not to mention all the progress traps capitalism stepped into
Where in the Arctic is it “100°”?
Temperatures reaching 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the Arctic occurred on June 20, 2020, in the Siberian town of Verkhoyansk, Russia, hitting 100.4°F (38°C).
It’s extinct species per minute not year, there are a lot of unique species most of them still undiscovered going extinct.
Capitalism only works when there’s a big bad Soviet state that they have to compete against in a popularity contest in the global stage, and if they go mask-off it scares all the fence sitting nations into communism.
If 2008 had happens in 1968 everyone involved would have been tried as Soviet saboteurs or something in a big red scare purge. “Using capitalism against itself” or something…
Not to say anhydrous communism is the solution either. I think the answer lies somewhere in the middle of ⅔ communism for natural monopolies and necessities, and ⅓ capitalism for luxury goods and comoddities in purely elastic markets.
A tank of gas and a TV cost the same amount of money because competition legitimately worked for the TV, and fucking didn’t for the gasoline 🤣
Okay but why does the picture look like someone put their phone on a flatbed scanner
Or they took a picture of another screen and the camera’s refresh rate caught the display’s scan line.
Do LCDs have scanlines? I thought that was a CRT thing.
I don’t know if it’s the reason for this but even with modern screens you can get screen tearing, which is why stuff like vsync exists. It happens when there’s a very brief mismatch in refresh rates.
From my understanding, screen tearing happens when the GPU sends a frame to the screen in the middle of that frame being written to the buffer, which means half of the buffer has the last frame, and half has the new one (citation needed on the exact mechanics). VSync works around this by keeping two (or more) final buffers, making sure there’s always a full buffer ready to send to the screen, and waiting to start rendering another frame until one of the buffers is “free”, having been displayed on the screen.
This means the phenomenon is different, because the monitor is displaying the image correctly - it’s receiving an image with a tear in it, and faithfully rendering that.
As a bonus fun fact, Variable Refresh Rate (VRR, also known under marketing terms GSync and FreeSync) is a better way to work around this, it’s basically monitor hardware that can render frames with freer timing (not stuck at a specific refresh rate), and a way for the GPU to send a frame to the monitor when ready instead of a strict schedule, so instead of the GPU waiting for the monitor to be ready, the monitor can wait for the GPU.
When I take a picture of the radio LCD in my car it has those exact same lines unless I angle the phone in a very specific way.
To be fair, what we have in most of the world isn’t actually raw/pure capitalism, most of the time called Laissez-faire capitalism. Most of the world has a mixed economy of different capitalism implantations across the board in different areas: state/regulated/corporate capitalism and best of all crony capitalism.
Regulated capitalism may actually work if we regulated it fairly and didn’t have megacorps writing the laws. But I don’t have that much faith in human nature to not keep fucking it up like we’ve done so many times.
Regulated capitalism may actually work if we regulated it fairly and didn’t have megacorps writing the laws.
Here’s the thing…that’s true for literally every form of governance/economic planning you can conceive.
The problem with socialism will always be “the ones with all the de facto power”.
I’d go one further and note that environmentalism isn’t exactly endemic outside the capitalist sphere of influence. The USSR was dirty af. Chinese Communists were openly antagonistic to environmental movements until the early '00s, when air quality in Beijing got so bad that the national leadership was forced to reconcile with it.
The real virtue of socialist policy is in it’s ability to adapt democratically, while capitalists are bound up in authoritarian modes of production. But if the public at-large doesn’t see the benefit of a good policy, there’s nothing inherent to the mode of production that makes it cleaner.
Regulated capitalism may actually work if we regulated it fairly and didn’t have megacorps writing the laws.
Regulated capitalism is just a tiger by the tail. As soon as you lose you grip, it eats you.
The only way to keep mega-corps from writing policy is to abolish them. Otherwise, why wouldn’t wealthy people try to beg, browbeat, or business plot a state government?
At some point, you need to eliminate the bourgeois class entirely. It’s us or them, over a long enough timeline.
It’s not capitalism per se. It’s the lazy, stupid populace that allows the system of regulatory capture we have.
The fossil fuel industry also gets a metric fuck ton of tax payer funded subsidies. That’s not capitalism. That’s a quasi state economy.
In a true capitalist system, we’d see more competitive forms of energy taking off, like solar and wind which are cheaper than fossil fuels at this point. But because the government keeps fossil fuels going, we’re not getting off them.
I think it’s inevitable of any human system that it eventually is undermined by greed and selfishness. Some systems are just more prone to it.
If a system were to work, it would have a way to deal with the psychopaths and other cluster b folks. It’s always been us vs them, throughout history.
