no it cannot because it’s referring to whether or not the workers control them and on a societal scale this is a binary flip, at some point the workers are more in control than the bourgoeis and at that point it is socialism and at any point before it is not.

Aha, so you do agree that different societies have different levels of control the working class and the bourgeois have over production, but you seem to be convinced that if that “relative level of proletarian control” is below 50% the state is fully capitalist, and otherwise the state is fully socialist. Why do you think this definition is more useful than the obvious one, where we retain the scale instead of quantizing it into a binary form?

This question is especially relevant because you also seem to believe that there currently aren’t any “socialist” countries by your definition. By retaining the spectrum, we can then make analytical statements like “China is more socialist than the US”.

if it can only breed with other cats it is a cat and not a dog.

By this overly simplistic definition you would count infertile cats as non-cats. You also completely lose the ability to differentiate the species of non-sexually reproducing organisms. And then there’s the insanity that is hybridization. Is a mule a horse or a donkey? They can occasionally reproduce with either of them.

In reality, differentiating species is a complicated science/art that involves not only the reproductive isolation, but also morphology and genetics, all with the goals of coming up with the most useful definitions for species.

In just the same way with economic systems. Workers in different societies and periods exercise different levels of control (which is the underlying meaning of ownership) on the means of production, it’s not black and white. It can be very roughly defined as (workers control over the state) * (relative assets of state-controlled enterprises) + (relative assets of co-ops or other directly worker-owned enterprises). There is of course a lot more nuances to be discussed, such as the exact distribution of control between different subclasses of workers, or the social hierarchies arising from the structures of control. Once again, the goal is to come up with a useful scale to gauge how much a certain country or region has progressed on its way to socialism, to learn from their mistakes and to build better governance systems in the future.

a society is either 100% capitalist or 100% socialist.

This is never true in the real world, everything is a spectrum. Do you think there are any countries that are 100% socialist in today’s world? If yes, then I highly doubt it’s actually true, if not, I suppose you count them as “100% capitalist”, which is a classic “no true Scotsman” fallacy.

And then the spectrum not linear either, on the “capitalist” side of the spectrum you have capitalism and fascism, each controlling the working class through different means; and on the “socialist” side you have various ways in which the working class controls (or is told that they control) the means of production; everything from anarchism to councilism to syndicalism to leninism to maoism to stalinism, and a million varieties in between.

I do agree with your other point, though, universal healthcare is almost entirely unrelated to actual socialism/communism, it just turns out to be a (very beneficial) consequence of redistributing power to the working class.

In the very old times, you’d have to be born rich already to do maths. You then don’t concern yourself with making a living, because your slaves do it for you.

In the old times, you’d live the same as artists: find a rich dude (exceptionally rarely: dudess) to pay your bills, and in exchange name shit you discover/invent after them.

Last few decades you also have a couple new options. You can work (teach) at a university for pennies, and typically have a second job/side hustle so that you can actually survive. And/or you can write books/make a YT channel, and if you’re lucky and get popular enough, that can be your living then, but it’s probably not going to be anything too advanced. And/or, if your area of expertise has some vaguely practical application (e.g. cryptography or statistics), you can actually find a job that pays you to do theoretical research in that area in hopes of finding practical application, but you’d have to be pretty lucky to get that.

Sadly, when it comes down to it, children are necessary for society to function long-term. They are the people who will be financing and effecting your retirement, at least in a well-functioning society. I think it is a sound policy to make sure people can have children without any unnecessary suffering, there’s plenty of necessary suffering in there already.

F**k. You added two, so I have to censor one to keep the world balanced.

The dumbest lemmy take I’ve read all day (that said, the day has just begun)

The far left wants to exterminate a particular social group - capitalists - because it directly oppresses everyone else through violence. Depending on the flavor of leftism, extermination of a group doesn’t have to mean extermination of individuals, rather it means the destruction of their social status and the redistribution of their wealth. The goal is self-defence: stop the literal physical violence through which the masses are kept poor & under control, through violence if necessary.

