If I understand what you’re saying correctly we are largely on the same page about this… class mobility upward is almost impossible. Classes are usually discriminatory against other classes (sometimes even towards higher classes). This makes actual class mobility very hard. People have to mask as having always belonged to a certain class by acquiring the correct signifiers.

What I am not sure I agree with, or maybe I just don’t understand it, is the point about dimensions of class. People are more than just the job they do. An aristocrat who is living off inheritance has about the same amount of actual working experience that a low class individual who can’t get a job has. They both don’t work, but since the aristocrat has a bunch of capital which the low class person doesn’t have they are on opposite ends of the spectrum.

Idk why you were getting those downvotes. I’ll check out Fussel if I get the chance.

Not saying caste system is better, both are terrible. We should strive to abolish both.

But to your point about class mobility: You can always move down in class, up is neigh impossible. Thinking that money will help you move up is only a carrot that the upper class dangles in front of the poor. Class is not only determined by wealth, it is determined by capital. Capital encompasses not only financial and economic capital, but also social capital, intellectual capital, cultural capital, etc. To move up in class you will have to acquire enough of all of these, just money isn’t enough. If you don’t have the same manners, vocabulary, friends, status symbols and don’t consume the the same media you will never be accepted and only be considered a nouveau rich and a gaudy buffoon. Your lifestyle will be better than that of the rest of your class, but the higher class will never accept you as one of their own. Your kids might be able to move up, if you put them in the right school so they can absorb some of that social capital and learn the language, acquire the correct manners and make the right friends. But you will very likely be forever stuck in the same class that you were born in, unless you move down.

There is a Philosopher called Hanno Sauer who wrote a book about this. I don’t agree with his conclusion that we cannot overcome class, but he does make some good points about its nature.

I’m OOTL, what did contrapoints do?

In the long run I’d miss my loved ones too much. For a year or so? I’d love it!

How is your trip going? And how long did your 500€ last you? Assuming you already spent them, what are you doing now to sustain yourself?

First they made the m&m less sexy and now this -.-

This is a frequently repeated quote attributed to the late philosopher Frederic Jameson. On its own it doesn’t make a statement about capitalism or what it is at all. (If you wanna know more about Jamesons theories on capitalism you can read about it in his books)

Jameson’s quote points out that people often find it easier to picture possible world ending doomsday scenarios, than it is for them to think about alternatives to living in a capitalist world to try to avoid these scenarios.

You can even test this yourself. Ask people around you about the end of the world and many will point out reasons like climate change, demographic changes, environmental destruction, pollution, world wars, nuclear holocaust, asteroid impacts (shoutout Roland Emmerich) and even biblical scenarios for an eventual end of the world as we know it.

But ask them if they think there are other ways to live, so that those things won’t happen and usually they will just give you a version of “this is just how things are, not much you can do about it” or “the world could be different, but there is no use in trying because this is just a utopia and I have no idea how to change stuff anyways”.

Regarding your last paragraph, imo this kinda misses the point. I agree, there are structures that exist parallel to what most people consider capitalism, but ask people in most self described capitalist societies and they will not really recognise the difference and will just see it as an anomaly at best.

Btw, this is all coming from a European perspective, albeit heavily informed by US media.

Another company Microsoft bought and ran into the ground. It’s really incredible that they managed to get their lunch stolen. They had basically a monopoly and gave it away without a fight. Hell, the colloquialism for video calling someone was to Skype them for a looong time.

And then one small competitor comes along and it’s all gone. How can you fuck up this bad? Especially during the pandemic, in which they should have further entrenched their monopoly…

Fair enough, I haven’t seen it yet. Also didn’t really notice how Decaprio heavy the list was until your comment.

No particular order. Also, it’s movies that I watched, can’t speak on essentials that I might be missing.

It’s kinda hard to make a list on essentials tho. Because your personal taste obviously plays a big role. I can’t see my girlfriend liking more than 10 percent of those…

Schindlers List

Gladiator

No country for old men

The grand Budapest hotel

The big Lebowski

The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers

Star Wars (the original one)

Requiem for a dream

Pulp fiction

The good, the bad, the ugly

The lives of others

La vita é Bella

All quiet on the western front (1930 version)

The dark knight

The Truman Show

2001: Space odyssey

Alien

7 Samurai

Princess Mononoke

Trainspotting

Boyz N the Hood

Scarface

The Godfather 1, 2

The Matrix

Clockwork Orange

Shutter Island

Kingdom of Heaven

Wolf of Wall Street

Honorable mentions because they are popular and everybody always talks about them (I like a lot of them, too. Don’t consider them essentials tho):

Inception

Interstellar

Fight Club

Harry Potter

Return of the King

Rest of Star Wars (whatever people consider the good ones at last)

Saving Private Ryan

Django Unchained

Toy Story

The Lion King

How about chess? I know you said you are not really looking for video games, but chess to me is a bit different to video games.

