Not just that, Nordic sex workers have a combination of problems in the various countries, like not being able to rent private housing because that’s seen as profiting off sex workers (pimping) and various other ancillary limitations surrounding that.

You’re better off fully decriminalizing first, and then later probably creating some sort of government sanctioned organization made up of sex workers and customers, to regulate the industry.

I feel like communism has been conflated with ‘tankie’ for a long while thanks to the red scares. “Tankie” seems to be a more recent (or at least, recently resurrected) term that is attempting to split the authoritarianism away from ‘communism’ and bring that latter term back to its roots as ‘classless, stateless, cashless society’.

But also, you can often avoid using loaded terms like communism. Personally I like to just double down on “democracy” since it literally means rule by people and has positive connotations. If you add more and more rule by people, eventually you get communism.

communism-rebuild switch

Subsidies are an incredible tool when used well, like when they funded a bunch of utility cooperatives that electrified rural US. Maybe you’re asking why we should because propping up the car industry when public transit and bike infrastructure should be subsidized instead, rather than challenging subsidies, though.

No surprise that a housing cooperative is doing a 4 day work week. It’s so sad that the 2010s’ political push for more cooperatives died with the change to Kier’s Labour in the UK. We could’ve had far more democratic businesses today that would be more open to trialing 4 day work weeks - actual risk taking, unlike our current dictatorial bosses who have to be dragged into the future while they wait for others to take the risks they’re too cowardly to take.

This is about specific sites’ abnormally high methane pollution, and China is in the data set but does not have as many “super-emitters” according to this. Here’s an example where China’s listed in the linked Sky article:

Coal is also a problem with one facility in Shanxi, China, peaking at around 181 tonnes an hour last February.

However, they go on to rank the countries in the article as such:

Kayrros’s data shows Turkmenistan had higher methane emissions than any other nation, followed by the United States, India, Russia and Pakistan.

So the answer is simply that China, along with the EU, does not have as many “super-emitters” to worry about. Other regions do, and that means they can target those sites specifically to reduce their methane emissions now that the data clearly highlights them.

That’s not what we were talking about here. We were talking about building enough housing to be able to guarantee it for everyone. That’s not rent control, that’s just investing in our housing supply.

The topic of this conversation follows from your statement:

Which is bad for landlords (including the ones that work in legislation)

i.e. landowners and people in power hold sway over the decision making process and are keeping us away from legislation that houses people. Unless I misread you. That’s why I brought up another example.

Rent control doesn’t work, the economists are correct (Who woulda thunk it, but studying the way prices are determined is a valid field of academic study). Or rather it does work for some people but makes life harder for others, and isn’t nearly as good of an approach as people think.

You clearly did not read the link, the person who wrote it is a PhD economist. Also, using one solution as a way to fix housing is naive, when we could (and should be, it’s horribly unaffordable for average people in urban areas, where most people in western countries live, already) be using many, including rent control.

Also economists (who are usually wealthy enough to be able to landlord if they want to do so)… which means they’re financially incentivised to hold right wing economic views like “rent control doesn’t work, 9/10 economists recommend against it!” like it’s a toothpaste advert and economists who challenge that don’t get much spotlight in the mainstream.

“A liberal* is someone who opposes every war except the current war and supports all civil rights movements except the one that’s going on right now.”

* not to be confused with “left wing” as the term is often used in the US

NL is one of the best countries in the world.

