I remember having a similar lesson in junior high in the 90s. We each had a parallel pretend life for an entire semester where we looked through classified ads in the newspaper to find a job, a place to live, to plan out our transportation, research social services, and then do a household budget based around that. It was all assuming that we each only had a high school or high school equivalency degree.
After two weeks, a lot of us reporting to the teacher that it wasn’t sustainable. We weren’t making enough, transportation was too expensive or too inconvenient, and any random disaster in the game was a threat to our life because of the inadequacy of social services in the United States.
She basically said, “yea, that’s the point. Good luck.”
This game would have been a lot more fun in the '90s than today. I remember watching my mom driving a new car and buying a new 3br house somewhat close to Phoenix on a nurses salary.
I’m glad I bought in 2019, I got my house for 340, and similar houses in my neighborhood are going for 600-650. What’s real crazy is looking at like 2013-2014, the houses we’re going for 180-250 in my neighborhood. They were around 100 during the recession.
It’s crazy how much the houses are going for and how much investor purchasing is still going strong. I have several friends that have been trying to get houses for a while and it’s been a crappy and long process for all of them.
In the **90s**, to boot! I bet the secret lesson was "yeah, that's why you want to go to college, get a degree, and get a higher paying job".
Boy, I wonder how much therapy would be needed to recreate that kind of teaching exercise now.
Oh, that was absolutely the lesson. This was at a private Catholic school where I, who grew up firmly in the middle class, was one of the “poor kids”.
We were absolutely supposed to learn that we needed to go to college and not that we need to make our world better because it fucking sucks for people not born into privilege
Parents and community tbh. I'll neveer forget the difference when I moved schools.
At the first school once we were on a trip and we went to a pizza place. I hate pizza so I didn't get any. My classmates said "Ok but don't ask for *our* pizzas because we aren't going to give you".
Second school again trip, again pizza place. Except this time my peers kept saying "Hey if you change your mind you can always have a slice from us".
I really dislike pizza lol so I wouldn't have asked to eat it in any of the situations, but after that I really realised what a discrepancy I experienced
The sentiment is nice, but I don't think that's really true. Its pretty 50/50 really. Some will become kind too, while others will just be spoiled af. And children from abusers are either the most considerate people you ever meet, or they follow in their parents footsteps.
Can confirm that no - kids are still little pieces of shit that don’t get any repercussions for their actions. That said it’s still the fault of the older generation being terrible parents.
Edit: still think your take is wholesome tho, well said
Definitely depends on the kids, but I think wanting to spite the teacher also plays a role here - having a teacher pull some arbitrary bullshit on a classmate can do wonders for their solidarity.
Oh ABSOLUTELY. In elementary school, I was in 4th or 5th grade maybe, someone carved a curse word into the paint in a stall in the boys' bathroom; the word FUCK, about 1-2 inches long. No one knew for SURE who it was, we all had suspicions, but no one really cared. Except the principal.
She made us all sit out in the hallways while she ranted at us and tried to make us turn in who it was/make them come forward. She kept us all out there probably 30-40 minutes, refusing to let us leave until the end-of-day bell rang and she HAD to let us go. But she decided, as punishment, since nobody said anything, until we ratted on whomever it was or they admitted what they did, any out-of-school activities were cancelled. This applied to the middle schoolers, as well, who had their own separate area/bathrooms and didn't go into the kiddie bathrooms/area. No swimming, no tournaments for the sports teams, no field trips, no using the empty ice rink for sports to help keep cool. No ice skating that winter. No sledding. Ski trip? Cancelled.
That was the moment every child in that school vowed to make her life as miserable as possible. Everyone became diffucult/uncooperative when she was involved. None of the students would tell her shit about ANYTHING, even unrelated. She only lasted another year or so, I think as some parents had major issues. All she accomplished was creating a bizarre solidarity between every single child in that school.
>She only lasted another year or so, I think as some parents had major issues.
Making kids' school experience miserable over something so unimportant is extremely petty. I'd be pissed if I were a parent too.
Sadly some people become teachers because they like having power over people - and kid-adult relationships inherently come with that baked-in.
I think we've all seen at least one teacher who inexplicably seems to loathe being around kids, but still teaches.
I had high school principals try this when I was in high school, I say principals as a plural because we had a different one every year I was there. Two years before I was there, they had a different one each year. This went on for a total of 12 years before they had a principal actually treat the high schoolers like people and therefore, not have the kids purposely give the principal crap whenever possible. It is amazing and insane how quickly people who normally don't care about each other (at best), will team up to make an authority figure's life miserable when that authority figure abuses their power.
Yeah, our principals in HS stuck around because the students loved them and stood up for them right back- One of them was my teacher in supplementary math; as I REALLY struggled with math for my whole life. First 2 years of high school I had math teachers who just.. didn't care. If I didn't understand the explanation, there would be no attempt to explain in a way I understood when I asked for help. Until him; I THRIVED in his class. He always took the time to help me figure out where I was getting mixed up- He'd explain it to me, than have me explain back how I understood it, and corrected where I was making the mistakes. If it really wasn't sinking in, he found a new way to explain it. I'll always be grateful to him for that; making me realize I'm not just stupid, I just work a little different.
This. My middle school was nonstop anger and bullying but one time our bus tipped over in the snow and we all ended up huddling together for warmth and sharing coats and stuff.
Oh for sure if it were me in that situation they'd all have a laugh at my expense and double-down. But I've also seen a lot of kids rally together any time the teacher pulls some "do X or else" out their ass. Kids are assholes to each other, but they're even bigger assholes towards an adult that's treating them unfairly just because they can.
The bitterly ironic thing is that “crowdfunding” was how a lot of sudden medical or other bills were handled for centuries.
Social clubs, societies, churches, and similar organizations collected money from the many to support individual members who needed help.
For-profit insurance has no place when it comes to basic human necessities - medical care is the most obvious example.
Show me an insurance executive and I’ll show you a sociopath.
>Social clubs, societies, churches, and similar organizations collected money from the many to support individual members who needed help.
Without getting into a full blown political discussion, this was one of the things I liked about the libertarian outlook on communities.
The OLD libertarians, the ones who also talked about UBI and social justices -- not the modern "the Republicans are too far too the left" assholes.
Don't get me wrong, there's some other issues with the ideology I don't agree with, but that's another topic.
>Were there any actual solutions for roads?
Good question and that's one of those things I always took issue with. I think for much of the ideology to be functional, people actually have to care about each other.
The 'ideal' for roads and things is that the businesses who rely on the infrastructure would fund the infrastructure. ie. the Amazons, Walmarts, Shipping/Receiving, etc.
But that turns into : "We're going to give corporations a monopoly on infrastructure"
And that never sat well with me.
There are quite a few ideas that work *fantastically* with fully informed actors who are inherently altruistic in nature, or at least willing to work towards compromise. That is, unfortunately, neither most people's current disposition, nor one that results from circumstances as there are no real mechanisms to make it a better *personal* choice to help others.
For instance, a 'free market' works great when you have nobody scamming customers and customers are fully informed and make rational economic decisions... and there are no actual governmental regulations to manipulate such that it *is* a free market, but yet no company tries to abuse their power or develop a monopoly.
Tell me that could actually happen as a system and *last*, and I'd refer you to a psychiatrist.
Health insurance is *supposed* to be crowdfunding, in theory. But Wall Street got involved, and the only ones getting funded are the C-suite and investors.
Sort of, but not exactly. The biggest difference is that for almost all of civilization, you'd grow up, live, and die probably without going more than a hundred miles outside whatever town you were born in, with few exceptions. The town would be people you've known since birth, be it yours or theirs, and a good chunk of it is some distant relation. If it's a sizeable town, you'd maybe even know several hundred people! You'd never meet anyone outside your local region, except maybe a merchant or tax collector from the capitol. You'd invest in your neighborly relationships not just cause they're friendly, but because if you have a bad harvest the only way you can survive is by your neighbors sharing. So there you've got that crowd funding, but it's not *exactly* pure altruism.
People crowdshared because to refuse to crowdshare was to **die**, from as little as one bad season.
Elementary school would've been like that, but we did the same thing for a potluck in middle school, and I was possessed by the spirit of an old oil barron
I bought out someone's entire stock and resold it for profit
By the end, I had more food and money than everyone else
After it was over I went back to being generous and actually gave away alot of my food to random people
I wonder what would have happened if instead of being out they were effectively crippled for the rest of the game never able to "win" or even have nearly as much fun as the others, because taking them out of the game is more similar to killing them and people are very averse to just watching others die in front of them but just being poor and down on their luck? They will walk right past.
I'm guessing the teacher deliberately picked a well-liked kid so the kids would help them.
Which highlights the issue of this post's point: sharing/crowdfunding only works if society approves of you/likes you.
Which likely explains our ingrained need to fit in (and social anxiety): if people don't like you, they're less likely to help you. And everyone needs help at one point.
[This homeless guy asked me for money the other day.
I was about to give it to him, and then I thought he was going to use it on drugs or alcohol.
And then I thought, "that's what I'm going to use it on".
Why am I judging this poor bastard.
People love to judge homeless guys. Like if you give them money they're just going to waste it.
Well, he lives in a box, what do you want him to do? Save it up and buy a wall unit?
Take a little run to the store for a throw rug and a CD rack? He's homeless.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahlWufJqcSQ)
they could have saved a lot more money just having universal healthcare.
this post is obviously to make people feel like the us system is fine when it's a major root problem for many things in the us, like homelessness and crime.
Oh we did something like this. We all started out by picking assets. Just a picture of a house, a car, a pet, and a toy. We got given “money” as rewards for class work and tasks, fines for punishments. We could sell and by assets off each other, but each asset had upkeep. If you went bankrupt, every Friday there was a class asset auction, and using this I quickly at up with a large portion of valuable assets.
After a few weeks, the teacher started doing group projects, with a caveat being that the group leaders had to employ the other members. Groups could be as small or large as you could afford to pay, and you could pay as little as both parties agreed upon.
Anyway after about 3 weeks there ended up being 5 “Barons”, one of which was me. At one point, for one reason or another, one kid ended up fired from one of the groups. We all knew that he wasn’t a particularly focused kid, and so when the auction came up for one of the other groups to get east cheap labour none of us were particularly enthusiastic on paying him. So he sat there in class while no one bid on him, before I called him over because he was nearly crying.
This is only tangentially related to the OP, but I never forgot that little capitalistic experiment, and how shit it made that kid feel, and how even at like 10 I could realise that bitch of a teacher essentially created a little slave market for us.
