Remember: Workers make the machinery. Then, workers use the machinery to make more things. It may be different workers at different stages, but workers are the only means of production. Everything is produced by someone working to do so.
Keep in mind most of that machinery nowadays is made by workers elsewhere in the world, primarily in China, where the union membership rate is something like 45%.
If workers rights in China improve capital may simply move on to idk Mexico, India, lots of places with cheaply exploitable labor and pliable governments.
The majority of those unionized employees in China belong to government-controlled unions. The Chinese government has the last word on all this, and the employees’ “rights” are ultimately subject to the CCPs whims. Basically both the company and the union are ultimately controlled by the same entity.
It’s absurd, as it defeats the whole point of a union.
This is what eventually seems to happen under every attempt at communism that we’ve seen so far.
The majority of those unionized employees in China belong to government-controlled unions.
Source? For all three claims please.
Chinese government has the last word on all this
That is the thing with states, i.e. the USA, the state power enforces laws. Just as Max Weber’s theories go.
However in the USA it often seems that corporations and economic elites do have quite a say in things that are related to doing away with employee laws, without many push-back.
Anyhow, are you in a union? Make your friends get into unions. However if you do you have to be willing to strike, willing to be internationalists and willing to organize. Try to achieve 45% union membership rate within your company and the subcontractors working with you.
There is no universe in which Chinese labor unions are even remotely the same thing as labor unions in the western-style industrialized democracies. China is an authoritarian top-down quasi-capitalistic system which means that there is no management for workers to negotiate with apart from a single massive structure that’s ultimately controlled by Xi’s government.
Contrast that to western-style industrialized democracies wherein unions are meant to use organized labor as a ballast against the power of privately owned industrial management.
It’s just not the same thing at all.
Furthermore, while virtually all modern machinery contains Chinese-made parts, it’s just a fact that in the western-style industrialized democracies, tradesmen vastly prefer power-tools made in places like the US or Germany or Japan because they tend to be much better in terms of quality and reliability and lifespan then are their Chinese-made counterparts.
Go to any big construction site in the US and you’ll immediately see that the workers prefer brands like Milwaukee, DeWalt, Makita, Hilti, Husqvarna and Bosch over the cheaper Chinese-made alternatives, for example.
Fun fact: If you cancel your HP Instant Ink subscription, they lock you out of using the cartridges already installed in your printer.
I also gave up on inkjet bullshit and went laser. I use a Canon ImageClass at both work and at home; A single set of toner cartridges easily lasts me for years of home use. Color laser options are also no longer rare or expensive.
The sad part is that inkjets aren’t inherently bad. They’re just a different way to print. They can make some fantastic, deep, high-resolution colors. It just so happens that this type of printing is being ran in such an anti-consumer way that it’s borderline unbelievable.
Ink is cheap. It’s INK. I can go to the art store and find thousands of different types of ink. It’s just water with coloring in it. It’s not special. However, HP sells their ink at a cost that is about 4x the cost of gold by weight. I can understand it being a little more expensive than just ink in a tube, but this is insane.
We should have inkjet printers that have caps on the top of the cartridges to let you add your own ink. No DRM. Buy common ink at the grocery store, and it’ll work with most vendors. Open the lid, add your ink. Dried up? Wash it under the sink. Really dried up? Buy an empty cartridge for $6.
Our society has advanced enough to where this is a solved problem. We have figured out INK of all things. We know what ink is, and we know how to put it on a sheet of paper. Civilization hasn’t been stumped on how to put ink on paper for decades, and it’s not like we’re in a position where only vendors like HP can save us. It’s 100% greed, all of it, and it’s so shameless that it reads like something out of Snow Crash or something.
Imagine if you bought a ketchup bottle from the grocery store, and refilled it with more ketchup when it was almost empty. Then, the ketchup bottle phoned home and figured out that you missed a ketchup subscription payment, so it refused to squirt ketchup. Ain’t it silly when I compare HP’s model to ketchup, yet both circumstances are literally dispensing a liquid?
