RareGodzilla

This is actually a bit of popular misconception. While the fins fought really well they did in the end give up all the teritiories that the USSR wanted them too.

I got 36 points. I'm a bit proud of myself, if I took this test 6 years ago I would have gotten "marked anxiety" no doubt. Pretty good growth, but there's still some way to go.

Individuals can. You're an individual so that's good news for you. But the masses can never do that. The system depends on an army of poor wageslaves working overtime for penauts. If everyone did this actualized thing with not spending money on stupid shit, eating healthy home cooked food, and doing their best to get ahead in life and the system would colapse. There would be a huge recession since the economy depends on you spending your money on stupid shit and wageslaving your life away. You can improve your situation with working hard, but that should not be a valid excuse for the system not growing and improving itself. In fact you should strive for being part of the solution once you manage to get ahead and get some power and influence.

Mede me full of energy, I would dance for hours and with all the girls that were there. Later had the best sleep in a long time. Next day I felt the need to do more of it, that shit is addictive as fuck even after doing just two lines. That was the moment I decided never to touch that shit again.

To some extent, Leo is right, but it's exactly this blind obedience to authority, which might really have been useful at some point, that brought them to the horrible situation that was the Second World War. Which only brought death and poverty for the people. Clearly, authority needs to have checks and balances to prevent abuse and corruption.

I don't think they are inherently the same. The main problem is that their campaing is financed by the same people. That's why there is little difference in terms of foreing policy.

You need stage orange or at least well developed blue society for capitalism to work. In stage red society it won't work. It's kinda like how USA attempted to enforce democracy on stage red/blue countries like Afganistan. It can't work, people don't want it and they are not ready. Same with socialism, it can't work on a stage red or even blue society. People need a higher stage of development in orded for the system to work, socialism is inherently based on solidarity, if everyone is just attempting to give into the system as little as possible and take as much as possible it becomes impossible for the system to work. Even Karl Marx wrote that socialism would come as a step after capitalism. Historic irony had it that socialists only won in semi-feudal countries.

@Something Funny In a way I agree. It's true that being a hot woman comes with tons of advantages. There's an obvoius advantage to having very high sexual value by mere virtue of your looks. However it comes with a serious downside. Your looks are to some extend luck based. Makeup, fashion, and fitness does a lot, but at the end of a day a 10, wearing a potato sack will be more attractive than a 5 doing her best to look good. Looks also degrade really fast. So I must imagine that loosing your greatest asset in the first third of your life feels kinda lame. As a man there's greater wiggle room to improve. Even an ugly man has insane value if he has status, charisma and personality. And all these you can increase up to 10 with hard work. You can also improve your looks, doesn't help us much, but it's an option. I imagine that it's fair to say that an avrage woman has a better deal in 2023 than an avrage male. However I would rather take my chances with being an avrage looking guy, knowing that I can imrpove my value with hard work.

My heart goes out to artists who are facing the reality of A.I. threatening their jobs. I understand that it sucks, especially right now that we're facing roaring inflation. But the truth is that A.I. is here to stay. You're not going to stop it by boycotting it, nor will you be able to ban it. If you do, the E.U. and China will have their own A.I. and then you're just going to get run over by the wheels of history. Instead of trying to fight the inevitable, we should be thinking about how this technology can improve humanity and ultimately bring us into the next stage of human development where wage slavery is no longer necessary. Althiugh I must admit that it's a huge historical irony that automation will take the jobs of artists, poets, and writers before those of bathroom cleaners, garbage man, sewer men, builders, etc. We always thought it would be the other way around. It's funny how life works.

I think that in the longterm it will free us. We will have time to fish a little in the morning, read some philosophy during the day, and do some painting in the evening. No wagie mcjobs, no hard manual labor, and no silly barista jobs. But this is really far away, far beyond our working lives. While technological innovation is fast, it's not that fast. To some extent, automation also creates new jobs, and with an aging population and a lower birthrate, it actually evens itself out. Take farming, for example. It took 15 people to harvest the field manually with sicles. Today, it takes 1-2 people to operate the machinery to does that. You'd think that this means that there would be 10 unemployed people for every two people doing harvest. But that's not the case. The farmer no longer has 12 children, and the fact that the modern tractor exists means that there are tons of other jobs needed to build and maintain tractors. As far as musicians go, there will be less commercial need for musicians. I wouldn't pay a random artist to make some random background music for a YouTube video if an A.I. could do it just fine for free. But at the same time, A.I. is really far from replacing a live performance. Which is also the place where most money is made in the industry.

This is a good example of the populism that led to Brexit. Migration actually increased post-Brexit. The immigration argument is just a way they scared the normal working people into voting for it. But the economic elites don't actually care what nationality the workers making their profits is.

I find Brexit a nice example of a collective ego reacting to change. The UK is no longer the colonial empire that it used to be. It's merely a regional power that had to work together with the EU. Being in the EU, certain compromises need to be made. The UK did quite well in the EU. Its geographical position and the very accessible English language combined with the EU common market gave it a really good position within the Union. Despite all the advantages, the fact is that the poorer EU states also get a vote and need to be taken into account. In the EU, the richer countries pay more money into the common coffers compared to the poor ones. This is key to keeping the EU working, because clearly the poorer states can't compete with the developed ones on the free market. The developed states actually profit from this. It would be very hard to export to places like Romania if they don't have developed infrastructure. On the long run, the highly developed states are still better off, but on the short run, it's easy to understand how a random British worker can be manipulated into thinking that the poorer states are just leaching off the UK. Despite the UK doing well within the EU, it's still not that hard to understand that it's not that easy to cope with the fact that you're just a piece in the puzzle instead of a great empire. I see Brexit as a natural reaction to that. The UK's political leadership caved in to the demands of the Brexit camp but had no vision as to what exactly a post-Brexit UK would be like. Which has manifested itself in this political crisis of changing leadership with no clear long term goal. The biggest irony is that a move that wanted to give the UK its sovereignty back is making the UK cave to the influence of its former colony, the USA. When they were in the EU, they were bothered by regulations made by the EU parliament, while now the US is making them change their own regulations to suit that of the American market.

How certain are you about this? Will you move to some third world unaligned south hemisphere country to avoid a nuclar strike?

I think the host is overgeneralizing the situation. Someone like an artist or a designer can maybe contribute personally to the work and even have a "relationship" with the company's leadership. Since they might have good individual bargaining power, they might not need a union personally. A McDonald's wage slave can only have so much individual input. Unions are very important for these kinds of jobs. Individual barging power of a garbageman is almost 0. However, if all of the garbagemen go on strike, the system stops working. This kind of profession needs collective bargaining. The host compares the workplace to a relationship, seeing a union as being unfaithful. But keep in mind that it's important that the power is balanced in a romantic couple. We don't allow 16 year olds to date their teachers because we are aware that it's not a healthy relationship if one spouse has such power over the other. In business, it's only fair that both parties negotiate in good faith on an equal footing. I also really don't understand this sentiment that people having more free time and better working conditions is a net negative. Bad health caused by overwork is a net negative for society. Bad relationships caused by a lack of time to socialize are a net negative.

Is there really nothing we can do to make our western governemets ease the sanctions imposed on countries like cuba?