Biggest indicator of US decline: You could buy 6 BigMacs with 1 hour of minimum wage in 1980, but today you can’t even buy one, despite minimum wage more than doubling.
It’s over.
Fs for the USA
explaining purchasing power collapse to an american: imagine no burger
Seriously, think about this for a moment. Nothing technological or ecological happened to make producing burgers more expensive. If anything, burgers should be wildly cheaper today than they once were.
What has happened is just theft. Theft through monopoly and vertical market integration destroying any semblance of competition, so prices can just go up and up and up without any connection to actual value of labor. And without rewarding labor.
The people making the extra money from this rise in cost of a Big Mac did not improve its quality. They did not contribute anything to the world. They just seized control of the supply and are now extorting you as surely as a group of armed bandits who steal six out of seven of your Big Macs on the way home and leave you one to split with your whole family.
one time a casual hockey fan tried to convey this experience to me from the other side as: “it’s like… okay, imagine that you like donuts, and you meet a guy who also likes donuts, and you’re like, hey, cool, we both like donuts! but this guy… he built his house out of donuts”
so now when I trip into a new fandom I’m like “oh shit I’m building this house out of donuts”
[Image ID: Tweet from @/ warnerbff on 22.03.23 reading: talking to someone with the same interests as you and realizing they’re a casual enjoyer while you’re deranged /End ID]
Interesting to call this “confiscating” when it’s just making the rich pay their fair share, especially considering all the stolen wealth from the bottom 99% and historic tax evasion.
Besides the obvious, the hidden benefit of this is that it provides an endpoint to runaway growth.
The biggest problem with capitalism, the reason it’s so destructive to the planet and to the workers and even, ultimately, to the capitalists, is that, after a certain point, the money’s just a way of keeping score. The number at the bottom of the column has no bearing on what you can buy or do; as a result, there’s no such thing as enough. The number can always be bigger.
Under this proposal, once you hit $1 billion, you’ve won capitalism. You beat the game, achieved the maximum score; you’re finished. There’s nothing more you can accumulate. You now have to find a purpose in life other that the relentless pursuit of profit. (And if we’re really lucky, it might be something that actually benefits other people, but even if not, it’s unlikely to be as damaging as whatever it is you were doing to get that $1 billion.)
Instead of companies expanding endlessly, like tumors, there’s a point where, when all the major stakeholders are maxing out on profit, it makes sense to just hold steady. Keep doing/making/selling whatever it is you do/sell/make, but stop trying to do/sell/make more of it every year.
The problem with a tumor–what makes it cancer–is that it keeps growing and growing, until eventually it’s taking up so much space and consuming so many resources that the surrounding tissues can’t function. The tumor doesn’t have to do anything better than the other tissues in order to crowd them out; it just does it faster. Stop the uncontrolled growth, and it’s something you can live with.
Stopping the uncontrolled growth of capital means more opportunities for multiple businesses–big and small–operating in the same sector, since it doesn’t make sense for any one company to gobble up too much of the market share. That, in turn, means more choices for customers–and workers, since they can take their skills to another employer doing similar things. It means less waste, as there’s no longer an economic upside to spewing cheap goods out of a fire-hose before you even know whether anyone wants to buy them. That could mean slower, more thoughtful use of resources in the first place, but at minimum, it’s going to mean not manufacturing products only to immediately throw them away.
crazy that in the 1970s they were like, “fine, women can play sports. but because they’re innately less athletic than men, only in a special ghettoized League For The Frail And Delicate where they get paid less 😊”. And not only is that still the system in 2023, but viciously lashing out at the smallest challenges to that system gets framed as Feminist Praxis
even setting aside the fact that gendered bodytype averages aren’t universals, and plenty of individual (cis) women and (cis) men could easily go to toe to toe. have we considered that the fact that all the most prominent and well-paid sports are ones that require things like Being Tall and Having Muscle Mass, as opposed to, ex, gymnastics…is itself an artifact of sexism
also to people who are like “well do you think WOMEN should be playing AMERICAN FOOTBALL against MEN” actually I don’t think anyone should be playing american football on account of, you know, the irreversible brain damage.
“Let us put it generally: if a regime is immoral, its citizens are free from all obligations to it.” – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago.
[Pictured: Captain Pia Klemp sitting in a chair beside her controls.
@VivianAngrisani on Twitter wrote on 6/8/2019: “Pia Klemp, a German biologist & boat captain faces 20 yrs in prison for rescuing 1,000+ migrants at risk of drowning whilst crossing the Mediterranean. Seeking asylum is a human right. Only 1 in 100 sea captains are female. This woman is a humanitarian, not a criminal. #FreePia”
@Galactic_Rabbit quote-tweeted on 6/10/2019 and wrote: “Thinking about all those videos of people honored in their old age for hiding/protecting Jewish people.”]
