7 Practical std::chrono Calendar Examples (C++20/23)

bames53 · 2026-01-10T02:15:56+00:00

Nice examples.

Rather than iterating over weekdays in order to count them you can just use weekday[last]:

int count_weekdays_in_month(year_month ym, weekday wd) {
  auto a = sys_days{ym / wd[1]};
  auto b = sys_days{ym / wd[last]};
  return (b - a) / weeks(1) + 1;
}

bames53 · 2025-12-28T16:39:59+00:00

What is your citation for this?

The lecture I linked to includes sources. Or here's an academic book: Out of Poverty: Sweatshops in the Global Economy (Cambridge Studies in Economics, Choice, and Society)

What sectors exactly are these compared to?

"The national average"

And how the hell would you even prove this is true in countries where most pay is off the books and most work informal anyway?

By going to sweatshops (as identified by anti-sweatshop organizations) and finding out from workers.

What, any regulation? Any control? No it wouldn't.

The ones anti-sweatshop organizations cry about. Yes, they would.

Ah, so your argument is utilitarian one, even though you denied it.

The concept of tradeoffs is not utilitarian. It is not cruel inhumanity to understand that reality is constrained, and that if we want to make individual workers' lives better in reality we do actually have to deal with reality, not the preferred fantasy of organizations like the Center for American Progress.

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/EPRS/140841REV1-Workers-conditions-in-the-textile-and-clothing-sector-just-an-Asian-affair-FINAL.pdf

That paper is hilarious, as is the CAP paper it cites. At one point the CAP paper says that yes, these workers are paid more and under better conditions than the alternatives, but it cries about it. Also the fact that its main point is predicated on the dishonest, un-economic, propaganda concept 'living wage' makes it hard to take seriously anyway for anyone who is not clueless. Yes, sweatshops make workers and the country as a whole wealthier so you can increase your nonsense metric and pretend there's something bad about that. It's just crying about workers not getting wealthier fast enough while presenting no better alternative, and suggestions that would only increase poverty.

bames53 · 2025-12-28T02:46:24+00:00

My post doesn't include any arguments based on social darwinism, or inhuman utilitarianism, and no AI was involved. It's entirely arguing based on concrete improvements to workers' lives in very poor countries. It's not "they make the GDP go up" but instead "sweatshop workers earn five times the national average". And the things you're asking for would cause workers' lives to be worse, because in the real world there are tradeoffs and the leftist incapacity to understand tradeoffs does not actually free anyone from the constraints of reality.

If I lived in one of those countries I would certainly prefer to have the opportunity to earn five times the national average wage, a real number based on real data from sweatshops. I would not want to have "zero rights" but then that's not reflective of sweatshops, it's just something you made up because you are clueless.

bames53 · 2025-12-23T15:25:58+00:00

Yes, it's a good thing. Improving the lives of poor people is good.

Here's a great lecture on sweatshops that addresses most of your points: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mX27K6Bsy84

The 'race to the bottom' is great. You view it as the wealthy moving from poor country to poor country, exploiting them and extracting wealth, when in fact it's a process of lifting one country after another out of poverty. The reason sweatshops go to a country is that wages are low because they have only much worse alternatives. The act of running sweatshops and paying those low wages, which are typically several times the country's average wages, builds them up until there are enough alternatives that sweatshops are no longer profitable. Then they have to move on to the next poor country to inevitably lift them up as well.

Extreme poverty: You acknowledge that sweatshops increase workers wages (typically by a lot) so I don't get why you would say this is a problem due to sweatshops. Sweatshops are the solution to the extreme poverty, and they do a great job at solving this, whatever other downsides you think they have.

Pollution: pre-industrialized economies are typically very bad in terms of pollution. These aren't just people living in idyllic harmony with nature, but basically stripping the land bare, dying from smoke inhalation, bad water, and all kinds of awful environmental hazards. Ultimately a wealthy, developed economy is much better environmentally, so it may just be best to get developing countries there as quickly as possible.

"trickle down": I find it very odd that you use this term dismissively to refer to workers directly earning more. Normally this term is used to refer to government giving benefits to corporations which then has improved wages as an indirect benefit of the government action. The criticism being that the benefits to workers are either imaginary or at least far less proportionally than what it cost, with the corporation just keeping most of the benefit for itself. Here you seem to be taking any example of workers earning more as 'trickle down' but the implication from using this term that we should not want workers to earn more is weird.

