o_class_star

8 ms·

1.
by o_class_star 6y ago
"Socialism" may be a word we need to retire, not because it's an invalid concept, but because it means different things to different people. Democratic socialists largely want a saner version of a market economy, where power
2.
by o_class_star 6y ago
The last movement of "Dancing Mad" (FF6) has been playing in my head all week.
3.
by o_class_star 6y ago
The problem we have on the Left is that even though 65% of the American population prefers our ideas (when stripped of D/R labels) they don't really like us. We're not very good at branding, and we've let Capital convinc
4.
by o_class_star 6y ago
This is in reference to the American standard business practice ("American Rule") whereby each party to a transaction pays its own legal bills. It is not necessarily connected to the more general American work culture (which I agr
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by o_class_star 6y ago
It's a cuck test. They want to know up front that you'll take abuse. If you "fail", by standing up for yourself, then they'll just work with some other interchangeable would-be founder who's more of a "cul
6.
by o_class_star 6y ago
Envy is a negative-sum emotion. It's no fun to be envious, and while people think it must be enjoyable to be envied, it's really not. When you're aware of it at all, it's just uncomfortable. It's a shitty emotion on
7.
by o_class_star 6y ago
The cultures wars are stoked by the 0.01% because they want working people divided against each other. If "blue state" workers think their red-state brethren are incorrigible racist assholes, and "red state" working peop
8.
by o_class_star 6y ago
I'm curious: how do people who are tone deaf learn and use tonal languages? Are such languages redundant enough that they can get by, or do they find other ways of adapting, or do they struggle to speak fluently even if the tonal langu
9.
by o_class_star 6y ago
What I've observed with novelists is that there are two kinds. There are those who write with frequency but stop at "good enough", the satificers who are usually quite good at keeping their word count within genre bounds, und
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by o_class_star 6y ago
It's psychological, but it also goes from an understanding that profits, in the rigid economic sense, don't reliably exist. A profit is gain realized by buying things, recombining them using innovation, and selling at a favorable
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by o_class_star 6y ago
Socialism has seen plenty of successes. And yes, it has seem some failures. The problem with communism is that it has too much history. It has a record, some of which is ugly, some of which is littered by some really awful people who claime
12.
by o_class_star 6y ago
As I get older, my theory of charisma is that it's a product, more than it is an innate trait, and that anyone can "become charismatic", although 99.9 percent of people never will, and the worst thing you can do for yourself
13.
by o_class_star 6y ago
Venezuela was done-in by so-called "Dutch disease"-- over-reliance on natural resource extraction, including subsidies for gasoline that made it nearly free-- and Chavez's corruption. He allowed his buddies to buy dollars at
14.
by o_class_star 6y ago
I'm a bit older, but I found as well that my mental health didn't fare as bad as I'd feared it would when I first figured out (February) how bad this thing was going to be. In the 2010s, corporate capitalism seemed eternal an
15.
by o_class_star 6y ago
Essentially if the show isn't a hit immediately after release, it won't be renewed, and the threshold required to renew goes up exponentially every season, so essentially a show has to be a runaway hit in order to survive past th
16.
by o_class_star 6y ago
Bean counters shit up everything. This started in traditional publishing in the 1990s and it's responsible for the oppressive mediocrity of the "high literature" scene in the US. Money people never, ever know their place. The
17.
by o_class_star 6y ago
The other responses are quite good, but let me add a few things on coping with panic attacks. They get more tolerable over time. Remember that actual health problems almost always develop over time. Even COVID takes days to kill you. At 40,
18.
by o_class_star 6y ago
I've been studying this since March, and the main issue is that lockdowns, in a capitalist economy, don't work nearly as well as one might expect. That's why, as the article notes, Brazil and Peru had lockdowns but still got
19.
by o_class_star 6y ago
Put a dot after the main segment of the URL and you can skip some metered paywalls.
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by o_class_star 6y ago
That could be. I know nothing about the consulting market in Europe. That's not a bad system, given that people who are good at doing work are usually terrible at going out looking for it.
21.
by o_class_star 6y ago
This is all nonsense, but I love how employers try to find professionals with 25 years of experience, who are somehow still under 30... who are willing to work 90 hours per week for barely enough money to make rent... and then whine about h
22.
by o_class_star 6y ago
Metered paywall-- but the dot trick works. I have a lot of authors in my social circle. It's true. I don't think they're usually as destructive as Steinbeck was to his family, but it's a rough road. They experience every
23.
by o_class_star 6y ago
As I said, the Soviet Union wasn't perfect. If I were to live in 1970, either in the US or the USSR, I would have picked the US, no contest. Back then, capitalism actually worked. If you wanted a job, you looked a CEO up in the phone b
24.
by o_class_star 6y ago
People in the Soviet Union, in general, took a high degree of pride in their work. Don't get me wrong. There was a lot wrong with the USSR, especially under Stalin. And since they didn't have a tradition of democracy and free spee
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by o_class_star 6y ago
One of my friends had an interesting observation about novels. Themes aren't created so much as discovered. If you start from a theme a priori , you're at risk of being preachy. However, the amount of effort involved in construct
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by o_class_star 6y ago
He has more product here than 75% of YC-funded startups have on Demo Day.
27.
by o_class_star 6y ago
I don't know why you were downvoted for this. It's utterly true. The birds and the trees don't hate Mondays. Babies don't hate Mondays. It's a learned behavior.
28.
by o_class_star 6y ago
It used to be six and a half. It became five because a bunch of people were smart enough to figure out their bosses weren't their friends, and fought for a shorter workweek (also reducing unemployment and increasing the value of each w
29.
by o_class_star 6y ago
If you're trying to "break out" instead of "just existing" (although there's nothing wrong with the latter; we put too much demands on ourselves) the winning play, for most, is to get up as early as you can sta
30.
by o_class_star 6y ago
Nuclear power is, by far, safer than fossil fuel power. The problem is that it has a branding deficit. The BP logo is a green-yellow sun; it's happy, because it's capitalism-- shiny and happy on the surface, and please don't

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