I have autohotkey configured to insert the current date in ISO 8601 format into my filenames on keyboard shortcut for just this reason. So organized. So pure.
Download Autohotkey, and create a new script. Paste these shortcuts into the script and restart the script:
#NoEnv ; Recommended for performance and compatibility with future AutoHotkey releases.
; #Warn ; Enable warnings to assist with detecting common errors.
SendMode Input ; Recommended for new scripts due to its superior speed and reliability.
SetWorkingDir %A_ScriptDir% ; Ensures a consistent starting directory.
:R*?:ddd::
FormatTime, CurrentDateTime, yyyy-MM-dd
SendInput %CurrentDateTime%
return
:R*?:dtt::
FormatTime, CurrentDateTime, yyMMddHHmm
SendInput %CurrentDateTime%
Return
Now, if you type ‘ddd’ on your keyboard, the current date will be typed out, eg ‘2023-11-23’.
If you type ‘dtt’ tgen the datetime stamp will be typed out in YYMMDDhhmm format, eg 2311231012
There are so many cool things you van do with AHK to make your work more productive. For example, rather tgan typing your email address a billion times, add the shortcut:
Lithuania is one of the Baltic States, conveniently squished between Russia & Belarus to the east and the sea to the west. Across that sea is Sweden. You’ll usually see three countries be the parts of this set. Lithuania is the southernmost of these three.
(This doesn’t consider the separator) Cyan - DD/MM/YY Magenta - MM/DD/YY Yellow - YY/MM/DD The other ones are mixes of those two colors, so e.g. the US is MM/DD/YY and YY/MM/DD (apparently).
Also just noticed I didn’t attribute this picture, I’ll edit my comment.
We are ridiculously inconsistent in Canada. I’ve seen all 3 of the most popular formats here (2023-11-22, 11/22/2023, and 22/11/2023) in similarish amounts. Government forms seem to be increasingly using RFC 3339 dates, but even they aren’t entirely onboard.
Funny thing, in ISO 8601 date isn't separated by colon. The format is "YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS+hh:mm". Date is separated by "-", time is separated by ":", date and time are separated by "T" (which is the bit that a lot of people miss). Time zone indicator can also be just "Z" for UTC. Many of these can be omitted if dealing with lesser precision (e.g. HH:MM is a valid timestamp, YYYY-MM is a valid datestamp if referring to just a month). (OK so apparently if you really want to split hairs, timestamps are supposed to be THH:MM etc. Now that's a thing I've never seen anyone use.) Separators can also be omitted though that's apparently not recommended if quick human legibility is of concern. There's also YYYY-Wxx for week numbers.
In many of them but not all, because it’s become convention and has been enshrined in their documentation policies. cGMP just requires that your quality management system has a policy in place that specifies how to document the date, and when exceptions are allowed (for instance, data printouts where YYYY-MM-DD is often the default).
It’s also the reason some labs require you to initial/date every page of printed data, and some only require you to initial/date the first and/or last page. I’ve seen FDA auditors be okay with both, as long as you can justify it with something like: our documentation policy defines the printout as a copy of the original data, and the original data as what’s stored on machine memory with electronic signature; versus: our documentation policy defines the original signed/dated data printout as the original data. In any case, it still has to follow 21 CFR part 11 requirements for electronic records & signatures, where the only date predicate rule example they give is 58.130(e), which itself is broad and only applies to non-clinical lab studies. It’s notable that the date format 21 CFR 11 itself uses is actually Month D, YYYY, with no zero padding on the day.
And if you don’t have IQ/OQ/PQ documentation showing how you locked down and validated the software’s ability to maintain an audit trail you can’t even use electronic records (or signatures).
YES! I wish more people knew about RFC 3339. While I’m all for ISO 1601, it’s a bit too loose in its requirements at times, and people often end up surprised that it’s just not the format they picked…
Huh, I’ve never noticed how much bloat was in ISO 8601. I think when most people refer to it, we’re specifically referring to the date (optionally with time) format that is shared with RFC 3339, namely 2023-11-22T20:00:18-05:00 (etc). And perhaps some fuzziness for what separates date and time.
“I can reuse this old function if I just monkey-patch this other class to work with it, no one will have any issues understanding what’s going on”
Edit: Thought this was the programmerhumor community. For context: A monkey-patch is when you write code that changes the behaviour of some completely different code when it is running, thus making its inner workings completely incomprehensible to the poor programmer using or reading your code.
Had a coworker who used MMDDYY with no dashes. Unless you knew it was very hard to figure out, since it could also just be a number that happened to be 6 digits, too. At least YYYY-MM-DD looks like a date generally.
Yea the rally against block chain tech is stupid as fuck. It consumes nothing in the grand scale…do people not realize a lot of large enterprises have ~200k nodes give or take? Bigger companies can have in the million range. 200k machines is a joke.
Edit: I can see a lot of people just hate block chain tech without understanding anything tech wise lol
The nodes aren’t the issue. It’s the fact that those nodes have to expend at least the same amount of energy every single time a record is added and the larger the ledger, the more energy is needed. Blockchain is somewhat unique in that regard.
It really feels like SOMEWHERE there was a legitimate use for this for very mission-critical stuff that might need to be immutable once published and kept for posterity…
…but then it just became yet another speculative asset to make magic money that fueled stupid monkey jpegs.
The pursuit of profit benefits mankind only by the occasional anomalous accident.
100%. Capitalism is great until it reaches a peak where people who provide no value except in the wealth they’ve amassed are the ones who gain the most from it. You can succeed simply by being born with wealth and having no other value because other people who do have value will need you.
The point in OP is that “blockchain” was not a new thing. The Merkle Tree was patented in 1979, meaning that it has been free for decades. Most programmers might never have a use for it but they still encounter it every time they use git (which is older than bitcoin).
So, if you’re not aware of this, that’s because it is very technical and nothing to do with cryptocurrencies.
You do understand what a DB is right? Like there’s millions of them…hell right now typing out this comment has one marking it. And then you’re downloading it to read it… that’s a transaction. Except there are millions of people reading comments constantly on all social media platforms.
My comment here has more bits in it than a single transaction.
With the electricity used to validate a single crypto transaction you could do thousands or even millions of DB queries.
Yes, everything uses electricity. That’s like saying that it’s fine if you kill one cow per day to eat its ear and throw the rest because hundreds of them are killed every day in farms.
Wasting so much electricity in such a non efficient manner so a decentralization cult member can have his wet dream of using non-government money makes no sense.
DBs are not the same as a blockchain. A DB doesn’t have to hash all previous data before it every time the DB is written to. You can read and write to a specific spot in a DB without ever knowing anything else about the DB. With blockchain, inserts have to be successive and they have to reference every previous insert to validate that the entry series is unbroken. On top of that, for things like Bitcoin, every other client also has to validate it since the ledger is shared.
There’s a reason blockchain is significant. Otherwise, why didn’t stuff like Bitcoin exist prior to it? Databases, in some for or another, have existed for decades. Blockchains are immutable, that’s why. The order of entries matters and validation is a requirement.
DBs still update their tables every time someone writes to it. And there are millions of DBs being written to every second. It’s absolutely comparable.
We’re not comparing millions of DBs to a single blockchain. We’re comparing 1 DB to 1 blockchain instance. If you had millions of blockchains, you would use exponentially more energy for the same data vs. a normal database. Updating tables is not the same thing as hashing and validating every prior entry in the table.
There doesn’t need to be. My argument is not bullshit, you just don’t understand the differences between blockchain and a standard database and are pretending you do which makes the argument impossible for you to understand.
Lol no I do, you clearly don’t have a clue what you’re talking about. The amount of DBs we have alone, that’s not counting any other compute servers or even WS dwarfs all the block chain out there. This article is a nothing burger and is complete bullshit. Even the study they referenced doesn’t know the exact amount…as it points out .6 to 2.2% is their estimated use…but this shit article went with the higher numbers because it’s great for people like you who hate any tech that you clearly don’t understand.
Yeah, people tend hate what they don’t understand. Especially when most people think think every blockchain performs exactly like bitcoin (which is proof of work). Bitcoin is slow and power hungry and would never actually be usable by the masses for everyday transactions. But it was the first and will likely be a “digital gold” for a long time
But it’s not the only one and in time everyone will be using blockchain technology. It’s so much more convenient and useful than most realize. The Solana blockchain has secured a big partnership with Visa that can be read up on if anyone is interested.
You don’t even understand blockchain so I’m not sure what your edit is all about. You’re comparing blockchain to a database in your replies as if they’re comparable.
When it comes to power…it absolutely is comparable…but most of you have no clue how much compute we use daily in terms of power. Acting like the block chain sucks down anywhere near the amount of power we use on even in the corporate world is hilarious…you know a lot of colos have their own sub stations right?
The only person here who doesn’t know what they’re talking about is you. If you took a standard DB (MySQL or Postgres, for example) and took that same information and stored it on a blockchain instead, you’d use far more energy on the blockchain and the issue would only get exponentially worse as the chain got bigger. Normal DBs don’t need to hash new entries or validate them against previous entries that are also hashed.
Are you dense, man? No one said that. They’re saying that one blockchain would take several hundred DBs to equal its energy use. You’re wrong and doubling down for some reason and it’s just making you look silly.
I said that genius…go check my posts…the fuck you arguing about? I literally said that the amount of DBs we have make the miniscule amount of large block chains out there look like nothing. Then you show up and say one DB isn’t comparable to one large fucking blockchain…no shit.
Please propose a law or regulation structure for significantly reducing or eliminating advertisements. I’m serious. I fucking hate ads. I just don’t have a reasonable or effective way to get rid of them.
Edit: Hey actually I just thought of one! If the consumer is paying for the product, it can’t come with ads, including things like product placement or ad reads!
In São Paulo, one of the biggest cities of the world, the municipality forbade by law all billboards and building disfiguring ‘decorations’ some 10 years ago. Since then, the city became much more bearable, aesthetically. Nothing special happened, everybody was happy, except a few bankrupt ads agencies. Maybe, you must be able to imagine that change is possible. However, there is this ideology, Americans seem to be so fond off, that seems to make such things very difficult.
New Jersey also banned billboards. That one is pretty easy and I vote that we should adopt that policy everywhere. It’s much harder to control digital adspace, since you can do things like astroturf campaigns and product placement. Great point though! I like that law.
Hey actually I just thought of one! If the consumer is paying for the product, it can’t come with ads, including things like product placement or ad reads!
Yes, those two are the most important and shouldn’t even be that hard to push. There are many laws that were pushed “to protect the children”, we might as well finally make some that actually do protect them.
Make sending unrequested data like ads and trackers to web clients a crime akin to gaining unrestricted access to computers. No need for a new law, just a new interpretation on an older one.
Most jurisdictions prohibit unauthorized access to computer systems. What if we just say, “running Javascript code that implements functionality not specifically requested by the user is unauthorized tampering”.
Perhaps, but you also never hear them complain about it anywhere near as loudly as people complaining about blockchains.
Yes, they’ll grumble about ads being annoying or YouTube blocking people who block ads, but the amount of power that gets wasted on this never even crosses anyone’s mind, meaning on some level, there exists agreement that advertisement are a necessary and responsible use of electricity while blockchains are not.
That’s because ad serving doesn’t set a lower bound on the electricity price. The value of crypto and the value of electricity are linked.
For the sake of simplicity I’ll just say Bitcoin.
If the price of Bitcoin stays constant (big if), and the rate of Bitcoin per watt does too, then everyone would start mining until the demand for power is so high that the price increases until it’s as high as the Bitcoin per watt.
Sure, they are unrealistic assumptions, but it’s easier to see this way that the value of Bitcoin is (almost) the same as electricity. If it were lower, noone would mine it, if higher, people would buy electricity with bitcoin for a profit until the 2 equalize.
Electricity will never be much cheaper than Bitcoin, market forces will make sure of that, causing a huge environmental impact. Ads, however, only use as much electricity as they need to operate, their amount is not decided based on how much electricity they waste.
Honestly, it never fails to surprise me when on a presumable anticapitalist forum such as this one, someone makes a passionate argument in favor of some of the most ghastly corporate practices known to man, but sure, let’s put that premise to the test, shall we?
Shall we call it a draw? Keep in mind that online advertising is a fast growing industry (and likely to continue to grow in the future), whereas Bitcoin’s power use isn’t likely to grow too much, as the above article explains. Also keep in mind that this is JUST online advertising, and completely ignores print, TV, and those digital billboards that are spreading everywhere from Times Square to your local grocery store. Think about neon store signs, illuminated billboards, etc.
