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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • The trick with inflation calculations is that they’re tied to a specific basket of wholesale goods. So each individual ingredient in that bagged salad may not have gone up more than 2.4%. But the grocery store’s corporate accountants have decided they can increase their margins with a 23% price hike.

    That’s not inflation, it’s greedflation. And while we see wholesale prices remain low, we’re watching profits soar.


  • Hey now. Communists also prohibited abortion - specifically in Romania in the 1950s under President Nicolae Ceaușescu.

    The following thirty years saw a flood of children showing up in foster homes and orphanages. Romania became a hotbed of infant human trafficking as overseas “adoption” agencies trafficked newborn children out of the country. Women pursuing illegal abortions underwent crude and dangerous procedures which periodically ended in sterility or mortality for the pregnant woman. And the surge in uneducated, unemployed youths never grew up to provide any kind of long term dividend to the Romanian economy as Ceaușescu intended. Instead, they became the vanguard of the opposition movement (a heavily fascist one, at that) which ultimately brought down the government and ushered in years of civil war and horrific bloodshed.

    The modern Romanian state still carries the scars of a policy that put pregnancy before human decency and economic growth ahead of quality of life.


  • 24 downvotes telling me actually this never happened.

    Also, nobody talk about Grenada in 1983. Or Iran Air Flight 655. Or the MOVE bombing in 1985. Or the police response to the LA Riots. Or the police response to the Iraq War protests. Or the police response to OWS protests. Or the police response to BLM protests. Or the police response to the campus protests in defense of Palestine.

    That’s Whataboutism.

    You can’t just talk about ACAB or discuss the broad problems of a heavily armed carceral state looking for heads to crack. Only Foreign Countries are Bad.


  • Given the long and storied history of American war crimes abroad, my first impulse is to label this “based” and “incredibly cool”.

    On further analysis, it appears Trump is not suggesting Milley be court-martialed for the decades of atrocities committed under his command in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo … jesus fuck this guy was in charge of Fort Bragg? Summary execution on the spot.

    But no. Apparently the hook he’s supposed to be hung on is checks notes taking a call from a Chinese senior military leader. Fuck it, sure.







  • not just in the US but it happens in the UK and other places too

    Damn. Can’t believe New Labour is getting tarred with accepting soccer tickets, fancy clothes, and vacation packages from British Peer Lord Alli. Seems so unfair. Wish people would stop accusing the Labour government of being corrupt, when they are very obviously following the rules of accepting gifts and definitely not operating on any quid pro quo.

    the new Labour government immediately found a £20 billion hole in the economy

    New Labour has a set of accounting rules that count investment in capital as an expense and insists on running daily budget surpluses for their operating expenses.

    Popping open your household account, making cartoonish bug-eyes, and announcing “We owe $200k on our 30 year mortgage but we only make $80k/year! We’re bankrupt for the next three years until we pay this house off!” This is New Labour accounting. It’s laughable and only ever used as an excuse not to spend any money.

    On the flip side, this is the same party that insists on privatizing everything. From Thames Water to British Gas to UK Rail, every once-public service has to be turned over and rented back from the private sector. The Brits pass out these privatization contracts as sinecures, guaranteeing their financial friends huge piles of free no-risk revenues at the expense of the British taxpayer. And then they complain that the country has no money.

    That New Labour slid directly into the driver’s seat the Tories left and gunned it isn’t something you can ignore, simply because the party leadership has changed.



  • there must be some level of insanity that the GOP voters realize that the GOP is utterly insane

    Different messages go to different audiences. You can find plenty of Republicans who think MTG specifically is a nut, but feel perfectly comfortable voting for Ted Cruz or John Thune or Mike Johnson, because they’re the serious adults in the room.

    On the flip side, you have a certain demographic of Rush Babies who will believe anything negative about democrats because its all just a game of smearing and you’re happy enough to feel like you put points on the board. “They said JD Vance fucked a couch, we said Joe Biden created a hurricane, so now we’re even.” The reality of the statement matters less than the vibes. And the vibe of “Democrats caused the Hurricane” boils down to “Democrats Hate America”, which Republicans generally understand to be true.







  • The battle for work-life balance is in a far better state in most western economies (including the US) than it is in many developing economies like India.

    Easy to say from an office suite in the downtown financial district than a slaughterhouse in Iowa or an Amazon Work Fulfillment Center or a prison farm in Alabama.

    The problem with this is that it results in the workplace culture in the private sector in India being utterly abysmal.

    Bosses will exploit their workforce as far as the workforce tolerates it (typically with the assistance of “business-friendly” state officials to compel obedience through debt or bondage). One of the major conflicts in India today is in the northern districts, where the Hindu nationalist state is trying to break the agricultural workers unions that date back to the 1950s when India was aligned with the USSR. If conditions are deteriorating abroad, it is largely because of the expansion of the police and military and the functional enslavement of working people under their domain. If they’re deteriorating at home… gestures towards the suppression of BLM street protests and the mass imprisonment of migrant workers… it’s the same picture.

    change on this scale takes time

    Conditions can change for the worse, and regularly do. But people quitting day one and making their outrage known is a good first step towards reversing the trend.