What are /r/LateStageCapitalism's favorite Products & Services?

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I don't know what pisses me off more - that self-described capitalists don't know what socialism is because they refuse to read socialist theory in order to understand it and attempt to refute it from an educated standpoint, or that self-described capitalists don't know what capitalism is because they refuse to read capitalist theory and understand the economic system they support.

"Adam Smith wrote a great book which demonstrates why capitalism is awesome!"

"Have you actually read The Wealth of Nations?"

"Naw I cba to do that, I've heard about all the important parts from Fox News tho"

I remember reading "Pedigree: How Elite students get elite jobs", a book that describes how at elite banks, financial institutions and companies:

>at every step of the hiring process, the ways that employers define and evaluate merit are strongly skewed to favor job applicants from economically privileged backgrounds. She reveals how decision makers draw from ideas about talent―what it is, what best signals it, and who does (and does not) have it―that are deeply rooted in social class. Displaying the "right stuff" that elite employers are looking for entails considerable amounts of economic, social, and cultural resources on the part of the applicants and their parents.

>Challenging our most cherished beliefs about college as a great equalizer and the job market as a level playing field, Pedigree exposes the class biases built into American notions about the best and the brightest, and shows how social status plays a significant role in determining who reaches the top of the economic ladder.

But instead of reacting with horror and disgust at the proof that the entire economic system makes a mockery of meritocracy and any notions of earned status, the reviews treated it as a "How To" -

>"Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs is an academic book with the requisite references to gender theory and Marxist concepts of inequality. But read it carefully and it becomes something far more useful--a guide on how to join the global elite."

Of course, it's not a "how to" at all - nobody without that kind of money and connections has any chance of joining these clubs. That's the whole point of exclusionary sorting like they engage in. But people desperately want to think they can be the exception and the winner. Same as why they like to play monopoly.

A MODEST PROPOSAL

For preventing the children of poor people in Ireland, from being a burden on their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the publick.

by Dr. Jonathan Swift

1729

> He meant well and his analysis wasn't wrong at the time

I need to download and read The Wealth of Nations to form a real opinion, but that's what I thought. He lived at the very beginning of the industrial revolution, globalization and big corporations didn't exist in his time, so his work can't really be used to promote the virtues of modern capitalism.

>>Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.

• Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

Confessions of an Economic Hitman goes into great detail about the Bechtel Corporation. Very well written story about a guy who was unwarily caught up in instituting U.S. interests abroad.

He's referring to "A modest proposal" by Jonathan Swift, a satirical piece proposing to solve the overpopulation of early 18th century Britain by eating the babies. Not Thanos.

Wanna hate the world? Watch Congo, My Precious.

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Some discussion here.

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Separately, this also does a decent amount of work for those who have an anti-tech / anti-civilisation critique.

Who will go down into the mines when we are free?

In the Shock Doctrine Naomi Klein has a chapter about how they did the same thing in New Orleans after Katrina and Iraq after we illegally invaded it.

The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein.

I really liked The Shock Doctrine. I know the book was haighly criticized over a few mistakes or omissions but the one thing that I think it does extremely well is to recommend that when high-emotion events like disasters and wars happen, instead of looking at all the flashy human interest stuff, take a step back and try to look at where the mney is going.

No Logo is pretty dated now, I think. Some of the stuff she says in it feels fairly common sense. BUT her chapter on public space (No Space) is, I think, extremely interesting and it actually changed my life in a fairly profound way.

I think if you already read lots of stuff on ideology and human geography, you’ll probably already know most of the positions she advances in her books but they’re way easier and more fun to read. If you’re new to this kind of politics its a really good place to start.

As I recall, Klein is also not strictly speaking a Marxist, so unlike a lot of the other writers who tackle this kind of stuff, you don’t have to come to her work with an understanding of Marxist theory.

I think that we misunderstand the effects of advertisements. I never watch an ad and think "Oh, I'll buy that", but sometimes I need something and when looking at possible options I'm more likely to think of that brand/product as an option. I think a good example of this is how, on youtube, we're bombarded with ads for Squarespace and NordVPN; sure, I don't use either, but if I needed a VPN or a website, those would certainly be services I'd look into because they come to mind immediately when I think of a VPN or website creation service.

The whole thing is a bastardization of Smith. He talked about the invisible hand once in The Wealth of Nations and it was to explain that self interest may lead to greater social benefits, but not as a rule that it always does.

I've ~~considered~~ thought about this once. Like making the app so the driver can set their rates, and they get all the money from the fare.

Looks like there is an open source alternative that is quite like what I just described.

http://libretaxi.org/

No doubt, but it's useful to distinguish between the usual theft of capitalism and the fervent looting capitalists partake in when there's a disaster to distract and encumber people more than usual.

