“Putin’s closest ally says more than dozen nuclear weapons in Belarus”
I know this is a supposed to be sabre rattling, but its hard to take Lukashenko seriously so this messaging strikes me like a Craiglist posting. “I have more than a dozen nuclear weapon for sale. No lowballs. I know what I got.”
Others have suggested professional counseling. Thats the right answer. Do that.
I can tell you even without the emotional baggage you’re carrying, getting started on your own in life is hard and confusing. There’s no book that tells you everything you need to do (and when) and what NOT to do that will cost you time and money you don’t have at that stage of life.
If you are under the impression that others launch successfully into independence without issue, let me remove that idea. All of us, even with massive support from our families had difficulty. You’ve got some extra difficulties on top of what others have. Don’t despair when its not going right. That doesn’t mean you’re a failure.
We ripped out our last gas appliances this fall, a gas furnace and gas fireplace log set. We now heat with a Cold Climate rated heat pump, and put in an electric log set. We actually use the fireplace much more now than we did with gas.
We’re very happy with being a fossil fuel free house now.
He’s not a scientist, he’s not an engineer,
Neither was Bridenstine.
he’s a tourist.
I’m not saying is the best pick for the job. I’m saying that at least they put someone who has an interest in NASA succeeding instead of someone that doesn’t give a shit about spaceflight and just wants political power.
“Of the states where Ram dominated, drivers were worst in Massachusetts at 64.44 incidents per 1,000 drivers. Tesla (31.13) and Subaru (30.09) were the only other brands whose drivers had incident rates above 30.00.”
Damn, Ram drivers are more than twice as worse as the second worst drivers. WTH?
Russia has imposed a 55.65% tariff on Chinese furniture sliding rail parts, previously exempt from duties, angering both Russian manufacturers and Chinese commentators.
Russia doesn’t know its a vassal state to China yet? Its about to find out.
At this point, it’s not really about maximizing profits, it’s about trying to undo every change Biden made
Its even worse. The new truck was likely by Dejoy, Trump’s own appointee.
The legend of Odin (the original santa) is always a success and I tell it in the most epic way I find, whith Sleipnir ridding the storm clouds in the Great Hunt.
I would watch this holiday stage play every year.
My guess is that this is not the guy. They’re holding this guy because he was “found with a gun similar” to the one used in the UHC shooting.
The UHC shooter had no qualms about abandoning and expensive backpack. I’m guessing the UHC gun is long since been abandoned too likely in a large body of water.
The perspective and the idea of a co-op however is completely different from what you describe: to distribute the hardships, the risks and rewards right from the start onto many shoulders. There’s no more “my company, my sacrifices” etc. It’s all we.
That sounds great, but how does that translate into real-world scenarios that organizations experience? As an example:
How do co-ops decide who needs to be fired when there isn’t enough money to cover payroll?
I guess my question is why do ML theorists think workers can organize enough to run a state when they can’t organize enough to run a business?
I’m not a Marxist, but my understanding of the theory is the difference between having all the the resources available to a nation-state to re-organize the state vs having to work with the meager resources provided by the existing state while working side that state’s existing restrictive system.
I don’t know, it seems the whole argument seems to boil down to “there’s not enough time, money or skill”.
“money” - what does money mean after you’ve toppled the state? Do you need money for rent? No. There’s no rule of law that will evict you from your home if you don’t pay your rent. Do you need money for food? No (in the short term). You break open the stores to take what food you need and is needed to feed the populous. The “money” problem can also be for required material resources the specific service you’re trying to set up. If you need something to carry out the will of the new state, you take it from whoever has it (which under Marxism usually means from the ruling elite), so that’s not a problem under this system.
“time” - The nation-state has been toppled. You don’t need to go to your wage job anymore for your life essentials. You’ve got all the time in the day you can dedicate to setting up the new state.
