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No it isn’t. But orange face is certainly helping the nefarious rich grow their empires while you are distracted!

Go Back to México Carlitos, USA is for free and sovering individuals

Would love a paid vacay to Cabo San Lucas, since I work like a robot ..but it will cost you a big zap that you probably cannot afford! 🤨

Stop begging For sats

But you are the billionaires… right?

Warmth View quoted note →

Tank man was and is still my HERO

I like this view. Who cares what they say. The city will win, as it has done for centuries, as an incredible meeting place of commerce Fascinating to witness though

i bet you a number of nostriches do

He’s Muslim

I bet some Pennsylvania militiaman's dying wish at the Battle of Brooklyn Heights was for this exact moment, when an Indian-Ugandan could impose economic communism with a side of sharia justice

He said those words exactly.

Someone is missing the difference between private groups and government.

Where? Point them out.

Little confusing, care to explain?

This is a joke, right?

Sorry if I broke the echo chamber

Not an echo chamber. Just primarily people who are intelligent and understand history.

Nice with the insults. Have a good night.

🤷‍♂️ It’s a reasonable conclusion

You didn’t get insulted you big baby

Reading comprehension

why?

I support his policy, for the most part.

Where was the insult?

It wasn’t from you. I consider implying someone is unintelligent an insult 🤷‍♂️

On the internet that rates about a 0.3 out of 10 on the insult scale.

Yeah I get that. I just end interaction when people start with insults. No reason to discuss any further with people doing that. Nothing productive can come from it.

He's proposed a wide range of things, from cutting red tape for food carts to free childcare and exit taxes for people who want to leave NYC. What policy proposals of his do you like?

My political views, for practical purposes, are generally democratic socialist. I’d prefer to go a lot further than that but it’s just not realistic. I support some supposed “right wing” policy though, like enforcing immigration laws and opposing trans stuff as it relates to minors. I know that’s kind of vague overall, but I don’t really feel like going through his platform line by line lol.

Zap

I don't think he's bright enough to be playing 5D chess. He's just a soppy liberal. Hardline Muslims will hold their nose and vote for him to grow their base and interests, then replace him with a fundamentalist.

100%. Sworn in on the Quran

Oh cool if Qatar state television says it then it must be true

They always claim they're not communist or socialist becase they don't fit the definition 100%. Nobody ever does. So I call them all forced-collectivists. Just saying collectivist doesn't deliver the same punch, because it implies everyone is on board, when the truth is most people are being forced in to it.

Exactly. See my other post in this thread.

That sounds exactly like Australia. 🫣🧡

organized religions are agency consuming collectivist systems.

If a push for re-migration happens in the West. After migrants have been treated as 1st class citizens for years in the West, what happens to the native homelands? What is the net product? Is it a viable mechanism of low effort colonial expansion?

I follow him on Bluesky, seems like a nice guy, who thinks about the poor people. He is kind I think. Maybe Kindness is about not being so focused on the self (the individual) and hence the word collective maybe.

lol nah

Kindness is a great characteristic. When applied on the personal level - giving generously to those less fortunate - it's commendable. When applied on the population level - unless that population is a small tribe - it requires theft and violence. The good thing is that the less you have of the latter, the more room there is for the former. (Even though I totally disagree with most of his policies, I was very sympathetic to Mamdani in this election for various reasons. And I sympathize with his supporters who are fed up with the current system.)

By theft if you mean taxation that is already happening and he is advocating for using taxes properly for better public services, so it makes sense. If the issue is about taxation and system itself then it’s a different topic , nothing to do with him I think.

If he's not advocating for more taxation, great. That wasn't my impression. But in general, I find the idea of kindness via coercion to be very problematic, so even if there's no change in taxation the rhetoric is troubling.

Oh yea true, I forgot that he is going to raise taxes for the top 1-5% richest I think. Anyway, I do understand the idea - whenever things are forced, we don’t like it and also makes us dislike things that indirectly cause this forcing (poverty, inequality, food subsidies, etc etc ) and thus reduces kindness in the world. But also, as long as the concept/tool of “taxation” exists as a system balancing act, guys like him are needed. Discussions to usurp forcing tools completely from our systems is a different topic - this has been my main point that we should not misplace our disappointments or anger.

but - fun fact- income taxes in the US were also introduced as only for the richest Americans (upper 3%)

Humans don’t seem to let go of money but the system needs money to be redistributed to keep the consumption economy going. And so Taxation (and UBI in future) will exist to keep the monetary economic system alive. The only freedom in my opinion is to evolve the system into something non-monetary resource based system.

How do you envision a resource-based system working?

This is hard to answer because 1. I don’t exactly know how it will function. 2. It will loosely be based on gift economy values. What I am mostly confident of is the path towards such an economy which will inevitably take us towards a new system and reveal it’s exact workings. The path I have in mind is an application of an ancient meditation method called Vipassana to the economy. Basically in this meditation, the root cause of suffering is identified to be our cravings and aversions. I think the economic system suffers from the same (Cravings for infinite growth). When I apply it to economy I got this : Start zero-profit business in the food sector. And hence I have a plan document here if you’re interested:

Google Docs

The Vipassana Grocery Store

The Vipassana Grocery Store Introduction: The Economy is a Body We often treat the economy as a math problem, but let's think of it as a biological...

This is incredibly sweet. I read the whole thing! It seems to me that something like this might work in a small community and in fact is probably not too far in spirit from how some tribes organized activities and goods.