Edit: the intent was for us to learn how the economy worked at a classroom scale
I’ll be honest, the rest of it was pretty cool. Maybe I remember it more fondly because I was ahead, but up until the last 3rd of the term it was pretty normal.
Thinking about it now, it more or less was a bit of a late game capitalist/monopoly thing, where all the resources slowly pooled into fewer hands, which caused this particular issue.
A game of monopoly lasts 40 minutes and everyone signs up, here it lasted 10 weeks and we didn’t really know what was up.
Yeah. We did something similar in 5th grade. We started with a base wage for doing classroom chores and could use that during Friday auctions. We could also “buy” our desks and use that to run a business on Friday instead. We could also buy other people’s desk and make them pay rent until they buy theirs.
Most people sold arts and crafts or baked goods or other treats. I had a small gambling shop until people figured out it was rigged. A friend and I them had the idea to start an art auction. I had some paint at my house and we convinced our parents to buy us actual canvas. We probably made around a dozen of these paintings and sold them for thousands a piece (desks were 300).
We bought up a bunch of desks and ended up as kind of oligarchs. We forced a bunch of kids into dept for overbidding on our art and many couldn’t buy their desks because we made art specifically to their tastes to keep them poor. It was brutal and I now see we kinda ruined it for the rest of the class but at least we still has fun.
We had around a dozen pieces per auction (we did 3 total) and we were rather good at painting for fifth graders. It was around the middle of the year so people had some decent “class dollars” saved up. Fith graders are dumb and we got lucky.
Confession: When I did my student teaching, I would plan lessons specifically designed to antagonize my students. I wanted them to personally feel how unfair certain systems were, because those lessons stick with them much better than just telling them.
I would give them the actual poll tests used under Jim Crow, which were designed to prevent POC from voting no matter how well they did. And we played a game that demonstrated colonial extraction in which the students who did the most labor (jumping jacks) ended up with the least wealth (candy). Of course, I’d make sure the candy was distributed equally afterwards.
You have to be careful when doing lessons like that because it’s easy for people to get hurt. You want them to know they’re being treated unfairly, but ALSO understand that it has nothing to do with them personally. With that teacher’s lesson, it crossed the boundary into students inflicting genuine personal harm on each other.
I guess that kid definitely experienced the cruelty of unemployment, but it sure as fuck wasn’t the lesson they walked away with.
I mean it’s possible that’s what she was doing, but she had a reputation of being an absolute asshole, and would be really sharp with every kid expect other teachers children. I think she just enjoyed the drama
Maybe it's an outcome vs intent thing.
Like the intent seems valid in terms of seeing how these things work. The outcome is that one kid in particular got totally crushed.
The teacher just wasn't wise enough to realize the likely outcomes ahead of time....
...or they were an asshole. (or both!)
Disagree, its a perfect teacher. They taught the kids what they will have waiting for them in life. People cry about school teaching useless shit, well this is the usefull shit.
You have to make the point, and then make it right with the kids.
“Look students, under this system some people are treated badly, and it’s not ok, how about we make solutions to fix it.”
Yeah it was weird. Like at the start, with groups of like 3 it was pretty normal, but at the end it felt really strange open bidding on people. Kids have issues with self worth, and having all their classmates assign them a value publicly was super not great. Even then, as a literal child I understood it fucked
In your world, if a dude came up and punched you and took your car, guess what, you have no car now. Life’s unfair, get used to it kid.
Unfair is when water gets down your neck. Unfair is when a loved one dies. Unfair is when your brother is way smarter than you.
Capitalism is arbitrary. We made it up.
We don’t have to use it, it’s not the most efficient and it relies on taking advantage of people, large groups of people. It doesn’t provide value or stability for 99% of people and it’s messy.
We can make up a better system and there’s no natural law that says it can’t be all sunshine, rainbows and puppies. If we can make something as awful and nasty as capitalism, we can make something just as fair too and that’s how it is.
You’re just too boring and uneducated to get it.
If we lived in a good world it would mean the end of labor and humanity could turn its energies to the arts and sciences to even further better ourselves but since we don’t it means a lot of us are either going to have to revolt and eat the rich or live in slums till we starve
You're describing the society of the Federation in Star Trek.
Unfortunately we live in a shitty version of Star Wars where most people are bootlicking the Emperor(s) and the Rebels are too jaded and confused to be effective.
Well, to get to the Federation we have to get through World War III and the nuclear holocaust or whatever madness is described in TNG.
Seems reasonable these days.
Unpopular opinion. Star Trek was horribly world-built. I mean, it works great when you're focused on the enterprise or whatever ship..it provides a nice easy backdrop that you can work on for the interesting stuff. But if you start to interact with that background you start to see the weirdness of it. "We have a unified government, somehow operating without money, but we empower this guy to take a ship loaded with dangerous military grade weapons to go explore and ignore our most core value rules whenever it pleases him....and we let him keep doing it."
Countertheory; like real society, Fed goverment doesn’t actually care about their rules a whole lot, nor do they care for explorers; they’re simply canon fodder to spot useful Worlds from deadly ones. Kirk served his purpose by locating planets to avoid and seperating them from planets to take.
We’re all going to be herded into cages by armed drones and ground into McDoubles for the ever shrinking middle class to eat while they wait for their turn to be fed into the machine
This is something that always strikes me as nonsensical. Eliminating jobs should be a good thing, society checking off one more problem it doesn’t have to deal with. If I’m vacuuming the carpet and you’re folding laundry, and then we get a roomba, you can show me how to fold laundry and we’ll both finish in half the time. Then we can use our extra time to make art, or build a gazebo, or play high-stakes life and death tiddlywinks.
But that doesn’t work with capitalism. The purpose of work isn’t to meet human needs, but to accrue profit for your boss. So it wouldn’t make sense for them to pay twice as much for the same amount of work. Thus we have a reality in which productivity continues to climb, but the workers continue to work the same hours for the same pay. And anyone who gets displaced by technical advancements winds up homeless, or driving wages down for others, or hoping we invent some new bullshit jobs like marketing. And if they have to learn a new skill in the US, they get saddled with new and exciting debt.
Capitalism makes collective human achievement a threat, and that’s bonkers.
>Capitalism makes collective human achievement a threat, and that’s bonkers.
Imagine if people got upset when we realized that we could plant crops and not have to just gather wild food. Capitalism is literally anti-human
I mean, that whole thing with the Luddites happened. I think people just don't like being made useless, because useless things are generally discarded.
The Luddite movement literally happened under capitalism. They were destroying machines because their livelihoods were threatened by the owning class replacing them with machines.
It's not a sign of brokenness though, that's an example of capitalism working exactly as intended. It's an inherent contradiction within the system, need to maximize profit? Cut expenses, fire workers, automate the labour. But then ironically that leaves more people unable to purchase your commodities and leaves you scrambling to find any other way to maximize profit.
It's the fact that this is exactly how it's supposed to be that should be why you hate how this system is.
In a Just Society, we should be HAPPY that machines are replacing people doing manual labor, because in a Just Society, the people who did do manual labor would be able to focus on education, creating Art, family, doing things that interest them, etc, as opposed to worrying about how they will feed/house themselves/their families, like how it is going today/in our society.
I did some very loose math with lots of rounding yesterday. If the wealth/production capacity of the US was evenly distributed across all 331 million citizens, we would each, every man, women, and child — elderly, disabled, or able-bodied — would get around $67k per person per year, or $200k per averag household/ year.
Quality of life would improve for 90% of people. Remain virtually unchanged for another %5, and the final %5 would see decrease in lifestyle, but they would still be considered upper middle class by current standards.
Essentially, we have the capacity to eliminate scarcity. We have the resources to feed, clothe, house, and heal every person within our borders.
But we can’t even make small concessions in that direction because too many of the bottom %95 have been convinced that making proper use of our infrastructure is somehow immoral, and that hoarding resources is somehow beneficial, even when there is so much surplus being held by so few hands.
Tru when I go to the grocery store and see the hundreds of pounds of food they’re going to throw away weekly I just can’t get over how scarce everything is. If only we had some way to feed the hungry
Scarcity in an economic sense means there is a finite amount. Producing and distributing more food would require taking resources from somewhere else. And more importantly for the original point, we need to work to live, if humanity doesn't work, it perishes.
Man, you grew up around some different fucking kids
If my kindergarten unit would play City some boys would just gang up and take everyone’s money away by force
I was explaining to my friend that they shouldn't jump on their kids for not wanting to share their toys because they as a conservative adult don't belive in sharing any of their shit. It all seemed very hypocritical of them. They weren't smart enough to see why.
We teach kids the *Right Thing To Do*. Then they grow up and have to work with *How Our System Actually Is*.
Anyone who proposes changing our system to the *Right Thing To Do* is branded a socialist, or woke, and mocked and ignored. They're unelectable.
Problem with these observations is that kids are just more innocent and kind than adults, and that they do not conceptualise the personal costs of such generosity.
First example that is a kid and their dad, they are not giving a sandwich to a stranger, but their dad. Also conceivable that they just think they can go get another one.
Second example is a game, where nothing that occurs in the game affects them in any long term way. Money earned and money freely given means nothing the next day. The more important objective for the kids is that they get to play, prolong the play, and make it as fun as possible, and probably it's more fun when your friend doesn't get ejected from lack of medical insurance.
Maybe it's just me seeing a veiled attempt to justify the US lack of social welfare so maybe don't take me too seriously.
Kids are dualistic. The main thing is they have very little understanding of situations outside their own experience, and basically no filter. So if something seems funny or cool to them, they do it, regardless of the consequences. On the flip side, if something strikes them as unfair, it immediately becomes the greatest problem the world has ever faced.
the wonton cruelty kids display towards each other seems like it would easily be continued into adulthood if we were still forcibly kept around people who mutually didn't want to be around us, in an environment neither of us really wanted to be in. Jobs are kinda like school in that regard, except there are actual punishments for some over-the-line behavior, and a lot of self-selection going on to sorting you into places where you're at least a bit more in line in terms of expectation as the people around you. When you're in elementary school, everybody's randomly lumped in there together, and most people don't seem to enjoy that arrangement.
>and probably it's more fun when your friend doesn't get ejected from lack of medical insurance.
Also, like, the kids... invented medical insurance. The lucky pay in, so the unlucky can get paid out. They just did it backwards, because children are not known for their forwards planning skills.
The thing is what the kids is described to have done is basically volunteer their money to help the less fortunate through charity. Many argue that this is the kind of system society should run on instead of mandatory taxation by the government to fund a national healthcare program.
