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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • This is a frequently repeated quote attributed to the late philosopher Frederic Jameson. On its own it doesn’t make a statement about capitalism or what it is at all. (If you wanna know more about Jamesons theories on capitalism you can read about it in his books)

    Jameson’s quote points out that people often find it easier to picture possible world ending doomsday scenarios, than it is for them to think about alternatives to living in a capitalist world to try to avoid these scenarios.

    You can even test this yourself. Ask people around you about the end of the world and many will point out reasons like climate change, demographic changes, environmental destruction, pollution, world wars, nuclear holocaust, asteroid impacts (shoutout Roland Emmerich) and even biblical scenarios for an eventual end of the world as we know it.

    But ask them if they think there are other ways to live, so that those things won’t happen and usually they will just give you a version of “this is just how things are, not much you can do about it” or “the world could be different, but there is no use in trying because this is just a utopia and I have no idea how to change stuff anyways”.

    Regarding your last paragraph, imo this kinda misses the point. I agree, there are structures that exist parallel to what most people consider capitalism, but ask people in most self described capitalist societies and they will not really recognise the difference and will just see it as an anomaly at best.

    Btw, this is all coming from a European perspective, albeit heavily informed by US media.


  • Another company Microsoft bought and ran into the ground. It’s really incredible that they managed to get their lunch stolen. They had basically a monopoly and gave it away without a fight. Hell, the colloquialism for video calling someone was to Skype them for a looong time.

    And then one small competitor comes along and it’s all gone. How can you fuck up this bad? Especially during the pandemic, in which they should have further entrenched their monopoly…






  • Augustiner@lemmy.worldtoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.worldEssential movies to watch
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    1 year ago

    No particular order. Also, it’s movies that I watched, can’t speak on essentials that I might be missing.

    It’s kinda hard to make a list on essentials tho. Because your personal taste obviously plays a big role. I can’t see my girlfriend liking more than 10 percent of those…

    Schindlers List

    Gladiator

    No country for old men

    The grand Budapest hotel

    The big Lebowski

    The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers

    Star Wars (the original one)

    Requiem for a dream

    Pulp fiction

    The good, the bad, the ugly

    The lives of others

    La vita é Bella

    All quiet on the western front (1930 version)

    The dark knight

    The Truman Show

    2001: Space odyssey

    Alien

    7 Samurai

    Princess Mononoke

    Trainspotting

    Boyz N the Hood

    Scarface

    The Godfather 1, 2

    The Matrix

    Clockwork Orange

    Shutter Island

    Kingdom of Heaven

    Wolf of Wall Street

    Honorable mentions because they are popular and everybody always talks about them (I like a lot of them, too. Don’t consider them essentials tho):

    Inception

    Interstellar

    Fight Club

    Harry Potter

    Return of the King

    Rest of Star Wars (whatever people consider the good ones at last)

    Saving Private Ryan

    Django Unchained

    Toy Story

    The Lion King


  • How about chess? I know you said you are not really looking for video games, but chess to me is a bit different to video games.

    I had a similar problem to you a few years ago during Covid. I was very stressed and lonely and didn’t know what to do with myself. I am completely addicted to chess now. To the point that I play for like 4-8h a night sometimes. Time passes fast, especially in the shorter time modes. And if you are looking for a more low stakes, slow paced distraction you can play correspondents chess and think about your next move for 1.5 hours.

    Bonus: if i tell people that i play chess for over an hour every day, they often assume i am a genius, even tho I’m just a 800 elo idiot like most people


  • People in western nations are largely responsible for climate change. Someone in Syria won’t be flying around the world and buying new clothes all the time. But they will be the ones hit the hardest by climate change, so they will likely either die or become refugees trying to come to the west.

    Also, a lot of our western wealth is based on exploitation of those nations (through colonialism and later capitalism or wars). So if westerners don’t want people from poor countries to come to the west they should help those nations to recover from that exploitation.

    Furthermore we need to do these things, because a bigger influx of desperate migrants will steer western politics even further to the right. That’s never a great thing and will lead to more inequality and possibly the collapse of our democratic systems.

    Finally to your point about migrants being more criminal. That is largely a result of worse economic circumstances and outlooks. Improve their chances and watch the crime rate drop.



  • Augustiner@lemmy.worldOPtopics@lemmy.world[OC] Watch out little bird
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    1 year ago

    The jackdaw I’m really sure about, they are everywhere in that region.

    Thanks for the praise and advice, it’s really appreciated! This image is basically not cropped at all, so unfortunately there is not too much I can do to try and reposition the rock (at least if I understand correctly what you mean). I also agree, tho focus is unfortunately a little off, but that’s just how things go sometimes.








  • I agree with your comment, even though I have no idea on the technical aspects. What I can weigh in on is crisis management, especially communication.

    Boeing needs to take control of the situation and actively start communicating and showing that they are working on fixing this thing. In Situational Crisis Communication Theory you would call it a rebuild approach. They tried denial, they tried downplaying, it’s not working. A rebuild strategy is usually the last resort, as things like admitting your mistakes and fixing them are rarely appreciated by investors. Furthermore it’s usually a huuuuge cost to do a recall on that scale. But Boeing need to show the public that they are actively working on improving the situation, to earn back their trust. So at least a partial recall should be considered.

    You’re exactly right in your first paragraph about the news. The media and the public are very sensitive to Boeing quality issues rn. These articles won’t stop unless one of three things happen. Either Boeing gets their shit together and gets some effective crisis management and communication done, the company goes bust, or something else turns up in the news that replaces this. The third option will be the most likely, but it will also haunt them forever. It’s like that exploding galaxy note 7 situation. There were articles about that for every new generation of Galaxy Note, despite Samsung doing pretty well in investigating the issues. And while the following Note phones sold alright, the whole thing was a significant loss of trust and money for Samsung and enabled competitors like Huawai to catch up.


  • What they do right is having a duopoly with Airbus, and great military contracts. So investors know that even if things are shit rn, they will probably get better again.

    Furthermore, while I agree that Boeing probably will not go bankrupt over this, the valuation sometimes is not a great indicator of what’s going on internally. Enron was worth over 60 billion. Half a year later they were at zero. Now I’m not saying Boeing is nearly that bad, but they are in some trouble for sure.



  • I know the general gist of the situation. Low spending from domestic households, real estate bubble, excessive government influence on industry scaring investors, and so on.

    My problem with it is that most headlines make it sound like it’s all gonna implode spectacularly tomorrow. The articles themselves usually paint a more reasonable picture of the situation, similar to your comment. But most people don’t read the article. They just see the headline over and over.