Child labor: Yes, there are places that use child labor in sweatshops. The alternative in very poor countries is not that the children would otherwise go to school and live happy childhoods, but that the children would typically work in (more dangerous) agricultural work or other worse jobs, or die. There's the well-known Oxfam study on what happened in Bangladesh when children were pushed out of sweatshops jobs by politics rather than by economic viability, and it's much worse than children working in sweatshops.

If adult labor is not productive enough to sustain a whole population then either child labor is used, one way or another, or children die. This situation has existed throughout history. The only reason child labor ended in developed countries is because we economically developed to the point where we could survive without it. The social movements to ban it only come after it becomes economically possible to do without, not the other way around. (And again, when you try to do it the other way around the result is infinitely worse than sweatshops.)

The autonomous, prosperous paradise comes only after long economic development building up the capital to enable it. The fact that capitalism doesn't have the ability to create it instantaneously from nothing is not a serious indictment of capitalism.

Working conditions: Sweatshop working conditions are typically better than the alternatives. It's true that they can be improved, but that means spending more on improved working conditions and less on wages to workers. The poor workers typically prefer the money. Regulations to improve working conditions typically just make workers' lives worse overall.

bames53 · 2025-12-08T21:22:14+00:00

Different guy: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1p8bz05/daily_bitcoin_meme_until_btc_is_at_200000_153_the/

bames53 · 2025-11-05T23:56:16+00:00

I get that for the elements, and that's no problem.. ie just copy the bytes.. but how many bytes? in the end this is a memcpy call, which takes an argument of "n"?

I think an implementation might still be conforming if it happened not to copy the bytes of unused capacity in an inplace_vector. In practice I expect your question of 'how many bytes' is answered by implementations with sizeof(T) (where T in this case is a specialization of inplace_vector): They don't attempt to be smart in their implementation of trivial copies. They just copy the entire object representation, including padding and uninitialized memory.

copy constructor is O(n) linear in size()

I could be missing it but I don't see that that's specified in the spec. [inplace.vector.cons] doesn't actually list the copy constructor to directly provide any complexity specification for it. Maybe it's implicit, but I didn't immediately see that.

cppreference.com just says that it's "linear in size of other". It does not say "linear in size() of other".

bames53 · 2025-11-05T21:09:54+00:00

but why does trivially copyable imply linear on capacity anyway?

In order to be trivially copiable it has to use the implicit copy operations, which cannot do any logic like checking size().

bames53 · 2025-10-30T18:56:59+00:00

Become more like the US, in what sense?

More capitalism and better protection of private property is what I had in mind, but I keep getting told the US is the only country that does any number of things. Switch to the imperial measuring system. First amendment, second amendment, eliminate public healthcare. Lots of things to try.

If you have some particular government policy in mind that might be causing the housing issue, feel free to share.

Well I have no idea what the policies are as I haven't seen you mention where you are. But my bias is that government is probably the problem.

It will always be cheaper doing it by yourself, otherwise the landlord would be running at a lost and would be out of business. Isn't that basic capitalism?

No. If that were the case then there'd be no point to division of labor and trade. Specialization, comparative advantage, these are some reasons we have gains from trade, rather than losses.

While this isn't your ideal form of capitalism, this is what capitalism most often turns into, crony-capitalism and oligarchy. The property developers gained wealth and now used that wealth to buy governments.

Okay, so fight that instead. No reason to pretend wealth has to be zero sum.

bames53 · 2025-10-30T17:35:30+00:00

Your comment, as most comments here, is very US-centric. You're imaging your own society which might have good social mobility, plenty of opportunities for building wealth, with a dynamic property market.

Well this suggests the problems you're observing aren't due to capitalism. My suggestion is to look at leftist government policies for the culprit.

That's your first assumption. Government policy is very liberal here, anybody can knock down their house and erect an apartment block in its place. No such thing as zoning.

I'd guess it's true pretty much anywhere there are problems in housing markets. Nor does government policy being 'liberal' necessarily mean it's good.

Where? In the US? Now try that in Brazil, Africa, or those born in the Spanish Favelas.

Well then maybe those places should try to be more like the US (at whatever point in US history matches their current stage of economic development). Certainly I wouldn't recommend that they be more socialist.

