Regret Rule

“The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.
There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”

John Steinbeck, "Grapes of Wrath"

Is that Steinbeck?
- oh yeah, the attribution fell off when copy-pasting

Have you seen the cost of the figs???

True… we’re not even feeling sorry for people starving half as much as hoarders

There’s enough hoarders that We have shows about hoarders.

The only hoarders that need to be scrutinized are the ones hoarding money
The worst hoarders are the financial hoarders. If someone hoards cats, or old rusty cars, or newspapers, etc., someone gets them psychiatric help.
But if you have a compulsion to hoard money to the point that it is having a negative effect on the entire nation, or even the planet, then they get celebrated as a successful businessperson, and the government shovels even more of our hard-earned money at them.
I'm tired of supporting mentally-ill money hoarders. Take their money away, and medicate them.
Even worse we actively try to make sure they don't go to our country, because we all know how much we did to become part of our own country (this is sarcasm because we did nothing at all, being born is not something we chose to do)
Well, we also haveMy 600lb Life. So checkmate?

The right given by the "democratic" capitalist state to own the means of production is the root cause of this problem

I love the quotation marks here. We have two parties that are both team stock-market/GDP, and there is no third option: we can hardly be called a democracy.
- I mean, between our FPTT voting system, the electoral college and rampant gerrymandering we have absolutely no right to call ourselves a democracy.

Only 8 dudes but we as 300M+ can’t even come together and depose them

Half of them praise those 8 men tho. So you're 150M of individuals vs 150M of individuals and $3T
- Fucking soft, removing my comment. Remove billionaire heads from their necks or their boot will stay on yours.
Because it isn't true lol
- Ok

though if you stopped working hard, foreigners would come and take your job, and then take your kitchen and land. (they come regardless, no worries, but they'd come faster.)

on top of that, what's the point of life without adventure and progress? we make great progress through your suffering, so heads up, the 40 hour work week is worth something. also, capitalism is a natural structure based on people's greed, and you can't abolish the capitalists because they will simply be replaced by other capitalists.

signed, your friendly capitalist :)

no but seriously ... it drained my soul somewhat to write this. i wish so fucking much for a 20 hour work week or less.

I honestly don't mind working a lot, as long as it benefits EVERYBODY and not just a handful of hoarders. I love improving things for others.
- I just don’t want my healthcare tied to a fucking job. Then I could actually work whatever, whenever, and how long I want to.
- I love teaching for this reason. At least when it’s not administrative bullshit, “fill out the forms for this miraculous new program,” but the actual interacting with and helping young people grow. If I get my third job I’ll be doing that 7 am - 8 pm basically 7 days a week, but I’m okay with that. Sitting next to a kid and getting them to understand how imaginary numbers work is the thing that makes me not want to kill myself. Explaining to a high schooler that yes, dinosaurs were real… saying “hey this time of year it’s really easy to see Orion,” or saying “yes I absolutely LOVE Ender’s Game! Let’s talk about foreshadowing in that book!”
  It’s bullshit work that kills the soul. I’ll teach until I’m hoarse and be happy to be alive.
- not to contradict you, just mentioning it:
  well i do mind working a lot because it drains my body and i get really really bad sensations after an exhausting work day, including the feeling that everything is shit and such. idk, it's probably only me, but there is people who struggle with work, independent on what kind of work it is. it's literally the exhaustion itself that does it.
  though it's good if you made that decision for yourself. doing community service definitely does help the world, especially your local community :)
i wish so fucking much for a 20 hour work week or less.
No offense but who is stopping you from working only 20 hours?
- starvation

My problem with this is that most people think the solution is to ask politely leveraging peaceful protests and waving signs.

When in reality this has been a popular concept that is protested for the past 100 years with ZERO actual progress, and the real solution to properly implement this kind of generous socialist idea of distribution of wealth and food and shelter with equity requires aggressive rhetoric and likely needs to be enforced with actual violence, otherwise fascism and capitalism will continue to persist for generations.

