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halsom

22 karma · joined May 22, 2021

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halsom··on World Now Likely to Hit Watershed 1.5 °C Rise in Next 5 Years
It simply cannot be done under capitalism.
halsom··on Instagram lets users hide likes to reduce social media pressure
The division most significant to Instagram is social class, not “discrimination.”
halsom··on Facebook Ends Ban on Posts Asserting Covid-19 Was Man-Made
US officials have been playing very loose with the truth about these things.

>U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams even told Americans in a late February tweet that they need to “STOP BUYING MASKS! They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!”

As time went on, the tone changed, and Americans were encouraged to wear face masks, with many places requiring them.

Now Fauci has admitted that the reason Americans were initially discouraged from using them is because there was a shortage, as Adams acknowledged in the second part of his February tweet.

“We were concerned the public health community, and many people were saying this, were concerned that it was at a time when personal protective equipment, including the N95 masks and the surgical masks, were in very short supply,” Fauci told The Street. "We wanted to make sure the people, namely, the healthcare workers, who were brave enough to put themselves in harm's way to take care of people who you know were infected with coronavirus, and the danger of them getting infected. We did not want them to be without the equipment they needed."

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/leahbarkoukis/2020/06/17/fauci...

halsom··on Facebook Ends Ban on Posts Asserting Covid-19 Was Man-Made
It’s really unfortunate that these authorities have already sacrificed their respectability by being dishonest with the American people in the mask debacle.
halsom··on Voice Assistant for VSCode
Would be nice to use for opening files if that could be configured to work in a suitable fashion.
halsom··on Collusion rings threaten the integrity of computer science research
The US health industry funded it
halsom··on 83% of Americans Are Belt Tightening Due to Inflation Pressures
It’s a propaganda piece. The point is to instill poor people with a fear of inflation to promote sentiment against redistribution, which is done by relating it with their everyday lives. Quality reporting is not the priority.
halsom··on 83% of Americans Are Belt Tightening Due to Inflation Pressures
Gas is up because of the recent pipeline shutdown.

Grocery prices have been rising since the start of the pandemic. Far more people are now accustomed to cooking at home. Anecdotally, I am one of them. I buy at least twice as many groceries as I did pre-pandemic and that is not going to change. Also the pandemic is still in full force internationally, especially in places where the US sources major food imports.

Clothing is up because commerce with the Chinese textile industry was shut down during the pandemic. It will take at least another year before clothing prices are restored.

Notice that the massive spikes in real estate prices are not even mentioned in the article. This is a propaganda piece. It cherrypicks items that poor people depend on in order to promote backlash against redistribution.

halsom··on 83% of Americans Are Belt Tightening Due to Inflation Pressures
Most of those trillions were delivered to the ruling/corporate class who has used it to secure assets instead of create value. That is the source of this inflation.

For example: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/koch-e2-80-99s-foundation-...

halsom··on An Asian Uber Driver Was Attacked by a Mob. Then YouTube Took Down His Video
If they don’t like it they can just get another job.
halsom··on Wuhan lab staff sought hospital care before Covid-19 outbreak disclosed
“Researchers could have gotten infected during their collecting trips, or while working with the new viruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The virus that escaped from the lab would have been a natural virus, not one cooked up by gain of function.”

https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-peop...

halsom··on Gen Z is going to have a hard time getting rich
Your explanation doesn’t check out. First of all, construction hasn’t necessarily slowed down. Second, jobs were always in cities. That hasn’t changed. Third, new construction trends follow economic trends[0] and that has always been the case, since the dawn of the industrial era. It would be one thing if you were arguing that rising wealth inequality is a result of no new homes being built, but you’d still have to account for all the people who live in homes but don’t own them.

[0]:https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?width=880&he...

halsom··on Archaeologists train a neural network to sort pottery fragments for them
Thanks for sharing! Beautiful pottery!!!
halsom··on A Ryanair Flight Carrying an Opposition Journalist Is Forced to Land in Belarus
The U.S. almost certainly does this, but the U.S. would be able to wield its dominance to achieve a far more covert operation.

The U.S. has grounded and delayed flights of foreign government officials numerous times. What makes you think the U.S. would consider a commercial flight off limits?

“On 20 September, Evo Morales announced a lawsuit against the U.S. government for "crimes against humanity" for repeatedly blocking presidential flights, after an incident in which authorization for an overflight of Puerto Rico by President Maduro of Venezuela was delayed, although U.S. authorities said that they were entitled to three days' advance notice. Maduro had been en route to arrive in Beijing for bilaterial talks with the People's Republic of China.[14]”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evo_Morales_grounding_incide...

halsom··on The Trouble with Capitalism
The core critique Marxists make have of liberal politics is that liberalism is not democratic enough. Specifically, Marxists argue for democracy in the workplace whereas liberals are comfortable centralizing power over the means of production to a select few capitalists.

