Terrarium [none/use name]

Yes it was a fully top-down, banker-spun narrative for how people buying subprime mortgages were “irresponsible” rather than the massively overleveraged financialization of all mortgages, including subprime, by the banks. This is part of a common PR scheme by which to blame “consumers” and the poor for problems created by capitalism and the ruling class. Same as telling people to budget better when they complain about real wages dropping. Or to “sell-improve” if you’ve been unemployed and are desperate for a job. It’s not that the fed created a baseline level of unemployment in the intetests of capital, it’s that you didn’t divine what skills were most in demand by capital 10 years before they needed them.

Even more dramatically, the banks went to the proles and advertised that even with bad credit and small down payment you could get a mortgage, escaping your landlord and becoming housing secure.

Just gotta invent the Molotov EMP

In the conditions under which the CPC made these strides, the proletariat was much smaller than the peasantry. In a typical ML analysis, the peasantry have a petty bourgeois character, or at least adopt one once liberated from landlordism. This was one of the major contributions of Mao’s CPC to ML theory, as even though the Russian Empire had a similar dynamic, it was not as extreme as China’s. In the Russian Empire there had been kulakizatiom to bring more petty bourgeois character to the peasantry and undermine the landlords and the proletariat was larger. China’s peasantry were often basically serfs.

This is my way of saying that basically every country has enough proletarians (we can quibble about how prole they are) compared to past successful revolutions. What we run up against most often is a deeply propagandized population that has some kind of dependency on financialization and imperialism, where they receive an “artificial” experience of their class, one heightened. Not quite a labor aristocracy, but one that fails to develop even vulgar class consciousness because nothing happens to them that can break through the propaganda. The coworkers that think unions are for lazy people and just accept being fired as a fact of life, as they are sure they will be employed again very soon, their industry being “in demand”, propped up by imperialist technological advantage or some insurance grift. The PMC technocrat that, at least for now, believes they can help solve climate change for a decent wage if they just make good enough slide decks (while their paycheck actually comes from capitalist lobbyists). The retail worker that knows conditions are bad but just puts up with it because they are young and believe the line that it’s a practice job and they’ll naturally get paid enough and work in better conditions as they get older. It’s a house of cards that I believe will crumble when imperialism becomes less effective and the expectations of these workers get a reality check. This is what I would usually call proletarianizatiom of the imperial core, it’s making proles prevented from developing class consciousness by confidence in future rewards become instead more directly aware of the bum deal, of seeing their exploitation.

The real challenge is how we will contend against modern fashy reactions to what will probably be seriously incompetent first stabs at real mass left organizing.

Anyways sorry for the really long response. I hope it is relevant and makes sense.

IDF can’t even pull off the “MIA” grift.

It will mean that sellers might as well warehouse stateside. So either there will be a bunch of new warehousing middlemen nonsense or it will all get folded into Amazon and Walmart with faster shipping times and 20-50% highet prices.

Many Chinese brands already do this. If you buy directly from their website they will ship it to you from a warehouse in Colorado or something and the price is better than Amazon.

I would also not be surprised if they just start using loopholes or trying to hide packages’ value.

Montana is just 3 drunk drivers and a cow in a trenchcoat.

The Biden admin actually got the ball rolling on removing the de minimis exception. It just synced up with Trump’s tariff threats.

Trotskyist paper writers in shambles

ONE.

THOUSAND.

PERCENT.

How much do you want to bet that 100% was chosen because it sounds like “maximum possibke tariff” even though that isn’t what it means?

Do a gun safety training with the most competent and least right wing group you can. A good course should require several hours (6-8) of training including theory, practice with fake guns, practice with unloaded real guns, and instruction and practice with real guns and rounds. This is approximately the minimum standard for the NRA so think about what this implies about the places trying to run two hour one-and-done places.

Gun safety training is a good baseline because you do not actually need to own a gun to do it but you will be prepared if you later encounter a firearm or find yourself wanting to buy one soon.

If you do buy a gun, train with it regularly at a range.

Remember when Biden just plain didn’t nominate someone to the board?

It’s not as accurate as mass spec but generally speaking you can test for geavy metals using certain acid and color changing indicators (in known concentrations) over a range of sample dilutions. Even better if you have a reference sample of a known concentration of the target, like manganese. Sometimes the chemical is not itself an acid but nevertheless reacts with the target.

For example, high concentrations of manganese will react with peeiodate to make a red/broan color. You can buy a set of 100 pouches of periodate for manganese testing on Amazon for $50.

Without being greedy

Costco has the same profit onus of every other company it just uses a slightly different business model that means ita members get huge volumes of cheap goods. That’s it.

It is exactly as greedy as every company anykne dislikes. The oppression of capitalism is not due to greed, it is a built-in mechanism that profits must be maximized. It doea not matter how highly a business owner or customers think of the company, it is a profit-generating machine or it will die.

Example: Costco always fights the union.