• 71 Posts
  • 95 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • The current capitalist system moves wealth from the poor to the rich. That sort of works, if the total wealth is growing at such a rate that the poor keep their quality of life. However when you have stagnation and even worse a decline in GDP you end up in a situation, where the poor get actually poorer and the rich either keep their wealth or become richer.

    So with a stagnating economy, you have to change the system to stop the flow of wealth to the rich. When you want to actively shrink the economy, you need to take from the rich.

    In this case these numpties work for Murdoch.




  • Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz increases the price of oil and gas. That was also the case, when the West sanctioned Russian energy after Russia invaded Ukraine. At the same time green technologies, like solar, wind turbines, heat pumps, evs and so on are getting cheaper. So when you get a price shock, you end up with reduced emissions.

    If Iran would have a regime change favorable to the US, then the Strait of Hormuz would be opened and oil and Iranian oil and gas would no longer be under sanctions. That would reduce the price of that. At the same time Western technology would end up in Iran increasing production.




  • The Line is actually a massive success. Saudi Arabia has a massive problem, in that it is dependend on oil and gas, while radical Islam causes a lot of problems for switching to a more sustainable future. Especialls womens rights have improved a lot(still bad, but better). If you ban married women from talking with unmarried men, travel without guardian, drive a car and so forth, you are not using half your potential work force. These sort of strict laws also make the country less attractive to outside visitors. That however is required, when you have business travel and tourism.

    If you want to avoid a big backlash, you need to bring the Saudi public on your site and crack down on the most radical faction. A utopian project like the Line is perfect for that. It can inspire the public, while distracting from the crackdowns. It also works as great advertising for tourism. If you are able to deliver something similar, then you have a pretty good product. That is not as true for the Line itself, but for other parts of Neom. A big port in the area makes sense and tourism on the Red Sea is big business in Egypt.


















  • One of the items will also include the abolishment of the so-called “blanket wage system,” where an employer preemptively includes extra work hours in the annual salary so that any actual overtime hours are not counted toward monthly salaries. The system is supposed to be used for positions whose working hours are flexible and hard to pin down, but it has often been abused by companies to force overtime without paying.

    Seems like South Korea has some bad laws in that respect, but they are working on fixing it.









  • I dislike the all or nothing aspect of a lot of them. It is hard enough to nail a single aspect of life. So imho it is better to have different groups for different aspects. As in you might have a housing co-operative, a co-operative work place, a utility co-operative, a bike sharing group and so forth. That makes it possible to not go and avoids being stuck in a group, which you really do not like. As in it is much easier to move to another place, then to do that and find a new job, organize transport and so forth.








  • There are also indirect links. Transit riders are also citizens, who can lobby for better transit. At the same time transit has a lot of indirect advantages. When moving from cars to transit, there are less cars on the road, which means less lanes are needed, which then reduces cost.

    As for allowing certain groups to ride free, just add it on top of existing systems or make guidelines easy. Say if you get some social security benefit, you get a transit pass as well, everybody under 18 can ride for free given they show some ID or maybe students can use their university ID to use transit.

    Edit: Also free transit makes transfers easier.