Genuine question. how are the voters supposed to keep their leaders accountable?
By voting. The US has set term lengths at every level. If the leaders are not fulfilling their job properly, they get fired.
For representatives it’s every two years.
That requires having an informed and active constituency though, which we do not have.
And what happens when the elections are not-so-subtly influenced by corporate lobbyists and whoever has more money to spend on campaigning?
Then the people need to put even more effort into exercising their power. It’s that simple.
And how do you propose they do that, since it’s so simple?
Well, voting for one. The US has abysmal voter turnout. More people stayed home and said they don’t give a shit in 2024 than either candidate got in votes.
The highest turnout we’ve had in over 100 years is 66%. A full 1 in 3 people that can vote put literally zero effort into voting.
That would be a decent start. Just actually doing anything to participate in the system.
And it will never happen because the people who control the resources also control the narrative. They promote their candidates, who change the laws in their favour, and progressively make things worse for your average person.
The system you describe is a pipe dream, and it’s a nice dream, but it’s not reflective of the world we live in today.
It’s literally the only possible system that could work. The alternative is just giving unrestricted power to politicians, and the people have no say at all.
Their power is ultimately derived from the voting public. That’s it. That is the power. You either have the ultimate power rest with the people, or the people have zero power.
It’s a cop out excuse to not put in the effort to be active and informed in the system. “It’s pointless anyway” is just defeatist bullshit.
I really wish I could believe in the system as much as you do. I think I’d be happier that way.
However, all the power lies with the capital. The capital controls the narrative, which in turn leads to people voting against their interest. The capital promotes their politicians. The politicians enact politics in favour of the capital. Then ultimately, capital controls the forces.
See for example how Murdoch and Thatcher completely destroyed the newspaper unions in England during the 80s. They went from having really strong worker rights and collective power, to being completely powerless and literally shot at by police within the span of a few years, all due to processes the workers were purposely locked out of.
I hear the French have ideas
The word 'competition" here is the trap.
Competition encourages you to seek every loophole and exploit to keep ahead, even if it means kneecapping yourself in the long term. It’s no different than an athelete drugging themselves up for the Olympic Gold Medal just to end up hospitalised for the rest of their lives.
Regulations are just another barrier to be bypassed under the law of competition. Why? Because optimising fun out of the equation is the meta.
It’s hard to know if the world would still suck the same under a different system.
But I agree lol
Who knew that you could turn an entire planet into a gas chamber?
Venus.
unregulated captialism…
it wasn’t always unregulated.
The planet won’t die, but we will
Not a fan of comments like this because it ignores all of the species that we are taking with us. Sure the planet will bounce back eventually but we really fucked the ever loving shit out of it.
Even if humanity doesn’t go extinct, we are one of earth’s big extinction events. If anything it could be argued that humanity being wiped out would save more species in the long run.
To e clear I don’t disagree with you, I just don’t see the point in enshrining species alive now as the most deserving over potential species in the future simply because they have emotional value to humans that will be dead.
Our particular iteration is statistically not the first time that life has evolved in the universe. When humanity and every other species goes extinct, life will evolve again.
The dragons will rise again! (But in all seriousness, this whole situation does really suck)
the fossil gas problem is only about 50 years old. before that, levels were increasing but still manageable. carbon taxes were designed to be a solution compatible with capitalism
Let’s be fair, we’ve made plenty of species extinct just for the love of the game.
Hammer and sickle … I grew up in post communist country, trust me, commies were raping the nature and people even more then capitalism. Find something else to blame.
IDK if capitalism is evil on its own. It’s just an idea. I don’t know what the answer is, but I don’t think if a better system is implemented in the future, that that would be a permanent solution for all of our problems either. It’s all just the same cycle repeating with different faces and places.
I’m not saying that we shouldn’t still strive for a better life for those who come after, and to take care of this planet like we can and should, but I think it’s kind of silly to blame some ideas when we can just look in the mirror and see what the problem really is.
Well… what the past hundreds of years of capitalism has shown us is that it has many faults in practice and is causing the destruction of the environment, no? You can have the greatest, most amazing idea in the world, but if it sucks in implementation it’s not a good idea. You may be on the right track though, I would recommend you watch some videos by the youtube channel Second Thought on socialism
The issue is there’s no real reason to suspect our environmental destructivity is a function of capitalism. Countless societies over the ages have faced environmental collapse. The Maya were hardly devout capitalists. The Soviets destroyed the Aral Sea. Prehistoric stateless humans drove most of the planet’s megafauna to extinction.
We seem pretty capable of decimating the environment regardless of our economic system. A worker-owned co-op can tear down a rainforest just as well as a regular company can.
