another non-solution to the affordability crisis? Colour me shocked

What is this even supposed to mean!? I guess the reader needs to only see Russia as some mythologized evil to make that sentence make sense with the rest of the article.

This has truely been a wonderful thing to see. I do wonder about what actions will be taken by the west in response to this.

At least 小红书 seems to be in the position that they want to allow the western users to keep using their platform non-region locked.

So often our whole world is just the things on the screen in front of us. Everything around us is filtered out and ignored.

However, every once in a while, that small piece of light ceases to be a world and becomes just a screen. The physical glass and electronics lose their status as a world and become just the physical objects. You now notice how they feel, how the borders of the device look, how it sounds to tap on it. The rest of the room comes into focus and your mind realizes that there is a world outside the room. The room, the screen, the whole world, shaped by other humans fills you with hope and sadness. You realize you live on just one spec of dust in a vast cosmos. But that spec is important and precious, because it is where you, and everyone else is. All these things are real, all have a story to tell. The people all have wants, fears, desires, but your interactions with them are superficial, mediated by tiny interactions, or just through the physical stuff they made which you interact with. You want to scream and cry from the sublime understanding of it all.

As quickly as it arrived, it is gone, the screen beckens you back and the world fades away into the background and you become immersed in the digital realm once again. Your eyes and brain filtering out everything but the screen, your fingers nothing more than a means of changing the screen, your body and mind, no longer important, is forgotten.

This is quite the change. I'm excited to see how it plays out. The one thing that bothers me is that the recommendations of the employee councils are not binding, but it's far better than not having it at all. Hopefully in practice any company that goes against employee desires will be penalized in some tangible way.

The way I see it is that at least 4% of the workforce will have a say in how the companies are run, and those 4% will be elected by the other 95%. Good law, will probably be popular.

It was always projection. It's honestly comical how often that is the case.

I think more important than co-op organizational structure would be a question of work place democracy. Are the workers given say over how their work is undertaken, do they have power over decisions? Ultimately under capitalism we are limited by the need to make enough profit to reproduce the business. The form that business takes when given those constraints can only be on some level exploitative.

The best you can do as an owner or part owner in the case of coops is to listen to your employees needs and compensate them as much as possible given the constraints of the budget.

The problem, as always, with capitalism is that exploitation goes into overdrive when the goal is to make a profit above the cost of production (including labour inputs) and this there is pressure to keep wages down and force longer hours.

If we had an unbiased look at his employees perspective and the finances, we could judge if he is engaging in profit making, or just earning enough to keep the lights on and to keep product moving. We can only take him at his word at this point.

Are there issues with this format, probably, but in the final analysis, will another pro communism propagandist be beneficial for the cause?

It's so nice to read these missives. They are so inspiring and the positive messages feel so genuine. The challenges are acknowledged, but they are not used in a decisive way.

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I'm here for it.

This is a great resource. Definitely saving this for later.

It's interesting to see the World Bank data with increasing share of income for the poorest segments of their society.

The data older than 2010 though shows the trends were not always so positive. Glad to see that they were able to make a turnabout and are on a good pathway right now. Long way to go, but their plans have paid off and things are on the up.

I genuinely recommend reading the book, it won't take you that long.

Key points I got are:

1. Summary of the US policy toward Russia post USSR up to present

2. There is a history of NATO moving east, and also a history of US weapons testing near the border and backing out of nuclear and arms treaties.

3. Preliminary integration of Ukraine military and economy prior to any admittance into NATO, effectively making them an arm of NATO without formal admission

4. A bunch of other history which contextualizes things. Seriously good extra context if you are not familiar with the history.

5. Ultimately, the US and NATO are far more at fault for the tensions that led to the current crisis.