How taxes are dealt with in North America. Just send me how much I owe. Don't have me go through a service to figure it out
Tipping.
I feel like that's a hard one. Whenever I argue against tipping with coworkers (we don't currently work in the service industry) they will mention how they are all for it and mention how during peak times they made double their usual amount. I feel like it's really been drilled in that it's good for the workers
That element of it — when the restaurant is doing well, the windfall is shared with the waitstaff — could be preserved by simply giving the staff a percentage of the price of each meal they work on. Structure it as a bonus, the way salaried professionals can receive a bonus when the company is doing well.
It may be worth noting that worker-owned restaurants, like Cheese Board Pizza here in Berkeley, typically do not solicit tips. (Well, except for the live musicians, who are not worker-owners.) If tipping was really all that great for the workers, then places where the workers literally control company policy would encourage it.
Over-reliance on proprietary, closed-source products and services from megacorporations.
For instance, it's really absurd that people in many parts of the world cannot function without WhatsApp, they can't even imagine a life without it. It seems absurd that Meta literally has them by the balls, and these people can't do anything about it.
Also the people who base their entire careers on say Adobe or Microsoft products, they're literally having their lives dictated by one giant corporation, which is very depressing and dystopian.
It’s worse in China. WeChat is EVERYTHING.
Ads being everywhere.
I have so many measures in place to block them whenever I do see them it always catches me off guard. The volume of them is ridiculous
Cars. Fuck cars.
So tired of being here in the states where people think you need a car, like it's required to live. It's only needed because we allow our infrastructure to be so lacking that we depend on cars. There are places both built up and as rural as the states where they don't need cars, where driving for 3 hours for a road trip is considered ludicrous.
Work to live.
Edit: we have built a world where we measure success by money. This has meant we are all in pursuit of it all the time, even if we don't want to be. The rich get richer by driving us to do more with less, which marginalizes those who cannot be a productive part of that. We supress our compassion because it isn't making money. People suffer. Those of us who can contribute subject ourselves to a different kind of stress so we can enjoy a few hours of leisure here and there but we never really are free of the shackles of our employer. If you advance to a management position you are forced to evaluate and possibly fire people you could be friends with. When hiring you are evaluating how well people bend the knee. It's not a great world we've made for ourselves.
Trump
Once got in a conversation about nuclear power that hit the point of "Yes nuclear is safer and more efficient but what about the jobs of the coal employees? Do you want them all to starve?"
Took a while to digest because there's a lot of normalization surrounding it, but after a while I realized what I had been told was:
"We have to intentionally gimp our efficiency in both energy production and pollution generation in order to preserve a harder, more costly industry, because otherwise people wouldn't have a task that they need to do in order to feed themselves."
Kinda disillusioned me with the underpinnings of capitalism, just how backwards it was to have to think this way. We can't justify letting people live unless they're necessary to society in some way - which might've made solid sense in older, very very different times in human history, but now means that so much of our culture is tied up in finding more excuses to make people do work that isn't really necessary at all.
New innovations happen, and tasks are made easier, and that doesn't actually save anyone any work, because everyone still has to put in 40 hours a week. New tech lets you do it in 10 hours? Whoops, actually that means that you're out of a job, replaced with an intern or something. Making "life" easier makes individual lives harder, what the fuck? That isn't how things should be at all!
Not exactly an easy situation to crack, but to circle back to the point of the thread - I hate how normal it is to argue on the basis that we need to create jobs, everywhere, all the time. I wish we'd have a situation where people can brag for political clout about destroying jobs instead, about reducing the amount of work people need to do to live and live comfortably, instead of trying to enforce this system where efficiency means making people obsolete means making people starve.
Hahaha i read the 102 current comments and basically 90% of those that name the absurdity is just "capitalism" or its consequences.
Having opinions about other peoples gender, sexual orientation, private matters. Also legislating about that.
we anthropomorphise and infantilise our pets, yet boast about the animals we eat who've had legit insanity level cruel lives thanks to our systems.
