Undernourishment in Cuba has been under 5%, and child mortality under 1%, every year since the year 2000. For Jamaica undernourishment currently hovers at 6.9%, and child mortality 1.3%.
Anecdotes are useless in a discussion like this. I don’t care what you think you saw, I care about the facts.
I’ve worked hard for what I have too. That doesn’t stop me from looking around, seeing that there are billions of people on this planet who work way harder than I do for way less than I have, and saying “this system should be changed.”
idk what communist countries you’ve been to, but if you compare for example the average Cuban’s quality of life to that of the average person on any other Caribbean island, capitalism doesn’t come out looking too hot. Most post Soviet countries are still poorer today than they were in 1989, almost everyone who has been lifted out of poverty in the past generation is Chinese, and there are literally hundreds of capitalist countries that have been doing capitalism for a hundred years or more that have remained the poorest countries in the world regardless.
The objective reality is that communism is leaps and bounds better at organizing society than capitalism can ever be, full stop.
We were talking about worker-owned companies, none of those are worker-owned companies and therefore don’t actually refute anything.
That is how capitalism works.
Yes. And it is deeply unfair in how it rewards entrenched wealth rather than giving everyone equal opportunities. That’s why socialists are opposed to it.
give an example
an example
you people and your excuses
Well the main thing is the concentration of capital. Guys like Jeff Bezos aren’t interested in founding cooperatively-owned companies, and they have all of the money. Add in the fact that average people are very strongly atomized and prevented from forming stable social bonds, and the likelihood that you’ll get a cadre of people together who want to start a cooperative business and can also afford to do so is very, very low.
That said, the few coops that manage to exist are often the best places in their industry to work, precisely because the profits are shared more equally than in the more common private or publicly traded corporations.
Market forces on their own produce many if not all of the perverse incentives of capitalism. Only a centrally planned economy, built on a foundation of grassroots democracy, can hope to overcome those incentives by doing economic planning with an eye towards future sustainability and quality of life, rather than towards profitability.
My reaction to the news was to follow uBlock Origin discussions more closely so I can always have the latest workarounds pasted into my custom filters. $0 /mo to one of the wealthiest monopolies in tech? Easy decision.
I mean, what’s Xi Jinping gonna do with your data? If you’re not a higher up in the defense industry then you really have nothing to lose from a hypothetical Chinese government backdoor into your phone (an American government backdoor, on the other hand, is extremely threatening to you as the USG has shown time and again that if you become a “person of interest” for any reason they can and will build a spurious case against you).
My parents got a brand new 2023 Sienna and the check engine light is already on - because the windshield wiper fluid is empty.
Once again your argument has gone somewhat obliquely past mine and not actually addressed it, although I do appreciate how incredibly smug you are telling me I don’t know what my own argument is.
I never said that standardization was bad, what I said was that the references for standard measures were more useful. We don’t carry around rods for poking oxen much anymore, so that unit of measure is rightly confined to history.
You’re acting like the ‘standards’ of one unit are superior to the ‘standards’ of another unit
As I said elsewhere anyone can get used to anything. I was also propagandized in school by teachers who insisted over and over for years that metric was better and that using anything else was a waste of time - it was only when I became an adult and started making shit for myself that I realized the truth.
The metric system was applied across the entire world and wiped out almost every single indigenous standard of measure that existed previously. The English unit of measures has a similar history vis a vis the British Empire spreading it, but my argument would be that indigenous measurements writ large should have been retained, not that they should have been wiped out once and for all by a second, even more imperial system.
I’m afraid you missed the point of mine. Anybody can “get used to” pretty much anything, but the difference between standard measurements and metric is that standard measurements are based on practical things that people interact with every day, while metric measurements were worked out on paper by the French bourgeoisie over a hundred years ago. They sought to use rationality to make a better measurement system, and in doing so made one that is totally untethered to the human experience.
read the xkcd
I’ve read the xkcd, the xkcd only responds to one common argument against the metric system, one which I am not making.
Because the bourgeoisie that lead the French Revolution famously remained 100% in lockstep with the underclasses. There was never a moment where the needs of the rulers diverged from the needs of the masses and a whole new regime of class strife arose from it, no sir.
The metric system was applied top-down to french society by its ruling class, it was not some grassroots attempt to make the world better.
read the xkcd comic
There’s nothing quite as intuitive as a table of numbers and associations that you can memorize by rote. Pass me my flash cards!
a kilometre is a trivially visualized distance
Only when you’ve gotten used to it. The thing with your examples is that very rarely does anyone actually need a kilofoot or 1/100th of a foot, but they very, very frequently need a mile or an inch. Metric was designed to make sense on paper, standard measurements were designed to be useful in every day situations.
That’s awful. Nobody on the planet has any frame of reference for the distance from the equator to the poles. The measurements used by people in the real world should be based on something they encounter frequently.
What’s important here is that the standard measurements evolved naturally from people doing and making things. The common lengths were so chosen because they were easy to “eyeball” for craftspeople, and they were lengths that were useful to make things in - not some arbitrary designation based on phenomenon far outside the human experience.
An inch it about the distance between the two knuckles on your forefinger.
A mile is about one thousand steps, or fifteen minutes of travel at a brisk pace
A cup is a cup, before portion sizes got daffy there was a pretty common cup that everybody had.
“Standard” measurements were refined over thousands of years by actual artisans making actual crafts. Metric was designed by a bunch of rich French people and foisted on the rest of the world because it makes more sense on paper, regardless of how in practical use it requires you to break out a ton of awkward decimals and other contrivances to make it match the human experience.
Stats are stats. If Cuba, even while facing a crisis in its food production due to lack of seeds, gas, and fertilizer, is still able to feed its people better than its neighboring countries, then that is a stirring indictment of capitalism.
Both of your examples link to a drop in imports as the cause of shortages, itself a symptom of the ongoing global production crises caused by COVID-19. A wealthy country like the USA can paper over a problem like that by throwing around money and credit - a small country like Cuba can’t.
Consider how Cuba’s economy could possibly respond differently to this situation if it were capitalist. I suppose they could take massive IMF loans in order to shore up imports, at the cost of “structural adjustments” that cause untold damage to future generations by eliminating the government’s mandate to run public services - but that plan hasn’t exactly worked in the long term anywhere it has been tried.
The fact is that these crises are well outside the sphere of influence of Cuba’s economy or government, and are exacerbated by American imperialism against Cuba and its allies (ie literally hijacking Venezuelan oil shipments using the US Navy). Regardless of political ideology or economic policy, Cuba would be facing these crises one way or the other, and centrally planned communism has proven time and time again that even if it’s not perfect it’s better at navigating these problems than a competitive market capitalist system is.