[-] Hexbollah@hexbear.net 3 points 6 months ago

The Historical Documents!

[-] Hexbollah@hexbear.net 22 points 6 months ago

In America, dental and health insurance are separate. And many jobs that provide health insurance can often not provide dental insurance. There is a reason teeth are referred to as the "luxury bones".

[-] Hexbollah@hexbear.net 1 points 6 months ago

No I think that is an effect of the lighting and a ring of yeast/bubbles on the walls of the jar. Mostly guessing from imagining my beer fermentations dyed blue.

1

The whole cave parable is like "what if the reality I experience is but a crude approximation and ill defined shadows cast by the real world? And I am forced to sit and observe reality this way."

This basically sounds like a description of when I am really drunk and my vision is blurring and doubling before blacking out (which itself proves impermanence and subjectivity of reality, if you think about it).

I think Plato was an alcoholic trying to dress things up in a baroque philosophical framework to justify it.

[-] Hexbollah@hexbear.net 16 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

I was listening to people reviewing the first season of HBO's Rome, and what stuck with me is they pointed out that post-2016, the Pompey/Anti-Caesar faction seems like the most out of touch geriatric Democrats. Even if they are in the abstract on the right side, they are so dedicated to the status quo and can't seem to understand that things have moved on, and people don't believe in the forms or institutions anymore. So they are stuck defending institutions from the right and complaining about how Trump/Caesar is not following the norms.

[-] Hexbollah@hexbear.net 9 points 7 months ago

When the sky has no rim

[-] Hexbollah@hexbear.net 7 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

They can have recessions, depending on how plugged in their economy is to the broader international capitalist market. But often socialist countries don't because the capitalist free market operates on supply and demand self-correction. This is dipping a bit into control theory and dynamic systems, but broadly, you get oscillations (business cycles) if there are delays and/or too much correction/amplification of signals. So, if there is unmet demand, it is overshot or as the market is correcting, the demand reduces, so that there is overproduction. This overshoot, is often seen as a bubble inflating and bursting.

But to get to why this can be avoided in socialist countries, we have to recognize that this is one of the few dimensions where central planning, even very flawed and crude versions, is robust. The planners can say "we have a demand of 500 units, and only 400 were delivered, increase production by 25%." Where multiple competing enterprises could just say "There is a market for 100 more units. So expand production by a significant fraction of that (leading to the many competing firms to produce a factor more)". Because of the lack of coordination, and the incentive to try to capture a large fraction of a market for profit, a lot of these self-correction mechanisms in capitalism overshoot their targets, causing a firm to go into bankruptcy and not pay back debts. But any form of planning can somewhat dampen that, even if fluctuations and errors can lead to some overproduction or shortfall.

[-] Hexbollah@hexbear.net 2 points 7 months ago

Come human, here is the way to Atlantis.

[-] Hexbollah@hexbear.net 2 points 7 months ago

I have been switching around a bit, but this is the current one. It is Disco Elysium fan art.

Hexbollah

joined 7 months ago