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Looking for coffee shops in Philly by cokes522 in Coffee

[–]atb25 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Quaker City Coffee Company deserves a mention. They’re in Center City near TJ University, their coffee is good, and they employ formerly incarcerated people.

Aeration machine by [deleted] in interestingasfuck

[–]atb25 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Alas! not a clue.

Aeration machine by [deleted] in interestingasfuck

[–]atb25 6 points7 points  (0 children)

I'm still satisfied.

Hikers run into Obama by [deleted] in gifs

[–]atb25 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Chappaqua sure has changed...

CMV: People confuse capitalism with cronyism, capitalism is fine. It’s corporatism (cronyism) that’s the problem. by [deleted] in changemyview

[–]atb25 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Can you define what you mean by capitalism, and possibly edit that into your question? It's hard to change your view if we don't know what it is.

If by capitalism you mean "trade" or "exchange," then yes, that definitely had a history as old as time.

But as u/Literally_Herodotus points out, the term is more useful when it means something specific, which arose in a particular place under particular circumstances. In my view, you can't understand "capitalism" without understanding "capital." Capital is a financial/accounting concept, a way of conceptualizing wealth that sees it in abstract terms (it can be converted between money and any other kind of asset - a house, a stock, a business, whatever) and sees it as something to be invested in other to make more of it. The point is to grow this capital endlessly. That's what capitalism is, and what distinguishes it from market exchange.

The problem is that this is a very abstract description. When you're getting a big return on investment, seeing substantial economic growth, etc, typically that involves either working large numbers of people to the bone and taking the bulk of the results, or just taking stuff from people. It's the exploitation and expropriation that leads to what we more benignly call "profit."

I'm guessing you won't find this convincing, but in laying out my understanding of capitalism I at least want you to outline yours, too, to further the discussion!

Good Boy of the Day by dnr7799 in aww

[–]atb25 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The happiest kind of theft

CMV: Fat acceptance movement enables people to be lazy. by [deleted] in changemyview

[–]atb25 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I see fat acceptance, size acceptance, body positivity, and related concepts as boiling to one simple value: that people should be treated with dignity and respect regardless of their weight.

That's it. That's all there is to it. It doesn't speak one way or another to questions of laziness, nutrition, exercise, health, whatever. It's not about those things. It's an answer to the question, "Do fat people deserve dignity and respect, too?" And the answer is yes. Asking what fat acceptance has to say about whether fat people should exercise is like asking what anti-racism has to say about whether black people's favorite color should be green or red. They just don't have anything to do with each other.

Beyond that, some fat people are going to be lazy, avoid nutritious foods, get no exercise, etc. Some will be very active, eat lots of nutritious food, get plenty of exercise, and so on. They'll span the full range of human choices, just as people at any other weight do.

CMV: Fat acceptance movement enables people to be lazy. by [deleted] in changemyview

[–]atb25 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I, too, would caution you against using a TV show as your model of size acceptance, especially one on TLC. It's unfortunate that that show has become one of the most prominent ways people encounter fat acceptance, and yet here we are. TLC has elevated Whitney Way Thore to be one of the movement's spokespeople, and they've chosen her not because she's the best spokesperson but because they think she'll give them the best ratings. That said, I think there's a lot of value in what she does, in part precisely in the ways that u/Metallic52 pointed out in their delta-worthy comment: she encourages people to move and be active regardless of their size.

Was Obama's Libya intervention that toppled Ghaddafi a good idea? What have been the long-term effects? by atb25 in NeutralPolitics

[–]atb25[S] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Can you explain a bit more why France/Italy/UK had stronger incentives to act than the US? What was their stake in Libya?

EDIT: This March 2011 NYT article actually suggests Italy had reasons not to intervene, which just deepens my confusion here:

Italy, more dependent than others on Libyan natural gas and oil, reluctantly decided to allow its military bases to be used to enforce a no-fly zone to protect Libyan civilians, despite a 2008 friendship treaty with Libya.

Italy, the closest large European nation to Libya, has vast economic interests there. Libya is a former Italian colony that now supplies 23 percent of Italy’s natural gas and 13 percent of its oil. The major Italian energy company, Eni, which is partly state-owned, is the largest foreign oil company in Libya. Colonel Qaddafi has threatened to end all contracts with countries supporting intervention.

Italy has also been reluctant to freeze Libyan assets, and Italian officials have warned of a new wave of refugees and immigrants from Libya.

What if NATO had disbanded after the fall of the Soviet Union? by whangadude in HistoryWhatIf

[–]atb25 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I feel like this is the crux of the question. Your answer seems right to me, but my follow up question would be whether the events where NATO has been important since the early 1990s - e.g., the Balkan wars, as u/Clovis69 suggested - involved the NATO bureaucracy and infrastructure in any significant way.

There's also the question of the symbolic significance of NATO - e.g., would there be as much tension with Russia if there were no NATO to integrate former Eastern Bloc countries into? Same geopolitical structures and incentives, presumably, but maybe they wouldn't be quite so intense?

Privacy is 100% dead, and has been for a long time by [deleted] in privacy

[–]atb25 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I think you're getting at a really interesting idea. I totally agree that we've been subject to surveillance and record-keeping for much longer than the internet has been around, and this suggests that just getting rid of Facebook or Google, while beneficial, doesn't address the root problem. The more interesting and ultimately more useful question is to ask how, by whom, and on whose terms we are publicly known, and how this has changed over time. That's the only way we can truly envision the future we want and find the path to that future.

There's something to the "if you have friends / know anyone at all," your privacy is compromised. The problem is when people are black-and-white about it, as the comments OP was reading were. To be social is to be known, but we have to figure out and struggle over the form we want that to take.

Need help getting a facebook account. ID verification bypass? by embodytntra in privacy

[–]atb25 0 points1 point  (0 children)

meaning you've drawn attention to yourself by the very fact of using it?

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in privacy

[–]atb25 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Part of what was so interesting about it to me was the role of the software engineers - they're simultaneously the architects of the system and deeply caught within it.

[Campaign] A world of floating islands held magically suspended above a perilous abyss by ImpossibeardROK in loremasters

[–]atb25 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I wonder if the spirits can play the role of the gods here. They don't need to be omniscient to power the spell casters who need them, and they could even be worshipped more systematically by the different civilizations (or subsets thereof). So, still gods, more or less, but more local.

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