So, the best printer I’ve ever owned in my life was a Canon Pixma iP5000. And yes, it was an inkjet. It had it all for the time: It made excellent photo prints, did double sided printing, could do borderless even on a full 8.5x11 sheet of paper, and its ink cartridges were literally just boxes full of ink. It had a separate print head below the tanks which was removable for cleaning (!) with no tools (!!) and the ink cartridges did not have any DRM chips or other bullshit in them. I refilled the original in cartridges it came with for years before I finally just wore the durn thing out, and I could not find the parts I needed to fix it.
Then began my odyssey of trying to find something to replace it. No one made a comparable inkjet printer by then. Anything you get nowadays is either missing duplex functionality, borderless, or both, and/or has head-on-cartridge printing, and they all have DRM chips built into the cartridges to prevent you from refilling. I thought the Epson Ecotank line was the answer, but it turns out those are all have trash build quality and while the no-cartridges idea is sound in theory, the way they’re designed means that the things inevitably cack themselves in short order and they’re basically impossible for a consumer to take apart to clean or service. The Ecotank takes the idea of commercial printers with external remote ink reservoirs, but messes it up by building the reservoirs into the printer body in a “consumer friendly” way that leaves the reservoirs not sealed (so the solvent can evaporate out of the ink, and dust can get in) and not removable (so they can’t be cleaned), nor can the print head be accessed in the event that it needs to be unclogged.
I went through three of them under warranty and once my warranty was expired that was it. I had to throw the damn thing away, and then I just bought my current color laser printer. The hell with it.
TBH, if they could provide a high-quality piece of hardware that would just work for years on end and automatically reorder ink (at no additional charge, up to some reasonable limit) when it needed it for a low fixed price, maybe 50 or 60 bucks a year, I might be interested. If they added large-format print-on-demand service with quick delivery (same day in cities, 1 or 2 day elsewhere) I’d probably pay a bit more. That way I could print regular documents up to, say 11x17, at home, and have big stuff like poster-sized delivered quickly and seamlessly with the same printing system.
I just want to be able to print stuff without futzing around with a persnickety machine, and needing to replace the infernal thing every couple of years.
I haven’t printed 50 pages over many months, but I still have a laser for those times it’s useful. Pretty soon they’ll be able to downgrade your colour to black only, at only a slight surcharge over the regular black ink plan. I noticed they say you can print 50 pages but do they give the paper too? Heh.
I have bought two laser printers in fifteen years. I got a Canon to replace the slow Brother MFC. I’ve lasted years on the toners I bought after the starter toners ran out. Toners never dry out and they don’t have the same print quality issues that ink jets have.
Anyone using an ink jet printer for anything other than printing photos onto photo paper is wasting tons and tons of money.
Brother is 90% awesome, 10% infuriating. My Brother laser would blow my 15 Amp circuit. I had to move it to the basement for a 20 Amp outlet. It’s been going for 12 years since on its third toner cartridge (and I probably will never get through my current 2 pack), though the Wi-Fi printing capability won’t work with any router I’ve bought after 2015. Duplex printing, Linux, smartphone, any computer I hook up to it, no worries.
That’s definitely what it is, but why was it removed from the plastic housing? It would never last long without the protection, and even if it was being bulk-written to, you wouldn’t do it outside the housing.
It seems unsustainable and mixed up to think no one should ever use non-FOSS options for anything.
Maybe that would be the case if we were in some post scarcity perfect society where no one needed income, and all devs were just doing it for self-fulfillment, but I can’t blame someone for wanting to make income off of their work. Especially if they seem like a reasonable person, wanting reasonable amounts for good work.
Isn’t supporting a smaller dev a good thing? I mean, this guy got screwed over by reddit fucking up his income.
Ain’t that the truth. People act like charging for software is evil no matter what. There’s a huge difference between a lone dev trying to earn a living and a huge corporation trying to wring every last ounce of profit out of their users. And there’s probably degrees of nuance between those.
Especially if they seem like a reasonable person, wanting reasonable amounts for good work.
And that’s the important context in this discussion. You’ve got a dev who’s active in the community and who builds an app not only with great features and UI but with stability too. And he has a not insignificant user base that is familiar not just with his work but essentially with this exact app… It’s reasonable for him to assume we’ll see the value and be willing to pay. And he is correct.