Also, that’s just the cost of delivering ads to people (i.e. it doesn’t even include the cost of producing them). Think about how many people work in advertising – all the offices they occupy, the computers, cameras, and whatever other equipment they use, business flights, what have you – and I’m pretty sure the carbon footprint of the entire industry far outstrips that of crypto.
I see you completely ignored my comment. The problem is not the amount of electricity used in itself, which the estimate of 6GWh-130TWh is as precise as shooting a dart at the moon.
Crypto uses energy for the sake of using energy. The value of crypto is based on the amount of energy used to create it. It’s not valuable to society. That’s what people is upset about. Crypto provides even less value to society than ads do.
Even you said it, ads spend energy because they employ people, those people generate value.
That’s like saying we should stop heating homes because it consumes more energy than crypto mining. Hose heating improves the quality of life of people. Crypto does not.
Well I was like 25 when I took care of him for two weeks and a pretty hard partier so silence wasn’t really my thing at the time. I’m in my 40s with 4 kids so I’ll I love silence now. I’ll even stare at walls.
Well, we weren’t very keen on talking in the family when I grew up. I can’t remember if we sometimes talked while TV was muted because of ads, but when we didn’t talk it didn’t feel awkward. If anything, it felt awkward to ever talk to each other. Not the healthiest upbringing in my mind ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Exactly! Blockchain and PoW are terrible but id really like to know how much time and electricity is consumed to serve ads, cool servers, train and educate people to effectively become ad engineers.
Same with porn. But I’m building a shake-power generator for fleshlites so it should balance out the power it pulls. Saving the earth one jack-off at a time.
Charging a hybrid car battery only takes 253.4 jerks. Pretty soon we will be expanding our charging service to parking lots across America and Canada! Most of them already have people willing to do it for you already …they were doing it there anyway… Win/win.
Powerjerk ™, we make perverts work for you!
Just roll up and say “Hey Jagoff, I need to get to x!” And you’ll promptly be taken care of.*
*Do not give them drugs to speed up the process. We are serious about our drug-free workplace.
Energy isn’t free. More power captured from jerking will increase food consumed, meaning more energy used in farming. You’ll have to brand this as either a carbon capture fapture system or as a weight loss program
Humans are incredibly inefficient power generators. I can buy 1kWh of electricity from the grid for about 18 cents (generation…transmission is extra).
I don’t think I can buy 870kCal of food for 18 cents. Certainly not a healthy source. And that’s even assuming 100% efficiency. Any high school physics student will tell you that won’t happen.
Yes but what about this whataboutism? And honestly I am fairly certain it ain’t as much as Bitcoin. People usually focus on 1 thing to get it done because moving to the next. I bet you try to do that at work too.
No way ads consume less power than bitcoin. Just the lights for ads probably consume more than bitcoin, not even talking about creating ads, which I assume consumes a double digit percentage of the global work force.
I did a back of the envelope a few comments up. How it looks to me, just sending internet ads around the world consumes 20 times as much as all crypto mining combined.
You assume wrong. In the UK, about 0.3-0.5% of people work in marketing or advertising, and that’s one of the most extremely financialised service economies in the whole world. No way is the number anywhere near even that high in countries where people actually work for a living.
Apparently, 48% of consumer web traffic is ads.. That is dystopian in itself, that means around half the content floating around the internet is stuff the client does not request but is pushed to them.
That would put the ad industry at 4500 TWh per year. However, this is back of the envelope.
That means the ad industry costs us around 20 times the cost of crypto in terms of power. Feel free to check me because I don’t know shit about most of these things.
That said, this does not account for the entire ad industry, just the cost of sending internet ads around the world. Ads are made, ads are displayed in various media other than websites, and most importantly, ads have the sole purpose of driving further consumption, which all contributes to the societal costs of the ad industry.
Total monthly posts exploded after Spez enshitified Reddit, and is still growing steadily month over month.
That suggests that the current decline in monthly active users is primarily because lurkers who only came to lemmy after initially hearing about it on Reddit, went back to lurking Reddit.
The number of users that are contributors is still growing, and that’s what’s important.
Yep, arrived during the initial digg exodus, had tens of thousands of posts at Reddit, modded two subreddits. Closed my account the day during the protests and haven’t been back.
I’m not as active here, mostly due to a busier life but found a new home anyway.
I’m close to that too, but I think mine was 13 years. The weird thing that I’ve noticed is that most of the time I was on Reddit, almost no one I talked to in real life used Reddit. I struggled for years to try to get people to check the site out. Now that I left, I swear I hear someone I know mention Reddit exponentially more often. The average person doesn’t give a damn about how shitty the platform has become, because they weren’t around to see what it used to be. The average person WANTS to see ads interspersed with their cookie cutter content with stupid ass features like chat and followers. Good riddance.
Agreed. First they killed RedditGifts, then AMAs, then the up vote/down vote debacle, and when they took away my ability to use Relay is when I left. Screw them.
I’m a counter example. I contributed on Reddit, moderated my own subreddit with a couple of thousand viewers; couple of tens of contributors
I haven’t been back to that sub, haven’t appointed any other mods. If automod can’t handle shit, shit isn’t being handled
I have been back to other subs. There are small inoffensive places on Reddit that simply haven’t moved
I still visit those subs, still write on them, just not nearly as often
Edit to add: checking today, those subs are becoming less good. With no good app, so many of the prolific commenters don’t comment much now. I also had a reply to a 2015 comment I made. I thought stuff was auto-archived much quicker than that
I’m still seeing so much growth in new content and communities, idk if the raw number of users is the metric we even should care about. Is it the best measure of quality?
I also think a big part of it is how active users are counted. Saw in a different thread that it only counts accounts who have commented or posted in the last month. Well… I browse and vote on probably an average of 30-50 posts and many of their comments every single day, but the last comment I left was over a month ago.
I also wonder if the active user count is counting people who made multiple accounts across different instances and was therefore always massively overinflated to begin with. I have 5 lemmy accounts - one on lemmy.world when I first joined, one on lemmynsfw for happy fun times, and 3 more trying to find a different instance with the de federation policy and hoster that I wanted after lemmy.world was going through their ddos downtime issue.
I mostly lurk, too, but enjoy being around my fellow Lemmings.
The only decline I have seen as someone who mostly lurks is in conservatives who thought this was the next Voat. After the surge I saw an uptick in all kinds of people, and a lot of them I don’t mind seeing leave.
You don’t need this lil slice of the internet to be the “next big thing”, you just need a place to go to see the stuff you like.
Ya ever since everyone defederated from exploding heads there’s definitely less of them. Maybe one day they’ll create another instance. I hope they do, maybe a less transphobic conservative instance, just for the variety of people.
Long time lurker here, 99% of the time I go to post a comment I delete it before posting like ah fuck it. I’m trying to engage a bit more now there are more users.
I’m yet to encounter the majority of issues I hear Lemmings griping about. Everyone has been pretty civil toward me. Every time my inbox blows up I feel dread, only to open it and find zero confrontation or vitriol. I’m not running into any racists, sexists, bigots, etc., and I certainly haven’t noticed a decline in content (I browse Top ~6 Hours).
I realize my personal experience doesn’t equate to these problems not existing, but I do get the strong impression that people are exaggerating greatly.
Exactly my experience as well. Sure, I don’t have infinite scroll, but I also don’t feel like an algorithm is trying to make me angry. When I get responses, they’re typically thoughtful or on topic.
I’ve been active for a month and in my opinion too many users have radicalised and extremist mindsets, but other than that it’s alright.
Going back to reddit would mean to install that unbearable app they have and having to deal with incompetent admins, so I will stay here for some time.
I can see why it’s off-putting for a lot of people though.
many users have radicalised and extremist mindsets,
I think thats the whole internet nowdays, unless you decide to exclusivelly consume cat content (and even then theres gonna be a way to jam in extremist political views by some nutter somehow).
Although i have to admit that the ones here are of a diferent breed than most, mainly tankies and people on that side of the compass (and yes they are very annoying about it).
One upside to lemmy is that ,at least up untill now, the mods and admins are very neutral and i rarelly see deleted comments (or maybe they are hidden… i dunno) and that theres genuine free speech in here, i mean if you whant you can look at my comment history, i get downvoted to oblivion most of the time but my comments are still up and not censored.
Although there is this weird thing on other instances (im in sh.itjust.works and they dont do this i know i tryied it) that delete words on peoples comments and posts, mainly slurs and politically incorrect words. Really, i seen that some months before, dont know if it still like that now with the world users, but if you type something like fa***t in .world you will get “deleted” in that word specifically irc
I don’t know how to feel about it, gives me some “spez editing the database to change comments” vibes.
I guess I would feel better to just get notified that my comment got removed.
Or is it just a displaying option based on the instance you logged in with and it gets filtered on the display side and a different instance user would still see the original?
Indeed it does, thats why i shit so much on political extremeism, it inevitably ends in censorship.
My advice would be that if it makes you feel uncomfortable (and you still whant to use lemmy), change instances, like i said, shit.just.works doesnt do that, dont know which other instances do and doesnt. I think lemmy.ml absolutelly does.
If you share a thought on a Biden/Trump thread, an Israel/Palestine thread, or another topic that attracts strong views, and your opinion is different than the hive, expect some vitriol and confrontation.
I’ve run into it while seriously looking for debate or productive conversation.
The same thing happens on Reddit, though. I think that’s kind of just the internet from now on. /r/worldnews is literally just a pro-Israel, anti-Palestine echo chamber so it’s nice to see another perspective on here. (I only browse Reddit at work not logged in for the record.) Over here, the hive mind on that seems to change thread to thread.
You mean pro Palestine? You literally can’t say “hey Hamas should be considered at fault too for using hospitals in the first place” without someone telling you that it’s 11101010% Israel’s fault for ever defending themselves when any civilian could get hurt.
It’s funny when the US does war in the middle east when a republican is president the media doesn’t even cover it. At least not to the extent we do today. That’s because Republicans are callous and could not give an ounce of fuck. The fact that people want to hold Biden to account should tell you everything you need to know about the two parties. Yes Biden sucks dick. Yes genocide is unacceptable no matter the people doing genocide. Only I’m voting along side the constituents that actually give a fuck.
And that is certainly not the GOP. They only care that it makes Biden look bad.
Sure? I don’t care about US presidents. I’m talking about how personal responsibility doesn’t exist for Hamas.
Israel is apparently completely at fault for having to attack hospitals because that’s where Hamas is choosing to fight from specifically to increase civilian death, but it’s not Hamas’ fault as well for choosing to put their own civilians in harms way for their political goals?
Fuck the both of them, the middle east is a cesspit of ancient draconian morals and ideas, and they’re constantly dragging first world nations into their ancient goat herder religion bullshit.
Sick of seeing the world on the brink of collapse and the conservative nutjobs always claiming it’s the end times and using it to justify their oppression of minority groups in other countries. Structured nations borderline fall apart every few years because a few million extremists half a globe away have had a blood feud for thousands of years.
Hamas had human shields. What is there to argue about? Should we take innocent lives to punish the guilty? Doesn’t sound like justice to me.
The world is a shit place. People are really flirting with the idea of fascism in America. Its insane but they are doing it. Americans are lucky now to have relatively peaceful lives despite corporations wanting to oppress them. Why we involved ourselves with the middle east is toothpaste we can’t get back in the tube. At what point as Americans are we allowed to bow out of the discussion? To me, it’s when we cast our ballot and its for the side that is the lesser evil. As individuals we are purposefully cut off from the reigns of power and until the people seize them again we have no choice but to keep making the humbling choice.
My only issue is the lack of small communities that get posts frequently, and yeah, duh, I should contribute, but theres only so much I can say about my transness.
One thing I miss about reddit is just being able to endlessly read about peoples experiences and stupid shitty trans memes, thats just missing here right now
Exactly this. My small Reddit communities had a few posts per day. The equivalent on Lemmy have a few per year. Still, I don’t miss them enough to go back.
So, following the 90/9/1 rule, 90% lurk, 9% comment, 1% create content, we are primarily losing from the 90%? That seems to be a good thing for the long-term. As long as we aren’t losing from the 1% I’d say we’re good
I feel I have better engagement here. It is still missing some more niche communities that Reddit had, and I’m trying to be active to grow them, but it has been slow.
lurkers are also not counted in this statistics. ifaik only active users who are posting or commenting are counted. so there might be more users out there who are active and just lurking and they are not counted.
Yeah, it’s plain to see that engagement is steadily climbing. The top posts keep getting higher and higher numbers and new, interesting communities keep popping up.
I find it more comfortable to contribute to Lemmy than to other sites. There seems to be actual discussion and opportunities to learn, which can be much harder to come across on the other platforms.
When you come across a ‘user’ that almost exclusively defends one controversial politician/company/government and all of their comments seem to follow a script. Also the account is either brand new or 5 years old but only started posting recently.
