Best products from r/TrueReddit

> Rather, they see that the social safety net is actively harmful, and often, believe that federal assistance is the worst way to effect benevolence unto the poor.

I'm British and a socialist, so while I can't speak to the efficacy of your specific social safety net I can say that desiring to see all such safety nets totally removed sounds pretty heartless to me. The assumption that the market fixes everything is demonstrably untrue and leaving the unfortunate at the mercy of a handful of benevolent philanthropists sounds highly unreliable. It could also be a smokescreen for "I don't care about them - I just want to pay less tax".

> If it weren't for partisanship, we'd realize that both the liberals and the conservatives stated goals have merit, and are equally noble

Can't speak for your American equivalents but here in Britain the noble sentiments of our political parties are much less interesting that the things they've actually done. Noble intentions are meaningless. Of course we'd all like to see an end to poverty, better schooling for everyone, etc, etc, but if your way of achieving those ends turns out to be suspiciously close to "letting the rich get richer while the poor get shafted" then I'm going to call shenanigans on your noble intent.

> This book might help understand their view: http://www.amazon.com/Please-Stop-Helping-Us-Liberals/dp/1594037256

Huh. So if American businesses could pay their workers at Chinese sweat shop levels then more black people would be employed? Forgive me for failing to see the altruism at work in that line of thinking. Alternatively you could all contribute a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction of your wages to pay for a better state education system that would help to enable a true meritocracy to exist.

I recommend Gandhi's Autobiography "My experiments with Truth". He was the first to accept that he has many shortcomings and he works hard to overcome them". This review does shed some light on some of the negative aspects of Gandhi, but it's more of a hit piece than objective journalism.

Relevant:
Only those matters of religion that can be comprehended as much by children as by older people, will be included in this story. If I can narrate them in a dispassionate and humble spirit, many other experimenters will find in them provision for their onward march. Far be it from me to claim any degree of perfection for these experiments. I claim for them nothing more than does a scientist who, though he conducts his experiments with the utmost accuracy, forethought and minuteness, never claims any finality about his conclusions, but keeps an open mind regarding them. I have gone through deep self-introspection, searched myself through and through, and examined and analysed every psychological situation. Yet I am far from claiming any finality or infallibility about my conclusions. One claim I do indeed make and it is this. For me they appear to be absolutely correct, and seem for the time being to be final. For if they were not, I should base no action on them. But at every step I have carried out the process of acceptance or rejection and acted accordingly. And so long as my acts satisfy my reason and my heart, I must firmly adhere to my original conclusions.

Excerpt from his excellent book, Gandhi An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments With Truth

Full disclosure: The above link to the amazon book contains my referral code. If you want, you can visit the direct link here.

>These are not false dichotomies I bring up, but genuine concerns about tradeoffs for implementing democratic processes at so many levels of a society

This is not the false dichotomy I mentioned; the problem was that the two options originally presented were the existing power relationships or a dystopian state controlling everything we do. But once you start to criticize specific details of one possible implementation of socialism, you are merely doing precisely what good socialist thinkers should do. Given some ideal, how should it be implemented? What are the inherent problems? How can we make this work? And you certainly have not given enough credit to socialist intellectuals who do consider these problems when you imply that there is one implementation of socialism and it is necessarily "a fairy tale". That is simply willful ignorance of an entire body of work stretching back centuries to the early days of capitalism.

You want to have a conversation about how socialism should work as a democratic alternative to authoritarian capitalism and find out more about what proposals have been made? Wonderful! My work is done.

>the greater the task or function of some institution, the larger the centralized body must be to orchestrate whatever task it must carry out; the greater the that this democratic, centralized body must be, the more people we need; the more people, the more statistics bear out the chance of differing opinions, differing levels of expertise, and susceptibility to corruption; then we have a slower, more inefficient operation.

You make a whole range of statements that imply things must necessarily be a certain way. Given how rare these truths are when discussing human societies, I would have to ask you to justify these claims with at least some good argument. "The greater the task or function of some institution, the larger the centralized body must be to orchestrate whatever task it must carry out"? What does "greater" even mean to begin with? Why should the importance of a task necessitate more centralized control? If greater tasks require more centralized control, why should these same tasks require more centralization when we switch to socialism? And so on and so on. None of these concerns seem valid to me; they seem to be disguised forms of fear of the unknown.

>These problems will arise; to pretend that this system is immune to problems of corruption and conflict, that it's some rosy paradise of a solution to governing a society is naive.

