am·bi·tion

A strong desire to do or to achieve something, typically requiring determination and hard work.

Lost me at the end there.

Except a chain email doesn't have random commenters who link to the original or archives of the original

https://archive.is/Fv1u6

“Fw:fw:fw:re:re: LOOK AT THIS Fw:Fw: Huge Science News (copy

The reason those existed at all was because of how massively popular they were from the standpoint of short, sensational bites of information. That has never changed, but our reach and methods for sharing that kind of shit has increased by light years.

Ok boomer 🤣

If you're actually doing ANY level of community organization, you're objectively better than most people on here. At least take that with you.

And next time you do organizing, and you should do it again, learn the right lessons. Target the right people with the right message. Promote in the appropriate places, create the kind of stir, buzz or drama that would get media attention, and so on.

No great activist or anyone who has changed the world had success from start to finish. At least if you've done it before, you know how to start it again, and that's a huge obstacle for most people, just knowing what to do once they get off the couch. Now keep adjusting from there.

Sadly many people don't have the time money and energy to support a movement.

Most people need support, and don't have much to give.

You'd be surprised at the amount of people that think they are unable to make change.

I fucking wish they'd spend the money on yachts.

At least the yacht sales man would get the billions and use it to buy a house, so the home owner would get the billions and use it buy a car, so the car sales man would get billions and use it buy cocaine, so the drug dealer would get billions and use it buy food.

Billionaires buying yachts would actually feed the poor. But they don't. They just hoard it in their dragon lairs for no good reason.

The basic-needs approach to measuring poverty sometimes yields dramatically different results from the World Bank method, depending on the provisioning systems that are in place. This is clear in the case of China, which we explored in a recent paper, and which provides an important example (Sullivan et al., 2023, Sullivan and Hickel, 2023). The World Bank’s method suggests that extreme poverty was very high during the socialist period, and declined during the capitalist reforms of the 1990s, going from 88% in 1981 to zero by 2018. However, the basic-needs approach tells a very different story. From 1981 to 1990, when most of China’s socialist provisioning systems were still in place, extreme poverty in China was on average only 5.6%, much lower than in other large countries of similar GDP/capita (such as India and Indonesia, where poverty was 51% and 36.5% respectively), and lower even than in many middle-income countries (like Brazil and Venezuela, where poverty was 29.5% and 32%, respectively). China’s comparatively strong performance, which is corroborated by data on other social indicators, was due to socialist policies that sought to ensure everyone had access to food and housing at an affordable price. However, during the capitalist reforms of the 1990s, poverty rates rose dramatically, reaching a peak of 68%, as public provisioning systems were dismantled and privatization caused the prices of basic necessities to rise, thus deflating the incomes of the working classes

you're telling me China isn't socialist??

maybe this Hickel guy is just a globalist imperial plant…

It is worth highlighting that the World Bank’s approach to poverty is convenient, from the perspective of capitalism, because it celebrates any increase in any form of production as a “solution” to poverty. Of course, for capital, the primary objective of production is not to meet human needs, or to achieve social progress, but to maximize profit, including by constantly increasing commodity production (Wallerstein, 1996, Wood, 1999).

And the core economies, including Denmark, cannot reasonably be used as a benchmark for development, because they have high levels of excess production and consumption, they dramatically exceed sustainable boundaries, and – as we described in the introduction – they rely on imperialist appropriation.

The UK has a GDP/cap of $38,000 (2011 PPP), representing very high levels of aggregate production and consumption, and yet 4.7 million people in that country do not have secure access to nutritious food (Francis-Devine et al 2023). Despite sustained GDP/cap growth in recent decades, most high-income countries have witnessed an increase in extreme poverty, as measured by the BNPL.

hmm 🤔

abs amazing paper 👏

you da real MVP here

I don't disagree with you, but why, then, did evolution land on making us so damn greedy and selfish?

There's always a boundary of cooperation. Like, the wolf pack that cooperates among themselves but fights other wolf packs for territory. Our closest neighbours in the animal kingdom, chimps, fight brutal wars between different groups. And, even among groups that cooperate on the surface, there's often cheating behind the scenes. Like, birds are well known for forming pair bonds that last for life but apparently adultery among birds is very common. The best strategy for a society may be cooperation, but the best strategy for an individual in a cooperative society may be occasional cheating if you can get away with it. Even plants compete for resources like soil and sun.

A computer model of a civilization might show that the optimum result is achieved with 100% cooperation. But, we aren't computer programs, so we need to find a society that's as good as possible given the constraints of our animal nature. It's actually pretty remarkable that we've created countries containing hundreds of millions of people who feel some sense of shared identity, and are willing to cooperate at least a bit with strangers from that same country.

On the subject of "reaching the stars", the space race is the perfect example of competition. There's no way that Sputnik would have been put into orbit, or humans onto the moon if it hadn't been for a massive competition between the USSR and the USA. Within those two societies there was a great deal of cooperation, but humankind wouldn't have "reached the stars" from cooperation alone.

Does forcing people to do what you want also count?

Those morons don't even appear to live particularly well honestly.