But there’s only a certain amount of labor a fixed number of employees can absorb. Imagine a scenario where everyone everywhere agrees to stop returning shopping carts - grocery store employees would be forced to spend their entire shift just corralling them, and then they wouldn’t be able to man the cash registers or stock the shelves or whatever else, thus forcing the store to hire another employee on each shift to be the dedicated shopping cart return person.

Logically, every store everywhere tries to run with the minimum number of people possible to keep costs down. The idea is to create a situation where that minimum number of people is increased.

I’m a fan of the Capitalist Realist Shopping Cart Theory, myself.

Putting shopping carts away is bad for society and you should stop doing it.

The reason is that putting a shopping cart away requires labor, labor requires a person to do it, and the person who has to do it is employed by the grocery store.

Thus, if enough people refuse to put their shopping carts back, enough excess labor will be generated at grocery stores around the country that they will be forced to hire more people to do it, creating jobs.

QED

I’ve seen a bunch of articles about it this past week. With Biden there were a lot of prominent liberal voices calling for him to step down, not to mention the absolute lack of enthusiasm within the rank and file that was showing in polls - with Trump the party’s rank and file are on his side no matter what, so if a prominent conservative calls for him to step down they will be ostracized for it.

In both the Soviet and Chinese famines, collectivized farms outperformed privately owned ones in terms of food produced per hectare. Without collectivization, those famines would have happened anyway, and they would have been worse.

Government subsidies are not the same thing as collectivization. Collectivization implies collective ownership, under Capitalism what you have instead is usually consolidation, where large farms buy up smaller competitors and become less efficient over time. America’s approach to agricultural policy is how you get perverse incentives like speculators buying up land in order to collect government money to not grow anything.

Right. I was saying that Hexbear isn’t a cult on the same level as the named examples, that it’s just some people with a different view of global politics than the norm, in response to a commenter who insisted that they were a dangerous cult that should be stamped out.

Any state can, but many don’t. And the point here was to explain why I don’t believe that blaming famine deaths on Mao Zedong is a justified position to take, when the cycle of famine was ended under his watch.

When I was a kid they taught penmanship too. I was awful at it but then when I was an adult I had a job where I actually had to use those skills and I was glad to have them - same with everything I learned in Home Ec, most the stuff I learned in wood/metal/auto shop, etc. I think all of those classes are extinct now, based on how people talk about school never teaching them anything useful.

Plot twist: America does agricultural collectivization in the 2030s

We were talking about cults, I brought them up as an example. I could have just as easily used Scientology.

Beautiful pup! I hope mine still looks that good at 15.5

Lower it even further.

I haven’t had to do a captcha myself for like a month. It’s great.

I wish I could go back to not knowing what a mukbang is.

Same here. I’ll drink whatever’s on tap but I don’t like Pepsi as much cuz it’s too sweet.

There are so many regional differences even if the recipe is 99% the same. Denatured coca leaves aren’t a thing outside the Americas, different bottling plants will use different types of sugar, water of differing quality will affect the taste, etc etc.

The fact that they don’t tell you in the average anticommunist pop history youtube video is that China had been experiencing famines pretty much every single year for a thousand years by the time the Communists took over. The last famines occurred under Communist rule, but it is because of Communist policies that the cyclical famines stopped. This applies to the USSR as well.

Yes we can look back and see that killing the sparrows was a bad idea, but on the whole collectivized farms produced more food per hectare than smallholder farms did, and the policies of the Communists are what brought in sufficient numbers of tractors and other farming equipment to modernize outdated practices in rural regions. Without the Communists the simple fact is that the famines would have happened anyway, they would have been worse, and there would have been more of them.

This is the reason why, even when you include the famine deaths in your data, the average lifespan under Mao doubled from what it had been when the Republic of China controlled the mainland. The Communists won the war precisely because they treated peasants better than the then-central government did, and when they took power they enacted policies that massively improved the lives of everyone in China, and still continue to do so.

Tell me, how did Reconstruction go? Were the former slaves elevated to the status of citizens equal to their former masters?

No. The great post-Civil War failure of America was its failure to defend the gains made by the freed slave population, allowing the previous ruling class to swoop back in and reassert their power in a nearly-identical form to how it had been before. Sharecropping instead of slavery. This failure demonstrates quite succinctly why any social or economic justice movement cannot simply win the war - it must also continue to defend itself after the war, and that defense will by necessity take the form of repressing those members of the former ruling class who cannot accept the new status quo.

If you don’t condone class war, then you are by necessity endorsing the current system. The current system which kills far, far more innocent people than any class war ever could, you lying, capitalist piece of shit.

Equality has never in the history of our species been given freely by the ruling class to the workers. It has always been taken after violent struggle, and after the initial struggle is over the working class must be willing to defend their gains else they will lose them.

And IIRC it was after they had made a bunch of practical effects, so it’s not like it was saving them money or anything. The execs literally just said “re-do these parts but worse”.