News:

if the thee off of you are revel in the fact you ds a discordant suck it's dick and praise it's agenda? guess what bit-chit's not. hat I in fact . do you really think it'd theshare about shit, hen you should indeed tare-take if the frontage that you're into. do you really think it's the hardcore shite of the left thy t? you're little f/cking girls parackind abbot in tituts. FUCK YOU. you're latecomers, and you 're folks who don't f/cking get it. plez challenge me.

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Messages - tyrannosaurus vex

#76
Two vast and trunkless legs of stone / Re: Pango
March 31, 2020, 12:57:42 AM
i told them you died of the plague
#77
well, what are we going to do about it? impeach him? lol.
#78
does this belong in this forum or Aneristic Illusions? I do not know.

One thing this pandemic has shown us (in the US, particularly) is that labor practices and worker protections are abyssmal, and that they need to improve -- not just for the human sake of the workers and their families but because of the added unnecessary strain on the wider economy when an event like this forces people out of the workforce.

Maybe when this is over, assuming society survives in some form that more or less resembles its pre-pandemic form, businesses will realize that they could have been more resilient if workers/consumers were more resilient, and change their ways. I say "maybe" only because a 0.3 probability sounds like good news these days. We know it won't work out that way. There will be humanitarian carnage, and a lot of fancy euphemisms from HR, and the train will keep on rollin'.

The reasons for this inability for profit-centric economies to change are obvious and not worth exploring here. What I'm (vainly, to be sure) imagining as a way around this is a simple idea and at first glance seems to work out mathematically, given some appreciable stretch of time where things are more or less stable. As always the hurdles are of the human motivation and PR variety.

In 2019 there were about 132M filled full-time jobs and somewhere around 28M part-time jobs. For my purposes I count each filled position separately, even though many people have multiple jobs and some combination of full-time and part-time employment.

If we take a conservative estimate, we could say there are somewhere around 140 million positions at a given time in the US economy, not counting gig work and the like. Now, imagine some kind of organization that acts like a combination of union and insurance that collects dues from workers. Say, $30 per week for fulltime and $20 week for part-time employees. Given an average adoption rate of 50% across the workforce, such an organization would collect about $2.1B per week, or $110B per year.

These funds could be used as an independent unemployment fund to provide or supplement unemployment payments to displaced workers, and to drive adoption this would probably have to be a selling point, but I'm wondering if this kind of money is large enough to strongarm industries into taking better care of their workers. For example, here's what I'm imagining:

- this organization could negotiate its own separate medical insurance plans, like an employer would but with a vastly higher pool and therefore more negotiating power, and enrolling in one of its plans would insulate workers from loss of coverage due to being fired or laid off or whatever. that in itself would eliminate one of the chief means employers use to coerce workers into unfavorable conditions.

- given a long enough time without catastrophic economic failure, the organization could accumulate large enough stockpiles of cash to organize walkouts of workers while paying 100% of their salaries. these walkouts could target individual employers or whole industries, and because the strikers aren't losing income, the strikes would be far more dangerous to employers than traditional union protests.

- subscription to protection by the organization would rise as its members are able to demonstrate the economic security associated with membership.

- eventually, the organization could publish its own fundamental bill of workers' rights which every employment position must satisfy in order to be certified or something. though there would be no regulatory or law-enforcement power, there would be the economic power of simply directing workers to positions that do qualify and effectively blacklisting positions that don't.

