You should checknout SMyths, fan edits that remove the cutting back and forth between stories so you get one myth at a time, and that cut out the repetitive narration meant for people joining mid-episode. Much nicer viewing

Yeah, the definition of “Productive” is all sorts of wacky when you consider that, by the numbers, the people doing high-frequency stock trading are some of the most “productive” people on the planet, because they manage to hoard so much money to themselves.

Meanwhile, the people actually providing goods and services that make people’s lives better and create new things, those people are “unproductive”, because they don’t get filthy rich off their honest work.

The real reason we are not “productive” is that foreign investors are paying us to do the hard work of extracting resources (lumber, ore), or generating new research (we have MANY top universities), but then demanding that the money made from refining those resources or selling those idea goes to them, in other nations (typically the US or China)

The problem is that’s literally just money laundering?

They are using a shell corporation and bullshit liscencing fee to cover over the fact that this transaction is and should be illegal.

Like, the idea here is that the church is not allowed to donate to a political figure, so they’ve set up a shell corp in the middle. The church pays $60 to the shell corp, who sends back 30 cents worth of paper, and then passes on 59.70 to Trump as a “licencing fee”, which is obviously just going to be spent on his campaign.

Another emulator. Iirc some of the code running Nintendo’s own retro gaming products was pirated FROM Ryiujinx

He’s like the third guy to do this in a year, big money doesn’t want you to know about it

We’ve removed critical functionality from the operating system because our boss didn’t want more than 6 buttons on screen at any time. Sorry the system is 100x more difficult to use!

Actually, in most cases having fewer police on the streets leads to LESS petty crime.

This is because cops tend to spook people, so everyone (including the innocent, law abiding citizens) will leave areas that are patrolled.

This creates the ideal scenario for crime: there are few/no witnesses around for a while after the cops come by.

In pretty much every case I am aware of where cops go on strike and stop doing regular beat patrols, crime goes DOWN.

Yep. The goal of all of this this is to force people into straight marriages because that’s all that matters to religious zealots.

They know that if kids practice safe sex they won’t get pregnant and ‘shot gun marriage’ rates will go down.

They know that if kids discover their gender or sexual identity is non-cis, non-het, or non-monogamous that they might not wind up having a traditional marriage.

The know that people who only have 1 partner in their lifetime are much, much less likely to successfully leave an abusive partner, meaning there’s a higher rate of divorce if people learn that having multiple partners in your life is normal and okay.

They know that kids who are educated about healthy sex and consent in relationships are less likely to go along with a child marriage or an assigned marriage.

They know that removing sex ed means more teen pregnancy, more intimate partner abuse, and more child-rape. For religious people whose only goal is to get young women into marriages, those are good things.

Example: An actual elected official in the state of Missouri defending his stance that “Parents Rights” includes the ability to marry off their kids to adults at age 12, because “Do you know any kids that have been married at age 12, I do, and guess what, they’re still married”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9H6UJ-uCrgc

These people legitimately believe that it’s morally correct to kidnap a 12 year old girl and force her to be entirely subserviant to, and dependent on, some pedophile husband who controls everything they do, because them being trapped in that awful situation means that there’s one more marriage in the world.

Shouldn’t the black king be on a white square and the queen on her own colour?

Object oriented programming encourages a number of anti-patterns

Nah, no way, you’re getting free XP out of the cutting.

Grocery stores know that when people are struggling to afford to eat, they try to save some money by going for the cheaper brands, which are typically owned by the store. Since the store control all the prices, they are able to jack up the price of everything, making their customers go “wow, food is expensive, better try to bargain hunt more”, and suddenly you’re not buying the competitor bread, now you’re buying Western Family / No Name, and they profit both from the price hikes AND because they grow their market share on first-party goods.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giffen_good

It’s fucked up that they are allowed to both make AND sell the same products on the same shelves as their competitor’s goods, but that’s because our antitrust sucks.

