Do you have any suggestions? That's the whole problem with all this anti-capitalism talk: no one ever has any kind of suggestions.

We don't have Plato's original manuscripts. Those copies have sure come in handy. We don't have Caesers' De Bella Gallico, yet those copies are nice. I can list hundreds of examples.

Don't underestimate the importance of copies.

The best option, obviously. I pointed out alternatives which some places have tried (or are currently trying), and they're so much worse that I don't consider them realistic alternatives. Why would you want to try a system which others have tried and were complete disasters?

It's very simple: in modern societies, the only economic system which has worked decently at all is capitalism. It isn't perfect by any means, has a lot of problems, and in my opinion needs a very strong dose of government regulation to keep things running smoothly and to keep corporations from gaining too much power and influence. If someone can point to something better, let's see it. All I see is people bitching about capitalism, without any realistic alternatives at all.

I'm a rather pragmatic person usually, so that means I normally judge things based on results rather than speculation. So far, the places in the world which have achieved the highest standards of living have been nations with capitalism economic systems. The ones at the very top are European nations, particularly in Scandinavia, where they have capitalist systems combined with strong government regulation and social services. So to me, that seems to be the best model to emulate. Now, I'm not completely against trying new things, but I've never even heard of any realistic ideas for alternative economic systems besides capitalism and soviet-style command economies. When people complain about capitalism, all I ever hear is bitching and complaing and bashing, but never any kind of constructive commentary or suggestion.

The problem is that everyone works from the assumption that capitalism is mandatory.

Um, it *is* necessary. Or do you have a better idea for an economic system, which actually has been proven to work somewhere in the real world outside of some primitive tribal culture? The Russians tried something different for a while, but that was a disaster, and the North Koreans are still trying something like that, and it's a complete disaster.

Not that much. One big factor is that in the US, you have to bring a lawsuit. This means you need to pony up $10,000 to pay a lawyer's retainer fee. How are you going to afford that when you're unemployed? Now, if the case is especially blatant and ridiculous, you can probably find a lawyer to take it on "contingency", meaning you pay nothing but he gets 1/3 of the proceeds, if any. It's a big gamble for the lawyer, so they only do this for "slam-dunk" cases, which usually result in a quick settlement without going to trial.

So, if your case is not a "slam dunk", because you probably were fired for good reason, or the company really was doing poorly and needed to eliminate people, then you're not going to get anywhere.

Sorry, I'd rather live in a world where people around me are not in a constant state of fear and stress.

Me too. However I do wonder how much a lot of this is exacerbated by all the open-borders immigration we've had lately. Why should employers bother giving nice benefits to employees when there's a limitless pool of dirt-poor people who'll happily take these jobs for any pay at all?

Are you sure about that? The US unemployment numbers are well-known to be completely bogus, because they only track people who are recently unemployed. The *real* number to look at is the "labor force participation" rate. The current rate is the lowest in 35 years. And even this doesn't track underemployment. There's a lot of well-educated people doing shitty retail jobs these days.

I think when people make statements like this, they're consciously or subconsciously confining their commentary to industrialized, mostly western nations. Everyone knows there's a bunch of shitholes in Africa with little more than warlords for government, such as Somalia, so I think people just omit these places when they're comparing countries like this.

So while I think it is useful to put things into perspective by comparing France with its EU neighbors like Italy and Greece and Portugal, trying to minimize how bad the US is for workers by saying "The US isn't bad! Somalia is much worse!" isn't really helping things.

I mostly agree, but it does seem like France is a little too extreme. I wonder if Germany is a better middle ground? They don't seem to be as extreme as France, their industry seems to be doing really well (they're the world's biggest exporter), plus their language is cooler and probably easier to learn for English speakers. And from what I've seen, the cost of living there isn't bad.

When had Google ever shut down a service with little or no warning? They always give you plenty of time, typically a year, to move somewhere else. It's annoying, for sure, but it's not like a HDD dying and taking all your bits with it.

I have maybe 100GB of photos. I could upload that lot in a couple of nights, or less than one day. As it happens I don't rely on Google to back my photos up, but if the encrypted cloud service I do use went down it wouldn't be a problem to move to a different one. It's only crazy to rely on the cloud if you somehow manage to get yourself into a situation where the cloud has unique files you don't have locally, which in the case of a backup clearly isn't the case, or if you are somehow unable to switch to another service.

Assuming it's only a monthly commitment I'd pay for it for a few months a year, so I can binge. Of course it isn't actually available in my country, so for now I'll just carry on pirating.

The employees get paid out of the assets that are sold off as part of the bankruptcy. I'm not an expert on French law but employees usually come pretty high up the order of who gets paid first in instances like this.

That's not correct. In France, as in most of Europe, it's standard for severance pay to increase with the amount of time worked. More over, the general expectation is that companies should try to avoid firing people. They can offer training, or move them to anther position first.

We are trying to avoid the race to the bottom that the US finds itself in, where people are discarded the moment someone slightly cheaper comes along. Shit jobs are a false economy for society, which is why living standards in France are so much better than most of the US.

Well, (D) and (R) often represent different corporations. There's only a few, like the investment banks and cable companies who bribe everyone.

I'm not outright against some manned missions, I just don't think they should be our top priority and shouldn't crowd out robotic exploration of new places. A manned "space race" is unlikely to get us much relative to other options.

In addition to the robotic missions I mentioned, powerful telescopes that can detect and do spectrographic analysis of planets of other star systems would be far better science than more manned missions to local rocks. We could detect another Earth with clear-cut life signs, for example. That would be a bigger discovery than simple microbes on Mars (which robotic sample return missions can perform).

There would be no Saturn V, no Falcon HR etc.

They are cool in the "wow, big!" sense, but maybe we don't really need them right now.