My wife was born in ( but too late to remember) a former Soviet state.

Talking with her grandma is pretty interesting. Recently with global inflation, some of the grandmas friends were speaking fondly about government controlled price of bread.

Then my grandma (in law) who still has more of her marbles than any 91 year old I’ve ever met said “lol, yeah that was the price on the sign, but there was no bread in the store!”

“Ooooohhhhh yyyeeaaaaahhhh…”

Jimmy Buffett

I’ll take you at your word that these are the 3 things that you’re most uncomfortable with.

I sincerely hope that these are the three most problematic things, because if true, China really would be nearly a utopia, and I sincerely want such a place to exist.

Considering the 2nd point came with the precondition that you think it’s a problem that is solving itself, and the third is that China isn’t projecting its power enough globally, there is only one outstanding issue for the proletariat being that the economy isn’t centrally planned enough.

With full sincerity I guess if this is your biggest gripe, I don’t know how I reconcile that personally with China’s current and historical trend of net negative migration.

It’s probably clear to you by now, but I am not an expert on China, but I am absorbing and am curious of your perspective.

To me, it appears like with such a rosy view but negative net migration, there must be a reason that statistically speaking, more people would rather leave the system than join it. In the same way that we can hypothesize the existence of a celestial body we haven’t directly observed by it’s gravitational effects on what we know, I wonder why we see net negative migration if there are essentially by your view no material unaddressed issues for the working class?

And I genuinely am asking this question in good faith. I’ll accept with respect any answer you give. In your view is it a global smear campaign that holds people back from migrating or something? Are the people who leave being seduced by false promises? Do you live in China, and if not, what’s holding you back?

Because I’ll say, you and I could comisserate extensively on the failings of western capitalism. I could easily lay out 50 significant issues with the societal organization of most western capitalist democracies. I’m sure you could too. That you only really see one significant unaddressed issue, regardless of if I agree with it, is compelling.

This is the most concise rebuttal and I think you’ve highlighted well where the root of the perceived discord lies.

If one accepts that the CPC represents the working class, then the critique of the unfair comparison via the meme would be viewed as legitimate.

If one contests the original assertion, then it does not. To them, Xi memeing a CEO would look to them more like Musk offing Altman.

Maybe I’m misunderstanding what you’re saying, then… But I agree that we’re just bouncing off supporting arguments rather than directly defending or refuting a central thesis.

My understanding of your point was that western critisms of China are either at best misinformed, but in general the result of trying to preserve the idea that “the west is in front, so everyone else must be behind”.

I fundamentally reject this specific formulation because the result of that formulation is that there exists no valid criticism of China.

So, let’s just settle this: what would you say is the most uncomfortablely valid criticism of China?

Western leftists literally never shut up about the Nordic countries so I must flatly reject the premise that the justification is the preservation some vestigial notion of Manifest Destiny

And then the second pillar of why any ml argument falls apart: the insistence that any concerns about how china operates implies that the speaker of those concerns is defending Western status quo.

I can envision a more perfect system than China, and guess what, it isn’t anything close to western capitalism. I’ll even go so far as to say that in terms of absolute delta, China may already be closer. Creating a false dichotomy, however, in which it is argued any criticism or concern about China is actually a veiled attempt to maintain the status quo of western capitalism is ridiculous.

I mean, look at the overwhelming response to the murder of that CEO. Can we not accept that this is at the very least a significant criticism of the USAs runaway capitalist system? Does that imply an overwhelming desire for a Chinese-styled government? No? Somehow it appears to be empirically the case that people can express criticism against a system without existing in some binary state which implies full throated support of exactly 1 alternative that’s been constructed as part of this false dichotomy that ml users live and die by.

This is where I think the conversations always break down on ml.

