Capitalism

[goldenquagsire]

The parasite expects the doctor to heal them for free, the farmer to feed them out of charity. How little they differ from the pervert, who prowls the streets, looking for a victim he can ravish for his grotesque amusement...

Poetry aside, that's still a pretty shite comparison. No-one should have to starve to death.

 

[Music Dragon]

Whenever anyone wants others to do their work they call upon their Altruism. "Never mind your own needs," they say. "Think of the needs of... of whoever. Of the state. Of the poor. Of the Army. Of the King. Of God." The list goes on and on. How many catastrophes were launched with the words "think of yourself"? It's the king and country crowd who light the torch of destruction.

 

[goldenquagsire]

So how does inciting war and genocide have anything in common with merely requiring obscenely-rich people to pay a decent rate of tax? The wheels of capitalism shall roll on regardless, the fat cats will still have their pampered lives, it's just that they shouldn't be able to exploit the system and end up paying little to nothing.

And yes, I believe there are many catastrophes launched out of self-interest. "Bloody immigrants are taking YOUR jobs" would be one such rallying cry. :/

 

[Music Dragon]

Gregory, don't come whining to me about market forces. And don't expect me to punish citizens for showing a little initiative. If you don't like what Fontaine is doing, well, I suggest you find a way to offer a better product.

 

[goldenquagsire]

Since I have no idea what you're whittering on about, I'll just assume for now that you're being serious.

People cry far too much for the rich. No-one's asking for them to be stripped of all their assets and dunked into the village pond (though I can't say I wouldn't enjoy watching that...). For that matter, even asking them to pay a higher percentage of tax than anyone else is still unnecessary (although I vehemently believe that everyone should pay an equal percentage, not fixed amount, of tax).

No, it's just that shit like this is fucking ridiculous. A man as rich as Bono has the gall to claim that he's a philanthropist when he won't even do the most basic civic duty. And he's certainly not an exception, by any means.

 

[Dannichu]

For that matter, even asking them to pay a higher percentage of tax than anyone else is still unnecessary (although I vehemently believe that everyone should pay an equal percentage, not fixed amount, of tax).

Really? The only way I can see a fixed percentage being even vaguely fair is if all gross income is capped (which, let's face it, will never happen because people like Bill Gates get absolutely obcene amounts of money and even a reasonable-sounding cap would make him lose billions).

 

[goldenquagsire]

Really? The only way I can see a fixed percentage being even vaguely fair is if all gross income is capped (which, let's face it, will never happen because people like Bill Gates get absolutely obcene amounts of money and even a reasonable-sounding cap would make him lose billions).

I think I may have worded that badly.

What I mean is that everyone regardless of situation should pay, for example, 15% of their income (don't bug me about the actual figure, I just chose a number at random), whether that 15% constitutes £10,000 or £1,000,000.

 

[Dannichu]

No, I got that, but there are people who need the 15% of £5.20 an hour a lot more than those who wouldn't even notice 15% of, say, £70 an hour. To one person it might mean they can't buy an extra car for their showroom, but to someone else, it might make the difference between being able to afford to fuel their car for the week or not.

 

[Tarvos]

equal taxes for everyone sucks

 

[goldenquagsire]

yeah but,

it's easier to argue for equal taxes for everyone AND make sure that everyone pays them than proportional taxing.

:P

but eh, I guess you're right.

 

[OrangeAipom]

No, I got that, but there are people who need the 15% of £5.20 an hour a lot more than those who wouldn't even notice 15% of, say, £70 an hour.

Raise minimum wage then?

 

[Tarvos]

No. The government has only a limited amount of money to spend, so minimum wage should be enough to live off. That is the idea of minimum wage. If you want more, work for it.

 

[Dannichu]

Pretty much, yeah. The minimum wage is (supposedly) the minimum a person can decently live off, so raising the MW so the government can claim more tax back off it is... pointless, really.