To all the people commenting that she’s an accessory to “illegal immigration,” note that seeking asylum is a human right. Countries which refuse asylum are in violation of the Geneva Convention. They get away with this and propagandize complacency towards the victims by using bureaucracy to complicate immigration proceedings. During times of genocide, this is tantamount to hearing a would-be murder victim knocking on your door and locking the deadbolt.
People who risk dying getting smuggled across borders do so out of sheer desperation because the situation they’re leaving is worse. Finally, you are missing the entire point: violation of the law is warranted when the laws violate human rights and criminalize existence. Laws which call immigrants “illegal” are tools of a systemic negligence designed to condemn those who need legal protection the most.
Hiding Jewish people or smuggling them out of Germany was illegal too.
as of 10 february 2023, the petition is still just short of its goal of 500k signatures.
You don’t own fanfics. They’re inherently public domain because they aren’t your IP. Agree or disagree with AI, there are no grounds for “protection” from AI because it isn’t your IP to begin with. That’s what you chose when you chose this medium
Okay, you get an answer, because at least you took the effort to write your ask out properly, even if you are hiding behind the grey, sunglassed circle.
Do I, or any fanfic author for that matter, have any legal claims to our work? No, not really, no. (Although if someone took a fic, filed off the serial number–deleted the fandom specific elements–, and then had it published for financial gain, yeah, that would be a case.)
BUT
Fandoms are built on a social contract that says we respect each others work, the effort people put into their art. We don’t steal or disrespect the work of our peers. By feeding people’s fanworks to AI you both steal and disprect it, and we need to make people realize that before it’s too late–before fandom falls apart, because there will be no more real, actual fanworks.
Disrepectfully,
Orlissa
(i can’t believe I have to say this)
Also this is not true. You do in fact have the copyright to the specific writing you did in a fic, because that’s not how copyright law works. Like this is not a grey area.
People who write IP content for corporations give up their copyright on a contractual basis–the company wants writing they can sell about characters/settings they own without getting entangled in royalty obligations etc, so they hire people. Who sign contracts saying they don’t own what they write as part of that job.
That’s why you don’t own Star Wars stuff you wrote for Disney; you specifically agreed not to own it.
Writing for IP you don’t own leaves you in a position where you can’t legally monetize it (without taking out the Owned parts ad rebranding), but it absolutely does not automatically cede or void copyright. That is super not a thing.
SUPER not a thing, I cannot say this enough.
I can’t sell my Batman fic, but neither can DC Comics without my duly authorized consent. Because they own Batman, but not the prose I composed about him.
Do not perform that kind of massive corporate overreach for them. Holy shit. Do they not own enough.
It’s fascinating that this misconception of copyright still exists. Haven’t we all seen the posts on here where authors beg fans to please not send them fanfic of their works? They’re not doing that because they feel like it, they do that because fans legally own their words and ideas, and an author who takes them even unintentionally can in fact end up in real legal trouble for taking something that’s not theirs. It doesn’t matter whether they own the canon.
It’s lucky that we grew up under the guidance of fandom moms that created fanfic & zines & fandom cultre, and they told us these rules and laws casually but repeatedly before every fic. It’s lucky that we grew up when fan works were under legal attack, which happened to further cement exactly what protections we had.
Are these things not being taught to the new generations or do they just ignore it bc they really think everything online is free, entitled domain for them? How did this happen? I never even dared put a fanfic quote on a userpic without the author’s direct permission.
A woman whose epilepsy was greatly improved by an experimental brain implant was devastated when, just two years after getting it, she was forced to have it removed due to the company that made it going bankrupt.
Specifically, because she couldn’t afford to buy the implant from the company. They basically took her implant back to recoup their losses. This is what happens when you privatize healthcare and health research. The group providing her with this implant should not have been able to go bankrupt in the first place, let alone repossess her implant to pay off their debts.
This is what disabled people mean when we say that cyberpunk horror is just a reality for us. This woman was literally forced to undergo a surgery because she couldn’t pay to keep the implant already inside her brain. How long till companies start repossessing pacemakers and transplants?
Hey there, so I'm a fanfic writer and I've finally started writing again - so you may see some of that on here. I am known online under the names Ornery Otter or Greiver Dhark. This tumblr is about more than sharing pics or quotes, but then, its my blog so it could be a boat of insanity.
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