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Pure carbrain propaganda. Jeff B*zos only mumbles to himself about the toupee, he doesn't actually ask people about it.

Profit is the passive income skimmed off the top by a capitalist, by using the power of their ownership to direct money. If workers own the producion and make money from it and keep it, that's just their income.

I fucking hate this "capitalism is when you make money, the more money you make, the more capitalism it is" mindset people have gotten. No, an artist selling their own work is not them engaging in capitalism, it's literally a worker owning their own means of production.

Remember capitalism is someone profiting off of someone else's labor though owning capital. It is not simply the act of profiting at all.

@sapphicsclub

Lmao

highly recommend reading the full letter

also, a friendly reminder, the world we live in now consists of an active genocide.

of warcrimes being posted on twitter by the official account of israeli government.

of people looking at children, women and men being bombed, killed, starved and butchered and saying it is okay because of a single terrorist group, THAT ISRAEL CREATED.

of westerners saying to look away from the slaughter happening in gaza because your mental health is more important than thousands of lives.

of israeli politicians straight up using propaganda from nazi handbooks to dehumanise palestinians, calling them less than human, less than the rest of us, animals.

and what one palestinian man posted on his social media hit me more than anything: “if we actually were animals, people would care.”

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-energy-substitution

WW2 was the start of the petroleum era, which means a shitload of energy to work with. Efficiency was no longer necessary in wealthy countries, so the question went from "How can we get more out of our resources" to "How much more can we get more get moregetmoregetmore?". Thrift goes out the window once you can snort a line of economic output directly into your brain hole.

I find it insane how we created the most efficient form of transport and then proceeded to switch it for the most inefficient form of transport, like, what happened did we all just collectively go into shock after WW2????

How to fix a suburb.

Step 1) build a transit line to a central location within it, one that people can walk to and from easily

Step 2) implement densification policies around the transit stop, such as infill housing, ADUs and low-rise apartments.

Step 3) allow for small businesses to open via mixed use construction, yard shops, and additional infill

walkable cities also means sittable cities send tweet

There's also the fourth gender of the conductor in striped overalls and hat, comin' 'round the bend, seeing the commotion off in the distance and blowing the horn, face aghast as the plight of the TiedToTheTracksGender person suddenly dawns on them, frantically pulling levers as the brake blocks clamp down, waste steam diverts from the cylinders, but the train is too heavy, the wheels don't have enough traction, there's not enough time, there's not enough time, there's not enought, ime there'sno tenougtimethere'snotenou

me and my friends joke that there are 3 genders, being tied to train tracks, tying someone to train tracks, and freeing someone from the train tracks, and i really want to know @amtrak-official’s take on this

They're just salty I decided to get forcibly rendered into a soup-like homogenate by the rusted-out buick skylark down the block instead.

yes i go out of my way to drive safely around bicyclists, no i dont care about their human lives, i know the fucking perverts are desperately slavering to be slammed and crushed by the beautiful steel of an automobile, trembling and hot with death-drive that only the merciless fenders of my foreverially dealerplated altima can answer, and i simply refuse to give them release.

[On the capitalism cooking show]

"What you really want is to broil that planet long enough that the civilization falls right off the bone. See how tender and systemically vulnerable that society is? That's good stuff right there"

YOU'VE GOTTA FIGHT!

FOR YOUR RIGHT!

TO BIIIIKE LANES!

Both? Like, there's no way to have option 1 without a lot of option 2?

The US population probably isn't going to get a whole lot bigger going into the future, so if you want to redevelop the places we live to to be higher density, a lot of the land currently dedicated to sprawl needs to be written off. Like, turned back into rural or wild land. Unless you want to have two or three houses per capita.

Anyways, this is an oldish drama and a long divide in urbanist communities, but it is a question that fundamentally affects my respect for you.

DUMB CONSERVATIVE TALKING POINTS (part 2 of ???): "IT'S JUST LOGICAL"

Don't get me wrong, when somebody says some shit like 'paying poor people less will make the economy better', the appropriate response is to laugh them out of the room and disengage. But if you can't leave well enough alone, or if the shitbrain takes are coming from someone you can't disengage with like a family member, might as well know how to do it properly.

The Facts and Logic^TM arm of conservatism paints itself as being above the corrupting influence of ideology, pure and untainted, despite the fact that they're actually taints. The thing is, they don't really know what logic is.

Logic is only a process. It can take you from one statement to the next, and it can ensure all the statements down a chain are consistent with all of the previous ones. But it never actually guarantees something is correct, because it never gives you the starting point for the chain.

In math and logic, the starting points are called axioms, and in ethics and politics, they're your values. There is no such thing as a "logical" value to hold, because they come before logic.

