Asbestos insulation is actually perfectly safe, in the wall.

Older apartments, particularly ones that have been regularly renovated or poorly maintained, don’t do a good job of keeping asbestos inside the walls. Also, asbestos itself tends to break down over time and become more difficult to keep contained. This makes asbestos cleanup extremely difficult and expensive.

A good article for understanding the relationship between the police and other unions. But it doesn’t answer the question

Why don’t the cops simply seize the means of production themselves? What keeps them loyal to the bourgeois?

Odds are that the Kims and probably a number of people at the top would be worse-off if things changed.

I mean, when you compare North Korea to the poorer parts of the periphery that capitulated to neoliberal capital - Haiti, Liberia, the former Yugoslavian states, Argentina right now, the Philippines, Lebanon or Iraq or Gaza - even the lay resident is getting out reasonably well off. They aren’t living in an active war zone, they’ve got a backwards but still functional economy, and they’re even making inroads on foreign trade at long last.

The xenophobic siege mentality of the Kims appears to have spared them a far worse fate, just by keeping the country isolated from shit like COVID and The War on Terror. They never got the windfall of the 20th century industrial economy, but they also didn’t get systematically wiped out like American Natives or Black Angolans or Rohingya Muslims.

The top brackets are manifestations of the bottom bracket. Its a divide-and-conquer strategy, and foolish to ignore on its face.

For centuries women couldn’t own property, couldn’t hold professional jobs, and couldn’t participate in politics. Same with ethnic minorities. Queer sexual preference was outright prohibited by law and used to disqualify candidates from office, to break up organizations with police action, and to deny people access to private careers and public services.

You can come at this from a vulgar Marxist perspective and only see the Owners v Workers. But you’re missing why owners have power if you neglect the layer upon layer of privileged class surrounding them.

If it really does just boil down to Workers v Owners, why don’t the cops simply seize the means of production themselves? What keeps them loyal to the bourgeois if they themselves are not invited to the Epstein Island Bunga-Bunga parties? What keeps suburban professionals loyal? What keeps religious radicals loyal?

There’s more at play than mere title to real estate or collection of rent. You have to face an ideology that’s caked on thick.

how do workers in other industries prevent the corporation they work for from taking in the revenue

Keep doing what you’re doing without operating the cash register, whether that’s serving meals or fixing cars or whatever.

For some stuff this won’t work (entertainment, for instance, needs a full work stoppage to compel capital concessions). But if you’re working to rule at a point of critical infrastructure, the only thing that really needs to stop is the financial side of the business.

It won’t. He’ll be lucky to make it to trial at all. Good chance he’s found suicided to death in prison, like good old Jeffery E.

moreover the idea that Marxists have never achieved change ignores the existence of the USSR, Cuba, PRC, Vietnam, Laos, and so forth.

The Westoid Brain is incapable of appreciating AES. Everything is either Not Real Communism or a book club that contemplates their own navels indefinitely.

When the SRs in pre-1917 Russia celebrated “an end to theory” as a unifying principle and claimed “assassinations transfer power,” they were wrong. Assassinations create temporary voids taken by those closest to the spot, always another bourgeois and never a transfer. What is required is organized effort to rise above the Bourgeoisie as a class so that Capital is controlled by humanity, and not the inverse. It was the dedication to theory and organizing the working class that proved the Bolsheviks, and not the SRs, correct.

Need that vanguard party to occupy the vacuum and initiate the reforms. It can’t just be stochastic violence.

That said, guys like Luigi aren’t operating in a vacuum either. They are the consequence of their material conditions (in this case, excruciating back pain in a country that refuses to deliver medical care in an efficient manner). So it seems trite to get mad at a man who was subjected to these horrifying economic forces. This stochastic violence is a consequence of the contradictions in the capitalist system, not a solution to it or an avoidable symptom of it.

You have to read guys like Luigi (and Thomas Matthew Crooks and Dylan Roof, etc, etc) the same way you’d read a cork going off a bottle you just shook up. Or the hurricane that slams into your coastline after decades of climate change. Praising/villanizing Luigi for offing a CEO makes about as much sense as praising/villanizing a tornado that levels a gas plant.

Remember when the railroad threatened to strike and nacy pelosi said they would throw them in jail if they didn’t go to work…fucking unreal.

There’s a great WTYP on this, detailing how the inability/refusal to strike has resulted in an exodus/early retirement of train engineers sufficient to knee-cap the industry already. Increased incidence of train derailments, higher rates of rail jams and mechanical failures, and generally slower delivery times are all the result of the decline in experienced and knowledgeable industry workers.