Anyway, yes, this is very rainbow flavored unicorn farts and rose-colored glasses and everything, but it's fun to imagine while everything is on fire. I do think the basic concept is sound, but since nobody has ever tried it (that I know of), I'm probably wrong.
#79
I think the question of "acting in bad faith" isn't as cut and dry as that, tbh. It doesn't take a specific devious motive to act in bad faith, only misallocated priority points, even unconsciously so. Appeals to ideas about nebulous and mysterious possibilities that flout good and available scientific explanations despite a potential danger to human life would count, as far as I am concerned, but I'm also a little extreme in my own positions and liable to make the same misstep in other cases. TWJ, I suspect that you, like me, may be prone for some reason to read more into things than is actually there in order to put a tidy lid on something unfathomable. I wouldn't ask you to top posting forever, only to forego the usual conspiratorial thinking in this specific situation because in this climate it can and will lead directly to more suffering, and there's already more than enough to go around.
#80
I don't see what the point would be of engineering this virus anyway. It doesn't kill enough people to be a threat to the species, but it's extremely effective at ruining the economies that support anything a bad actor could stand to gain. Personally it seems to me that identifying this pathogen as being manufactured only serves to inspire a hunt for a human or set of humans to blame for all this carnage, and that kind of motive is a lot more plausible than creating this virus in a lab.
#81
there is no ethical consumption under capitalism anyway, so why not
#82
3/24
Got laid off yesterday, have been talking to other potential employers all day. Old job was in the travel/hospitality industry, so that place is as good as cooked anyway, even if the 50% of workers who got to stay on (with a 25% pay cut) don't realize it. Other places are still hiring, but so far they are "waiting til the situation eases up" so they can continue their preferred face to face interviews. Basically no one seems to have realized the depth of the economic hole we just pitched over into, which is less "find the bottom and start climbing back out" and more "Alice goes to Wonderland," I suspect.

Outside, at least here in northern Virginia, everything is noticeably quieter. It's peaceful. I like it, but it puts a lot of other people on edge. Life is supposed to be busy, loud, bustling, and frantic. It isn't supposed to be peaceful, and it sure the fuck isn't supposed to be quiet. Granted, this maybe the calm before the storm, but what better reason to enjoy the stillness?

Personally, I am riding waves of psychosomatic symptoms. I am too aware of everything about my sinuses. It isn't debilitating, but it's annoying. I am also running out of patience with people who can't handle long term disruptions to their routines, but for now I am treating that as a problem that will sort itself out on its own somehow.

The president and a lot of governors are talking about how we need to hurry up and get back to normal, even though the US hasn't even come close to peak infection rate yet. I hate that so few people can see this for the obvious intention to sacrifice possibly hundreds of thousands of people on the altar of the status quo that it is. I hate how shortsighted the news headlines are, too: today the markets crash, today the markets bounce back, today they crash again, and nobody seems to notice the pattern. I assume the narrative is engineered, because nobody could be dumb enough to miss that, right?
#83
i like the LARP actually. it could be fun, maybe i'll try it. my only real concern is replayability. also there should be some way to drag it out longer. this quarantine might last *months*, so it would be cool to have a game that could last, idk, days, at least.
#84
Aneristic Illusions / Re: Look at the stock market
March 17, 2020, 03:00:29 PM
Everything's fine, the financial news is saying the markets are "bouncing back" (after historic losses, but shh). Everything is fine, crisis averted.
#85
Quote from: Juana on March 12, 2020, 06:30:53 PM
Quote from: Doktor Howl on March 12, 2020, 01:28:23 AM
200 dead in Italy in the last 24 hours.
do we know the demographics of the dead?

