KillingTimeItself

put a sign on your door next year, and report back on how well it works lol.

I see you did it this year, but doing it again next year should also increase the amount of visitors. We do a little science.

well only for part of the world that knew what was happening, the rest just kinda, existed.

that’s like relating halloween costumes to BDSM gear. Or like i said, sports jerseys.

That was literally the point lmao.

You brought up porn

yes. for an irrelevant reason

that’s why I responded about porn in public.

fursuits are not porn, public indecency is not porn, and fursuits are not public indecency.

How eat with suit on?

take off the head.

Why not just not wear the suit in public?

they don’t? Like most of the time? Whenever you see a furry in public chances are, there’s a fur con, if not, they’re probably not causing problems.

At least the gimp while being similarly inappropriate in public despite your protests can unzip the mouth, that just seems like added difficulty to me.

you have to be trolling

nah not even depression, just sad enough that we stopped working for a few years, and the eventually decided we should probably start working again lmao.

See, so that’s like, I dunno if that’s so much a problem. First off, rationality is sort of just a method that you’re using to affect some type of process, in this case, economic efficiency Under which it probably also wouldn’t make sense to, say, just throw old people off of big towers or whatever type of thing.

thats the thing though, economically this is rational. If you’re arguing for some sort of ethical rationality, that would be irrelevant to socialism. Granted rationality of resource usage could also apply to capitalism, it’s just redundant, because the market already operates that way.

People would probably overthrow your system, you’d deal with a high level of instability, and being unable to track people’s ages effectively

i guess birth certificates aren’t real? The government is already perfectly capable of tracking who is alive and who is dead, we already deal with it for voting lol. It wouldn’t be hard to do it in any other context. People might forge documents i guess. But you don’t need to forcibly through people off a tower or gas them or anything either, you could just abolish social security for example.

anyway, this is all entirely relevant since my point was that the definition of rationality is entirely arbitrary and probably not applicable to a large scale society/economy to begin with. Again this is just sort of a fundamental rule under capitalism.

You don’t have a universal definition of good, because you’re always just making short term moves to maximize the profit of your company. Moral miasma, zombification.

yeah, in terms of work, but work isn’t the only thing you do, you have leisure as well. Capitalism is specifically designed to regulate goods and services in an economy at scale, very very efficiently, and it does that very very well. Once you get outside of that is where you get into things like social security and government assistance, as well as publicly owned things. The trick here is to focus on having a reasonable work life balance, as well as good working conditions, this allows for effective leisure under a capitalist economy.

Getting even more off topic, I think in general though my main counterargument is just that like. Any risk we take by defining a “good”, right, a good to work towards, I think that’s a good risk to take.

that may be the case, but my fundamental problem is that i don’t see how socialism is relevant here, you can do this in any society. Through socialist legislation if you really wanted, or just public services more broadly.

This is getting to my whole point about “socialism just turns into capitalism/communism if you go far enough” because eventually you’ve just reorganized capitalism, and put it into a box labelled socialism, or communism. Depends on the flavor.

in capitalism, we define freedom as the ability to own capital, own property, spend money on what you want to spend it on, and work to death in a soul-sucking 9-5 flipping calorically and nutritionally deficient burgers for a bunch of other people who have worked to death in a soul-sucking 9-5 doing equally insane things.

so actually, no. In capitalism we do not define freedom, capitalism is strictly adherent to monetary mechanisms. This idea of freedom and liberty comes from the US federal government, as well as it’s subsequent state governments. These are two unrelated concepts.

We define no “good” in capitalism, we just leave that shit up to the market, and the market already reaches a decision, which is that every little corporation should just replicate authoritarianism in their little shithole section of the economy.

yes, it’s not the job of capitalism to define this, it’s the job of the government, and it’s constituents to decide what is best. Again things like social security, the ACA. ETC…

big shocker when their personal definition of “good” is fucked up, short sighted

i don’t necessarily disagree with you here, again there are things like regulations for this purpose. Anti trust laws exist to break these things up, there are numerous laws surrounding the rights of workers to protect against this sort of ruthless competition. Arguably there should probably be more, learning from standard oil would be a great start.