I’m personally averse to subscription models, but again context matters. Reasonable rate and you know what you’re getting. And I say this as a huge fan of both FOSS and socialism. I could have easily just let my DNS continue to filter out the ads, but I appreciate quality and believe it should be appropriately compensated.
actually, speaking of the subscription, the fact that ads can be removed with either the subscription or a one time payment is one of my favorite things about sync. I don’t really like subscriptions either, but then the only feature I really wanted from Sync was the ads removed, so I don’t have to even care about the subscription. I wish that kind of monetization style was WAY more popular.
And I only subscribed because the one-time purchase was not available at that moment, so I assumed no such option existed. But honestly, I’ll continue to pay the subscription. It’s still less than a year’s worth of my monthly donations to the developer of Tasker.
The “he won’t face any consequences” crowd is getting just as good at moving goalposts as the MAGA crowd is.
“He won’t be investigated”.
“He won’t be indicted”.
“The trial will be delayed indefinitely”.
“He won’t be convicted”.
“He won’t actually see any jail time”.
The goal has always been a cell. Anything less means he hasn’t faced consequences. I’m not aware of anyone who believes he is guilty who would have been happy with an investigation or indictment that goes nowhere.
The only way he isn’t going to face some time in jail is if he flees the county. He’s facing 79 felony counts and only needs 1 for prison time. All I’m trying to say is just because he’s not in jail yet it doesn’t mean he won’t go to jail. And that’s the attitude a lot of people are pushing. “He won’t go to jail” doesn’t hold up when the same people said he wouldn’t be investigated, then he was investigated. They said he won’t be charged, then he was charged. The ball is rolling and picking up momentum now, and it will run his ass over. But just because it hasn’t caught up to him yet doesn’t mean that it won’t.
Many, if not all, of the charges he faces across all three indictments have a punishment of a fine or jail time or both. So no, he doesn’t need just one for prison time. He could easily get a slap on the wrist and pay a fine.
I’m one of those. I don’t know if you realize or not, but there are a stupid number of examples of rich people commiting rather horrible crimes and never seeing jail.
I’m absolutely all for Trump facing consequences. But I’ll believe it when I see it. This country is made for the rich.
I’m concerned that if he goes to jail, a bunch of his redcap loyalists will try and break him out. What they lack in critical thinking skills they make up for in numbers and firepower.
If they couldn’t do it on January 6th with Trump crippling capitol security, inside tours of the Senate and house, police cooperation, and removal of the panic buttons, they won’t be able to accomplish it now either.
I am on the side that I hope he goes to jail. But with everything else that he has dodged I don’t have high hopes. With these charges and the potential charges from Georgia I believe he should be disqualified from running for president. Now hopefully justice moves quickly for all of these cases
I’m on the side where “we got him” has happened so many times without actual consequences that I’ve been numb for a long time. I’m feeling optimism that he might go down for the first time in ages.
It’s only moving goalposts when it’s outright denial of reality. When new information (failed attempts to nail the bastard) is taken into account, it’s adjusting expectations.
Exactly. Have we forgotten the impeachment already? And the second impeachment?
I’ll believe Trump will actually go down for his crimes when we get a guilty sentence. There’s still a long way to go between now and a conviction.
He may be able to delay until the election. Who knows what happens then.
He might win the election.
He may not be found guilty.
He might be found guilty and not do prison time.
He might be under home arrest and start an even more dangerous insurrection.
It’s so stupid to ask what side we’re on or accusing us of “moving goalposts.” We’re on the side of “Don’t count our indicted chickens before they hatch.”
The process has already been incredibly biased in his favor this entire time. The stuff he’s facing charges over are things that you and I would already be sitting in a prison cell awaiting our trial for. He’s being handled with kid gloves. Also look over how world leaders in the past are usually handled, even those that have committed heinous crimes like genocide and such, it’s usually exile or house arrest. I’d be happy to be proven wrong, I would love nothing more than to be proven wrong and for him to face very real consequences, but somehow I doubt it.
Some people have to complain about how bad things are - when things work the way they are supposed to these people get upset becuse cynicism is also a mask to hide lazy thinking.
