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It’s funny how the solutions for the failures of capitalism often end up looking just like socialism
Almost like a society of individuals that only care about themselves won't last long...
About 3% of humans are born psychpaths (roughly: they have no empathy hence only care about themselves).
One would naivelly expect that only caring about yourself would be a winning strategy from a genetics point of view and hence over time the whole of Manking would have become psychopaths as the ones with such a natural advantage were more successful at surviving and reproducing than the others, yet that's not at all the case and only a small fraction of people are born psychopaths.
My personal explanation for that is that psychopathic behaviour is only a genetic advantage if most people around are not that - or, transposed to to economic terms, being a rent-seeker only works if most people are producers and doens't at all work when most people are rent-seekers.
I expect that in our evolutionary past, whenever a tribe/group had too many psychopaths without some kind of mechanism to kick them out or force them into cooperative mode, it eventually collapsed and ended up removed from the genetic pool hence why in millions of years of evolution the supposed superior behaviour of caring only about yourself didn't end up dominating the human genetic pool - the "threading of the needle" for the survival psychopathy as a behavioural trait in the gene pool was a balance between that behaviour expressing itself often enough to reproduce and remain in the gene pool and not so much that there were too many such individuals in a group causing it to collapse.
I have a degree in psych, and regret to inform you that you have no idea what you just rambled on about
You're just making random guesses
Right. First, indeed it's not a scientific theory, just an idea. The bit were I wrote "my personal explanation" and the context being a News community should've been a strong enough hint that it was to be taken as a bit of a ramble and I hoped (apparently wrongly so) it would make it obvious that's "chewing gum for the brain" rather than "nourishment".
Second: unless you're disputing the Biology side of how behavioural traits that provide reproductive advantages result in the spreading of the genes that define those to a whole population (aka Theory of Evolution), or your understanding of Statistics is outside generally accepted Mathematics, the mere presence of that part means its not made up from "random guesses", no matter which random distribution you're thinking of. Ditto for the Economics side of it - i.e. rent-seeking does not create wealth and if the proportion of that kind economic activity exceeds a certain proportion of the whole then actual production won't keep up with natural consumption and natural attritional losses.
Third: Absolutelly, even if the Biology and Economics are not, the Psychology part is mainly coming from ignorance, so if that's wrong then the whole of it is wrong.
What is the bit in there that is that is so deeply insulting to your domain expertise that you felt that in response to this ramble of mine here in the News forum you just had to post a comment were you pointed out your qualifications in Psychology and then proceede to describe the entirety of my post with the mathematically inaccurate expression "random guesses" without actually providing an explanation?
(PS: I'm not asking this to dispute your knowledge on Psychology as I accept I'm pretty ignorant in the domain. I'm mainly curious if it's on the nature-vs-nurture in psychopathy side, if it's on my assumptions of the behaviour of people high in the psychopathy spectrum when it comes to "not caring about others" being "bollocks" - say hyper-simpistic or way off - or if I'm using the wrong terminology)
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It's sad seeing all the idiots excited to go to the proprietary platforms. I feel like they're victims of viral marketing, similar to how red bull operates.
Some things never change with this generation.
Is city ownership socialist though? Are the workers unionized? Do they have the right to decide what is and isn't stocked?
Not necessarily. That would turn it into something more like a public utility than like a for-profit business.
I mean, it's "not socialism" when the fire department or the power utility aren't private, for-profit corporations, but it is if the grocery store is? LOL
Are fire departments for profit?
You do get billed afterwords. At least my dad did when his house burned down 20+ years ago. However his insurance covered the bill.
My in-laws had a housefire a couple of years ago, and they live in the boonies outside of a small farm community.
The volunteer fire department handed them a bill afterwards and told them "give this to your insurance. We only want what your insurance will pay so don't worry about it if they only pay part or don't pay at all"
Its a dystopian racket, but at least its pulling a bit of money from the haves to get it to the have-nots and helps sustain a vital service to the community
That sounds kinda dystopian to me
The stores all closed down due to high crime rate, I don't blame them.
This is true. I don’t know why you’re being downvoted.
I know, the issue is well known. I'm sure I was down voted because the city is primarily black so to mention the fact of it's high crime rate in a discussion that pertains to it is wrongly offensive to them, que sera sera.
A lot of the discussion related to retail theft is heavily racially-motivated and insincere. A short comment without nuance can look indistinguishable from a scary dogwhistle news segment, even if the short comment is accurate
Doesn't look like socialism to me. Buiseness being city-owned isn't enough.
Socialism is ownership by the workers who run the store. What you're describing is a customer cooperative, which is just replacing bosses with "the people"
That's state capitalism, there is an owner class and a worker class, the workers do not have the sole ownership of the shop, nor do they receive the full share of the fruits of their labor.
It's funny, because one of Marx best known works contains a diatribe against people carelessly talking about "full share of the fruits of their labor" and insultingly described the notion as Lasallean (see Critique of the Gotha Programme, chapter 1, where he utterly savages what became the German SPD over this).