[ not saying fussing over your pets is bad, i love it too, just the contrast is whiplash++ ]
hint: most lqbqtia rights, reproductive rights, medical/medication rights, are all the SAME RIGHT:
your body, your choice.
it is constantly under attack, and diffused into separate arguments when its the one right effecting all these issues. newsflash: when it comes to my body, your unwelcome opinion, religious or otherwise, ain't worth the air its vibrating through.
making harmless x illegal because a subset of x might lead to harmful y. if y is bad, then enforce your ban on y, and fuckoff trying to use it as an excuse to control x₀, x₁, x₂ etc.
"Your body, your choice" has a limit once a super dangerous pathogen shows up and people start refusing the best tool we have to stop it for increasingly batshit reasons.
If you choose not to vaccinate, you're directly putting everyone else you interact with at risk. So there's a limit
To some degree literally all of it. My monkey brain was designed to handle at most 150 people, wandering around all day searching for food, unprocessed food, using my body, having a close community I trust, relationship with nature, extreme knowledge of a small amount of things, and an uninterrupted sleep cycle powered by the son.
My humanity is a poor fit for the world I am in.
Religion is a collective delusion and college graduation shocks me by how ritualistic it still is
The current work week, there is no need for it to be that long with the advances in technology. Capitalism, its a pyramid scheme that is unsustainable.
That repairing stuff yourself is worse than the company repairing it for you
It's kinda true since the company will probably try to withhold schematics, withhold spare parts or worse, maliciously design it to be unrepairable
Western society handing money, tax breaks etc hand over fist to rich people while our quality of life slowly erodes over time.
Mowing lawns, screw you dad.
Even worse, watering lawns. Not only in many places there is water restriction during the summer season and people watering their lawn do-it illegally, but the only consequences is that you have to mow-it more often. If you want to have green-grass, go to Britain or Netherlands where it's always raining and stop living around the Mediterranean
Much of the concept of "intellectual property". Here's a good essay by Richard Stallman:
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.en.html
Copyright by and large needs to be abolished. Patents in software are nonsensical, and elsewhere they should be drastically scaled back. Trademark is alright, with a few adjustments needed.
But all of the above is hiding behind a concept of "property" that just does not apply to intangible things, and we need to stop using that term to describe them.
The job "market". Every time I hear a politician say "I'm going to make more jobs", I want to yell "jobs are made by the act of doing something!"
some more
eg.1 "free market will balance everything"
will it now? until we actually see one, we'll never know. we don't live in a free market, and never have. they rig the shit out of it with eg. drm and region locks, and then gaslight us that its free & balanced. lol.
eg.2 "democracy is the best we have"
same as above, when i see a true democracy i'll let you know. caveat: unsure of your exact country's situation, but when was the last time you consistently voted on what you want to happen, rather than who will fail to implement their election promises (with 0.0% accountability btw).
also, friendly reminder: mostly the "who", you can vote for was already chosen in a private vote by the political parties, before they even pretended to care about our opinion. lol.
arguing in the media over the wrong points in an issue to keep public discourse on a 'lively' treadmill
eg.1
Q: Is climate change human caused?
A: Doesn't change the issue: stop poisoning the water, air and soil - we need them to live. duh.
eg.2
Q: Is being lgbqta a choice?
A: Doesn't change the issue: if its not a choice they can't control it, leave these people alone. if it is a choice, its a free country, leave these people alone.
edit: if you disagree with any of the above, please expand, i'm open to a new perspective.
Positive attitude towards billionaire philanthropists. First, they made a fortune on the result of labor alienated from workers, then they threw a pitch and became good guys
Christmas.
An environmental impact study on this would be interesting.
That few countries take a person's wealth and income into account when fining them for breaking laws. I see examples like these and wish this were the norm everywhere.
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