Naomi Klein's book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, is a great read that really dives into how fucking twisted it all is. That book was also pivotal in developing my opposition to capitalism.

But yea, disaster capitalism is just another facet of capitalism.

It's quite old and the links are dying, but when I originally came across this info it was here.

The issue with the stats is that 91% of custody cases aren't settled by courts. It's just agreed by the parents. MRAs then point to the number of fathers with sole custody vs mothers and say "ha, see? gender bias" without pausing to reflect a moment on why this might be the case.

They're not concerned with fathers' relative lack of interest in their children, they just want easy ammunition to prove that the evil feminists have weaponized the courts against men's rights.

At least it totally backfired and crashed their stock price

(source)

>What exactly is the ideal way that society should be organized and function after Capitalism has been abolished? [...] What I mean by this is how would a "stateless, classless, moneyless society" even work exactly?[...] I guess what I'm ultimately getting at is, how does a truly post-capitalist system work? 

Karl Marx wrote in <em>The German Ideology</em>

>Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.

Anyone who claims to know what a post-capitalist society will look like is just guessing, honestly.

Like you said, there are many different theories and ideas on how to establish socialism / communism, and what that should look like.

Should it be a revolutionary vanguard party taking control of the state on behalf of the working-class? Direct seizure over the instruments of production by the workers? Should co-ops within capitalism wrest supremacy in the market? General strikes and riots to pressure the ruling-class to capitulate? Should socialists support reformist parties under capitalism or only advocate for direct workers control?

I think you're right to struggle with these questions because they dont have easy answers, and what type of praxis should be attempted or advocated for will depend on the material circumstances, ideological climate, etc.

A book I read recently that tries to lay out an actual concrete plan is Richard D. Wolff's <em>Democracy at Work</em>, but keep in mind his ideas are not the end-all-be-all.

Ah, yes - the mis-application of a narrow argument made by Adam Smith against protectionism, because he believed that investors would be ruled by a bias toward investing in their own countries even if more profit could be made elsewhere. A case where Smith was clearly wrong, the only time the phrase "invisible hand" appears at all in "The Wealth of Nations," and yet it's somehow used as justification for every aspect of neoliberal capitalism.

It's not [too simplistic]. Check out <strong>Capitalism Must Die! (link)</strong> it's a great book that breaks down the battle against capitalism into simplified and digestible language. You can enter $0 into the fair price tag to download it for free, but of course I would heavily encourage you to pick up a physical copy as well, not just to support the artist/author, but then you can foist this shit on your buds outta the blue if they ever show a mere mote of curiosity about the struggle.

rooktakesqueen hits it right on the nose. It's not more complicated than that. That's the entire reason the system is evil, inherently unsustainable, and must be resisted at every turn and overthrown as soon as possible. Workers are paid a fraction of the value they produce, capitalists steal the rest for themselves (known as surplus value), they re-invest that surplus value into the system to expand and continue. There are some more steps in between (like surplus value is what drives the profit of the commodity produced by exploited labor, and then monopoly retailers can muscle over smaller capitalists and consolidate power even further, etc) but the overall idea is extremely simple.

> "Man," said the Ghost, "if man you be in heart, not adamant, forbear that wicked cant until you have discovered What the surplus is, and Where it is. Will you decide what men shall live, what men shall die? It may be, that in the sight of Heaven, you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man's child. Oh God! to hear the Insect on the leaf pronouncing on the too much life among his hungry brothers in the dust!"

Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/A_Christmas_Carol

Ha Ha: Hillary Clinton’s Top Financial Supporter Now Controls “The Onion”

RIP The Onion, once America's Finest Marxist News Source, now officially a propaganda outlet for the Clinton campaign.

The key ingredient to a successful protest is that it is disruptive. I guess agitate works great as well.

Please, y'all, read This is an uprising it is basically a manual on how to change the status quo.

The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) predates The Wealth of Nations (1775) by 16 years, in fact. People should look at it as the underpinning of The Wealth of Nations and not the other way around, you're right. Smith's work as represented by mainstream economists and other ideologues is a complete travesty.

If you own your own house, turn your backyard into an opium poppy growing factory. I am not joking.

A book that might interest you, written by a man with pain issues

https://www.amazon.com/Opium-Masses-Harvesting-Natures-Medication-ebook/dp/B004URM3DG

Cannabis may offer some relief as well. You can grow that in a closet.

“Right to work”. Also there is a really fantastic book out there about the decline of social mobility in the US that I would highly recommend.

