FluffyPotato

Merisiga in Estonian which also translates to sea pig.

I guess it's a misconception then that living in the US without a car is very difficult.

Are you saying that's the norm in the US?

I have always been about 5 minutes walk from the grocery store in Estonia.

I was being somewhat hyperbolic, the point was you guys have to drive everywhere to do anything which is so alien to me. Or I guess take public transit which always sounds horrible when Americans describe it, which is also something that sounds so weird to me about the US.

City design and suburbs. Like if I had to drive 40 minutes to get groceries I would prefer to starve and those suburbs look like death would be the better alternative. Also driving to go for a walk, wtf?

Plenty of things are legally indistinguishable but real world applications are often quite different.

Though I would also challage that claim since owning a joint business gives you legal deciding power while owning 1 stock does not, you get zero votes from that.

Shares only give you voting power if you have a massive amount of them. In the vast majority of cases shares function as either a place to store wealth to protect it from inflation or as speculative gambling, the majority of use cases is not to signify ownership. I would not classify that as collective ownership, maybe only in theory if you don't look into it too much but real world application of shares is definitely not collective ownership.

I'm very much in favour of businesses being actually collectively owned through a coop business model though.

The USSR collapsed in 1991 so you would be 18 then if you're 50 now. It very much depends on where in the USSR you were, the countries resisting their imperialism got the worse of it. In the baltics most older folks lost family or friends to the occupation so their views on it aren't actually favourable, especially if they remember the time before occupation.

Fun fact for you: The famines were largely caused by Stalin appointing a guy to do agriculture policy who knew less than nothing about agriculture. He forced farmers to plant crops too densely because "communist crops will not compete for nutrients" causing the crops to just die. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trofim_Lysenko

Most dictators are absolute troglodytes and Stalin was no exception.

Not most, in the US around 400 individuals own over 50% of wealth. Similar situation in Russia.

So what I read from there is the public sector creates the new tech and private ones turn it into a product to sell. That's also pretty much what I said. Yea, I'm good with that part being handled by literally anyone other than the already rich.

Like my preference would be that any large company is collectively owned by everyone who works there. That would let the people who do the actual work to also keep the profits from said work. That would also not change anything about innovation, great or small.

Capitalist innovation is usually changing an existing product just enough to keep a patent or actually making something new but only if the government funds them so much they have zero risk. Most innovation comes from the public sector.