But take the ICE, for example. I fucking hate the ICE. Mostly because it has enabled mass market automobiles to become a thing, which has impacted our transportation infrastructure in a very adverse set of ways, with an adverse set of incentives.

technically this isn’t accurate, it’s the automobile and it’s creation that led to suburbs, and roads, and the highway system, ICE engines were initially just created as a way to turn a burnable substance (gas/diesel) into power without having to use steam, which is rather inconvenient in some cases. And it did work, however eventually people figured out you could use them in place of horses, and then people eventually figured out that, hey cars are pretty cool, but then big auto realized, wait, we need a market to buy these things. So in turn it ended up incentivizing and creating a car centric culture, which was arguably boosted by the US government enabling it through legislation and what not.

and to be clear, white flight was more market subversion than anything, not that racism wasn’t involved, but the markets stood to make lots of money by engaging in it. so it did. This isn’t necessarily a problem with capitalism, more so a societal problem.

fill the air with leaded and mostly unregulated particulate emissions, and we’re like a century into that as a system now

leaded gas was banned a long time ago, so not quite, but i understand that this is hyperbole lol.

you’re still spreading out cities much more than they need to be which massively increases the necessary power consumption by decreasing the r-values of homes by increasing the surface area of homes and increasing the surface area of a home in which a singular person is going to live and increasing the volume of air inside the home per person which is necessary to be heated, and then we have relay stations so we need to spend more money to pump more electricity and water a longer distance and so on and so forth.

well that’s the thing though, it was marketable, and it worked. It’s less marketable now, and people are pushing for mid density housing, zoning reform, and multi family units, all of these things promote the goals that you mention here. Under capitalism and democracy all we have to do is push for legislation that matches up with these goals, and we’ll get it. And it’s working. It’s not incredibly fast, but nothing is, that’s life. But as a result that means that the economy won’t at the very least completely shut down, which is the benefit.

My concern, personally, is sort of like, I look at the market economy, at capitalism, and the supposed “freedom” it provides people, in the market, to make totally dunderheaded, propagandized decisions, that if you look at them in the abstract, make totally no sense whatsoever.

this is a valid concern but this is also one of the greatest things about capitalism as well. If 75% of the market wants something, it will eventually get that thing. It’s inevitable. In our case, lets say more high density housing, if people (not me) want more high density housing, than they can get it, it just needs to be pushed for. There are certainly legislative problems with it, but cities do exist, and they are real as evidenced by going outside, so to some capacity this must be possible, we know other countries have done similar things, so we can easily point to them as an example of why this legislation would be beneficial, and it’s clearly in our interest in terms of the market, as it incentivizes an entirely new market segment, which creates a lot more money flow.

My primary concern for something like socialism is that we would remove some fundamental level of freedom. Only building high density housing because it’s what the collective hive mind says. If you need an example look at reddit now, although it’s not quite the same, it’s a mess over there. Half the posts on that website are AI, and the other half are just, bad. That’s why we moved to lemmy lmao. Anyway, i personally, do not want to live in high density housing, i don’t want to live in suburbia, i want to live in the middle of the woods far away from everyone. Capitalism and american democracy affords me that option if i so choose. And it also affords you to go live in a city, or to go build mid density housing. That’s one of the beautiful things about it.

And again, market forces are the driver, if mid density housing is just better than suburbia, suburbia will all but die out. Which is probably a good thing, not that it would stop it from being built, but it would be a very small portion of the market at that point. People go where the market allows them, some people go where they want to. Generally the market follows broad trends, and people reciprocate.

Really all I want is for everyone to just have healthcare, everyone to have good regional transit, for our energy infrastructure to make sense, our food infrastructure to make sense,

healthcare is probably going to be an example of government expenditure, if we were to break it out on a state by state basis, we may be able to achieve the best of both worlds. transit is fundamentally harder but i think simply building mid density sprawl would solve it, energy infra is a weird one, but i would argue it already makes sense. Allowing more flexibility in production would help though. Food infra is generally pretty rough, i think we should move towards more farmers market type setups, as well as decentralized farming, allow people to plant gardens for food, maybe even incentivize them to do so, allow them to share that produce with neighbors etc…

1/2 (world limit)

No see again, where porn is acceptable is at someone’s house, not in public. The people on the train do not need to see you watching porn whether you’re cranking it or not, and whether it’s furry porn or not.

nobody is arguing for this? Public obscenity laws exist for a reason.

are you comparing fur suits to literal porn? If so, then i may argue we ban all public display of sports attire because i find it distinctly related to sex.