The far right wants to exterminate all minorities. And in that case it does literally mean hanging black people in trees and setting gay couples on fire, physical destruction of marginalized individuals. The goal is to install an religious ethnostate.

If you can’t tell the two apart, you’re literally the centrist from the OP meme

I don’t expect altruism. Stability and economic prosperity in the region is directly beneficial and profitable to China.

Nah, I mean that what they’re doing isn’t charity (so they are doing the debt trap thing on some level), but it’s also beneficial for populations of countries they invest in, and better than whatever the fuck IMF is doing.

China has successfully withstood US intervention and helped communist forces prevail in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. They also semi-successfully done the same in Korea.

They don’t fear US intervention much, it’s just that their modern foreign policy is targeted at stability and growth rather than immediate overthrow of capitalism.

¿Por qué no los dos? I mean, if you actually go to developing nations you will see that they are investing into real infrastructure that improves the standards of living dramatically. They also intend to turn some profit off of it. Most likely much of that profit will be in building long-term economic relations, rather than immediate rent-seeking, which can be viewed as “trapping nations in debt traps”, or as “investing into development”. They also invest with much fewer strings attached compared to IMF, which is a win comparatively speaking.

China nowadays has the capacity to steamroll half of asia into compliance. Instead they build alliances/partnerships via trade, even with countries they ideologically disagree with. It’s less profitable in the short-term but leads to more predictable and stable development in the region, which benefits them massively in the long-term. Crazy what you can do if you think in centuries and not quarters.

If you look at the history of military operations performed by both countries, it’s pretty clear which one is the more likely option

Just another “free thinker” who believes that a country of 1 billion people, with good quality cheap/free higher education, a massive industrial base, and half a trillion dollars of annual R&D expenditure, can’t develop tech on their own. I’m sure there’s industrial/military espionage going on, but China is also pulling ahead in many research areas independently. With the way US is treating its scientists, I fully expect in a few years China will be the dominant STEM player in the world, US being second or third after europe.

Would they benefit from having an F-35 to take apart? Yes. Will they build a relatively competitive fighter jet without any F-35 tech for half the price or less? Also yes.

Pigs are very smart (smarter than dogs), empathetic to their kind, and above all are extremely adorable and cute. So it is also ok to call someone a piggy as a mutually consensual term of endearment.

Last time I ordered a phone battery from AliExpress I got it in two weeks flat. If you notice that your battery doesn’t hold as long, just order a new one, it will arrive long before the device dies. There are also local battery shops, but they will charge a premium for quicker delivery.

Doing this once every few years is nothing compared to the hassle of taking out the batteries every time you want to charge them.

You might be replying to a wrong comment? But I think the OC meant that a bigger lithium battery can provide more power for rumble and such, compared to AAs.

I think that’s mostly because you can’t really keep them plugged in while playing, so if you forget to charge them before a play session it would get very annoying. I would still prefer if they used an explicitly rechargeable standard with a way to charge the batteries while in the controller.

If it’s a popular enough device, Chinese manufacturers will copy its batteries for more than the lifetime of the device itself. I’ve bought new replacement batteries for a smartphone over 10 years old off AliExpress.

If it’s not, chances are it’s using one of the standard pouch battery sizes (yes, that’s very much a thing, AA is not the only battery standard out there), which Chinese manufacturers will keep producing for longer than the lifetime of the universe.

The only tangible benefit is the hot-swap feature.

To me it doesn’t outweigh all the drawbacks of having to charge batteries separately. For a controller like this it literally doesn’t matter, you can just plug it in to charge while playing.

For VR controllers it does matter more, but I would still much prefer some explicitly rechargeable standard size, e.g. 14650, with a way for the controller to also be a charger still.

Yeah, if memory serves, the last ThinkPad to do it was the T480, which was in 2018. Maybe there’s some P-series that did it afterwards too. Hello from an X2100!