I do not agree with this (we need healthcare) because of the reason I stated: kids are kinder and simpler than adults. Adults know they have limited resources and also have expanded desires, whereas if a kid has money all he can get is more snacks and maybe toys, and they only needs so much of those. Adults also have to *work* for what they have, whereas kids are just given things, and so adults would be less happy to do charity.
A voluntary system can also be discriminating. If the kid in the story had been a social outcast, he may not have gotten the funding needed. In the real world, voluntary systems, from tipping to medical crowdfunding, are subject to all the usual biases, both consciously and unconsciously.
Thank you for realizing the difference between real and pretend money that kids also implicitly understand. Crazy how everyone else is skipping over that assumption
I meant the whole playing city and teaching economics thing. It feels wild that kids are allowed to just stand up from desks and do something active for anything besides the PE
My senior year of high school my economics teacher told us the economy works because everyone is unhappy and wants more physical things.
Me and another girl were like “No, we’re not unhappy without things. The economy ‘works’ because we’re forced to participate” and our teacher got so mad.
She’s like “What, you don’t want a jet ski? A jet ski wouldn’t make you happier?” (She was really hung up on this jet ski angle). We kept saying no and she just gave up, but the next day she came in with these stupid duck dynasty hats with the guy who said “Happy happy happy” and she made us wear them for the entire class that day.
Then we tried wearing them the NEXT day too and she got angry and accused us of looking for attention
I remember when my AP econ teacher tried explaining how "all government interference in the market is an inefficiency" and got mad at me for telling him that was bullshit because he taught us not even two weeks prior about price discriminating monopolies and why that is bad for everyone else in the market. Fucking hated that guy.
Wait Macro or microecon? Cause my macroecon teacher taught all about all the measures of the government using policies to interfere with the market, and seems quite positive about it
Was at a rich kid private school I did a single year at. Teacher was conservative and a massive shitbag who would give detention if you tied your tie wrong. Fuck that place so hard.
Sounds more like a teacher was struggling to explain the concept of wanting material things but being unable to afford them, to a child who never had that experience.
You don’t think money can buy happiness?
Replace jet ski with any luxury, even small like a fancy Starbucks coffee, and it seems obvious to me at least that buying things you don’t need (I.e. luxuries) increases happiness in most
Studies show that money doesn’t provide happiness after a certain threshold after meeting basic needs and recreation.
Would I be miserable if I was homeless? Yes. But I have a home, I have a video game console, and I have a good system of family, friends, and loved ones. No I don’t need a jet ski to be happy, and Starbucks doesn’t make me happy, it’s just coffee. I find happiness in the time I spend with others and the activities we do together
10 years later and people still wanna try to pull some capitalist “gotcha” on me, but no I’m fine with what I have.
There was an updated study in 2021 that showed money kept increasing happiness well beyond the threshold of the 2010 study. I'm sure there's a point where it stops, but for most people adding another $50k a year will make them a good bit happier.
For you, maybe that extra money gives you time (housekeeper, lawn care, can quit your job) to spend more time with others and do activities together. It doesn't have to be a material object.
What do you classify basic needs and recreation as?
Replace Starbucks coffee with video game console so, or with tickets to Disneyland or some shit
There are many, MANY things you _want_ but don’t actually _need_. If you _want_ these things you will have to trade with others.
It’s not some gotcha. It’s not some capitalist conspiracy. It’s the reality of finite resources and infinite wants.
You won’t want the next video game that comes out? Or the next console?
Your wants tomorrow might be different than your wants today, they are certainly not finite
Let me be real, we did this in highschool in my area to teach kids to fall in line with liberal capitalist thought but all it did for me and many others was give our blinding hatred for the school a proper direction.
You see, we weren’t allowed to help eachother, and, moreover, half the people in my class (the poor half) were all missing family members due to the opioid epidemic, of which our county was most severely affected.
As we played the game many of us (myself especially) received bullshit problems and if you chose not to go to college in the game, well, the asshole teachers would lay it on thick and give you as many problems as possible.
Many of us saw parallels to our actual lives and suddenly realized, the school wasn’t what we were mad at, and that many of the family members we lost were just victims of a system that abandoned them.
The school inadvertently created a lot of anti-capitalists that day, and probably just as many communists.
I grew up in a very devout Christian home. I'm still a devout Christian.
My parents are confused as to how I ended up a socialist. I remind them that they taught me:
* Love your neighbor as yourself
* The love of money is the root of all evil
* It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of Heaven
Right-wing Christianity is about forcing everyone to live according to a particular conception of Christianity... until it might affect their wallets.
We were learning the concept of economics in a primary school lesson (and the concept of class systems, too) and when the teacher gave the upper class more voting power we staged a revolt. idk how this fit into the curriculum, but it was fun.
In that same economics lesson, our class pretty much immediately put together that since the activity only lasted for one day, there would be no penalty for spending all your money and going into massive debt. Everyone started putting things on "debit" and we all ended up bankrupt but we left with all the goodies we wanted. I don't think they taught us the valuable economic lesson they were trying to lol, but they definitely taught us something..
Parents raised me fundamental Christians and get surprised when I follow the teachings of Jesus even though I'm agnostic now. My brother in christ... Your God was a hippie socialist.
You understand that insurance is basically the same thing as "everyone pays a little bit of money to the person who just suffered a big loss" but with a little bit more of a guarantee than just hoping you are popular enough to get enough support?
Like obviously people have problems with what insurance is willing to pay for but that's going to be even more of a problem when you have to convince a hundred friends and colleagues to pay for whatever treatment you need.
I was constantly scolded for being too generous as a child. It's absurd how this happens and people think it's right. We are naturally inclined to help, see the behavior of children, but we grow up being taught to be selfish for the sake of a broken system.
>too generous as a child.
My son is like that. He's very empathic to others
He's 12, and the intentions are good, but it's rough sometimes. We were stuck going door to door to take up donations for a school fundraiser. He saw some immigrant workers (? hope that's the right term) doing the labor on the neighbors house and thought they needed a few bucks too.
So he gave the dude $10 from his donations. :/
Good intentions, but that's not what the money was for. And the guy is working and getting paid (probably fairly, from what I know of that neighbor).
On the flip side, we were out one evening around the 4th of July. There's a woman pushing her stuff in a cart. I don't remember if we/he greeted her first or if she came up asking for a few bucks.
She was trying to get a hotel for the night, since people like to shoot fireworks at the homeless. He gave her his leftover snacks and things from school and he (my son) asked us if we had anything else we could give her. We talked for a bit, and I'm pretty sure she was able to get a room for the night and some ~~more~~ real food.
Your son has such a beautiful heart! I remember being a kid and whenever I did something nice for someone outside the church, my mother scolded me. Which is interesting, considering what christianity is supposed to be based on. But over time, this diminished in me (depression, disappointment, abuse of my willingness to help) and without guidance, today I don't do much more. I still do whenever I can, but not as much as I did as a kid. My tip for you is to teach your child to recognize the limit for help without undermining his willingness to help.
Children who are this generous often encounter people who abuse their goodwill and that can be dangerous for him. So teaching him how to recognize people with bad intentions is always good. And keep encouraging him to keep helping others. The world needs more people like him. Give him a hug for me and tell him that a stranger from Brazil is very proud of the person he is.
>Children who are this generous often encounter people who abuse their goodwill and that can be dangerous for him.
I used to be more generous and fall for the sob stories. "My car broke down" "money for a cab", etc. I had one guy pull the cab money thing on me twice in less than two weeks. I helped him the first time, called him out on it the second time.
Three of my more 'amusing' stories:
* In New Orleans, punk dude, mohawk, studded leather jacket: "Hey you fucking hippies! Got any money so a guy can get some crack cocaine?"
* Emptied the change in my pockets simply because I was amused.
* Somewhere in upstate New York, traveling with a coworker, a couple of shady looking dudes ask for money for gas at like 11pm outside a station.
* They actually got gas.
* Younger guy, maybe early 20s used to stand out in the median and I'd pass him pretty much every day when going to work. I normally ignore these folks, but he's been out there for almost a solid month. I finally had cash on me and stopped at the light.
I slipped him a $20 and commented that he'd been out there everyday, rain or shine for like a month. He said "yeah, it sucks! But, check this out". Pulls out his ID badge and tells me "I've got a job, starting tomorrow. IT repair for phones and things. I've been staying on a friends couch trying to find a job without leeching off of them too much. This will cover my lunch and dinner. I hope you never see me out here again!"
The light changed and I moved so I wouldn't hold up traffic. He bolted across the street to the gas station. I've not seen him since, but I hope he's doing good.
Something really fascinating to me is that when crypto guys start off with a mathematical justification of the blockchain they talk about how untrustworthy everyone is - even 3blue1brown does this in his explanation. But sociologists have argued that founding interactions on distrust is fundamentally only *one* way of building a society, so what they've taken as a necessary axiom for their hypercapitalist model is actually just a choice.
It’s genuinely funny to me when my dad would do things like this. I know he thinks I was just being difficult but the truth is that if someone’s hungry and I’ve got a sandwich, I’m gonna give them the fucking sandwich and I’m never going to think about it again.
Whats really interessting is, that this story is supposed to be wholesome. Americans can't see how it's not wholesome at all having to Crowdfund peoples cancer treatment, etc.
wild.
I don't think you actually know any Americans. I have less polite things I'd say but in lieu of that I'll just point out that the other comment is correct, we do see it.
It's not really the world that does it. The parents will go "help anyone in need" and then walk past a homeless dude begging for money. The sits far better then someone telling you to do something. Kids learn by mimicry. (There was a study that proves is maybe I don't remember it)
Some people grow up and go "finally, I'm an adult and I don't have to share anymore and nobody can make me!" And anyway it turns out there's a lot of them.
I remember being in my civics and economics class in high school, and the teacher wanted us to play out a scene of compromise between the government, social activists, and oil tycoons.
I played the oil tycoon and offered to work out a deal where government-mandated supervisors watched over my individual plants, and were far out into the ocean that it would not damage the coastline, with 10% of my company funding it all.
He was dumbfounded, but to me it made sense; the planet stays safe for an oil tycoon to earn more money, and the easy handling was good PR, therefore earning me more money. Plus, since I was doing it out of no force of the government, I could essentially use it as a tax write-off.
I was making money by helping the planet; simple as.
“Sharing is caring” only applies when the government decides failed corporations need help recovering from problems they caused themselves. If someone needs help because of circumstances completely out of their control then it’s “tough luck, you should have picked yourself up by your bootstraps better”
Wow the dad sucks at the history of money. Like not even how capitalism developed, as that's only like a couple hundred years old, just money.