Nobody ever said socialism would have no problems that we'd need to solve. Again, you're misrepresenting the alternative to the current power structure instead of directly engaging with it. People who believe in revolutionary change to socialism must be "naive" because we're to scared to think about the implications of such fundamental social changes.

>But suppose we go throw with it. How deeply do you embed this democratic structure into company. Large companies admit nested hierarchical command structures. Do we elect someone at every level of management? That only magnifies the problems of democratic processes listed above, likely in some geometric fashion.

Worker cooperatives already exist and have a wealth of answers to these questions. The Mondragon corporation is an often-cited example of a pseudo-democratic institution operating within the prevailing capitalist system. Also, Richard Wolff has written and spoken about these issues extensively; to these concerns I would simply say "go and find out - engage with that conversation!"

>I'm not saying that we should ignore socialism entirely, but to swallow it wholesale is not practical.

Now these are the statements that imply a false dichotomy. What is it to "swallow socialism wholesale"? Socialism is not a single monolithic set of precepts about how society should work. Socialism is simply saying that the biggest problem you currently face is that private control of capital has created and raised a powerful monster that has simply purchased your "democratic" government and will now proceed to solidify its global power until regular people are left with lives that are barely worth living. And all of this was entirely predictable for people who are just willing to question the underlying social hierarchies instead of blindly accepting them! Socialism is a universe of possibilities that begin with one idea - nobody should rule. Surely that one single idea cannot present such an insurmountable difficulty for our digestive tracts.

absolutely. people are going bankrupt by not being able to afford health care. We have failed. Are you saying a rich country MUST be successful, just because the overall wealth of the country is more than any other?

You could have a much poorer country that is a success. How would you define success anyway? Happiness?

http://www.earth.columbia.edu/articles/view/2960

Surely happiness is more preferable to wealth, right? Money can't buy you love, and all that? I think most anyone woudl rather be happy than rich, at least sane people would be, if they had to pick just one.

If so, yeah the US has failed. We are so much richer than any other nation, but we rank 10th on the list of happiness in the world, just above... Costa Rica. You know, that South American country that is pretty poor?

You could also try this book, but I doubt, from the way you talk, that you will:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Spirit-Level-Equality-Societies/dp/1608190366

If you're interested in the Japanese Yakuza, I wholeheartedly recommend the book Tokyo Vice by Jake Adelstein (mentioned in this article).

It is simultaneously a credible assessment of the modern-day Yakuza's place in society (albiet from a westerner's perspective) and a very authentic memoir from a remarkable journalist. Also, I found it to be quite humorous and entertaining without that air of condescension that quite a few books on Japan tend to succumb to.

Probably one of the most enjoyable non-fiction pieces I've read in a while.

For all you would be parents out there, I would suggest this book. Hands down the best book I ever read on parenting. Want your child to sit in their high chair for dinner? Show them their stuffed animal doing it. Want your child to overcome their fear of loud hand dryers. Pretend to dry your hands at home and make a game of it. Want your kid to stop pretending to play with guns? Pretend their gun sends love your way. Everything a child does and learns is through play. By demonstrating outcomes and behaviors you want your child to do / have through play, parenthood becomes easier. (all of the above are real stories from the book that the author, a therapist, walks through)

I'm not a conservative, but "cutting holes in the social safety net" isn't the goal of the conservatives. Rather, they see that the social safety net is actively harmful, and often, believe that federal assistance is the worst way to effect benevolence unto the poor.

If it weren't for partisanship, we'd realize that both the liberals and the conservatives stated goals have merit, and are equally noble. Similarly, in practice, both are equally ignoble, and equally meritless.

That said, that conservatives have a different way of helping the poor than the one you prefer doesn't make them heartless.

This book might help understand their view:
http://www.amazon.com/Please-Stop-Helping-Us-Liberals/dp/1594037256

> Macro-economics has a major problem in that it cannot conduct proper experimental studies with a control group.

Are there any computer models that you are aware of that do, or may do in the future, a good approximation of the real world?

Also, everything you have described is, I'm sure you are aware, a kind of bottom-up intelligence. There are patterns in society, across both space and time, that influence us far more it seems than any top-down approach the we believe to be steering this ship.

> Economics is complicated and we shouldn't reduce it to hero worship of some past figure who "proved capitalism wrong". A recent book that focuses on the injustices of economic inequality with a far more sophisticated treatment is Capital in the Twenty-first Century by Thomas Piketty.