He thought it was utter bullshit to talk about that in an organised society, because in practice in a functioning society there are in fact all kinds of necessary deductions and redistribution necessary in order to ensure the needs of everyone is met.
E.g. healthcare, funds for those unable to work, funding of societal needs such as schools etc.
Even that, he describes as constrained by "bourgeois limitation", pointing out that"
"Thus, with an equal performance of labor, and hence an equal in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on. To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal."
The notion of "full share of the fruits of their labor" is not a socialist one at all.
On the contrary, the main socialist slogan used to be "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs," which goes directly counter to the notion of giving everyone the full share of the fruits of their labour.
Fantastic comment
Lemmy has the largest group of socialists I’ve ever seen argue about the definition of socialism.
Tbf, we're working with a stated definition that's translated from 19th century German
Not to mention folks who imagine a definition in vision and spirit but not necessarily to the letter of what Marx described
Shit's gonna get down to exact doctrine real quick even in a room full of socialists all supposedly of the same clade of ideas
"I've never heard of foreign hires before."
This is why I try to avoid using words like socialism and communism. Everyone has their own ideas of what they mean, and most of them aren't exactly wrong because these are broad terms with different sects. So many times a person mentions either word, and then guys like you come out of the woodwork to be like "umm, actually..." Lol.
I prefer to focus on real solutions to real problems (pragmatism.) This is a very pragmatic approach to solving the issue of corporations not meeting standards.
You're right. They should tax 100% of my income and give me a weekly grocery credit!
Oh, and it won't be enough to buy a nice steak more than once a week. Even though I have a very prestigious position at my job, I'm given the same grocery allowance as everyone else
That's one steak a week more than I'm currently eating
If you insist. The solution that sane people are proposing is way better, but if you want we can setup this weird system of punishment for you.
But also you think that amount of steak should be somehow tied to the prestige of a job, so yes, for you specifically.
The stores left because of the crime, not because there isn't a market for them. I'm sure there are tons of people in Chicago who would love shopping at a local grocery store.
It's not sustainable to run a business when your loss to crimes outweighs any potential profits
The crime stories (yep, they made a big buzz and media ran hundreds of stories about that one shoplifter in San Francisco) wildly overstated the actual amount of crime. It's just so interesting that corporate news oversold that story, so much so that a person that didn't know better would think that was a pervasive thing in urban areas and cities are all hellscapes of disorder and flames.
Meanwhile, shareholders rewarded Walgreens' management with a boost to stock prices after they reported they'd be pulling out of 'crime-ridden' areas. They didn't leave because of the crime, they left for the stock bump and told the crime story to make it look less-bad
By definition, if the business venture isn't profitable, then there isn't a market.
REI in downtown Portland pulled out and publicly said it was because of rising crime, but it was really because the employees were trying to unionize.
Yeah. We all know how much Walmart is struggling to make profits.
Invoking crime for this practice is just a tactic to pretend it isn't red lining.
Are they closed because of rampant theft?
As other people have pointed out, big companies target an area and set about establishing a monopoly using $$$
Then they realise “huh. There’s not so much profit here in Assfuck, Montana after all.” And make some lame excuse (theft) to pull out.
Citizens get fucked because : capitalism.
Bonus points if the large business trying to monopolize Assfuck, Montana kills the small businesses that were otherwise sustainable and leaves a gigantic financial burden on Assfuck, Montana's township finances in the process (demanding unsustainable subsidies, changing terms on the township after much money is already spent in the hopes of bringing more money into the town so the township invests more taxpayer dollars into the private business, and of course leaving a giant retail space that no business can afford to sit vacant and create additional costs to demolish and/or mitigate damages as it decays)
There's a large homegoods chain that had locations in both the small town I live in and a neighboring town of which the parent company went bankrupt. The location in my town sat empty for several years because it was too large of a space for any local business to be able to grow into (the local furniture store asked the city to give them the space for free though!) it eventually got filled by one of uHaul's weird abandoned-retail-space projects where its now a storage space and truck rental. The town nearby has yet to fill the space, although the parking lot is sometimes used by the manufactured home factory nextdoor for overflow storage
Wow, that was a considered and interesting contribution. I learned a lot there.
That has essentially never happened, that's just a fraudulent PR campaign
Yes really
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/retailers-talk-a-lot-about-rising-theft-but-a-retail-industry-report-finds-a-key-metric-for-it-hasnt-increased-that-much-b24ee181
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/08/09/claims-about-organized-retail-theft-are-nearly-impossible-to-verify.html
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/12/shoplifting-holiday-theft-panic/621108/
https://www.vice.com/en/article/g5ve49/we-cried-too-much-walgreens-cfo-admits-retail-theft-isnt-the-crisis-it-portrayed
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-12-15/organized-retail-theft-crime-rate
https://news.wttw.com/2023/05/12/retailers-walmart-and-starbucks-are-closing-big-cities-some-cite-crime-changing-habits
Wage theft.