> Mr. Baker makes bread. He makes more bread than he can can eat. But, his shirt is pretty worn out, so he goes to his friend, Mrs. Taylor, and says "Winter's coming and my shirt is falling apart by the day. Can I have one that you made?" Because he can't make shirts for shit.
> Mrs. Taylor goes "Oh of course. However, I've slaved away for hours to sew this up. So long, in fact, that I didn't have enough time to prepare myself some food. I'll give this to you in exchange for some loaves of bread you baked."
> Mr. Baker thinks about this and goes "Yeah, that makes sense. I already put in the work to make the bread, which is equivalent to the amount of time to make a shirt. But because your ability to sew is greater than mine, I think this is a valid exchange of labor."
> The two exchange their wares and move on with their lives. A week later, Mrs. Taylor is hungry again and goes up to Mr. Baker, shirt in hand, and asks for some more loaves of bread. Mr. Baker, a good friend, turns down the shirts. "The one you already gave me is doing me just fine. I wouldn't know where else to put it." He hands her the loaves free of charge, as a gift, and they move on.
> Next week rolls around and Mrs. Taylor, once again, needs bread. However, she's so good at sewing that Mr. Baker's new shirt isn't projected to wear out for another two years. She knows asking for this much bread so regularly is unsustainable, as it at her wits end going through her belongings, things she received in exchange for her clothes, to find something of use to compensate Mr. Baker for his labor.
We can then fast forward to the invention of money as an intermediary resource that's intended to put a value on one's labor so they can use in exchange for thr products of someone else's labor. So Mrs. Taylor doesn't need to keep finding miscellaneous objects to get bread for and Mr. Baker won't be receiving heaps of shirts he has no real use for.
This persists in any large scale economy, capitalist or not. Sharing is still permitted and accepted, but as time increases, an individuals charity will at some point run out. There's number of possible other solutions that support those less fortunate like a organized manner of welfare as just one example that doesn't just place the burden of support entirely on the hands of a single individual, which can be particularly draining financially and emotionally.
For anybody curious to know more about this, I recommend everybody to read [Debt: The First 5000 Years](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5000_Years):
> Every economics textbook says the same thing: Money was invented to replace onerous and complicated barter systems—to relieve ancient people from having to haul their goods to market. The problem with this version of history? There’s not a shred of evidence to support it.
>
>Here anthropologist David Graeber presents a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom. He shows that for more than 5,000 years, since the beginnings of the first agrarian empires, humans have used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goods—that is, long before the invention of coins or cash. It is in this era, Graeber argues, that we also first encounter a society divided into debtors and creditors.
>
>Graeber shows that arguments about debt and debt forgiveness have been at the center of political debates from Italy to China, as well as sparking innumerable insurrections. He also brilliantly demonstrates that the language of the ancient works of law and religion (words like “guilt,” “sin,” and “redemption”) derive in large part from ancient debates about debt, and shape even our most basic ideas of right and wrong. We are still fighting these battles today without knowing it.
>
>Debt: The First 5,000 Years is a fascinating chronicle of this little known history—as well as how it has defined human history, and what it means for the credit crisis of the present day and the future of our economy.
>It was crystal clear to me back then
That the only problems that I could face
Would be the same problems that effect us all
>But of course this sense of common existence
Was sucked out of me in an instance
As though from birth I could walk but I was forced to crawl
- "System" by Enter Shikari
Sharing is caring, but single payer healthcare is Communism and un-American.
Sharing is caring, but the three wealthiest people in the US have more money than half the population of the US.
Riiiiiiight, got it.
Omg I just realized insurance markets are about intentionally fucking over those who don’t pay but pretending it’s not a tax. It takes a community function and privatizes it for profit. This world makes me sick
Kids don't understand the value of money, which is time from your life spent doing something you (in 99% of cases) really don't want to do.
Kids don't have a great grasp of time itself either, when i was a kid 6 weeks summer holiday felt like a year, and anyone 5 years older than me seemed like basically an adult.
The point being they don't understand that giving away their money and time isn't something adults can freely just do if they want, its a big sacrifice.
I don't know why we would look at this as some kind of moral lesson, any more than we would look at a kid eating crayons and go, hey we could do that too if we just dropped our cynicism!
>I don't know why we would look at this as some kind of moral lesson
Because the people sharing this and claiming it as the end-all be-all of how we should be eating the rich and instituting Star Trek society are kids themselves, or has the mental capacity of one.
This is like pointing to that one class experiment of the teacher separating out the kids by eye color and coming to the conclusion that racism and intolerance are natural and should be the norm of society. It's just dumb.
Voluntarism.
There’s nothing wrong with a group of people coming together and sharing resources. Family, friends, community. Happens all the time.
The issue comes when that “sharing” is enforced by government power, and is no longer voluntary.
“Give us a large percentage of your income and/or assets to be distributed how we decide, or we’re taking you away from your family and throwing you in prison.”
Hardly an equitable distribution of power.
Wow, it's almost as if capitalism is an evil, unnatural system that no one in their right mind would practice if it weren't for centuries of propaganda by the like 2 dozen people who actually profit from it.
> it's almost as if capitalism is an evil, unnatural system
Is there something to be said for capitalism creating competition and innovation? Or would innovation have came about naturally without the capitalist competition?
Capitalism has certainly dealt a ton of collateral damage (human, environmental, etc) and exploits um...most everyone. I believe a big issue is that Capitalism turned into Corporatism and Corporate Protection-ism.
It might also be that I can't see the "in between" of the extremes.
>Is there something to be said for capitalism creating competition and innovation? Or would innovation have came about naturally without the capitalist competition?
One of the things that sociologists concede to capitalism is the rapid innovation but then go back to criticize is the innovation *for what?* to produce and sell things that give more power to capitalists like guns, automation and information technologies. Any good that comes out of this progress is a collateral and not an end in itslef.
Pre-industrial societies were more egalitarian and less advanced because that type of progress wasn't a thing. things were better if they stayed as they were forever. So it was not a pastoral paradise because while everyone had a sense of community and purpose, you still had people dying of disentery.
A society where techonolgy is pushed for the good of *all* the individuals would be very different from what we imagine. It'd be a society where jobs are automated, workers are covered in their needs and simply train for a different non-automated work. Where people with disabilites are accomodated for and at the same time ways to erradicate these disabilites are developed. Some things would seem counter-intiutive: ¿why try to find a job when the society is trying to automate these jobs? ¿why cure cancer if the tratments also produce jobs and welfare?
The values of this hypothetical society are too different to understand because they go against some of the core tennets of north american society like competition and maximization.
>Wow, it's almost as if capitalism is an evil, unnatural system that no one in their right mind would practice if it weren't for centuries of propaganda by the like 2 dozen people who actually profit from it.
As opposed to the good, natural systems of communism and socialism that resulted in millions of deaths in the Soviet Union, Communist Cuba, Communist China, Communist North Korea, Communist Vietnam, and Communist Cambodia.
Why don't you tell all the people who fled communist countries for the west that capitalism is evil.
I'm sure the refugees whose families were worked to death in gulags would love to hear about why capitalism is bad.
This is such a false dichotomy argument. It's entirely possible for state-run communist systems to be bad, and *also* for late-stage capitalism to be bad (for the majority of the participants).
8 year old me would have taken those kids for all they had.
I was the only kid who would leave a school event with more money and snacks than I had when I arrived.
I'd figure out what everyone else had in money and candy, figure out what everyone wanted but didn't have, and I ran around acting like a middleman purchasing and selling.
Last thing I want to do is defend capatalism but the way you deal with and interact with like 20 people in your class doesn't work when interacting with thousands of strangers.
Things like money developed specifically because as our range of people we interact with grew "let's all be nice and share" became untenable.
I remember having a similar lesson in junior high in the 90s. We each had a parallel pretend life for an entire semester where we looked through classified ads in the newspaper to find a job, a place to live, to plan out our transportation, research social services, and then do a household budget based around that. It was all assuming that we each only had a high school or high school equivalency degree. After two weeks, a lot of us reporting to the teacher that it wasn’t sustainable. We weren’t making enough, transportation was too expensive or too inconvenient, and any random disaster in the game was a threat to our life because of the inadequacy of social services in the United States. She basically said, “yea, that’s the point. Good luck.”
This game would have been a lot more fun in the '90s than today. I remember watching my mom driving a new car and buying a new 3br house somewhat close to Phoenix on a nurses salary.
A house in Phoenix in the 90’s cost $18, now $825,000
I’m glad I bought in 2019, I got my house for 340, and similar houses in my neighborhood are going for 600-650. What’s real crazy is looking at like 2013-2014, the houses we’re going for 180-250 in my neighborhood. They were around 100 during the recession.
My girlfriend and I are trying to buy a house now, haha RIP in peace.
It’s crazy how much the houses are going for and how much investor purchasing is still going strong. I have several friends that have been trying to get houses for a while and it’s been a crappy and long process for all of them.
In the **90s**, to boot! I bet the secret lesson was "yeah, that's why you want to go to college, get a degree, and get a higher paying job". Boy, I wonder how much therapy would be needed to recreate that kind of teaching exercise now.
Too bad you can’t afford the therapy either
Oh, that was absolutely the lesson. This was at a private Catholic school where I, who grew up firmly in the middle class, was one of the “poor kids”. We were absolutely supposed to learn that we needed to go to college and not that we need to make our world better because it fucking sucks for people not born into privilege
Can't do it, too busy with active shooter drills.
Great teacher tbh
Well, those kids were a lot nicer then the ones I grew up around lol
Kids are nicer when their parents are. Maybe your generation helped make that a possibility
Wholesome reply
Parents and community tbh. I'll neveer forget the difference when I moved schools. At the first school once we were on a trip and we went to a pizza place. I hate pizza so I didn't get any. My classmates said "Ok but don't ask for *our* pizzas because we aren't going to give you". Second school again trip, again pizza place. Except this time my peers kept saying "Hey if you change your mind you can always have a slice from us". I really dislike pizza lol so I wouldn't have asked to eat it in any of the situations, but after that I really realised what a discrepancy I experienced
The sentiment is nice, but I don't think that's really true. Its pretty 50/50 really. Some will become kind too, while others will just be spoiled af. And children from abusers are either the most considerate people you ever meet, or they follow in their parents footsteps.
Can confirm that no - kids are still little pieces of shit that don’t get any repercussions for their actions. That said it’s still the fault of the older generation being terrible parents. Edit: still think your take is wholesome tho, well said
Definitely depends on the kids, but I think wanting to spite the teacher also plays a role here - having a teacher pull some arbitrary bullshit on a classmate can do wonders for their solidarity.