Let me give you my (non-US) perspective: The world has watched this monster stomp on every value a decent human might have for more than 5 years. We saw the things he got away with due to a brigade of lawyers (essentially money). We all know that money talks, worldwide, but especially in the US.
I have no faith in the US justice system doing the right thing anymore (if ever). So I’ll believe it when I see it.
As an American living in “Trump country” I don’t know if things will be any better if he does get convicted. I don’t think even other Americans living in the coastal areas fully understand just how big of a powder keg middle America is. The right spark in the right place and this whole country could go up before the end of the decade. I’m actively trying to move out because I fear for my safety in these next few years.
I think it’s a fear of getting their hopes up. Liberals have been pretty consistently disappointed by their party recently, so lots of people are afraid to even start hoping for improvement.
Welcome to the British Petroleum summer heat wave. Next up is the Exxon Mobile Hurricane season.
Fun fact about the Exxon Mobile Hurricane Season, oil and gas platforms can get insurance against a storm in the Exxon Mobile Hurricane Season, but homeowners in Louisiana can’t get any homeowners insurance due to the expected severity of the named storms in the Exxon Mobile Hurricane Season.
You people live in a fantasy world where physical threats do not exist. The US is leading the way protecting Asia and Europe. The entire balkins would be under RU is it wasn’t for that spending.
The spending it’s needed and it’s EU/Asia doesn’t step up it’s game they’ll ultimately be a second tier power to the United States perpetually. Their call I guess 🤷♂️.
I mean sadly you’re right - people like to hate on our defense spending in the US, but who does the world look towards when Russia invades Ukraine? It sucks that it needs to be this way, but if we don’t have a strong deterrent to other countries then we’re just asking for problems. Look at how aggressive China and Russia have gotten recently, with China inching closer to an invasion of Taiwan. Who’s going to be laughing when the US is there to help Taiwan?
I’m not sure why your being downvoted, but it’s true. Allied countries of the U.S. do not have to put much towards their military budget do to being able to rely on the U.S.
The U.S. has a strong military presence in the Indo-pacific region and if they didn’t, surely some adversaries would have already been having their way.
It’s unfortunate it comes to this but that’s just the facts.
We know more about geo politics in the region than you do. And your drastic oversimplification does not actually result in a reasonable and coherent plan for peace in the Asia pacific region. Again I’ll say, your presence and commentary in this case is misinformed and incorrect.
I thought tablet, then I thought the post was about the way they were bending the tablet’s screen with their thumb, then I finally realised it was paper. Holding a printout of a screen shot just didn’t enter my mind.
Norwegian here. I quit reddit and joined Lemmy after the API debacle. Installed mint because of W11. (A big factor was how Steam and proton enables me to play games)
Can’t say either Lemmy or Linux has gotten any media attention in the big news sources as far as I can see.
I am the only one in my circle of friends that quit Reddit (most follow the various 40k reddits, and they have no replacement in federated options)
Also Norwegian. I installed Debian linux inspired by my brother who uses a version of Gentoo before systemd, and trying to hack an annoying neighbour’s bluetooth speaker. I quickly became invested in Linux. However, as far as I know, I might be the only one among my friends to make the switch. I joined Lemmy after discovering Voyager on F-Droid on my rooted, degoogled android phone
Never changed the ROM of my abdroid phones but, as far as I understand, it should possible to install Lineage and lock the boot loader and stop using root, no?
You can measure anything in nanograms, but a typical LSD dose starts at about 100ug with the threshold at about 25ug or so. Still not much, but not what you’d usually measure in nanograms.
That’s ten million doses to the kilo though. I have no idea what the current cost of LSD is, it used to be 5 euros when I bought it last (dating myself here), so 100 million bucks to smack someone KO as a conservative guess…
Yes, and apparently fifty-odd people have upvoted that comment, like “yeah, wait a minute, increasing how much your balls stink probably isn’t good advice!*”
Yes thats true. It is a fantastic game. But you know as well as I do that Smash Brothers tournaments have quite the reputation for smelly attendees. Like, even worse than anime conventions, and I like anime too.
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