I googled that website. It's one of those toxic horseshit management philosophies from the 1990's. Everything about these books says, essentially: your boss is right, you're wrong for even thinking about not being productive, and even if you're right, you're still to blame because you had emotions on company time. It's meant to quash worker consciousness by having all employees internalize external problems.

If it's any comfort, I'm sure WalMart will take care of the worker's family. WalMart has a long history of looking after their workers. /s.

Edit: I found this while looking around to see if I could find out if WalMart actually compensated the families of killed workers, thought it was funny...

The gospels are the primary source for hearing about Jesus's life. The only contemporary corroborating sources are the Apostle Paul's letters (written ~20 years before the gospels) and Josephus's Antiquities (written around the same time as the gospel of John and about 20 years after the synoptic gospels, which only mentions that he existed. There's a lot more in Josephus about Jesus's brother James and John the Baptist). You can call them a "radicalization" but there's not really an objective source to compare them against, so we can't really tell if they're radicalized or not. People have tried to "de-radicalize" the gospels, but again, there is no source material outside of the Bible that describes his life, so it's all just conjecture. However, if you want a really good and highly respected attempt at that, you should check out <em>Jesus</em> by David Flusser. Flusser is a liberal Christian (which is different than politically liberal) and was the foremost Jesus scholar, Christian or not, in the 20th century. He's quite objective, easy to understand, and absolutely brilliant. It's very much worth the read!

It's important to remember that The Wealth of Nations is not the title of the book: the book is actually called An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations. It's an investigation, not a set of rules to follow, not a get rich too scheme.

And yes, his ideas may be out of date now but they were what economics is and should be — observations of human behavior in markets. He was working it out as it evolved, not trying to remake society in the image of his masters.

I agree, the left should reclaim Smith as our own, where he belongs. He is not the evangelist of laissez faire at all.

You could do worse things than wander through these quotes.

Because despite what we're all told, there really isn't such a thing as an unskilled job. There was a bestseller ten years ago Nickel and Dimed where the author set aside her graduate degree, job history, and finances to try and start with nothing and get by.

One of her experiences was that even the most unskilled jobs take skill.

Yep, profiting off of and exploiting crises, whether they be political, social, or natural disasters, is a cornerstone of modern capitalism.

If you want to learn more about this phenomenon The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein is a good read. She's ultimately a liberal, but it's a good historical explanation of how policy elites create and/or exploit crises to implement policies that the population would not accept otherwise.

> Klein argues that "the free market policies of Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman have risen to prominence in some countries because of a deliberate strategy of certain leaders to exploit crises by pushing through controversial, exploitative policies while citizens were too busy emotionally and physically reeling from disasters or upheavals to create an effective resistance."

I'm sure this sub is aware, but it's not only conservatives who do this.

Here's Rahm Emanuel literally saying this word for word.

Do not use the Facebook app. I repeat, do not use the Facebook app. Ever. That thing is a Trojan horse. If on Android, use something like Metal which needs almost no permissions as it is a wrapper for the browser version of Facebook.

A while back there was a comic called "Batman: The Golden Streets of Gotham" which told the story of Batman as a working class hero during the industrial revolution. It's an interesting take on Batman and IMHO a Batman I can definitely get behind.

I also recommend the book, "Working class comic book heroes: Class conflict and populist politics in comics." If you're not keen on using Amazon, I am sure you can find it elsewhere.

Have you read The Shock Doctrine by any chance? Klein describes exactly this kind of thing as one factor in why the American occupation of Iraq was such a clusterfuck, since the companies hired to rebuild the infrastructure did this so much that nailing up a piece of $2 tarp cost over $170 (which didn't go to the guy who actually nailed it up).

Heck, even Adam Smith would get labeled as a filthy leftist by some of these people if they had actually read him.

>No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.

The Wealth of Nations

>Resentment seems to have been given us by nature for a defense, and for a defense only! It is the safeguard of justice and the security of innocence.

The Theory of Moral Sentiments >Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.

On the Revenue of the Sovereign or Commonwealth >Our merchants and masters complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price and lessening the sale of goods. They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits. They are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain only of those of other people.

The Wealth of Nations.

It's not apple but it is real, see here: https://www.amazon.com/Airpods-Magnetic-iPhone-Lightweight-Connector/dp/B06XD9869H You can ignore the other insulting comment asking if you are gullible. This is capitalism after-all, where people buy useless shit. People go into debt to buy big ass loud obnoxious fuel guzzling trucks that transport lumber, just to go to and from their office job.

People forget that Adam Smith didn't invent capitalism. The Wealth of Nations was a book of observations on capitalism; what works efficiently and what doesn't, and how it weighs up against mercantilism.