That I agree with. I don’t post often but when I do it’s always very positive and makes me want to post more . Compared to Reddit where it would have alot more negative comments or would just get removed by the mods for some stupid reason. Did you know you can no longer post on r/buildapc about asking for suggestions on building PC’s ? What’s even the point anymore?
Did you know you can no longer post on r/buildapc about asking for suggestions on building PC’s ?
Yeah it’s like a sub for a specific narrow purpose then people get buthurt about how people are always making the same posts over and over. So they turn it in to a wiki to “address repetitive spam” or whatever, so at that point you might as well just refer to one of the hundreds of other build lists found on other reputable sites. A lot of the productive hobby subs turn in to “hey check out my [reddit hyped product]!” and people actually posting things they’ve put effort in get little to no attention.
For me Mastodon is still growing and getting more interesting, with more and more formal institutions joining (newspapers, NGOs, government institutions etc.).
That’s just not true. I’ve made comments that I thought desirve no reply but humans find a way. If there’s no comments to read the shared content just isn’t that interesting. If I see comments then the shared content must be interesting enough to justify a discussion.
Well I think you’re wrong, fuck you and your opinion /s
I actually don’t know to what extent I agree with you, but your theory certainly feels plausible to me. It reminds me of the internet adage about how the best way to get a right answer to your question is to be wrong. I can’t remember what it’s called.
Aye, cunningham seemingly meant it as the fastest answer though, which was the sentence right afterwards in that wiki entry. So maybe mr. anarchist-with-a-machine-fetish would have gotten an answer earlier if he had said it was the anti-murphy’s law.
Division gives people something to talk about. Not everyone can think of something constructive and interesting to say at a given time, but when presented with an opinion, it is trivial for most people to formulate a comment either agreeing or disagreeing with it.
It’s funny how despite social media becoming very normal, the old phenomenon of most content getting generated by a small portion of power users persists.
Have you seen the shitpost communities? Cleverness isn’t required, and in fact I think in those communities it’s somewhat frowned upon, 'cause c’mon, no polishing shit!
I take a break over the weekend. If I comment, I need to check the client every hour or so. I don’t want replies/rebuttals to linger without a response if it is warranted. I need to work on my car projects and can’t be bothered with online interactions whilst doing so.
That’s probably the one thing I like about lemmy that surprised me when compared to reddit. I’ve found myself commenting on posts or to replying to comments days after the initial posts, and no one seems bothered by it.
I try to make it a point to post questions on communities that have not kicked off yet, knowing that I most likely will not receive a response for a while.
Socialists don’t hate markets, they hate workers not having any power or democratic choice in how they interact in the market.
Workers owning the means of production just means the workers are doing the same work but they are in ownership of the factory and the profits. They will still sell the products they produce in a marketplace.
So ah… What’s the issue then? You can have what you want under capitalism. Attacking the system is forcing your own on others. This is unironically what makes socialism unpopular in the context of history.
The western left doesn’t agree on one form of socialism to align around so it is both impossible to criticize with any specificity and serves as a catch-all in opposition to the current system. It breaks down when they suddenly have to align on specific policies.
That’s a good thing; socialism is a fledgling idea. It needs discoure and experimentation. The attack that lack of exact details and perfect cohesion is an empty one.
I think the point the other user was trying to make is that Starbucks already has connections, and they are able to source their coffee from more shady sources if they really want to. Someone starting out new has no such connections and will pay a higher price for their beans than Starbucks, ergo, they have to find something else to compete on other than price (which I think is possible, I live near many local coffee shops, including some worker co-ops). However, you’re still dealing with Starbucks having a larger presence than you, economically, and them being able to source cheaper goods due to economies of scale. I would think you’re already familiar with this. You’re correct in asserting that you’re stuck just having to “believe” your sources don’t use slave labor, because you’re sourcing it from another country. Starbucks at least has the money to check on such things, if they so choose.
The point that I was trying to make was that Starbucks works with more than just the people at the counter, which is how you characterized it. Moving goalposts now isn’t very helpful.
I don’t disagree, but you characterized it differently in a previous comment. If you don’t want people jumping to conclusions, maybe leave out the hyperbole and try to focus on what you actually want to get across. Obviously “What third word slaves make your coffee at Starbucks? It’s normally some teeny something green haired person making your coffee.” is majorly hyperbolic if you’re aware of bad working conditions in other countries. You could have said as much and made the argument you’re making now.
Seriously, to others it just feels like moving goalposts.
That doesn’t make it ethical? “Everybody’s doing it” usually isn’t a great way to explain away anything. However, you can choose how to spend your money, and if you don’t like where they source it, it’s easy enough to… just not buy coffee. (Caffeine is an addictive, shitty drug anyway)
I think plenty of people agree that if the chain of production includes slavery, it doesn’t matter if they’re not directly employing them, they’re still using slave labor in service of getting the product to market. Once again, “everybody does it” isn’t really a good reason to keep doing it. Also, acting like it “doesn’t count” and that you didn’t move goalposts just means you’re not arguing in good faith here.
I mean, that’s the rub. If you pay someone who uses slave labor to produce a product, you are inherently financially supporting slavery, even if you don’t personally own the slaves.
Sorry, it counts, you knew about it, but tried to minimize it or act like “since everyone does it” it’s okay. I call bullshit.
Starbucks doesn’t own the farms. They buy the beans from the people growing them. The exact same thing you would do if you started a coffee chain or you would buy from a wholesaler…
It's so insanely more complicated than that. Not all farms are equal.
You clearly know nothing of the coffee industry. Don't speak on a topic if you literally know nothing. Third wave coffee exists because of the inherent abuse of the workers who actually harvest coffee. That you're so naive to even think that the person behind the counter is the end of who is part of Starbucks is shockingly sad considering how much you're trying to fight for something that is dependent on you needing a much better understanding of what you're talking about.
I never said Starbucks owns the slave labor. But to ignore the influence they have is outstandingly naive. Like, do you think at all before replying? Are you in middle school and have any idea how the real world operates?
What did I ignore? You only had one or two sentences there. I replied to it and pointed out how it's faulty. You'll need to help me out because I think you're using some other form of the English language or dialogue model than the rest of those who speak the language use.
Yeah, and a third party candidate could be voted into every seat and the presidency, but it's so stacked against it occurring, it's effectively impossible.
The state of the economy today is what's stopping a vast majority of people from doing so. You can open a coffee shop and survive, but you could never compete against Starbucks. You would not even dent their bottom line. You would need hundreds of millions of dollars to realistically compete. Capitalism has brought us to a point where a majority of folks need to sell their idea to investors, further separating most workers from the value of their work.
Edit: I'm really tired of the naive and childish defenses most people put up for capitalism. "Nothing is stopping you." Yeah and "nothing" is stopping a transgender women from becoming our next president by the same definition of "nothing". Might as well say nothing is stopping you from passing through walls as quantum mechanics says it's possible.
Dutch brothers by revenue is essentially a drive through energy drink stand, not a coffee company and Peet’s is owned by a holding company that got rich off of Nazi work camp labor.
Peet’s had 4 stores before it started changing hands, Peet’s and Starbucks famously did not compete with each other for years, and Starbucks wasn’t even selling brewed coffee before it was taken over by Shultz and venture capital.
But from my experience in the industry, your confident incorrectness is perfectly in character for a coffee shop owner.
You haven't owned coffee places. You've been entirely wrong on how to source coffee plus your description of what even makes coffee. If you used to own them, you probably ran them into the ground. You're objectively wrong on coffee production.
You seem to think to compete, you have to grow larger.
You need to at least meet inflation, if not outpace it. Moreover, you're not competing if you aren't actually trying to battle. Competition breeds innovation. If you do not compete and do not get better or try to improve, society would degrade and regress. Come on. Before you respond next time, just think about what the consequence of what you're saying is before.you actually hit the button. It saves us a lot of time.
Even if, hypothetically, 65% of people owned their homes outright, that’s still over a third of the population who can’t even consider getting a loan like you described.
And for those that COULD, they’re betting their entire life on it. People with money can afford to take risks. It’s not an even playing field, at all.
Nothing stops them! except shitty wages that are not enough to pay your absurdly high bills for housing, utility and shitty food plus competition which does not treat their eorkers fair and is therefore much more profitable and can easily destroy your worker-friendly cooperative, which they totally will do because CAPITALISM
Okay I said I was done talking with you but I actually love any excuse to nerd out on this so here:
The state of California has mandated compostable household and business waste be separated out and picked up separately much like recycling is already separated. This is a law that is already in effect; however, they have declined to enforce it so far. They have recently began making statements that they will begin enforcing the law and fining businesses and property owners for not complying.
Many small municipalities (and some big ones) have not even started setting up the infrastructure to do so. They’re way behind.
This means there is a captive market for a company providing those services. A potentially huge market.
Now anyone can set up a waste collection service, it’s pretty standardized, but here’s where my idea is different. A technology called pyrolization.. It mostly requires organic materials, lots of em. In essence, it’s burning without fire. The input is organic material, the output is a stable carbon-rich solid called biochar (similar to charcoal except not as flammable), and something called syngas, which is similar to natural gas. With the right machinery, the process produces energy and is carbon-negative.
The carbon-negative aspect is the selling point. Do you know how many carbon-negative businesses there are? You could probably count them, globally, on both hands. This would play EXTREMELY well in California.
Pyrolysis is not a new technology, but applying it at scale is. Currently it’s mainly in use as a way of processing human waste. There’s a company called BioForceTech in the Bay Area that has a successfully operating pyrolysis machine processing human waste, and they have machines globally that also process feedstock like wood chips and nut shells. Municipal organic waste would require a sorting machine for sure, but other than that it could use their machine just fine. And the sorting machine wouldn’t have to be as complex as those in municipal compost systems: if plastic gets mixed into your compost, that’s bad. If plastic gets mixed into something you’re just going to burn and bury, not a huge deal.
$850,000 is not enough to set something up like this on the municipal level. That would take millions. It’s enough to get buy-in from BioForceTech, ReCology (bay area waste management company that has experience with waste-gas powered trucks, and compost sorting machines), investors, and local and state government (the state has several grant and loan programs for “green” businesses, especially in waste collection).
In my opinion the biggest, most profitable market would be Santa Clara County or Alameda County, both in the bay area and both have limited compost pickup presently. But that’s a big bite to chew and I think beyond the capabilities of a new business. Something like small towns in Mendocino County would be perfect - small enough that they don’t have municipal organics collection aside from maybe yard trimmings, liberal enough that the carbon-negative aspect would play well, rural enough to have plenty of cheap land for a processing facility.
So that’s our market. We get to charge customers for the pickup, and then sell the power generated as “clean energy”. Not to mention the whole thing functions like a peaker plant. When electricity prices are low, you can adjust the output ratio to create more biochar - adding to the carbon-negative selling point (and getting some money from cap and trade). When electricity prices are high, you can get more syngas and burn it as carbon-neutral energy.
The one thing I’m not very familiar on and would need to consult experts on is the regulations involved in the “selling electricity” aspect. The regulatory burden may make that part not feasible, I just don’t know enough about it.
People will donate a significant portion of their wages to ineffectual radical politicians but won’t bother to consolidate capital to support co-ops. That’s the actual system I see.
Those lazy commies with their limp wristed excuses like: “The reality of living under a capitalist society”. Why don’t they just eat some bootstrap stew like my pa did and die of preventable illness generating labor value for someone else?
Surprise, when there are obstacles standing in the way of your goals, people may mention those obstacles when asked about progress towards their goals. What an absolute flaccid take.
Tesla is not close to bigger than GM. They only make consumer vehicles and maybe a model of semi truck but I don’t think that’s being produced yet, while GM has been making consumer cars in addition to commercial and military vehicles for decades. They might be valued as more but that doesn’t really say anything in practical terms.
Wait…so these are your examples of people who “did something”
Do you realize that the edge every single one of these companies had over the others is the willingness to do whatever it takes to extract as much value from labor for the least amount of money, right?
You are just making the case for the complete destruction of capitalism. Only soulless psychopaths are rewarded here. Winning is not beating these people at the same psychotic game that they’re playing.
No one cares if you “buy into” anything. It exists whether you believe it or not.
The entire point of keeping unemployment at certain levels is so capitalists can dictate wages and responsibilities. It’s not a secret. Bourgeois media openly panics whenever unemployment levels get too low.
Anyway, in the very real world that we live in, unemployment is kept at certain levels so capitalists can dictate wages and responsibilities. It’s not a secret. Bourgeois media openly panics whenever unemployment levels get too low.
Yes, they are panicking because people have bargaining power to get higher wages. Are you still not connecting the dots there?