So when you hear somebody say that society would be better off if we let the children work in the mines for which they yearn, don't go after the process they used to arrive at that conclusion. Debating about whether child labor is effective will only validate the values that their argument originates from. Instead, identify that original value and let them know that it's absolute baldercrap.

- Putting more people to work is logical if the meaning of a life well lived is to maximize productivity and consumption.

- Gender essentialism is logical if "nature" is a good thing to obey

- Private ownership of the economy is logical if the only valuable part is the people at the top barking orders

Being a shitty person is logical if you choose to hold shitty values. Choose to care about and respect others, or I will show up at your house and write long blocks of text at you. You've been warned.

🔥🔥 **SUMMER PRO TIP** 🔥🔥

It's not the heat that gets you, it's the burning fury of knowing that something could be done about it, but the systems of power that govern us choose self destruction instead

"GET OFF THE ROAD!", you say?

Well if it's called that, then why are you droaving a cahr on it instead of roading a skapedord like me is? Checkmate, loser.

Why Capitalism Needs Infinite Growth to Survive

Or, 'Even The Goddamn Money Is Privately Owned '

So, you know how capitalism apologists always say that we need a high growth rate in order to ensure high standards of living? Didja ever notice how they don't actually give a shit and a half about the magnitude of resources people are able to access, only that the rate of change is positive? There's a structural reason for that. It's a dogshit one, but like, it's pretty influential.

It starts with Fractional Reserve Banking. Been around for a while, basically ever since paper money was invented. When a bank takes a savings deposit, it can lend most of that deposit back out to someone else. The person who takes out the loan will spend the money on something, and the person who receives the money will put it in their savings account, and the cycle repeats.

The reserve requirement in the US is 10%, which means that through this multiplier effect, the commercial banking system can expand the money supply printed by the government by up to a factor of 10x. In other words, ~90% of the money in circulation is privately owned, and crucially, it carries interest.

So, almost every dollar out there needs to get paid back to a lender, with some extra dollars sprinkled on top (as a treat). This is only possible if there is always more money in the future than there is in the present, in order to make up the missing difference.

This means capitalism is always operating in some mixture of three states:

1. The increased flow of money is spent on an increased flow of stuff, which is growth.

2. The increased flow of money is spent on the same amount of stuff, which is inflation.

3. The flow of money does not increase, so the loans cannot be repaid, so the banks crash and pull the plug on the money printer and now nobody has permission to do anything anymore and the entire system crashes and everything is terrible but it can probably be fixed with austerity guys, I promise, just one more public service cut, it'll fix everything this time, trust me bro

The State can come in and print a whole bunch of money to shift the economy from situation 3 to situation 2, but you can't print more resources. That requires pulling a bunch of energy and materials out of the ground. And so they pillage the Earth, and they lie about trying to cut back in the future, and they greenlight new fossil projects, and they pillage even faster, and they profit.

Capitalism can often feel insurmountable, but part of that is because, ever since World War 2, there have been easily extractable deposits of petroleum that have let the system constantly accelerate to insane levels of material throughput. That won't last forever. Fossil fuels and mineral deposits get harder to extract as time goes on. And every time the extraction system has even the slightest hiccup, capitalism reveals itself to be as fragile as a shark, choking to death as soon as it stops swimming.

PICTURED: How energy and mineral resource depletion built up to trigger the 2008 financial crisis, and radicalized an entire generation

Inaugural post, I’d like everybody to internalize that the Netherlands did not rise out of the primordial soup as a cycling paradise.

In fact in the 1950s and 60s we were pretty busy making plans to roll highways through cities, looking at cars as the ✨ future ✨ and trying to follow America’s lead - including hiring American planners, some of whom advocated flattening entire historic neighborhoods to do so (like plan Joniken). In the 1970s Amsterdam was deciding whether to rebuild a historic neighborhood that had been partially demolished to build the new subway or build a four lane road there, and the road plan was defeated by just one vote (crucially the wife of one of the councilmembers who voted to restore the old street layout was about to have her baby, but he stuck around long enough for the vote).

