Tag: usa

vashti-lives:

note-a-bear:

millennial-review:

If you wanted to see how many people don’t know what taxes are or how they work, read the notes

I think my only problem with continued joke— tech bros just invented busses tech bros just invented renting etc— is that it assumes these guys are just clueless idiots who don’t know how the world works. The reality is these guys know exactly what they’re doing and what they’re doing is creating a lifestyle that deliberately excludes the poor. Re-invent the bus system so you don’t have to sit next to the poor. Re-invent renting to be even more exclusive.

Re-invent taxes so you be sure your money is only helping “your community” ie other wealthy people and then vote to lower actual taxes so that none of that money goes to help anybody else.

This is absolutely a purposeful plan. Nobody wants to drive on roads with potholes or walk on broken sidewalks but why should our tax money go to *those people* I know let’s create a “community startup” so we can cut taxes without personal inconvenience.

millennial-review:

gnetophyte:

shmernstrobel:

is anybody else unsettled by how a lot of protests have turned into a “who can make the most clever sign” contest

right and i feel like that distracts from and decontextualizes the original intent of the protest. protest slogans become another thing to consume, another commodity to produce and to enjoy

eatingmuffinsinanagitatedmanner:

“There’s a much quoted proverb in the world of finance that I hate: Give a man a fish and you will feed him for a day. Teach a man how to fish and you will feed him for a lifetime. I say bullshit to this. Do the poor really not know how to fish? And what good is it to know how to fish if the rights to fish are owned by powerful landlords? And if the river is polluted by upstream tyrants? And what good is it to be taught to fish if the price and distribution of fish is controlled by conglomerate monopolies?””

— Ananya Roy, “Who Profits From Poverty?“  (via kuanios)

bogleech:

It’s so alarming to look at the history of soft drinks and see how they went from literally something people categorized as a “candy” to something we were pushed to chug down with every meal.

There was a time people “went out for a soda” like it was a special occasion or gave a few sodas as holiday or birthday gifts. Drinking a coke occupied the same sort of cultural place as eating an ice cream cone or having some chocolate cake.

Then Coca Cola and its competitors got to thinking “what if we just advertised it like it’s normal to have our luxurious dessert for every single meal of the day??? Holy cow $$$$$$$$$$$$$” and they successfully normalized that idea to where a huge portion of the ENTIRE WORLD thinks nothing of it.

pyomorphic:

if you ask a right winger why a job like, say, sanitation worker has such an abysmal wage even though their job is necessary they’ll tell you that it is an unskilled occupation. we could contest that but for the sake of argument let’s concede.

by this logic, value is derived by how much labor is required to accomplish something, in this case the labor of learning the skill in addition to the labor of completing the task at hand. a doctor would earn a much higher wage because of the labor required to earn the necessary degrees to practice. okay.

but then if you ask a right winger why the price of a pair of glasses, a mattress, or even a bottle of water is so expensive, despite these things being cheap and easy to make, they’ll tell you that value is not determined by the labor that goes into it, but by need and demand.

this inconsistency reveals how neoliberal economics functions: the value of something means whatever is most convenient to the ruling class.