I have a skill and I am not struggling like some of my other comrades are. That does not make me blind to the purpose of unemployment or to the fact that if everyone in the world had my skill set then that would mean there are a lot of important jobs that aren’t getting done, a fact that, curiously, has completely escaped you.
No, they are concerned about having to pay people more, because that cuts directly into their own profits. They are not more concerned about inflation then they are about their own loss of profit from having to pay workers more, unless they require so few laborers to run their business that inflation does actually cut into their profits more.
Feds are increasing interest rates to increase unemployment. They directly stated that. You can Google it if you don’t believe me.
Quite a bit has escaped you and it is endlessly entertaining to me.
This is the reasoning that leads to “if you think medicines are too expensive, stop buying them” with much the same problem of it not being quite that simple for the majority of humanity, whose “choices” are not as unconstrained as the ones you’re familiar with.
I know you deleted your earlier nonsense, but I saw some of it first, so I know how out of touch you are. You were wrong about how much wealth people have, but even after having that corrected, here you are with “It’s just how the world works”, another incorrect assertion that might describe your experience of the world, but is unrepresentative for humanity as a whole.
Most people don’t have the luxuries you so clearly take for granted. Turning down exploitative employment is only an option for those with money in reserve. Most people do not have that. Going somewhere else means separation from family and friends—easy enough for the thoroughly unlikable, but community is important to most members of a social species. And, anyway, that’s assuming there aren’t legal restrictions like immigration controls. As I said before, most lives are more constrained than yours, and that isn’t because those people are any less deserving. That is how the world works.
That capitalism unobstructed by public regulations, cartels, monopolies, oligopolies, effective trade unions, cultural inhibitions or kinship obligations is the ultimate engine of economic growth is an old-hat truth
so it’s not commie propaganda. But it might relieve you of some of your misconceptions, since you clearly aren’t listening to us here. Of course, you could just carry on regardless, but then it’ll be just far too clear that you’re not acting in good faith.
Oh, no, what am I saying? You don’t want to do that, because that would once more point out that you’re clueless in your assertions. Now I don’t want to read any more of them. And I’m free to turn you down, right?
I can’t force someone to take a job, but I can starve them until they do. And I can make it illegal for them to acquire food in any way that isn’t engaging with my system of capitalism.
The more you keep bringing up your insistence that you’re not raging about being called (apparently, correctly) a bootlicker, the worse you’re making it sound for you.
Crying about personal attacks after accusing me of being effeminate (because femininity bad, amirite bucko? jordan-eboy-peterson ) is really shooting yourself in the foot. You’ve already come across as misogynistic, insecure, and a stan for corporate masters that don’t care if you live or die. You’re just digging deeper.
I try to tell myself that most of the people bought into capitalism can be rehabilitated, maybe some just need to spend a few years breaking rocks to get it through their heads that other people fucking exist on this planet.
Reading your comments has made me re-evaluate that
I don’t buy into that lame beta theory of gravity. You go down. If you don’t feel like going down, go up. It’s that simple. That is the beauty of jumping. I can jump as high as I want
Sure: becoming a member of a corporation costs money. You either have to pay to get it set up or buy a share to get in so those who already paid are made whole.
Unfortunately, the US as an example, our society is structured such that the majority of people here have zero savings with wages decreasing in value every year due to inflation. A person in this situation cannot produce money to buy-in; squeezing water from a stone situation.
All people are essentially born with no assets, and if they want to secure wealth, they must sell their labor to achieve it.
In other words, children of parents who own an outsized number of assets do not have to sell their labor to achieve it, because it is offset by their parents assets. This inherently produces an unequal/unbalanced system where some people simply never have to work this way. This is why extremely in-demand internships at companies in places like New York City are often unpaid, and thus generally end up going to people who already have money, access, and support systems. Because only those kind of people can afford to take on an unpaid internship to move upward in the capitalist system.
This is also the source of generational poverty, because it can be really hard to escape when generation after generation are born to no assets.
This is an area I have said needs to be taxed to hell, there is no good reason we should allow the passing of wealth without heavy penalty. I’m convinced that if we taxed all forms of wealth transfer at something like 80%, we could pretty much get rid of income tax. Income you have earned should be your entitlement, assets passed down to you should be where the taxes cut in.
So, you have to sell off 80% of your dead mother’s mementos unless you’re rich? Careful—your proposal is good in spirit, but has ugly side effects that need to be carefully avoided.
I’d rather sell off mementos than lose livelihood. We all know the top 1% shelter and live off non income based tax shelters, and then just pass those shelters on through legacies. Given the arbitrary caps on assets your grandmother’s Polaroids would likely be safe. You wont see good faith attempts to fix taxes regardless though, as politicians are in the business of making money, so would never go after their own livelihood.
Inflation’s been happening since currency was created. We don’t notice day to day because the effects are stretched over a long period.
Try calculating the value of a 2010 dollar against the current 2023 dollar. You’ll find the cumulative effect of ~5% inflation each year is significant.
In addition, periods exist throughout American history during which inflation has spiked noticably within a year or two - this is nowhere near the first time.
Look at the current environment in America. Look at the absence of worker co-ops besides like Winco. Why aren’t there more? What factors are at play that is seemingly preventinf the natural formation of worker co-ops if they are allowed? Are children taught they can do that? Do people getting MBAs learn this in their classes? There are a lot of questions to ask here. While we do have some examples, for whatever reason they are not common here. I do think it has something to do with the resources the average citizen has available, the current ecosystems within existing markets, and all around education of the average American citizen.
Well the main thing is the concentration of capital. Guys like Jeff Bezos aren’t interested in founding cooperatively-owned companies, and they have all of the money. Add in the fact that average people are very strongly atomized and prevented from forming stable social bonds, and the likelihood that you’ll get a cadre of people together who want to start a cooperative business and can also afford to do so is very, very low.
That said, the few coops that manage to exist are often the best places in their industry to work, precisely because the profits are shared more equally than in the more common private or publicly traded corporations.
250k is a lot of money. It was more even more money in the 90s. Its an exceptionally large amount of money to recieve for free straight from your parents.
People don’t become billionaires from working. They become billionaires by taking profit from the surplus value of other peoples work.
$250,000 isn’t a lot of money to the average person
Thats literally 5-6x the median annual income what the hell are you smoking. That is a life changing amount of money to most of the country.
they didn’t take the profit from anyone
They took that profit from the people working there. Profit is the difference between expenses and income. In order to turn a profit companies cannot pay workers what their work earns the company, there has to be a difference. In economic parlance this difference is referred to as surplus value being generated by the workers for the company. If workers were paid what they were worth then the profit margin of that company would be 0% but those people would all be paid more than they are now. Whether you think the workers are entitled to the full value of what they create is an ideological determination that I will judge you for.
2: I am aware they ran on venture capital. You didn’t address where they take their profit from now that they’ve achieved their dream near-monopoly status. That status that would have been impossible without their thousands of employees to begin with.
If wealth were actually distributed in the US equally that might be true, but as it is it’s more than double what most Americans have, even ignoring inflation.
The average net worth of all American families was $746,820, according to the Federal Reserve’s 2019 Survey of Consumer Finances, while the median figure was $121,760.
The average US worker has a salary of $46,800 (in 2018) before taxes. Assuming they saved everything and spent nothing, it would take over 5 years for them to make 250k. Again, this is before taxes, and without spending anything. For the vast majority of people, 250k is a lot of money.
Exactly. So you agree that it’s impossible to earn and save a billion dollars just by working hard. It requires either exploiting your workers by stealing their surplus value, or by using the market by short-selling, using hedge funds, trading through illegal offshore numbered accounts, derivatives, etc.
If I don’t take what my boss offers I will starve to death and die. That is not what I would consider a strong bargaining position. I can go to the other company that I could work at but they both work together to keep wages low. I have no power to improve my status because the system is rigged against me and every worker like me
So you are saying that as black people on average don’t earn as much as white people they just aren’t as good as them? It is their fault for the way the system treats them? I would hope that is obvious ridiculous to you. However the average person has just as much control over the capitalist system as black people have over the police state.
When you’re old enough to work you’ll sell it to whoever you can at whatever price they offer and you’ll be lucky to get annual raises that match inflation.
i wonder if the nature and specialization of your professional work is what allows you to be like that with employers, i imagine the local cashier at mcdonalds doesn’t have that kind of bargaining power
Imagine giving up a technical position for a sales position. I’m poor as fuck but I actually enjoy my work. I own my home. I get to play guitar and play with my kids. If I’d taken the sales position I was offered I’d be dead.
or by using the market by short-selling, using hedge funds, trading through illegal offshore numbered accounts, derivatives, etc.
Which is also just stealing surplus value by proxy, since return on investment is simply a share of the company’s profits, which is itself just surplus value, or unpaid labor.
since he deleted it, here’s what this loser wrote:
250k isn’t that much money. Maybe to you but to the average person it isn’t.
You don’t even get how billionaires are made. LOL. They didn’t take the profit from anyone. Amazon doesn’t give a dividend.
Their wealth is based on the value of the company which is truly arbitrary. Since people are not expecting to make money from a dividend, it’s all made up.
It is why Amazon could drop in value tomorrow if people felt it wasn’t going to continue to climb in value. The only way to make money is still sell the shares.
I’m legit trying to figure out the logic that determined which of his posts he should delete and which ones he shouldn’t. Seems like it’s whatever was getting a lot of replies, but also some other random ones for fun?
This is ironically a poor sales pitch, unless you believe that networking, marketing, and familial wealth should be what orders society.
And I never said that 250k was all they had, and in fact being able to throw that much money at something is going to be less and less of a concern the more money you have, though I don’t think his family was “poor as hell” to start with. Unfortunately for this point, their finances at the time are not publicized that I can find.
Back then, he used a considerable amount of money to run at a loss. Nowadays, he does steal a remarkable level of profits in the unpaid wages of the employees who keep winding up in the news for being forced to piss in bottles or drive to work in a hurricane.
Yes. And it is deeply unfair in how it rewards entrenched wealth rather than giving everyone equal opportunities. That’s why socialists are opposed to it.
I’ve worked hard for what I have too. That doesn’t stop me from looking around, seeing that there are billions of people on this planet who work way harder than I do for way less than I have, and saying “this system should be changed.”
idk what communist countries you’ve been to, but if you compare for example the average Cuban’s quality of life to that of the average person on any other Caribbean island, capitalism doesn’t come out looking too hot. Most post Soviet countries are still poorer today than they were in 1989, almost everyone who has been lifted out of poverty in the past generation is Chinese, and there are literally hundreds of capitalist countries that have been doing capitalism for a hundred years or more that have remained the poorest countries in the world regardless.
The objective reality is that communism is leaps and bounds better at organizing society than capitalism can ever be, full stop.
Undernourishment in Cuba has been under 5%, and child mortality under 1%, every year since the year 2000. For Jamaica undernourishment currently hovers at 6.9%, and child mortality 1.3%.
Anecdotes are useless in a discussion like this. I don’t care what you think you saw, I care about the facts.
Stats are stats. If Cuba, even while facing a crisis in its food production due to lack of seeds, gas, and fertilizer, is still able to feed its people better than its neighboring countries, then that is a stirring indictment of capitalism.
Both of your examples link to a drop in imports as the cause of shortages, itself a symptom of the ongoing global production crises caused by COVID-19. A wealthy country like the USA can paper over a problem like that by throwing around money and credit - a small country like Cuba can’t.
Consider how Cuba’s economy could possibly respond differently to this situation if it were capitalist. I suppose they could take massive IMF loans in order to shore up imports, at the cost of “structural adjustments” that cause untold damage to future generations by eliminating the government’s mandate to run public services - but that plan hasn’t exactly worked in the long term anywhere it has been tried.
The fact is that these crises are well outside the sphere of influence of Cuba’s economy or government, and are exacerbated by American imperialism against Cuba and its allies (ie literally hijacking Venezuelan oil shipments using the US Navy). Regardless of political ideology or economic policy, Cuba would be facing these crises one way or the other, and centrally planned communism has proven time and time again that even if it’s not perfect it’s better at navigating these problems than a competitive market capitalist system is.
Where do they get the business owner who wants to do that? Can it happen? Sure, it has. But thats not going to happen for most bussiness operation in capitalist countries. Can workers get the money to buy out their owners? Sure. But that’s not super likely in most situations either.
I’m sure this dude is bullshitting literally every single thing he’s saying. Anytime someone makes a reasonable reply his immediate response is to demand proof. I would not be surprised if everything this person has said is a lie.