In the 1970s many Dutch streets were what I’d graciously term car gutters, cluttered end to end with traffic, and the number of traffic deaths kept rising, peaking in the early 1970s with about 3300 deaths - 400 of whom were children. There was a growing “damn we can’t keep living like this” realization

Amsterdam traffic in the 70s

People began protesting and advocating for change, including the admirably bluntly named “stop de kindermoord” (‘stop the childmurder’) campaign, among many others. These campaigns did stuff like block streets and hold dinner parties there, holding demonstrations and illegally painting lanes on the road at night, but also by identifying traffic bottlenecks and producing a huge report with practical solutions. It was a constant struggle and they had to fight for every street, but they got results and their progress is reflected in the official standards that all streets have to meet, which over the course of a few decades of regular street maintenance and redesigns meant the entire country steadily became bike friendly. The effects can be seen in the statistics (below are traffic deaths per year, divided by type of vehicle, red is cars, light blue is bikes, dark blue pedestrians). The proportion of young children who died in traffic also fell sharply. Don’t let yourself be fooled into thinking the Netherlands just emerged as a place with a cycling culture out of nowhere - people fought tooth and nail to get the cars to fuck off

That's hardly a certainty. Dollar dominance allows the US to sustain a huge imbalance of imports, which helps keep the treats flowing to the ruling class. If the stream of exploitated foreign workers dries up, the next place the ruling class will look is to intensify the exploitation of domestic workers. The economic turmoil from the US losing its hegemony might present an opportunity to advance workers' rights, but it sure as hell doesn't guarantee that it will happen.

19FortyFive

America Has Spent an Astounding $113 Billion on the War in Ukraine

“We could do it forever,” Brookings Institution fellow Michael O’Hanlon told The Washington Post about the rate of funding and support for U

"We could do it forever" says Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution, "it's not economically unsustainable, but it's probably politically unsustainable."

Sickening words from Brookings Institution Political Elites who think wasting $113 Billion is a great deal for Americans, even as the govt offers only $700 a person to the handful of survivors of the Lahaina Wildfires, even after losing their homes, cars, jobs, pets, personal and sentimental items, and even their entire families. It was yet another easily preventable, predictable disaster our government did nothing to prevent, and is actively opening the door to giant corporations to rape the resources of Maui and use the disaster to gentrify the island and displace Working Class Natives.

Meanwhile, our fully corrupt Political Elite brag about the destruction of Ukraine, claiming it's the best deal in history to have tens of thousands of Ukrainians dying so America can weaken its adversary Russia.

However, anyone taking one look at the current Geopolitical situation can see the rise of a Multipolar world, with rising Powers aligning to undermine US imperialism.

As these BRICS countries and their allies integrate economically, and as that integration increasingly degrades US Dollar dominance, US debts will begin to result in stubbornly high inflation that cannot be stifled using Washington's traditional tools of raising interest rates and stifling Working and Middle Class demand.

The American people will take the hit as Political Elites in the US refuse to subsidize Workers, guarantee them jobs, or raise the minimum wage to keep up with inflation.

But in the long run, this is good even for US Workers. The degradation of US Dollar dominance will mean US legislators will eventually have to begin to live within their means. Profligate spending on Military bases all across the globe and maintaining Global Empire will become next to impossible, and money can begin to return to the US to be invested at home instead of for foreign wars that only help US Capitalist Elites at the expense of Working people.

Yes, it's important to be mindful of other's needs! Also:

- Cars are inaccessible to many people for medical or financial reasons. My best friend is not eligible for a license, and is not able to work most jobs. There's a reason for the strong history of disabled people fighting for mass transit access.

- Cars and their infrastructure are responsible for 25% of the emissions that are quickly eroding our ability to exist on Earth.

Which is why I believe that hating the machines themselves is both reasonable and necessary.

It's not that I hate cars, I do see them as a very useful tool for those not living in cities or just non-able bodied folk. But the amount of them in urban really pisses me off. You can't walk anymore.

The tragic thing is that we used to have a lot of this. There was a time when almost every significant American city was connected on a national grid of passenger rail, with interurban rail lines for commuters, and streetcar lines within the cities. It's all been ripped up and paved over.

Not to be controversial B U T. I think 3rd/2nd shift public buses should be a thing. If you work the graveyard or a 2nd shift with weird hours you deserve to be able to get home regardless if you have a car or not.

I also think that there needs to be (a) bus line(s) to and from the cities to the rural areas. Yes this also means “rural” as in those ‘southern gothic aesthetic’ rural areas.

People should not have to be locked in the cities or in rural areas, they should have the freedom to be able to move around. If you’re low income, older, disabled, or can’t afford a car (bc it’s car + insurance + gas $$) then you’re kind of stuck where you’re at and this is coming from real life experience.

Well I'm RIDING ON MY BOARD

And a MAN COMES ON THE RAAADIOO

Tellin' me MORE AND MORE

'Bout 0% APR ON THE ALL NEW TOYOTA RAV4

Supposed to FREE ME FROM THE PRISON OF CAR DEPENDENCY

I can't GET NO!

A photorealistic depiction of my commute to work