What is more classic than Brits braising meats in old milk?

In fact, it generally wasn’t even a category. It was just a behavior

You might want to back down off that position. Just take a look at jim crow laws

You’re arguing in bad faith.

The peaceful solution is the decline of the West. Politics is rational. The CPC has no need to invade provided that foreign militaries do not build up threats on the province. As the West declines, trade with them becomes less attractive to Taiwan and trade with the mainland becomes more attractive. As the mainland develops, Taiwan will have the same calculus to do as Europe is doing now - align with the US or align with China.

It’s really just a matter of time before Taiwan fully embraces 1 country 2 systems. Materially, the only component they don’t currently embrace is the national defense component. They don’t purport to be a country independent of China, and the legal reality is that they are literally part of China. So they essentially are 1 country 2 systems with th exception of national defense being provided for by the US instead the CPC.

Peaceful reunification will happen when the US withdraws. Violence will happen if the US escalates. That’s the entirety of the spread of possibilities. The choice of peace lies entirely in the hands of the US.

Now you’re getting it. Security guarantees from the US are NOT relevant. They are rhetorical cover for military build up inline with the US policy of encirclement. Absent from all of these discussions is that the US has military forces stationed 4 miles off the mainland because Taiwan is not one island it’s a province comprising an island chain. The CPC’s consistent policy is peaceful reunification via waiting except in the case where a foreign military uses the province to threaten the mainland.

Th exception proves the rule. Department of Transportation is not market driven. DPW is not market driven. Army Corps of Engineers is not market driven.

And that’s just the US. Look to the rest of the world and you’ll see that most infrastructure is not market driven at all.

And even in the cases where they have to get private companies to do the build, the INFRASTRUCTURE ITSELF is not market driven, it’s the talent that’s market driven.

You said universities share information in “marketplaces of ideas”.

No. But describing all social interactions as “markets” is distinctly Neoliberal brain rot

You don’t know what markets are then.

Modern infrastructure in China is built by state owned enterprises and funded by the government. There is no price competition, and the infrastructure is not sold on the market as a commodity.

“Marketplaces of ideas and information” would be places where you could purchase ideas and information and resell them. That’s what a market is. That’s not how universities work. They receive planned funding for planned research and conduct planned research according to forward looking plans without regard to the market demand for specific outcomes. Granted IP markets are layered on top of that but they pervert the entire process and they are totally artificial.

The idea that you think markets are not actual systems but just a descriptive word used to refer to various non-marker realities indicates that you are fully saturated with neoliberalism and need a detox.

Please don’t confuse actual technological progress with markets. These two things have always been separate. The intellectual property market is a huge problem for innovation, and it exists because the market system is inherently a resource control system, and resource control systems that are driven by market dynamics are huge problems for innovation.

Modern infrastructure is not built by markets. University materials research is not driven by markets.

Exciting modernization in entertainment and sports

Whut?

Gin gets its name from juniper, an evergreen tree. We make turpentine from evergreen resin. So it’s no wonder most people have trouble finding their foothold in gin - you’re trying to find good tasting alcohol and people are giving you a drinkable paint thinner.

I hated gin, too, until I did a tasting. The first thing I noticed - varying degrees of pine resin flavor. That was a big revelation.

But then you study gin and realize that gin is made with a bunch of botanicals, and the flavors come from whatever they steep in it.

Some botanicals are so strong that the producer basically has to label it “X Gin”. So like lavender gin is really distinctive and most people when using a gin will not expect it to be a lavender gin.

But then you have other botanicals that clearly shape the flavor but don’t rise to the level of something like lavendar. Cucumber is one of those. Henricks is famous for using cucumber and their gin is generally one of the first gins that people find they like.

Other than that, it’s a lot of subtlety. I prefer Plymouth. Some people prefer Beefeater. I also like Aviation.

The other thing to note is that some companies don’t do traditional botanicals anymore but create a sort of syrup or additive mixture in a chemical factory. It makes the alcohol uniform and consistent, but it can also just be gross and harsh.

Rich people are needed in our current system to provide money for literally everything because rich people, as a group, control and hoard all of the money.

If they didn’t hoard all of the money, they a) wouldn’t be rich and b) wouldn’t be needed to provide jobs because there’d be more money in circulation.

Money doesn’t come from rich people. They are not money trees. Money comes from the government and rich people hoard it so that the only way you and I can get money is to work for them.