You fervently assert things like a 95% approval rating while selectively ignoring the “social credit” system that punishes people who don’t approve. You use large party employment to justify some kind of perfect overlap between the proletariat and the government. Where do you think the real decision making is done? Do you think it isn’t a tiny fraction of party elite? How would you view these things through the lens of manufactured consent?

I don’t think it’s any better in a western capitalist system, but I’m not going to deceive myself into thinking that china is running fundamentally differently than any western oligarchy.

My point is you had no point. You responded to a FANTASTIC explanation of the difference by splitting hairs on what by your definition qualifies as a class.

Instead of addressing the argument, you just threw a semantics argument, which I maintain is the terminally online version of pocket sand.

I’m not from the US

The world is burning. Now. With the justice systems you’re alluding to.

That agrees with my preconceived biases, for sure.

Beyond that, I think it’s possible that the “sting” of negative reactions, or the perceived lack of positive reactions my possibly shape how people think.

And, you can buy that kind of engagement in bulk if you have money. You can train people to engage in different thought patterns buy buying upvotes (buying them dopamine), that would be my hypothesis.

If that’s true, I think the inherent danger from a sociological standpoint could not possibly be understated.

Causal relationship between social media and degradation of basic critical thinking skills. Not just tiktok, anything in which people are primarily communicating asynchronously and has a “reward” (likes, upvotes, etc)

So Reddit/Lemmy for sure included

The energy is in the form of complex but stable intramolecular bonds

Banners body has a store of extremely high energy particles. When he transforms, they are converted to much lower energy particles and the energy is converted to mass (e=mc^2). When the hulk goes back to banner, is the same process in reverse: mass is converted to much more highly energetic particles.

This is all predicated on the assumption that people already have a familiarity with organizing their thoughts and intentions in a way that even have a prayer of being understood by a machine.

There are a lot of ways people innately organize their thoughts. Some of them translate much more easily than others to code.

For some people, even step 1 is a hurdle that there are insufficient resources to clear.

That’s an interesting description of lemmy.ml

I’ll just say that hiding not only the instance, but also any comments from any user registered with that instance has made my Lemmy experience about 1000 times better.

Edit: oh shit I’m thinking lemmyGRAD.ml lol

Ok, I’m just going to go ahead and pitch an alternative and then you can weigh in on the relative merits.

In my mind, the issues aren’t the loans themselves, it’s that they’re secured by shares. Billionaires are able to realize real value from those shares without paying taxes in them.

I think if you want to use shares as collateral, you need to pay the taxes on them.

You wanna use shares to back a loan, fine, but the instant you do, all taxes on those shares are due at FMV.

This isn’t without precedent: when an employee has unvested shares with a company and meet a companies retirement eligibility criteria, the IRS sees that those shares are “no longer at substantial risk of forfeiture” and several social taxes are due, despite the shares not being sold or even technically owned by that person.

We can extract fair tax values from securities even before they’re sold. We already do.

Tax the assets used to secure the loans and it gets the taxes into the system without removing voting rights. Win/win, and it’s a scalpel directly targeting the root.

This is a bad system for several reasons:

-It requires an arbitrary use-agnostic choice of value. Why 10 million? Why not 5? Why not 50?

-it requires an arbitrary time scale. Why 5 years? Why not 3? why not 10? Why not limit once in a lifetime?

We’re defining a system here with numbers out of thin air with no context around anything. These are fundamentally badly designed systems. No amount of fiddling with the parameters will make up for the fact that it’s fundamentally flawed.

Also, beyond that, you would be amazed how many scenarios exist for people and businesses to secure large loans that this would impact. The goal is to actually tax the super rich who are dodging taxes, not kneecap legitimate useage. You’d hurt hundreds of thousands legitimate borrowers and just shove Bezos and Musk into using alternative mechanisms to leverage their security holdings.

I know you think I don’t understand your proposal. I challenge you to consider that I do, and still think you can reconsider the root cause of the issue and come up with alternative ideas. You’re stuck on the loan aspect. That’s a symptom, not the cause.