blakemiller

@blakemiller@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Advantageous geography has allowed the US to fall upward in success throughout its existence. It’s as simple as that, no joke. By sitting on a mountain of natural resources and having no formidable enemies in the western hemisphere, the US was the default player to take center stage post WW2. Europe was decimated and America funded the war. Bam, the US gets success in spite of its thoroughly racist and regressive culture. Their position (and hubris) became too entrenched for there to ever be a legitimate contender. We might get to witness a changing of the guard now though, we’ll see how much damage 47 does.

  FDR era is an incredible circumstance though. The past North’s failure to reconstruct the South led to all kinds of strategic chess moves that ultimately saw the D and R parties swap. The liberals had to put aside the racism problems for a bit so they could unfuck the economy. It was probably the best that the progressives could have hoped to achieve given their challenges.

  All said as an American. So we’re not all morons. But it’s a sticky, uphill battle. I’m not sure if it’s fixable without a big change to the world order. Thanks for the question!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is this what every election is like?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Trump is representative of the systemic issues America has left unresolved

  Him and literally every other politician, so thanks for defining politics for us. The problem is that enough people think he’s the right solution. Oh boy are they wrong.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is currency so essential?⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  And we exist to extract value from agriculture. We’ve developed to a point where it’s both possible and desirable to live in close proximity to one another. It’s possible because ag is so successful and scalable, and it’s desirable because new opportunities are possible when everything is nearby. So that’s the trade off you made. To afford the city life, you accrue value through city opportunities and you trade it in exchange for the goods from service providers. The alternative is that you run your own farm. Ask yourself how many farmers you know! And you’ll see which decision most people make.

  All to say, we shouldn’t think of value extraction as a uniformly bad practice. We all do it and we need to do it because each square acre of land doesn’t provide the same goods and services.