None of this matters to the train management, which has reaped an enormous windfall in profits at the steady marginal decline in network efficiency. Monopoly means you either pay the cartel for degraded service or you ship using a more expensive method.

Solidarity will be hard to achieve because those threats will be too much for people on the ropes in their day to day life to endure.

Its important to recognize modern capitalist control as a form of hostage taking. “Pay us the ransom or your critical infrastructure get its”, even as we’re receiving fingers and earlobes in the mail with every passing year.

Solidarity is about liberating these critical components of infrastructure and operating them for the benefit of the public. The goal isn’t to shut down these institutions, but to run them without profiteers leeching the excess revenue. That’s why some of the most effective popular economic protests don’t involve suspending services, but operating them while refusing to collect fees for service.

So you’re saying that Gandhi accomplished nothing

Gandhi achieved a socio-economic mass mobilization. Boycotts, work stoppages, supply chain failures caused by mass mobilization. It wasn’t just people parading through the streets. They inflicted real economic damage on the British Imperial State.

when millions followed him, they couldn’t just arrest them all

Thousands were killed by British-aligned police. Millions more were impoverished in retaliatory trade sanctions, embargoes, and other economic retaliations. The Indian state was set back decades by the English response to independence - not unlike how Cuba and Haiti have been deliberately impoverished in retaliation for bucking the American and French former overlords.

They could arrest Gandhi and Congress leaders all they wanted to, but the movement they inspired couldn’t be stopped.

The current Modi government is a stark reversal of policy from the Gandhian Indian socialist state. They’ve embraced a very western-oriented capitalist-friendly militant hierarchy that has fully rebutted the movement Gandhi lead. That is, in large part, through continuously aggravating tensions between caste cohorts and between Hindu and Muslim regional populations.

When millions follow you, and refuse to cooperate, the ruling class will suffer

Mobilizing and orienting millions of people requires a large, cohesive popular media campaign. Gandhi was able to tap into a huge underground of anti-British opposition. But even that wasn’t able to overcome the base anti-Muslim sentiment that the Brits had fostered for centuries. Gandhi himself was the victim of this unfettered hatred, when he was assassinated at age 78 by an anti-Muslim fanatic during an interfaith prayer meeting in 1948.

Assassination of leading civil rights activists and organizers by hyper-partisan radicals has consistently worked dismantle national movements. From the slaying of US civil rights leaders in the 1960s to the bombings and assassinations of Latin American, African, and Pacific Island socialist organizers in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, we’ve seen the ruling class triumph through a persistent campaign of organized violence and stochastic terrorism.

It was also preceded by a violent act of terrorism

Its so easy for people to forget the decades of violent acts committed in and around the Saudi Peninsula, and fixate instead on a handful of retaliatory strikes against US interests. The Battle of Mogadeshu, which involved Black Hawk helicopters obliterating Somali mosques with hellfire missiles. The brutal occupation of the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, from 1992 to 2001 as a US-backed narco-state. The entire Iran-Iraq War, sponsored by US arms dealers and double-dealing diplomats, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Arab and Persian young people. The occupation of Saudi Arabia by a western-backed military dictatorship going back nearly a century. The violent overthrow of democracies from Indonesia to Egypt in pursuit of neoliberal international trade policy.

9/11 didn’t happen in a vacuum any more than the Brian Thompson assassination or the aborted coup in South Korea. These have long historical tails that trace back to a geopolitical policy that’s racked up a staggering death toll.

To quote Mark Twain:

There were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.

The answer is neither peaceful organizing nor individual aggression, but mass, millitant organizing!

This is true, but also extremely difficult, especially in an era of mass media induced paranoia and alienation. Mass militant organizing requires a large cohesive social class that has a center of gravity - a church house or a social club or a workhouse floor - that increasingly no longer exists.

Social media was supposed to be the new venue for mass mobilization, and we saw the beginnings of it in the early '00s. But media consolidation, saturation from automated marketing accounts, and counter-programming have largely washed it out.

Read theory and get organized.

One is significantly easier than the other.

That said… go look for local unions in your town or neighborhood. Look for chapters of the DSA or the PSL or other labor-friendly organizing groups. Go to your local PTA meetings and city council meetings when you can, and get to know the people who show up there regularly. Get out of the house and meet people where they are.

