In every system from hunter-gather society, feudalism, socialism and capitalism you need to exchange your work for the products of the work of other people. No system will give you the ability to not work and get what you want.
The capitalism is the least bad one where there the correlation between "making something that people want" to the value you can keep to feed yourself.
The conditions for retirees relative to those still working in the USSR were fairly decent (by the end). But its not exactly fair since the demographic situation there was much better than it is now in most developed countries.
And then all capitalist countries in Europe these days (which coincidentally are all capitalist) generally have similar retirement systems to the US.
Where will these resources will came from if the capitalist system is the most productive of them all? You can't redistribute something out of nothing. You need a healthy tax base to redistribute.
Childcare is just too regulated and people don't want to do it and ask for a premium on childcare.
Retirement in socialist country? Or in China before the capitalism came there? Or in a feudal society where your children where your insurance in the old age?
Why don't you ask them "where will these resources will came from"? This isn't a hypothetical we're discussing, most of Europe has protected retirement.
The original commenter was saying something more like "we will work until we die, but that's okay, because capitalism is great! And it's not like you would get to retire under any other system anyway"
Not all capitalism is equal though. The overlap between socialism and capitalism is state capitalism, and it turns out if you want affordable childcare, healthcare, utilities, public transport, etc. then state capitalism is the way to go.
Read Milton Friedman on why this won't work. If you have seen any government run organization you'll see why.
Taxes can be levied on productive businesses that are in ruthless competition in the free and international market. No productive businesses = nothing to redistribute. No international business == no imports. Everybody is poor and hungry.
There is a difference between productive business and basic infrastructure. Just look at China, they have state capitalism with free market economy according to the 60/70/80/90 rule. The state capitalism covers most basic needs like utilities, healthcare, and public transport extremely efficiently.
The free market economy is ruthlessly efficient in the national and international market due to involution and strategic loans from state-owned banks.
Difference between the capitalism our parents had vs us. They had taxes on the rich. So they could afford homes and retire and never needed 3 jobs to scrape by. In fact one job was enough to afford a home and a family.
This is just painfully and obviously not the reason why childcare is so expensive now. Labor costs are higher these days (Baumol's cost disease), regulations have become more strict because we are more protective of our children, and multigenerational living has declined.
Taxing the rich is great but it's not gonna fix any of those.
Taxing the rich means that there are fewer people with absurd money, which means businesses won't have many customers at such high prices. It's like McDonalds charging $5 for a quarter of a potato. They're hoping that the lost sales from the poors at such a high price is made up by fewer high priced purchases by the rich.
If even the rich couldn't or didnt want to afford $5 quarter potatoes then they'd have to lower the price
Taxing the rich is not going to solve any of this. It may help some, but it's nothing like the panacea certain people pretend it is.
If we took all the assets from all the billionaires in the US, that total is something like $6-7 trillion if we pretend there's no asset price decrease in the selling of said assets.
Sounds like a lot, but we're nearly $40 trillion in debt. Taxing the rich heavily won't solve a spending problem.
The federal government specifically, and the admin class in general was a lot smaller during our parents' era.
They "operate" in Iran because of OFAC issues general licenses under the Iranian Transactions and Sanctions Regulations (31 CFR Part 560) permitting non-commercial personal communications, including satellite internet for free expression. Starlink activation in 2022 protests and recent events exploited these, as Musk sought formal exemptions for "internet freedom."
And no Tesla factories in Iran I suppose helps too :)
It has to be free in case of OFAC sanctions otherwise if you are generating revenue from commercial activity in sanctioned regions, you get huge fines.
Yes, synchthing is godsend + also there are several music streaming docker based servers you can pair with an app on your phone and stream only the things you like (or download them) without moving the whole collection on the device.
For serious lectures (not story telling like history or other humanities) you can't be doing anything on the side if you want to understand. Try listening to a math lecture, or chemistry lecture while doing dishes :)
I found the same to be true with audiobooks, nothing serious can't be "just listened to". I've tried to "listen" to a good biology non-fiction on how live evolved from the primordial soup. Shit, in the first chapters there were covalency chemistry and other stuff that I needed to sit down and write to understand.
> not story telling like history or other humanities
Those are not serious humanities lectures. The serious ones are not storytelling, but serious examination of the evidence or of its analysis. There are far more factors, complexity, and uncertainty in an historical event or process than in a petri dish, and the event can't even be reproduced. It's impossible to use the same kind of scientific method and obtain the same kind of certainty, and requires far more critical thinking, judgment, and analysis.
What caused Andrew Jackson to be elected? There's a relatively simple story told, but the reality is enormously complex and uncertain.
Referring to "math" as serious just makes me want to discount your opinion entirely. Lectures (or indeed any linear encoding) are a bad medium for discussing formal languages. This has nothing to do with how much you care about a topic or whatever "serious" is supposed to imply here.
Regardless, listening to something intently and doing mechanical actions are not exclusive.
Well try to listen to a group theory lecture (for example on cohomology of groups) while doing chores :) But the lecture was indeed useful if you stop and rewind and see how the lecturer was explaining (there were some interesting graphs).
Your brain can't hold the context long enough to go to the required level of abstraction, while you're multitasking (may be walking or something deeply automated doesn't count.
I would say the main reason it's hard to follow abstract maths lectures by listening is not the difficulty of the concepts per se, but simply because it's so visual: it relies on notation and diagrams
But mathematicians can talk to each other about arbitrarily abstract concepts, as long as they have enough shared background, and they don't (always) need a blackboard to do it.
Conversely, you can have conceptually very simple things that are basically impossible to follow just by listening, like multiplying two nine-digit numbers or following one of Euclid's proofs in plane geometry. The difficulty isn't about abstraction, but how many things you have to hold in working memory
Original LibGen was still the best browsing experience and it's been down for months. If we lose this resource it would be truly a setback and grave loss.
Got it after a bad car accident, some brain damage. Interestingly it also made me race blind as well - I'm probably one of the few people in the world who can say that! I do identify loved ones from the sound of their voice, though, or if not speaking, I can sometimes tell from how they walk and move. Same thing races, it's not hard to tell if someone's voice sounds black or if they walk like a white guy
The modern societies run via those devices and the enforcement will move to the mostly free Internet that was "a long time ago, when it didn't matter as much".
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