If I took your property by force, it'd be OK to kill you if you tried to take some property from me because I'd just be concerning myself with my interests, right?
I just want to be clear about the basis on which you're arguing.
Through support for Ethiopia, America in large part contributed to the instability in Somalia which produced the pirates. To band-aid over the symptom of the disease you caused is less beneficial to everyone, including your own people.
Hazel: UNCLOS. Dails: *armed with only ignorance and the Internet* That's about maritime safety! You're spinning! Hazel: It has sections related to ownership on the seas. Let me highlight some for you. Dails: But it has stuff about maritime safety in it!
In other news, a car is for holding cups because some cars have cup holders in them.
So, which parts of the rules on exclusive economic zones and the continental shelf documented in UNCLOS "aid safety of navigation"? You're embarrassing yourself.
To solve a problem, you look for a cause. It has everything to do with American aggression: specifically, wanting to keep Ethiopia as an ally.
The piracy is a symptom and "oh we're just protecting the freedom of [oil tankers to carry our legitimately obtained oil over] the seas" is a hilarious excuse.
(1) This is the bit where you deny that European and American influence has anything to do with the existence of these pirates in the first place. It's so easy to push desperate people into doing something which, on the face of it, seems so unreasonable that you can hand wave the right to sail half way across the world to stop them.
(2) While the US extending its territorial claims (i.e. countering the "freedom of the seas") was one of the moves bringing about UNCLOS, the US is - as always in matters like these - one of the few states not to have ratified. The "freedom of the seas" to the US means nothing more than the freedom to selectively enforce the interests of whoever has the Navy's ear - sometimes not even the Navy itself.
Here's my proposal: do nothing. For once, America, keep your fucking nose out of another continent. I realise it'd be lovely to pincer what with being under your best buddies (when they're not killing you and/or women in general) the Saudis, so this will be hard for you. "Secure the horn of Africa"? What is this, the 18th century?
Also, when the US does it = securing. When Somalians do it = piracy.
As usual, if the US wanted to, they could wipe out Somalian piracy within hours. The real question: who stands to profit from a long, drawn-out, ineffective war?
I think it makes little sense to try to make so broad and vague a statement as "the system's biased against blacks".
"I deny out of hand the elephant in the room."
Cities have high concentrations of poor folks, who are black. When you are in that situation, it can be difficult to get out (bad education, high crime, etc).
Yes, under capitalism, it's almost impossible. Something capitalist being "the system".
That doesnt mean the system is "trying" to hold them down, just that having no money, poor upbringing, and poor education tends to be a cycle that grows on itself.
Under capitalism.
I will note that not ONLY do we live longer (granted, by a small margin) than folks in your precious Cuba
Per the UN, no you don't, not within any margin of error. Considering you're supposedly the richest, bestest, mightiest, unembargoed-for-decades country in the world, that is pathetic.
, on average, than folks in Cuba-- seeing as their national per-capita GDP is under $10k, and our poverty line is around $11k
You are really clutching at straws. Comparing the per capita GDP (a mean, not a median!) in one socialist-ish country with the poverty line in a much more expensive capitalist-ish country to determine that the latter's population are better off? Do you know why that is nonsensical? Do you even know how to calculate GDP and the nature of Cuba's currency system?
GDP is a crappy measure of quality of life. Adjusted for purchasing power, look at countries with higher GDP than the US and ask yourself whether you'd have preferred to live there or in the US over the past couple of decades (and not as the ruler but as the median resident).
Prison population is related to poverty, and poverty is related to race. This is just a causal chain. The US is set up to hold a black slave population via its prison population.
Your point about Arizona is irrelevant: we're considering the US as a whole. The proportion of young black men in jail in the US does not reflect the proportion of people in jail in the US.
Slashdotters seem to know and love accusing people of two fallacies - the straw man and the false dichotomy. But not every man is straw and not every dichotomy is false.
Your selective reading of what the Soviets "provided" - until the near-dissolution of their state - has conveniently left out the stratospheric corruption, the ethnic cleansing, and the bread lines.
