Wait...you're trolling me to suggest I shouldn't engage with trolls?

Time should be fluent - floating. It would be calibrated each day, where 6:00AM would be the exact moment the sun goes up at that location.

It means something about them. It doesn't mean anything about shared reality.

Did you click on that guy's profile though? I checked a few prior comments. Just another old embittered illogical angry raving far right wing lunatic. Sometimes I just want them to demonstrate that further in public. I'm relatively conservative, but people on both political sides (though it's actually way more complicated than that) just go too far and lose all critical thinking skills, including any capability to debate rationally. It's like their anger at everyone not exactly like them is their complete identity and it prevents them from any valid analysis. The potential loss of that identity is what truly horrifies them.

I try to give people chances, the benefit of the doubt. I am truly interested in all perspectives backed by logic or evidence. Heck, I'd even consider alien visits in our timeline, if anyone had any evidence or even sound logical arguments. A lack of response to my comment or a nonsensical response would make my point for me.

Can you unpack this a bit and provide any links? It seems coded and a bit conspiratorial otherwise, but I'm interested in the perspectives and evidence.

I hope you used AI for that.

You assumed right, I didn't realize this was OSS software!

Hard to know unless you know what slop they replaced it with. I've never encountered good software written by a government agency. Usually takes a tenfold increase in budget before enough money gets to the contractor to actually build the thing barely functional.

So it couldn't possibly be that the new software simply isn't as good and lacks important or useful features?

I've worked on government software projects before and my guess is extremely little of the allocated funds got to the contractors actually writing the software. They probably hired one or two programmers maximum and gave them a two or three months to throw something together, then said 'oh no, the money ran out' and shat out what they had percolating.

$10M spent, maybe $50K in the developers' paychecks.

> You claim that these delusional ideas

> and murderous regimes

> that not only NEVER worked

> but brought more deaths than Hitler

> were all somehow for all the people.

I made no such claim. I am always confused when people online start arguing with the voices in their heads, which generally seem to represent Fox News. I saw this:

>> Communism has never been for the people.

I wrote this:

> This statement is hard to validate.

The rest of your post seems to be a rant along similar invalid lines about my thoughts and writings.

> no allegedly well-meaning totalitarian leader actually does any good

Agreed, but communist/socialist and totalitarian are not necessarily the same thing. USA under Trump is becoming more totalitarian. Again, individual leadership characteristics may be as important or more than the underlying system itself.

> You people still dont get it

Sorry, what category of people does this reference? Why would you include me in that group?

> you excuse the same m.o. and the same trail of blood from your great commies that you are ideologically bi-curious about.

This statement seems particularly deranged, or at least completely unfounded on anything that I wrote.

> US left wing like you disgust me so.

Why would you assume that I am left wing?

> you cannot even see the massmurdering regimes for what they are

Is that so? You think I haven’t studied these things? I’ve been to the killing fields in Cambodia. I’ve also spent a lot of time in Laos, where the USA bombed Buddhist rice farmers – admittedly some of whom were defending their country and their regional brothers – for ten years and left approximately 90,000,000 pieces of unexploded ordinance behind – and still won’t clean it up. So capitalism isn’t always exactly saintly either.

> you blindly condemn one and curiously philosophize about the others.

Where did I do this? You really need to see people as individuals, not some stereotype on steroids.

> you have no true, firm, foundational values.

This is an unfounded and extreme logical jump in a post that was already quite illogical.

> you believe in no real, actual truths.

I am always open to new information.

What are you so afraid and/or angry about? What do you have to lose from people’s opinions online? Did these pixels actually stab you in the eye or something? Where was the violation of righteousness?

Did a single word of that sound clever while you were writing it?

> there is no such thing as a "capitalist" ideology

> the premise of PROUT is invalid

Both debatable and at least the first seems to revolve around semantics, though I don't really care to debate these issues. Capitalism is certainly a system, not an ideology, though it has proponents that have ideologies. There certainly seem to be specific ideologies behind at least some aspects of *finance* capitalism.

If your argument is that PROUT is invalid if capitalism is not an ideology, then I don't follow your logic. I am not advocating PROUT, but was hoping for a more detailed analysis by someone that understands economic systems better than I do.

We seem to agree on most things. Basically, people in general are corrupt and self-centered; the few exceptions don’t seem to make it into government, and getting there would probably change them in negative ways anyway. I absolutely detest big government. I consider myself to be financially conservative and (at least until about 2020) socially progressive. I can’t seem to reconcile these things and neither party represents me; they both seem to represent corporate interests and their campaign contributors, most of which don’t seem to be average people.

I think that associating socialism with social programs was intentional to label social programs with the evils of communism. Oversimplifications like this basically function as thought stopping red meat for certain audiences, reducing analysis as well as critical thinking and hence individual understanding. This lack of distinction has almost certainly tripped me up over the years, as I support social programs but not a completely planned economy. So maybe I’m not really a socialist, though I do support some level of social programs, even though it seems that my taxes (and really, the share of the national debt associated with me and my descendants) would go directly to others, some of whom certainly don’t seem deserving.

While I have benefited and continue to benefit significantly from capital gains tax rates relative to income tax rates, I think inequity in taxation is much more significant than just this differential. It’s just too easy to maintain wealth after acquiring or even inheriting wealth, especially considering things like IRAs and 529s (which can convert to IRAs, and for which one can change beneficiaries). People that are able to save for education and retirement seem to have significant tax advantages over those that cannot. Additionally, people that have stock portfolios and other assets can borrow against those instead of selling, which allows them to access cash without reaping investment income for which they would otherwise have to pay taxes. There’s a reason that Trump hasn’t release his tax returns.

> controlling the means of production means controlling labor

I feel some vague potential argument around something like blended capitalism/socialism that would allocate resources other than labor more equitably and with less short-term thinking as well as environmental and other damages than finance capital requires, and also about how people that don’t labor can reap incredible gains from stock market and other investments, but I don’t have the time or energy to think about it too much at the moment. From my perspective, we’re basically stuck with the systems that we have and should address some of the inequities, which include inheritance (there are certainly some families that continue to benefit from the legacies of slavery, and basically all Americans benefit from taking land from Native Americans). I know, we can’t go back and change anything, and I’m not in favor of reparations. I see many problems with no apparent reasonable solutions.

I absolutely agree that finance capital could benefit social programs including social security. I cannot understand why the democrats would have been against this. But I also fear that pumping so much money into things like the stock market creates risk by overvaluing assets, which can lead to bubbles and collapses (the cyclical economy). It can also increase housing costs by funneling money into things like REITs and corporate structures that buy real estate to rent out. The money has to go somewhere, even if the underlying assets don’t actually support such high valuations. I am not an expert on any of this; the global and national economic systems are both incredibly complex, many aspects are incomprehensible to me, and there seem to be few certainties. I am somewhat against speculation by the wealthy class, though I also benefit from this.

I really wish that the USA would focus more on profit from sustainable natural resource extraction as well as creating products and services of actual value, not crap like marketing, financial shenanigans such as crypto, and especially things like facebook.

Why would it stop at 4 if we can't make it stop at 8, before the economic calamity of population collapse sets in? And how do a handful of children pay for the benefits of a massive glut of old people?

Or is this another problem sticking your head in the sand will solve, like the national debt and climate change?