u/MeanLeadership92

Long story short, I acquired a load of rare figures and started selling them on bricklink. I inspected them thoroughly and was pretty sure they were real.

Turns out these were fakes and I was scammed! Really good UV printing with barely any texture, I found out when a really experienced seller bought from me and noticed they were not original with his fingernails.

The issue is that I have sold them to a few people who were not as astute and who were like me, fooled by the prints.

What is the best way to inform my customers/get them their money back?

Hi everyone,

I am from Canada, and I'd like to learn Welsh, because I think it is a cool language. Unfortunately, it seems really hard to find quality resources outside of wales. I cannot really do the classes offered by the welsh government because of timezone differences.

First, I really want to learn to write and read, but since most online resources seem oriented towards pronunciation, and very few seem oriented towards any grammar at all, I suppose that leaves me with buying a book, I do not have a problem with this, but I do not want to waste my money either. I see that the wiki recommends two books :

-"Colloquial Welsh" by Gareth King and "My Way to Welsh" by Heini Gruffudd

My question for you all, is either of these books good for a complete beginner? (I know a hundred words or so of vocabulary and some basic sentences, but nothing further), and do they teach all the basics well? (mutations, sentence structure, pronouns, etc...) If not, is there some other book(s) you can recommend? Do keep in mind that any book that I buy will be supplemented by my own vocabulary research and some spoken welsh/listening practice, so even if the book is a little incomplete, that is fine with me.

Second, I do want to learn to speak/listen in Welsh. Since I am outside of Wales, it is pretty hard to find classes near me. So I suppose that this leaves me with using an app/website, I again have no issue with paying for stuff, but I again do no want to waste money.

I've tried Duolingo, it isn't too bad, and it does build some Welsh relatively intuitively. However, it is seemingly allergic to providing any explanations, for instance, it will tell you that there is a mistake when you don't mutate a word-even though it never told you before or explained why there's a mutation there! But I suppose that since I will learn grammar separately, it is a non-issue. Is it worth it to pay for say, a year of subscription for someone who will use it 30+ minutes each day?

I have heard good things of saysomething and glassika, are they any good?

Are there any other resources you folks would recommend to a beginner? Diolch!

Alright, so I’ve noticed that Marxists really dislike “exploitation” as they define it, however, what I find interesting, is to ask the question: why is it bad? First, you need an understanding of the concept, for Marx, exploitation is the process through which capitalists generate profit by extracting value from workers (who are themselves the only source of value), so for instance if you sell 100$ of goods but pay your workers 95$, then you are exploiting your labour by generating 5$ of profit.

Do note that the opposition to exploitation is officially not a moral one, don’t get me wrong, socialists will be quick to denounce the “Epstein class”, and talk about how workers should “remove the shackles of capitalism”, and Marx himself compares capitalists to thieves and advocates for a violent removal of them, but officially there’s no moral judgment. And anyways, it is hard that someone disabled receiving money by taxing workers (in other, by extracting value from them but doing no work) is doing something wrong, or that a retiree receiving dividends from stocks (aka capital) which they own is doing something immoral. So then why do socialists dislike it? Note that because the term “exploitation” is inherently pejorative in most contexts, I will refer to it as “utilisation” from now on, if socialists truly have no moral qualms with the concept, they won’t mind using a more neutral term. But if, as I believe, the choice is an intentional rhetorical weapon, they will complain. Imagine saying “I support exploitation”, yeah you sound like a bad guy, so you have to say “there is no exploitation”, but the way the concept is defined, as soon as there are profits, there is exploitation, so the socialists always start the debate with a rhetorical win. No more, utilisation is far better and fairer.

Perhaps, it is because utilisation costs the workers, in other words they lose while the capital-owners win. Makes sense…if you believe the world is a zero-sum-game. Ok, but then why do we trade with one another? Adam Smith correctly points out that we do it because we both gain, it is a mutually beneficial agreement. Even Marx admits that workers and civilisation have gained from capitalism. Fine then, you will say, the issue isn’t that workers lose, it is that they gain less than the owners, that the trade is uneven, the capitalists have a bargaining power advantage. You know what? That’s a pretty decent argument! Smith too partly agrees on that point, so I can see the reasoning. So now we have an argument along the lines of “capital-owners utilise labour because they control the labour market and use it to maximise their profits to the detriment of workers, reducing said workers’ potential gains”.

Ok, let’s balance things out! What if the owners have to compete viciously for labour, and they are as such forced to improve wages? What if there are unions that serve to even out power situations? What if the state intervenes to prevent businesses from becoming too large? Well, Marxists will still claim workers are utilised here, because there’s a profit, so there must be utilisation! Their claim is usually that because workers will starve if they do not agree to work (but most businesses will keep the lights on if they have no workers doing anything for them? Somehow?), there is still an imbalance. Fine! Let’s give them a welfare state, so the workers only work when they want, are there still profits? Yes! So, there is still utilisation, but now the socialists’ argument completely unravels, since in a highly unionised and regulated welfare economy, profits still exist, but there’s no source for profits according to theory! Naturally, the explanation here is that welfare states are utilising poor countries, but then we get the same arguments, poor countries are wealthier than before, they will not starve if they stop trading with any one capitalist country, and no single country controls global trade, so there is tight competition in that area. The result is that again, we can’t explain where the profits are coming from! The truth is that profits (and therefore utilisation) come from an incentive to hire labour, if there’s no profit, there’s no point to hire more workers.

Fine, fine, fine, you will say, utilisation isn’t immoral, it doesn’t worsen workers’ conditions, it in fact improves their condition, and the theoretical explanation for profits does not always work. But still, you will say, workers would be better off if they owned the businesses, since they could keep the profits for themselves, so utilisation is inefficient since it creates the wrong incentives! That’s where socialists have it all backwards, worker-owned businesses will be less likely to take risks (or they will lose their jobs and hence their livelihood) and will create fewer incentives for individuals (if you create an innovation worth 1M$, in capitalism you keep the profits for yourself, but in socialism they are shared among the workers, so an innovator gains far less by creating something new, and has fewer incentives to start a business). There’s far more innovation from utilising workers than otherwise, and that is why it is a positive.

But of course, if you disagree, why? Why is "exploitation" (aka utilisation) a bad thing?