RmDebArc_5

What about biodegradable plastic?

AFAIK in comparison to the median income the wedding only cost him 18,50$ relatively

The thing with products like games, textbooks, movies etc is that a large part of the cost is the design. This means that while you can make the products cheap and still cover the cost of manufacturing, you won’t make back the money from the design if your margin is very low. This gives manufacturers the ability to sell the same product in differently wealthy markets while still making a profit.

If you now take the product from a cheaper market and sell it to more wealthy consumers at lower price than they usually pay, you aren’t actually selling at a better price because you are providing a better service. You are selling at a better price because you’re breaking the manufacturer’s business model.

This isn’t something that can permanently work because either A: the manufacturer doesn’t get enough money to cover the design, can lead to bankruptcy or change of business model (C), B: through regulations this is prohibited or C: The manufacturer raises the price in the regions your buying from, breaking your business model and screwing over the people who can no longer afford it there.

Of course this depends on the scale you’re acting in, but in theory preventing you from doing so would bring more equality between richer and poorer nations

Nintendo is selling them for cheaper in Southeast Asia because people there have less money. They could sell them for less in the US as well, but people are able to afford the prices there so capitalism dictates that the price is higher. What Amazon and the retailers are doing undercuts this strategy, which in theory means that Nintendo should raise their prices in Southeast Asia to make their business model work, making the games inaccessible to consumers living there. In classic liberalism this is the logical way things should be, in neoliberalism the state should intervene.

The problem with capitalism in a representative democracy is that is almost impossible to maintain a perfectly sized government. If the government asks for too many taxes (on an extreme level) etc the market doesn’t function anymore. The “free market” needs some level of class difference to make profit attractive and keep people committed to their jobs. Because of these differences class conflict is created and through privately owned newspapers, corruption and short term economic gains regulation’s get liberalized. This results in wealth accumulation, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. This then leads to the social and economic conditions that allow for the rise of the populist right.

As a European I can currently see this happening in all countries to which I pay attention (namely Germany, Netherlands and Britain).

Can someone share some insight with us non Americans, how close are you to a civil war? Between the LA protests and this it seems very imminent

o7

I have made good experiences with GPT4ALL

AFAIK per EU law the collected data has to stay in data centers in the EU, ChatGPT and Gemini at least pretend to conform while Deepseek explicitly states that the data is stored in Chinese data centers.

According to Meta it runs on their private servers

Regarding the edit: you should probably add that to your first comment as you probably meant the starter of this thread and not me

Using the political compass wasn’t ideal to get my point across (I know it’s flawed, just didn’t know how to say it better). Basically what I meant is that on a scale from social democracy to anarcho-communism socialism+democracy would be something of a middle ground if that makes sense.

Regarding state socialism/capitalism: I know there is a distinction and my insertion wasn’t very nuanced, that’s why I formulated it as possibility.

Anyway thanks for the nice discussion, it’s always to have a discussion that is based on arguments and not insults

The way you describe it makes sense to me. The main problem in Germany was probably not directly going to socialism after WW1, especially since Germany somewhat was expected to directly go there from monarchy (I believe this prediction was made in the communist manifesto? Not sure). Even though it doesn’t fit my ideals, Weimar may have been more stable if an authoritarian socialist government was installed, as a lot of people were anti democratic.

Sorry if my statements seemed in bad faith, but I find it hard discussing Marxist-Leninist politics on Lemmy, as those defending those parties/states are a lot of times Lemmygrad style stalinists.

I asked about rule 3 as I and most people I personally know use the democratic socialism definition in that capitalism is inherently incompatible with democracy, and that one should thus strive for a socialist society using any means possible (including a revolution). This society would then be organized via a representative democracy.

What you described is what I would describe as social democracy and nothing else, however after looking it up a bit these terms are defined so broadly that there is significant overlap between definitions. I fear this is a major problem with these kind of terms as everyone has their own definitions of them/uses them differently creating confusion.

I think socialism is inherently a related idea to democracy (one could argue socialism without some form of democracy or decentralized government isn’t socialism but state capitalism) and together they are the “conservative” variant of anarcho communism.