Peaceful protesting does work. But the sit in and get arrested kind. Waving signs doesn’t do much. People aren’t miserable enough yet to misbehave.
- Also the don't work and grind the economy to a screeching halt kind.
Honestly, I think most people don't even see it as a problem. Anyone who is better off than the average person likely doesn't want stuff to get handed out for free. It's easy to think "I struggled to get my stuff and now we're just going to give it out for free!?"
It's like someone finally paying off their student loan after years of thrifty spending and going without and then seeing their classmate who didn't pay a dime towards theirs, instead spending on frivolous luxuries and going on yearly trips, having it forgiven. The person who did things "the right way" feels like they got played.
Unless people who have gone through struggles to improve their situation can avoid feeling slighted, they're unlikely to be supportive of change.
- Okay, so why aren't people upset that some joker who wasn't smart enough to get a physics degree and switched majors because it was too hard, then had a sure thing handed to him by the company he was working for arguably because he was bad at his job, started a business that took less than a month of work to become profitable, and then became one of the world's richest men by exploiting the desperate working class? Why aren't people angry about that?
- While my anecdotal story won't mean much in the sea of Internet comments, i look at it from a societal point of view; when I graduated college, I came out with $100k in debt, no job, and no way to make ends meet. I did work hard through jobs and through as many clever ways to move the debt around as much as possible. Eventually, after many years, they were paid off. Student loans are a curse cast by the greedy predatory schools and lenders that make empty promises.
  Who am I to get upset when someone figures out a way, or stumbles into a way to release them from that curse? In the long run, the sooner loans are paid off/forgiven, the sooner it will help everyone else.
  The most important asset to any country is it's people, so why wouldn't we want to take care of each other in every way possible? We all live on the same rock together, so why not try to make life less painful for everyone.
  Will people take advantage of it? Of course. There is no way to prevent that, but if resources are provided or made easier to access, then it makes it less likely for people to take advantage of it.
  Do I think that will ever happen? Probably not, it's a utopian ideal and it would take such a major paradigm shift to get people to have empathy for others and to help lift each other up during rough times. I still think it's something to strive for, even if we only achieve a fraction of that utopia.
- This. You cant give back the thousands of hours studying instead of living life and hanging out with friends, then the lazy person that only partied gets all their shit paid for. That isn't gonna fly.
Actual violence was used by the rich to create this current moment too. It is all they know or will understand.
- Violence to free us from oppression isn't violence to oppress. Get your priorities correct. Your food is stored for use, take it. Don't starve. You were taxed for it, it's yours.

If only a significant percent of the population didn't feel the need to control other peoples lives.

If people would organise themselves that percent would be powerless.
- The people who would do the organizing in this case are going to have a disproportionate amount of power, and since power corrupt, they'll become the new elite.

Responsibility also lies the people. We have no respect for our belongings, frequently trash working tools, computers and other goods. Replace the old with new, for the sake of keeping up with the times. Even cheap knives and other edged tools can be sharpened thousands of times before requiring replacement. Most are never sharpened at all.

The classic tale of a dining table made to last for generations, paid for by the father, be tossed by the son for something made by Ikea. As a woodworker, ive seen firsthand that the biggest killer of fine, handmade furniture.

It isn't time, it's us.

Yeah, so many people seem to buy new shit just to buy new shit. Even when the new thing is lower quality. Hell, my parents did it with their house. I'm constantly surprised by the crap my family and friends spending their money on. Most of my stuff is second hand that they've been throwing out.
- Dude same. There is NOTHING wrong with old and many times its BETTER because corporate enshittification hadnt reached an all time high until recently because of the invention plateau we are in now.

But the rich man's ego of pretending to be a saint by doing charity. THINK OF THEIR FEELINGS!

But then people might get stuff without working for it! The horror!

