TiredTiger

It is plastic, though. The exact formulas tend to be proprietary, but they use a plastic rather than a natural gum base unless explicitly stated otherwise on the packaging. Even a lot of the 'natural' brands still use a plastic base.

Or literally any age between the two, because yes, the US education system sucks and has for a very long time.

Your claim that party members or state administrators in socialist states are automatically not proletarian because they administer is nonsense. Class is not determined by whether someone performs administrative labour or exercises authority. Class position is determined principally by relation to the means of production, particularly ownership thereof.

I'm going to take this as a jumping off point to explicate the nature of the administrative arm of the state further for any lurkers out there.

What exactly do state administrators do? Administration is the enforcement arm of the state - they exist to see the law carried out. People think of cops when they hear the term "law enforcement," but 'the law' is greater than just the criminal code; it also contains regulations on worker wages and hours, food safety, and energy usage, to name a few things.

In the west, discussion of this tends to begin and end with "bureaucracy bad." The libertarian framing of needful regulation as "restricting freedom" has infected a lot of the western working class with bourgeouis ideals and convinced them to act against their own class interests. It should be obvious that clean air, clean water, functioning infrastructure, and higher wages are in the working class's interest. Capital, however, will always seek to maximize profit, and regulations will invariably cut into those profits. Whether that's indirectly in the provision of vital services paid with taxes, or directly in extra costs to capital in the form of higher wages or complying with environmental regulations. And in the sense that more regulations require higher cost of compliance, these can be seen as suppressing the petite bourgeoisie by making entering an industry require higher investment which pushes out would-be 'small business owners.' The working class can be tricked into supporting deregulation by their desire to escape wage labor by joining the ranks of the petite bourgeoisie.

As capital controls the government in capitalist "democracies," it has a number of tools at its disposal to undermine its own administrative arm. These include underfunding their enforcement or setting the penalties as mere fees that companies consider the cost of doing business, but also more structural methods, such as privatizing as much of it as possible so that even these necessary functions can be subordinated to producing profit - infrastructure (both physical and digital) in the US is built not by the government itself but by contractors. Likewise, healthcare, transportation, energy production, and even weapons manufacturing are handled by private companies instead of by the government. These things become expensive because they must produce profit.

In a socialist state, these functions are performed directly by the government itself which serves both to keep costs down and protect the interests of the working class. This is necessary because even after a proletarian revolution, the capitalist class continues to exist. As long as it does, it will continue to try to maximize its profits, and it does so by cutting corners in manufacturing, abusing workers, and will always attempt to regain the power it has lost. As such, the socialist states must maintain a strong administrative arm to keep the capitalist class constrained.

Let's examine how violators are handled between the two systems to make it clear how these differ in their functioning. There are many examples of US corporations cutting corners - consider the Ford Pinto, that was knowingly designed in such a way that increased fatalities from rear-end collisions. Ford was eventually fined in a lawsuit, but no one went to prison or suffered any greater penalty. This is typical of US enforcement actions, and leads US corporations to cut corners and budget for legal penalties. If the corners cut save more money than projected legal cases will cost, the corporations will put out products knowing they will prove fatal for some number of people who use them.

By way of comparison, let's look at a Chinese case. Most of us over a certain age probably remember the melamine scandal back in 2008, when a Chinese corporation named Sanlu Group adulterated powdered milk with melamine in order to artificially boost the protein content, and 6 infants died as a result. Several public officials were stripped of office, the corporation went bankrupt, several executives went to prison, and 2 people were executed.

The differences between the two couldn't be more stark. In a capitalist country, regulation exists at best as a "gentleman's agreement" between capitalists, while as in a socialist country, it is the strong arm of the state, able to constrain capital and punish it for failure to comply.

I had a professor who explained this (as well as I can remember so long after) that the people over-reported yields because they wanted to please Mao (not out of fear of punishment, but out of gratitude). Is that what you mean by poor reporting, or was this professor off-base?

And if PSL or any other socialist party ever becomes large enough to receive a substantial percentage of the vote, we'll see the mask of humanity fall from the face of capital. Not that that should stop us from organizing.

I still think their play is that if Trump is succeeded by another Republican or if Trump himself becomes too unpopular, they coup him, and we wind up with a military junta. The libs would be so busy applauding their 'saviors' that they wouldn't even notice their rights being taken away until it's too late. I think the capitalists are tired of democracy, and want to be able to drop the pretenses without ceding control.

And who is "the government"? Elected officials? Bureaucrats? Do you think the low-level grunts at the tax agency are living high on the hog? Or do elected officials take your money and hand it to their buddies in the form of lucrative government contracts? And who is elected? Capitalists consort with each other and choose who among them is to represent you. You're conflating the bureaucratic apparatus of the state with the class that controls it (capitalists) and in doing so losing sight of the actual material reality at play.

Here's a recent article that may be relevant.

You may not believe in classes, but that doesn't negate their existence.

We will continue to support AES states (current and those sadly no longer extant). Go advocate for utopianism somewhere else.

If I remember correctly, the "group" names in Japanese are based on shape but aren't always intuitive, and sometimes a certain number of them will have its own special name or way of counting - the sort of thing that requires a lot of rote memorization.

Does it have different words for the number of objects in a group like Japanese does, or just different types of groups of objects?

It was always the tones that made me anxious about trying to learn it; I'm glad to hear that's overstated.