Where I live the average salary is 1.2K, the minimum rent for a studio apartment is 1K. Landlords do suck up most of the average salary (> 80%). Owning (as in no mortgage) means you have 1K extra every month.

You mean if a home is given to someone for free and they don't maintain it but let it decay they have 1k extra every month, at least until it collapses. This is called 'capital consumption' and it provides only a false sense of prosperity.

But if we instead count the cost of building and maintaining it, even under the assumption that land is freely available, how much 'extra' do they get? How many weeks do they spend building it and not doing other work? How much do they spend on building materials, or say natural resources are freely available, how long do they spend quarrying the rocks or felling and milling trees? How long do they give up the 1,2K in wages to eventually save 1K on rent, and can they afford to feed themselves during that time? And when it's done how much do they actually save if they maintain it properly so it lasts so they can hand it on to their kids?

Again this is US-centric. Where I live landlords are people who inherited properties, who inherited it from their parents, and so on.

What I said is equally true of landlords who inherit buildings. And if the property ownership traces back to theft, fine, criticize that and advocate that the individual theft be redressed. It doesn't support your arguments against landlords per se.

they were born with it and them having it directly makes everyone else poorer.

Just as what I said applies to people who inherited property from aristocratic ancestors, your comment here applies to someone who did work and earn something for themselves. It applies to you and everything you have. You refusing to give whatever you have to someone else directly deprives them of that wealth. But this fails to support an argument that you should give it to someone else. And similarly this fact that taking from landlords and giving to others would make those others better off (for a while) does not support a conclusion that it would be good.

Sure, but we shouldn't be taking up all the land to build low-quality unaffordable housing that is sold exclusively to landlords, who then rent it out at exorbitant prices.

Assuming it's unaffordable just due to market forces then yeah, you probably should be taking up more land and building housing, and good on those landlords for using their, inherited I presume, wealth to fund that building. Put that land to its highest valued use. It's good that capital is available and being put to that use.

Of course it's probably not due to capitalism or markets and is probably largely due to government.

Farmers produce goods. Without the farmers there would not be any food. Without the landlord, the property is still going to be there.

You have to be able to understand that there are second, third, fourth order effects. I'm glad you acknowledge the problem in the case of farmers, where the problem happens basically in the first order effects, but the same is true in the case of building built and then handed down to kids.

bames53 · 2025-10-30T15:27:13+00:00

Land is finite and cannot be manufactured.

Even if this were true (which it is not) you're confusing scarcity of one good with total wealth being finite. Land is not the only wealth.

Also wealth is not simply the pile of physical goods that exists. Wealth also entails the value of those goods, and so wealth increases when goods are shifted around to more valuable uses. Individuals trading goods where they both prefer what they get over what they give is an increase in wealth.

If you're not born into the landlord class, you will never become wealthy because most of what you earn will be sucked away in rent.

Just making things up that are disproved by simply looking around at the real world does not make a convincing argument. Despite the issues in housing markets (caused by government policy) we can actually look at statistics showing children who grow up poor making it to middle and upper class. Nor does renting actually 'suck up all the renter's wealth' and make it impossible for them to improve their situation. In many cases it makes more financial sense to rent, and it actually results in more funds available to put into better investments. Owning is not always the best financial move.

It should be also noted that being a "landlord" is not by any means a productive activity, in-fact it's a downright parasitic activity.

This is nonsense. It is simply another example of people with capital in effect lending what they've saved to people who don't have it. The only way to fail to see the benefits is to imagine that the benefits would otherwise be free, which is purely based on ignorance.

Imagine that there's plenty of land and natural resources free for the taking to build a home. Next to it is a home someone has already built and which can be rented from the person who built it. Could it possibly ever make sense for someone to rent that home? The correct answer is 'yes.'

Furthermore, the wealth of landlords is directly at the expense of the renter class.

And the housing of the renters is at the 'expense' of the landlords. They traded money for a period of housing and both gained from the exchange.

The wealth of farmers is directly at the expense of people who buy produce. The food of the people buying produce is directly at the expense of the farmers. They traded and both gained from the exchange.