COVID taught me Americans enjoy grifting, soo

Does anyone really believe the ‘we don’t even need to be working really at all’ part?

I'm taking it as hyperbole.
The amount that technological developments have amplified our productivity over even the past couple of decades, is insane
Yet
Many people are working longer hours for less money (in real terms)
We absolutely should be working less
- tech advancements are converted to company profits rather than worker profits. What CEOs try to do with AI (but fail) is a proof of that.
The Conquest of Bread by Peter Kropotkin was written in 1892 and argued then that we labour far more than is actually necessary. Lots of work is work for the sake of work, not necessarily for the necessity of life and society.
Think now on how much technological improvement there has been since then. The industrial revolution continued, flight, computers and automation, even the factory line system didn't take off until Ford in the early 1900s.
We have so many machines, computers, and processes that never existed a hundred years ago.
The point isn't that we have no need for work, the point is we don't need to work anywhere near as much as we do.
A modern book that argues something similar is Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conquest_of_Bread
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-kropotkin-the-conquest-of-bread
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-bullshit-jobs
Yeah, not working shouldn't even be a goal here. What we should strive for is to build a society where work is empowering for the workers rather than alienating, where it benefits the whole society rather than just creating value for a select few
- I mean, we couldn't do that very well even when we had strong families and strong communities, and unions were more common.
  The last 30-40 years has seen individual independence grow alongside digital sequestration, communities disappear, families shrink, and unions almost fully evaporate.
  What is required is a new revolution where luddites are given control and digital tools are eschewed, so that real community can grow again and total control of digital spaces ceases not because benevolent IT folks take control, but because digital spaces are eradicated entirely until an equitable way of using them without the current totalitarian bent can be agreed upon.
  That's basically fiction at this point. Zero chance that happens. So then what is the option to combat the paradigm of establishing super convenient and useful digital worlds that have real strengths and usefulness, only to then use that strength and usefulness to create dependence and leverage that into data mining and total control of those who rely on the useful digital spaces?
  The best hope at this point is a generation where totalitarianism and greed is completely rejected and the current philosophies of the uber-wealthy few are completely abandoned in favor of a decentralized system that uses the same algorithms designed to chisel every last dollar into upward-flowing profit to achieve actual, complete and mathematically-verifiable equality of resource across all people.
  Thank you for coming to my Ted talk
It's not true at all. Until robotics catches up and real AI is developed, we still need people doing shitty jobs like picking crops
Edit: And it's not even just shitty jobs. Humans working is essential to society functioning. There's not a single industry that can operate completely without human labor.
- But people hugely overestimate how many of these jobs exist. We went from 90% farmers 150 years ago to like 1-2% now.
- Rowcrops like corn and potatoes is one of those things that is heavily automated.
- first of all, picking crops isn't a shitty job. i did it two times in summer, it was fun. what sucked was the low pay and the bad quality of working colleagues that it caused.
That was where I stopped reading and taking him seriously. I don't know if we have enough clothes for 6 generations (and I somehow doubt it but I am happy to be educated) but the claim we don't need to work anymore is a fucking nonsense.
- For the clothes, yeah 6 gens might be stretching it, but definitely multigen. Think of all the fast fashion in the landfills. Think of your average department store of what's just on the shelves. Think of how often we dispose of perfectly good clothes out of our own closets. It adds up.

guillotine

The Americans could learn from the French in regard to labor laws what happens when the government and corporations try to fuck them over. General Strike.

Buddy just discovered communism

Upcycling is not communism.
- Treating symptoms instead of the root cause is idealistic and utopian

I think a lot of you people need to learn about hyperbole and missing the forest for the trees.

People get pedantic when they don't agree with the main point. I'm not mad, it's to be expected.

Is there a way to look up what the violation was?
- They were spamming advertisements for a gambling site.
  Every comment was identical and started with "Exciting casual games, high rewards, and a variety of gaming experiences. So, what are you waiting for?" and then ended with a link and some emoji.