Just mail the child to Effrey Jepstein and you’ll get your lost rent money back.

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Yeah, fair enough. I’ll keep my comment up as a permanent record of my stupidity.

Of course there are, but their problem is that they’re too chickenshit to speak up.

Well ok. If we’ll look instead of an example where the government is actively trying to kill people, https://www.shahit.biz/eng/ lists about 77k victims in the Uyghur Genocide.

Perhaps it’s not quite as many as western media claims, but it’s definitely more than 0. I mean, governments kill more than 0 people even if they actively try not to.

Russia has murdered almost 20 000 civilians, perhaps around 500 000 soldiers in total (both sides) in its mindless war in Ukraine. Not all of them innocent certainly, but I’d guess at least 90%. And they’re not even trying to protect themselves from anything.

And if you’ve been paying attention, this has been going for almost 2 years now. And still goes on. One best case scenario that Estonia recently presented in a report was that Russia will lose the war in 2 years. So if the rate keeps until then, we’re looking at about a million deaths in total. Granted, Ukraine and Russia’s combined population is a lot higher than the Gaza strip. Senseless deaths still.

Yeah, I hate also that those things are equated. I mean perhaps the actual elite are more often rich than others, but there definitely exist plenty of non-elite rich people.

Let corporations run amok and sacrifice your well-being for profit as they do in the US, or in your case let unions take over and give people better lives at the expense of bureaucracy.

This is a classic example of a false dichotomy. These are not the actual real-life options on offer.

EU quality of life is higher, as is upward mobility, longevity, and a bunch of other factors.

It’s possible that quality of life thing derives from politics, but it’s also possible that it’s happening for some other reasons. Also, you might not have the correct view of quality of life when it comes to EU vs USA. The problem is that USA is often depicted as a single entity which is compared to individual European countries. But really, it would make more sense to compare the entirety of EU to USA, or individual EU states vs individual US states.

But if you do compare it like that, it doesn’t look great for EU:

We have Scandinavia (where I live) and Switzerland. Scandinavia is grounded in capitalist free market economy, with varying levels of freedom and government intervention. Switzerland, of course, is one of the most free market/capitalist countries in the world – also often one of the happiest ones.

I don’t think you really want truly free market. The first thing to be sacrificed is you for more profits.

That doesn’t seem to happen in a free market, at least when competition is healthy. Companies are competing against each other in terms of employees and their product, which practically guarantees optimal outcomes for both.

Not even in 2016, but DEFINITELY not in 2024.

Pro-free market to a fault while completely ignoring the damage free markets do, and the fact that they’re never really free.

You are quite close to the truth of the matter. Free markets aren’t the problem, the fact that they’re often not really free is.

quick trip thru your comment history shows possibly Finnish?

Yep. We have a pretty catastrophic situation here in Finland because of unions that have been made too powerful by legislation. I’ll happily grant that they’ve done a lot of good work in Finland in the past, but really nothing positive in the last 4 decades at least. It has grown stale like most powerful things do when they’re let to linger without any accountability for too long.

My own experience with Linux and Steam currently (and since roughly beginning of 2023 at least) is that 99% of all games work on Linux/Proton if you enable Proton for everything.

But it’s probably somewhat dependent on your distro and hardware. I have all AMD and Nobara, and with this combo I haven’t met a game that doesn’t work, at least in a year.

Yeah, with Proton enabled, Linux has 99% of all games in Steam these days.

No, Steam works sort of fine on Macs. It’s just that there’s not many new games on Apple these days. I think even native Linux might have more games these days.

The CCP’s fear was that political liberalization would empower a nascent capitalist class which could lead to economic disaster. I don’t think they were necessarily wrong in this regard as that’s exactly what happened to Russia only a few years later.

I would call that class in Russia a nascent criminal class, not capitalist class. But if you’re inclined to think from the left, perhaps you equate these classes.

You’re right that that group indeed caused a catastrophe in Russia’s liberalization attempt. Some sources claim that Putin has absolutely no interest (and therefore, probably, knowledge) in economic matters, which might be one of the reasons why he failed. Argentina and Milei will perhaps show us soon if liberalization will work better if the person leading it is interested in economics. Argentina’s and Russias GDP per capita has been roughly similar after Argentina’s crash in early 2000s, so the countries are at least in some ways comparable.

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Rather the living conditions for the average Chinese person have improved dramatically over the course of only a few decades thanks to policy decisions made by the CCP.

Not sure if that explains it all. CCP had high approval ratings also 1950s and 1960s when their policies caused millions of people to starve to death. But sure, they have made some pretty good pro-free market revisions in the last few decades, which has made them float to top of the world. It doesn’t look like it’s going to last for very long, though – their population is changing and they’re still clinging to the obviously wrong communist principles, which makes adapting to changing circumstances slow.

What I don’t understand is what was the point of the civil war, then? If they’re becoming the Republic of China, why call themself communist anymore? Perhaps they should really join Taiwan, and just stop their silly socialist experiment. That’s the peaceful reunification I would like to see.

Tankie is someone who (apparently) unironically loves communism, in the USSR sense. The name comes from when Hungary wanted to rescind from the Soviet Union in 1956, who replied by sending in tanks. This made many communists around Europe think seriously what they’re supporting and move to a more moderate position. Some people remained tankies, though.

Orcs are what Ukrainians are calling Russian invaders. It works because they come from the east and behave like orcs in Tolkien’s books.

Do I need a Gandalf?

Yes, we do need a Gandalf.