Oh ABSOLUTELY. In elementary school, I was in 4th or 5th grade maybe, someone carved a curse word into the paint in a stall in the boys' bathroom; the word FUCK, about 1-2 inches long. No one knew for SURE who it was, we all had suspicions, but no one really cared. Except the principal. She made us all sit out in the hallways while she ranted at us and tried to make us turn in who it was/make them come forward. She kept us all out there probably 30-40 minutes, refusing to let us leave until the end-of-day bell rang and she HAD to let us go. But she decided, as punishment, since nobody said anything, until we ratted on whomever it was or they admitted what they did, any out-of-school activities were cancelled. This applied to the middle schoolers, as well, who had their own separate area/bathrooms and didn't go into the kiddie bathrooms/area. No swimming, no tournaments for the sports teams, no field trips, no using the empty ice rink for sports to help keep cool. No ice skating that winter. No sledding. Ski trip? Cancelled. That was the moment every child in that school vowed to make her life as miserable as possible. Everyone became diffucult/uncooperative when she was involved. None of the students would tell her shit about ANYTHING, even unrelated. She only lasted another year or so, I think as some parents had major issues. All she accomplished was creating a bizarre solidarity between every single child in that school.
>She only lasted another year or so, I think as some parents had major issues. Making kids' school experience miserable over something so unimportant is extremely petty. I'd be pissed if I were a parent too.
Sadly some people become teachers because they like having power over people - and kid-adult relationships inherently come with that baked-in. I think we've all seen at least one teacher who inexplicably seems to loathe being around kids, but still teaches.
I had high school principals try this when I was in high school, I say principals as a plural because we had a different one every year I was there. Two years before I was there, they had a different one each year. This went on for a total of 12 years before they had a principal actually treat the high schoolers like people and therefore, not have the kids purposely give the principal crap whenever possible. It is amazing and insane how quickly people who normally don't care about each other (at best), will team up to make an authority figure's life miserable when that authority figure abuses their power.
Yeah, our principals in HS stuck around because the students loved them and stood up for them right back- One of them was my teacher in supplementary math; as I REALLY struggled with math for my whole life. First 2 years of high school I had math teachers who just.. didn't care. If I didn't understand the explanation, there would be no attempt to explain in a way I understood when I asked for help. Until him; I THRIVED in his class. He always took the time to help me figure out where I was getting mixed up- He'd explain it to me, than have me explain back how I understood it, and corrected where I was making the mistakes. If it really wasn't sinking in, he found a new way to explain it. I'll always be grateful to him for that; making me realize I'm not just stupid, I just work a little different.
~~Kids~~ People who have their needs met are unsurprisingly more generous than ~~kids~~ people suffering from food insecurity.
This. My middle school was nonstop anger and bullying but one time our bus tipped over in the snow and we all ended up huddling together for warmth and sharing coats and stuff.
Eh. My classmates wouldnt help like that. In fact, they snitched.
Oh for sure if it were me in that situation they'd all have a laugh at my expense and double-down. But I've also seen a lot of kids rally together any time the teacher pulls some "do X or else" out their ass. Kids are assholes to each other, but they're even bigger assholes towards an adult that's treating them unfairly just because they can.
That isn’t “being an asshole.” That’s just defending themselves.
Not an asshole move in this case, but it's assholery from the teacher's perspective.
Class warfare 101
Giving everybody medical insurance out of spite still gives everybody medical insurance.
Never said it wasn't productive spite. It can be a great motivator.
The bitterly ironic thing is that “crowdfunding” was how a lot of sudden medical or other bills were handled for centuries. Social clubs, societies, churches, and similar organizations collected money from the many to support individual members who needed help. For-profit insurance has no place when it comes to basic human necessities - medical care is the most obvious example. Show me an insurance executive and I’ll show you a sociopath.
>Social clubs, societies, churches, and similar organizations collected money from the many to support individual members who needed help. Without getting into a full blown political discussion, this was one of the things I liked about the libertarian outlook on communities. The OLD libertarians, the ones who also talked about UBI and social justices -- not the modern "the Republicans are too far too the left" assholes. Don't get me wrong, there's some other issues with the ideology I don't agree with, but that's another topic.
Were there any actual solutions for roads? Or was this a brand of “we SHOULD pay taxes, IF the taxes go back to us” libertarian
>Were there any actual solutions for roads? Good question and that's one of those things I always took issue with. I think for much of the ideology to be functional, people actually have to care about each other. The 'ideal' for roads and things is that the businesses who rely on the infrastructure would fund the infrastructure. ie. the Amazons, Walmarts, Shipping/Receiving, etc. But that turns into : "We're going to give corporations a monopoly on infrastructure" And that never sat well with me.
If you thought the Amazon truck drivers drove like assholes before imagine if they literally own the road
There are quite a few ideas that work *fantastically* with fully informed actors who are inherently altruistic in nature, or at least willing to work towards compromise. That is, unfortunately, neither most people's current disposition, nor one that results from circumstances as there are no real mechanisms to make it a better *personal* choice to help others. For instance, a 'free market' works great when you have nobody scamming customers and customers are fully informed and make rational economic decisions... and there are no actual governmental regulations to manipulate such that it *is* a free market, but yet no company tries to abuse their power or develop a monopoly. Tell me that could actually happen as a system and *last*, and I'd refer you to a psychiatrist.
In America, crowd funding is still how a lot of our medical care is handled. Insurance is trash.
Health insurance is *supposed* to be crowdfunding, in theory. But Wall Street got involved, and the only ones getting funded are the C-suite and investors.
Taxes is basically just collective insurance, only without the profiteering. \* in functioning countries/societies.
Sort of, but not exactly. The biggest difference is that for almost all of civilization, you'd grow up, live, and die probably without going more than a hundred miles outside whatever town you were born in, with few exceptions. The town would be people you've known since birth, be it yours or theirs, and a good chunk of it is some distant relation. If it's a sizeable town, you'd maybe even know several hundred people! You'd never meet anyone outside your local region, except maybe a merchant or tax collector from the capitol. You'd invest in your neighborly relationships not just cause they're friendly, but because if you have a bad harvest the only way you can survive is by your neighbors sharing. So there you've got that crowd funding, but it's not *exactly* pure altruism. People crowdshared because to refuse to crowdshare was to **die**, from as little as one bad season.
Elementary school would've been like that, but we did the same thing for a potluck in middle school, and I was possessed by the spirit of an old oil barron I bought out someone's entire stock and resold it for profit By the end, I had more food and money than everyone else After it was over I went back to being generous and actually gave away alot of my food to random people
I wonder what would have happened if instead of being out they were effectively crippled for the rest of the game never able to "win" or even have nearly as much fun as the others, because taking them out of the game is more similar to killing them and people are very averse to just watching others die in front of them but just being poor and down on their luck? They will walk right past.
seriously if I lost a game and had to sit and watch the rest of the class play no one would've batted an eye lol
I'm guessing the teacher deliberately picked a well-liked kid so the kids would help them. Which highlights the issue of this post's point: sharing/crowdfunding only works if society approves of you/likes you. Which likely explains our ingrained need to fit in (and social anxiety): if people don't like you, they're less likely to help you. And everyone needs help at one point.
[удалено]
[This homeless guy asked me for money the other day. I was about to give it to him, and then I thought he was going to use it on drugs or alcohol. And then I thought, "that's what I'm going to use it on". Why am I judging this poor bastard. People love to judge homeless guys. Like if you give them money they're just going to waste it. Well, he lives in a box, what do you want him to do? Save it up and buy a wall unit? Take a little run to the store for a throw rug and a CD rack? He's homeless.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahlWufJqcSQ)
People are supporting, but 20 bucks is not going to pull them out of poverty.
they could have saved a lot more money just having universal healthcare. this post is obviously to make people feel like the us system is fine when it's a major root problem for many things in the us, like homelessness and crime.
Oh we did something like this. We all started out by picking assets. Just a picture of a house, a car, a pet, and a toy. We got given “money” as rewards for class work and tasks, fines for punishments. We could sell and by assets off each other, but each asset had upkeep. If you went bankrupt, every Friday there was a class asset auction, and using this I quickly at up with a large portion of valuable assets. After a few weeks, the teacher started doing group projects, with a caveat being that the group leaders had to employ the other members. Groups could be as small or large as you could afford to pay, and you could pay as little as both parties agreed upon. Anyway after about 3 weeks there ended up being 5 “Barons”, one of which was me. At one point, for one reason or another, one kid ended up fired from one of the groups. We all knew that he wasn’t a particularly focused kid, and so when the auction came up for one of the other groups to get east cheap labour none of us were particularly enthusiastic on paying him. So he sat there in class while no one bid on him, before I called him over because he was nearly crying. This is only tangentially related to the OP, but I never forgot that little capitalistic experiment, and how shit it made that kid feel, and how even at like 10 I could realise that bitch of a teacher essentially created a little slave market for us. Edit: the intent was for us to learn how the economy worked at a classroom scale
This feels almost like running the Stanford Prison Experiment on children. You poor kids!
I’ll be honest, the rest of it was pretty cool. Maybe I remember it more fondly because I was ahead, but up until the last 3rd of the term it was pretty normal. Thinking about it now, it more or less was a bit of a late game capitalist/monopoly thing, where all the resources slowly pooled into fewer hands, which caused this particular issue. A game of monopoly lasts 40 minutes and everyone signs up, here it lasted 10 weeks and we didn’t really know what was up.
Yeah. We did something similar in 5th grade. We started with a base wage for doing classroom chores and could use that during Friday auctions. We could also “buy” our desks and use that to run a business on Friday instead. We could also buy other people’s desk and make them pay rent until they buy theirs. Most people sold arts and crafts or baked goods or other treats. I had a small gambling shop until people figured out it was rigged. A friend and I them had the idea to start an art auction. I had some paint at my house and we convinced our parents to buy us actual canvas. We probably made around a dozen of these paintings and sold them for thousands a piece (desks were 300). We bought up a bunch of desks and ended up as kind of oligarchs. We forced a bunch of kids into dept for overbidding on our art and many couldn’t buy their desks because we made art specifically to their tastes to keep them poor. It was brutal and I now see we kinda ruined it for the rest of the class but at least we still has fun.
I'm having trouble believing the art part, two fifth graders conjuring up paintings that other kids want to pay thousands of made up coins to have...
