KaiReeve

My entry point into Star Wars was KotOR so I've always been pretty critical of the average Star Wars media. I really enjoyed Rogue One, Andor, Mandalorian S1&2, and Clone Wars S7. Star Wars can deliver sometimes.

With a budget of $180M I was hopeful that Acolyte could be great, and it hasn't delivered yet.

My 2yo niece visited last week and wouldn't stop singing this.

Why does Communism require "true equality amongst its citizens?" What does that even mean, in practical terms?

Do you imagine a communist system that has social classes?

How would a group of people take advantage of this to form a "practical dictatorship?"

Castro, Zedong, Putin

Capitalism does not deploy the most efficient means of product delivery, but the most profitable...

You're arguing Communism on a philosophical level against capitalism on a practical level.

What of Marx have you read? Or any leftist theorist?

As I said, I'm not well read and unprepared for the higher level argument you are seeking here.

I can make some suggestions for reading material if you wish.

I appreciate your desire to educate, but I'm too busy being exploited by the current system to dive further into social philosophy. When you guys are ready to rise up I'll be there, but I won't be a part of the debate on which system we should implement going forward.

The recurring issue with Communism in practice is that it requires true equality amongst its citizens and there's always some asshole or group of assholes who want power and dominion over others, so it seems to repeatedly fall into a practical dictatorship.

Capitalism at its best requires businesses to find and deploy the most effective and efficient means of product delivery in order to compete with each other, which means that the consumer will always have the best product at the best price allowed by the market. The problem is that greedy assholes either conglomerate competing companies into monopolies, or otherwise collude with one another to maximize their profit margins.

I'm not well read in Marxism so I'm probably not qualified to answer this, but the recurring issue with Communism seems to be the same as capitalism, in that it requires people to not be assholes in order to properly function.

At the very least, they should raise real estate taxes on empty units. This will penalize people for owning several vacation homes, as well as incentivize landlords to lower rates in order to fill the unit.

Difficult to enforce, but send a few people to jail for real estate tax fraud and the rest will fall in line.

But this is 200 years before the fall. We're supposed to see how the Jedi lost their way. This is just a bunch of incompetent assholes with authority. The witches call them kidnappers and they barely deny it while nearly embodying it. Where's the honor? Where's the mysticism? Why must we continually suffer this bag of dicks while being told 'this is what they were always supposed to be.'

Well, according to China, those waters are their territory, which means that the presence of foreign military vessels is an invasion.

Practically speaking, I think you could call that area a contested region, so minor skirmishes like this are expected and could escalate to war (like Crimea eventually did).

I think that the Philippines approach has been something like, 'You can claim those waters if you want, but you can't possibly keep us from entering them, so we're just going to ignore you until you start killing our people, and then we're gonna call in big brother America.'

They did the Jedi so dirty. The council members are petty, the masters can't defend themselves against a sith apprentice, and the knights are constantly taking Ls on screen. The only one who seems mostly competent so far is the padawan Jecki.

Maybe it's someone who just happened to be hanging around

I'm more interested in seeing him kill a couple of the unnamed Jedi. Hopefully they handle it better then the first fight scene.

After the first 3 episodes felt like a 00's Disney teen sitcom I considered giving up on this show, but this week felt more coherent to me. The forests of Khofar is the best locale so far, the conversational writing has improved and so the acting feels more natural (mostly). I'm still not thrilled that the Jedi Order is being portrayed as mostly antagonistic, and I'm a bit concerned that the best episode so far is one in which very little happens, but the last scene actually has me excited for next week. Here's hoping that the second half overshadows the rocky start.

India is one of the last places I'd like to visit. This is based on how India has been portrayed in various travel shows over the years (Amazing Race, Top Gear). It looks crowded, dirty, and the locals often aren't very friendly, especially towards women.

One of your main exports to the west is scam calls. It's a huge PR problem and your government refuses to address it. Your other main export right now is Russian oil.

Indians used to have a fairly large online presence in English-speaking spaces with mixed results. There were a lot of helpful tech bros on YouTube, but also a lot of horny dudes on Facebook. I don't really see much of either of those anymore though.

My wife works in software testing and has regular interactions with Indians. Some are really nice, but others are really not. Misogyny is far too common and when Indians are rude they are boldly rude.