“skill” - If you have the skill to do the job but couldn’t do that job before because it didn’t pay you a living wage, that problem is now gone. The state will provide for your means, and you will do job X which the state needs done. If the state doesn’t have someone with a skill, the state will provide free education to train up citizens who will then be skilled enough to do job X needed by the state.
So none of those are actual problems on paper under Marxist because its generally applied to the nation-state level, not working in micro within an existing oppressive regime.
I say “on paper” because Marxist itself is flawed because it requires humans to act purely altruistically forever, and frankly thats beyond the capacity for humanity. Or said another way, Marxism would work great if there were no humans involved, which defeats the purpose of Marxism.
These are great points, and looking at some of the other responses I get the sense that it’s a time and skills issue. So, what exactly do communists and socialists imagine will happen when “workers seize the means of production”?
I admit I’m not a scholar in this area, but my college reading of Marx and Engels they were taking about nation-state levels of “seizing the means of production”. As in, the entire nation’s ability to produce goods, grow and transport food, facilitate communications, etc. Doing so on such a grand scale that the elites/bourgeois would be forced to cede control of the levers of power because society effectively halts with the means of production in the hands of the working class (proletariat).
Marx wasn’t talking about a socialist group starting up a competing grocery store to the entrenched established players in that market space.
I don’t want to discourage anyone from pursuing these ideas, I think at least in the U.S. it might be cool to have a consultancy or non-profit which helps connect such founders and provides them with education, training and startup resources.
There are educational resources for starting non-profits organizations (and I’m assuming co-ops). The real resource any org (for-profit or nonprofit) needs to start up is: large amounts of money. In for-profit ventures (assuming your business plan is respectable) you can get bank loans or outside investors. Both of these groups expect a return on the money they’re giving you to get started up.
With a co-op, I’m guessing the only sources of startup capital are: government grants, philanthropic donations, or a founder that already has amassed their own fortune.
Edit oh and some of the other points are that one wouldn’t get rich doing this. So what?
At those really dark times for your business you ask yourself “why the hell am I even doing this?” for most business owners the answer is “so that at some point in the future my life will be much easier”. For a co-op, there has to be a very deeply held belief that what you’re doing is extremely meaningful and your sacrifice will be “worth it” somehow. While those people exist with almost a religious level of obligation to their cause or their community, I think they are extremely rare.
I don’t envy the leadership in a struggling co-op. Running an organization is hard enough at the best times as a single owner. Having to run it by committee when it is crumbling sounds like a painful death.
I’ve already seen people look down on wealth accumulation, so I think it’s fair to say that the motives for someone who’d start such a business venture are different, which is valid and reasonable.
You may already have your answer. In your first post you said: “I’d also like to see more childcare co-ops, or community shared pre-k schools.”
What is stopping you from you creating a child-care co-op?
Secondly, I don’t think market forces will impact such businesses because if you’re creating communities around them, then people will choose what they know and trust.
This is naive. Market forces (and other externalities) can have massive impacts on your organization irrespective if you’re a for-profit or co-op. Just think of what COVID did to many organizations. Though nothing change in the business model or service offering, thousands of companies went under because the conditions of the market changed through no fault of the organization owners/leaders.
In short, co-ops are the closest socialist/communist business model that’s actually implemented in the U.S., so why are more leftists not doing this?
Starting a business (that is based on a sound and viable business plan that has even a snowball’s chance of surviving its formative early years) is really REALLY hard. It takes massive amounts of money or debt, the early years promise years of having no income for yourself (or paying yourself below minimum wage), it means a staggering amount of hours you need to put in to keep it going, forgoing vacations and important family events, loss of friendships because you’re having to put all your time and energy into the business without socializing, having to work when you’re incredibly ill, incredible amounts of stress (which increases by 10 times when you have employees that now depend on you for their livelihood) and even if you do everything perfect your business can fail leaving you with nothing for the years that you put into it, and potentially also with tens of thousands or millions of dollars in debt. It means many times being force to make decisions that massively affect other people’s lives (your employees or your customers). It can be versions of the Trolley Problem time and time again.