I've been saying for decades that modern conservatism begins during that era in the '70s and '80s when liberals around the world were piling on apartheid South Africa and dictators like Marcos and Pinochet. Old-school conservatives felt they had to defend those regimes because they were reliably anti-communist, but newer conservatives came back from supporting those places saying, "Dang, why can't we have nice things like that at home?"

Naomi Klein had it right in The Shock Doctrine. Take a good look at what the banksters and their puppets force onto third world countries, because you better know that as soon as they can, they'll do it to you, too.

A People's History of the United States

The Autobiography of Malcolm X

Everything here is so very very wrong. I mean literally point by point everything you said here is wrong. Smith did not think capital was tied up in land. He put landowners and capitalist in separate classes, labor being the third class. He did not assume labor was mobile and could just move to colonies. In fact he wrote extensively in opposition to laws that prevented the mobility of labor.

I'm absolutely amazed Chomsky would say Adam Smith thought the division of labor was terrible. Smith pointed out some undesirable consequences of DOL that made public schooling necessary but he clearly thought increasing DOL was good. Smith said, "It is the great multiplication of the productions of all the different arts, in consequence of the division of labour, which occasions, in a well-governed society, that universal opulence which extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people." In other words Smith thought increasing the DOL was how you pulled people out of poverty.

No one that has read The Wealth of Nations in it's entirety could come away with these conclusions from it.

> YouTube is fairly unavoidable, but for maximum communism use something like YouTube-dl, create torrents and seed them, and they'll never be taken down.

I recently got into mps-youtube since reinstalling my favorite flavor of GNU/Linux. You can use it to search, load playlists, and comment. Normally I just listen to music, but you can have it output video to mplayer. Figure I would link it to ya since you talked about YouTube-dl.

> No comrade, you don't understand. We should be able to make as many bad choices as we want, and have the people who made good choices support us!

Yes, because that's the socialist critique of capitalism isn't it?

Well no, it's not. People will make decisions in accordance with their material conditions. Marxian theory assumes a society in which individuals aspire to gain subsistence.

Classes are not defined according to who made "good" decisions and who made "bad" ones. Classes are nor defined according to material wealth. The liberal idea of a "low", "middle", and "rich" class lacks material analysis. Classes are defined by who controls the means of productions.

Those who control capital will always be at odds with labor. This is for the very simple reason that as society progresses it becomes cheaper to replace labor with what is known as constant capital. Constant capital may be thought of as machinery and means of production, so expansions of capital are expansions of such. Labor is the employment of a society.

Furthermore, it is not only cheaper to replace labor with constant capital but it becomes absolutely necessary due to the existence of business cycles.

>Can't afford a kid? WHO CARES! Have one anyway! As a matter of fact, have two kids! Only, make sure you aren't married, or in any form of long term relationship.

Yes, this is who needs to be shamed in society, those damned parents! It's not like we have houses to house their families in or food to feed them.

The worst part is that you can buy loads of those gold leaf sheets from Amazon for around $20. I've used them in art and grant projects. But the restaurants that use those sheets on their food hike the price up exponentially for each little inch as if the presence of the shimmer makes it instrinsically more valuable when it tastes like nothing and does nothing for you nutritionally or otherwise.

“A prince must always seem to be very moral, even if he is not.” - Niccolo Machiavelli

I’d imagine Machiavelli would be none too surprised to see men consolidating their power - that’s what massive accumulation of wealth truly is - at the expense of others. Then sharing enough to look good, but not so much that it threatens to destabilize the system that allows them to have such wealth.

He talks about people being whimsical in their allegiances based on what benefits them the most (referring to the masses), and it seems to me that if those in power believe that, it behooves them to take as much as they can as often as they can in preparation for the (inevitable?) changing of the tides, potentially against their favor.

He wrote in a time when many philosophers had idealized versions of leaders (think philosopher-king archetype of Plato), so the idea that those in power may not have the interests of the masses as their primary motivation was radical thinking at the time. I wonder why the Catholic Church banned The Prince?

Man, I need to re-read that ASAP.

Project Gutenberg’s Online Version of The Prince

If I can suggest Liquid Ass

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000OCEWGW/ref=cm_sw_r_sms_c_api_i_3pa9DbQQK4RJP

I have some in my garage right now https://i.imgur.com/fLnWsII.jpg

I can promise you with 100% confidence that shit can clear out a house.

It is, but the savings here are being overstated. It's not a product with a huge margin, and the prices they get are based on bulk buys. Here's 16 ounces of extract on Amazon. Here's enough beans to make 12 ounces.

I'd also suggest light rum over vodka, personally.

That quote is ostensibly credited to John Steinbeck (Wright quoted it in a book he authored) but it is incorrect.