 

[Zhorken]

Starbucks is a phenomenally massive chain, and because of this, it can charge less for its products than independently, often family-owned coffee and teashops, thus attracting more customers than them, and ultimately pushing them out of business.
The Taiwanese government has significant worries that, should Starbucks become as populous in their country as is the case elsewhere (Canterbury, where I live, has three), the traditional tea houses will all have to shut down, especially considering how sucessful Starbucks has been at marketing coffee at traditionally non-coffee-drinking nations such as Japan.

Furthermore, you can go into any Starbucks in the world and choose from exactly the same menu, regardless of unique local specialties; the cultural context is utterly ignored in favour of a familiarity than can be reproduced anywhere.

I'm all for variety, but local specialties are a terrible idea. If you come up with a delicious dish, share it with the entire world; don't brand it with your country/island/area and keep it mostly centered close to where you live. Being kept local and mostly unknown to everyone else is what makes them prone to being crushed.

The idea that a person's culture should be centered around mundane personal facts (the culture of that person's country, etc) and not deliberate choices (e.g. the culture centered around a musical movement the person decided to be a part of) bothers me. The world is opening up; culture should go along with it and center around people as people and not people as products of circumstance.

If Taiwan wants its traditional tea to survive, it should try to introduce it to the world; if it doesn't catch on, it's a shame, but oh well. I agree that it sucks that general people today want everything to be familiar, are averse to new things, and don't really put a lot of conscious thought into a lot of what they do daily, and that Starbucks kind of reflects that; it also sucks that Starbucks will make it a bit harder for things to spread. The fact that the entire world is adopting something isn't what bothers me about it, though; things should go global, and we need to figure out how to make that work best rather than trying to keep things from moving.

Also I'm seeing a "think about things, figure new things out, find out how to make yourself happy instead of just droning through everything" mindset appearing growing and replacing the general love of the familiar and nothing else.
EDIT: ehh, the mindset isn't new, just rising

 

[Dannichu]

I'm all for variety, but local specialties are a terrible idea. If you come up with a delicious dish, share it with the entire world; don't brand it with your country/island/area and keep it mostly centered close to where you live. Being kept local and mostly unknown to everyone else is what makes them prone to being crushed.

The idea that a person's culture should be centered around mundane personal facts (the culture of that person's country, etc) and not deliberate choices (e.g. the culture centered around a musical movement the person decided to be a part of) bothers me. The world is opening up; culture should go along with it and center around people as people and not people as products of circumstance.

If Taiwan wants its traditional tea to survive, it should try to introduce it to the world; if it doesn't catch on, it's a shame, but oh well. I agree that it sucks that general people today want everything to be familiar, are averse to new things, and don't really put a lot of conscious thought into a lot of what they do daily, and that Starbucks kind of reflects that; it also sucks that Starbucks will make it a bit harder for things to spread. The fact that the entire world is adopting something isn't what bothers me about it, though; things should go global, and we need to figure out how to make that work best rather than trying to keep things from moving.

Also I'm seeing a "think about things, figure new things out, find out how to make yourself happy instead of just droning through everything" mindset appearing growing and replacing the general love of the familiar and nothing else.
EDIT: ehh, the mindset isn't new, just rising

Thing is, it's never a good thing when quality is sacrificed in favour of cheapness and convenience. And in today's global society, the Big Companies only want their products to be quick 'n' cheap, and because of this, quality is always sacrificed. Bill Bryson (a travel writer) wrote about this, and how, as a result, US chocolate, coffee, ice cream, meat and pretty much everything else is a pale imiatation of that which can be found in mainland Europe, where things are (or were - it was written a few years ago) less about being cheap and catering to a maxmium number of people and more about making a good product.

And because of this, it's fairly easy to understand why some places might not want their local specialities going global; Chinese takeaways and Italian pizzas are absolutely nothing like the meals people in China and Italy eat; in order for their dish to become popular globally, it has to become Americanised, and I can understand why they wouldn't really want that to happen.