That can change. Norway is also one of the best countries in the world, but they’ve been doing the same thing I see happening in the UK: not funding health care adequately, police corruption scandals, refusing to decriminalise and legalise drugs, not really using the oil fund money enough (unlike Alaska (US) which pays dividends to its citizens from its oil fund, not exactly a left-wing US state compared to Norway), welfare benefits being reduced, the Norwegian state used to fund housing coop development which led to 20% of our population living in democratic housing but isn’t doing that anymore and now we’re in a housing crisis, inequality has grown over the last 50 years, union density has reduced over the last 50 years, …

When we’re talking about things going to shit we mean relative to where we were before. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot I wish we had in the UK that Norway has, but the trajectory looks oddly similar to what happened and is happening in the UK. We’re currently boiling frogs and because things are going to shit so slowly it’s harder to notice. Like, so much counter evidence to what we’re doing exists around the world if we simply look at how other areas are solving problems. For example, Finland is the only country in the EU where homelessness isn’t increasing and housing prices have actually decreased* - wanna guess how they did that? (hint: the state gave people free housing)

* at least until recently, housing markets are weird now because of the inflation, but theirs were falling before that

You don’t have to support Epic’s ultimate goal of increasing their profit, to understand that the monopoly power this lawsuit is fighting is even worse. Apple and Google should not be able to gatekeep what kind of apps we get to use - any argument in favour of them basically boils down to “they let us avoid malicious apps” but you can have democratic orgs decide that instead of oligarchical cartels. And I don’t necessarily mean the government, although government regulation would be a welcome move, I mean even more democratic:

In Finland, some of the largest grocery chains (think Walmart) are collectively, democratically owned - in other words, they operate in the same boring, stable, functional, and efficient manner as other grocery shops without being undemocratic(!). The average Finnish person has say in what products are being stocked, can be elected managers of stores, and the coop gives members 5% of their spending back (i.e. revenue sharing), among other things. [1] For reference, in the UK, we get a measly 1% back from grocery shop purchases, or from Amex with their cashback.

Sure, Epic won’t give us this democratic org, but they do help us challenge the gatekeepers that are way more invested in working against giving us anything like this.

[1] https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2023/10/11/inside-the-walmart-of-finland/

Makes you think if we had some crazy-ass lottery based system where a few people out of the population would be randomly selected for a week-long placement in prison, the fear of being on the receiving end of that would turn the prison system into a Norwegian-style reformative system almost overnight – where prisoners are given student accommodation-esque rooms with access to their digital devices, friend and family visits with privacy in the room, normal looking on-site grocery shops, mental health care workers, and so forth, all culminating in a recidivism rate as low as 15% in their best prison.

And if they can cater to that fetish totally fine, why aren’t my fetishes allowed??

As already stated, it isn’t necessarily a fetish, but you bring up a good point - why YouTube is enforcing some puritanical Christo-fundamentalist ethical standard is kind of ridiculous. As a European, where we have a less puritanical view of sex I’d like to be given the choice. It’s not complicated to keep sexual content behind a tickbox choice like on Twitter or Reddit, especially not when, you know, Google Play is their only real gatekeeper here and guess who owns them? They also already use credit cards and the like for “age verification”, so any excuse they have is vanishing more and more.

To be fair, it already exists - PeerTube is a thing. The real reason people stay on YouTube is the network effect[1] - everyone else is there, so why would you leave? They’re not coming with you, they’re not giving you money on the new platform, they can just stay on YouTube and keep life simple by not worrying about a bunch of choices. Epic has spent billions losing money trying to compete with the network effect that Steam benefits off, so it’s clear how much money and risk it takes… only for nothing to really change. It’s not something that we can expect creators to drive without collective effort, and that kind of is happening with Nebula (which is part owned by the creators who join it) - we can only hope they keep that momentum going so they begin to form a real threat to YouTube’s dominance.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect

And those companies have spent a ton of time and effort discouraging and preventing people from collectivizing via union busting. There’s a huge power asymmetry at play here, an individual should not be held to the same standard of accountability as the people who literally control the economy through non-democratic or straight up unelected positions of leadership (board of investors or private CEOs respectively). They can, at any moment, choose to reduce their profit margin for the betterment of the planet - but they don’t, because as a small group of owners, they exist to profit so they would never agree to do so in a meaningful way*. And because they’re collectivised and we’re not (just look at the swathe of antitrust cases where businesses that are supposed to compete, have instead chosen to act like a cartel), they hold almost all the power. Let’s focus our attention away from blaming the average person, and onto the real root cause so that we can actually collectivise against that root cause rather than fight amongst each other.