If they actually had that kind of money they would understand that unemployment is used to violently force people to take jobs that they don’t want to do. It keeps their entire system afloat and they somehow have no knowledge of it? Yeah, dude is a bootlicker
Only in the most technical of technical senses. Much like “there’s nothing stopping someone who’s born poor from becoming a millionaire”. Legally? No. Practically? Yes, there’s so freakin many barriers to such a thing happening, it’s almost statistically impossible. It’s so rare that when it happens it makes national headlines.
Poor people who became millionaires exist, but they’re a rounding error. I don’t think you’re one of them, though I bet you tell yourself that. Having daddy pay for your tuition or whatever is just conveniently left out.
Actually, I bet you’re not even a millionaire.
Whatever it is, the point is that what you’re claiming is so statistically rare, I don’t believe you. And then you’re also claiming it’s common.
The system actively discourages that. It was tried in the 70s. Banks wouldn’t work with coops because they were diffrent. Other companies wouldn’t work with them because they didn’t being as high a ROI. They were more efficient and stable, but under capitalism none of that matters.
Do they actually trust their coworkers to run the company without tanking it almost immediatly? Most of my coworkers can barely make it through their own tasks without fucking something up, let alone actually having input on how the business is run.
That doesn’t really change the overall point. People are stupid. It’s the single biggest sticking point in democracy, socialism, communism, really anything except dictatorship/technocracy/oligarchy/etc. Any system where you cede power to the masses runs the risk of the masses being utterly stupid.
I think it’s worth it, because stupid is better than evil, but it’s still a point worth considering.
Most of my coworkers can barely make it through their own tasks without fucking something up
This is a problem with the company you work for, not your coworkers. I’m sure if they were paid more, were given more agency, and received better training, they’d be better elployees
Either that or the reason they purposefully hire meth-addled freaks is because they want desperate people who won’t fight for any of those things.
Source: Friend who works in a warehouse and has coworkers who are obviously there to get a paycheck to afford their fix and then move on. It’s the company culture. They could choose to hire better people, or mentor the people who could grow, they don’t.
It’s not just about treating current employees well. It’s also about offering enough at the hiring stage to attract more good workers. Higher starting pay and a better reputation as a place to work means more people applying, means that Methface Matt can’t compete with TypeA Teresa to get hired in the first place.
People lie in their interviews all the time. The amount of conversations I’ve had with my boss regarding people he’s hired that turned out be idiots that have started with “I don’t know what happened with that dude, he seemed totally normal in the hiring process”. We’re also restricted in what questions we can ask during interviews because asking people probing questions is apparently not fair according to our HR dept which makes it pretty easy for them to BS their way in. Then we’re stuck with their dumb asses for months before HR lets us fire them.
Sounds like you’re a duct-taper. That’s also indicative of a procedural issue with the company you work for. Shit sucks. Hyper competent duct taper usually ends up being a pretty thankless job as well. Never getting to actually fix underlying problems. Always putting out fires. And everyone just learns to expect it from you, from above and below. And it sounds like you’ve learned to expect it as well. I know all workplaces have their dysfunction, but I hope you can either come to find this one more tolerable or find a better environment soon.
I didn’t say all I said most. It’s really probably not even most just a large enough portion of them that there’s always some issue going on caused by their negligence.
Some of the workers may be managerial. But the managerial workers don’t own a disproportionate amount of the company, and they’re not considered the “superior” of any other workers.
Didn't say they run it. The person who runs it can be simply another employee. It's just there are no outside investors and everyone has a vote on the board. You put someone in charge you trust but everyone as a whole has a say in big picture stuff with the person at the top being day to day and being held accountable to employees and not investors.
Capitalism fundamentally changes the relationship between workers and their work. One takes the value they create and gives it to someone else. One doesn't.
But why would this employee put in that more work than anybody else? Just to get the same amount of compensation as anybody else? I certainly wouldn’t put up with all the complications of leading a bunch of people without being paid extra.
Than I don’t really get the idea. Could you elaborate?
As far as I understood, the company’s shares belong to the employees (“everyone gets a seat on the board”) and those elect a director which in turn organises the work structure, assigns roles etc. Correct?
Can he be replaced at all times?
How is the compensation of the employees determined?
How are employees handled which are not performing their duties?
Can employees be fired?
How can employees join and leave the company?
Do they return their shares on leaving?
Can they buy and sell their shares?
How do new employees get their shares? Are they assigned or bought?
How is capital raised for large long-term investments like a new machine?
If the employees bring up the capital, do they get interest?
What if no capital can be raised? Is the company terminated?
Can some employees put in more capital than others?
Is the financial gain distributed equally between the employees?
Yes I think so, because the people running the company have no interest in listening to the positions of the workers, especially if it makes them less money.
When the people working in the company have a democratic vote, they at least have a choice and don’t have big mistakes dictated from upon high.
At least then, the workers can agree they all made a shitty mistake together. It doesn’t mean workers are infallible. All humans are fallible. All humans make mistakes. The difference is the power dynamic, nothing else.
I think they have education related to the running of a large company whereas most of my coworkers barely made it through their IT certs and have some of the stupidest takes regarding how things should be done I’ve ever heard in my life.
if you dont raise your children to be adults, they won’t act like adults when they grow up. A revolution would mean people learning entirely new skills, like making decisions in the workplace. Most workers have no agency, theyre treated like machines, so I dont expect people raised in that society to know how to run a completely different one from scratch. Revolution is a process, it has to be built. Keep shitting on your coworkers tho, im sure its a productive activity
They can’t even learn to do the tasks they are expected to do now. Even with frequent coaching. How the fuck can you expect them to learn to make business decisions?
same way we expect students in 9th grade to be capable of more complicated tasks once they’re in 12th grade. The nature of labor in capitalist countries is to sort out wheat from chaffe. “Good” workers become managers (although this is theoretical, ive had plenty of shitty managers), leaving the “bad” workers down at the bottom. This how the economy works right now, but it doesnt always have to. For example, unions sometimes have a probation period where you work as a temp, then join the union after a month or two. This gives you time to learn the job, before you have a say in how things are organized.
These days it’s mainly external hires, but it used to be you got promoted to incompetence. You do a job well, you get promoted. You don’t do it well and you don’t get promoted. Thus you get stuck doing something you’re bad at
I used to work for a food type company and the way they decided to import and sell stuff locally was if the board of directors (the CEO who inherited the company from daddy + his siblings) liked the item. They hired someone, my coworker, to actually run the market tests and everything and then promptly ignored any suggestion she had to make about the viability of this product on the local market, instead relegating her to a busser that was in charge of ordering the samples they decided they wanted.
I remember one item nobody liked (they would give us the remaining samples in the break room like some dogs getting the leftovers), but one of the siblings liked it and they got that close to putting it on the market because of it.
I have so many stories from there. At the end of the year they would sell the soon to be expired stock to the employees for like half the price. On paper it was half (you’re just giving money back to your employer so fuck them I stole as much food as I could), but the person who actually took the money was super nice and often gave us further discounts. For them the difference was like a decimal in accounting.
They announced these sales by email with the time and date. And in 2020, the year of covid, when half the workforce was working from home, they made the sale as usual. I learned afterwards that on that morning, the siblings who owned the company went and parked their cars right in front of the warehouse where the sale took place, and filled the trunk with as much stuff as they could. Then 2 hours later the sale happened and there was almost nothing left.
Technically legal but a fucking shitty thing to do lol, your job is to have a blurry monitor and pretend to do Excel sheets and you drive a Porsche, I think you have the means to load up your car at the store like a grown adult if you need to.
Sounds like a structural issue. Your coworkers are overworked or underpaid or not informed correctly for the job they’re given. Maybe they know they’re not skilled, but the job is the only one available to them and since they need the money they’re stuck doing something theyre unskilled at. These are but a few systemic problems that might lie to reason.
Ask yourself this: If all your coworkers are bad at their job, are you just an extra special boy, or might there be something wrong going on?
Most of my coworkers can barely make it through their own tasks without fucking something up, let alone actually having input on how the business is run.
Your coworkers aren’t incompetent. Your coworkers are just half-assing at work because they correctly realize they’re not going to get paid more if they actually tried.
So they’re just selfish assholes that don’t mind creating more work for everyone else and potentially putting people’s safety at risk? That doesn’t do anything to convince me that they should have a say in how the business is run. If they’re not happy with their pay they can go elsewhere.
Where did I say anything about helping the business? I don’t expect them to go above and beyond, when they don’t do their assigned tasks correctly their coworkers then have to deal with the problems this causes getting bitched at by angry customers and such. On top of that some things if not done properly can create a safety issue. We have safeguards in place for this but again it’s just extra work for someone else to redo it. This attitude is causing far more problems for their coworkers than it is for the business.
They’re on track to get fired so they’re not going to get paid for long. You totally ignored what I said about making all their coworkers suffer for their laziness. I thought all us workers were supposed to be in this together?
It’s not. Management gave them an extra 6 month freeze on any corrective action for not meeting their metrics while we gave them dozens of hours of extra training to try and help them get their shit together. A handful of them actually listened and are now doing okay. The rest didn’t give a fuck and are doing as bad as ever.
Yea, maybe we shouldn’t have been soft on them and built up so many shitty ones but they were trying to go easy due to covid. Won’t happen again after these ones are gone.
Every single job I’ve had was made worse by management. Not just worse for us, but worse for customers/clients as well. I have zero faith in management, I have complete faith in the people actually working on the floor knowing what would be best to do on the floor.
Now you ask about “not making it fail immediately” which to me gives me an impression of thinking it is still a business that needs to be grown.
I imagine a lot of shop floors would agree their time and resources were better spent elsewhere. No one needs Funko pops, I don’t doubt those workers would find something better to do
Cool, what is your preferred replacement and does everyone in this thread agree? You have managed to continue criticism but not offer a replacement yet again.
Edit: “Thing bad” doesn’t broaden or deepen anything. “Thing has specific shortcomings which aren’t present in specific alternative to thing” is a useful criticism. Criticism without alternatives is just called complaining.
Not always, sometimes it’s just an acknowledgement of insurmountable facts. Pointing out the inability of a particular engine to overcome the laws of thermodynamics to output more energy than is input is not useful criticism. Pointing out the mortality of individuals is not useful criticism. Those shortcomings are specific, but unless there’s some alternative that doesn’t have those shortcomings, those aren’t useful observations, they’re pointless complaints.
if we’re talking about the input requirements of some engine to drive its load and those don’t match then “yells in thermodynamics” is an incredibly useful criticism.
if we’re talking about a project that relies on one person then discussing their mortality is an incredibly useful criticism.
in this case, the thing we’re talking about is markets and the comment youre accusing of being a pointless complaint is
I, a socialist, hate markets. They are simplistic and functional artifacts of the available way to pass information.
which is an absolutely useful criticism. relying on markets to pass information is a holdover from before we had better methods to do so. the most profitable companies now use data outside the marketplace to make decisions to the point of developing enormous networks to collect, store, parse, interpret and disseminate that information. Cybersyn, the socialist version of this technology, allowed such powerful subversion of american plots against Chile that the only alternative was a fascist military coup.
so it’s not a pointless complaint, but an accurate distillation of criticism most recently offered up to the american public eye as the book The Peoples Republic of Walmart.
My comment was a flippant derision of the hypocrisy of the poster directly above it. I don’t really care about defining pointlessness, as I haven’t really cared about any part of this conversation with you.
I care about calling out hypocrisy. You read too much into my comment, and instead of letting it stand, as intended, as a directed comment toward the person I responded to, decided to interject with your opinion on pointlessness.
I repeat, opinion. You refuted nothing, you diverted from my examples to unrelated examples that used similar words. That’s called a “strawman”. The scenarios you refuted were not the ones I presented, you changed them in fundamental ways to justify your opinion.
I am not interested in this conversation. I repeat, my whole point was specifically the hypocrisy of the comment I responded to. I find arguing about the definition of pointlessness to be even more pointless than anything else.
I, a socialist don’t. I think however they should be tightly regulated. And kept away from basic necessitys.
Markets have proven time and again to only serve oligarchs, or create oligarchs to serve. When left to their own wont. If we can choose to participate or not in the markets. Then there is no issue with markets. When we’re slaves to the markets as we currently are however. No one is free.
Markets have lots of issues; you just named a bunch. Markets are subject to all kinds of hidden information manipulation contrary to prompting non cooperation and solving for individual maximums via exploitation like you literally outlined. Your wish to magically regulate them is just going to be corrupted.
Which is why I specifically mentioned decoupling from necessities. Regardless it seems like we are both blocked from the community LOL. But it’s not like I expected more from the community based around memes
No because I don’t give you a gift only if you give me one. It’s not a transaction. They are gifts.
…but you turned it into a semantic point. If I farm sheep and you bake bread, it’s a market when I trade you wool for bread. If trade even as basic as this can’t occur then you’re relying on everyone to be self-sufficient.
