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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: January 22nd, 2024

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  • Not so much as ragebait but unpopular opinion. I think most Lemmy users are highly paid middle class, tech workers who are out of touch with the genuine grievances and feelings of the working class, whose previous manufacturing jobs were outsourced and left with no alternative. They are then left to compete with just as poor immigrants for artificially-induced resource scarcity. And then Lemmings call them ignorant redneck hillbillies without listening to their lived experience. Sure, many former manufacturing blue collar workers could re-skill, but it is easier said than done, since most people find it hard to re-adjust and prefer to stick with their trade.

    Now that there is huge lay off of tech workers the past year in preference to cheap immigrant labour, and cost-free AI, many Lemmy users are starting to realise and feel the experience of working class who had been left by globalisation.

    I am increasingly becoming socialist. At some point we will all need UBI.












  • From cold hard rationale, Hayek and Friedman makes sense, but they do ignore reality that circumstances always change. Deregulation made sense at the time of 1970s oil crisis as the economy and welfare state stagnated, but we’re now in the age of economic prosperity again, but the wealth is hoarded by the few and act as though austerity still matters.

    Not entirely sure about why Friedman’s claim that India was costing the British empire more to maintain, but it has also been repeated in many circles. I suspect that the data is not fully contextualised and repeated as if it’s the absolute truth. An Indian historian countered the narrative, mentioning that if we include the period of private control of India by the British East India company, before India was formally taken over by the British state in 1858, the total wealth plundered from India is about $1 trillion. The term “loot” is Indian origin, which became part of the English language after East India’s violent colonisation. When the British public found out of about the brutal occupation by a private company and were enraged by it, the British state took over the formal administration. But this only happened well after committing crimes against humanity, after a state-sanctioned plunder and massacre that made their private owners and their government enablers rich, while the cost of running another country is taken over by tax payers. It’s an early example of “privatise the profit, socialise the cost”.