If you see a furry in a mcdonalds, they’re probably buying food because their hungry lmao. It’s not like it’s some weird BDSM psyop.

Interesting to note about the possible overlap or lack thereof, and possible correlation but not causation, thanks for your insight on that!

that’s what im here for, np

god forbid a chemistry major doesn’t peer review my sociological paper written on the furry community.

TBF a sociologist might, but furscience are likely sociologists anyway so.

The fact that they insist it isn’t sexual, when it clearly is at least for many. It gives me the same “don’t involve me in your kinks” feeling like if I saw a dominatrix and her sub licking her heels in a McDonalds

i think this whole dialogue is just, fucking stupid to be honest. If we want to complain about porn, and NSFW material, we should be banishing the entire fucking human race to death instantly because the porn industry is a massive mover of money.

The fandom with the biggest sex positive scene is literally humanity. Who gives a shit what furries do. They just happen to very sex positive and open about things, as some people do. It’s both hyper sexualized and extremely wholesome. It’s just the duality between those things that confuses people.

Funny example of this, on the image board e621, you aren’t allowed to leave weird sexualized comments. You get banned for that. But you can also post the most heinous NSFW material ever there as well assuming it abides by the rules (which is basically just “drawn furry art”)

It seems to have some overlap with the contingent of online people that like to call themselves wolfkin and stuff, like vulpine.club or whatever that masto instance was. I’m not sure how much overlap, but I have seen some creepy shit posted from the individuals there, and the complete lack of reality those people live in is maybe not bad but it is startling and makes me uncomfortable. Again, I agree with their right to do it, but I blocked the instance, ykwim.

this one is interesting, but from my experience and understanding, otherkins are completely different and irrelevant to furries, i would probably argue that there is an expected negative overlap. TBF there is probably some overlap, but it’s probably similar to overlap between for example, car guys and minecraft players. Rather than like, car guys and professional racers.

its mostly young/minor furs from my understanding.

I don’t know if anybody over the age of 16 unironically holds that position.

For me, I think it’s the sexualizing animals that gets me. I’m not saying furries do anything bad to real animals

if it makes you feel any better, it’s not animals directly, it’s animal attributes. There is a very very specific dividing line between “furry” and “animal”

That means that if you’re in the fandom of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Sonic the Hedgehog, etc. You. Are. A. Furry.

technically, this isn’t exclusively true since most of the time the specific fandom actually supersedes the anthro aspect of it. For example if ur a sonic fandom nerd, you’re a sonic fandom nerd, but you may not have a general interest in anthropomorphic characters more broadly, in which case you wouldn’t be a furry. These things are not directly related.

The more correct definition here would be “a fan of anthropomorphic characters more broadly, specifically those within the furry community, and the furry community itself more broadly” It’s also worth noting that most of the time it’s actually done via self admittance. There are fursuit makers who do not consider themselves to be furries. It’s odd, but it’s how works.

Otherwise we start to define people who drive cars as “car people” and that’s just, wrong.

For example a lot of people have pets, dog/cat whatever, they talk to their pets, that’s literally anthropomorphizing an animal. Or personification, it’s the same shit at the end of the day though. Does that make those people furries? Because they speak to their dog in a language it doesn’t understand? Or apply human concepts to their pets that don’t really exist?

god forbid i trust climate scientists to tell me whether climate change is happening.

listen, it’s true, since the beginning of human history anthropomorphic creatures have existed in the human lore.

Now we just need to find a way to convince future historians that furries were some sort of high class god like figures, and our troll will be complete.

This is one of the most inane threads I’ve ever seen on Lemmy. Nuance is having a fine understanding of a topic, while the line I’m quoting is taking a complicated topic and boiling it down to a truism.

well yeah, i’m reading economic socialism down through the lense of capitalism. Obviously it’s going to be a little bit restrictive, this is lemmy, not a PHD thesis.

to be clear, this is a complete and blatant misrepresentation of what i said.

I literally called it an “approaching zero” problem.

half of it is pretty schizo, but aside from that it’s pretty comprehensive i think.

surprised that you haven’t heard of bland spices, but i guess it’s all relative.

