DJohn Grady

Everyone treats these questions like it's "how do you maximize money" but the other important factor is if you can actually manage it.

@_midori_me_ @maggistratus I mean, you are proving her point, though.

@maggistratus Ah, well the last birthday I was around my father he got drunk as it turned my birthday & came to my room as I was cleaning up for the next morning & he started bitching about millennials ruining everything & how me & my brother didn’t appreciate his intelligence enough. 🥰

If you really pay attention sometimes you will witness men carrying more emotional weight than they get credit for. I witnessed my brother asking his daughter if she was excited for a trip. She pouted her lip. He asked what the matter was….

This is an interesting psychology test. People are primed with the factoid that it's 50% regardless of what happened before, because they are used to arguing with gamblers But the question is specifically about the prior, and people just default to the factoid instead of thinking

Why do people think that pretending to be stupid is a hot take? Though, the answers aren't all that much better.

@michael_galant @owenjonesjourno @Eve_Barlow Since she made the statements publicly, you can link them. Otherwise, I'm calling *you* out for exploiting a horrific tragedy for internet points.

@Eve_Barlow I personally know someone who was sexually assaulted using dogs while being tortured as a prisoner of the Pinochet dictatorship. Do you deny her personal testimony of this horrific abuse, which she has made publicly?

For the 1000th time. There is no scientific or behavioral evidence that dogs can be trained to commit sexual assault. Experts and dog behaviorists point to several biological and cognitive barriers that make this impossible. But go on with your desperate myths.

@GreenPlusAnE It seems your data suggests that European countries are also free market and capitalist. What about a statistic that compares retirement spending as a percentage of GDP for these countries?

The idea of free market, capitalist U.S. is a total myth. We spends more of our economy on social programs than the U.K., Iceland, Norway, Australia and New Zealand! The money is just mainly going to senior citizens, so young people don't notice.

@srnorty @bruno7302734223 @George_Da_Gorge @thomasforth Well, that's the point, no? Say a bunch of things to distract people while stealing the means of production in the confusion 😉

@DJohnGrady @bruno7302734223 @George_Da_Gorge @thomasforth I'm so confused by this little exchange we've had 😂

I loved this tweet, and I read as many replies as I could, and all of the quote tweets hoping that I'd get the answer --- because there is a really good answer --- and I didn't find the answer, so I'll put it here.

@srnorty @bruno7302734223 @George_Da_Gorge @thomasforth That's a neat trick, pretending this is about OP's views and not the general discussion about seizing the means of production. But thanks for reaffirming my point.

@DJohnGrady @bruno7302734223 @George_Da_Gorge @thomasforth Go on then, where does he provide his answer to this question?

@srnorty @bruno7302734223 @George_Da_Gorge @thomasforth Why do people pretend they don't understand something as if that were an argument?

@bruno7302734223 @George_Da_Gorge @thomasforth I don't think OP really makes his views very clear on any of this.

@srnorty @thomasforth That doesn't explain why you have to seize the other factory. Just buy its products like other businesses do. If you want to make a factory that produces hammers, you don't need to seize the steel mill. Just buy the steel. You know, like the current hammer factory does.

The answer is because a new means of production can't be created ex nihilo, from nothing, but only by means of the existing means of production. (You can't create a factory without using other factories). Hence you need to seize the means of production before you can create the means of production.

Counterpoint: 1 trillion Zimbabwean dollars.

This explains an important part of the fertility crisis, and also the reversal in historic IQ growth.

@nataliapetrzela Well, if your kids get a better education, they have a leg up on the ones who got worse education. This seems more about maintaining privilege than hypocrisy. Since they won't vote against their own school. Just like " defund the police" don't want their precinct cut.

Exactly. I can’t even count the ppl I know who denounce charters or anything w a whiff of “privatization” but quietly send their kids private You can think public schools are important AND want the best for your kid, incl private Consistency, honesty pretty important!

@GayBearRes Husbands go along with it because we don't want to upset our wives. My MIL will nag her husband into supporting her when she tries to pressure my wife.

It begs the question: why do husbands and other moms feel pressure to indulge this mentally ill behavior? Our societal default is to indulge the insanity instead of pushing back against it.

Before I became a parent I assumed that husbands put pressure on their wives to do more through negligence / incompetence. Now I’ve learned that moms put this pressure on each other and themselves, and it’s insane. 1/2

People are taking this as a test of altruism, but it's really a measure of whether people trust their fellow humans. Blue: High trust society. Red: Low trust society.

@estherzelda0514 The problem with Bullshit Jobs is that it didn't look at the issue economically, which is where the capitalist class works. There is loads of work that is not productive to the point that it's most of if not all of some people's jobs. But determining that requires economics.