A recent survey of them yielded no responses
#86
Aneristic Illusions / Re: Look at the stock market
March 12, 2020, 04:43:59 PM
the stock market is my favorite organized human behavior. in the best of times, we kinda-sorta understand what's happening (if we don't look too closely), but in the worse times it's plainly evident to everyone involved exactly what is happening, and yet we are powerless to control ourselves to stop it. like right now: everyone is scared of this pandemic and is scrambling for safety, which means selling anything that moves to anyone who will take it, and this is going to create a major problem for everyone, and we know that, but the instinct to be spooked outweighs all our globally combined foresight.
#87
Aneristic Illusions / Re: UNLIMITED 2020 THREAD
March 06, 2020, 07:30:03 PM
That's true, but I'm not sure where to point my finger about that. Americans are trained to hate and to feel superior, and to blame somebody for everything that bugs them. You're definitely going to encounter short-sighted ignorant bigoted pieces of shit under just about any rock. Hate and ignorance are like the background radiation of the USA. That doesn't excuse it, but if you're holding your support out for the candidate whose camp is comprised entirely of saints, you're going to be holding it out a long time. Bernie Bros (of which this particular Nazi at this particular crowd may or may not be one) engage in despicable behavior, but Bernie or Bust accelerationism isn't really that much more destructive than sneering at the children and threatening to withhold your own vote until they grow up or leave the room. If you genuinely disagree with Sanders on the issues and have no intention of voting for him at all, then that's one thing. But if you'd be cool with casting your vote for him but only when his supporters get in whatever line you've drawn out for them, that's different. And making that a great big bone of contention in the meantime only adds fuel to the fire.
#88
Aneristic Illusions / Re: UNLIMITED 2020 THREAD
March 06, 2020, 06:50:26 PM
obviously no democrat is going to defeat trump as long as they keep blaming the candidates for the ways their crackpot supporters behave.
#89
Or Kill Me / Re: Ronald Reagan was wrong
March 05, 2020, 04:28:07 PM
Quote from: altered on March 05, 2020, 04:18:09 PM
I would like to point out the Black Panthers.

It has been tried. You need a critical mass, though, sufficient that militarizing the people into dirt becomes something of an economic and political problem.

The vast majority of Americans I have met are fundamentally hateful, greedy, jealous, xenophobic pieces of shit. And I've been all over the USA. Some of these people are overcoming their worse impulses, some are just keeping them out of sight, but the average person on the street is terrible at their core.

That means those who do give a fuck aren't willing to throw everything away so they can be shot by the Feds and used as an excuse to demonize the other people like them.

This is all true. I'm not saying it's a situation likely to be resolved -- in fact I'm saying the opposite. The USA has a rotten culture that has been rotten from the start. The main problem now is the 60 or so years where we combined that rotten culture with surpluses in profit, resources, and productivity and got it stuck in our heads that somehow abundance was our birthright. The strides that were made socially and economically for the lower classes and the disenfranchised were, largely, no more than payoffs to keep people from grumbling because it ruins the view. Now that that abundance is drying up, we find that those payoffs are also drying up because they were never really implemented for any genuine reason in the first place.

Now we have a rotten culture and withdrawal symptoms from that phony American Dream business that was never a real thing anyway. And most Americans are awful at their core -- if not because they are hateful and racist, then just because they are myopic and addicted to instant gratification. And that's why the US government is the way it is -- not because the oligarchs grabbed control (they've always had it anyway) but because the government is an emergent phenomenon that embodies all the qualities of the electorate, whether it wants to or not. Selfish, impatient, greedy, violent people -> selfish, impatient, greedy, violent government.
#90
Or Kill Me / Re: Ronald Reagan was wrong
March 05, 2020, 04:12:19 PM
Quote from: chaotic neutral observer on March 05, 2020, 04:00:26 PM
Quote from: tyrannosaurus vex on March 05, 2020, 03:43:48 PM
All governments are democracies. No government ever existed except by virtue of the fact that the people it ruled didn't rise up and tear it down.
"The population is not currently in a state of revolt" is not how you characterize a democracy. It is neither necessary nor sufficient.

Democracy implies distributed control, which is distinct from general consent.

If all governments were democracies, then the term itself would be meaningless, for there would be no distinction to be made.

I meant the term "consent" of course, in the sense that they meant it in the Declaration of Independence, that "all government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed". It wasn't just flowery political theory, but a basic fact. If the people rescind their consent, the government falls -- regardless of the organizing principles of that government. "Democracy" as a form of government is obviously distinct from Fascism or Stalinism or (actual) monarchy; but the fundamental social principle of any government is that it exists because the people allow it to exist, and in that sense is democratic.

My point was that the US government is what it is because we don't stop it from being that, not because we are victims of some insurmountable power that has some sort of existence separate from the people. It gets back to the DoI, as we apparently have not yet encountered any trains of abuses and usurpations long enough to prod us into real action.