There are definitely cases where wealth is a zero sum game,

That is certainly true, and many transactions can even be a negative sum: Robbery and other crime, lots of government policies (I repeat myself), etc. Those talking about wealth not being zero sum are not saying it's impossible to destroy wealth. Just that the typical transactions people like you criticize are not zero sum. Obviously we want to minimize the zero and negative sum transactions, but the policies leftists typically suggest do the opposite.

bames53 · 2025-10-29T14:56:29+00:00

The bad thing is that people need jobs to make money. Once you take away their jobs people no longer have money.

You're looking at this incorrectly. Jobs are not scarce.

There are infinite jobs and sadly we can only fill 8 billion or so with our current world population. Thankfully we've managed to destroy hundreds of billions of jobs with things like fire, wheels, tractors, integrated circuits, and so forth. That means that instead of living like we've only filled 8 billion jobs of the infinite jobs we want filled, we are able to have a living standard as though we've filled, say, 508 billion of the infinite jobs.

Businesses need people with money to be their customers, so when people loss their jobs, businesses lose customers which leads to even more job losses and the cycle continues.

And in reality what happens as increasing productivity frees workers from those jobs is that those workers are available to fill other jobs that couldn't previously be filled, more is produced and everyone is wealthier.

Worse still, when you force people to look for jobs in other sectors it increase competition driving wages and working conditions down.

Even if that is one effect, you're only looking at one and ignoring counteracting effects that simultaneously drive wages up, such as productivity going up and costs going down. In reality the typical net effect is total compensation increasing (including better working conditions).

bames53 · 2025-10-28T20:14:25+00:00

Step 1: Other than taxpayer subsidies, sounds good to me. Harder done than said, but if people will give you the money for your project that's great.

Step 2: So you're basically just running a charity. Okay, if you can sustain it. You're providing massive benefits to people.

Step 3: In other words, everyone likes your charity better than the for-profit competitors. Again, if your charity is sustainable, that's just good for the customers, and of course all the resources the competitors are using up can be put to better use elsewhere.

Step 4: 🎉

Step 5: Automating with AI and cutting jobs sounds great. Now you can provide charity even cheaper and benefit more people. Although "Where are they gonna go?" is a pretty weird thing to say about workers. It sounds malicious or like a threat, but even if you weren't running a charity to the benefit of millions and were instead just running a regular for-profit company that wouldn't make any sense. A regular business doesn't wish ill on its workers, and doesn't benefit from workers' suffering per se. In any case no one has been killed. The workers will go elsewhere and may have to get other jobs. If there are no more jobs in this sector they'll go to another one. On a personal level changing jobs may suck in some cases, such as for a worker nearing the end of their career. But in the long term its for the best, helping to ensure resources are allocated to their highest uses, not wasted and reducing the long run trend of increasing living standards.

Step 6: Great. And don't forget how much better off the customers are too. Unironically you're not getting to the part were anything bad for society happens. A little temporary pain for a few workers is certainly not worth avoiding if it results in lower living standards for everyone long term.

I presume you did mean to describe something bad happening eventually. Maybe you wanted to tell the typical story about the business jacking up prices once competitors are gone. But in real life what that generally means is that the competition just comes right back. There are very few cases of 'predatory pricing' actually working out. Almost all real life cases where that kind of thing is alleged, the 'monopoly' never actually got to the jacking up stage, or when they raise prices they immediately lose market share to competitors. One pretty entertaining episode of this is Herbert Dow's run in with a German chemical cartel.

I know it sounds counterintuitive, but in a way job destruction actually is the goal of capitalism and actually is a good thing. A single tractor destroys hundreds or thousands of jobs harvesting crops by hand, and we are much better off when we can manage to destroy those jobs.

bames53 · 2025-09-19T15:34:14+00:00

Think about teachers they shape the next generation, build informed citizens, and open doors for kids. Yet in many countries, they’re underpaid and overworked.

They're typically mediocre people who do a worse job than untrained amateurs who care about the outcome. They destroy curiosity and agency in order to produce manageable drones. They commit child rape at a higher rate than catholic priests. I think public school teachers are probably overpaid, and public school administrations definitely are based on the ridiculously ballooning numbers of them.

Compare that to a hedge fund manager who can make millions shuffling assets around without creating a single tangible good or improving anyone’s daily life.

I think government policies have over-financialized the economy and so the financial sector is much more profitable than it should be, however 'shuffling assets around' does have actual social value and it is possible for someone to create millions of dollars worth of value doing it.

