Convolutional

I should point out to those not from the US that this is how Americans view the US. There is a lot of crime, the government and NGOs are on the side of the criminals etc. It is up voted to the top as well, with agreement in the replies, this is how Americans view the US.

The US incarcerates more people than China, despite China having more than four times as many people, but the view obviously is the incarceration rate needs to increase even more, as crimes are barely being prosecuted according to him. The US is off the charts in incarceration rates, but he thinks they are far too low and want them increased more, as he sees increasing incarceration even more as the solution to the problem which western Europe does not seem to have to this extent.

So those outside the US can get insights into what the US is and how it thinks from threads like this.

There is the war on drugs, locking people in prison due to marijuana transactions.

With all the talk of China being a police state, the US has more people incarcerated than China - and China's population is more than four times that of the US.

European countries don't have these problems, like the rash of mass shootings we have had in the past few weeks in just Texas.

Also these prisons are a sop to rural communities for money and jobs, with prisoners from the cities. The prisoners also count for congressional districts going to these areas but can not vote.

Of course there is also the profit making of private prisons. Judges have been found sending innocent people to jail for kickbacks.

It is time to solve these problems like Europe does, and one step is incarceration going down to three times the rate of China, as opposed to over four times.

> Are you gonna argue with the God of invisible hand?

Especially when you consider modern talk of the invisible hand, and then go back to Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations and see his one reference to the invisible hand in the book is of something that is against free trade between nations.

> Capitalism just has too many advantages, and closer mirrors human nature

It mirrors human nature? From the time of the early cave paintings tens of thousands of years ago to the rise of the class system 10,000 years ago, social classes did not even exist. Even 1000 years ago there were no capitalist societies.

Odd how an economic system which "mirrors human nature" is so recent.

In France I watched the yellow vests protest economic conditions and then the more recent strikes. Lula just took over in Brazil, and most (not all) of Latin America is run by governments of a like mind. Also 2022 did not see an expansion of trade, but Russia being cut off from it, and steps to cut China off from it (chip ban). The capitalist economic system may have a short life span.

The vanishings like the sheriff who had three voter registration workers killed in Mississippi are not common, it tends to be straightforward extrajudicial executions like Fred Hampton. I wouldn't even include the car bombing of 25 year old Ronni Moffitt in 1976.

The US police are killing people all the time. In January police killed an environmentalist in January, Manuel Taran. The US kills and jails political prisoners all the time.

> Thankfully, posting banned ideas or government critical stuff in the US doesn't involve being arrested by the police and being held for months or years.

Let me think of groups of people in the US and if they have been treated like this - C language programmers...we'll there is Julian Assange.

> no issues jailing people for speaking the wrong things, forcing it's citizens into reeducation camps, welding them locked into buildings

China has more than four times the US population, yet the US incarcerates more people than China does. In that context it does not sound like much of a knock "China locks up less than a quarter of the people the US does!" Well - yes.

Not even mentioned is Sihanouk, who had ruled neutral Cambodia since 1941 under various positions, was overthrown in a CIA-sponsored coup in the days before the US invasion of Cambodia. This had the effect of destabilizing Cambodia for the next couple of years.

> When government won't allow construction of "workforce housing," complain, because nobody's big enough to try to push back and get concessions to make it possible.

You'd make a great 19th century robber baron.

Arkansas just tossed out its child employment laws for 14 year olds, so it sounds like things are going your way.

> the government prefers a handful of tech companies which they can control

I think you have the order wrong there

Slashdot was a hacker forum, initially (prior to 1999). This has been a forum seen as an adjacency to a seed/VC incubator from the get-go.

People keeping to their roots and not going for the money like Richard Stallman are mocked. Steven Levy glorifies him in Hackers, then takes a break from books glorifying the Google corporation, and when Stallman is down delivers a coup de grace to Stallman in Wired, for soi disant very progressive reasons.

Of course Wired was founded by Rossetto as a continuation of the "New Right" project he was talking about in the New York Times in 1971.