The alternative is you’re expecting everyone to put everything they produce into a kitty which is distributed to all, and I think that is a sure fire recipe for everyone to go hungry and for society to stagnate. There’s little incentive to be productive, and no incentive to be inventive.
Market forces on their own produce many if not all of the perverse incentives of capitalism. Only a centrally planned economy, built on a foundation of grassroots democracy, can hope to overcome those incentives by doing economic planning with an eye towards future sustainability and quality of life, rather than towards profitability.
Within the context of one person’s career, socialism on its own can do quite a bit to transform people’s relationship to their workplace. No longer would your job be at risk because you’ve all done too well and it’s to “cut labor costs” while profits soar. No longer would you be worried about automating away your job, instead you’d gladly automate your job away and then the whole organization could lower how much work needs to be done as things get more and more automated.
Democracy would massively improve work-life balance.
Of course this comes with problems, all of which exist in capitalism (how do we care for people outside of these organizations who won’t have access to work, for example). But if I had to choose between market socialism and capitalism, the choice is pretty clear, and it’s something much easier for liberals to stomach.
The idea of centrally planned economy ignores the lessons of the past. Bronze Age empires and recent examples all display universal inability to adjust to changes.
It’s the same magical thinking as the blind belief in market forces exhibits.
Priests of “invisible hand of market” ignore information exchange speed limits and market inertia, believing that markets will just magically fix everything in time for it to matter.
Preachers of central planning ignore information exchange speed limits and market inertia (and yes, there is a market, as long as there is goods and services exchange, however indirect) by believing they will have all the relevant information and the capacity to process it in time for it to matter.
Neither is true. Neither school of thought even attempted to show itself to be true.
I think the better way would be a centrally planned economy for some goods (electricity, “normal” food, health, …) and something more “free” for the rest of the market. Bread has a marked price but a PS5 doesn’t.
They will still sell the products they produce in a marketplace.
There is no rule that states they have to sell squat in a marketplace. They could, but they also couldn’t. That’s the whole point of the workers owning the means of production - the workers involved makes those deicisions, not a capitalist or bureaucratic parasite class.
It’s very very easy to do something like have a capitalist system where business and the rich are taxed. But you aren’t on about that.
You could divide everything up today. But with change and new business ideas that system will never work. You think the people would want to invest in new automation, new ways of working, new industries. If it means growth and job losses? No never. Just look at the western car industry, or any big government owned industry. People don’t want change, even things like running a factory 24/7 instead of a nice 9-5 is difficult.
Then Japan’s comes along and does all this new stuff and puts most of the western workforce out of business.
Under capitalism automation benefits the owners (on a small timescale, they worsen the totroptf) under socialism time saving just means the population has more time.
That is why workers currently push against automation under capitalism.
If worker-owned workplaces still operate within a market, there will still be pressure to compete with other companies. People can still come up with new ideas to compete and change can still happen.
Marxists do hate Markets though, that’s part of why Marx advocated for abolition of Money. Over time, of course, but that’s the entire point of Labor-Vouchers.
Sort of. Unlike Money, Labor Vouchers are destroyed upon first use, as I already pointed out. They still act much the same way, as a unit of exchange, just without the ability to accumulate off of transactions.
Marx spent much of his time talking about the Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Fall, issues with the Money commodity, consumerism, and more. Marx liked Capitalism over Feudalism, and Socialist markets over Capitalist ones, but ultimately he did advocate for abolition of Markets, in the traditional sense.
Right, and Marxists are characterized by their complete lack of reasoning skills, so they have to blindly parrot everything Marx has ever said, especially the stuff that obviously doesn’t work out. This is actually core marxist thinking.
Marxists are indeed characterized by generally accepting what Marx said. Additionally, being anti-Market isn’t exactly something that “obviously doesn’t work out,” no Socialist state has developed to that level yet.
Time for a new influx. Everyone still on reddit needs to advertise lemmy.
And not join-lemmy.org, that’s confusing. Just pick one of the larger servers like lemm.ee or fedia.io and tell people to browse it and click “Sign Up” if they like it.
I’d recommend a smaller community to help spread the load. I originally signed up on .world but they were having some growing pains (And a disgruntled idiot ddosing them) so I moved to .ca which helped tremendously.
I really disagree. For learning lemmy for average people, big instance is best.
There is a point where people who stick around are likely to make a new “real” account on a different smaller server, after they know what they want to browse.
Basically big instances should be like training wheels.
Before I left Reddit, I searched for alternatives and saw that people recommended Lemmy or Kbin. But I didn’t know what those things were. I assumed they were just Reddit clones hosted by someone else. I didn’t know that I could create an account on Kbin and interact with other posts in the Fediverse. I didn’t even know what the Fediverse was. So I was stuck with this decision of “do I try Lemmy or Kbin first?”
When I decided to try Lemmy, the first thing you need to do is sign up on an instance. People recommended beehaw.org, but that required filling out an application to join. That seems weird, since I never had to apply to read Reddit. I decided to try another instance (sh.itjust.works) but was worried that I was missing out on what people had recommended about other instances. Maybe I chose the wrong one? Maybe I should make an account on Lemmy.world instead?
It took me a little while to grasp the concept of federation and realize that it made no difference as an end user which instance I chose. I stuck with it, as did everyone reading this, but I think it’s fair to say that the average person has similar barriers to entry. We’ve overcome them, but many, many people will not.
True, the concept of the fediverse is probably what confuses people, it's never explained clearly. I hope it's growth helps spread information about it, how it works and why you want it.
The app situation is getting much much better. The website UI is inferior to old reddit or the apps. I know some servers support the old reddit UI but it’s not discoverable. Stuff like expanding images needs to be easier to do instead of clicking a semi-hidden 10px square each picture.
Sync and Boost are great, though I’m still not happy with the iOS apps (I like Avalon and Mlem, but I don’t live either of them, whereas the Android apps feel fantastic).
Boost is lovely and polished and you can see that tons of work has gone into it.
Tell you what though: while I was waiting for Boost, damned if the Voyager (fka wefwef) PWA came out of nowhere with (I think) some of the nicest UX of any of the contenders, plus an insane release schedule because they can just push changes whenever. Voyager is honestly what has kept me here. (…he says, posting from Boost)
Yup ads and posts on reddit are becoming even more indistinguishable, the “organic community” is just a selling point for marketing because you can embed yourself in it, basically just exploiting their users. The metrics to gauge ad performance is based on things that make the site shitty as well. Reddit, at least the big subs, haven’t been organic in this way for a long time, it’s basically a simulation of an organic online community at this point.
people go fucking nuts hyping the game as a result. their social media team plants those seeds to make it look organic.
a year or more of speculation occurs.
todd howard being his little schmuck self comes out and boasts about their new game.
people lose their god damn minds.
whispers of shitty gameplay start occurring closer to launch.
the masses tell those people to fuck off how could they know, dishonest review etc etc.
the big names in game reviews all review it and give it out of the park amazing reviews.
people go batshit crazy. people are out in the streets killing their parents for a chance at the new bethesda god game.
the game is released and is somewhat playable but jesus fuck is it lacking, it’s buggy, and every character looks like they’ve been updated from skyrim graphics of yore. the story sucks. the game play is empty but goddamn is there a lot to explore.
everyone rushes in like a madman.
everyone realizes the gameplay sucks.
people start bitching.
others say “oh don’t worry, DLC and user created mods will fill the game out nicely.”
years pass.
the unpaid modding community pours their heart and soul into making the game not fucking suck.
after all the DLC has come out (all with mostly positive or mixed reviews on steam) the game will go dark for a year or so.
todd howard wakes from his capitalist vampire coma needing fresh life force. the blood money of his unsuspecting idiot fans.
todd howard makes it into the office and says we could make a new game or we can milk this game for the next decade and a half. quick come up with names to rerelease the game under. game of the year edition. complete edition. master edition. elite edition. remastered. remastered complete. anything works!
over the course of the next three decades, todd howard is fed the blood of bethesda’s fan base.
he is swollen, like a fat tick upon his harkonen throne, waiting to burst.
“the people. they call for a NEW game”, he says, a devilish sneer contorts his face.
If you like Bethesda games, you’re gonna like this one. If you don’t like Bethesda games, you’re not going to like this one. I don’t know what else to tell you, bud.
Don’t mistake the bitching of a vocal minority of lemmy/reddit posters and YouTube influencers (who bitch primarily for clicks) as “everyone”. There are actually a lot of people who like these games - myself included - and a lot of them aren’t on any sort of social media. I loved vanilla Oblivion, Fallout 3, Skyrim, and Fallout 4 and love modded versions even more. I’m having a blast with vanilla Starfield right now - easily dozens of hours over the long weekend. And I’ll probably love modded Starfield even more as well.
You can’t be forced to testify against yourself, but you can be forced to testify against others.
Exceptions are: Spouses can’t be forced to testify against each other. Parents can’t be forced to testify against their child and same thing vice versa.
Some rulings that pleading the 5th can be considered cause for a warrant if not directly an admission of guilt.
The past decade or so has also weakened rights in regards to you having to plead the 5th directly, and of course the “War on Terror” led to the Supreme Court more or less saying “No, actually, torture doesn’t count, plus we’re going to ignore that it’s been the official position of America for centuries that Constitutional rights are human rights (for a changing definition of human).”
Taken as a whole the past couple decades have severely reduced the protections the government wants to admit the 5th offers.
You still can’t use the 5th to infer anything about the defendant in a criminal case. In a civil case, the court can take a person’s refusal to answer into account.
My layman’s understanding is that if you say you committed murder 20 years ago, but your therapist doesn’t believe you are actually a clear, present, and immediate danger to yourself or others, they don’t actually have to report it. I find it hard to believe that there would be a situation where someone could admit to something like that and the therapist doesn’t think they are at a reasonable likelihood to reoffend, but I guess the potential for the situation exists.
The link above is specific to Florida, but I’m sure that there are differences in law in different jurisdictions and probably even specifics at the federal level.
I am neither a lawyer nor a therapist, just a shitposter, so take all of this with a grain of salt.
They can, they’ll just have to find other evidence. If there’s a court case with the defendants being a married couple who both refuse to testify and there’s no other evidence, it’s essentially the same as a court case with one defendant that’s refusing to testify against themself and there’s no other evidence. Both cases will result in dismissal.
You mean by a court subpoena? If so then you testify or get found in contempt of court.
Or do you mean what if someone is threatened/blackmailed into giving false testimony? If that’s the case then you should probably go to the police. If it’s law enforcement who are coercing you then I suppose you could try to include that fact in the testimony, but there may not be much difference in that and refusing to comply with the blackmailer in the first place, in terms of your safety.
If you’re coerced to lie under oath then I’d guess that still counts as perjury, but I doubt most judges would be mad at you for it; they’d shit fury all over whoever was coercing you.
IDK, imprisoning a person until they either comply or the trial concludes without them seems pretty good for the judge. Bad for the person subpoenaed, but it’s no skin of the judge’s back
It's really a process of letting the subpoenaed know that they either tell the truth, lie and face perjury charges, or refuse and face contempt or court charges. The latter can seemingly land you in jail in perpetuity. Because fuck you, I guess?
That's mostly for police. Once you're in court and ordered to testify, the person talking about germany is mostly correct. You can't be forced to self-incriminate nor testify against a spouse. Otherwise yes. Generally 99% of courts won't bother even asking the defendant to testify because self-incrimination is practically guaranteed. Usually only if the defense calls on them, which is often a bad idea.
Only if there’s a risk at incriminating yourself, and if it’s not immediately apparent how you’d run that risk (e.g. you’re a witness that doesn’t have a direct relation to the crime at hand) you’d have to motivate how it could be incriminating.
How is it legal for them to just throw you in jail forever just for pissing off a judge? Why even pretend we have rights if that’s how the system is going to operate?
It’s illegal to lie to the court. Even if all oaths weren’t utterly worthless, one made under duress is inherently invalid. This one serves literally no purpose other than to psychologically dominate a person.
It’s just a more formal affirmation. Lots of people “promise” things they have no intention of really trying. It’s a grander gestire for grander consequences.
No it isn’t. Oaths aren’t “grand gestures,” they’re just silly. This one is worse than silly; it’s the rough equivalent of a school bully putting you in a headlock and not letting you go until you agree to whatever bullshit he wants from you, and beating the shit out of you if you won’t.
It’s a “grander gesture” (quote me correctly pls) than an informal promise with a friend. Do you consider signing a lease or a mortgage to be the rough equivalent of a school bully putting you in a headlock?
