No, really in large groups too.

What I believe is rather, the larger the group, the larger the chance to get a few psychopaths in there that screw things up for everyone. Psychopathy seems to have a prevailance of about 1% in the population.

Btw the division of labour economy we all live in is cooperative in nature. You might compete for roles in it, but the output of those roles is supposed to be cooperative. Anyone who’s work is purely competitive is basically someone who works solely to take something away from someone else. So essentially something akin to a thief in function. I consider that part of the problem, not part of the normal economy.

I assume we don’t teach kids to be like psychopaths because the system only can take so many. Unlike the image portrayed by propaganda, even American life doesn’t mainly consist of competition but of cooperation. There is competition to fill roles in companies, sure. But once in a role one is supposed to cooperate with coworkers to achieve something larger than one could alone.

If everybody saw life through the lens of a psychopath I guess we’d end up in a Mad Max scenario. Modern cooperative society with a system of division of labour simply wouldn’t work anymore.

On the other hand I’m morbidly curious how a society entirely without psychopaths would look like. Would it be better or worse? (And for wich definitions of “better” and “worse”). I can only assume we’d have much less wars, for one.

Sounds like they are reinventing the main frame, just without the specialized hardware support that guarantees things go right.

Any IT device can be hacked. We completely missed the evolutionary opportunity to have secure computing devices. Proper object capability machines would make it possible. But quick and dirty and by Friday is what we got instead.

Huh, good job they developed that Rusty Dagger for Ukraine then. They could make a few for themselves on the quick.

China still calls itself “communist with Chinese characteristics”. They quite openly gave their companies strategic goals to fulfill.

It’s all the dorks thinking they could get hold of that sweet big market if only they gave China enough concessions. And there it was always only for the bosses and owners to participate in the windfall, employees be damned. They were played big time and payed themselves huge bonuses in the mean time for selling us out.

Next Monday.

If he’s found dead or unable to conduct his duties before then, there’s a special election. If that happens after Monday, the seat simply remains vacant until it’s filled January with whomever wins the regular election.

They have for decades been at the forefront of cheating. Which party broke into their competitors offices to so on them? Who used the supreme court to stop the count in Florida, where after the fact it was found out they would have (narrowly) lost?

They know they cheat at every opportunity, so they need to accuse their opponents of the same.

More combined starches: Verheiratete (German, something like “married couple”) are a kind of dumplings with potatoes together with diced fried bacon. One of my favourite local foods.

Only if there are ways out for the elite. Otherwise it’s essentially a defense co-op. If you believe your country is using the military in ethically wrong ways, that’s the actual problem, not the draft.

It’s not really even about being a democracy. Kommunist East Germany with one of the most formidable surveillance systems to date could only look on when a sufficient percentage of the population rose peacefully.

I believe the plumbing for democratic change is still present in the US. What is preventing change is people doom scrolling on the couch.

Will there be a special song? “Ding, dong, the witch is dead” is Thatcher.

I don’t think it’s about being able to afford it. More that he is loath to let her have anything at all on principle.

It’s not about whether a perpetrator deserves to live or not. It’s about the reliabilty of the judicial system. Even this day and age with our amazing forensic techniques, plenty of innocent people get indicted instead of the actual perpetrators. It’s also about what executing people does to the society doing the executions. Honestly, I have tons of sympathy for the character Hawkeye in Avengers: Endgame. However in this sort of fiction the people getting killed absolutely certainly are guilty. Reality is much more messy than that.

Fun Fact: what killed communism wasn’t so much the ownership details of the means of production, but the fact they chose a command economy instead of a market economy. Planned or command economies are bad, no matter what political ideology is behind it.

Also: the way politicians world wide allowed conentration of mega corporations, I feel we are moving much more towards a command economy than a market economy.

We were talking office suites, but yeah. Though M$ should have lost the OS wars not against Linux (it was a fledgling OS at the time) but other systems of the day. OS/2 was what a stable win3 should have been. VMS or true64 Unix could do stuff windows server could only dream of. Yet marketing to pointy haired bosses brought MS the victory, not technical merit.

I upvoted you, because by and large you are right. As a caveat though some people do have office tied up in automated workflows with scripting in some sort of M$-language. In that case you would have technical hurdles in addition to lobbying and politics.

The only thing that makes them “left” is that they are not Republicans and that Republicans keep calling them left.

Establishment Democrats would fit right in with traditional conservative parties throughout Europe. I could easily see Merkel of the CDU being to the left of quite a number of Establishment Democrats.

Exactly! There is even still defense equipment in use that uses 8inch floppies!

Not entirely. Generally of course people who don’t have to labour for their livelyhood have more time and certainly more resources to influence politics. But the common man can make their voices heard. -you can vote in your interest. Be careful of what people try to tell you is your interest -you can protest (peacefully); look at France to see a populace that doesn’t just take what is rammed down their throats -you can talk to your neighbours; discuss things with them to form an opinion; don’t just parrot talking points from media; -you can write to representatives; sure, your letter won’t be directly shown to then, unlike one from Koch or someone. But it won’t go unnoticed. -participate at town halls -participate in polls A fortune 500 CEO or Forbes billionaire list name will have more impact than a single voice from the population. But organised, the voices of the population make a difference. Organisation, participation and critical engagement can make a difference.