“Your comment […] was removed. Reason: Rule 6.”

How is it off-topic to point out that the Hong Kong ‘’‘protesters’‘’ were a gaggle of CIA-backed stooges supported by literal fascist mercenaries from the Empire’s other imperial project?

Removed by mod

Ah, my bad!

No fair! They stole the data we stole!

It’s funny how they look at a setting barely less overtly satirical than Judge Dredd (to the point of having cops in it that are literally outright homages) completely saturated by the quite specific miserable, dystopian vibes of 80s England under Thatcher, and go “yes please!”. And by funny I mean Khorne is going to manifest in reality through the conduit of my brain.

I also hate the way chuds spam out God-Emperor memes for whichever pathetic whiteboy they’re jacking themselves off to at any given moment, when the canonical Emperor was an Anatolian born in 10,000BC with a gestalt soul formed from the shamans of every tribe living on Earth at the time. The ‘Avatar of Humanity’ is not going to be white.

“How can the same thing happen to the same mode of production twice?”

One of my top images of all time. Every detail perfect. The extended hand, Kim’s wtf-face, the guy in the background’s smile.

Wow, flamingos are way bigger than I thought

Wonder who they’re voting for (prolly shrimp)

Thank you, that means a lot to me!

I’ve never really written anything before, so it’s a strange feeling to know someone out there is thinking about something I wrote, even just a snippet!

You’ve actually just inspired me to go back and make one small change I’d been thinking about, so if you take a look at that post again, I hope you’ll enjoy the slightly different ending…

I think it’s cool: a country that grew from nothing into a vast empire

Huh???

It looked to me like America 200 years ago

Fucking what!!!

I wrote papers about China when I was still in primary school

Papers?? I assume he means something like ‘essays’, but from the rest of the interview I can easily imagine this person being arrogant enough to call a three-paragraph writing exercise he did when he was nine a “paper”.

Either way, his understanding clearly has not advanced since then. I’ve never seen someone (who wasn’t a paid propagandist) be so wrong, so succinctly about a country, especially one they supposedly lived in. This guy is a fucking idiot.

This image should explain (my understanding of) the difference between surplus value and profit.

Surplus value is the value of commodities produced beyond the equivalent value of commodities needed to produce a day of labor.

You can imagine a worker who could somehow teleport between jobs, spending exactly long enough in a bread factory to make their daily ration of bread, exactly long enough at a treatment plant to make their day’s water, exactly long enough at a clothes factory to make up the “fraction” of wear and tear on their clothing for the day, exactly long enough at a power plant to produce their day’s usage of electricity, etc…

If you add up all the time required to produce each of the commodites they need each day, then you would find the labor time required to produce one day of labor - the value of a day of labor. The special characteristic of labor as a commodity is that it produces value, so that while it takes X amount of value to produce a day of labor, that day of labor then produces X+Y amount of value. The extra value produced, Y, is called the surplus value.

Appropriation of surplus value is the basis of capitalism, but not all the surplus value is necessarily appropriated - unless the worker is being paid an absolute minimum subsistence wage (which, to be sure, the capitalists are always trying to force them down to) then they will also receive some portion of their own surplus value that they were forced to produce.

But the bulk of the surplus value goes to the capitalist, in the form of the commodities produced over the course of the day of labor. This is then eaten away at by the cost of materials and upkeep for the tools and machinery (as required for production of the specific commodity turned out by their factory) and then modulated by the price of their specific commodity on the market as affected by supply and demand at the particular moment they try to sell it, to result in the final profit.

The capitalists are thus always trying to increase both their share of the surplus value relative to the worker’s share, and the absolute amount of surplus value produced in a working day - the simplest tools of which are, respectively, paying workers less per hour, and making them work more hours - in order to make an even greater quantity of products while paying out the same wages.

However, this runs into the problem that for every additional unit of commodity produced without paying additional wages, there is relatively less money in the market to buy your additional commodity. So, with every capitalist trying to create more surplus value without paying more wages, the laws of supply and demand force the price of their commodities to decrease further and further until they can no longer sell them for a profit. This creates a crisis of overproduction, which happened continuously in every industrial economy throughout the 19th century (until the discovery that you can send your gunboats around the world to force open new markets and dispose of your excess commodities there) and even after that point recurred frequently, as described for instance in The Grapes of Wrath.

So the crucial thing to take away is, while surplus value is necessary for profit, at any time there is a particular ratio between them that the capitalists are working their absolute hardest to erode away until the whole system is so choked with commodities that they can no longer be sold - until the surplus value can no longer be realized as profit. The obvious inefficiency of this is why communist nations can post such staggering rates of industrial growth, as manufactured goods can be allocated based on rational central planning instead of having to go through the anarchy of the market - surplus value can be realized directly into increased industrial production.

It’s free protest votes

It’s specific, but Quorn nuggets are objectively superior to chicken nuggets in every way.

Better taste, better texture, no gristle, easier to cook all the way through, zero (well okay, much less) chance of food poisoning.

Even if you’re not a vegetarian there’s simply no reason to eat chicken nuggets any more, they’re fully obsolete.

Absent Without Organic Life

They get allocated, reallocated, and spent elsewhere

They don’t. You can’t tag a particular dollar and follow it as it leaves a taxpayer’s account, goes into a government account, gets allocated to a particular item of the budget, and then gets spent out again into the economy. When a dollar is taxed, it basically goes into a furnace and disappears. Separately, dollars are conjured out of thin air and sent into the economy by the government.

The amount of dollars thrown in the furnace in a given day are tallied, sure. But that doesn’t determine the amount of dollars the government can create, it only informs it. The government can create as many dollars as it likes at will.

Millennium Challenge, the perfect dessert after a good meal

I hope someday an unexpected outburst from the barrel of a gun causes him to lose his life.

An illegal, unprovoked, full-scale attack!