(1) There was corruption, though whether it was as "stratospheric" as the sum of all corruption in government + all private businesses in a Western country ought to be the subject of study;
(2) There was lots of forced resettlement by Stalin, officially to (i) spread the population around the country; (ii) improve internal security, just as the USA used the excuse of (ii) to intern Japanese within their borders. Stalin's schemes were more about paranoia over foreign nationalities, often in bordering territories and especially when they've been part of a previous ownership structure (e.g. Poland), than ethnic homogenising in his favour. With modern eyes, we can agree that neither the Soviet nor the US approach was appropriate or humane. Of course, considering the age of the USSR at the time, we might be better comparing with the colonisation of North America... this procedure is a feature of new, insecure power structures, not something specific to any regime;
(3) Aside from those preceding the USSR's collapse, which were already a transition period to capitalism involving the breaking down of the command economy, to which bread lines do you refer? Also, and I know this is going to be a horrific notion to the gluttonous West, but everyone queues all the time for stuff, whether virtually or by standing in a line. There's nothing especially bad with queueing for bread as long as you get the food at the end, something not guaranteed to the poor in the West - if you think your country's welfare net is universal and doesn't have a huge slew of conditions, you're probably so fortunate that you've never even known anyone who had to make use of it.
Of course, when the UK was short of food up to 1954, you had to present both ration book and money...;-).
You know you wouldn't move there if given the choice, but if you really wanted to move there you could probably engineer a route.
To Cuba? Well, it's currently going beginning a New Economic Policy sttyle period, so I certainly wouldn't go there under the "it's socialist" banner. I have found it difficult to respect Cuba since they did the whole tourist industry enclave thing, though it's obviously a response to the US political/trade embargo + collapse of Soviet support.
If no one can get good information, in this modern age, chances are, it's a cultish dictatorship, or something much closer to it than to a free marketplace of ideas.
"A marketplace of ideas" is a horrible basis for anything, though it's certainly the basis of IP law! Although of course you're going to get more information from a place which sells itself, IOW which competes in the marketplace of ideas. NK does not sell itself at all.
I could make a more sensible argument - one based on standard of living - that Norway is the most successful nation on Earth.
Welfare state + oil, it's a winning combination.
The interesting thing about that comparison is, the US remains a lovely place to live even if you slump from the middle class down to the working class.
Bullshit. If you're healthy and reasonably intelligent then you may be able to make it as a wage slave and even save a little, but millions of people are not both healthy and reasonably intelligent and they struggle to maintain enough money for food, healthcare and a roof. The US is so very good at hiding this latter sort of person from the minds of everyone else, mostly by substituting negative stereotypes (the fat poor, the criminal poor, the lazy poor, the malignering poor...).
I'm sure if you felt it would be an improvement to your current lot, you would be living in China.
The social contract goes that you accept that society will take more than you want from you, and in return it protects you from being pillaged and killed (especially likely if you hoard).
Only your sense of entitlement perceives it as a threat, because you believe you are entitled to protection. But the default is that you get no protection at all.
I recall a raid in Germany. Depending on police behaviour and accessibility of records, in some countries that can be as harmful as a conviction (e.g. if you're working in a job with vulnerable people).
When I was young, my family had a gardener. The gardener had a relation, called Cedric, who had learning difficulties. Cedric ended up turning up a lot of the time to help out, so my family paid him too. We would sometimes sweep up leaves together.
Since then I have turned my back on thoughts of privilege and wealth, and the idea of employing a gardener, or even owning a garden, makes me shudder. The only one gardening with me is going to be sharing a garden with me. So the National Trust and its affiliated organisations are more my cup of tea now. If Cedric were still around, and whether he still wanted to do gardening or just relax in some of the best kept gardens in England, I would love to take him around some of the NT properties.
Every time I meet someone called Cedric I still think of him. Growing up with someone who was much older than me, yet more childlike, and yet who worked for us... I guess it had a marked effect on me.
Can someone explain to me why someone who is monitoring sufficient backbones and running sufficient Tor nodes himself can't just watch a packet stream being bounced between Tor nodes?
Then there are people using Tor really dumbly such that you don't even need a three-letter acronym to work out who it is.
Except, of course, if you're running wireless. Then MAC addresses are recorded by various data gatherers and used, among other things, for that Google location guesser thing.
Of course, it's OK if you never speak wireless in the clear and always use an encryption protocol which will never be found insecure in the future.