No, because I can refuse to sign the lease and I won’t get put in prison for that. Swearing a compulsory oath under threat of imprisonment in a sitiation you were forced to be in isn’t any kind if gesture, it’s just submission to coersion, nothing more, nothing less.
That doesn’t give them the right to jail you indefinitely. This system lies and tells you we all have rights, but if they can just do that forever because you insulted or angered a judge, then you need to realize it is just a lie and we don’t have rights. It’s the same authoritarianism people fought and died to erase from the world. Judges can’t be allowed to just do what they want.
They aren’t jailing you indefinitely just because you angered the judge. They might give you a few days if, again, you’re just being an asshole or wasting time.
I’ve seen a lot of “Oh, judges can’t be trusted” since Trumps indictments have rolled out. I wonder why that is.
By refusing to tell the truth to the court, you’re basically refusing to take part in the trial. Which translates to you’re refusing to take part in the justice system, yet also somehow wanting justice … ??
The thread is talking about a dude telling a joke. It’s obviously a joke. And you’re defending the possibility that a judge could have someone be jailed for years over it. That in the land of the free you can be tortured on the order of a psuedo king over a joke.
No. Fuck that, and fuck you. There is nothing legitimate or defensible about that, goodbye.
just to be a bit of a devil that advocates thingies, i lost my pooch a bit ago and my family asked when they could get me a new pup. i told them i needed time and maybe around my upcoming bday. so, i think if its been discussed in some fashion… i think it okays.
but i do understand the overall point and i don’t disagree - surprise pets tend to be a bad move.
I mean I see were you are going but if they already wanted and you confirmed, like if the kid has wanted it and you are the parent or you talked with their parents, etc… it’s not that crazy.
I mean maybe I would go and make a gift card or something saying they can get it as a presen and if they are ok with it you then get it, ideally adopting of course.
Paying for something someone wants isn’t the same as a surprise gift.
A parent buying a pet for their kids is actually a parent buying a pet for themselves; the parents very well know the pet is ultimately their responsibility.
I don’t think anyone is saying to not do those things. It’s the surprise of a pet that is heinous.
Agreed. Even assuming you know the person wants a pet and can handle a pet, you’re still robbing them of choice in what pet they get. The poodle is cute and all, but little timmy really would’ve preferred a border collie.
Pretty much the only scenario I can agree with gifting a pet is if you know they want one, know they can handle one, and finally when it comes to the actual gift giving, it starts off with a trip to the animal shelter so they can pick their own companion.
I think you missed the proverbial point. We likely slaughtered the chimps and put their heads on pikes. Chimps have nothing on the violence humans are capable of inflicting.
Yeah the context is that many indigenous people depended on the buffalo for food.
It was basically the same as when Israel pours concrete down wells and burns olive groves that took centuries to get that productive. They knew for every buffalo they killed, an indian would starve.
That image is similar to the rooms full of luggage in Auschwitz in what it represents.
I remember a documentary about a famous northwest passage expedition that was never seen again. One of the inuit people they talked to during an investigation claimed they found a boat, and in the captain’s quarters they found a body in the bed with a big smile on its face. That would be absolutely terrifying, but apparently that’s what naturally happens to corpses when their lips and gums receed.
You’ve just ruined my night. I screamed. My phone was like an inch from my face and I was all tucked into bed. That triggered something primaly unsettling for me. Thank you
You’re right though, as soon as someone dies, there’s something not right at all about how they look. They don’t look asleep, they look uncanny valley.
It doesn’t matter how many people or what kind of people moved from Reddit. I was there 14 years (Digg 4.0 exile here). They have a new group of people now. My wife and kids now use Reddit, but it’s not the same type of user interaction I experienced there in the past. It’s very much a mix of scrolling through TikTok videos and sparse reading of comments on an /r/askreddit thread. It’s casual browsing and video content. There are still some holdouts, which I think mostly contribute to what’s left of the comment section, but that’s it. It sucks, because I miss the discussions there. Lemmy kind of scratches that itch, but the content is slow to come in, and the comments so few. I’m doing my part, and I am much more active here than I ever was on Reddit.
Exactly how I felt there too. Reddit was different. It wasn’t the place where you could come and chat with strangers about things you enjoy, even the most positive subs were littered with spam and comments usually devolved into arguments.
Not saying it didn’t happen here but the vibe is for sure better. Haven’t logged into my reddit account since spez killed Sync.
I was on reddit a couple times past couple of days for some specific purposes (like looking up Minecraft seeds). Checked the front page and stuff out of curiosity and I genuinely don’t know if the content was already as bad when I left or if Lemmy just gave me new standards or something, but Jesus Christ. It’s all just ragebait and TikTok reposts, even though everyone on reddit always claims to hate TikTok. It’s like if you collected all the lowest tier posts from every other site and then gathered them in one.
Same thing for me here, so much rage bait. I was asking a specific question on Google and a reddit post had a very good answer, curiosity sent me to r/all and it is so clearly meant to get under your skin.
It’s all “TikTok” now. I see TikTok, YT Shorts, Reddit video clips, Facebook video clips, IG video clips, etc. They are all TikTok in my head, and I don’t care enough to check them each out to differentiate between them and change my mind. This must be what getting old feels like.
It’s interesting to me. We saw a similar evolution in facebook, where it went from silly posts about your status, to image posts that people argued over, and now (as I saw when I visited my aging mother) it’s just an endless scrolling of short videos.
They all repost to each other anyway. Some creators will just post directly to several of them, but there’s also entire content factories designed around stealing other peoples creative works and reposting them on a different platform.
Ill never understand the appeal of short form video. I watch YT for episodic content ~10-20 mins or deep tutorials about some niche technical thing Im doing or interested in doing
IMO the quality of discussion here is about the same on reddit. Which is to say, not very good, or very deep. It’s shallow observations, memes, and one liner gut reactions to headlines. People have been conditioned over the past decade to not engage with long replies or complex thoughts. It might have to do with social media becoming more or less defined by people engaging with it on mobile devices, which don’t really enable that sort of engagement. But it might also be people genuinely not giving a shit anymore and only wanting that minor degree of superficial interaction.
I get better responses here on Lemmy with my longer replies, which is great. Reddit feels overall dumber now where people will try and argue that your comment with sources is somehow less compelling than someone else’s sourceless opinion (true story).
My favorite thing about Lemmy is that you can comment on an article that’s several hours old and get responses. Reddit was so big that if you didn’t comment on major articles within a couple minutes of being posted, your comment would get buried under a thousand other comments and would never be seen. Commenting became a game of which top level comment you could possibly sneak your comment as a response to, even if it wasn’t really a “response” to what the person had said, just to get your comment seen and have a chance at sparking a discussion.
I’ve had the same experiences actually. It’s also a lot more common (at least from what I’ve experienced) to find people being more composed here even in the face of some divisive or provocative content.
There’s just so much content now a days it’s easier to just not comment to a reply and move on, where when I was on forums it was the main thing to do because there wouldn’t be so many posts
Yeah I’ve seen some pretty benign comments get downvoted to hell here on Lemmy if they’re even just a tiny bit out of line from the consensus which is no better than Reddit.
Honestly, the worst thing about Lemmy is Lemmy users thinking it’s better than Reddit simply by the virtue of it not being Reddit.
The platform? Yes, absolutely, a much better solution with built in checks and balances to stop one greedy company eating everyone’s lunch.
The content? It’s identical! (Bar a few cosplay communists that stir up drama occasionally). And some things are significantly worse like the quality of content curation and moderation.
For every person writing an “ugh you must be a Redditor”/“I thought I left this behind on Reddit” type comment,I bet there are many more people rolling their eyes and at least a few of them that end up abandoning the platform entirely.
Also let’s not forget that Reddit has duration as an advantage. I can look back 10 years on a tv show that is no longer airing and there will still be discussion threads from when it came out. That’s literally impossible to manufacture overnight, so Reddit has a huge edge.
That’s fine so long as we’re admitting it does. Reddit having a huge edge and everyone acting like it doesn’t is just setting up new users for disappointment.
For every person writing an “ugh you must be a Redditor”/“I thought I left this behind on Reddit” type comment
Oh my God right? This bull shit.
I want to like lemmy because I don’t want to support a web platform that so clearly thinks so little of its users and aims for monetization that involves literally just paying for comments you want to hear.
But this self assured that lemmy is the hottest shit stuff needs to cool off. I mean look at who started this platform and the large communities of people with super simplified garbage takes on anything with an iota of complexity and you realize that people here just want to be superior without doing anything superior. But that is a great way to be lonely forever.
I think you’re right. And if anyone wants to give a deep/thoughtful comment it often feels like swimming upstream. Nuances are ignored and people will just downvote you if they think you’re disagreeing with them (even if disagreement is only partial).
People have been conditioned over the past decade to not engage with long replies or complex thoughts
I think this has two parts. One, it’s just so easy for any long/complex comment to attract ‘attacks’ that will target some small minutia. The internet in general seems to find pedantry of grammar and small inconsistencies (in an allegory, for instance, which is not supposed to be an exact match for the tale it’s telling) to be the height of humor and the best way to ‘counter’ an argument.
Second, I think people in general are more demanding of having their space be as comfortable and similar to them as possible. My friends of nearly three decades and I have plenty of things we disagree about, and even argue about, but it seems as if differences are no longer accepted. Let’s pick a common and slightly humorous one from Lemmy: if you and I were to disagree about the extent of how evil a conservative is (not even that they are evil, or do evil, or whatever else), one or the other of us would be blocking the other, haranguing the moral turpitude that is said different belief, etc.
It combines to make anything but short, bland or ‘act like they are acting’ comments a headache to actually post. I’ve found myself typing up a response to a biology article somebody had posted, and eventually just hit the cancel button because it wasn’t worth the bother.
The people that think they are being clever by ignoring the entire conversation and just responding with Strawman! or Ha! You misspelled that so you don’t know what you are talking about! offer so little to actual conversation that they don’t even realize why no one wants to talk to them. They seem like they are just repeating what they saw people before them do without awareness or understanding of why or even what their words mean.
The internet is such a microbubbled place now. Each niche divided and divided again so that everyone can have exactly what they want and nothing more or less until each of them might as well be a homunculus living as a single entity if wasn’t for the ability for someone to advertise or sell a product to that group.
I thought it is good if everyone has their own specific thing but we still need to be able to interact as a whole, and that generalized communication is a dying skill apparently. Or maybe we are just to many steps away from the original products that the internet is becoming full of Cargo Cults that just copy without reason… I dunno.
I think it has a lot to do with longer messages seeming “elitist” in addition to the tendency of trolls to find one phrase they don’t like and derail the entire topic over it. You write 3 paragraphs, most don’t read past the first sentence and vote based on that, and some troll starts nitpicking your use of “us” vs “we” instead of the actual topic. Over time you see putting the effort into a comment as pointless or outright adversarial, and you stop. It’s the trolls and the low effort people that make having quality conversations frustrating. Not trying to gatekeep, but I firmly believe that once a site becomes popular enough that all the “Lowest Common Denominators” join, quality drops. The signal to noise ratio just becomes too much. Popularity is a death sentence on the Internet.
Also there’s this legit tactic en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop that sometimes is employed by the trolls themselves to basically DDoS people. Preferring shorter comments at all become a legit behavior if there’s too many comments like that. If there’s long af comment, usually I’d like to see the replies or upvotes first to defend against that.
Have you been on reddit recently? The average discussion on Lemmy may not be super deep, but the comment sections of larger reddit threads have become downright painful to read. It honestly feels like every negative cliché about reddit has been dialed up to eleven.
Yea I remember it went to shit around 2018 or somewhere there about. I had been hoping for a viable alternative for a while. I should thank Spez in retrospect.
I mean, it’s kind of always been shit, but it was “our” shit. Now it’s a different crowd, and their “shit”. I don’t want to deal with their “shit”, so I don’t really go there anymore and treat it like Ravenholm.
Fellow Digg exile, previous Fark, previous Slashdot, etc.
I still go back to Reddit for several niche groups that just don’t have enough users to transition - would likely disappear if people moved elsewhere (Lemmy or Discord)
Lenmy is brilliant as platform and concept, but the truth is it simply can’t compare to Reddit where there are 1000x more user and 100x more comments/activity.
Maybe I am part of that new group? I’m just here for the memes. Lemmy is amusement for me and a way to kill some time. If I want to have deep or meaningful discussions I’ll talk to people I actually know (and then I’ll also know I’m not wasting my time arguing with a troll). The “casual browsing” content is also lower quality here than on Reddit, but I can’t complain, because I don’t really contribute, I just lurk.
Reddit very much depends on the subreddits you subscribe to.
Browsing /r/askhistorians or /r/programming isn’t really the same experience as r/memes or whatever. Not logging in to reddit makes it way worse since you only see the popular low-effort threads instead of better niche content.