The actual quote was ""I guess the trouble was that we didn't have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist."

If you're on Android, download YT Vanced, https://vancedapp.com/

Gives premium features (like removing ads, pnp, audio with screen off) as well as AMOLED dark mode, and sponsorblock support, and probably some other stuff.

Last Easter my husband and I were driving through a neighborhood where we used to live. "Look honey, they turned that old hotel into a drug treatment center!"

Bam, an hour later ads for drug addiction centers appear as ads right here on reddit!

The comments on the article are more examples.... http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/your-smartphone-listening-or-coincidence/

When I worked my last soul-crushing retail job, I used an app to track how much I was making the company pay me to drop a deuce. It was some small comfort to know that my laptop was mostly paid for by shitting on the clock.

"Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all." - Adam Smith's 'The Wealth of Nations'

Recently reading Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom and it really hit me when he said "Capitalism results in proportional representation; every man is free to vote for exactly what color tie he wants to wear."

And this guy never once stops to think, what if I don't want to wear any damn tie?

Although at the time of writing the work day was longer, Kropotkin made a good point in The Conquest of Bread that workers spend most of their time working or -- so that they are well rested for work -- sleeping. Despite this, their food and shelter, at least in most cases, is not subsidised or paid for by their employer. Dark value!

Yep. Chomsky regularly talks the reasoning behind Smith's ideas and how the goals of Enlightenment figures are usually at odds with the ideology of the business people who worship them. The best contradiction is probably Smith's assumed position on the division of labour. Quoting Chomsky (source):

>People read snippets of Adam Smith, the few phrases they teach in school. Everybody reads the first paragraph of The Wealth of Nations where he talks about how wonderful the division of labor is. But not many people get to the point hundreds of pages later, where he says that division of labor will destroy human beings and turn people into creatures as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human being to be. And therefore in any civilized society the government is going to have to take some measures to prevent division of labor from proceeding to its limits.

Smith also agreed with Marx on the LTV for fucks sake. It's pretty odd that right-wing libertarians decided to name him their champion.

Those harsh laws for whistleblowers are just depressing.

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/05/obama-has-sentenced-whistleblowers-to-31-times-the-jail-time-of-all-prior-u-s-presidents-combined.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/30/opinion/sunday/if-donald-trump-targets-journalists-thank-obama.html?_r=0

For context:

> They're lockboxes. If you know the combination you can open it and get a key out for a unit. Realtors use them when they've got open units to let prospective renters in, and I guess AirBnB hosts are doing the same thing now. It's not uncommon to see one or two outside an apartment building, but this is just...unbelievable.

Thanks to /u/robertbieber for the explanation. Here's an Amazon link to better illustrate what those things are.

but I need this cane to walk, because of my knees?

>Edit: and no, I'm not going to sell my video games to cover half of one week of medical expenses.

I don't know how much your games are worth but I doubt you would even get an hours care for your games.

>Above all, it became a puzzlement to his followers why wealth did not become concentrated solely in a tiny group of people in the advanced societies...

lol wut https://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/jan/20/oxfam-85-richest-people-half-of-the-world

It's like they're not even trying.

Very few musicians/film makers actually make any decent amount of money from YouTube or Spotify. According to this article, one Spotify play as an artist nets you about 0.1 cent, but let's call it 0.5 cents to be generous. Under this scheme, 10k streams nets you $50, 100k streams nets you $500 and one million streams gets you all the way up to $5000. You can see where this is going: you need to be a very popular artist indeed in order to make a significant amount of money from Spotify. A similar payout scheme is inevitably the case in places like YouTube. The reason for this is just because of the distribution of popularity among artists probably looks a lot like this. In other words, it's something like an exponential distribution, where most artists aren't very popular and a small number of artists have a huge following. The problem is that when you make people's incomes proportional to their popularity (which is essentially what Spotify et al do), then you inevitably end up with a system where a small minority of artists hoard the vast majority of the money. The move away from pirate music platforms like Napster to Spotify, iTunes, etc., has benefited the owner of the platforms, super popular artists, and their labels. The people who have not benefited are the overwhelming majority of artists, even those who have a decent fan base. The new monetised platforms concentrate wealth, they do not distribute it.

Looks like Denmark’s median salary is €2,321.00/month = ~$31,362.75/year

https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmXoypizjW3WknFiJnKLwHCnL72vedxjQkDDP1mXWo6uco/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_median_wage.html

US median personal income is $31,099/year

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

This was just a quick google search. Not sure of the accuracy of either link. Also, the US figure is personal income, not salary. It includes wages, investments etc.