As for deserts, snow is very water based. As is ice. Antarctica is very ice.

So I guess the problem is that socialism and communism are kinda used in two different ways. One way refers to a political program, the other refers to a hypothetical stage of economic development.

yeah, so the way that i see it is that communism is a specific subset of socialism with very clearly defined restrictions, however i think it suffers from a generally similar problem, regarding the lack of specificity at least. Capitalism manages to do away with it on a fundamental basis by simply moving that to the markets itself. I guess to preface this entire comment, i see the lack of market flexibility as a fundamental issue with everything other than capitalism, as it’s a decentralized system that works to fit the market needs.

But “socialism” and “communism” as stages of economic development are moving targets, impossible to pin down because they’re entirely hypothetical and there are only a couple countries that have even tried to achieve them.

This is one of my primary concerns when i see people talking about economic socialism, there is no clearly defined mechanism of operation for it.

Was the Soviet Union communist? Well, it was lead by Communists in the political program sense, but I don’t think anyone would argue that it achieved communism in the economic and social development sense.

it also depends on the period of time as well, you could make the argument that under lenin it was communist/socialist, but under stalin it was more authoritarian/dictatorship. It certainly made strides and advancements from the previous state that russia was in at the time, so there’s something to be said about that, although it’s pretty clear to most people that this was primarily due to industrialization and increasing productivity, which levels off in a goods market eventually.

Modern day China, too, is Communist in the political sense, but even by their own metrics they are still capitalist, and see socialism as a goal they are working towards (if you believe their rhetoric and don’t think it’s all just cynical, which many western socialists do).

i’m not sure how applicable this is, since communism and capitalism are economic systems, the chinese government would be more authoritarian capitalist than anything. And as you said “socialism” as defined is a very broad goal, so it’s really hard to even interpret that statement to begin with.

So while the Chinese Communists have their own definition of practical socialism, western leftists are not in power and all of our ideas remain purely theoretical as a result. Add to this the fact that there is no major leftist political org in western countries for the socialists to rally around and you get more definitions of socialism and communism (the stages of economic development) than you can shake a stick at. This leads to the problem you’re describing, where socialism appears to have no solid meaning at all, because the notion of it is so phantasmal.

yeah i’m just sort of surprised that with the modern age being here and present and what not, that somebody hasn’t tried simulating a few hundred variants of a socialist economy to write a thesis on yet, it shouldn’t be difficult, and i’m sure it would make for an interesting read. It’s definitely an odd problem to have with something so popular among farther left types. Even the far right nazis know what they want to do when they get into government lol.

But I don’t think that you can dismiss socialism or its results as “capitalism, but different,” because the whole thing about socialism is that new power structures create new incentive structures and therefore even if there are some superficial elements of capitalism that remain - like the use of currency - under a socialist regime the outcomes should be more equal, fair, and democratic.

to be clear, i’m not inherently dismissing socialism, i’m just dismissing the particular issue i see present with it. And while the equality aspect is arguably true, i feel like you could just as easily apply socialist policy to a capitalist system and get a similar result, while retaining the very clear operation of capitalism.

There are numerous historical examples of these better alternative outcomes, but of course they’ve all been relentlessly propagandized against in Western countries so that the average person doesn’t realize that there is a better way to run society than the one they were born into.

idk i guess i just feel like we kinda hit the nail on the head with the “decentralized self regulating market economy” idea from the get go. There are problems with it, and notable issues for sure, but that’s why the government exists, to take care of these problems. There are also some interesting ethical implications you get into with either system as well. That’s a whole other discussion though.

I feel like if I told you to go and read a book on socialism, and how it functions, and what some theoretical structures for it would be, that would be kind of useless and repetitive, since you’ve probably gotten that before, it’s a pretty popular response. But I think that would probably be the best solution for your confusion here, any given book you decide to pick up or get recommended on the subject will probably be able to inform you better than some random person’s re-translation of the book.

i probably should, although my specific interest is more in the sociological aspect of things, so while it would be rather informative it’s probably not ultimately what i’m looking for. Although it would solve the obvious problem here lol.

If you have gotten that response before, then I gotta ask, along with everyone else that would’ve gotten that recommendation and then not done so, why you’d still be talking about a topic that you’re not willing to invest like, I dunno, 7-8 total hours in.

i haven’t although that’s mostly because i don’t really talk about socialism, i mostly engage with other political things i find more pressing/interesting. My previous bit explains most of it though.