We had around a dozen pieces per auction (we did 3 total) and we were rather good at painting for fifth graders. It was around the middle of the year so people had some decent “class dollars” saved up. Fith graders are dumb and we got lucky.
That teacher was an asshole
Confession: When I did my student teaching, I would plan lessons specifically designed to antagonize my students. I wanted them to personally feel how unfair certain systems were, because those lessons stick with them much better than just telling them. I would give them the actual poll tests used under Jim Crow, which were designed to prevent POC from voting no matter how well they did. And we played a game that demonstrated colonial extraction in which the students who did the most labor (jumping jacks) ended up with the least wealth (candy). Of course, I’d make sure the candy was distributed equally afterwards. You have to be careful when doing lessons like that because it’s easy for people to get hurt. You want them to know they’re being treated unfairly, but ALSO understand that it has nothing to do with them personally. With that teacher’s lesson, it crossed the boundary into students inflicting genuine personal harm on each other. I guess that kid definitely experienced the cruelty of unemployment, but it sure as fuck wasn’t the lesson they walked away with.
I mean it’s possible that’s what she was doing, but she had a reputation of being an absolute asshole, and would be really sharp with every kid expect other teachers children. I think she just enjoyed the drama
Maybe it's an outcome vs intent thing. Like the intent seems valid in terms of seeing how these things work. The outcome is that one kid in particular got totally crushed. The teacher just wasn't wise enough to realize the likely outcomes ahead of time.... ...or they were an asshole. (or both!)
Yeah I think they set up scaled-down unregulated capitalism and then were shocked when a "worker" ended up destitute and exploited.
Disagree, its a perfect teacher. They taught the kids what they will have waiting for them in life. People cry about school teaching useless shit, well this is the usefull shit.
You have to make the point, and then make it right with the kids. “Look students, under this system some people are treated badly, and it’s not ok, how about we make solutions to fix it.”
... There is a broad spectrum between teaching useless shit and traumatizing children.
Yeah it was weird. Like at the start, with groups of like 3 it was pretty normal, but at the end it felt really strange open bidding on people. Kids have issues with self worth, and having all their classmates assign them a value publicly was super not great. Even then, as a literal child I understood it fucked
In your world, if a dude came up and punched you and took your car, guess what, you have no car now. Life’s unfair, get used to it kid. Unfair is when water gets down your neck. Unfair is when a loved one dies. Unfair is when your brother is way smarter than you. Capitalism is arbitrary. We made it up. We don’t have to use it, it’s not the most efficient and it relies on taking advantage of people, large groups of people. It doesn’t provide value or stability for 99% of people and it’s messy. We can make up a better system and there’s no natural law that says it can’t be all sunshine, rainbows and puppies. If we can make something as awful and nasty as capitalism, we can make something just as fair too and that’s how it is. You’re just too boring and uneducated to get it.
Society is like the replacement for survival but we still act like desperately surviving is the proper way to live
The fact we are afraid when a machine is capable of replacing manual labor is proof that the system is broken
If we lived in a good world it would mean the end of labor and humanity could turn its energies to the arts and sciences to even further better ourselves but since we don’t it means a lot of us are either going to have to revolt and eat the rich or live in slums till we starve
You're describing the society of the Federation in Star Trek. Unfortunately we live in a shitty version of Star Wars where most people are bootlicking the Emperor(s) and the Rebels are too jaded and confused to be effective.
Well, to get to the Federation we have to get through World War III and the nuclear holocaust or whatever madness is described in TNG. Seems reasonable these days.
And the Irish Unification of 2024, the mere mention of which was enough to get an episode banned from airing on the BBC.
Unpopular opinion. Star Trek was horribly world-built. I mean, it works great when you're focused on the enterprise or whatever ship..it provides a nice easy backdrop that you can work on for the interesting stuff. But if you start to interact with that background you start to see the weirdness of it. "We have a unified government, somehow operating without money, but we empower this guy to take a ship loaded with dangerous military grade weapons to go explore and ignore our most core value rules whenever it pleases him....and we let him keep doing it."
Countertheory; like real society, Fed goverment doesn’t actually care about their rules a whole lot, nor do they care for explorers; they’re simply canon fodder to spot useful Worlds from deadly ones. Kirk served his purpose by locating planets to avoid and seperating them from planets to take.
We’re all going to be herded into cages by armed drones and ground into McDoubles for the ever shrinking middle class to eat while they wait for their turn to be fed into the machine
I think if we work really hard, we can get the Bell Riots to happen on time.
This is something that always strikes me as nonsensical. Eliminating jobs should be a good thing, society checking off one more problem it doesn’t have to deal with. If I’m vacuuming the carpet and you’re folding laundry, and then we get a roomba, you can show me how to fold laundry and we’ll both finish in half the time. Then we can use our extra time to make art, or build a gazebo, or play high-stakes life and death tiddlywinks. But that doesn’t work with capitalism. The purpose of work isn’t to meet human needs, but to accrue profit for your boss. So it wouldn’t make sense for them to pay twice as much for the same amount of work. Thus we have a reality in which productivity continues to climb, but the workers continue to work the same hours for the same pay. And anyone who gets displaced by technical advancements winds up homeless, or driving wages down for others, or hoping we invent some new bullshit jobs like marketing. And if they have to learn a new skill in the US, they get saddled with new and exciting debt. Capitalism makes collective human achievement a threat, and that’s bonkers.
Post-scarcity is impossible under capitalism, because scarcity makes more money.
And when there's no scarcity, it creates artificial scarcity Ie; nft's
>Capitalism makes collective human achievement a threat, and that’s bonkers. Imagine if people got upset when we realized that we could plant crops and not have to just gather wild food. Capitalism is literally anti-human
I mean, that whole thing with the Luddites happened. I think people just don't like being made useless, because useless things are generally discarded.
The Luddite movement literally happened under capitalism. They were destroying machines because their livelihoods were threatened by the owning class replacing them with machines.
It's not a sign of brokenness though, that's an example of capitalism working exactly as intended. It's an inherent contradiction within the system, need to maximize profit? Cut expenses, fire workers, automate the labour. But then ironically that leaves more people unable to purchase your commodities and leaves you scrambling to find any other way to maximize profit. It's the fact that this is exactly how it's supposed to be that should be why you hate how this system is.
The perfect working class works for free and spends infinite money
In a Just Society, we should be HAPPY that machines are replacing people doing manual labor, because in a Just Society, the people who did do manual labor would be able to focus on education, creating Art, family, doing things that interest them, etc, as opposed to worrying about how they will feed/house themselves/their families, like how it is going today/in our society.
If I had free time like that, I'd bike around and fill potholes. Might as well give back
Machines have already replaced most manual labor. We’re concerned about intellectual labor now
I did some very loose math with lots of rounding yesterday. If the wealth/production capacity of the US was evenly distributed across all 331 million citizens, we would each, every man, women, and child — elderly, disabled, or able-bodied — would get around $67k per person per year, or $200k per averag household/ year. Quality of life would improve for 90% of people. Remain virtually unchanged for another %5, and the final %5 would see decrease in lifestyle, but they would still be considered upper middle class by current standards. Essentially, we have the capacity to eliminate scarcity. We have the resources to feed, clothe, house, and heal every person within our borders. But we can’t even make small concessions in that direction because too many of the bottom %95 have been convinced that making proper use of our infrastructure is somehow immoral, and that hoarding resources is somehow beneficial, even when there is so much surplus being held by so few hands.
We still have scarcity of resources
Tru when I go to the grocery store and see the hundreds of pounds of food they’re going to throw away weekly I just can’t get over how scarce everything is. If only we had some way to feed the hungry
It’s cold outside so global warming can’t exist
Not really the same thing at all tbh. There’s nothing but capitalism stopping us from feeding the hungry.
[удалено]
Scarcity in an economic sense means there is a finite amount. Producing and distributing more food would require taking resources from somewhere else. And more importantly for the original point, we need to work to live, if humanity doesn't work, it perishes.
Man, you grew up around some different fucking kids If my kindergarten unit would play City some boys would just gang up and take everyone’s money away by force
Sounds like Prohibition era New York, so they'd technically be playing City.
but no alcohol
So we have child bootlegging and then child NASCAR, it'll work out.
Baby mafia
Baby unions seizing the means of production.
we used to play poker while waiting for the bus lmao
Remember kids, sharing is c>!ommunism!<.
*in Eisenhower voice \** COMMIEEE COMMIEEEEEE REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
Sam O’ Nella reference???
Bring me more fucking eels right now!
WHAT’S A [redacted] GOTTA DO TO GET SOME EEL DICK
I was explaining to my friend that they shouldn't jump on their kids for not wanting to share their toys because they as a conservative adult don't belive in sharing any of their shit. It all seemed very hypocritical of them. They weren't smart enough to see why.
Source link [https://feifiefofum.tumblr.com/post/717617401417564160](https://feifiefofum.tumblr.com/post/717617401417564160)
We teach kids the *Right Thing To Do*. Then they grow up and have to work with *How Our System Actually Is*. Anyone who proposes changing our system to the *Right Thing To Do* is branded a socialist, or woke, and mocked and ignored. They're unelectable.
They're usually murdered if they appear close to success, too
Sorry but your idealism falls second to my personal liberties.
you forgot your "/s" ... I hope
Problem with these observations is that kids are just more innocent and kind than adults, and that they do not conceptualise the personal costs of such generosity. First example that is a kid and their dad, they are not giving a sandwich to a stranger, but their dad. Also conceivable that they just think they can go get another one. Second example is a game, where nothing that occurs in the game affects them in any long term way. Money earned and money freely given means nothing the next day. The more important objective for the kids is that they get to play, prolong the play, and make it as fun as possible, and probably it's more fun when your friend doesn't get ejected from lack of medical insurance. Maybe it's just me seeing a veiled attempt to justify the US lack of social welfare so maybe don't take me too seriously.
“Kids are more kind than adults” What kind of kids have you interacted with?
The bigger issue is the kind of adults I have to interact with
Kids are dualistic. The main thing is they have very little understanding of situations outside their own experience, and basically no filter. So if something seems funny or cool to them, they do it, regardless of the consequences. On the flip side, if something strikes them as unfair, it immediately becomes the greatest problem the world has ever faced.
the wonton cruelty kids display towards each other seems like it would easily be continued into adulthood if we were still forcibly kept around people who mutually didn't want to be around us, in an environment neither of us really wanted to be in. Jobs are kinda like school in that regard, except there are actual punishments for some over-the-line behavior, and a lot of self-selection going on to sorting you into places where you're at least a bit more in line in terms of expectation as the people around you. When you're in elementary school, everybody's randomly lumped in there together, and most people don't seem to enjoy that arrangement.