But lest you think I'm sucking off Graeber, his error is the same error most commit: they attribute to malice what is best explained by stupidity, because he, like most academics, is too isolated in his ivory tower to have any interaction with real people. Corporate bloat, or whatever amount of bullshit jobs exist, are part of the inherent inefficiencies of any human-created system, which can never been completely ironed out, Smith be damned (Keynes was right). To the extent that corporations over-hire or create useless positions and bureaucracy, just like governments that do the same thing, they are trying to address an issue they perceive to be real, and landing on a solution that is not effective. Corporate audits are extremely expensive, and are just as likely to find areas where hiring is sparse and administration too flimsy, than areas where there is too many "bullshit jobs." So diagnosing or even finding the inefficiencies is likely to create more of them. But the idea that a capitalist class is sitting in their corporate offices twiddling their fingers evilly and thinking of ways to make people too exhausted to organize is ridiculous. They're just stupid and the company gave them mostly unilateral power to find and solve problems, and it's very likely that they're going to fuck it up, and often.

I have to address this, because I did read Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber a while back, and even though I disagree on many of his premises in this and other books and essays, I have respect for him as an original thinker and an exemplary anthropologist. First, the key premises of Bullshit Jobs are all intended to lead to the conclusion that, as productivity increases, we should not be creating more and more corporate bloat to keep people busy, but we should instead institute UBI. Graeber is an anarchist and leftwing thinker, and pretending he would agree with conservatives who are obsessed with the notion that women are useless "girlbosses" is ridiculous. Second, Graeber explicitly addressed the premise that positions occupied by women in admin positions are the source of employment bloat. Instead, he said that it is far more likely that a woman working as an assistant for a male executive is the only person doing any real work. He went into detail about how middle-management and executive roles are "pure bullshit," while the admin staff supporting them are the only people performing the essential labor that keeps the company running. Third, the idea that "bullshit jobs" are a personal failing of the person holding them (supposedly because they are female), would be completely contrary to Graeber's conclusions. He calls bullshit jobs a structural failure of finance capitalism, and the people holding them as victims of "spiritual violence," i.e., they are forced to pretend to work while doing nothing, or at least nothing they care about, which is psychologically destructive. Fourth, even if you want to credit the premise that HR bloat is a key part of where corporations have too many useless jobs, Graeber explicitly talked about how HR consultants and DEI officers are victims of "managerial feudalism," not a symptom of some sort of woke feminist "longhouse culture" or whatever weird shit conservatives talk about these days. Namely, corporations are feudal organizations, and managers gain status by hiring more subordinates, regardless of their utility. One of the easiest places to do that is HR and VPs or executives. Fifth, Graeber differentiates between "bullshit jobs" and "shit jobs." Shit jobs are jobs that are necessary, but unpleasant. He doesn't count just jobs men usually work, like mechanics and construction, but also jobs women work, often without any pay at all, like caregiving. He explicitly argued that society perversely compensates caregiving, disproportionately done by women, with low pay while overpaying for truly useless make-work middle management roles in corporations. Sixth, and this goes back to his overall premise, he argues that the proliferation of these bullshit jobs, which keep people "occupied" for 40+ hours a week and psychologically exhausts them through tedium and pointlessness, serves the political purpose of keeping people too busy and tired to organize. Graeber would likely state conservative commentators attacking "girlbosses" are simply participating in the typical "crisscrossing of resentments" which distracts from the actual ruling class: the finance capitalists who benefit from everyone being occupied with meaningless tasks. So the idea that Graeber would agree with ANY premise of the conservative obsession with "girlbosses" is completely absurd. It's like people looked at the title and cover of his book and decided to fill the pages what they themselves think are bullshit jobs, which is just a reflection of their own misogyny.

It's a cancer because people like this refuse to understand it. He even admitted to not finishing the book. Those of us in the actual workforce are well aware of just how much work is bullshit.

@MCLuhan17 I was homeschooled until 12, so I got the academic advancement, but also the social experience. It's about finding a balance, and depends on the person. Some people are just different, no matter where they went to school.

So I lived the counter-example to this meme - my dad pulled me out of school and homeschooled me when my teachers told him and my mom at a conference that they had to stop teaching me stuff at home because I was too ahead. I think overall it was a mistake (1/x)

"A living wage costs less than a revolution." youtube.com/shorts/NfRi3GZ…

@TomCast27757620 Chile es uno de los 60 paises que mas comercializa con EEUU, tambien incluye a Australia. No hay que meterle tanto color. Este entusiasmo de algunos para armar problemas con EEUU...

Los yanquis van a apretar y apretar y apretar. Correr el cerco hasta la completa dependencia y subordinación de Chile. Y dudo mucho que la derecha lo sienta como una agresión al país. Van a creer que están “derrotando a los comunistas y zurdos”.