My assertion was, "If capitalism were a success, we'd all be working fewer hours and adults would be living significantly longer. We are not and they are not."
Data showing "life expectancy at birth" is thus not relevant.
Life expectancy at birth has gone up significantly thanks to universal sanitation and healthcare programmes: sewers, vaccinations, etc. No-one (sane) has denied the value of such government contributions to health, so I specifically excluded the death of the vulnerable young from my remark.
Some committee decides how much of the "means of production" each worker/engineer/cleaning lady controls and gets to keep when they leave?
No, no-one gets to keep the means of production when they leave, unless they're going home to work and no-one else needs the means. Recall the discussion earlier in the thread about the countries with the longest life expectancies as birth? A good number have state-owned healthcare facilities, with "some committee" deciding precisely the above (like the "some committee" of managers or management consultants which decide the same in private firms, except their interest is enough short-term profit to get a bonus before they leave).
You should join us, America! You're humans just like us, and have a right to a dignified, healthy life.
And why would I want to keep the fruits of my labor? Unless I'm maybe a farmer
Yeah. Open source really worked out bad. And why should those Chinese labourers who make millions of iPhones a year get one for themselves? It was the shareholder back in the US who did the work and he deserves the bonus. And if the labourer dare campaign for better wages instead, we throw him in jail. We don't have to feel guilty about countries we contract out to when they deny freedom of speech because rights aren't inalienable when their denial gives you a competitive advantage. That's capitalism!
Of course, the labourer doesn't have to keep physical items. But he receives value for their worth, rather than the minimum his employer is able to pay to retain him. When the means of production belong to the workers, of course, there is no profit-making "employer" to exploit you.
another committee get to vote on my "needs"
A very large committee voted on your right to not be murdered. Continue cursing the voter and perhaps he'll vote that right away from you: let it be a need you decide for yourself and we'll see how well you do at defending it.
[under capitalism] of course you are the one who decides what and how much you need
Really? You get to choose your own wages? And you get to just walk into a store and take whatever you feel you need? This isn't the capitalism I know.
noone is gonna tell you you can't have two laptops until everyone else gets one
That's the second time I've seen that example in as many days. Do people really define quality of life / freedom / something important by how many laptops they can get?
Wow, that must have annoyed you. Yes, if you decide that almost all countries today lean toward capitalism, and decide therefore to label them all "capitalist", guess what's going to happen? Also could you also try not quoting from Wikipedia? It means I can take you seriously.
Now let's see what these countries actually offer in terms of services which would improve life expectancy... perhaps we could look at their healthcare systems? To then call France "capitalist", for example, is absurd. Same for Iceland, Israel, Sweden, Spain and Australia, which all have variants of the European model. Yes, the theme you're looking for is the presence of comprehensive state healthcare (preventative and curative) as part of as strong social democracy.
Japan provides health care through government programmes paid through a universal health insurance system, although participation may be through employer, personally or (e.g. for the elderly) through government sponsorship.
Switzerland requires you to buy health insurance, and requires insurers to accept you. Not much capitalism in that.
The "very, very capitalist" Hong Kong is a British legacy, and its healthcare practice has strong ties with Britain's. Once an outlet for rich ex-pats and Chinese, the end of the mandate has brought with it an increase in poverty, but it's still a shining example of what happens when you build a city-state for the rich and stoke it with special favours: you end up with a city-state full of rich people.
Conclusion: good healthcare comes from either socialism in healthcare or being very rich. Which is what we knew already.
Working hours - Which table are you pointing at to argue your point, please? The data shows a plateau since the 1930s, recalling the evil left wing New Deal, although the Adamson Act affected railroad workers earlier. In general, we can clearly see the collective bargaining power in the decades around the beginning of the 20th century and the response from government. More recent data reflect an increase in more recent decades, though it's a shame you've given little since 1980, when the trend really began to see a reverse.
Life expectancy - about the fifth misreading? Which part of adult sounds like at birth to you? But credit where credit's due, life expectancy at birth has gone up in the US. Well done. You're tied around 36th place with Cuba now.
Oh oh just like Japan in the '70s. Guess what happened 10 years later.
Of course, China and Japan already have much better process management (see esp. Japan on incremental improvement) than in US factories. Yet the US still stubbornly even refuses to play catch-up. All those MBAs must know what they're talking about, right?