Marxists are for organizing society to serve the needs of the working class which reproduces society.

Marxists are progressive as they don’t deny the progress of history, which moves in one direction and cannot be turned back. Marxists understand capitalism as a necessary stage in the development of society but one that can only be temporary.

halsom··on Why the Bronte sisters may have died so young (2019)
There’s always a price.
halsom··on The Trouble with Capitalism
That is simply not true. You are partially correct on Marx’s use of the term, but by Marx’s standards, nothing about the USSR could conceivably be considered communism. Marx was starkly against pursuing revolution without first achieving capitalism. He was against Russian revolution because Russia was not a capitalist society.

That said, Marx was also less consistent on the definitions than some suggest.

Regardless, “communism” was the term decided on shortly after the civil war ended. It was confusing and a poor choice but there was certainly no confusion as to how well it correlated with the idea that communism was a final stage. Nobody believed the USSR had reached a final stage of anything.

halsom··on The Trouble with Capitalism
That is the question! But it would be mistaken to presume Marxists believe they have all the answers. Marxists have only determined that the working class has no choice but to find the answer. This is why Engels called for a scientific socialism rather than a utopian socialism. Marxism is distinctly concerned with the scientific tradition.
halsom··on The Trouble with Capitalism
I think you did a good job!
halsom··on The Trouble with Capitalism
I am simply saying that personal property is out of the picture. And there is no such thing as “owning labor.” There is only laborers, which under wage labor are owned for a certain amount of time. But my central point is that Marxism has no conflict whatsoever with personal property.

But, as I said, it can be complicated, especially if that is your goal, as can be done with anything if you so please.

But, a self-sufficient farmer with no employees is not even part of a societal economy in any modern sense. They are a mere peasant. If they are a farmer with a farm that requires no hired labor or modern technology then same thing. If they require a military to protect them and they send surplus to a feudal arrangement, they probably live in a feudalist society. If they own their land and use industrial technology and hire their own wage laborers to produce a surplus to trade it on a market to pay for all of that, they are now part of a modern economy and Marxism would have more to say about that. The latter have dependencies beyond the mere protection of their farmland, meaning the farmer now lives in a capitalist society.

halsom··on The Trouble with Capitalism
Yeah, he would probably be shocked to learn what Karl Marx actually thought about capitalism and the human spirit, and how comparable their analyses are.

See:https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts...

halsom··on The Trouble with Capitalism
The line is drawn by relations between people in the extraction process. As anything, it can be complicated but the starting point is very simple: wage labor. In other words, all workers should own, which is to say they should have democratic rights to the management of, the means of production.
halsom··on The Trouble with Capitalism
> “Socialism in the strict sense, which would centralize the most fundamental economic decision-making, is intrinsically evil.”

What do they think socialism is? Even the most radical Marxists define it as “democratic worker ownership of the means of production.”

And fwiw the USSR did not even consider itself a socialist state. That’s why it decided on using the term communism instead, and Marxists tend to agree it was not deserving of that name either, deeming it state capitalist.

halsom··on Why the Bronte sisters may have died so young (2019)
Doctors still do house calls, but if you’re poor then you’re lucky to be seeing a doctor at all. Neither of these things have changed.
halsom··on How to get rich without being lucky (2019)
The book is full of wildly exaggerated statistics that have been proven so. It’s that simple.
halsom··on Working at a startup is overrated, both financially and emotionally
Your discounting of the budget factor among many others is brave. Many hardworking directors with high expectations have very different priorities, some which are simply big distractions from producing a quality production. This “be relaxed and chill to make a good film” idea is delusional, but its not necessarily wrong as much as it is just nonsense. And the ability to merely plan and execute plans, regardless how good they are, depends tremendously and straightforwardly on budget.
halsom··on How to get rich without being lucky (2019)
This book has been proven a fraud by historians around the world time and time again, including by many leading historians in the United States. It’s fraudulence, and the support and proliferation of it by US state officials and US academies is sheer embarrassment. The fact that anyone still has the nerve to so much as imply that this is a worthwhile source of information should serve as a stain on the prevailing liberalism of our times.
halsom··on Show HN: I hate adding updating to my apps, so I created Pakkly
As a desktop developer, I would like you to know that I also have a mobile phone and I use it to read Hacker News during my breaks.

This looks like a very cool project. I wish it was around before I glued together my current hellish multi-platform release system. I will dig into it before I require it again.