I'd like to second this too. I've only just bought it but it sounds an amazing, thoroughly researched book. Can't wait to start reading it this weekend. There's a brief review here that includes a link to a lengthier review in the first sentence.

Deschooling Society. He critiques the institutionalization of people through the school (and other institutions) and provides ideas for what alternatives might look like. Writing in 1970 its pretty amazing how useful his ideas (including his suggestions) are today. A decent overview.

Comparing invasive species to GMO crops is a false equivalence. Also, your entire post rests on an outdated and bullshit view of the natural world as existing in this pristine state upon which modern man has recklessly trampled. I highly recommend reading the book 1491, which does a good job unraveling the thesis that 'nature=pristine, man's interference=bad'.

Also, we aren't talking about zebra mussels or rabbits in Australia, we're talking about domesticated crop species that are the result of thousands of years of breeding and cultivation, and generally don't thrive in the wild without human intervention. I'm not talking GMO, I'm talking your 'heirloom' varieties. Inserting a gene which codes for a vitamin A synthesis is nothing like releasing birds because we think they'd be pretty. The rice plant already grows in the Philippines. The fundamental biological method by which the plant grows and reproduces has not changed. If we accept farming as part of the natural tableau of the area, then we're changing nothing in the status quo, aside from providing more rounded nutrition to the population

Stephen Hawking is on point:


If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.

A good read to begin to realize a new alternative:

Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work

These books look cool! Thanks for sharing.

>I actually read about this some time back in two GREAT and well-researched novels called Power of the Dog and The Cartel.

>Actually I learned more about the drug war in those 2 novels than I've learned anywhere else.

I have the same thing. Didn't actually realize it until I was an adult. But in retrospect it explains a few things.


Know those "Viewfinder" things that you would load with these little disks with images? I had no idea that it was supposed to look 3D when you looked through those, I just thought it was a really boring toy. Big deal, you look through it and see an image.

Also binoculars are pretty pointless to me as I can really only look through one eye at a time so I'd do just as well with a telescope.

Terrible at foosball because it's hard to judge then the players are lined up with the ball. Same goes for badminton when the birdie is above my head, can't really judge when it's within striking distance.

You might be interested in checking out this book: Fixing My Gaze by Susan R. Barry. The woman is a neuroscientist with strabismus and she goes through optometric vision therapy when she's in her forties and is able to gain full stereovision. I'm hopeful that I'll be able to do it someday as well.

The hero worship of Marxist economics is largely misplaced and unproductive. Marx was ignorant of many intellectual breakthroughs in economics that occurred between his writing of The Communist Manifesto and Capital. Take, for example, the marginal revolution compared to Marx's theory of prices. No economist pays any attention to Marx's ideas on price theory, or his other "economic" contributions. Other things that people would like to credit to Marx, eg a focus on income inequality, is better credited to previous economists like David Ricardo.

Marxist economics failed to account for the core role of economics--the allocation of scare resources with alternate uses. Instead Marx simply asserted that a communist economy could achieve the same efficiency with more equitable distribution of gains, but without explaining how this could be done. He similarly ignored the tradeoff between worker's quality of life and efficiency/growth--this isn't to say that we have the right balance now, but that Marx didn't even consider the question. Every time Marx's ideas have been put into practice they have proved a dismal failure and demanded an immediate reversal to more traditional (ie "capitalist") means of organizing production. See Lenin's New Economic Policy and Deng's economic reforms. The tragic irony is that Marxist economies tend to cause the most suffering for the people they are intended to help, as the elite are perfectly capable of protecting themselves regardless of circumstances.

Marx's contributions to history are significant and his political contributions are undeniable, but we shouldn't lionize his economic theories simply by association. His contributions to economics as practiced today are non-existent. Marxist critiques of capitalism were disproven within his own lifetime. Indeed by the publication of Capital, wages of the working class were increasing. A lot of casual Marxists tend to think he predicted that "capitalism was bad" and then cherry pick periods that loosely agree with this understanding. Marxism actually makes much more specific predictions about the way the world will evolve that were false--for example, where and how the first communist revolution would take place. We shouldn't lose sight of that.

Economics is complicated and we shouldn't reduce it to hero worship of some past figure who "proved capitalism wrong". A recent book that focuses on the injustices of economic inequality with a far more sophisticated treatment is Capital in the Twenty-first Century by Thomas Piketty.

http://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/1400032059/

Great read, excellent writer.

