• 0 Posts
  • 46 Comments
Joined 4 months ago
cake
Cake day: December 4th, 2025

help-circle






  • And in german (if I’m not mistaken) fox is Der Fuchs, so boy.

    That’s true, but the grammatical gender has nothing to do with the actual gender. Nobody thinks that all foxes are male, just as nobody thinks that spoons (Der Löffel) are male or the street (Die Straße) are female. They can also change depending on the amount. For example, if we take “Haus”, which means house, we say “Das Haus” if we talk about a single house, which would be neutral, but refer to multiple houses as “Die Häuser”, which would be female. Nobody thinks houses become female once there’s more than one tho.


  • Most people default to “this entity is male” without more context.

    I have a hard time wrapping my head about this sentence. I don’t think about the gender of any entity without more context because it’s usually completely irrelevant.

    Male is default, female is marked

    So, I didn’t grow up in an english speaking country, but if I hear “the baker” I don’t automatically assume it’s a man. I think it’s a person that bakes bread and pastry. The same with “the mechanic”, “the engineer”, etc. It’s all - by default - a person.

    Now, if we were to talk german, there is actually a difference. As “the baker”, for example, we have “Bäcker” as Male and “Bäckerin” as female. The reason why male is “the default” in german is because it’s shorter. That’s it. If you say “Der Bäcker”, it’s as you’d say “the baker” in english, you don’t automatically make an assumption about the gender. If you say “Die Bäckerin”, you are referring to a female baker specifically.

    So I can see this as making the non-genderedness explicit.

    Honestly this feels more like a mockery of people that identify as non-binary than raising any kind of awareness. Kinda has some “apache combat helicopter” vibes.




  • Who says they’d need to?

    We have a certain standard of living right now that is only maintainable that way.

    we’d make glass and clay pots

    Lmao.

    people doing jobs for the money rather than less demand would actually mean people wouldn’t even need a set job

    Yes, that’s how it generally works. Most jobs that people expect this day and age are not enjoyable. Are there people who’d do them for free? Yes. But not on a massive scale that works for billions of people.

    Look at Animals, how many animals work 2 jobs just to survive?

    What a retarded comparison. Probably the dumbest you could’ve made.

    Animals don’t have access to a network of goods and services, they also don’t live in a city with potentially millions of inhabitants. They don’t have internet, they don’t have healthcare, they don’t have delivery drivers, plumbing, electricity or anything that we know from modern life.

    With all due respect, but if that’s something you strife for, get a few like minded people and go live on an island. Nobody is stopping you. There, you can live free of capitalism. But you also get all the disadvantages.

    It amazes me how blinded people are to a capitalist free world

    We had a capitalist free world and it was shit for the most part. People got killed, life expectancy was shit, education was shit, extreme poverty was rampant (WAY more than under capitalism) winters were harsh and potentially deadly - bro you talk like someone who just played 12 hours of manor lords straight. You’re romanticizing a time that was just straightup terrible for the most part.

    And if you’re referring to “modern” communist countries, ask yourself why so many people try to flee from them and why the regimes actually made leaving the country illegal.

    Look at the waste now, the plastic pollution and then look carefully at the next package you buy and ask “does this really need ‘this’ much packaging? Do i care if this new spade I bought with all its shiny cardboard and plastic protection, arrived with a scratch? But even if the TV was scratched, does it really matter so long as it worked as intended?

    You’re talking about minor individual problems. How is this a problem that warrants the abolishment of capitalism? Why not just fix that singular problem? You’re finding a small scratch in the wallpaper of your house and instead of just fixing it, you want to tear down the entire house? All of these things are SOCIETAL problems that are not the fault of capitalism. Capitalism doesn’t force companies to use excessive plastic for each cucumber - it’s the customers expectation that makes companies do that.



  • Normal functioning societies don’t leave heaps of stinking trash around, they neatly pack it and the work of a janitor of garbage collector becomes actually enjoyable if you’re a proper type of personality.

    Idk if you noticed, but people won’t behave that way if there is no repercussion for it.

    He has his basic needs met by other means, and his “job” pays him enough to get a cup of coffee before the shift and a sandwich after. He just enjoys making the world cleaner, chatting with locals, taking care of stray cats, and having a routine.

    Great but some people have more aspirations than your uncle. And I think they should have the chance to achieve that. And I don’t think having a clean neighborhood should depend on having that uncle that enjoys cleaning for free.

