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Cake day: February 24th, 2025

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  • Lol. This comment sent me down a rabbit hole. I still don’t know if it’s logically correct from a non-physicalist POV, but I did come to the conclusion that I lean toward eliminative materialism and illusionism. Now I don’t have to think about consciousness anymore because it’s just a trick our brains play on us (consciousness always seemed poorly defined to me anyways).

    I guess when AI appears to be sufficiently human or animal-like in its cognitive abilities and emotions, I’ll start worrying about its suffering.


  • Global South basically just means underdeveloped/developing nations.

    Capitalism results in the rich, mostly in developed countries, extracting resources for low prices and exploiting desperate workers for low wages in developing countries. The developing countries get little in return. Some of these countries have been able to muster some protectionism to mitigate so much transfer of wealth out if their country (such as China). Developed nations have purposely kept some developing nations destabilised to maximize exploitation.


  • I think the term fits fine. The surpluses go to the owners of the means of production (barring “state capitalism” I suppose). These surpluses are actually the true value of the workers’ labor that the owners take, which is why I think capitalism is immoral, but that’s not really related to my point. The system incentivizes the owners to maximize these surpluses, which means paying the workers as little as possible, and charging customers as much as possible. I.e. the system incentivizes greed.

    Social democracies are absolutely better than unchecked capitalism, but it’s my opinion that they’ll never be able to stop from regressing (they have been, as I understand it). Because of the owners’ place in the hierarchy and outsized wealth and influence, they will always be able to push governments to their benefit, and then it just keeps snowballing as they gain more wealth and influence. Admittedly, very strong unions can counteract this, and were responsible for them becoming social democracies in the first place.