Excrubulent

Which dictator do you mean? The democracy movement and the June struggle was in 1987, 10 years before the general strike.

Also, neoliberal capitalism is very, very happy with right wing dictators because they love oppressing workers and lowering wages. Just look at Pinochet in Chile.

And again the June struggle was won by popular struggle, not market forces. The idea that the unions supported the dictator is a weird one too. Like, where are you getting that, and is there any evidence they weren't just yellow unions approved by the dictator?

Even then I don't know why you brought those things up. You just added a bunch of details and I guess assumed those details - some of which were very wrong - were somehow in support of some point, but you didn't say what that point is.

And I don't know why you think I'm talking about industrialisation when I talk about workers improving their lives. That is not at all what I'm talking about. And industrialisation isn't a capitalist thing, they just happen to coincide in human history. We don't have alternative Earths to test the idea, so crediting the gains of industrialisation to the market and capitalism is weird. You just put that out there completely unsupported.

That's another thing neoliberal economists love to do, just blame all the problems of capitalism on unions and regulations, and credit every good thing that happens on the glorious invisible hand.

And since you understand a good amount of economics, perhaps you can tell me what is the scientific basis of supply & demand for instance? I've looked for this information and had people try to show me, but they've never actually shown it. It's a fundamental part of economics so I'm told. What is the science behind it? The perfectly straight, perpendicular bisecting lines on an unscaled graph do not suggest any scientific basis to me, they suggest the aesthetics of science devoid of its substance. If you could disabuse me of this notion then perhaps I could move on from my current woeful ignorance on the matter.

And finally, you don't think there's any conspiracy around Epstein, fine. I bet it's easy to maintain that idea when you just ignore all the evidence I gave you.

Honestly it sounds like someone was paid to do something about adblocking and just like... did something. Like if you were tasked with reducing adblocking, and your first and most obvious idea of "reduce the obnoxious ads" was disallowed because enshittification is mandated, you could say no, which most workers won't do, or you could just do whatever random bullshit feels like it might work because it's punitive. Or at least it's a gesture that shows your boss you're trying.

Authoritarian systems like capitalist corporations are inherently low-information for exactly this reason. People on the low rungs doing the real work who understand what needs to be done will typically not report problems to their superiors. And when they do, those superiors tend not to listen, because the idea that lower workers know something they don't threatens their leadership status.

Also our society's legal system trains us to believe punitive measures must do something even though they don't.

Also I guess another reason they might wind up at this strategy is that straight up telling users that the problem is their adblock is the fastest way to get adblockers to block your countermeasure, so they think they have to be sneaky.

I guess that's possible, and a very creepy thought, but more likely they saw the level of general attention on the issue and backed off globally.

I definitely got really awful, unplayably spotty playback that seemed linked to adblock usage. Then I saw an article about it and confirmed I wasn't going crazy, and that day it stopped happening, so it felt like I was going crazy all over again. It's like the moment they realised it was going to become a problem and they weren't as sneaky as they thought, they turned it off. I haven't had an issue since then.

You're right, it's not, but ignoring him doesn't get rid of him either. That's not how capitalism works.

I also just learned of it.

They don't have to choose, they have the power to make Aussie politicians bend the knee, and everyone knows it. That's what they're afraid of.

Land acknowledgements devoid of teeth are common, where someone flaccidly admits that Indigenous people exist and have some unspecified connection to the land, not where someone actually states out loud the crimes that put their opera house on that land.

~~This was a good acknowledgement that actually implicates the current ruling class. That's why they cancelled him.~~

Edit: he actually went on to say more, but I stand by the fact that this wasnt just a standard acknowledgement.

That sounds very realistic to me.

I think our first family PC had 40MB of storage, and we loaded optical discs into a caddy before inserting them. That was in the late 80s.

It's fascinating to me that your example was South Korea. That's literally the place I had in mind when I talked about the working class organising to better their lives. They have deeply militant unions.

You know they had an honest to goodness general strike in 1997, right? And that they were specifically striking over laws that would legalise strikebreaking? That's going to have a tectonic effect on the quality of life of workers in general. They fought hard for their pay increases and got them. That's not attributable to market forces. Striking is literally a breakdown in market behaviour, where the bosses have squeezed so hard and so unfairly that the workers have to withdraw their labour in order to get what they need.

And every single worker's benefit we enjoy today was a function of labour activism. 8 hour days, the weekend, child labour laws, OSHA, I could go on. And all of those benefits are actively fought against by the ruling class because they erode their power over us and raise our wages.

Also, orthodox economics is basically the managerial class being funded by the owning class to come up with post-hoc justifications for why they should keep their wealth. It's not scientific in the slightest. The Economist is basically neoliberal propaganda.

Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent goes into this in some detail, about the forces that act to ensure that the dominant media narrative caters to the ruling class on all levels, and he has talked extensively on how this process works in academia as well. I forget if the academic discussion is a large part of the documentary, but it's well worth watching anyway. It's free on youtube: https://youtu.be/BQXsPU25B60

Also... if you really think the Epstein network was just two or three people... I mean wow. You know authorities seized a bunch of blackmail from his island, video of rich people with kids, and it has never surfaced since? Those same authorities ruled his death a suicide, because they're doing their best, honest, but they just can't seem to find that missing collective brain cell that would let them figure out the blindingly obvious. Was that the one guy arranging that too?

I'm not saying the ultra wealthy run the network themselves, that's what I've literally been saying they don't do. The difference is if they got caught actually doing the deed, if would be a very different matter, because you physically cannot do that via proxy. That's how the blackmail can exist, and why it was covered up.

Oh and to answer your question about who their drug dealers are, they have middlemen for that as well. Personal assistants who are on call for anything the client needs, who will readily break the law rather than disappoint a client, and whose instructions are generally vague enough that any legal risk falls on the assistant. Again: diffusion of responsibllity.

Don't kid yourself, the society of the wealthy and powerful is rotten to the core, just as it was in the days of monarchy. They just have better cover for it nowadays. It's no longer the divine right of kings, but the invisible hand of the market.

Honestly most of that gets eaten up just airlifting my mansion. I'm sick of doing it, but I'm glad I invested early in the airliftable frame kit when I had the place built. The foundations wouldn't have held up more than one or two moves otherwise, and there's no way I'm commuting more than 15 mins.