Random half-baked schmucks from all walks and different schools of socialism and communism are going to present you with a litany of different explanations as to what the system actually entails, that they’re probably half-remembering and then regurgitating from youtube videos, or whatever random collection of academic works they’ve gone in for. That’s obviously not the best way to learn about the system, or really to learn about anything. Means that you’ll get weirdass definitions like:

yeah, which is why i made the point about needing some sort of real proof of concept application that we can work with more completely. Because right now the existing literature base is either, very old, or very academic, and while there’s nothing wrong with academic works, it should probably get some more attention outside of that. If for no other reason than to stop people from making shit up about it lol.

Also just like. I dunno, maybe we don’t need 15 brands of peanut butter at the supermarket which are superficially different but fundamentally the same. Maybe we can get away with just having chunky and just having smooth.

ironically, i’d be willing to bet money those are all owned by one singular company, just sold under different names with slightly different manufacturing between them.

Technically, the reason you have different brands of peanut butter is the same the reason you have things like federated lemmy instances. We could have one centralized lemmy instance, but if one of those peanut butter manufacturers for example, laces all of their production batches with the death chemical for example, you can simply just use a different one. (not that this currently applies)

Maybe the measure of an efficient economic system isn’t that there’s shelves full of a range of insubstantially different products and then also that 30-40% of the food is wasted,

from my knowledge, most of that food waste is farther down the consumption chain. A lot of production waste product is going to be reprocessed and consumed via other means, livestock feed being one example. A large example of food waste currently is stores throwing out perfectly good food rather than simply giving it away or something. Another big problem is food waste at the individual level. A lot of food ends up being wasted by the ultimate consumer of the food itself.

You can’t assume that the decision making choices of people in the market are 100% rational, maybe by assuming that they’re rational we just leave the corporate propaganda apparatus totally unacknowledged, which is exactly where that apparatus likes to be.

this is true, but i think rationality is a potentially dangerous and arbitrary distinction here. If the economy were operating under rationality it would probably stop feeding elderly people as they can’t do any work and don’t provide much in the way of productivity, for example. I think markets need to be balanced somewhere between rationality, and market needs. Capitalism has the very distinct ability when compared to socialism/communism of allowing the market itself to stabilize on what is provided and what gets consumed. An interesting example of this is the internal combustion engine, once built to run on what was ostensibly a waste product from refining oil, is now the primary use case for refining oil. If gas gets too expensive, people will move to other things like EV’s for example, although there’s arguments against this, for example transportation is generally pretty important. I think a market functioning like this under a socialist/communist economic system is either going to be very very difficult to correctly implement, or that it will end up removing a significant degree of personal freedom and liberty from day to day life, which is not something i’m fond of from a conceptual level for multiple reasons.

You can’t assume that there’s no monopolies, which are just going to sit on top of a singular element of the chain, do all the calculations completely internal to themselves, not communicate that with anyone else, and then effectively be a centrally planned authoritarian state for that particular sector of the economy which they and they alone control completely.

yeah, and this is why the US isn’t a free market capitalist state. It’s a relatively free market with restrictions that are supposed to prevent this kind of thing, and have before in the past. For example your previous peanut butter example, that’s why there are literally 15 different brands. If there was only one, it would literally be a monopoly.

Most of all, I think that you can’t assume that the government isn’t totally conscious of all of these flaws, and have decided to ignore them at the behest of corporate donors. The can gets kicked down the street.

this is true, and i think this is the ultimate reason behind that schizo rant i went on in my previous comment. You simply cannot assume something about any given system. A lot of those comments i made might be rather silly, but it’s not like its improbable of happening in a socialist system based on capital either.

capitalism sits in the unique position compared to socialism where it has a self regulated market flow. Any state planned economy is not going to function like this in any significant capacity. And that’s arguably a significant drawback of any system.

what kind of octopus are we talking? How big?

It’s a known fact that as long as their mouth fits through the hole, the rest will follow, but it must be pretty small for it to move through your entire GI tract.

Now the spooky thing is that it’s probably intelligent enough to do it, assuming it doesn’t die somewhere along the way.