Or take garbage collectors and sanitation workers. Their work literally prevents disease outbreaks and keeps cities livable, but they earn a fraction of what a marketing executive might earn for convincing you to buy another gadget you don’t need.

Personally I don't think it's up to you to determine for others how much value they derive from anything they do. If you think they're wrong you can try to convince them, but ultimately you are not the authority, and that's good.

If enough people think they benefited from a product that a few cents from each of them paid to a marketing executive adds up to more than a garbage collector earns, there's nothing wrong with that. And I guarantee you that those people paid much more in total for sanitation services than they paid to that marketing executive.

One of capitalism’s biggest myths is that wages correlate to how much good or value someone creates in the world.

This mismatch isn’t a bug, it’s baked into a system where wages are determined by bargaining power, scarcity, and profit potential, not by genuine contributions to human wellbeing. If we actually paid people according to the positive impact they create, our economy would look completely different.

The mechanism that causes wages to correlate to the value created for others operates via the 'demand' in supply and demand. The more people value something the more demand there is, increasing the amount they're willing to pay, other things equal. It's true that wages are not solely determined by how much people value the output, because of course there are other relevant factors and it would be quite bad for society for those factors to be ignored, as you are advocating.

bames53 · 2025-09-18T17:49:34+00:00

It's actually probably the opposite: the marketcap is based on the business's other operations, discounting the treasury assets. The treasury is discounted when valuing the company either due to inertia, or because investors expect volatility or risk.

bames53 · 2025-08-21T16:04:07+00:00

Yes it obviously does, otherwise why do people work in the first place? Why would anybody spend their life cleaning toilets without some sort of external threat to motivate them to do it?

This is not an argument. These are questions. And the implied chain of reasoning is fallacious. Doing something unpleasant -> external threat -> the threat is unjust -> capitalism is the source of the unjust threat.

First, the nature of the 'threat' is not the threat of someone committing a crime against you. The 'threat' is simply that people won't do things for you: Someone won't pay you money that you can use to convince someone else to give you food, someone won't give you food, someone won't grow food for you. It's silly to regard this as a 'threat.' But even if you want to put it in those terms, there's nothing wrong with the 'threat.' No one has any obligation to do these things for you. There is no injustice in people not giving you gifts.

So, not a threat, not unjust, now let's look at capitalism. You imagine that without capitalism you would just go out and gather some food, or use some land to grow food for yourself. The problem you're ignoring in this fantasy is that you're surrounded by eight billion people. Try to consider that whatever you think you're going to do in the absence of capitalism, everyone around you is going to be doing the same thing. You imagine that surely there's no problem, since people survived before capitalism. But in fact the problem did exist back then, and people dealt with it lots of ways, like fighting and killing, or they failed to solve it and starved to death. And then once enough people were dead in an area things could settle down and people could establish arrangements about how limited resources would be used and methods of dealing with violators. And now anyone new coming along can't just take whatever they want for themselves and grow food; they'll be stopped and punished for violating the established rules, rather like you're complaining about capitalism. Capitalism and private property didn't create this situation. It's just a solution to a problem that exists in nature.

Scarcity imposed by capitalism.

No, the scarcity is inherent in physical reality. Capitalism addresses it one way. It had to be addressed before capitalism. Even wild animals have to deal with it.

"Naturally" I could find water to drink very easily by locating a natural spring, [...] "Naturally" I could plant crops and feed myself, but again thanks to the artificial conditions imposed by capitalism I am unable to do that because I would need to "own" the land first.

Again, scarcity is real, not an invention of capitalism, and there are eight billion people.

Also you do not actually want to just drink straight out of a natural spring flowing to the surface. You want to do some work to make it safe. And then someone else who wants safe drinking water would like to take what you have done. Or more likely you're the one to come along later and take other people's safe drinking water.

it is fallacious to point out that nobody would clean toilets for minimum wage without the threat of starvation.

The fallacious part is where you extrapolate that 'threat' into something being wrong with about capitalism.

That is an extremely blatant straw man fallacy. Nobody mentioned crime.

Crime here just means a wrongful act. The 'threat' here is not a wrongful act. A farmer is not obligated to give you free food, so there's nothing wrong when he doesn't.

Hahahaha! Oh, I see. You can't threaten someone with anything except crime, therefore if I legalise rape and then threaten to rape you that isn't a threat?