And, back to captialism, when things do go global, it's one stupidly massive company that ends up owning everything. In a consumer-driven society, it's not possible for small, independant businesses to compete against huge corporations, and the little guy will always lose, and the market superpower will just get bigger and richer.

 

[surskitty]

In a consumer-driven society, it's not possible for small, independant businesses to compete against huge corporations, and the little guy will always lose, and the market superpower will just get bigger and richer.

No. The little guy will lose if he has nothing to offer the public. Because the large corporations take shortcuts in order to mass-produce their products, smaller companies can take advantage of that in order to fill niche markets with actually good things.

 

[Dannichu]

It's possible that some smaller companies can fill niche gaps with good-quality products (I'm thinking especially of Innocent), but it's impossible to deny that the market is completely dominated by massive corporations, and if a Wal*Mart opens across the street from an independantly-owned grocery store, the store will be lucky to last another six weeks.

 

[Harlequin]

tl;dr

If minimum wage isn't enough money on which one can live then there's something wrong with minimum wage. When I say "on which to live" I don't mean "survival," I mean "to achieve a decent standard of living." Minimum wage should provide this. I'm aware of the Marxist sentiment here but raise wages, not taxes.

 

[Zhorken]

Oh, no, I realize that the way we are going about it isn't entirely good, and I do like regional culture to some extent. I just don't think it should define a person by any means, and don't like the idea that it should be kept closed and tied tight.

I'm not totally against local specialties; I just meant local specialties to the point of "this is what we make here, you can't really get it anywhere else. Maybe a cheap knockoff at best." I love being able to eat various good Asian dishes here; I know they'll be better if I go where they originate from, but they're still really good here. I really wouldn't like actually having to go to Asia to get said dishes even decently made.

I don't find that most dishes tend to be Americanized*; I do find that a few specific, very widespread things are cheap in quality (chocolate tends to be really waxy, aside from the fair-trade/organic stuff, and good pizza places are... less than ubiquitous, at least, which sucks), but it's not to "taste more American" or fit into our culture or anything; it's just the cheapness factor. It's not foreign culture turning people off; a lot of people (though increasingly few) just don't tend to actively think about things like quality, and a lot have it in their heads that "cheap means money for me which is fundamentally good".

That's what I'm saying, even; I don't like that quality is tossed out and I think that it would be a good thing if we could get foods from foreign cultures consistently at a quality comparable to the originals. I get that going global isn't necessarily good as things are, since there is that chance that it won't go well and the dish or whatever will come out mutilated to some level. Ideally, though, a piece of culture could (and would!) go global and stay accurate. This does happen, too; as I mentioned, I know of a really good pad thai place.

Also, when I say that it's a what-will-be-will-be case if those traditional teas die out, I only mean "die out" as in "fade out of any popularity"; the methods should still be recorded and easily available in some form, even if the tea houses disappear (which, again, really would be a shame; I just don't think putting up restrictions to stop it is the right way to go.) I really don't like the idea of anything being lost.

I'm not aiming to make everything universal or uniform; I'm aiming for global openness and spread of information, and I think that keeping ideas close to home in an effort to protect culture isn't a good thing. We should try and make going global more worthwhile, because there's there's a hell of a lot of potential there. It is a bad thing that quick-'n'-cheap is spreading, but it's the quick-'n'-cheap part that's bad, not the global spreading. Also people need to think more actively instead of just autopiloting through daily life, but that's not the main point.

(The bolded part is the most important part of the post. I'm not trying to stress it as if people won't get it otherwise; it's just an "if you read anything, read this" thing.)

*I'm in Canada, but I'm in the middle of the little southernmost tip that peeks down into the USA; we're mostly influenced by the States, and mostly get the same products. We also have most of the people; I have no idea what living in Canada outside of the Windsor-Montreal strip is like.

 

[sagefo]

Capitalism is one of the worst things about america.