That’s all good advice. But its also hard, exhausting work. And its done in the face of enormous headwinds. Don’t mistake the failure of leftism as a simple failure of “human nature” or whatever. We’re in an entrenched system and attempting a Herculean feat to change it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good

A Veblen good is a type of luxury good, named after American economist Thorstein Veblen, for which the demand increases as the price increases, in apparent contradiction of the law of demand, resulting in an upward-sloping demand curve. The higher prices of Veblen goods may make them desirable as a status symbol in the practices of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure. A product may be a Veblen good because it is a positional good, something few others can own.

people would still want the, objectively worse, natural stuff, because for some reason

It’s not a mystery reason. Its advertising. Billions upon billions of dollars, millions of man hours, Gigawatts of energy, landfills of brouchers and fliers and billboards - all hammering into you that these luxury tokens are worth the six or seven figure price tag that a retailer has placed on them.

It’s propaganda of the must vile sort. The painful irony of it all is the absurd volumes spent to coerce people into these purchases relative to the skinflint labor practices used to dig the stuff out and manufacture it.

The company is faceless and doesn’t care how much you abuse the worker bees as long as they get your money.

Hey now, sometimes the company employs security that’s extremely bored, incredibly racist, and looking for a low income punching bag to hassle.

Just. Don’t. Go. To. Macdonald’s.

Best advice on the menu

From Hillsborough Democrat Susan Valdés switches to Republican Party

But there was little indication Valdés was contemplating such a move until Monday. She ran to be the Hillsborough County Democratic Executive Committee chairperson earlier this month. She attended a Kamala Harris debate watch party in September at a meeting of Hillsborough County Democrats, and she’s posted numerous times to X about the dangers of Donald Trump’s policy platform — particularly when it comes to immigration.

She flipped because the Republicans are freezing the entire Democratic Party out of the legislative process and she lives in a district that’s been curdling conservative like old milk. Florida has been overflowing with “conservative Democrats” for decades. The party’s been so desperate for wins that they’ve taken to running former Republicans for statewide office.

It isn’t the vetting structure that’s the problem. The Florida party is rotten to the core. It has been fully co-opted by business interests, social conservatives, and anti-Cuba reactionaries. It’s just a second Republican Party without any pull. Why not flip?

I don’t understand how this isn’t illegal in some way.

Who is going to arrest her? DeSantis?

She’s a Cuban ex-pat whose harshest criticism of the GOP was that they were too much like Fidel Castro. She ran unopposed twice, after the Dems cancelled the primary and let her waltz through unopposed. Now she’s facing an entrenched majority GOP that happily rewards turncoats and completely freezes out the rump opposition. This is her last term in office before retirement, so she can flip the bird to her constituents and cash out at last. Why are you surprised she flipped?

the fact that he actually put his money where his mouth was on philanthropy

Even setting aside the question of where the money came from, the theory behind philanthropy is fundamentally anti-democratic. The philanthropist establishes an untaxable trust and personally appoints a board of cronies to allocate limited resources based on an inaccessible group’s whims.

I could go into the numerous failures and crimes of private non-profits - the Bill & Melinda Gates campaign to sterilize Africans in a nakedly racist effort to curb population growth, the Longtermist tech industry campaign to invest billions into generative AI in pursuit of a god-like superintelligence, the Catholic Church’s enslavement and abuse of young people in their network of church run orphanages from Ireland to Guatamala to Thailand. But the bottom line is that using your economic position to play Sim City with other people’s neighborhoods and livelihoods isn’t charitable in any meaningful sense of the term. Its mega-maniacal. The utopian visions of the philanthropy’s founder don’t change that, even if your organization doesn’t end up going the way of the philanthropy shaped Ponzi Scheme like Foundation for New Era Philanthropy or St. Jude Hospital’s horded endowments

co-founder of Duty Free Shoppers Group, the travel retailer of luxury products based in Hong Kong

Sort of squeezing second-hand. But you have to know his primary client pool is the business elites passing through international airports and taking advantage of a legalized form of tax evasion while exploiting the working class in sweat-shops on the mainland/surrounding Pacific islands.

A bit like becoming a billionaire by selling yachts or luxury hotels or cocaine. Even if you can argue you didn’t abuse your staff to make your mint (spoilers: you absolutely did), you know all your biggest customers did.

Mainly because the governments already have access to everything and I mean EVERYTHING.

There’s limits, largely around the speed and accuracy by which data can be ingested and processed. You can look for everyone somewhere sometimes and someone everywhere sometimes and someone somewhere at any time, but it takes a ton of digital resources to monitor everyone everywhere all the time. For the data to be meaningful it has to be interpreted.

Manned checkpoints allow local state actors to make decisions in near-real time relative to immediately present information. The classic example is someone with a stale warrant or notice on their record. The sheer volume of delinquents makes pursuing every individual troublesome, but as soon as a known offender steps across a checkpoint the police can pounce on the individual offender in that instance. If you’ve got a five year old traffic ticket, a police officer can be in your face about it as soon as they run your ID.