Are you sure we want more, bigger, better TVs? Or are we perhaps so distracted by the constant command to work and and work and consume and work for no particular reason that all we have is stupid toys to waste our copious free time on?
As for living longer, just as infant mortality has been thoroughly reduced through social health and sanitation programmes, older people's lives are extended by good education and good observation. This extends from a less competitive environment encouraging less dangerous risk-taking (young men still mostly die from car accidents... or suicide) to state provision for screening and early treatment for cancers.
If you don't understand the difference between being put to work for a crime and being put to work for the colour of your skin, I'm not sure what to say.
Now Stalin was obviously single-minded to the point of paranoid cruelty in certain years, just as Churchill was when, say, he let a million starve in Bengal. But Churchill gave his Empire away to the US, while Stalin brought more progress in shorter time to his nation than any leader throughout the twentieth century... so it's worth your being precise about what you're accusing him of. Try to avoid Wikipedia quotes.
(Of course, a glance at US prison statistics and US prison ownership confirms that the US still engaged in race-based enslavement. Beating Russia even by numbers.)
Well, since it doesn't exist anymore...I would say that they kinda hit a rough patch.
Since the individuals making up the various countries in the Soviet Union voted with a clear majority to keep the Union, the end of the USSR being the result of a minority revolution following Glasnost's breaking the Soviet command structure, I would say that the Union was a sabotaged success.
The aim is not to beat everyone. The aim is to improve life, and the population of the USSR wanted the USSR to remain. (Satellite states wanted independence, just as many states are fed up with their American puppet governments. But they weren't part of the USSR.)
It's a pity that most Internet-based accounts of the USSR come from kids who can only remember the '80s and who still can't remember it accurately: it'd be like hearing a lament on capitalism from people whose formative years were 2007 to 2015. "I remember the bailouts, the cuts, the takeovers, the offshoring, the union-bashing, the tax increases, the decade-old wars, the new wars..."
Slashdot Mirror
If I took your property by force, it'd be OK to kill you if you tried to take some property from me because I'd just be concerning myself with my interests, right?
I just want to be clear about the basis on which you're arguing.
Through support for Ethiopia, America in large part contributed to the instability in Somalia which produced the pirates. To band-aid over the symptom of the disease you caused is less beneficial to everyone, including your own people.
-- story so far --
Hazel: UNCLOS.
Dails: *armed with only ignorance and the Internet* That's about maritime safety! You're spinning!
Hazel: It has sections related to ownership on the seas. Let me highlight some for you.
Dails: But it has stuff about maritime safety in it!
In other news, a car is for holding cups because some cars have cup holders in them.
So, which parts of the rules on exclusive economic zones and the continental shelf documented in UNCLOS "aid safety of navigation"? You're embarrassing yourself.
To solve a problem, you look for a cause. It has everything to do with American aggression: specifically, wanting to keep Ethiopia as an ally.
The piracy is a symptom and "oh we're just protecting the freedom of [oil tankers to carry our legitimately obtained oil over] the seas" is a hilarious excuse.
(1) This is the bit where you deny that European and American influence has anything to do with the existence of these pirates in the first place. It's so easy to push desperate people into doing something which, on the face of it, seems so unreasonable that you can hand wave the right to sail half way across the world to stop them.
(2) While the US extending its territorial claims (i.e. countering the "freedom of the seas") was one of the moves bringing about UNCLOS, the US is - as always in matters like these - one of the few states not to have ratified. The "freedom of the seas" to the US means nothing more than the freedom to selectively enforce the interests of whoever has the Navy's ear - sometimes not even the Navy itself.
Here's my proposal: do nothing. For once, America, keep your fucking nose out of another continent. I realise it'd be lovely to pincer what with being under your best buddies (when they're not killing you and/or women in general) the Saudis, so this will be hard for you. "Secure the horn of Africa"? What is this, the 18th century?
Also, when the US does it = securing.
When Somalians do it = piracy.
As usual, if the US wanted to, they could wipe out Somalian piracy within hours. The real question: who stands to profit from a long, drawn-out, ineffective war?
I think it makes little sense to try to make so broad and vague a statement as "the system's biased against blacks".
"I deny out of hand the elephant in the room."
