Yes, but look at how people see the industrial revolution! There is the optimistic view of this enriching everybody and making lives easier and the pessimistic / envy-oriented view that it all is just about exploitation, profits and greed. Some see goods going to customers, and some see broke-back workers and fat dividends. It is all perspective.
I have learned enough economics to be closer to the first view, but you cannot really expect the average person to learn econ. And even I, despite having learned econ, feel on the gut level that cheering for a corporation would be incredibly gullible and materialistic, that the only "cool" way to read corporate mission statements is in the tone of sarcasm, that advertisements that see people somehow happy about their washing machine are lying because you cannot possibly be happy about such a mundane and material thing, and so on...
When Ole Nydahl (from Denmark) was travelling in Nepal in the 1960's he was utterly shocked that a local lama, rinpoche, "holy man" who would give them spiritual teachings and blessings and being all pure and lofty would change hats when they wanted to buy large bricks of tea from the monastery and haggle furiously about every cent like a vendor in some bazaar. They were under this typcially Western idealist impression that money is dirty, spiritual people should not be materialistic and so on. They were thinking it would be far more befitting a holy guru to gift them tea and then they will donate the monastery money instead of haggling.
Yes, but look at how people see the industrial revolution! There is the optimistic view of this enriching everybody and making lives easier and the pessimistic / envy-oriented view that it all is just about exploitation, profits and greed. Some see goods going to customers, and some see broke-back workers and fat dividends. It is all perspective.
It is not all perspective. There are socialist economists just as capitalist ones. The argument is over how to make standards of living rise for the masses.
Mistake not hipster douchebags for a serious critique of political economy.
Your job, should you choose to accept it, is to comment on this thread explaining the most awesome thing you've done this month. You may be as blatantly proud of yourself as you feel. You may unabashedly consider yourself the coolest freaking person ever because of that awesome thing you're dying to tell everyone about. This is the place to do just that.
Remember, however, that this isn't any kind of progress thread. Nor is it any kind of proposal thread. This thread is solely for people to talk about the awesome things they have done. Not "will do". Not "are working on". Have already done. This is to cultivate an environment of object level productivity rather than meta-productivity methods.
So, what's the coolest thing you've done this month?