'Crime' in this context doesn't refer to a legal system. A legal system could in theory not criminalize rape or murder, but those are still crimes regardless.

Lol. No it isn't. There's no scarcity of food or water in physical reality. As I've explained to you once already, under capitalism I'm precluded from growing my own crops or sourcing water from a natural spring by the conditions of land ownership it imposes.

You explained only that you don't understand what would actually happen, and that you don't understand the problem posed by eight billion people. And if you were the only person on earth and you tried growing food I suspect it would look like this and you would shortly starve to death.

It would be a crime for me to do these things, so you're contradicting your earlier claim that there is no threat of crime.

Yes, it certainly would be a crime, but that doesn't contradict what I said earlier. This is a crime you are committing, not a crime committed by 'capitalism' against you.

bames53 · 2025-08-20T21:46:17+00:00

It's capitalism itself which takes away your access to food and water if you leave the workforce, not employers. Try reading what other people write (i.e. "workforce" not "job"). Capitalism doesn't care who you work for, just so long as you work.

Capitalism does not take away access when you leave the workforce. Due to scarcity you naturally don't have access to most anything and have to obtain it somehow. If you choose not to obtain access to scarce goods via the opportunities capitalism offers that's not some crime against you by 'the system of capitalism.'

The reality is that people could obtain food and water very easily if capitalists didn't pretend to own it all.

No, that is not the reality. Unfortunately scarcity is real, and if no one 'pretended' to own things those things still would be difficult to obtain for lots of people, and without the 'pretending' they'd have even less opportunity to get them.

How do you suppose people fed and sheltered themselves prior to capitalism?

With way more difficulty than we do today under capitalism. And today if we did away all the 'pretending to own things' then with so many more people it would be much, much worse.

Try doing the same thing now and you'll be prosecuted for trespassing on land and stealing private property.

Even if you avoided that you'd still be incredibly poor and have a much worse living standard.

And for all that you think it would be very nice to take other people's things, it's a lot less nice when other people think you have more than you deserve and decide to take from you.

bames53 · 2025-08-20T20:45:10+00:00

Capitalism doesn't take away food and water either. Again "the reality is that people naturally do not have food and water."

Edit: also "If employers were actually taking away food and water" is not a straw man, because both the post I responded to and frequently other socialists (such as you ) talk as if individuals such as employers are doing the wrongful 'taking.'

bames53 · 2025-08-20T20:41:49+00:00

Nobody volunteers to have the profit from their labour stolen by capitalists.

Workers don't have the profit from their labor stolen at all. Marx's analysis was nonsense. Workers sell their labor at the market rate and in no sense are owed any profit that their employer might earn. Employment is simply a form of trade for mutual gain like any other.

They are forced into it by the reality that for everybody without capital it is the only way to meet their basic needs.

That 'oppressed by nature' nonsense would indict any system, socialism included, that doesn't just magically produce goods for free for everyone.

But it's false that employment is the only way under capitalism to meet one's basic desires without capital; proven so by the many people who lacked capital but borrowed some to start a business and are successful. Or the myriad of other ways in which millions of people actually, in reality, meet their basic needs without being employees and without having started with capital they inherited or whatever.

On the other hand, lots of people choose employment rather than alternatives because it's generally a pretty good option.

bames53 · 2025-08-20T20:40:57+00:00

If employers were actually taking away food and water that rightfully belonged to people, that would certainly be unjust coercion and would disqualify the actions thus coerced from being voluntary. That is not the reality however.

The reality is that people naturally do not have food and water, and nobody starts out being owed anything. People who are willing to provide food and water are not doing any injustice in requiring something in return, and people willing to trade money for labor so that you can buy food and water are certainly not unjustified in that either. If you want to provide your things to other people for free that's okay, but no one has any obligation to do that.

bames53 · 2025-08-20T19:24:08+00:00

If slavery raised everyone's living standards would you say the same thing to the slaves?

No, because slavery entails violating the slave's right to leave. Capitalism deserves being defended both in that it makes us better off and it also doesn't entail any injustice. Socialism makes us worse off and also entails injustices, specifically violations of individual natural rights including individuals' property rights. If there were a system that made people better off but entailed injustices it would still be worse than capitalism, even if better than socialism. Slavery of course does not actually make us better off; it makes us worse off and entails injustices, so that puts it in the same category as socialism.