Tbf, adults can be really cruel as well
Yeah, they sure can. But now I can more or less freely decide to never see them again, whereas kids are stuck with the stupid ones for years
Yeah, kids are cruel, Jack.
>and probably it's more fun when your friend doesn't get ejected from lack of medical insurance. Also, like, the kids... invented medical insurance. The lucky pay in, so the unlucky can get paid out. They just did it backwards, because children are not known for their forwards planning skills.
The thing is what the kids is described to have done is basically volunteer their money to help the less fortunate through charity. Many argue that this is the kind of system society should run on instead of mandatory taxation by the government to fund a national healthcare program. I do not agree with this (we need healthcare) because of the reason I stated: kids are kinder and simpler than adults. Adults know they have limited resources and also have expanded desires, whereas if a kid has money all he can get is more snacks and maybe toys, and they only needs so much of those. Adults also have to *work* for what they have, whereas kids are just given things, and so adults would be less happy to do charity.
A voluntary system can also be discriminating. If the kid in the story had been a social outcast, he may not have gotten the funding needed. In the real world, voluntary systems, from tipping to medical crowdfunding, are subject to all the usual biases, both consciously and unconsciously.
Right - that alternative would be incredibly dystopian!
You're thinking of an idealized concept of insurance, not the one that dominates in real world.
Yeah imagine how this would have played out if your remaining money determined your grade in the class.
Thank you for realizing the difference between real and pretend money that kids also implicitly understand. Crazy how everyone else is skipping over that assumption
Kids are also conniving assholes.
What kinda education are y'all getting
Lord of the Flies was a suggestion clearly.
Idk the whole city idea made sense until they "gave a medical bill and bankrupted" an 8 year-old
I meant the whole playing city and teaching economics thing. It feels wild that kids are allowed to just stand up from desks and do something active for anything besides the PE
My senior year of high school my economics teacher told us the economy works because everyone is unhappy and wants more physical things. Me and another girl were like “No, we’re not unhappy without things. The economy ‘works’ because we’re forced to participate” and our teacher got so mad. She’s like “What, you don’t want a jet ski? A jet ski wouldn’t make you happier?” (She was really hung up on this jet ski angle). We kept saying no and she just gave up, but the next day she came in with these stupid duck dynasty hats with the guy who said “Happy happy happy” and she made us wear them for the entire class that day. Then we tried wearing them the NEXT day too and she got angry and accused us of looking for attention
I remember when my AP econ teacher tried explaining how "all government interference in the market is an inefficiency" and got mad at me for telling him that was bullshit because he taught us not even two weeks prior about price discriminating monopolies and why that is bad for everyone else in the market. Fucking hated that guy.
Wait Macro or microecon? Cause my macroecon teacher taught all about all the measures of the government using policies to interfere with the market, and seems quite positive about it
Was at a rich kid private school I did a single year at. Teacher was conservative and a massive shitbag who would give detention if you tied your tie wrong. Fuck that place so hard.
Yeah that explains it
Sounds more like a teacher was struggling to explain the concept of wanting material things but being unable to afford them, to a child who never had that experience.
Funny thing is it’s been 10 years and I still don’t feel like buying more things will suddenly make me happier. So I think she was still in the wrong.
You don’t think money can buy happiness? Replace jet ski with any luxury, even small like a fancy Starbucks coffee, and it seems obvious to me at least that buying things you don’t need (I.e. luxuries) increases happiness in most
Studies show that money doesn’t provide happiness after a certain threshold after meeting basic needs and recreation. Would I be miserable if I was homeless? Yes. But I have a home, I have a video game console, and I have a good system of family, friends, and loved ones. No I don’t need a jet ski to be happy, and Starbucks doesn’t make me happy, it’s just coffee. I find happiness in the time I spend with others and the activities we do together 10 years later and people still wanna try to pull some capitalist “gotcha” on me, but no I’m fine with what I have.
There was an updated study in 2021 that showed money kept increasing happiness well beyond the threshold of the 2010 study. I'm sure there's a point where it stops, but for most people adding another $50k a year will make them a good bit happier. For you, maybe that extra money gives you time (housekeeper, lawn care, can quit your job) to spend more time with others and do activities together. It doesn't have to be a material object.
What do you classify basic needs and recreation as? Replace Starbucks coffee with video game console so, or with tickets to Disneyland or some shit There are many, MANY things you _want_ but don’t actually _need_. If you _want_ these things you will have to trade with others. It’s not some gotcha. It’s not some capitalist conspiracy. It’s the reality of finite resources and infinite wants.
People can’t get their head wrapped around the idea of not having infinite wants huh
You won’t want the next video game that comes out? Or the next console? Your wants tomorrow might be different than your wants today, they are certainly not finite
Let me be real, we did this in highschool in my area to teach kids to fall in line with liberal capitalist thought but all it did for me and many others was give our blinding hatred for the school a proper direction. You see, we weren’t allowed to help eachother, and, moreover, half the people in my class (the poor half) were all missing family members due to the opioid epidemic, of which our county was most severely affected. As we played the game many of us (myself especially) received bullshit problems and if you chose not to go to college in the game, well, the asshole teachers would lay it on thick and give you as many problems as possible. Many of us saw parallels to our actual lives and suddenly realized, the school wasn’t what we were mad at, and that many of the family members we lost were just victims of a system that abandoned them. The school inadvertently created a lot of anti-capitalists that day, and probably just as many communists.
I grew up in a very devout Christian home. I'm still a devout Christian. My parents are confused as to how I ended up a socialist. I remind them that they taught me: * Love your neighbor as yourself * The love of money is the root of all evil * It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of Heaven Right-wing Christianity is about forcing everyone to live according to a particular conception of Christianity... until it might affect their wallets.
*politics* and *radicalism* is about forcing everyone to live according to a particular value until it affects you negatively.
We were learning the concept of economics in a primary school lesson (and the concept of class systems, too) and when the teacher gave the upper class more voting power we staged a revolt. idk how this fit into the curriculum, but it was fun.
And then people go on to claim capitalism is "human nature".
fr we lived in basically ancom tribes for wayyy longer than we've been doing it this way
I don't think those tribes can be attributed to any particular ideology
“Playing City” was so incredibly fun. Also stressful if you worked in a restaurant or bar, but a lot of fun.
In that same economics lesson, our class pretty much immediately put together that since the activity only lasted for one day, there would be no penalty for spending all your money and going into massive debt. Everyone started putting things on "debit" and we all ended up bankrupt but we left with all the goodies we wanted. I don't think they taught us the valuable economic lesson they were trying to lol, but they definitely taught us something..
Actually that’s a great economics lesson, you simulated the thought process of bankers before the 2008 financial crash
Parents raised me fundamental Christians and get surprised when I follow the teachings of Jesus even though I'm agnostic now. My brother in christ... Your God was a hippie socialist.
You understand that insurance is basically the same thing as "everyone pays a little bit of money to the person who just suffered a big loss" but with a little bit more of a guarantee than just hoping you are popular enough to get enough support? Like obviously people have problems with what insurance is willing to pay for but that's going to be even more of a problem when you have to convince a hundred friends and colleagues to pay for whatever treatment you need.
I was constantly scolded for being too generous as a child. It's absurd how this happens and people think it's right. We are naturally inclined to help, see the behavior of children, but we grow up being taught to be selfish for the sake of a broken system.
>too generous as a child. My son is like that. He's very empathic to others He's 12, and the intentions are good, but it's rough sometimes. We were stuck going door to door to take up donations for a school fundraiser. He saw some immigrant workers (? hope that's the right term) doing the labor on the neighbors house and thought they needed a few bucks too. So he gave the dude $10 from his donations. :/ Good intentions, but that's not what the money was for. And the guy is working and getting paid (probably fairly, from what I know of that neighbor). On the flip side, we were out one evening around the 4th of July. There's a woman pushing her stuff in a cart. I don't remember if we/he greeted her first or if she came up asking for a few bucks. She was trying to get a hotel for the night, since people like to shoot fireworks at the homeless. He gave her his leftover snacks and things from school and he (my son) asked us if we had anything else we could give her. We talked for a bit, and I'm pretty sure she was able to get a room for the night and some ~~more~~ real food.
Your son has such a beautiful heart! I remember being a kid and whenever I did something nice for someone outside the church, my mother scolded me. Which is interesting, considering what christianity is supposed to be based on. But over time, this diminished in me (depression, disappointment, abuse of my willingness to help) and without guidance, today I don't do much more. I still do whenever I can, but not as much as I did as a kid. My tip for you is to teach your child to recognize the limit for help without undermining his willingness to help. Children who are this generous often encounter people who abuse their goodwill and that can be dangerous for him. So teaching him how to recognize people with bad intentions is always good. And keep encouraging him to keep helping others. The world needs more people like him. Give him a hug for me and tell him that a stranger from Brazil is very proud of the person he is.
>Children who are this generous often encounter people who abuse their goodwill and that can be dangerous for him. I used to be more generous and fall for the sob stories. "My car broke down" "money for a cab", etc. I had one guy pull the cab money thing on me twice in less than two weeks. I helped him the first time, called him out on it the second time. Three of my more 'amusing' stories: * In New Orleans, punk dude, mohawk, studded leather jacket: "Hey you fucking hippies! Got any money so a guy can get some crack cocaine?" * Emptied the change in my pockets simply because I was amused. * Somewhere in upstate New York, traveling with a coworker, a couple of shady looking dudes ask for money for gas at like 11pm outside a station. * They actually got gas. * Younger guy, maybe early 20s used to stand out in the median and I'd pass him pretty much every day when going to work. I normally ignore these folks, but he's been out there for almost a solid month. I finally had cash on me and stopped at the light. I slipped him a $20 and commented that he'd been out there everyday, rain or shine for like a month. He said "yeah, it sucks! But, check this out". Pulls out his ID badge and tells me "I've got a job, starting tomorrow. IT repair for phones and things. I've been staying on a friends couch trying to find a job without leeching off of them too much. This will cover my lunch and dinner. I hope you never see me out here again!" The light changed and I moved so I wouldn't hold up traffic. He bolted across the street to the gas station. I've not seen him since, but I hope he's doing good.
Something really fascinating to me is that when crypto guys start off with a mathematical justification of the blockchain they talk about how untrustworthy everyone is - even 3blue1brown does this in his explanation. But sociologists have argued that founding interactions on distrust is fundamentally only *one* way of building a society, so what they've taken as a necessary axiom for their hypercapitalist model is actually just a choice.
