onoira

mine came with a battery defect and no longer turns on. i used it a total of four times.

postcovid prevents me from going to the library to print the RMA and then to the post office to actually ship the fucking thing, and i have no one to help me get rid of it. so now it's a paperweight.

you mean the migration 'crisis' and collapse in '"living" standards' which were brought on by US-EU neoliberalism driving down the standard of living in other parts of the world before coming home to roost?

there are certainly ways of reversing direction, but people in the core would sooner choose literal fascism before giving up their imperial lifestyle. they use the IMF to politically terraform 'underdeveloped nations' and export their own harms so they can say they're 'meeting climate goals', and then complain about all the emissions and migrants coming from those countries which are ravaged to supply their hyperconsumption. the same migrants which predominantly staff their service, medical and technology sectors to prop up their precious treats and their oh-so superior 'knowledge economies'.

voting for fascism is the individualistic choice which lets them keep their treats and means they don't need to interact with their neighbours or advocate for real change. it's easier to blame the victims of their actions than to cut the DARVO shit and accept responsibility.

at which point your profit becomes linked to the degree to which you provide the functionality

except when the commodity is a basic necessity and there's no alternatives. 'the market' can't really 'vote with their wallet' on the cost and quality of shelter, particularly when price fixing is rampant.

sidenote: 'voting with your wallet' implies people with more money than you should have more say in what's 'more valuable', because the rich can always outbid you, and homo economicus is only a thought experiment. (see: foreign real estate investment, conspicuous consumption…)

i'm going to ignore your posting history and assume for a moment you aren't a contrarian debate pervert. what exactly is the point you are trying to get across?

you agree we should move past animal cruelty, but because we have animal cruelty today, we still need to have animal cruelty today?

you agree that animal testing is fundamentally wrong, but because someone was unconsensually subjected to unethical experimentation, we need to keep the animal testing?

why do you feel the need to agree with people but then say 'but that's not how it works today'?

i see these types of comments in every comment section about societal problems. 'i agree X needs to change to Y, but we don't have Y today, sweaty. 💅' like- what? are you all really just trolls, or do you really think you're being insightful and helpful? because this isn't what a discussion looks like. it's dis-miss-ion.

what a harmful, elitist, high technocratic, economistic, no-true-scotsman take: someone who doesn't view the world in pure quantitative terms and understand precisely a dialect of jargon has no valuable insight?

why 'productivity' specifically? why not GDP? or GPI? or SPI? or HDI? or HPI? or GBMI (Goodhart's Bad Metric Index)?

you're right that this character wouldn't be part of a 'solution', under current conditions, because it would be formulated by a well-funded political thinktank, specialising in number-go-big policy, tacked to the end of a dredged report with absolutely no involvement from measly imperial subjects.

this assumes that:

1. all workers are 'producing' anything.
2. all workers are serving real needs.
3. the difference between supply and demand is really so low that any dip in 'productivity' would harm anything more than an executive's RoI.
4. that the threat of this financial 'harm' necessitates more work.

with the increase in 'productivity' over the last century, if we reduced our expectations, and stopped letting monopoly money run our entire society, and stopped burning surplus resources because it's 'unsold' or would drive down prices: we wouldn't need to work even 20% what is expected of us now.

this assumes that:

1. dependence is inevitable if Europe is not the most competitive.
2. that economic competitiveness had anything to do with natural gas imports.
3. that our economic system and its basic dynamics are unchangeable.
4. that our needs are unchangeable.

the natural gas situation wouldn't have been avoided if Europe were more 'competitive'; neither would any other geopolitical situation. instead the EU should have — and is currently — diversifying its domestic energy sources. the EU could also work on energy coöperation and reducing energy usage.

interdependence works for everyone. independence is a destructive mindset.

no, it's called information literacy and recognising insincerity. what you're doing is called deflection and splitting.

believe it or not: one does not have to pick which colour empire they like best, because one does not have to like an empire at all. no one is forcing you to consume hypocritical fearbait.

Elaine Dezenski, senior director and head of the Center on Economic and Financial Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in the U.S.

hmmm, i wonder if this 'researcher' for a warhawk and Israeli lobbying organisation is trustworthy!

FDD was founded shortly after the September 11 attacks in 2001. In the initial documents filed for tax-exempt status with the Internal Revenue Service, FDD's stated mission was to "provide education to enhance Israel's image in North America and the public's understanding of issues affecting Israeli-Arab relations". Later documents described its mission as "to conduct research and provide education on international terrorism and related issues".

'the Center on Economic and Financial Power' sounds like a ministry from Nineteen Eighty-Four.

i also find this quote amusing:

“Despite the problems for host countries and the large portfolio of failing loans for China, Beijing has still been successful at building influence across authoritarian-leaning regimes, who are eager to follow the Chinese model of single-party state control and high-tech domestic repression,” Dezenski says

the pot calling the kettle black. let me reword this:

"Despite the problems for host countries and the large portfolio of failing loans for the [United States|IMF], [Washington|Davos] has still been successful at building influence across authoritarian-leaning regimes, who are eager to follow the [American|Western|liberal] model of corporate state control and high-tech domestic repression," someone says

what is so bleak about two people exercising their autonomy to choose when and how they die together?

i found this point a bit unclear (emphasis mine):

People who bear a middle class culture need to unlearn it, as it manifests in a politics of comfort: building informal social power, flattening contradictions, and avoiding conflict. Currently, its crusade is to destroy practices of transformative justice—and the difficult experiences those practices come from—in favor of the kind of attitudes (simultaneously fragile and vicious) that flourish on social media.

what are some examples of what the author might mean here?

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