They make a ton of difference if you’re standing on a hard floor for more than an hour or two. Still worse than something to sit on but stools are a luxury beyond the reach of American workers.

Thanks! :) Never heard of one before.

I’m on it. We will defeat the Russians avec mes waterslides.

Triomphe Napoleon.

I call dibs

Some obscure Puerto Rican who is alive today but nobody has heard of yet.

Step 1 find a land surveyor student with micropenis

There should be at least one in the entire world.

That’s it

Yeah but now they have tools like TikTok to cook our brains and microwave cannon to cook protesting bodies.

A monarchy is just a hereditary dictatorship.

Are you stupid or illiterate?

Google it.

Years ago, I took a job at a call center. These jobs paid, on average at the time, about 10 dollars an hour. Which was more than minimum wage, but not by much.

Jobs other than call center work for under educated, under experienced people in my city were really hard to find. The good employers were almost never hiring, hired from within, and outsourced the entry level stuff. The vast majority of available jobs to myself and ultimately the other 300 people that ended up going through that particular call center were customer service roles.

That industry is notoriously difficult to break out of. You’d say ‘just go find a different job.’ and yeah that’s good in theory. But everyone working those jobs is always looking for another job. No one takes a call center job and isn’t thinking about getting a better job. If those jobs were readily available, call center staff simply wouldn’t exist. These are jobs of last resort. A step up from flipping burgers.

The pay is barely enough to afford rent and groceries. That was years ago, it’s probably much worse now. I had roommates. Without them I wouldn’t have been able to afford much other than going to work and back and feeding myself, nevermind driving all over town trying to find another job.

Thing is at these jobs you’re infinitely replaceable. As desperate as you were when you took it, there are ten other people behind you, just as if not more desperate for work. They will literally hire people off the street and throw them in training within a day.

So not only can you not afford to lose this job, you can’t afford to speak up at this job. You can’t unionize, because mentioning it will get you fired on the spot, you can’t speak up about abusive situations, because HR will simply fire you. You can’t even report illegal practices.

So on to this particular call center job. This was basically just filling mail order prescriptions. Theoretically people would call in, tell someone what they’d needed, we’d click a few buttons and in a week they’d have a 90 day supply.

That’s not what happened. 95% of the calls we received were problems. Most of the day was spent either being screamed at, or pleaded with, with none of the tools we needed to actually address these problems. To add to this, we were constantly watched by management. Quality, supervisors, auditors, trainers, you name it. If they weren’t taking calls they were listening to calls. My record was 3 simultaneous people listening in to a single phone call while it was happening but I heard of more. Any deviation from our very strict rules meant immediate and swift correction from everyone that heard about it, every time they heard about it. That was the only feedback.

Because we were not trained for the type of work we were doing, this negative feedback was constant.

Add to that, they gave us a really bizarre schedule. No one started at the same time every day. No one had two days off in a row. You might start at 11 am one day and 630 am next. You can imagine, bathroom breaks were also tightly monitored and yes, more than one woman was fired because they were pregnant and peed too frequently.

All of this is to just provide some context you apparently sorely need.

I found more than one suicide note at that job. Generally hidden under keyboards. I know at least one woman did commit suicide while employed there, two others that committed suicide in the years following, still working similar jobs.

It’s important to know how trapped these jobs make you feel. Not only are you rarely ever actually able to help anyone, the company you’re working for is actively making shitty business decisions and counting on you to smooth it over for them. Your managers are under pressure to keep your call times low and your answered calls high, and that shit rolls down hill. You can’t just quit, you can’t easily find a different job, you can’t afford to do anything other than work and sleep.

So no, it’s not a dictatorship. But that’s not the fucking problem.

What dogma? That we should all contribute to society, and get something in return for that?

Do you understand the mental gymnastics you’re doing here? You literally use the pinnacle of capitalism and science, a mobile phone ( I presume, if not, a computer works too) to removed about the evils of capitalism and how you want to get rid of it and how evil it is for allowing you to do this in the first place. Because yes, without capitalism, you would not have this phone. You would not have most of the things you take for granted.

I’m presuming here that you’re young, 15-25 or so, and that you still have a lot of facts to learn about this world. I’ll assume you didn’t learn much history because if you did you’d know that capitalism has a lot of issues, that can and should be resolved, but it’s a buttload better than the alternatives

this is pure rhetoric. it doesn’t even undermine what it said. it’s pure posturing.

You’re a small and angry individual and I have no idea what the fuck you’re trying to say.

You make some good points. They most definitely have currency and a lower working class with an upper government official class. I would not consider them communist at all. North Korea is just an authoritarian capitalistic hellhole, that tries to sprinkle in one or two socialist policies to maintain the illusion of pursuing communism.

Just slap a coat of red paint and a gold star on it and call it communist.

I see in reading more that NK is pretty far from communist. But I think people have imagined communism to be something that it never could be. I don’t see how society could exist without money. I see that Soviets thought that eventually they wouldn’t need money but I think this is unrealistic and I don’t see that existence of money in a society could be used to determine if it’s communist or not. .

This is the problem with people promoting socialism. They tend to compare idealized version of socialism with real version of capitalism. And such comparison inevitably leads to unrealistic conclusions.

The problem is that real version of socialism is what you see in China or Cuba or former USSR. The argument with “we haven’t done socialism right” is the same as “we haven’t done capitalism right”.

I have been born in socialist country and to this day I can see negative consequences of that era. And the obvious reason why ideal socialism can’t exist - people. Same reason why capitalism sucks.

Edit: To people downvoting me: Your fake internet points have no meaning, but I love the irony of it. You can’t even keep the illusion of classlessness and equality in an internet thread, yet you are somehow convinced you could run a country like that. You’d be locking people for life in your communist paradise just for having different opinion and you know it.

I don’t think they’ll be killed. Neither North Korea nor China are that stupid. I do think that they’ll be forced to work until they drop and paid nothing or paid a pittance, even by Chinese standards, with the bulk of the value of their labour being split between the company that they work for and the Chinese and North Korean states.

because maybe it will be enough of a warning for our owning classes that we won’t have to personally get our hands bloody

USA is reserve currency for a huge chunk of the world, they have to all fail with their local currency first, you need a common ground for international trade - the US is still a reserve currency because oil mostly.