Thank you :) It’s a simple grocery store idea and so, I think it will work anywhere. This is more like a consumer food coop and when Food coops can exist why not this everywhere? Normal stores - Try to Maximise & keep all profit Coops - Share it with members as dividends Zero profit store - Gives it back to customers it took it from. Simple unexplored business model and doable I think. And thanks for read it 🙏👍

It just seems to me that you'd need a lot of people on board to not take advantage of it. I'm not quite sure how someone would take advantage of it but it's hard to imagine it working at scale. This is in fact pretty close to what co-ops do, right? employees are paid but there's no owner that profits. Someone who organizes it would take a salary? (ironically, I believe that grocery stores are one of the lowest-margin businesses out there so even though I like your analogy of breath in vipassana to food in society, groceries are not actually a very high-profit business) On the subject of money: one of the things that's interesting when you study the history of currencies is that humans didn't use them in very small groups. There was just no need. But with trade among tribes, currencies tended to emerge naturally as a way to facilitate exchanges. You might find the study of money quite interesting.

It was hard for me to imagine how Vipassana Meditation centers which don't charge a penny, still exist and not only exist , they grow, Now they have 267 own centers world wide offering 10 day courses for free. The surprising part is once you finish a course, there is no one "asking" you to donate. Sometimes people have to really ask around where the donation counter is. That is the effect of something that is offered selflessly and we living in a system built upon selfishness have forgotten that power. And a selfless organization isn't playing the game of "who is taking advantage of whom" - that game is only true inside a system based on selfishness. Yes, there are paid employees and also volunteers in co-ops. Both are possible. You would be surprised regarding margins. This is the recent report on retail sector / Supermarkets in Germany (As its in German, maybe some AI can answer your questions once you upload and ask it): 📄.pdf In summary, there is a kind of monopoly happening in Germany, these supermarkets squeeze the farmers, food processors and also charge customers a lot as they don't pass on the savings. And guess who is the wealthiest person in Germany, owner of a grocery chain, Aldi. I have read the history of money and those examples. Somehow the assumption is that we would go back to that era when the topic of a moneyless economy comes because it is hard to imagine one and so as I said it is hard to describe for me the final evolved form of the economy without money. I just try to kickstart this simple zero-profit grocery project and see where it goes 😄 .. I know it wont transform the entire economy in my lifetime, but maybe after 75-100 years - just laying the foundations, sowing the seed for a different kind of economy :-)

I can see how much you have thought about this! I don't know enough about Germany, but in the US most monopolies exist because of the way corporations lobby the government for rules and regulations that work in their favor and basically create a moat around them that makes competition almost impossible. I think the most damaging monopoly is of money itself. Only central banks can print money, and the use of each nation's currency is enforced by violence (or the threat of violence). I can imagine that without that, different forms of currency or trade could emerge naturally.

True, it is a really competitive space but its food 🥺, its life, we need to claim it back and make it free from profit. No matter what the currency is (Even Bitcoin), we know how profit ruins any industry, I think this is clear to the world today. So though I agree theres a monopoly of money but I don’t see how a new form of the same idea (ofcourse free from govt n central authorities) has a different effect on humans in running the same services/businesses , won’t we want more of bitcoin , will profit maximising disappear, will hiding scientific research to make profit go away, will businesses suddenly care , will kindness exponentially increase? I dont see how.

I guess I don't agree that profit itself is bad. What's dangerous is when some people have the leverage of monopoly to impose their will on everyone else. Without that centralization, you still have human greed (on a continuum - people who want a second set of clothes for their children all the way up to people who want 30 yachts) but you don't have money printing as a tool for the most powerful (who I think tend to be on the pathological side of that profit-seeking range). So personally I don't think that profit ruins business; it's monopoly and centralization that ruins business and society. Competition has become a dirty word. I'm not sure why - because it feels harsh or mean? between siblings or partners it can be negative, I suppose but in society it's the basis for so much that works well. I buy little apple seedlings for our land, and I look for varieties that have been selected over the years for resistance to certain diseases, etc. The nurseries that sell them compete with each other to grow better trees, and everyone wins when there are more of those better apple trees out in the world. It means more apples per tree, more food (which, as you say, is life) in the world.

Reminds me of a recent song I wrote/made using my Philosophical notes on Evolution as a Greedy Optimizing algorithm vs Conciousness + Me humming the tune + AI putting it all together, please give it a listen 😃 :

Podverse

We are nature rolling the dice - We are Nature

So .. I think money and its direct consequence, profit, played a very important role - lots of trade, cultural exchange, etc. Just like, Competition has played a very important role in Evolution and therefore Humans exist today. So no, Im not classifying any of them as categorically bad. I now remember a famous quote "Nature is cruel, but we don't have to be" by Dr. Temple Grandin. By the way, I remeber it from a really good movie based on her life, worth checking out. So, Yes competition, money and therfore profit are not bad. They were needed in the past. But now they're not well suited to be dominant mechanics or the soul of our economic system, we need to evolve out of it too. If change is the only thing constant, then maybe we must entertain a bit of change. And I think our economic system needs change. Let me know how you like the song 😃

What year is it in your opinion? Is it 2007?

I'm not sure I understand the question? I think Georgie and Mamdani are wrong in this thinking. My takeaway (and perhaps Luke's point) is that even a popularish republican US president that didn't want to follow free-market principles was wrong. Also, not sure we've had a free-market in America for decades. Different politicians just tilt the playing field in favor of different beneficiaries/lobbyists/bribers.

yeah well, collectivism inherently touches people’s shit as they think its property of the collective.. lol.