The correct answer.

True

This guy is obviously borderline famous in Thailand, but all anyone here wants to know about is his money situation! Ahh Americans.

regime

It’s still a government, give it a couple of years.

OP won the thread before the first response arrived.

I share your concern and considered posting the same question.

I would be avoiding eye contact and playing deaf

Bubbles and echo chambers.

Yes, I know. I am one of those people. But still, I would think that in the Venn diagram of “people who go up to complete strangers and ask if they can sing” and “introverts”, there is extremely little crossover. If only because introverts tend towards misanthropy.

if you disagree, you can always just go to another instance

This seems to unintentionally reveal something less positive that the internet has done to our culture.

I like to walk around town and ask if people want to hear me sing

I’m pretty introverted

Something’s off.

And renters miss the fact that by intelligently investing the renter’s dividend that I mentioned they could usually make a much better return than they can by investing it in their own property. Almost none of them even save that money, let alone invest it smartly.

Anyway, this debate is boring. Everyone is entrenched in their views.

Not necessarily. All else being equal, mortgage + property charges + maintenance + tax is usually quite a bit more than rent. The issue is that renters almost never save or invest that delta, they spend it.

How does this post not contravene rule #6? Is there any moderation here?

Seriously, it’s a good subject but there must be a more appropriate place for it.

It’s no secret that Ukraine has conscription. It’s a country at war, because it’s been invaded. Wartime rules therefore apply. This is also why the election has been postponed, automatically and legally. Historically, many countries have had peacetime conscription. The UK had it until the 1960s for example, France’s until the late 90s.

Ukraine had conscription for only for 27-and-overs until recently. It’s now 25.

None of this is a secret.

Since you seem especially concerned about the moral aspects of the subject, and cite scandalous abuses, the question is unavoidable: why you are so exercised by Ukraine’s situation when Russia is far, far, far worse on all these fronts? It’s odd.

You seem to have a whole theory about what’s up, and it might even be right. Or it might not.

That’s the point. Nothing here is falsifiable, and the subject is inflammatory, so your chances of getting a productive discussion are approximately zero.

Move on.

Fair enough.

But are you aware that Russia has had multiple rounds of conscription? Have you considered that many of Russia’s hundreds of thousands of dead soldiers were not properly supplied and used cynically as cannon fodder against Ukraine - and were therefore obviously deployed under some form of duress? Either as prison convicts or press-ganged off the street in poor remote parts of the Russian Federation that nobody in Moscow cares about.

Let’s remind ourselves who is the aggressor here, and who is responsible for the vast majority of the war crimes in this pointless war that could end tomorrow if Russia called off its illegal invasion.

In the light of all this, why would you be so concerned about the aggressed party’s respect for legal procedures as defined under its own laws?

Perhaps it’s time you stopped watching this “bunch of videos” and starting getting your information from reputable sources instead.

This is the correct response to OP’s transparently bad-faith question.

Yes, your theory about inevitable concentration sounds like the one of Thomas Piketty (where war functions to keep a lid on the concentration). Depressingly persuasive.

Personally, I find it hard to deny that capitalism has been incredibly successful at creating abundance seemingly out of nothing. I see it as a kind of ingenious roaring engine, the whole question is how to somehow harness it to good purposes.

And also how to turn it off. Because I think that the abundance does not come magically out of nowhere, as orthodox economics seem to believe. It comes from plundering the natural world, which the human economy sits on top of.

Another word is needed, this one has become so baggy as to be meaningless. Capitalism has been the predominant economic system across the world for centuries now. It just means the accumulation of surpluses, creating economic growth. It has no a-priori about what’s done with the surpluses.

Just as the Gilded Age and today’s broligarchy were underpinned by capitalism, so were New Deal liberalism and 1980s Swedish social democracy. That last model in particular created a society that was freer and fairer (so: less evil) than any ostensibly “non-capitalist” one has ever been.