I myself am not surprised that people wander out of their prep schools and universities into these corporations and hold these views. People's hegemonic ideas are borne from the material conditions and class relations they are in.

> unionising has been a bad stratagy (sic) that loses. That has been true pretty much forever.

If lowering hours, raising pay, better working conditions are a losing strategy.

> Trying to muscle and threaten the organisation in the world most willing to give you money is wildly silly.

Glad these organizations never muscle and threaten.

I think you have the direction of money mixed up. The workers create the wealth, and the heirs who own IBM stock parasitically expropriate dividend profits from those workers surplus time. The money flows from the workers creating wealth to the aristocratic expropriating parasites.

There are two parties here - the workers creating all the newly created wealth with their labor, and the heirs who parasitically expropriate profits from their surplus labor. We know you're not on the side of those of us doing the work, so it's clear which class you're representing.

What is the hierarchy in a migratory 50 person hunter gather band? Who is the king or heir? There is no class system and there is no surplus produced, because there is mo reason to produce surplus.

Behavioral modernity happened over 40,000 years ago, and probably over 50,000 years ago. We can see Chauvet cave paintings, Venus figurines and other evidence of behavioral modernity. The whole world of art-creating humans lived in non-hierarchical hunter gather bands until 10,000 years ago. Deep in the Amazon some still live like this, although a few centuries back many in North America and much of the world lived like this. Even a few hundred kilometers north of Stockholm. The initial hierarchical structures 10,000 years ago only covered a limited area.

If hierarchy and class division is an innate biological thing, why did humans not live like this through most of biological modernity?

After the murder, I had to read scores of comments like this ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35456168 ) about the homeless, need for more law enforcement (although the US already incarcerates more of its population than any industrialized country) etc.

I had to read scores of tech bros in the professional-managerial class whinge about the poor, about black lives matter and how this was due to "progressivism".

Turns out the suspected murderer is a guy who describes himself as an "entrepreneur" on Linkedin and has a Crunchbase listing where he is described as being in executive management. Maybe we should have law enforcement target entrepreneurs as opposed to people made homeless by the enormous wealth disparity on display in San Francisco.

Lenin also said communism would be built in the West, not Russia. Circumstances allowed power to fall into the Bolsheviks hands and he decided to take it - to the surprise of Trotsky, Stalin, Zinoviev etc.

The second point follows from the first.

Karl Marx said capitalists gain profit by expropriating the wealth a worker creates during surplus labor time. There is a conflict in the relation of production between the worker creating the wealth and the heir seeking to expropriate it.

Feudal pre-capitalist society did not need unemployment, but capitalist society does, if there is no reserve army of labor ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_army_of_labour ), the workers creating wealth have more leverage to keep more of the wealth they created.

This is all happening because the rentier class is seeking to retain its rate of profit.

Developed into what? The hunter-gatherer bands still roaming the Amazon don't have to worry about unemployment, layoffs, crime or a host of other maladies - their only problem is encounters with murderous gold miners from the "developed" world.

Sociologists found hunter-gatherer bands usually work less than 40 hours a week. They have it made more than Amazon SWE's grinding away on the weekend.

The past 10,000 years of "development" has been a disaster for the majority of people, and a benefit to a small minority.

I don't even know how to respond to someone talking about how the US has one of the highest rates of incarcerating its people by saying how it is one of the most free countries in the world.

Also the incarcerated population is 1500k not 500k.

> Those countries also don’t have issues prosecuting people who commit crime for fear of being prejudicial.

The US already has one and a half million people incarcerated, which does not count all those on probation or parole. It has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world, although I think Rwanda has more, no large or industrialized country has a higher incarceration rate. Not sure increasing the incarceration rate even more is the solution.

> until residents in SF start voting different

The author here confesses his disconnect with the majority of people in San Francisco. This assessment is correct - the author and his views are disconnected from those of the majority of working people in San Francisco.

