Correct, most voters don’t understand enough to demand effective redistribution policies. Speaking from experience, if you get involved in politics this becomes the bane of your existence.

There is some redistribution now, and it’s gone up recently in Canada, although I’m not sure off the top of my head what the global trends have been. It’s just slower than the natural self-accumulation of wealth.

How the New Deal got so much traction in the US is a big mystery, honestly - it really was a unique event. People weren’t smarter or more educated back then, and on the other side of the Atlantic they just elected fascists, who can tell a hell of an emotionally appealing story. (The USSR definitely managed redistribution, although they came straight after a brutal monarchy and a war without a significant liberal democracy phase, and struggled to keep growing over time)

Yes, without hesitation, although I’d want to rinse it first to avoid cross-contamination.

Banana picking and shipping as it usually happens isn’t exactly sterile, either. Or the grocery store where everyone is picking through them. This is also why you should wash anything you don’t peel.

Yeah, I futzed with it a bit. At first I did sesquicentennial, but that’s purely an adjective which isn’t great. Sesquicentenary refers to the day, so that wouldn’t work. So, I made a nonce word which, if you know these other two, is clear.

I’ll just ignore the insulting tone.

They addressed that, actually.

True to the spirit of journalistic inquiry, your correspondent can attest that seawater has not degraded the taste of the bananas, with the only threats to health posed by skin slippage and by eating too many of them.

Definitely peel it first.

I mean, that was slightly fictional, although that’s the maybe the joke. And set a sesquicentury ago.

As far as I can tell most synagogues aren’t that cool, though. The ones remotely nearby to me give Zionist vibes.

It’s a shame, I was planning to reconnect with my heritage right before Oct. 7.

Absolutely fascinating, thanks for sharing!

Dying naturally tends to be an excruciatingly painful and slow process.

eating, drinking water, moving out of the way of danger, etc.

Not eating and drinking is a definite thing.

Good argument

Thanks!

What gave the voters then the opportunity to make better decisions for themselves?

The voting. If it’s anything like Canada, there have been socialist fringe candidates all along, it’s just that there hasn’t been much interest.

You could say people have been railroaded into not supporting socialism, but they don’t. No amount of extra democracy will change that.

Having been involved in campaign treasury myself, you absolutely can run a campaign on a shoestring budget. A good campaign costs a bit more, but at the end of the day it all comes from small dollar donations, and if you’re getting a meaningful amount of votes you should get some of those as well.

People tend to blame the government if their services aren’t working or the economy preforms poorly, working class solidarity be damned. That’s why it’s tempting to shut strikes down even if you endorse the basic concept in theory.

Obviously there are regional differences, e.g. US vs Canada vs EU. I think the tendencies are the same but the degree is different at any point in time.

I will point out that in Canada, there’s not much money in politics. We don’t have a Citizens United equivalent. Pretty sure European countries are more like us, although each one has a distinct system.

It’s an essay format, not a deductive argument so the thesis is stated, then it’s given support. Not saying you should be convinced, just explaining why it seems like this.

Alright, I guess I’ve delivered as much rebuttal as is appropriate, then.

It’s also a light year away from an exhaustive analysis. I can’t do that here and now. It takes books to do this.

You know, too much length on each analysis itself actually reduces strength, in my experience. If one’s idea is that complicated, they need to put it in a modular, structured form (so not prose), or are guaranteed to have made logical errors somewhere inside.

Democracy was pushed by the bourgeoisie.

Sure, because it weakened the aristocracy over top of them, not because it was a better way to keep the proles down. Marx, who you probably respect, held that, and it has strong support from modern scholarship as well.

A king may care about his subjects, the rich barely care about the poor.

So, again, that’s not real history. Now most people of a given high class start in a slightly lower class and get lucky, while monarchs are raised in a system of open extreme violence and either knew they were an almighty heir from the start, or were willing to kill and betray friends and family to usurp power. A look through history books will confirm they tend to be more brutal than guys like Paul Fireman (who’s boring enough you’ve never heard of him) or Amancio Ortega (who you also probably haven’t despite being number 9), on average.

I doubt it was driven by competition, since the USSR was never close to lifestyle parity, and the US was never at any real risk of pro-communist unrest. You can’t really make the policies of the period (good or bad) have nothing to do with American voters.

See, that just seems like “it’s ideology, but also billionaires are there”. European businesses don’t want tariffs, but there’s still European tariffs. The simplest explanation would just be that it wasn’t their call.

It feels like you’re starting with your conclusion and then building a story about it to end at whichever facts are appropriate for the instance. It’d be more convincing if you could put it in a form agnostic of where and when it’s being applied. Like, when do billionaires want tariffs, and when don’t they? Then, does it actually predict policy decision?

Yeah, there’s estimates going both ways for conditions of ordinary people in the European Medieval period. There’s probably more than one truth - it was non-uniform and lasted a millennium. It was also a pretty poor region after the collapse of Rome, so even the rich could only be so rich. Stone age hunter-gatherers would have a pretty much perfect Gini for the same reason.

For richer premodern regions like the India and China estimates are much higher (here’s a really recent analysis on some of them). Ditto for societies before the Medieval period, although usually they just go off of house sizes for that and the results can be so high they seem impossible. It’s also worth mentioning Gini has some problems for this kind of thing - the paper I link emphasises other metrics more as a result.

Looking at modern dictatorships, Russia is said to have most of the world’s billionaires, and their official 2021 value is up at 0.880. Unofficially it’s probably worse. Other dictatorships report lower values, but anyone connected to the third world knows they’re bullshit and the elites own absolutely everything. The US is also an outlier; Canada is 0.726, Iceland is down at 0.649.

There was only more inequality after the renaissance. Much of that time was democratic.

No? The first modern thing that people will even claim as democracy is the US at the the end of the 18th century, and it was very rich, male and whites-only. Before that you had the age of absolutism, and before that you had various republics like Florence or classical Athens, but imagine voting bodies at least as exclusive as the early US and pretty unstable, with periods of effective dictatorship. Ordinary male citizens gradually got rights over the 19th century, and the first unrestricted, universal suffrage appeared in New Zealand in 1893.

TBF inequality kept increasing in the democratic US, but then it went down in the postwar era, which is unprecedented in history. Being equal before the law doesn’t mean equal in practice, but it’s just kind of common sense that it would be closer.

For one thing, inequality is still way lower than it was before democracy.

Wouldn’t the US working in ever deeper cooperation with both China and the EU be better for business? Billionaires move pretty easily between all three anyway.

By all appearances they’ve never fully committed with China because of the ideological gap, and are cutting out the EU now do to new, emerging ideological differences.

Taking in Africans is political poison right now in Europe, and outsourcing local industries has never been super popular even if it makes sense.

I’m sure it will happen, Africa will develop and start taking on lots of low-end manufacturing and similar, and Europe will probably be a very good customer. But, in terms of a strategic alliance for the EU, most African nations are not a contender. South Africa maybe.

Ah, okay.

So what’s the threshold for this power to be used? It doesn’t actually say.

Is Heise a reliable source? There’s not much corroborating this ATM, and the legislation title returns nothing - maybe because it’s just a draft.

Edit: Also ironic that they make you sign away your full GDPR rights to view the privacy article without an account.