I don’t understand people talking about what coffee they’re drinking on the internet. I’m drinking local cafe beans you’ve never heard of and I assume most people are drinking their local Cafe beans I’ve never heard of.

Yi Gang is also the name of his rap crew.

That’s very funny.

From context clues it seems like they were hosted on Lemmy which is why they are now limiting image hosting.

Their point is that they agree with you 100% on slavery, but this isn’t slavery.

Why are 50 percent of prisoners minorities?

Because the system is racist and bad and minorities are disproportionately imprisoned. Nobody here is arguing against that. They are just pointing out that if 50% of the “enslaved” are white, that is a different sort of thing than the race-specific enslavement of black people. Things can be not-literal-slavery while still being bad.

What happens if you refuse to work?

I assume you can’t refuse without a medical exception of some kind. These are imprisoned people, they also can’t leave. Not trying to excuse everything about prison labor but as a society we have decided the state has the capacity to remove rights from people as a punishment after due process has been afforded to them. We can argue that it’s not right or humane to force labor on an imprisoned population without saying it’s literally slavery. “It’s not literally slavery” is not a defense of the system.

We’re not arguing “well prisoners can’t be sold to other prisons so that proves it’s not slavery” because that one difference doesn’t prove anything, just like one similarity doesn’t prove anything.

It may not be inherited at birth but is the system setup to capture successive generations of prisoners from the same families?

…no? Even if you include Capitalism and wealth inequality and racist policing as part of “the system” maybe members of the same family are disproportionately likely to be imprisoned because they are the same race and likely similar economic status, that isn’t because a parent was imprisoned. There’s nothing targeting children of imprisoned people. And even then, you’re trying to compare disproportionate odds to be imprisoned to literal 100% ownership of slaves’ children by slave masters? What are we talking about here?

It’s also time-bound for the length of the sentence. So like sure it’s slavery…temporarily, non-inherited, non-race-specific, as a punishment for a crime, at least sometimes paid.

Which is just a lot of caveats.

Similarly, having a job is just temporary, non-inherited, non-race-specific paid slavery where you get to pick your slave master. Sure you can make that argument but it’s not a very good one.

A lot of stuff about the US prison system is really bad, including this part, it’s just not literally slavery, and it doesn’t have to be slavery to be really bad and need changing.

Pretty sure it should be “valuation”

If I’m low on hot air I’ll just invite [local politician] on the balloon! Oh ho ho ho

Direct Drive tech reduced the number of moving parts so low that it put Big Washer Repair out of business and they had to develop other ways to monetize your laundry.

It’s doing fine. There are many free trade deals in the works around the world, the WTO is still chugging along as normal.

I’d actually say the idea of minimal government control over the economy is still the majority opinion in the US, Biden’s Child Tax Credits are tax cuts, Trump had tax cuts. UBI which has been growing in popularity on the Left is really a neoliberal solution to welfare.

And on trade we just renegotiated NAFTA and kept it and we’re working on a trade deal with the UK. You think the trade barriers to China are this big turn against neoliberalism but nobody has even had the ability to pass a law about it, the sanctions law is all repurposed from the Cold War.

Personally I had way too many quality issues at that price range. An earbud would be randomly quieter than the other, the battery of an earbud would die, the Bluetooth would suck, or they would be unusable for phone calls. I bought refurbished $100-something headphones for $70 and haven’t needed to buy any more since.

There’s a famous example of the poverty trap that uses boots that fall apart every season vs quality boots that last, and I think there is a quality level that is so bad it’s more expensive in the long run. So I do buy shoes that cost money. But I’m not buying fashion shoes or luxury brand shoes which I think is what you’re saying too.

This comment did not go where I thought it was going but very interesting. You’re clearly making the right call for your personal finances.

I assumed you were going to say something about like expensive composting equipment or aluminum straws.

That ‘immigration is bad’ would actually be the vastly more common incorrect belief.

I asked for a switch and all I got was a vers.

I just realized recently that I’m back up within 20lbs of where I was in the “oh my God things have to change” weight.

It’s basically the gold standard. The country not having the ability to devalue is exactly the point.

The monetary trilemma is that you have to choose 2: monetary independence, exchange rate stability, and free capital flow. Dollarizing picks exchange rate stability over monetary independence. There are downsides but it’s a legitimate choice, there are upsides too.

You know it’s a good grinder because its name is incomprehensible combinations of letters and numbers.

Article from 2019 is very 2019.