In Sweden we often think of our selves as socialist. I suspect it means something very different across the pond. Anyone care to elaborate on the differences?
Socialism means different things depending on where you are, even within Europe. For some socialism is the same as communism, for others socialism simply means social-democracy.
In a lot of American discourse, it honestly seems like the baggage surrounding the term is more of an issue than the policies being debated that are labelled "Socialist".
Since political threads don't last long on HN, I'll add for the anecdote that I was first puzzled the difference in meaning by the lyrics of a Slayer song, "Consumed democracy returns to socialist regime" [1], certainly because at that time the government in my country was "socialist".
Socialism in the US is currently a slur that you use to discredit your opponents, it’s not interrogated to mean anything useful. You are expected to be violently opposed to socialism while being completely dependent upon social programs. The point is to make the contradiction seem normal.
The word “socialist” was strongly associated with the USSR in the Cold War era United States. Anyone advocating for socialism was dismissed as a red pinko commie spy.
See Joseph McCarthy, HUAC, Hollywood blacklists, J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO and other domestic surveillance programs for a small slice of anti-communist efforts in the Cold War US.
The Ruling Class in the US has long been effective at influencing public opinion and behavior with boogeymen: communism, socialism, woke-ism, and so on. Mention publicly funded healthcare to 1000 random Americans, and the response from 950 of them is gonna be "Socialized medicine is bad!", and nothing else.
Very true. I’ve started talking to older generations about their Socialism Security checks. “That’s different! The government taxes me and then… uses it… to support me when I’m not making money… Oh.”
Lots of people detest socialism until you show them how they’re already benefitting from it. I’m not even really pro-socialism, except in the simplified case where you have a number line with “capitalism” on one end, “communism” on the other, and “socialism” as the range in the middle. I definitely wouldn’t want to live on either end of that spectrum, and a mixed economy where private enterprise handles wants with a government handling needs for those who can’t do it on their own — i.e. socialism — is a reasonable alternative.
Social Security is a really bad example though. It doesn’t support a living wage, and everybody depending on it would have been better off if they could have invested those taxes instead.
I'm so curious why this comment is being downvoted. Isn't it true? Words have meanings and meriam webster agrees with this comment. If we say any country anywhere that provides anything to its citizens is included in the socialist umbrella, then every country on earth is socialist and what's the point of the word in that case? The DSA in the US have hitched their wagons to this word that is highly ambiguous and it feels unhelpful when it comes to any meaningful national political goals.
I think this is awesome. Anything we can do to get away from burning fossil fuel is a win in my book. I don’t know about this particular effort, but it seems to me that aviation could really need some big wins in this direction. Last I looked we still run smaller planes on leaded fuel. Crazy.
This isn’t awesome, it doesn’t work at scale and it only lets idiots ignore what should be done: leave fossil fuels in the ground, and only then do what we can with the energy that’s still available. Aviation is mostly incompatible with a sane global environmental policy.
Very few people are willing to accept a, "sane global environmental policy" if it means changing their lifestyle. Thus, anything that allows people to keep (or better yet, improve) their current lifestyle while making the environment sane, that is the one we need to be searching for.
Leaded is slowly going away, but regulation means these changes take many, many years and dollars to implement and test.
It will be similar (worse?) implementing a new type of fuel for commercial jets, especially when it comes to wide adoption across a majority of countries around the world. Basically you need something which is as least as reliable, clean (I.e., won’t clog/solidify), non corrosive, etc. and remain that way after being mixed with standard jet fuel.
I too want to see alternatives but expect to see more failures than success at this stage.
The new packing law makes selling direct to customers in EU tricky and expensive for small operators. I understand the spirit of what they are trying to achieve. But missing out on having a single register is unforgivable.
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