Cities have high concentrations of poor folks, who are black. When you are in that situation, it can be difficult to get out (bad education, high crime, etc).
Yes, under capitalism, it's almost impossible. Something capitalist being "the system".
That doesnt mean the system is "trying" to hold them down, just that having no money, poor upbringing, and poor education tends to be a cycle that grows on itself.
Under capitalism.
I will note that not ONLY do we live longer (granted, by a small margin) than folks in your precious Cuba
Per the UN, no you don't, not within any margin of error. Considering you're supposedly the richest, bestest, mightiest, unembargoed-for-decades country in the world, that is pathetic.
, on average, than folks in Cuba-- seeing as their national per-capita GDP is under $10k, and our poverty line is around $11k
You are really clutching at straws. Comparing the per capita GDP (a mean, not a median!) in one socialist-ish country with the poverty line in a much more expensive capitalist-ish country to determine that the latter's population are better off? Do you know why that is nonsensical? Do you even know how to calculate GDP and the nature of Cuba's currency system?
GDP is a crappy measure of quality of life. Adjusted for purchasing power, look at countries with higher GDP than the US and ask yourself whether you'd have preferred to live there or in the US over the past couple of decades (and not as the ruler but as the median resident).
Prison population is related to poverty, and poverty is related to race. This is just a causal chain. The US is set up to hold a black slave population via its prison population.
Your point about Arizona is irrelevant: we're considering the US as a whole. The proportion of young black men in jail in the US does not reflect the proportion of people in jail in the US.
Slashdotters seem to know and love accusing people of two fallacies - the straw man and the false dichotomy. But not every man is straw and not every dichotomy is false.
Your selective reading of what the Soviets "provided" - until the near-dissolution of their state - has conveniently left out the stratospheric corruption, the ethnic cleansing, and the bread lines.
(1) There was corruption, though whether it was as "stratospheric" as the sum of all corruption in government + all private businesses in a Western country ought to be the subject of study;
(2) There was lots of forced resettlement by Stalin, officially to (i) spread the population around the country; (ii) improve internal security, just as the USA used the excuse of (ii) to intern Japanese within their borders. Stalin's schemes were more about paranoia over foreign nationalities, often in bordering territories and especially when they've been part of a previous ownership structure (e.g. Poland), than ethnic homogenising in his favour. With modern eyes, we can agree that neither the Soviet nor the US approach was appropriate or humane. Of course, considering the age of the USSR at the time, we might be better comparing with the colonisation of North America... this procedure is a feature of new, insecure power structures, not something specific to any regime;
(3) Aside from those preceding the USSR's collapse, which were already a transition period to capitalism involving the breaking down of the command economy, to which bread lines do you refer? Also, and I know this is going to be a horrific notion to the gluttonous West, but everyone queues all the time for stuff, whether virtually or by standing in a line. There's nothing especially bad with queueing for bread as long as you get the food at the end, something not guaranteed to the poor in the West - if you think your country's welfare net is universal and doesn't have a huge slew of conditions, you're probably so fortunate that you've never even known anyone who had to make use of it.
Of course, when the UK was short of food up to 1954, you had to present both ration book and money... ;-).
You know you wouldn't move there if given the choice, but if you really wanted to move there you could probably engineer a route.
To Cuba? Well, it's currently going beginning a New Economic Policy sttyle period, so I certainly wouldn't go there under the "it's socialist" banner. I have found it difficult to respect Cuba since they did the whole tourist industry enclave thing, though it's obviously a response to the US political/trade embargo + collapse of Soviet support.
If no one can get good information, in this modern age, chances are, it's a cultish dictatorship, or something much closer to it than to a free marketplace of ideas.
"A marketplace of ideas" is a horrible basis for anything, though it's certainly the basis of IP law! Although of course you're going to get more information from a place which sells itself, IOW which competes in the marketplace of ideas. NK does not sell itself at all.
I could make a more sensible argument - one based on standard of living - that Norway is the most successful nation on Earth.
Welfare state + oil, it's a winning combination.
The interesting thing about that comparison is, the US remains a lovely place to live even if you slump from the middle class down to the working class.
