pingveno

It's not just that. You want businesses to be able to fail if they are being run poorly. That's something that's a lot harder with government agencies, state owned enterprises, and large companies.

• government agencies: People rely on them by design. You can't simply shut down the health care or welfare system because it's being run poorly or corruptly.
• state owned enterprises: There is pressure from the ruling class to keep even inefficiently run or corrupt SOE going because they provide jobs and patronage.
• large companies: They become systemically important. The loss of a single large business can cascade through the economy. See: Lehman Brothers or the big auto companies during the 2008 crash.

I found this article on the audit. It's also about boring but necessary things like stockpile management, automation, climate risk, and bookkeeping. It's broken into 30 sub-audits. It sounds like all of these must be fully passed as "clean" for an audit to not be considered failing.

How so? Fascism is rarely a matter of a single election. It's usually a slide. Providing a bulwark against that slide means you have several election cycles to snuff out fascism and return to liberal democracy.

This is why it's important to build strong democratic institutions to resist fascism, populism, and the like. They won't last forever, but they can take a few election cycles of abuse. Part of the problem with many countries that have truly fallen to fascism or fascist-like movements is that they started out with weak or non-existent institutions. Contrast that with the US, where even the election of Donald Trump of the "Lock Her Up" slogan (very fascist) got basically nowhere with both prosecuting Hillary Clinton and overturning the 2020 election.

Are you able to live comfortably without working for the foreseeable future?

I'm pretty sure that's just a strawman version of capitalism. Plenty of capitalists who had their life's work taken during a communist revolution and were at best told they could come back as a manager worked plenty hard. Didn't save them.

My point was more this. In the American Civil War, the South was a breakaway region. In the Korean War, the North and South were separate countries with separate governments. The government of the North invaded the South. Period.

Before this gets brought up, the governments of both countries were authoritarian turds.

South Korea doesn’t count, you can’t invade yourself

North Korea and South Korea were separate entities following the surrender of Imperial Japan, with the North administered by the Soviets and the South administered by the US. North Korea 100% invaded South Korea, both with troops and supporting insurgency groups.

That's not how productivity works. It's basically looking at how much a person can produce with a given amount of labor.

Take that small scale subsistence farmer. Individually, they will live a precarious life. Their country will not have the surplus food needed for other pursuits like building cities, engaging in R&D, developing science, and so on. A smaller and smaller number of people need to be able to feed more and more using less land per person.

Manually copied manuscripts are another example. They were painstakingly copied over by hand in an incredibly low productivity manner. The introduction of the printing press essentially eliminated an art form, but gave rise to practical mass media.

In the present day, computers have been the main form of productivity booster. While arguably social media is a drag on productivity, overall computers open up a broad range of possibilities.

Like yo, cancer is incredibly productive.

Cancer is incredibly costly to society. Think about it, a single person getting cancer could mean many hours of them being in the hospital. Net zero on productivity

Demolishing subsistence farms and replacing them with cash crop slave plantations is mad profitable.

As I detailed above, transitioning from unproductive farms to highly productive farms is necessary. Don't believe me, ask Mao.

I could make thousands of dollars in a day if I just sold everything I own.

That would not be a productive activity since there would be no value added. Arguably there would be less value, since that stuff is likely worth more to you than it is to another person.

Overton window

There's a difference between socially unacceptable and "straight to jail".

You mean like Assange and Manning?

Manning not only released documents that were under her care as an intelligence officer, but also broke into other systems. Regardless of whether you support what she did, she did so knowing the consequences of breaking her oath. In doing so, she made public wrongdoing, but also exposed sources that the US had promised would be kept safe.

Assange... well, that feels more like a case of karma. The Obama/Biden administration declined to indict him in relation to the Manning leaks. He then screwed with the 2016 US elections, blatantly stoking conspiracy theories, laundering Russia's hacks in service of Trump, and coordinating with the Trump campaign to time releases to blunt at least one scandal. In return, the Trump administration indicted him. I don't fully understand the case, so I won't comment on it.

Compare that to investigative journalism in general in the US. Journalists can publish pieces that are extremely critical of both the government and corporations. High up people regularly are dragged down from their perch by an enterprising reporter. Maybe newsrooms aren't as well staffed as they used to be, but it's not in the same league as countries like China, Russia, and Venezuela that lack anything resembling a free press.

Censorship in the West: we don't want that on our platform, person goes and finds a different platform.

Censorship under authoritarian governments: Criticize government? Straight to jail. Uncover wrongdoing by party official? Jail. Political opposition becoming more than controlled opposition? Believe it or not, jail.