“If you’re a white person who’d never heard POC talk about white people before the advent of social media, it probably means no POC, even your friends, have truly trusted you.”
i think the worst idea that this site has popularized vis a vis mental health is that its okay to treat your friends like therapists, and that its expected they react like one when you have an episode or breakdown
its a lot like approaching a friend and going “hey, you bandaged my cooking burn once, can you give me open heart surgery?” and getting upset when either they refuse to do so or getting hurt when they dont have the knowledge needed to do it safely.
people can support you, and they can help you out of rough patches, but relying on them for your continued functionality and stability is stressful and dangerous for everyone involved.
So you are saying 0% of the world should be billionaires?
Yes.
Why shouldn’t their be billionaires? That makes no sense.
Because the existence of billionaires is predicated on the exploitation of human labor and unsustainable environmental harm. That level of wealth hoarding is harmful to economies, as it reduces the amount of money in circulation. No one person, no family, could ever conceivably even SPEND a billion dollars anyway, and it is inherently immoral to accumulate wealth so narrowly while so much of the world lives in abject poverty.
Better then to create a wealth ceiling, a point at which all wealth over a certain point is taxed at or very near 100% to incentivize people to actually spend their money rather than hoard it, stimulating the economy and bettering the lives of far more people. Better even still to create and regulate economic systems that protect workers and the environment in a way that such extreme levels of wealth accumulation aren’t even feasible.
The problem with this is that it reduces the incentive to actually do fiscally well. What’s the point of starting a business if you can’t become wealthy?
There is a very real difference between “reasonably wealthy” and A BILLIONAIRE
No one is saying you shouldn’t have a nice house, we are saying that having multiple really, really ridiculously nice houses while your employees are either homeless or at serious risk of becoming homeless is immoral.
I’ll never understand why this concept is hard for people. I think it’s because they can’t actually fathom how much $1 Billion is.
Seriously.
Let’s say you have a badass job. A great job. You make $100 AN HOUR. You work 10 hours a day ($1000 A DAY), 5 days a week ($5000 a week!!!), every week ($20,000 A MONTH), thats $240,000 Every Year.
It would take you 4,167 years to make a billion dollars.
Keep in mind then, that if you got paid $1000 an hour, 10 hours a day, five days a week, every week, all year, it would still take over 400 years to make a billion.
You want to make one billion in a human lifetime? If you made $10,000 an HOUR, 10 hours a day, 5 days a week, every week, all year, it would take you 41 years to hit a billion.
(And that’s not counting, ya know, money you spend to stay alive on food or rent or anything. )
being touchstarved makes u absolutely buckwild when someone does smth simple like .share a chair with u
like having someone touch your hand with the tips of their fingers shouldn’t feel like So Much it shouldn’t feel like your whole body is going into anaphylactic shock but here we are. here we are.
ok 2 many of u relate
Someone gave me a compliment and reached out and squeezed my hand and I fell in love and couldn’t speak for several minutes
I was just gonna type this in the tags but I have to say this.
Growing up in North America is surreal. Every tiny little blip of physical affection is deemed as sexual interest. Boys aren’t allowed to hug eachother because “that’s gay.” Girls can’t hold hands because “are they going out?” And GOD FORBID a female friend hugs a male friend.
Having lived in the Netherlands, and reading up about shit like this, Canadians and Americans are starving.
I went to Japan for a school trip in 2012. I went to a highschool there. There were boys hugging, lounging on those blue gym floor mats, holding hands, trowing their arms around eachother. I was startled by how shocked I was.
This mentality of “if you’re touching you must have sexual interest in the other person” is so fucking disgusting. Hug your friends. Hold hands with them. Touch their hands when you want to reassure them.
God, yeah, I obviously never want to make people uncomfy but I’m really touchy and physically affectionate
We have entered a phase of regression,and one of the easiest ways to see it is in our infrastructure: our roads and bridges look more like those in Thailand or Venezuela than the Netherlands or Japan. But it goes far deeper than that, which is why Temin uses a famous economic model created to understand developing nations to describe how far inequality has progressed in the United States. The model is the work of West Indian economist W. Arthur Lewis, the only person of African descent to win a Nobel Prize in economics.
In the Lewis model of a dual economy, much of the low-wage sector has little influence over public policy. Check.
The high-income sector will keep wages down in the other sector to provide cheap labor for its businesses. Check.
Social control is used to keep the low-wage sector from challenging the policies favored by the high-income sector. Mass incarceration – check.
The primary goal of the richest members of the high-income sector is to lower taxes. Check.
Social and economic mobility is low. Check.
Temin says that today in the U.S., the ticket out is education, which is difficult for two reasons: you have to spend money over a long period of time, and the FTE sector is making those expenditures more and more costly by defunding public schools and making policies that increase student debt burdens.