Bullshit. If you're healthy and reasonably intelligent then you may be able to make it as a wage slave and even save a little, but millions of people are not both healthy and reasonably intelligent and they struggle to maintain enough money for food, healthcare and a roof. The US is so very good at hiding this latter sort of person from the minds of everyone else, mostly by substituting negative stereotypes (the fat poor, the criminal poor, the lazy poor, the malignering poor...).
I'm sure if you felt it would be an improvement to your current lot, you would be living in China.
Go on, you know you want to say it: black people are predisposed to criminal behaviour.
Either that or the system's biased against blacks.
Which is it?
The social contract goes that you accept that society will take more than you want from you, and in return it protects you from being pillaged and killed (especially likely if you hoard).
Only your sense of entitlement perceives it as a threat, because you believe you are entitled to protection. But the default is that you get no protection at all.
I recall a raid in Germany. Depending on police behaviour and accessibility of records, in some countries that can be as harmful as a conviction (e.g. if you're working in a job with vulnerable people).
When I was young, my family had a gardener. The gardener had a relation, called Cedric, who had learning difficulties. Cedric ended up turning up a lot of the time to help out, so my family paid him too. We would sometimes sweep up leaves together.
Since then I have turned my back on thoughts of privilege and wealth, and the idea of employing a gardener, or even owning a garden, makes me shudder. The only one gardening with me is going to be sharing a garden with me. So the National Trust and its affiliated organisations are more my cup of tea now. If Cedric were still around, and whether he still wanted to do gardening or just relax in some of the best kept gardens in England, I would love to take him around some of the NT properties.
Every time I meet someone called Cedric I still think of him. Growing up with someone who was much older than me, yet more childlike, and yet who worked for us... I guess it had a marked effect on me.
Anyway, your name is close enough.
Can someone explain to me why someone who is monitoring sufficient backbones and running sufficient Tor nodes himself can't just watch a packet stream being bounced between Tor nodes?
Then there are people using Tor really dumbly such that you don't even need a three-letter acronym to work out who it is.
Except, of course, if you're running wireless. Then MAC addresses are recorded by various data gatherers and used, among other things, for that Google location guesser thing.
Of course, it's OK if you never speak wireless in the clear and always use an encryption protocol which will never be found insecure in the future.
My assertion was, "If capitalism were a success, we'd all be working fewer hours and adults would be living significantly longer. We are not and they are not."
Data showing "life expectancy at birth" is thus not relevant.
Life expectancy at birth has gone up significantly thanks to universal sanitation and healthcare programmes: sewers, vaccinations, etc. No-one (sane) has denied the value of such government contributions to health, so I specifically excluded the death of the vulnerable young from my remark.
Some committee decides how much of the "means of production" each worker/engineer/cleaning lady controls and gets to keep when they leave?
No, no-one gets to keep the means of production when they leave, unless they're going home to work and no-one else needs the means. Recall the discussion earlier in the thread about the countries with the longest life expectancies as birth? A good number have state-owned healthcare facilities, with "some committee" deciding precisely the above (like the "some committee" of managers or management consultants which decide the same in private firms, except their interest is enough short-term profit to get a bonus before they leave).
You should join us, America! You're humans just like us, and have a right to a dignified, healthy life.
And why would I want to keep the fruits of my labor? Unless I'm maybe a farmer
Yeah. Open source really worked out bad. And why should those Chinese labourers who make millions of iPhones a year get one for themselves? It was the shareholder back in the US who did the work and he deserves the bonus. And if the labourer dare campaign for better wages instead, we throw him in jail. We don't have to feel guilty about countries we contract out to when they deny freedom of speech because rights aren't inalienable when their denial gives you a competitive advantage. That's capitalism!
Of course, the labourer doesn't have to keep physical items. But he receives value for their worth, rather than the minimum his employer is able to pay to retain him. When the means of production belong to the workers, of course, there is no profit-making "employer" to exploit you.
another committee get to vote on my "needs"
A very large committee voted on your right to not be murdered. Continue cursing the voter and perhaps he'll vote that right away from you: let it be a need you decide for yourself and we'll see how well you do at defending it.
[under capitalism] of course you are the one who decides what and how much you need
Really? You get to choose your own wages? And you get to just walk into a store and take whatever you feel you need? This isn't the capitalism I know.
noone is gonna tell you you can't have two laptops until everyone else gets one
That's the second time I've seen that example in as many days. Do people really define quality of life / freedom / something important by how many laptops they can get?