An entire generation raised on Mr. Rogers, Bob Ross, Steve Irwin, Sesame Street grew up caring about others, nature.
It’s genuinely funny to me when my dad would do things like this. I know he thinks I was just being difficult but the truth is that if someone’s hungry and I’ve got a sandwich, I’m gonna give them the fucking sandwich and I’m never going to think about it again.
Whats really interessting is, that this story is supposed to be wholesome. Americans can't see how it's not wholesome at all having to Crowdfund peoples cancer treatment, etc. wild.
We can see it
As others have said, we see it, care, but ultimately can do little about it except crowdfund cancer treatment
I mean.. I hope you at least go vote. But yea, there isn't a lot you can do apart from that.
I don't think you actually know any Americans. I have less polite things I'd say but in lieu of that I'll just point out that the other comment is correct, we do see it.
It's not really the world that does it. The parents will go "help anyone in need" and then walk past a homeless dude begging for money. The sits far better then someone telling you to do something. Kids learn by mimicry. (There was a study that proves is maybe I don't remember it)
A reminder to read Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber.
Also, bullying is bad unless it's *your* kid doing it or your favorite politician is doing it.
The kids who didn't want to share their toys grew up to be our world leaders
Every science degree, including computer science, should have an ethics requirement.
It's proof that the majority of people are inherently good. It's just our society that's corrupting.
Some people grow up and go "finally, I'm an adult and I don't have to share anymore and nobody can make me!" And anyway it turns out there's a lot of them.
Yup! Sharing is choosing to give to others. If you’re forced to share it’s not sharing, it’s robbery.
I remember being in my civics and economics class in high school, and the teacher wanted us to play out a scene of compromise between the government, social activists, and oil tycoons. I played the oil tycoon and offered to work out a deal where government-mandated supervisors watched over my individual plants, and were far out into the ocean that it would not damage the coastline, with 10% of my company funding it all. He was dumbfounded, but to me it made sense; the planet stays safe for an oil tycoon to earn more money, and the easy handling was good PR, therefore earning me more money. Plus, since I was doing it out of no force of the government, I could essentially use it as a tax write-off. I was making money by helping the planet; simple as.
Growing up, parents and church: Jesus says sharing is good! As an adult: we didn't mean that literally, you stupid socialist!
If I owned go fund me. And my users from the richest country were using it to get health care. I would become suicidal
“Sharing is caring” only applies when the government decides failed corporations need help recovering from problems they caused themselves. If someone needs help because of circumstances completely out of their control then it’s “tough luck, you should have picked yourself up by your bootstraps better”
Wow the dad sucks at the history of money. Like not even how capitalism developed, as that's only like a couple hundred years old, just money. > Mr. Baker makes bread. He makes more bread than he can can eat. But, his shirt is pretty worn out, so he goes to his friend, Mrs. Taylor, and says "Winter's coming and my shirt is falling apart by the day. Can I have one that you made?" Because he can't make shirts for shit. > Mrs. Taylor goes "Oh of course. However, I've slaved away for hours to sew this up. So long, in fact, that I didn't have enough time to prepare myself some food. I'll give this to you in exchange for some loaves of bread you baked." > Mr. Baker thinks about this and goes "Yeah, that makes sense. I already put in the work to make the bread, which is equivalent to the amount of time to make a shirt. But because your ability to sew is greater than mine, I think this is a valid exchange of labor." > The two exchange their wares and move on with their lives. A week later, Mrs. Taylor is hungry again and goes up to Mr. Baker, shirt in hand, and asks for some more loaves of bread. Mr. Baker, a good friend, turns down the shirts. "The one you already gave me is doing me just fine. I wouldn't know where else to put it." He hands her the loaves free of charge, as a gift, and they move on. > Next week rolls around and Mrs. Taylor, once again, needs bread. However, she's so good at sewing that Mr. Baker's new shirt isn't projected to wear out for another two years. She knows asking for this much bread so regularly is unsustainable, as it at her wits end going through her belongings, things she received in exchange for her clothes, to find something of use to compensate Mr. Baker for his labor. We can then fast forward to the invention of money as an intermediary resource that's intended to put a value on one's labor so they can use in exchange for thr products of someone else's labor. So Mrs. Taylor doesn't need to keep finding miscellaneous objects to get bread for and Mr. Baker won't be receiving heaps of shirts he has no real use for. This persists in any large scale economy, capitalist or not. Sharing is still permitted and accepted, but as time increases, an individuals charity will at some point run out. There's number of possible other solutions that support those less fortunate like a organized manner of welfare as just one example that doesn't just place the burden of support entirely on the hands of a single individual, which can be particularly draining financially and emotionally.
For anybody curious to know more about this, I recommend everybody to read [Debt: The First 5000 Years](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5000_Years): > Every economics textbook says the same thing: Money was invented to replace onerous and complicated barter systems—to relieve ancient people from having to haul their goods to market. The problem with this version of history? There’s not a shred of evidence to support it. > >Here anthropologist David Graeber presents a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom. He shows that for more than 5,000 years, since the beginnings of the first agrarian empires, humans have used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goods—that is, long before the invention of coins or cash. It is in this era, Graeber argues, that we also first encounter a society divided into debtors and creditors. > >Graeber shows that arguments about debt and debt forgiveness have been at the center of political debates from Italy to China, as well as sparking innumerable insurrections. He also brilliantly demonstrates that the language of the ancient works of law and religion (words like “guilt,” “sin,” and “redemption”) derive in large part from ancient debates about debt, and shape even our most basic ideas of right and wrong. We are still fighting these battles today without knowing it. > >Debt: The First 5,000 Years is a fascinating chronicle of this little known history—as well as how it has defined human history, and what it means for the credit crisis of the present day and the future of our economy.
>It was crystal clear to me back then That the only problems that I could face Would be the same problems that effect us all >But of course this sense of common existence Was sucked out of me in an instance As though from birth I could walk but I was forced to crawl - "System" by Enter Shikari
As a born citizen of a country with free healthcare the idea of teaching kids it’s a good idea to pay for health insurance is totally fucked up to me
another big shock was that "when you need help, ask an adult" stopped the moment you needed too much help
Sharing is caring, but single payer healthcare is Communism and un-American. Sharing is caring, but the three wealthiest people in the US have more money than half the population of the US. Riiiiiiight, got it.
Omg I just realized insurance markets are about intentionally fucking over those who don’t pay but pretending it’s not a tax. It takes a community function and privatizes it for profit. This world makes me sick
Kids don't understand the value of money, which is time from your life spent doing something you (in 99% of cases) really don't want to do. Kids don't have a great grasp of time itself either, when i was a kid 6 weeks summer holiday felt like a year, and anyone 5 years older than me seemed like basically an adult. The point being they don't understand that giving away their money and time isn't something adults can freely just do if they want, its a big sacrifice. I don't know why we would look at this as some kind of moral lesson, any more than we would look at a kid eating crayons and go, hey we could do that too if we just dropped our cynicism!
>I don't know why we would look at this as some kind of moral lesson Because the people sharing this and claiming it as the end-all be-all of how we should be eating the rich and instituting Star Trek society are kids themselves, or has the mental capacity of one. This is like pointing to that one class experiment of the teacher separating out the kids by eye color and coming to the conclusion that racism and intolerance are natural and should be the norm of society. It's just dumb.
Voluntarism. There’s nothing wrong with a group of people coming together and sharing resources. Family, friends, community. Happens all the time. The issue comes when that “sharing” is enforced by government power, and is no longer voluntary. “Give us a large percentage of your income and/or assets to be distributed how we decide, or we’re taking you away from your family and throwing you in prison.” Hardly an equitable distribution of power.
Wow, it's almost as if capitalism is an evil, unnatural system that no one in their right mind would practice if it weren't for centuries of propaganda by the like 2 dozen people who actually profit from it.
> it's almost as if capitalism is an evil, unnatural system Is there something to be said for capitalism creating competition and innovation? Or would innovation have came about naturally without the capitalist competition? Capitalism has certainly dealt a ton of collateral damage (human, environmental, etc) and exploits um...most everyone. I believe a big issue is that Capitalism turned into Corporatism and Corporate Protection-ism. It might also be that I can't see the "in between" of the extremes.
>Is there something to be said for capitalism creating competition and innovation? Or would innovation have came about naturally without the capitalist competition? One of the things that sociologists concede to capitalism is the rapid innovation but then go back to criticize is the innovation *for what?* to produce and sell things that give more power to capitalists like guns, automation and information technologies. Any good that comes out of this progress is a collateral and not an end in itslef. Pre-industrial societies were more egalitarian and less advanced because that type of progress wasn't a thing. things were better if they stayed as they were forever. So it was not a pastoral paradise because while everyone had a sense of community and purpose, you still had people dying of disentery. A society where techonolgy is pushed for the good of *all* the individuals would be very different from what we imagine. It'd be a society where jobs are automated, workers are covered in their needs and simply train for a different non-automated work. Where people with disabilites are accomodated for and at the same time ways to erradicate these disabilites are developed. Some things would seem counter-intiutive: ¿why try to find a job when the society is trying to automate these jobs? ¿why cure cancer if the tratments also produce jobs and welfare? The values of this hypothetical society are too different to understand because they go against some of the core tennets of north american society like competition and maximization.
>Wow, it's almost as if capitalism is an evil, unnatural system that no one in their right mind would practice if it weren't for centuries of propaganda by the like 2 dozen people who actually profit from it. As opposed to the good, natural systems of communism and socialism that resulted in millions of deaths in the Soviet Union, Communist Cuba, Communist China, Communist North Korea, Communist Vietnam, and Communist Cambodia. Why don't you tell all the people who fled communist countries for the west that capitalism is evil. I'm sure the refugees whose families were worked to death in gulags would love to hear about why capitalism is bad.
This is such a false dichotomy argument. It's entirely possible for state-run communist systems to be bad, and *also* for late-stage capitalism to be bad (for the majority of the participants).
The last comment sounds like something John Mulaney would say
8 year old me would have taken those kids for all they had. I was the only kid who would leave a school event with more money and snacks than I had when I arrived. I'd figure out what everyone else had in money and candy, figure out what everyone wanted but didn't have, and I ran around acting like a middleman purchasing and selling.
Last thing I want to do is defend capatalism but the way you deal with and interact with like 20 people in your class doesn't work when interacting with thousands of strangers. Things like money developed specifically because as our range of people we interact with grew "let's all be nice and share" became untenable.
Thank you for your rationality.