The magnitude of the wealth disparity in San Francisco is almost hard to comprehend. Many in this thread have advocated militarizing the city, and cleaning it out of poor people so that it can be some kind of elite utopia for tech bros and VCs. The people of San Francisco do not share this view. That they do not share this view is not in my opinion (although it is) - but in the opinion of the parent poster. As those from more equitable European cities have said in this thread - Europeans don't have these kinds of problems where they live.

Under what circumstances would Finland be at war with Russia?

Lithuania is in NATO, so Russian conflict with any other NATO member drags Lithuania in.

There are no gymnastics - previously Finland and Russia had a diplomatic relationship.

Now if Russia has a conflict with one of the Baltic states, Finland is dragged into it.

Before a war between Lithuania and Russia would not involve Finland necessarily. Now Finland has pledged a war between Lithuania and Russia would involve Finland.

Not many mental gymnastics are needed - to a person who reaches the level of average intelligence any how.

The war hawks here think Russia fully mobilized, Russia which pushed the Wehrmacht back to Berlin in 1945 would have had more than minor difficulty taking over Finland in 1945. Perhaps they should read some history books, even US history books. The present may be cloudy, but the 1940s are less so - listen to their hawkish views, then consider how clear their view of history is.

You left out Marxists.org (on that list), which contains the writings of Marx, Lenin and Mao. It was blocked for years and even had DoS attacks on it coming from the PRC.

> “there is no problem because the government can simply create as much money as it wants out of thin air.” So they are implicitly saying that any currency has value because people believe it has value but don’t extend that generosity towards other assets where there is a clearly demonstrated group ascribing value to it.

Prior to 1971, federal reserve notes were backed by gold. Their value was generated out of thin air even then - a piece of paper with a promissory of gold is not a bar of gold.

Today the US holds thousands of tons of gold at Fort Knox and other places. Why? Why does it do this? I can assure you the 9 billion dollars worth of Dogecoin out there do not have thousands of tons of gold out there implicitly backing them.

Beyond all of this, your point that countries don't have printing presses that can generate am infinite amount of value is valid.

Twin Oaks in Virginia has been going for over half a century, and other such places exist all over the US.

Israel has religious and secular kibbutzim as well.

Some hippy communes failed, or just decided to break up, but religious communes fail as well.

> Democratic policies have consistently squeezed the working class into a perpetual grind

> The student loan crisis has many starting out in tremendous debt just to be able to work until they die!

You might want to check on recent votes, there is a party that does not want to help with tremendous student loan debt, and it's not the Democratic party.

> The white working class used to be the focus of the American left, but the left abandoned us

From World War I to the 1950s or 1960s, the idea that factory workers in Europe, or of European descent, might take over their countries, displacing the rich/capitalists/bourgeoisie, was an idea that was people took seriously, on all sides of the political spectrum. Not only would this class take over, but be the vanguard of the change.

Does anyone think this is going to happen now?

This article indicates an opinion on that question. A class of people taking power for themselves don't have to beg for pity from a coastal professional-managerial class. It would organize itself and take power.

> punk as f*ck

Those Sand Hill Road VC investments were definitely punk.

> the gov't adds through decision taken by ombudsman/committee, the more power asymmetry is added

This has nothing to do with whether Bitcoin, or some MLM scheme, or Ponzi's postal reply coupons have value or not. For over a century they've all promoted the scam as power to the little guy.

Also if you're tired of fiat money, there are alternatives - like commodities. Precious metals like gold have had use value for millennia.

> There were some great magazines of the time like Mondo 2000, and the ethos was real techno-libertarianism, information wants to be free, and all that fun stuff. Everyone was coming off the high of the Soviet Union falling apart and believed that now human liberty would flourish everywhere.

Louis Rossetto had this viewpoint 20 years before he launched Wired, and was smart enough to focus on the tech and tech people and tech business for the most part. The right-libertarian philosophy was doled out lightly and cleverly. Wired did try to make it seem that Silicon Valley was just a right-libertarian utopia, and made it seem everyone was of this mind - more than was the case.

R U Sirius had similar ideas. I think it made things seem different than they actually were.