Can't believe my firm has both Culling Strike and At Will Employment

It's because video game theory begets video game logic. It is further mediating and alienating yourself from reality as opposed to exposing yourself to it. The desire of the isekai isn't to experience reality with explicable video game mechanics, it is to escape reality into a world of explained video game mechanics. Language is already a mediation, further going to a world of metaphor is adding another layer of obfuscation.

I've never been opposed to it as an entry point, but it inevitably spirals into tier lists and meta talk, which are not compatible with Marxist thinking. If we are to make metaphors here, reality for Marxism is more like a 90's point and click adventure game than any modern game. There is alot more backtracking and absurdist puzzle solving than most people enjoy. Once the logic is uncovered, it makes sense, but usually only in hindsight, and sometimes not at all.

The only thing I do advocate for using videogames for is that the entire thing is a developed experience created by humans. No video game is naturally occuring, just like human society.

I really like this way of putting it, they are smart in videogames.

Yeah execution threshold is what’s familiar to me, but also that may be some residual WoW in my brain

Either misinformed or deliberate propoganda lol.

Esp love throwing in "socialized losses" in typical fedboi fashion.

For these people, the last resort is moving back to the villages and lay low.

I'm sure the homeless woman I watched die outside my apartment is grateful that she was given the freedom to freeze to death in an urban sidewalk as opposed to living in a rural area where the state guarantees land. Which mind you is the unattainable end goal for most people my age. And before you go on your liberal diatribe about how much rural china sucks I've been there and it's still better than 90% of the planet.

In China, because of so much wealth has been tied to the real estate, letting the housing bubble burst would cause unmitigated chain reaction across the financial sectors and even spread to the real economy, so the government has to provide a “soft landing” by any means necessary.

Famously the 2008 Financial crisis never involved government bail-outs of any kind and never had any effects on the financial sector. This of course has never had any real world consequence^1^ which definitely didn't turn the city Detroit into a ghost town.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008%E2%80%932010_automotive_industry_crisis#United_States

The key here is government providing “soft landing” by socializing the costs - using the national wealth to slow the plunging property prices. This way, when the house finally drops to $500k, you are not losing $500k, but that loss has been spread to 5 other buyers, as well as many others’ to prop up/slow the falling price. The cost is thus socialized. This translates to people working longer hours for lower wages, with their wealth being used to provide a soft landing, but at least you won’t see large scale “falling off the kill line”. In this sense, the working class took on the burden experienced by the home-owning middle class, and cushioning their losses.

This paragraph is completely nonsensical and betrays a lack of understanding of both liberal and marxist economics. Like a garbled zhihu post. A slow deflation is how bubbles are supposed to end. I don't see how your alternative of allowing it to pop and create another 2008 financial crisis would benefit the working class. The same reduction in demand would exist in both cases, except in one case you have mild deflation and unemployment and on the other side case you have total economic collapse. Btw your whole "working class" "middle class" distinction is neoliberal nonsense, as is your "using their wealth to provide a soft landing" narrative.

You need to understand what 90% homeownership in China actually means.

In China, your hukou (i.e. where you are born, or rather, the residence of your parents) determines your access to housing, education, healthcare, pension/insurance and public utilities in the urban areas. There are ~40% of people with rural hukou registration that are effectively barred from what urban citizens get to enjoy - not completely, but it’s extremely limited.

Currently, there are ~300 million migrant workers (农民工) in China (~40% of the 700+ million total labor force, and nearly the entire population of the US!) who work in the cities but their rural hukou registration limits their access to housing (and education for their kids - both are connected, see below).

Migrant workers are the true underclass that makes your cheap iPhones and build all those amazing infrastructure across China, yet because of their rural hukou registration, are not entitled to public utilities in the cities they work in, because technically they are not residents of the cities they work in. Your home is tied to the village/provincial town you came from. This allows the municipal governments to exploit their labor while providing minimal services in return. (Remember, there is no personal income tax in China (only 70 million people have to pay income tax), the most important tax revenue is value-added tax, so the more labor hours being squeezed out of the workers, the higher tax revenues the local governments receive).

Similarly, employers are not obligated to contribute to pension funds and insurances (五险一金) so migrant workers usually get screwed the worst because they have little to no safety net if they get sick or become unemployed.

It is class division based on where you’re born.

Now, on to housing, more than 60% of them live in rental units, ~20% live in company-provided hostels/dormitories (shared living spaces) and a proportion of them (~20%) did purchase houses (especially with marriage and kids) but mostly in the provincial towns. A lot of them were scammed into purchasing houses because the local governments, in an attempt to drive up land prices, tied education resources to housing, and effectively coercing these migrant working class families to purchase a house in the county in order to even have a chance of sending their kids to public schools due to the points-based system that prioritizes home ownership:

According to Prof. Wang Ou’s research (see my linked article above):

So, how much does it cost for a migrant worker to buy a home in the county? While staying in newly purchased apartments of migrant workers, I calculated the expenses carefully. In a county in southern Jiangxi, homes cost 6,000–7,000 RMB [$852-994] per square meter; in a county in western Guangxi, 4,000–5,000 RMB [$568-710]. A 100-square-meter shell apartment plus full fit-out costs at least 600,000–700,000 RMB [$85,215-99,418]. This is an enormous burden—often draining the savings of two generations and still requiring loans for ten or twenty years.

And this was back in the 2010s, when the property prices were still appreciating. You can imagine how these migrant workers are now having a much harder time paying mortgage for the next 10-20 years as the economy is undergoing deflation. All of those who bought houses after 2017 are getting screwed.

Also, your linked article was from 2016… when the property prices were appreciating like crazy. That illusion has been shattered since 2021.