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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 24th, 2024

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  • It’s complicated.

    Unfortunately, the Wikipedia articles I found lack citations, so they probably aren’t a good source. They claim that the ROC (Taiwan) claims all of the mainland.

    This reddit thread refers to the ROC constitution and interprets it as:

    In the Act Governing Relations between the People of the Taiwan area and the Mainland area, the following is stated:

    “Taiwan Area” refers to Taiwan, Penghu, Kinmen, Matsu, and any other area under the effective control of the Government.

    “Mainland Area” refers to the territory of the Republic of China outside the Taiwan Area.

    “People of the Taiwan Area” refers to the people who have household registrations in the Taiwan Area.

    “People of the Mainland Area” refers to the people who have household registrations in the Mainland Area.

    The implication is that wherever this law applies, is what the ROC government considers to be “territory of the ROC outside of the Taiwan Area”. Currently the application of this law overlaps the entirety of the PRC, minus HK and Macau.


    This the fun part. If you look at the ROC constitution, it makes […] mention to Mongolia and Tibet.

    I don’t know how much of this applies beyond the KMT.


  • I think rules, written or otherwise, should have exceptions to account for extreme circumstances like this, but a lot of online people just go ‘No, if you don’t bring your cart back you’re a BAD PERSON no matter what!’.

    To treat any rule as immutable is an idealist junk perspective. Rules, like all ideas, need to be applied to a context, and I personally don’t see the point in codifying every possible exception. Law officials, programmers and others can tell you how Sisyphean that task would be.

    So yes, there are exceptions (obviously!). If you’re putting your cart back and you injure your leg, you don’t have to crawl on your arms just to put it back. But we can still generally say “people should put their cart back after shopping” and it’s clear that we’re generalizing.





  • eureka@aussie.zoneBanned from communitytoPolitical Memes@lemmy.worldDon't be fooled
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    1 month ago

    Sociopaths always win.

    That’s not exactly my point, it’s more that our current political economy penalises pro-social behaviour (a business is more likely to be out-competed and fail if they actually treat their workers and customers well, so it’s an exceptional thing to see) and sociopaths are rewarded for profiting in this system, their gain comes at our exploitation so they’re effectively rewarded for hurting us.

    If we can restructure our political economy so that sociopaths are rewarded by contributing to society, then their own competitiveness and greed is much less of a problem. For lack of another better developed-world example, look at how China keeps their billionaires on a leash[1]. Now obviously there’s plenty of problems in their political system and some would say they their billionaires are still a problem despite them being dominated by the government, but it’s an example of an alternative to the oligarchical system we know, proof that there are successful ways forwards which are applicable to our economies, even if we don’t copy them exactly (that would be silly).

    (On top of this, a society is certainly capable of detecting and ostracising or punishing anti-social people such as sociopaths. The problem is that the most important ones are effectively out of reach in our society since they have a police force protecting them and we have a more alienated, disorganised society)


    1. https://redsails.org/china-has-billionaires/#fnref14 ↩︎






  • eureka@aussie.zoneBanned from communitytoPolitical Memes@lemmy.worldDon't be fooled
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    1 month ago

    If AI replaces a lot of workers, we’ll have too many people in the country.

    Unless you’re in China or India, you can look at those two countries to see just how high population can get without destroying a country. Literally in the billions. The bigger problem is how the country organises, not just the number of people. I’m guessing you can look outside for a few minutes or hours and notice plenty of jobs which could use people doing them, the problem is our political-economic system forces people to do what’s profitable, instead of what actually needs to be done. And when the people with enough money to employ people (i.e. to decide what work we do) are stingy parasites, we get this mass unemployment. In fact, some of that unemployment is intentional.

    But, with all that said, you’re absolutely correct that we also need to consider the current situation and cope with that, and that a good government needs to try and manage that. And they’re not.


  • eureka@aussie.zoneBanned from communitytoPolitical Memes@lemmy.worldDon't be fooled
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    1 month ago

    but decrease how much each person has available as resources? Essentially just throwing a lot of people into poverty?

    That is not implied. Especially if we consider that the resources we waste are through supply chains rather than our own direct use. If my electrical supply comes from from a more efficient source, then my usage can be less wasteful and potentially cheaper. If my city continues to improve public transport, I can actually save money and use less resources in daily transit. Products we consume have serious potential to conserve resources at a mass scale, and often it even saves them money due to paying less for resources needed in production. A lot of waste also comes from overproduction, think of those Dunkin’ Donuts end-of-day-disposal videos. We make far more than we need in so many areas.

    Furthermore, the most wasteful people are a minority of the mega-rich. You and I probably don’t need to cut down much on jet fuel costs. People close to poverty usually aren’t (directly) wasteful, hell, some of them actually reduce waste through dumpster-diving and recycling schemes.


  • eureka@aussie.zoneBanned from communitytoPolitical Memes@lemmy.worldDon't be fooled
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    1 month ago

    If that would ever happen.

    Well, you see, the thing about capitalism is it empowers exactly the people who don’t want that to happen. Consumerism-driven, wasteful capitalism is the in-built trend of capitalism itself, not an unfortunate variant - even government regulation doesn’t solve these problems.