Even with a diploma, you will likely find that high-paying jobs come from networks of peers and relatives. Social capital, as well as economic capital, is critical, but because of America’s long history of racism and the obstacles it has created for accumulating both kinds of capital, black graduates often can only find jobs in education, social work, and government instead of higher-paying professional jobs like technology or finance— something most white people are not really aware of. Women are also held back by a long history of sexism and the burdens — made increasingly heavy — of making greater contributions to the unpaid care economy and lack of access to crucial healthcare.
How did we get this way?
What happened to America’s middle class, which rose triumphantly in the post-World War II years, buoyed by the GI bill, the victories of labor unions, and programs that gave the great mass of workers and their families health and pension benefits that provided security?
Around 1970, the productivity of workers began to get divided from their wages. Corporate attorney and later Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell galvanized the business community to lobby vigorously for its interests. Johnson’s War on Poverty was replaced by Nixon’s War on Drugs, which sectioned off many members of the low-wage sector, disproportionately black, into prisons. Politicians increasingly influenced by the FTE sector turned from public-spirited universalism to free-market individualism. As money-driven politics accelerated (a phenomenon explained by the Investment Theory of Politics, as Temin explains), leaders of the FTE sector became increasingly emboldened to ignore the needs of members of the low-wage sector, or even to actively work against them.
Temin notes that “the desire to preserve the inferior status of blacks has motivated policies against all members of the low-wage sector.”
What can we do?
We’ve been digging ourselves into a hole for over forty years, but Temin says that we know how to stop digging.
If we spent more on domestic rather than military activities, then the middle class would not vanish as quickly.
The effects of technological change and globalization could be altered by political actions.
We could restore and expand education, shifting resources from policies like mass incarceration to improving the human and social capital of all Americans.
We could upgrade infrastructure, forgive mortgage and educational debt in the low-wage sector,
reject the notion that private entities should replace democratic government in directing society, and
focus on embracing an integrated American population.
We could tax not only the income of the rich, but also their capital.
We have a structure that predetermines winners and losers. We are not getting the benefits of all the people who could contribute to the growth of the economy, to advances in medicine or science which could improve the quality of life for everyone — including some of the rich people.”
Along with Thomas Piketty, whose Capital in the Twenty-First Century examines historical and modern inequality, Temin’s book has provided a giant red flag, illustrating a trajectory that will continue to accelerate as long as the 20 percent in the FTE sector are permitted to operate a country within America’s borders solely for themselves at the expense of the majority.
Without a robust middle class, America is not only reverting to developing-country status, it is increasingly ripe for serious social turmoil that has not been seen in generations.
In Other Words Revolution
Capitalism’s bad
I really hope i don’t see any fellow white Americans on this post talking about how we don’t deserve this because we’re “the greatest country in the world” or how “this shouldn’t be happening in America of all places”. It shouldn’t be happening ANYWHERE, it doesn’t need to be happening anymore, and the fact that it was already happening in predominantly nonwhite countries is largely the fault of white supremacy
Thousands of cartons of Vanilla Almond Breeze are under recall for containing undeclared milk. I don’t care what you think about vegans, nondairy milk, whatever…
This could kill people if word doesn’t get out fast enough.
Alabama, Arkansas, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and Wisconsin
Please share this. Dairy allergies can be fatal and many people with them choose to drink almond milk.
recall is dated august 2, this is current. pass it along for your lactose intolerant friendos.
I learned in a Latin Studies class (with a chill white dude professor) that when the Europeans first saw Aztec cities they were stunned by the grid. The Aztecs had city planning and that there was no rational lay out to European cities at the time. No organization.
When the Spanish first arrived in Tenochtitlan (now downtown mexico city) they thought they were dreaming. They had arrived from incredibly unsanitary medieval Europe to a city five times the size of that century’s london with a working sewage system, artificial “floating gardens” (chinampas), a grid system, and aqueducts providing fresh water. Which wasn’t even for drinking! Water from the aqueducts was used for washing and bathing- they preferred using nearby mountain springs for drinking. Hygiene was a huge part if their culture, most people bathed twice a day while the king bathed at least four times a day.
Located on an island in the middle of a lake, they used advanced causeways to allow access to the mainland that could be cut off to let canoes through or to defend the city. The Spanish saw their buildings and towers and thought they were rising out of the water. The city was one of the most advanced societies at the time.
Anyone who thinks that Native Americans were the savages instead of the filthy, disease ridden colonizers who appeared on their land is a damn fool.
Makes me happy to see people learn about the culture of my country 😀
Also, please remember that the idea of a nomadic or semi-nomadic culture being “less intelligent”, “less civilized” (and please unpack that word) was invented by people who wanted to make a graph where they were on the top.
Societies that functioned without 1) staying exclusively in one location or 2) having to make complicated, difficult-to-construct tools to go about their daily lives… were not somehow less valid than others.
wupacing 