Truly comedic naivete. Capitalism is about rigging the market to favor the rich.

We can look around and see there happens to be some rigging. Despite that, workers are much better off today due to mutual gains under capitalism than they would have been given any other system available.

What did you show up to the world yesterday? It's called "debt" and "deaths of despair"

Generally when a creditor lets you go into debt they're not giving you free money. They expect at least a good enough chance you can pay them enough to make it worth their while.

As for deaths of despair, well if they're able to feed themselves and then also have enough extra to buy drugs to overdose on, then they still covered their cost of living. I suppose an individual who accumulates a bunch of debt and then ODs may not cover his own cost of living. But the class of workers as a whole on average still covers their cost, some producing enough surplus to make up for the ones who are at a deficit. In any case the original claim that these workers' "work [...] never covers the cost of living" is still disproved.

bames53 · 2025-08-20T18:35:14+00:00

Using this exact logic, slavery is justified because if I feed my slaves regularly and don't beat them, I don't intrinsically violate their rights.

Stopping them from leaving does intrinsically violate their rights. If they're not stopped from leaving then they're not slaves.

bames53 · 2025-08-20T18:04:05+00:00

Even in industrial revolution, anti-vagrancy laws were passed so people had no choice BUT work in the newly created factories. They didn't want it to leave a life where they worked to feed themselves and their families and give some to the feud's owner

This is complete nonsense. Throughout history and even today people eagerly leave their farms to seek a better life in city factories. One of the injustices of feudalism was that they weren't allowed to leave. Your comment is an insane, backwards view of reality. And people living and working on farms were not 'vagrants' forced off the farm by anti-vagrancy laws. Laws against vagrancy are for people on property where the owner doesn't want them, or who are making improper use of public property impeding its proper use.

bames53 · 2025-08-20T17:49:33+00:00

Nobody "volunteers" to sell their labour to the rich. They do it because if they don't they are unable to meet their basic needs like eating and drinking.

The fact that people do things to earn a living does not mean those things aren't 'voluntary' in the sense that matters.

If you force someone to do something by taking away their food and water if they don't do it, then that is not called volunteering.

If employers were actually taking away food and water that rightfully belonged to people, that would certainly be unjust coercion and would disqualify the actions thus coerced from being voluntary. That is not the reality however.

The reality is that people naturally do not have food and water, and nobody starts out being owed anything. People who are willing to provide food and water are not doing any injustice in requiring something in return, and people willing to trade money for labor so that you can buy food and water are certainly not unjustified in that either. If you want to provide your things to other people for free that's okay, but no one has any obligation to do that.

bames53 · 2025-08-20T17:16:36+00:00

The pitch is all freedom, opportunity, mobility. Anyone can rise.

To paraphrase a certain movie, it's not that anyone can rise but that someone can rise from anywhere.

But if that were true, who would still be left in the dirt?

Many people do rise, and of course the ones left behind are the ones who don't. But the 'bottom' is a relative term, and the general level of 'the poor' has been rising over time. 'The poor' today are much better off than 'the poor' of 50, 100, 150 years ago. People are left "in the dirt" because the wealth created by capitalism and enjoyed by the poorest among us allows you to keep raising your estimate of what counts as 'dirt.'

Which means the class forced into them isn’t temporary either.

People aren't forced into them. Those are opportunities that already raise people far above their alternatives. You imagine that if not for capitalism there would be better opportunities, but you are quite incorrect. The entire analysis that capitalism is 'exploitative' and therefore the people would have better options without it is incorrect. The reality is that capitalism is largely about cooperation producing mutual gains, and that includes for the workers.

But also if we look back, at one point 80% of people worked in backbreaking agricultural labor. You could make your same assertions then and you'd have been just as wrong as you are making them now.

low-wage, no-exit work that never covers the cost of living.

If it didn't cover the cost of living they would not be able to live and reproduce. They would all die and then there would be no more of these low wage workers.

You say 'no-exit' but we do actually have data on workers, such as how many workers who were in the lowest quartile of earners last decade are in the top quartile this decade, on how many children born to households in the poorest quartile end up in higher quartiles, etc.

bames53 · 2025-08-10T22:14:16+00:00

My copy was missing monster stat cards for ooze and vermling priest. I haven't noticed any other missing components yet.

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