There is NO downside for the store when they make you starve, you still gotta eat to live so you’ll pay anything, and these things are all owned by the same handful of megacorps.

Socialist and communist economies actually tend to grow faster and be more prosperous than Capitalist ones… Until the US kills the government and blockades the ports.

My dude, everything is politics. Especially things like “I want a free internet” or “I don’t want to be drowning in ads” which is a huge part of the appeal of Lemmy are both DEEPLY political stances.

Given how many politicians have advanced law or business degrees, it’s not crazy that they could earn more by turning to private industry.

Hell, one of the fastest ways to qualify for a six-figure job is to run for political office, fail, and use that experience to get a job with a lobbying or PR firm.

Exactly, articles like this are just confusing the meaning of class.

What makes you a member of “the working class” is that you are forced to sell your labour to survive. Fullstop. A tradesperson, and a lawyer, and a burgerflipper are all in the same class from that point of view.

As soon as your accumulated capital becomes large enough that you earn your income only as a result of your capital, then you are no longer working class, and that’s when your interests diverge from the average worker and average homebuyer or renter.

A landlord with no other job, the major shareholders of a profitable business, a wealthy heir, those people make their money by siphoning value off of other people’s work without actually needing to spend their time on work.

Long story short: I have no problem with a 50 year old plumber with a large family who legitimately uses that 4500 sqft house.

My issue is with Karen who used dad’s money to buy 8 properties to airBnB them and insists she get special treatment because her business risks didn’t pan out.

This is just the neoliberal way, we’re decades deep into the idea that all solutions to any problem must involve directing public funds into private hands, usually those of the wealthy.

At this point, the concept of allowing public-sector employees to use publicly-owned equipment to take publicly-owned materials and provide necessary services for the public who vote for and fund the government is tantamount to heresy. In their minds, money should only go one way, from the government, to a select few private hands. We have at least three generations of bureaucrats and politicians whose minds are so warped by this practice that they cannot conceive of any way to help people or really implement any policy without giving some private business a chance to run a profit off of it.

Think about it, try to come up with anything government has directly built since 1990. Not talking about subcontracted, or with “funding provided as a private/public partnership”, that the government has directly built and run. Used to be that the government would actually employ people to do things like GO Transit, or Ontario Place, or the LCBO, but that era is long, long passed.

Now do the reverse, think about all the things that used to be publicly owned but have now been given away to some billionaire. Air Canada, Petro Canada, Potash Corp, Highway 407, Telus, Hydro One. The list is huge, and a lot of these are very profitable. Imagine if we still owned them? Imagine what we could do re: climate change if we still owned Petro Canada and Hydro One? Or what our internet services might look like if we owned Telus? We gave away billions of dollars of value and significant strategic assets, mortgaging our future.

In addition to the direct costs of all the money that could have been put back into the budget (or the cost savings provided to the average taxpayer by not requiring that these companies take massive profit margins), we are also losing government capabilities: think about all the people, all the equipment, all the buildings and services that used to be directly delivered but now are parasitized by rent-seeking private companies looking to extract as much value as they can from us before we die. Think about old-age homes, hospital services, corporate landlords that hold the lease on former government buildings, contractors paid instead of municipal works departments.

The government won’t act because it would mean admitting that the neoliberal ideology that’s made a small number of people very rich was wrong.

This video covers the UK, but it’s all similar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58t-YH7DURk

Actually, because the highly paid people tend to be REALLY highly paid, a LOT more than 50% of people earn less.

Absolutely ridiculous. Why are we punishing people who are trying hard to conserve their resources and use less energy? The carbon tax is revenue neutral, if you burn less than the average person you are BETTER OFF with a higher tax. This is a GOOD tax for the poor, and the cons are using this wedge to hurt them

Exactly, and because of the revenue-neutral nature of the Carbon pricing, this hurts all Canadians, and especially hurts the Canadians that are poor and/or care about being efficient and conserving resources.