Noone believes that people have full freedom with no context, no extenuating circumstances. What makes arguments like this seem convincing is how uncommon it is for people to think dialectically.

Here’s a very good essay that steps through all of the different parts of the problem, and looks at different views historically. https://www.marxists.org/archive/plekhanov/1898/xx/individual.html

To the hard deterministic explanation that “something always came before,” it asks “what is the role of the individual in history?”

This excerpt isn’t a substitute for reading the whole essay but it makes a point pretty concisely:

But let us return to our subject. A great man is great not because his personal qualities give individual features to great historical events, but because he possesses qualities which make him most capable of serving the great social needs of his time, needs which arose as a result of general and particular causes. Carlyle, in his well-known book on heroes and hero-worship, calls great men beginners. This is a very apt description. A great man is precisely a beginner because he sees further than others, and desires things more strongly than others. He solves the scientific problems brought up by the preceding process of intellectual development of society; he points to the new social needs created by the preceding development of social relationships; he takes the initiative in satisfying these needs. He is a hero. But he is not a hero in the sense that he can stop, or change, the natural course of things, but in the sense that his activities are the conscious and free expression of this inevitable and unconscious course. Herein lies all his significance; herein lies his whole power. But this significance is colossal, and the power is terrible.

Healthcare please

More victims of wokeness, smh /s

Why are we assuming we don’t have free will? We do. Its not total freedom, our freedom is contingent on existing circumstances, but hard determinism is easily disprovable.

The idea that there is no free will is a mind fuck that keeps you from questioning your reality. You might as well ask, “assuming the earth is flat, why does the stick disappear on the horizon?”

The commons

I see. Well, i hope we never meet in person cuz this is just the way I tell jokes, and I’m always half joking. Watching you get irritated would probably only encourage me to keep doing it too

Is this an actual question or are you being indignant? If you have actual questions can you please try to articulate them? If I try and answer you without knowing what questions you are asking, we are more likely to get frustrated.

Hopefully you aren’t just being indignant.

They’re…from Europe.

Because I’ve been conditioned to never question laws, and never learned to mentally deal with contradictions in society I’m mad at the pronouns now! Those darn pronouns!

If you believe you are a bad person, then being “bad” is self affirming.

Class isn’t an ideology

I don’t know, maybe a proclivity but our family wasn’t really the type for diagnosing mh disorders. I had to fight like hell to get my own diagnoses as an adult.

Quitting smoking and vaping is harder, last year was the first time in my life where, after not having a cig in a long time, I was at a thing and people were smoking and I bummed one and it was absolutely disgusting to me. Felt great to hate it tbh.

But in like 13-15 years of habitual smoking I never had a psychotic episode from it.

Granted I was an almost constant user, I maintained a “high” basically from when I woke up until I went to bed at night. It was def a form of self medication, it did help with a lot of ADHD symptoms because rather than getting lazy I would get hyped and very active. Used it that way basically from a little before covid, all through covid, until November of last year. It did affect my work performance, looking back, but I interviewed for that job high, I went to work high most of the time, still got good reviews, raises and a promotion. I was addicted or dependent or whatever term you want to use. But like high functioning I guess.

But in November I crashed hard. Had a complete psychotic break. I thought the government was using 5g to beam mind control beams, an array of numbers containing hidden brainwashing instructions, to make me believe I was this person, when really I was a fake, an android put into this life to do their bidding, they killed the real me and I was the replacement, and this happened all the time, I just happened to pick up on one of their transmissions.

I’m a rational guy, I don’t know where this shit came from. I have pages in my notebook documenting it. Luckily my wife is amazing and I was kind of able to talk myself out of it enough to have her convince me and remind me of what was real. Since then I had to quit. I def got some intelligence points back. And I haven’t had any more episodes. But damn that scared the shit out of me. I didn’t even know it was possible.

What? Please elaborate

Omg I remember having this argument with my friends. “Well there are some home remedies that work, modern medicine doesn’t have a monopoly on all knowledge” OK but homeopathic medicine just means its water, plain water that remembers being able to cure a disease, its fake “Yeah but they’re not all like that some of them work, my grandma would use a half of an onion to take the pain out of bee stings” jfc I’m literally not talking about that, I’m talking about water sold as medicine that is covered by most major insurance! look it up!

What I have thanks to money, what i pay for, i.e, what money can buy, that is what I, the possessor of the money, am myself. My power is as great as the power of money. The properties of money are my- (its owner’s)- properties and faculties. Thus what I am and what I am capable of is by no means determined by my individuality. I am ugly, but I can buy myself the most beautiful women. Consequently, I am not ugly, for the effect of ugliness, its power of repulsion, is annulled by money. As an individual I am lame, but money can create twenty four feet for me; so I am not lame; I am wicked, dishonest man without conscience or intellect, but money is honored and so also is its possessor. Money is the highest good and so its possessor is good. Money relieves me of the trouble of being dishonest, so I am presumed to be honest. I may have no intellect, but money is the true mind of all things and so how should its possessor have no intellect? Morever he can buy himself intellectuals, and is not the man who has power over intellectuals not more of [an] intellectual than they?

–Marx, 1844 Manuscripts

They’re vertically integrated so I doubt the stores themselves are making all of that profit. But you’re right, they’re very profitable as a company I was only thinking about the stores. especially since they handle every transaction from the moment its hits our shores to the moment it leaves the stores, accumulating little markups along the way as it’s passed from legally separate business to business, the warehouses are a different company from the trucking and logistics, as well as the stores; all owned by the parent co. But the store’s profits probably aren’t much higher percentage than any other box retailer or grocery store.

So this is being sold a certain way, as a tech advancement that takes advantage of “surge” pricing, as if retailers are adopting the latest tech and profitability schemes. And in fact, wrt a huge company like Walmart that operates on wafer-thin margins scaled up to mass consumption quantities, I don’t doubt this will have some effect.

But the fact is, these chains already had extremely dynamic pricing schemes, and would change many prices daily or at least weekly; its just they had employees walking around who manually scanned the items and replaced the labels. When I worked at a box retailer we had 3-5 people where this was their only job. And i didnt work at a place with half as many skus as walmart. So the real savings is in the value of the labor the company will cut from implementing these smart shelf labels.

The initial investment will seem quite high, but businesses split up their capital investments over 10-30 years. So despite the hype, and even the predatory valance on the philosophy of the tech itself, in fact this technology, just like most technical advancement, is to automate the tasks of workers and eliminate their jobs. Profit is made from stealing from workers.

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