rectang

The racial slurs are critical as Twain used them to indict the culture of the antebellum American South, and not to endorse its prejudices. When Huck Finn chooses "All right then, I'll go to Hell" by helping Jim, he goes against his ingrained social training as a white Southerner.

People who want to censor Twain misunderstand his message, either out of ignorance, or purposefully so as to take the sting out of Twain's social commentary and rewrite history.

Perhaps you can think of some works of literature set in India where characters utter analogous slurs, and the purpose of the author is to criticize the caste system?

I don't trust Maytag and GE. It's good that they have simple interfaces and lack surveillance tech, but their cheap machines are almost certainly built for price-driven consumers who don't consider that they are built to fall apart.

Household appliances have been around for a long time now. I wish that there were open-source hardware designs that a certification organization could evaluate.

Who can tell which Whirlpool appliances are actually quality? It's so hard to trust anybody. Between the short-time-horizon thinking of public companies driven by the share price and the brand cannibalism of Private Equity, the brand you thought was reliable a couple years ago is today dialing up short-term gains so that its current leadership can gut the company and retire.

Reviews are so easily gamed that it's hard to trust them. Only companies with small product lines can build and maintain a durable reputation for quality.

I'm about to buy a Speed Queen TR7 washing machine. It feels great to buy a dumb appliance that's built to last and serviceable.

No spyware and featuritis a la kings of user-hostilility LG and Samsung.

No planned obsolescence from built-to-disintegrate brands living off ancient reputations like Whirlpool and Maytag.

Just a machine that I won't have to worry about from a company that makes money by providing value rather than by victimizing their customers.

Has there ever been a "Stop political texts" ballot initiative?

When real income goes up 15% but rent goes up 75%, people are absorbing a cost, not flaunting their wealth.

To escape the "communist" critique, I think it's worthwhile to grapple with opposing all concentration of power, whether private or public, governmental or corporate.

For instance: marketplace competition requires some regulation, but recognizing that regulation is a necessary evil with many opportunities for abuse (e.g. regulatory capture) helps inoculate against socialism's worst excesses.

I agree, but I don't think many wealthy people are open to that perspective. Many seem to credit themselves with having created an environment where everyone's lot is improving in absolute terms, and don't see anything wrong with accumulating outsized relative power for themselves.

The reluctance to give up resources also an understandable aspect of human nature, but power concentration in the hands of the few is always problematic. I'm very much a capitalist but the last few decades have persuaded me that wealth taxes are a necessary and moral correction to capitalism's unfortunate spiraling acceleration of inequality.

Then can we agree on a government funded safety net for the sake of labor mobility? ;)

Typically the real disagreement here is over whether workers should get benefits at all.

EDIT: can we get another `vouch` or two for groundzeros2015's currently [dead] reply? It's well-argued and an olive branch and deserves to be visible.

> the average number of hours worked per worker have fallen

Hooray for just-in-time scheduling where workers have to be available full time but rarely get scheduled full time. It’s an innovation that has been great for capital and terrible for labor.

Everyone in your filter bubble is not "everyone else".

The specific legal arguments made in this video are hedged and sober. For example, Stone doesn't play to popular sentiments about expansive EULAs — he notes that the liability for listening devices like LG TVs is at most limited to guests and others who haven't consented to being recorded by clicking on the EULA agreement.