*: without the state straight up socialising their risk, for example the green tech grants and loans we have been and are giving out, all over the world. Something Elon Musk is very familiar with, given that Tesla might not have existed today without the generous $465 million government loan they got in 2009.

The story of McDonalds in Denmark is a fun example of this if anyone wants to read. [1]

McDonalds decided not to follow the union agreement and thus set up its own pay levels and work rules instead. This was a departure, not just from what Danish companies did, but even from what other similar foreign companies did. For example, Burger King, which is identical to McDonalds in all relevant respects, decided to follow the union agreement when it came to Denmark a few years earlier.

In late 1988 and early 1989, the unions decided enough was enough and called sympathy strikes in adjacent industries in order to cripple McDonalds operations. Sixteen different sector unions participated in the sympathy strikes.

Dockworkers refused to unload containers that had McDonalds equipment in them. Printers refused to supply printed materials to the stores, such as menus and cups. Construction workers refused to build McDonalds stores and even stopped construction on a store that was already in progress but not yet complete. The typographers union refused to place McDonalds advertisements in publications, which eliminated the company’s print advertisement presence. Truckers refused to deliver food and beer to McDonalds. Food and beverage workers that worked at facilities that prepared food for the stores refused to work on McDonalds products.

Once the sympathy strikes got going, McDonalds folded pretty quickly and decided to start following the hotel and restaurant agreement in 1989.

This is why McDonalds workers in Denmark are paid $22 per hour.

[1] https://mattbruenig.com/2021/09/20/when-mcdonalds-came-to-denmark/

The FBI’s political surveillance was not a result of popular hysteria, such as scholars used to claim, or a rational response to communist spying and the Cold War confrontation, such as a number of historians have recently argued. Instead, it was an integrated part of the attempt by the modern federal state, rooted in the Progressive Era, to regulate and control any organized opposition to the political, economic and social order, such as organized labor, radical movements and African-American protest.

• Red Scare: FBI and the Origins of Anticommunism in the United States, by Regin Schmidt, PhD

The FBI working against progress shouldn’t really be surprising when this is what they did in their formative years. It’s a big mistake to think we were stupid in the past and that we’re above doing what we used to do, today, and I’m really starting to wonder if intelligence agencies actually are a net positive the more I read about them, at least they seem like they’re well overdue for some radical reforming to ensure they act in the best interest of common people, rather than whatever they’re doing now and historically.

If anyone thinks this is a unique situation - this has happened so many times. The easiest example is the Nazis, or the “national socialists” because socialism was popular back then so they used the term despite starting with killing union workers and leftists.

Vincent Bevins talks in depth about this in his book If We Burn, where he discusses why (certain) protests fail by going through real life examples of movements that were hijacked by right wing extremists. This is not new or novel, this is going by the playbook on how to fight against movements that ask for justice, peace, more democracy, economic equality, and so forth.

You mean like when the UK police force were deemed institutionally racist[1]? Or that other time it was found to be institutionally racist[2]? Yeah we have some shit to deal with here in the UK.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/feb/22/institutional-racism-britain-stephen-lawrence-inquiry-20-years
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/mar/21/metropolitan-police-institutionally-racist-misogynistic-homophobic-louise-casey-report

Make sure you keep in mind that Conde Nast (the parent company of Wired) has subsidiary companies running articles like “35 Best Airbnbs Near New York City, From Cozy Cabins in the Catskills to Beachy Houses in the Hamptons”[1]. They likely have indirect or direct financial ties to AirBnB.

So this article that is seemingly trying to present an argument that this regulation isn’t working because a black market has emerged, while giving more space in the article to small landlords and AirBnB’s CEO and their defence than to critics of AirBnB, as well as mentioning hotel prices rising but not how AirBnB has caused rental prices to rise… should give you pause about the bias this article is trying to hide.

[1] https://www.cntraveler.com/gallery/best-airbnbs-near-new-york-city