There is actually plenty of reason to suspect our environmental destructivity is a function of capitalism, given that capitalism is driven by a desire to produce as many goods and services as possible without much regard to its consequences. The two prehistoric examples you gave don’t really make much sense anymore, given that we now possess significantly more knowledge about how our actions affect the environment, as well as the tools to alter the environment in general. The Soviets destroyed the Aral Sea because they were in need of cotton, but this doesn’t really have much to do with what economic system the soviet union used, just that they were a country that made mistakes. Simply put, capitalism actively incentivizes the destruction of the environment while socialism does not. The People’s Republic of China is the world leader in renewable energy production, has significantly increased its forest coverage, and its CO2 emissions have already peaked.
A better question for the last example you gave might be, would a worker-owned co-op, with the interests of its workers in mind, want to tear down a rainforest to the same degree as a regular company? Or would they deforest at a more responsible level, planting replacement trees in order to guarantee a stable resource and not destroy the environment the workers live in (assuming the workers are owning a co-op in their own rainforest)?
In theory private companies have no incentive to destroy the environment, as their shareholders are human beings that live in the world more than anyone else. And there’s no reason that worker-owned co-ops can’t also degrade the environment. Some of the biggest co-ops in the US are composed of factory farms.
The rest? You’re not applying even scrutiny. You ascribe the failures of capitalism to its intrinsic nature, but every other economic system gets excuses.
Yes, you can say that “capitalism is driven by a desire to produce as many goods and services as possible without much regard to its consequences.” But the same could be said for any economic or political system. The ancient hunter-gatherers hunted the megafauna to extinction because they were driven by a desire to obtain food without regard to its consequences. The Maya exhausted their farmland through excessive slash-and-burn agriculture because their leaders were driven by a desire to obtain wealth and power without regards for consequences. Soviet planners destroyed the Aral Sea because they wanted to make their quotas and receive their incentives, regardless of the consequences. You excuse their activities saying it had nothing to do with their economic system, but the same could be said for capitalism! Companies aren’t Captain Planet villains; they don’t pollute for the sake of pollution. Pollution is a byproduct, not a goal, of every economic system.
You do have a point about China and its renewable production, but remember it was capitalist economies that did the decades worth of preceding work on renewables before China really ramped up manufacturing. And of course, China is doing all of that renewable rollout through capitalist enterprises, rather than through some centrally planned system. And the US has seen a major recovery in its forests. (Well I’m sure in the cases of both China and the US, most of the ‘forests’ are tree farms.) But in terms of raw numbers of trees, there are as many trees in the US in 2026 as there were in 1900.
Don’t mistake me for some huge proponent of capitalism, I’m not. But I bristle at lazy thinking that blames complex problems on simple solutions. Humans, regardless of the economic system, have proven talented at exploiting resources beyond their sustainable level. Most of what gets lazily ascribed to capitalism this way is just human nature.
It’s Occam’s razor. If we observe environmental destruction from every economic system humankind has ever created, that’s a damn good sign that humans just by nature can often damage the environments we live in. The economic system is irrelevant.
Yes, you can say that “capitalism is driven by a desire to produce as many goods and services as possible without much regard to its consequences.” But the same could be said for any economic or political system.
Except it literally can’t, given that socialism and communism are trying to abollish commodity production. All the examples you give after this are about people trying to obtain wealth, which is kind of capitalism’s whole thing. The USSR was in the very earliest stages of socialism, and still had many problems given that it was created then immediately went through a civil war, went through WW2, and went through the Cold War. Yet it still achieved some of the fastest quality of life improvements of any civilization in recorded history, because obtaining individual wealth was no longer the primary focus of the economy.
You do have a point about China and its renewable production, but remember it was capitalist economies that did the decades worth of preceding work on renewables before China really ramped up manufacturing.
Take a second to think about why said capitalist countries have not implemented the results of their own work, then. Could it be that it’s not as profitable to anyone who has a stake in the Oil/traditional energy industries?
China is doing all of that renewable rollout through capitalist enterprises, rather than through some centrally planned system.
Except they are doing it through a centrally planned system, to an extent. The communist party is the one who implemented the conservation policies and paid the subsidies to make this happen.
Humans, regardless of the economic system, have proven talented at exploiting resources beyond their sustainable level. Most of what gets lazily ascribed to capitalism this way is just human nature.
Once again, read a psychology or sociology textbook please. Humans are influenced by their environment and society, not all human behavior is some innate thing.
Tbf, jupiter looks sexy and huge , so gas chamber planet is novel idea that worthy to pursue.
Earth is turning into more of a Venus situation.
Which has beautiful persistent flesh eating clouds, I fail to see the problem