Actually there is some good evidence for low corporate tax rates. It's actually one of the No-Brainer ideas Planet Money did a segment on. (Really good show, btw. Worth a listen.) The basic reason is that corporate taxes are taxing profits that could be reinvested in the company. That's good for the economy. The good thing about corporate taxes is that they tax the rich. But they do it in this clumsy indirect way. Instead, we should just tax the rich directly.

That's the real reason this bill is so bad. It lessens the load on corporations and on the rich. So the wealthy are winning twice.

Yes, they are. You, as well as everyone else on the planet who has talked to a Facebook user, have a &quot;shadow profile.&quot;

> How Can Facebook Have A Shadow Profile For Me? ...[A]ll you need is one friend to search for friends using their email account or one friend to install an app on their phone. There’s your Facebook shadow profile with your phone number and email addresses kept together to identify you later... If you have a Facebook account using your email or phone number, they will be linked together with information Facebook already has about you... Facebook says they don’t collect information about non-users. Do we believe that? Not really.

I really recommend reading the article (or another article on the Internet about it if you don't like the website.)

Also for more reasons to dislike Facebook see: https://www.reddit.com/r/AntiFacebook/wiki/index

> In the end the federal reserve and Treasury made money

The Federal reserve makes money off every dollar the government spends, it's a private bank though so that doesn't do anyone any good except for their already mega rich shareholders. Also the banks paid back their loans with money that was earmarked for the Small Business Lending Fund and the Community Development Capital Initiative, they lobbied to get the funds from these programs to cover their debts. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/bank-tarp_n_1335006

Real easy to google, but you wanted to be snarky instead. I'm assuming you've already unsubbed, so you'll need to get RES to filter the sub globally. If you're not on PC you'll have to dig into the bootstrap fund to pay for gold, there's a similar feature there.

You already knew that though, didn't you.

And hoping I ain't late I too want to plug Matrix.org and its client Riot, a decentralized messaging platform that, like with mastodon, you can host an instance of it and communicate with anyone at any instance, focused on privacy.

nothing new

White Trash

The wretched and landless poor have existed from the time of the earliest British colonial settlement to today's hillbillies. They were alternately known as “waste people,” “offals,” “rubbish,” “lazy lubbers,” and “crackers.” By the 1850s, the downtrodden included so-called “clay eaters” and “sandhillers,” known for prematurely aged children distinguished by their yellowish skin, ragged clothing, and listless minds.

Surveying political rhetoric and policy, popular literature and scientific theories over four hundred years, Isenberg upends assumptions about America’s supposedly class-free society––where liberty and hard work were meant to ensure real social mobility. Poor whites were central to the rise of the Republican Party in the early nineteenth century, and the Civil War itself was fought over class issues nearly as much as it was fought over slavery. Reconstruction pitted poor white trash against newly freed slaves, which factored in the rise of eugenics–-a widely popular movement embraced by Theodore Roosevelt that targeted poor whites for sterilization. These poor were at the heart of New Deal reforms and LBJ’s Great Society; they haunt us in reality TV shows like Here Comes Honey Boo Boo and Duck Dynasty. Marginalized as a class, white trash have always been at or near the center of major political debates over the character of the American identity.

https://www.amazon.com/White-Trash-400-Year-History-America/dp/0670785970/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&amp;qid=1548890204&amp;sr=8-1

&#x200B;

Divide and conquer remains an effective strategy. Get poor people thinking they'll be rich as soon as the OTHER poor people are fucked hard enough.

It's why The Art of War is a must-have accessory on almost every corporate sociopath's bookshelf.

Naomi Klein is an amazing writer, not only articles but books too. Her book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate is a phenomenal read. I got so much out of it I promptly ordered The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. She's an excellent writer and champion for a steady-state economy (among other things).

Great article though, thanks for sharing.

uBlock <em>Origin</em> is the one you want.

The other uBlock (which exists at "ublock.org") is a clone of uBlock Origin, except the guy that cloned it put a donate button to himself on the website.

>Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.

• Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

You're ignorant then. https://www.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_587e757be4b0cf0ae88068fe

Second, it's a fun fact that garbage food like snacks are cheaper than healthier alternatives. MUCH cheaper. The only exception is water. Water is literally the only "healthy" food/drink item that's cheaper than its unhealthy alternative. When you're poor as fuck, you but what's cheapest not what's healthiest.

You're also BSing about the iPhone X because that thing sold extremely poorly. Not that it matters - phones are a bad example of wealth because most people are on payment plans so they only end up costing like 15-30 a month. Most people are not paying full price on phones.