Wow, that must have annoyed you. Yes, if you decide that almost all countries today lean toward capitalism, and decide therefore to label them all "capitalist", guess what's going to happen? Also could you also try not quoting from Wikipedia? It means I can take you seriously.
Now let's see what these countries actually offer in terms of services which would improve life expectancy... perhaps we could look at their healthcare systems? To then call France "capitalist", for example, is absurd. Same for Iceland, Israel, Sweden, Spain and Australia, which all have variants of the European model. Yes, the theme you're looking for is the presence of comprehensive state healthcare (preventative and curative) as part of as strong social democracy.
Japan provides health care through government programmes paid through a universal health insurance system, although participation may be through employer, personally or (e.g. for the elderly) through government sponsorship.
Switzerland requires you to buy health insurance, and requires insurers to accept you. Not much capitalism in that.
The "very, very capitalist" Hong Kong is a British legacy, and its healthcare practice has strong ties with Britain's. Once an outlet for rich ex-pats and Chinese, the end of the mandate has brought with it an increase in poverty, but it's still a shining example of what happens when you build a city-state for the rich and stoke it with special favours: you end up with a city-state full of rich people.
Conclusion: good healthcare comes from either socialism in healthcare or being very rich. Which is what we knew already.
Working hours - Which table are you pointing at to argue your point, please? The data shows a plateau since the 1930s, recalling the evil left wing New Deal, although the Adamson Act affected railroad workers earlier. In general, we can clearly see the collective bargaining power in the decades around the beginning of the 20th century and the response from government. More recent data reflect an increase in more recent decades, though it's a shame you've given little since 1980, when the trend really began to see a reverse.
Life expectancy - about the fifth misreading? Which part of adult sounds like at birth to you? But credit where credit's due, life expectancy at birth has gone up in the US. Well done. You're tied around 36th place with Cuba now.
Oh oh just like Japan in the '70s. Guess what happened 10 years later.
Of course, China and Japan already have much better process management (see esp. Japan on incremental improvement) than in US factories. Yet the US still stubbornly even refuses to play catch-up. All those MBAs must know what they're talking about, right?
Well, if you consider life expectancy at birth, the US is tied in 36th place in the latest UN list with... Cuba. Hehe. Viva la capitalizacion!
Are you sure we want more, bigger, better TVs? Or are we perhaps so distracted by the constant command to work and and work and consume and work for no particular reason that all we have is stupid toys to waste our copious free time on?
As for living longer, just as infant mortality has been thoroughly reduced through social health and sanitation programmes, older people's lives are extended by good education and good observation. This extends from a less competitive environment encouraging less dangerous risk-taking (young men still mostly die from car accidents... or suicide) to state provision for screening and early treatment for cancers.
If you don't understand the difference between being put to work for a crime and being put to work for the colour of your skin, I'm not sure what to say.
Now Stalin was obviously single-minded to the point of paranoid cruelty in certain years, just as Churchill was when, say, he let a million starve in Bengal. But Churchill gave his Empire away to the US, while Stalin brought more progress in shorter time to his nation than any leader throughout the twentieth century... so it's worth your being precise about what you're accusing him of. Try to avoid Wikipedia quotes.
(Of course, a glance at US prison statistics and US prison ownership confirms that the US still engaged in race-based enslavement. Beating Russia even by numbers.)
Well, since it doesn't exist anymore...I would say that they kinda hit a rough patch.
Since the individuals making up the various countries in the Soviet Union voted with a clear majority to keep the Union, the end of the USSR being the result of a minority revolution following Glasnost's breaking the Soviet command structure, I would say that the Union was a sabotaged success.
The aim is not to beat everyone. The aim is to improve life, and the population of the USSR wanted the USSR to remain. (Satellite states wanted independence, just as many states are fed up with their American puppet governments. But they weren't part of the USSR.)
It's a pity that most Internet-based accounts of the USSR come from kids who can only remember the '80s and who still can't remember it accurately: it'd be like hearing a lament on capitalism from people whose formative years were 2007 to 2015. "I remember the bailouts, the cuts, the takeovers, the offshoring, the union-bashing, the tax increases, the decade-old wars, the new wars..."