The reason the money matters at all is because people need food, water, shelter, clothing, medicine, and community to live, but all of those things currently require money. Hoarding the money is equivalent to hoarding the necessities of life. We are destroying oversupply of food while people go hungry. We have vacancies everywhere while people go homeless. The whole system is organized by rich people against everyone else to prevent everyone else from having life’s necessities so that they are all compelled to work jobs for the money that the rich people hoarded explicitly so that you would starve if you don’t work for them.

Rich people aren’t necessary in all societies, just the ones organized like ours.

Law makers take bribes as low as $20k

According to the US, the role of government is to protect to the opulent minority from the will of the majority. That’s what Madison argued for in the Federalist Papers. He then proceeded to explain how to achieve this with the design of the Senate. And then that is exactly how the Senate got designed in the Constitution.

The role of government, essentially forever regardless of system and country, is to manage power struggles between all the possible sources of power.

Read closer. It said:

1. we don’t know the exact forms and processes that communism will take as it is still being built for the first time in modern history

2. during the transitionary phase, which all communist countries you can name are in and no country has ever yet left, incentives are and have been compensation, meaning money

3. prior incentives from pre-capitalist societies were violence

4. prior incentives from primitive societies were the outcomes of doing the work

5. without monetary incentives, primitive societies didn’t wonder about how to incentivize people to do dangerous work, they wondered about how to make dangerous work less dangerous

6. as communism is built from capitalism, compensation is the incentive that will be used while society also works on reducing the need for incentives by making dangerous work less dangerous or making it obsolete. A communist society will be one where the incentives are sufficient to get the work done without being so large that they create an upper class of rich people

I also should have said the richest among us under capitalism have never done dangerous work and that people who do dangerous work rarely become capital owners anyway.

There is nothing contradictory about people who do more difficult or dangerous getting special privileges (which is all extra salary really amounts to) under communism.

There have been no countries in the modern era that have made it communism. Every communist party in the world is starting from a non-communist starting point in a world where capitalism is the dominant economic form that shapes everything. Name any Communist country and you’ll be naming a country led by a Communist Party.

A communist party is a party that sets building communism as their goal. The process of building communism has never been complicated to date. The first experiment large scale experiment in building communism was the USSR. They lasted 70 years. Many would say they stopped even attempting to build communism around year 50 or 60.

Let me try this in levels.

Under the transitionary phase between capitalism and communism, there is still currency/money, there is still commodity production, there are still bank accounts. So, for things that society needs but people are less willing to do, the answer is compensation. Communist parties have always compensated people for their work, yes even prison laborers, and for the work that fewer people are qualified for or fewer people desire to do, that compensation is increased to create incentives.

When we reduce that to simplest form, the answer is incentives.

Before capitalism, people still did dangerous work and difficult work. They didn’t do it because they were going to get rich (they weren’t), they did it because the consequences of not doing it were dire.

In feudal and slave societies, this is because the consequences, though they might be social, we’re personalized by the oppression of lords and masters. Lords and masters beat, tortured, and killed serfs and slaves to incentivize them to do dangerous and difficult work.

But what about before those societies? In nomadic societies, people did difficult and dangerous work because it needed to be done, and the consequences of not doing it were felt by the whole tribe. People weren’t tortured and murdered to incentivize them to do the dangerous work. In fact, people got together and tried to make the dangerous work less dangerous.

Reducing those things down, we have an understanding of what “difficult and dangerous” work really is - socially necessary work.

We also understand how it can be solved without incentives - socially collaborative problem solving.

So, in the transition between capitalism and communism, we still incentives and we still have socially necessary work.

Why do we call it a transitionary period? What is happening to make a transition?

The transitionary period is the period of socially collaborative problem solving to make socially necessary work both less voluminous and less risky (which includes risk of harm as well as risk of understaffing and risk of knowledge loss). No one knows that communism looks like yet. But we know what contemporary experiments exist in reducing the volume and risk of socially necessary labor - robotics, real-time systems monitoring and feedback, new construction methods, new chemical science, new applications of physics, etc.

As it turns out, sedentary lifestyles are also incredibly dangerous and lead to huge numbers of premature deaths. So it’s unlikely that communism will go the same direction capitalism seems to go, with huge numbers of people sitting in office chairs or couches for decades on end.

Would you say that a government is functional if a highly biased university research project spanning 15 years determined that over 95% of people approved of their government, even accounting for the possible ways these numbers could be skewed?

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/07/long-term-survey-reveals-chinese-government-satisfaction/

Jitsi