Piggybacking off of the point about using browser addons, you can get a list of privacy nd security enhancing addons over at https://prism-break.org or https://privacytools.io

Also, my fellow consumers, I recommend you only use FireFox, its derivatives, or Tor Browser in order to maximize your privacy.

There’s an actual game called No Trumps where you’re given a ridiculous quote and have to guess if Trump said it or not.

I got this at a used book store for $1 a long time ago and it was the most easily digestible economics book I’ve ever read. I’d highly recommend it for teenagers who have remote interests in economics.

Economics in Wonderland

He's the guy who wrote of the corporations of his time:

> The directors of such [joint-stock] companies, however, being the managers rather of other people's money than of their own, it cannot well be expected, that they should watch over it with the same anxious vigilance with which the partners in a private copartnery frequently watch over their own.... Negligence and profusion, therefore, must always prevail, more or less, in the management of the affairs of such a company.

Getting back to the point: WTF does Adam Smith have to do with corporations using the person-to-person connections social media is ostensibly designed to foster to spread propaganda favorable to their brands?

Does Adam Smith have an argument against blocking brand accounts on sight? If so, I didn't find it in my copy of The Wealth of Nations.

If you're interested in a good read, the truth appears to be much more interesting. Many early human societies switched between hierarchal and egalitarian social forms seasonally. In one season they would be widely dispersed small groups, in another they would be a concentrated collective, and depending on the culture one season would be hierarchal, even to the point of resembling a state, and the other highly egalitarian. Sometimes their religions would even change between seasons. They were on to something that we lost sight of.

https://www.academia.edu/13105162/_with_David_Graeber_Farewell_to_the_childhood_of_man_ritual_seasonality_and_the_origins_of_inequality._Journal_of_the_Royal_Anthropological_Institute_2015_The_Biennial_Henry_Myers_Lecture_

Ben Shapiro literally admits that he argues in bad faith. He wrote a book about it https://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Debate-Leftists-Destroy-Them-ebook/dp/B00JRJQ7Z2

This piece of shit should never be given a platform ever again to spew his dogshit opinions, because that's all they are. Anyone that unironically listens to Ben was probably a massive loser in school.

Ignorance??? I don't know, but it's messed up that people don't know more about a Whole Foods Plant Based diet.This book saved my dad's life. He is no longer diabetic and his hypertension is controlled now.

> Our current version of capitalism is essentially cronyism at this point and it's time we brought it to an end and return to the free market principles that Adam Smith described in his famous book, "The Wealth of Nations".

I'm going to say this as nicely as possible, you've never fucking read Smith.

Even Late-stage capitalism is a misnomer, this is just capitalism, working as intended. Capitalism needs the state in order to prosper, without the threat of violence that the state embodies capitalism could not have spread how it did. This is a system literally built on the displacement and slavery of peoples world-wide.

There's no included free option to disable these either. Here's a way to remove them.

Edit: changed stuff

>People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.

• Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

>A 17-year-old girl from Texas named as the 10th U.S. victim. She was driving a 2002 Honda Civic. Her death is attributed to shrapnel from the exploding airbag striking her neck. 

Is it a Samsung Smart TV? I recently discovered mine also would play random ads when the native Netflix app was running. Turns out there's a setting that you can set to turn off the ads

That should work, at the very least until they start to just force them down your throat. Though at that point you can go nuclear on ads and use Pi-Hole

Hope this helps!

The author is dead so he doesnt gain anything.

https://www.amazon.com/Journalists-Hire-How-Buys-News/dp/1944505458

$2,796.00 for a second hand book that is unavailable for sale is down right anti-capitalist aversion to make money.

That's exactly what I thought upon finding this site. It's like someone read The Shock Doctrine and ironically came up with a facsimile of it in the form of an investment strategy. This sub really captures the apocalyptic atmosphere of failing capitalism and how it can be so blatant.

That's because the reCAPTCHA service knows your computer (+ browser?) from previous visits and trusts you are a human. Try accessing these same websites by using the Tor browser for instance and you'll be challenged with some task (tagging the images in which you can see numbers, spotting the store fronts among a set of pictures, selecting all of the pictures containing a river or a lake, etc.).

Cancer is actually super serious and will probably never be "cured"

https://tapas.io/episode/58081

Definitely a ton of examples of what you are talking about though.

Adam Smith (the father of modern economics) wrote two brilliant books on what capitalism was supposed to be. The first was "The Wealth of Nations", which is basically the capitalist Bible. About 15 years before that he wrote a lesser known book titled "The Theory Of Moral Sentiments" which explained that capitalism could only really function if it was unofficially regulated by social stigma and Christian morals that prevented people from taking advantage of others. Unsurprisingly that particular thought process hasn't been taken to heart, and capitalism was left to fester.