It isn't "our culture", it's the regulatory structure.

It doesn't take a decision of "Americans as a people" to keep dense housing from being built in urban commercial centers. Land that is near places where people work has a great deal of value as a place for said people to live. All that is required is that it be legal to build appropriate housing and developers will do the rest. And if they can't, they'll make suburbs instead.

I just buy salt sticks and drink them with water. they're super handy and much lighter to carry when backpacking or such :)

https://www.amazon.com/SaltStick-Electrolyte-Replacement-Capsules-bottle/dp/B002IY96B0

Not the original commenter, but you both seem to be going on your intuition about what rhetoric will work best. I recommend reading "How Culture Shapes the Climate Change Debate" (https://www.amazon.com/Culture-Shapes-Climate-Change-Debate/dp/0804794227). I would argue that you both misunderstand and oversimplify the beliefs of your climate-change-denying audience. I highly recommend the book I've linked to! Relatively concise, cogent and backed by extensive sociological research.

The Soviet Union and China were/are state capitalist countries. Capitalism is defined as an economic system where the capitalists (read non-producing workers) own all the value created by the laborers (read people who produce the physical product). In socialism and communism the labor force is more democratic in that the laborers directly own and distribute their profits.

Source:
Richard Wolff - Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism https://www.amazon.com/dp/1608462471/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_HBHRBbGEVP6FD

Richard Wolff - Google Talk https://youtu.be/ynbgMKclWWc

Wikipedia - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_capitalism?wprov=sfla1

I also recommend this book for those who are really interested in the subject.

From a review: " Shoup zeroes in on the reason for such problems: we assume that parking should be free. Shoup points out that if we decided that gasoline should be free, the result we would expect would be obvious: people would drive too much, shortages of gasoline would develop, fights would break out over scarce gas, and governments would go broke trying to pay for it all. Shoup shows that parking is no different. Providing free parking leads to overuse, shortages, and conflicts over parking. Cash-strapped local governments and neighborhoods lose out, too. Free parking is like a fertility drug for cars. Many people don't realize how much of the high price of housing is due to requirements by local governments that a certain number of parking spaces must be provided. These costs are paid by everyone, including those who don't own a car."

Your link is ... I'm not sure. But it doesn't link to the amazon page for the book, "How Culture Shapes the Climate Change Debate". I provided a link to the Amazon Smile page for anyone interested.

The high cost of free parking is by now so well-known that it is also the title of an eponymous book. Yet we spend massive amounts of money and cause tremendous externalities by trying to making parking "free." We can live saner and more productive lives by acknowledging these costs and becoming better systems thinkers.

fyi, you can hyperlink on reddit like this:
[has another book](http://www.amazon.com/Protecting-Gift-Keeping-Children-Teenagers/dp/0440509009)

So it will look like this:
has another book

Submission Statement

In essence this article is a book review of Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, but delves deeper into the themes discussed in the book. The article talks about the history of neoliberalism and draws some interesting parallels with it as a utopian concept as much as any left wing ideals of the post-war period.


Quite a long read, but insightful. First of a series on the site discussing neoliberalism.

I strongly endorse this safe for handguns.

Keeps kids out but allows you to access your weapon instantly and silently and can be done without looking at the safe.

Fascinating stuff.

The book is available on Amazon (US) or Amazon (DE).

If you care about this issue, make your views known to your local zoning board and elected officials. Insane real estate prices in metro areas are not inevitable, they are a result of deliberate anti-growth, anti-development policies that prioritize car ownership and suburbanization.

I highly recommend this e-book for a more lucid explanation. The writer is a DC resident, and I think you'll find it very relevant.

I actually read about this some time back in two GREAT and well-researched novels called Power of the Dog and The Cartel. Actually I learned more about the drug war in those 2 novels than I've learned anywhere else.

> The Gift Of Fear

Looks like he has another book, which is about kids:
http://www.amazon.com/Protecting-Gift-Keeping-Children-Teenagers/dp/0440509009

He wrote a book "Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan". I read it a few weeks ago and was impressed. It shows how the yakuza, not one single entity but multiple groups that rise and fall, have an often symbiotic relationship with the government. It also answers a lot of questions about japanese sex culture and wider culture in general, the open side and the darker one where human sex trafficking can go uninvestigated.

I guess that Mr Shoup was right!