“According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), approximately 20% of new businesses fail during the first two years of being open, 45% during the first five years, and 65% during the first 10 years. Only 25% of new businesses make it to 15 years or more.” source
So ask yourself if you want to go through all of that, and instead of wealth you can live on and support your family with at the end of it, you get simply a “thank you” for building a co-op.
The USA grudge against Iran wasn’t because of the storming of the embassy. It was holding Americans diplomatic staff hostage for 444 days and threatening to “put them on trial” if Iran didn’t get what it wanted from the USA.
I haven’t heard any reports of Syrians holding Iranian diplomatic staff hostages yet.
There is no victory here that should be celebrated. It’s just Stalin replacing Hitler in East Germany. Everyone else who lived there lost.
You’re talking as if there was ever a point in human history that wasn’t like this. This is geopolitics. This is humanity. Yes, it sucks. However, there is a version of “sweetness” here, but this is the bittersweet kind. Its the periods of general peace between the hot wars of destruction and revolution where humanity has the chance to lurches forward a bit.
If the end of the Syrian civil war means a few decades where people in Syria can generally live in peace without bombs or artillery falling on their homes and their families, thats a win. That may be as good as it gets, but its a win.
Of course by international law they shouldn’t be doing that.
International law is a product of, and supported by, nation states. If the previously ruling government has fallen, it effectively doesn’t have a nation that respects the binding of international law. When a new government forms, that government will most likely take up the mantle of support for international law in exchange for international recognition. Right now on the ground its a bit of a free-for-all, I’d imagine.
They also use the higher taxes argument. They lean on the decades of anti tax propaganda and tell people your taxes have to go up for it to work.
This is a rephrasing of their zero sum argument. As in “for the poor to gain healthcare, you, the middle class, must lose wealth”.
You say that, but when the Dems had a filibuster proof super majority in Congress for a handful of weeks over a decade ago, we got the ACA.
The ACA barely passed in its original form (219-212) with a bunch of democrats voting against it too. A few aligned themselves with big business however many other democrats voted against the ACA because they believe it didn’t go far enough.
The ACA was still the biggest win for the American people on healthcare in decades.
I can’t imagine why USA hasn’t introduced something similar yet, but prefer all that bureaucracy that only makes the whole process way more expensive. Just to make sure some unemployed poor guy doesn’t get free treatment!!
(concepts stolen from a very insightful reddit post from years ago) Nearly all modern conservative positions can be explained with two idea.
So apply this to healthcare:
Most arguing against medical-treatment-for-all view it as zero-sum. So for most its not just because they don’t want some unemployed poor guy getting free treatment, but rather, “if the unemployed poor guy gets free treatment, then treatment won’t be available at some point in the future when I need it”. This is silly of course.
For others arguing against medical-treatment-for-all, the suffering is the point. The unemployed poor guy should suffer because that is his station in life. A life of comfort is reserved for those of higher classes. They believe, alleviating his suffering would go against the class he’s in and should in. This is, of course, also silly.
The electric boiler is really attractive especially with the option of using A3 refrigerants. We bought an existing house which already had conventional HVAC ducting and very few A2L heat pumps were available this fall for purchase so we had to buy one of the last R-410a units.
I looked at that route but the energy efficiency is lower compared to other electric only options. Also the maintenance of descaling multiple times a year wasn’t appealing. We went with a tank-based heat pump water heater to replace the existing electric tank water heater. The energy efficiency has been amazing, and the side benefits of extra cooling and de-humidification in the basement where the unit is was nice.
We put in a 17kW array with 10kWh of battery and its been wonderful so far. We haven’t had an electric bill since a month after installation, with this month being the first since then. If your state/locality has true 1:1 Net Metering, the cost of batteries isn’t worth it from a ROI perspective, but we were interested in not only that, but the backup capabilities in the even of an outage.