the entirety of your political analysis is devoted towards determining how various events and forces fit into your twisted and demonic idea of morality you're just going to end up being a vain reactionary no matter how you try to present yourself or even the idea of yourself you have within your mind...I do beleive this is what happened to the reviled (to me at least) simon schama...also. STOP USING WIKIPEDIA AS A SOURCE FOR ANYTHING. ITS NOTHING. ITS FOR STRICTLY ENTERTAINMENT RELATED PURPOSES. ANYONE WHO SAYS OTHER WISE IS NAUGHT BUT A CONTRARIAN. I saw another irritating Girondin doing this with Vladimir Illyich Lenin of all people earlier this year so I suppose that nowadays reactionaries,fools,and demons have some kind of newfound affinity for that accursed website,most likely due to its penchant for untruthfulness (just try to read the english articles for "tibet" or "soviet collectivisation" or any of the meaningless things linked in the post above and youll see what I mean). You might as well just scan and upload a Thermidorian pamphlet to your dumbass post if you're that invested in misinformation. Anyway if youre very very stupid youve probaby gathered my main point here is that it's very epic and virtuous when innocent people get killed with some sort of bladed contraption or perhaps a fusillade and my appreciation for bloodshed,despotism,and just pure evil is what defines my perspective towards the world and is the reason I have inclinations toward twisted and tenebrous things. In which case I suggest you please change your outlook on things,as previously outlined.
Oh, sorry, I didn't tell you that you were boring the first time so you had to come back and beg for attention again?
Okay, here we go:
You're boring.
I'm not going to be shamed for using a collective resource because it isn't ✨️elite✨️ enough, comrade.
Especially not for "looking up the numbers of dead from La Terreur and the populations of France and major U.S. cities," you weirdo.
You can keep stroking it to how you're the Smartest Kid In Class. I'm going to keep educating my fellow workers so we can better our lives.
I didn't read 90% of this. Two sentences in I could see it was facile and terribly written.
Line breaks, embrace them.
This is boring.
Please, I beg you, get a fucking life or at least some better praxis.
Look. All y'all Revolutionary cosplayers can put your dicks away - I'm not measuring with you.
I'm sure it's super fun to play pretend that the Rapture the Glorious Revolution will come to save you all from sin capitalism, but some of us are actually living in a world with people in it who could use better lives now. I'm so not here for your self-congratulatory American Protestant revolutionary fantasies wherein you accomplish nothing but somehow "win" due to ideological purity. Or maybe you're just here for an almost scatological obsession with the idea of the destruction of the lives of others, after which you can stand above the toilet bowl a lone survivor, rugged and manly and proud of what you flushed away.
There. Did you finally get the attention you were craving from Mommy, snookums? There, there. It's okay. See? You did it! And now you can run off and play with your friends elsewhere, assuming you have some.
You're going to be blocked now. Don't contact me again, you suppurating pressure sore of a human being.
Hi, French here !
I just wanted to butt in to say I fully support your point, and while I can't really say how much more correct you are than bozo (how many times 0 is 10 ?) I can say fully that you ARE correct, especially on the most important point :
Mob violence is not targeted, and when it runs out of designated bad people, it either finds new ones, designate a new category of bad people, extends the definition or falls back on old prejudices.
Mob violence is not the answer, and any political system that fetishizes it should be considered dangerous and to be avoided.
So yeah, your take on the French revolution gets my Croissant of Approval.
Thank you for your kind words. And yeah, that's the main thrust of the point I've been trying to make. I'm so tired of the flip "let's just drag people out in the street and shoot them."
I have seen less and less posts about Palestine each day, and I want to remind people that there is still very much a genocide going on and Palestine has continued to be attacked.
The number of casualties in Gaza has increased to 8,525 with 21,000+ injured
Hospitals in Gaza will run out of power today
Israel has once again cut Gaza’s communications
Israel has striked another refugee camp, killing 50+ and it was reported that children were carrying other injured children to get to safety
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