I know you're being facetious, but this line of reasoning is trotted out so often by conservatives that I find myself having to quote the father of modern capitalism, Adam Smith:

From "The Wealth of Nations": > By necessaries I understand not only the commodities which are indispensably necessary for the support of life, but whatever the custom of the country renders it indecent for creditable people, even of the lowest order, to be without. A linen shirt, for example, is, strictly speaking, not a necessary of life. The Greeks and Romans lived, I suppose, very comfortably though they had no linen. But in the present times, through the greater part of Europe, a creditable day-labourer would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt, the want of which would be supposed to denote that disgraceful degree of poverty which, it is presumed, nobody can well fall into without extreme bad conduct. Custom, in the same manner, has rendered leather shoes a necessary of life in England. The poorest creditable person of either sex would be ashamed to appear in public without them. In Scotland, custom has rendered them a necessary of life to the lowest order of men; but not to the same order of women, who may, without any discredit, walk about barefooted. In France they are necessaries neither to men nor to women, the lowest rank of both sexes appearing there publicly, without any discredit, sometimes in wooden shoes, and sometimes barefooted. Under necessaries, therefore, I comprehend not only those things which nature, but those things which the established rules of decency have rendered necessary to the lowest rank of people. His point is that poverty is not to be measured absolutely, but relative to the society and times that it exists.

"The poor" might have refrigerators now, which they did not have had in 1776, but it is disingenuous to suggest that means anything relative to living in America in 2017.

Here's one with 90%.

https://edition.cnn.com/2017/01/24/health/flint-water-crisis/index.html

That was more than a year ago. It's also important that to remember that these limits are meant to make drinking the water fine for babies. For adults lead is a magnitude less dangerous.

Same here, but I imagine users of Amazon Echo might be tempted to; they already paid to bug their own house so why not pay to let the same guys go into the house as well.

https://brave.com/

New web browser founded by Brendan Eich (same guy behind Mozilla Firefox).

Brave is focused on ad/tracker blocking by default, so you don't have to download any additional extensions.

I love that they promote capitalism with a complete misquote of Aristotle's, Nicomachean Ethics, which is itself an argument for good and prosperity of one's own state. While money making seen as the opposite of the good and benefit of a state.

Where he states in his opening thesis,

"The Life of Money-making is a constrained[2] kind of life, and clearly wealth is not the Good we are in search of, for it is only good as being useful, a means to something else."
[2] Literally 'violent'; the adjective is applied ... in the sense of 'constrained' and 'not natural'

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0054%3Abekker+page%3D1096a

Adam Smith did have a book about about a theory of moral sentiments.

That isn't at all an accurate summary of The Wealth of Nations. A paragraph long observation in a hundreds of pages long book mentions that bakers produce bread to sell it (astonishing) gets taken out of context to mean that Adam Smith is a free market cheerleader.

If he has insurance the individual out of pocket maximum (aka maximum amount he would be forced to pay before insures covers it at 100%) is $7,150. The $100k grossly exaggerates how much he is personally responsible for if he has any insurance whatsoever. https://www.healthcare.gov/glossary/out-of-pocket-maximum-limit/

Recent versions, maybe. The active ingredients in Spice & K2 have changed dramatically as manufacturers evade bans on synthetic cannabinoids as drug analogues over the years, regularly shifting to new research chemicals before they're identified & scheduled by regulatory agencies.

K2 available in the US around 2010 mostly featured JWH-018, which did not cause the slumping you see in the video. When this was banned, these products switched to other cannabinoids that were later reported to cause seizures in some users. The blends most commonly identified today are laced with 5F-ADB, which is also a CB¹ receptor agonist but is much more toxic.

If you read his books you’ll see several are semi-autobiographical novels where he goes from menial job to menial job collecting just enough money to sustain his addiction to alcohol and pay for some food and shelter while attempting to be a writer. That was a possible life back in the 1960s but probably isn’t now. Eventually he got paid by a publisher to write full time and spoke about how if you want to be happy don’t work 9-5 jobs. Heres some more stuff on it.

I loved Robert Crumb's take on The Book of Genesis

The accurate translation (or rather the accurate illustrations) managed to upset the Chrisian Institute..

Average mortgage debt is $172,806 [1] Average student debt is $49,042 [1] Average income (for those under 65) is $46,409 [2]

I'm not sure how accurate those numbers are though. So, y'know. Depends on how you by budget your money, I guess.

Sources

1 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-15/average-credit-card-debt-16k-total-debt-133k-where-do-you-fit-in

1. https://www.fool.com/retirement/2017/01/02/americans-average-income-by-age-how-do-you-compare.aspx