    All of that is possible in a world that doesn’t revolves around squeesing every bit of labour from people

    I mean, yes, absolutely possible without squeezing every bit of labor from people. However, it’s not possible in a world without money or capital. The wide-spread introduction of capitalism has DRASTICALLY reduced the amount of people living in extreme poverty. According to https://ourworldindata.org/end-progress-extreme-poverty , from 1990 - 2025, the amount of people living in extreme poverty dropped by 65%, from 2.3 billion to 800 million. If we extend the timeframe a bit further, according to https://ourworldindata.org/history-of-poverty-data-appendix , the number went from 53.9% in extreme poverty to only 5.5% - meaning an almost 90% reduction in extreme poverty. Unless I’m too stupid to do math now.

    (ourworldindata.org is a non-profit funded by the university of oxford btw - so it’s fairly reliable)

    Now, capitalism isn’t the sole reason why poverty dropped - it’s the combination with effective social policies. Capitalism creates wealth, taxes take a part of that wealth and spread it to the rest of society. That’s how it should work and that is also by far the best system we could ever have in place. The fact that america fails on that tax-part is not the fault of capitalism. It’s a failure of the government.

    It’s insane that so many people tried to flee from communist terror regimes, and still try to flee to this day out of North Korea or Cuba, yet people on lemmy will just close their eyes and pretend that communism is the perfect system and every system that fails is just because of the “CIA”.


  • Like, half of the jobs you listed would be automated out pretty quick in a world without money

    If that was even remotely possible, companies would’ve done that already. Every company tries to cut staff as much as possible.

    pretty sure we can find something better for batteries than lithium

    Which requires research, which requires investment. Much of the research we currently have only exists exactly because of funding, and a lot of funding is done by companies, not by the government.

    What’s left can be rotated out or done by lottery, and those doing the undesirable labor get to have more luxury items or whatever

    I like the “whatever”. Let’s just introduce a shitty system that also potentially forces people to do work they don’t want to do and they get like a bar of soap or “whatever” as reward…

    It’s not hard to imagine, people have been doing it for centuries.

    I don’t know where these people lived that you talk about, but it certainly wasn’t on this planet. Such a system has never existed.


  • If you removed money, imagine where we’d all be as a society

    Probably dead or living in the stone age.

    There’s so many jobs that people don’t enjoy but are necessary. Nobody enjoys working in the middle of an australian desert at 40°C in a lithium mine. Nobody enjoys collecting your stinking trash. Nobody enjoys sitting in a store for 8 hours a day, scanning groceries. Nobody enjoys working in a warehouse for 8 hours.

    However, these jobs and many more are vital for todays society.

    toxicity of money, wars and hate!

    You make it sound like wealth and wars are an invention of capitalism and not something that has existed basically since the dawn of time, even as something you can observe in primates, albeit on a much smaller scale.




  • You don’t think it’s bad enough to be upset over, but you agree it’s worse than it could be

    Everything is worse than it can be. We’re not living in a utopia.

    I’m not expecting a business to always act in the best interest of everyone, that is just completely unreasonable. I’m not even expecting individual people to always act in the best interest of anyone but themselves. And the fact that valve has never raised prices, never worsened their service (intentionally), never tried to shaft anyone and in general never attempted to extort their presumed “monopoly” is the highest bar I can reasonably set for any entity, business or personal.

    Maybe you heard of don vultaggio, the founder and CEO of arizona ice tea. That company has never increased their prices since 1992. In an interview, when asked why, he said: “We’re successful, we’re debt free, we own everything. Why have people who are having a hard time paying their rent pay more for their drink?”. You’re not going to see me ask him to lower the price because clearly he “can afford it” (his net worth is 6 billion. Not quite gabe, but still extraordinarily wealthy). The man is doing everything I can reasonably expect from a business: Not squeeze consumers, not treat staff shitty and not worsen their product for profit. Valve is doing the same thing, just on a much much larger scale.

    I feel you have completely unreasonable standards when it comes to businesses. Which is your right to have, I’m not gonna sit here and say your standards are wrong. I just think that, in a realistic world view, while your intentions may be good, your expectations are unreasonable. And I also think that is just something we’re fundamentally never going to agree on.



  • I don’t get it. Landlords don’t buy houses. They mostly buy apartment blocks. At least in central europe, where I’m located. It’s usually not lucrative enough to invest money into a house to rent it back out for like 1500€ - 2000€ a month when you can invest the same amount into an apartment block, have 10 apartments and make like 800€/apartment.

    Also, in germany specifically, the problem isn’t landlords. It’s extremely restrictive and confusing building regulations that are extremely hard to fulfill. It also sometimes takes YEARS for buildings to even get approval. Well, and the prices for raw materials are currently through the roof aswell. No idea how it’s in other european countries tho.