I had a similar problem to you a few years ago during Covid. I was very stressed and lonely and didn’t know what to do with myself. I am completely addicted to chess now. To the point that I play for like 4-8h a night sometimes. Time passes fast, especially in the shorter time modes. And if you are looking for a more low stakes, slow paced distraction you can play correspondents chess and think about your next move for 1.5 hours.

Bonus: if i tell people that i play chess for over an hour every day, they often assume i am a genius, even tho I’m just a 800 elo idiot like most people

I agree with your comment, even though I have no idea on the technical aspects. What I can weigh in on is crisis management, especially communication.

Boeing needs to take control of the situation and actively start communicating and showing that they are working on fixing this thing. In Situational Crisis Communication Theory you would call it a rebuild approach. They tried denial, they tried downplaying, it’s not working. A rebuild strategy is usually the last resort, as things like admitting your mistakes and fixing them are rarely appreciated by investors. Furthermore it’s usually a huuuuge cost to do a recall on that scale. But Boeing need to show the public that they are actively working on improving the situation, to earn back their trust. So at least a partial recall should be considered.

You’re exactly right in your first paragraph about the news. The media and the public are very sensitive to Boeing quality issues rn. These articles won’t stop unless one of three things happen. Either Boeing gets their shit together and gets some effective crisis management and communication done, the company goes bust, or something else turns up in the news that replaces this. The third option will be the most likely, but it will also haunt them forever. It’s like that exploding galaxy note 7 situation. There were articles about that for every new generation of Galaxy Note, despite Samsung doing pretty well in investigating the issues. And while the following Note phones sold alright, the whole thing was a significant loss of trust and money for Samsung and enabled competitors like Huawai to catch up.

What they do right is having a duopoly with Airbus, and great military contracts. So investors know that even if things are shit rn, they will probably get better again.

Furthermore, while I agree that Boeing probably will not go bankrupt over this, the valuation sometimes is not a great indicator of what’s going on internally. Enron was worth over 60 billion. Half a year later they were at zero. Now I’m not saying Boeing is nearly that bad, but they are in some trouble for sure.

Working for Boeings PR department must be absolute madness right now… imagine having to somehow excuse all those fuck ups and every week there is a new one

You misread. They got scammed into paying 10$ shipping for a supposedly free product that will never arrive.

I banish thy bad breath with the power of Colgate

This kinda makes it sound like Abercrombie and Fitch back in the days… guess they still miss the smell tho

Thanks for the answer, definitely is an interesting perspective! I’ll look more into the masks. And I wholeheartedly agree on the part about reactionaries using these kind of strategies. Something just throws me off about the weird folksy way we see a lot of these guys… be it Daddy Elon or Uncle Bill or Cowboy Jeff, framing them as quirky characters in the reality tv show that is our news media distracts from the real issues that each of those guys represent.

Can you give me a summary why character masks make this cutesy billionaire shit ok?

I’m not confident enough in my knowledge about Marx‘s ideas to be arguing about that.

I think I got a grasp on the basics, capitalism creates societal positions like owners and workers, and Bill slipped into the mask of an owner.

But to me that does not mean that humanizing the billionaire class is a good thing. I’d rather say it makes it a worse thing, as it takes away incentives for lower classes to change the system and get rid of the owner class. How do we get anywhere close to equality if people see good ole Bill and Daddy Elon, instead of the ruthless oligarchs that they are?

But like I said, I don’t have a good grasp on this theory so would be happy to be corrected/have it explained to me ;)

Such a nice little stoner billionaire /s.

Don’t humanize these assholes. It’s the reason why he says stuff like this. He’s a wealth hoarding bastard that fucked a lot of people over to get where he’s at. If he thought it was a good idea he could easily just start a big trial somewhere. But he doesn’t. Instead he sits on his mountain of money and says cute shit for idiots to drool over instead of taxing him.

A stakeholder is something different than a stockholder. A stakeholder could be an employee, investor, customer, someone selling equipment to them or even the community they work in.

Basically anyone who’s affected by their actions.