I mean the stages of economic transition have been “fuedalism->capitalism-> socialism” as each one is progressively more efficient and supercedes the previous.
Okay, well, I’ve studied everything from all sorts of marxist tendencies to syndicalism to anarchism, to classical economics, and I think you’re either using terms wrong or have the wrong idea. Can you define your terms or rephrase what you mean?
Viewing it entirely in economics is incorrect. All of the above can be done under capitalism. The key difference is not what form of economics are employed but which class controls power and puts the resources of the state to use.
The capitalist state is a state where capital owners hold power and use that power to exploit more capital.
The socialist state is a transitionary state in which the workers have seized power and use the state to repress the bourgeoisie and put resources to their own use.
The communist state is what occurs when capitalism is entirely defeated, all nations are socialist, conflict is eliminated and material abundance is achieved, at which point states start to stop existing as the resources within them that are put towards repressing the bourgeoisie through violence are put towards other things when there is only 1 class in society.
Okay, so extremely abridged, here is what seperates capitalism from socialism.
Under capitalism, private individuals own the means of production, distribution, and sustenance. Workers are forced to go to one of these private individuals and exchange their labor power for a wage. Capitalist profit is generated by paying the worker less than their labor power is worth but enough to sustain workers as a class. The workers are prevented from using the means of production without entering into the wage labor model through the threat of physical violence.
Under socialism, the means of production are managed in common, somewhere along a sliding scale of the people working in a workplace and democracy having control of how the workplace operates depending on the system
You’ll note that these both can operate within markets, and both require at least some planning.
For the record, I think before this your definition of capitalism was defensible, but then communicating clearly would require using the term “liberalism” to describe the government.
That’s not a socialist state. It’s a capitalist state with welfare. If the political structure of the state itself has not been reworked to put the workers in power what you’re describing is just a state where the bourgeoisie (who control power) have decided to do welfare, usually for their own benefit such as reducing revolutionary energy by providing the workers with concessions (the welfare state). That is social democracy.
You do not have socialism without overthrowing the hierarchy that places the bourgeoisie as the ruling class:
The people en-masse being in control. Representative democracy, by it’s nature, creates a “ruling class”, the representatives. Only a direct democracy asks the people what they think of each and every issue, but that is impractical in my opinion.
…and I don’t feel that leaders of state owned capital are particularly any different from leaders of privately owned capital. Both are individuals in privileged positions of power that work to maintain themselves above the workers. To me it’s not the ownership that matters but the fact you have a ruling class at all.
Hence, what political system is required for a truly equal society?
The people en-masse being in control. Representative democracy, by it’s nature, creates a “ruling class”, the representatives. Only a direct democracy asks the people what they think of each and every issue, but that is impractical in my opinion.
No, that’s just our government/s. You can have representative democracy where representatives are beholden to their constituents, and where they are easily recallable if they do not follow those interests to a T. This is one of the many reforms socialists want to make to the democratic process.
…and I don’t feel that leaders of state owned capital are particularly any different from leaders of privately owned capital. Both are individuals in privileged positions of power that work to maintain themselves above the workers. To me it’s not the ownership that matters but the fact you have a ruling class at all.
Genuinely no offense but this is a position born of ignorance. Under a democratically run state economy the representatives only get rich through corruption. Under capitalism the owners get rich through the extraction of surplus labor value and the politicians in their pockets get rich through corruption.
Corruption is a drop in the bucket compared to surplus labor value theft. Compare how wealthy Pelosi is to how wealthy Jeff Bezos or Elon musk are. And people like Pelosi are only that rich because of insider trading, which couldn’t exist under socialism.
Representative “democracy” alienates the common man from the political process while maintaining a semblance of democracy. For this reason it is the ideal political form for capitalism, an economic system which alienates power from the masses and concentrates it in the hands of a few.
Class interests are the primary axis on which all political activity turns. Getting the working class to vote does not help them, it helps those in power.
Representation is necessary as a matter of scale, though. There are other issues with small r republicanism that are more specifically nefarious, like the legalization of bribery, the tilting of power towards land owners via the senate, etc.
With modern technology I wonder how necessary representative style governments really are. Electronic voting already exists and works quite well, and is probably the most secure form of voting as long as it can be audited. Of course, at some point administration has to come down to individuals, but as long as those individuals are held accountable in some way then it seems that the actual democratic step (i.e. voting on policy) need not be mediated through representatives as is oft repeated to justify the status quo.
You might have been referring to this with republicanism, but there are different types of representation, too. Parliamentary democracies are not obligated to obey the wishes of their subjects, whereas soviet (council) democracies are a form of direct democracy, where representatives are merely delegates and are obligated to obey/communicate the wishes of their subjects. In my comment above I had in mind the parliamentary type, since that is the kind in which there is a buffer between citizens and political institutions which is used by the bourgeoisie to suppress changes which would undermine capital.
First step is abolishing wage labor and private property. Transitional political forms take on some form of direct democracy, probably something similar to soviet councils.
What about the absolute lack of “representative democracy” we experience under capitalism?
I’d argue that the capitalist system is more at odds with representative democracy than other systems mentioned. Most workers have no say in what is produced, who produces it, how they are paid, how much products are sold for, etc. Instead, we end up with figurehead CEO’s and nameless investors making all of those decisions, and of course they do everything to minimize costs, maximize profits, and disempower workers so that they can collect billions of dollars at the expense of the workers who actually make their companies run. If we had representative democracy do you think we’d have billionaires?
Whataboutism is a meaningless brainworm which the user invokes in order to ignore their own cognitive dissonance and inconsistent standards. You cry “whataboutism” when @very_poggers_gay was correct to point out your own double standard. “All of this sounds at odds with representative democracy” implies that you believe genuine democracy is something we currently stand to lose.
What you need to understand is that Marxists are not interested in imposing utopian futures on the world. “What do you have in its place?” is the wrong question. Better questions: What currently prevents genuine democracy? What are the material conditions which both produce and maintain it? Then you get to work on changing those material conditions and removing the real basis which produces the problems.
Richard Wolff, a prominent marxist academic, talks often about a socialist system where democracy is employed in the workplace. He focuses less on reforms or abolition at the state/government-level, and instead emphasizes the bottom-up changes that giving workers power and agency (i.e., making it so workers at all levels are involved in the decision-making process of the companies that require their labour) provides. He has a youtube channel and podcast called “Democracy at Work” that provides great introductions to how he views things, and he has worthwhile podcast appearances on other podcasts like Lex Fridman’s, for example.
Consider how impactful countries like Wal-Mart or Amazon are in our daily lives. Their economic throughputs are larger than all but a few countries in the world, and their workforce populations are also larger than many countries. Clearly they aren’t organized as representative democracies?
Another question I wonder related to this, is what exactly makes “representative democracy” the gold standard? Is it even the gold standard?
Thanks for the answer. I consider myself a SocDem, at least in some areas, so what you describe sounds interesting. I can see the benefit of shared ownership and cooperatives, and wish we had more of them. So what you’re describing doesn’t sound alien.
I’m surprised at your highlighting of Amazon and Wal-Mart. You’re right, they are not democracies, but I think many would point to them as some of the worst examples of capitalism. In addition the reason they are so bad is because (Amazon in particular) is run as a dictatorship with a high level of exploitation of those at the bottom. Bezos is in control, and the workers have no say.
To your final question, I think the only thing that makes me view representative democracy in any kind of positive light is that everything else appears to be even more awful. Most people seem to head either towards a dictator who does the right thing (Ok there Anakin) or anarchy. Both are horrible. So until I hear a better idea, rep-dem for me.
Amazed that I had to scroll down this far to read this. Capitalism does not magically create a fair society through the creation of value (which seems to be what its proponents keep saying: investors generating economic activity and wealth). But similarly you could have a socialist economic system, with no real democracy. Which, as we’ve seen, devolves into a corrupt oligarchy. We’ve seemingly lost this perspective in the decades since WWII, but a solid representative parliamentary democracy and separation of powers are the best way to create and maintain a fair society. It requires some other conditions too, like good education, free press, etc. but the core is a system where power is distributed and temporary, depending on democratic processes (elections). This democratic legitimacy is what we should be defending at all costs, imho. It’s not sexy, though.
I learned that “capitalism” is an economic system, not a system of government.
Consider for 3 seconds that what you “learned” about the world is a product of the system that produced it
Capitalism is a system of government, and in capitalist countries, they teach their citizens that capitalism is at at odds with the state and not working in conjunction with it
Then what would be, according to you, the difference between a country with a democratic systen of government and a country with a “capitalist” system of government? Assuming both use capitalism as their economic system.
‘democratic’ is used today a lot of the time to describe neoliberal capitalist governments that are controlled (influenced greatly) by the capitalist class
for example we can look at somewhere like the US and point out how the majority of people in government are all rich capitalists and how through lobbying and campaign ‘donations’ and owning the media the capitalist class controls the government
marxists call this kind of state a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie (capital), as opposed to a dictatorship of the proletariat (workers)
dictatorship here meaning general ‘rule’ not the specific meaning that the word has taken on more recently
so ‘democratic’ capitalist countries that exist today are under the “rule of the capitalist class” or “dictatorship of capital”
so if you wanted an actual democratic (in the real sense of the word) government, you’d need a government which is controlled by the majority of people, that is, the workers, a dictatorship of the proletariat
under such a system capitalists cannot be allowed to have influence on the government, which is something that is not really possible unless you implement tight capital controls like they do in China
the reason being that capital flight is a very real threat to a capitalist economy, and having that power over a government lets the capitalist class dictate terms and change laws to be favorable to them despite what the majority of people might want.
so to answer your question, the only way to have a government with a capitalist system not be controlled by capitalists is through suppression of the capitalist class, if they are allowed to have influence then you no longer have actual democracy.
What exactly do you mean by “capitalist class”? Is that only the people that dont work at all?
And why cant those capitalists and the “working class” BOTH have power over the government? Disregarding lobbying for a moment, how does each member of the “capitalist class” have any more influence on the government than each member of the “working class”?
the class of people that makes a living through ownership of capital, they do not need to sell their labor, as opposed to workers which need to sell their labor to survive.
Is that only the people that dont work at all?
it is people who do not need to sell their labor to survive, they make their living through taking the surplus labor value that workers generate. (they may also choose to work, but this doesn’t change their position, they have a choice to work if they desire, unlike a worker which doesn’t have a choice)
And why cant those capitalists and the “working class” BOTH have power over the government?
because one class here has more leverage over the government, and so in a conflict of interest the government sides with the capitalist class as can be seen during any economic crisis (or crisis of any kind really) where austerity measures are immediately implemented and worker rights are rolled back.
how does each member of the “capitalist class” have any more influence on the government than each member of the “working class”?
they do on average, but you’ll easily be able to find a small capitalist that doesn’t have more power than you to control the government.
the thing is, here we are talking classes and class interests, if those who control the government belong to the capitalist class then the government will do things that benefit most members of the capitalist class, there doesn’t need to be direct control by every single capitalist for them to benefit from capitalist control over the government.
to give an example, regulatory protections to protect employees from hazardous working conditions may be removed through the direct influence of amazon or some other large corporation, but, smaller capitalist corporations also benefit from this as they stop having to take on the cost of providing a safer working environment (they can exploit their workers more fully), in this way, the government is controlled by capitalist, but not every capitalist controls the government, yet the government works for the benefit of the entire capitalist class.
if those who control the government belong to the capitalist class then […]
regulatory protections […] may be removed through the direct influence of amazon or some other large corporation
This I dont understand because if everybody votes, the government represent the interests of the whole population (still disregarding lobbying), doesnt it? And if lobbying were the issue, we could just ban it…
if everybody votes, the government represent the interests of the whole population
This is simply false, representatives in the majority of neoliberal ‘democracies’ are not held accountable to the wishes of the people they are representing, and cannot be removed from their position with a simple majority from those who elected them, so then these people look towards those with influence (corporations, rich capitalists, etc) and then do things to please those groups in order to gain favor with them, like campaign donations, lavish luxurious trips and vacations, positive coverage in capitalist owned media, etc
(still disregarding lobbying)
Lobbying is not the only lever of power the capitalist class uses, the private ownership of mainstream media by capitalists means that all of their coverage would push capitalist interests, campaign ‘donations’ and funding is also used for control, to choose the candidates who represent your interest as a capitalist the best to win, and the candidates themselves are more likely to win if they come from a rich well connected upperclass background (meaning they are most likely capitalists themselves)
Regulatory capture is also a thing
There’s also the fact that capitalists also fund think tanks to publish studies that support their interests (no matter how far from the truth they have to stray) and are then used to support legislation that is in their favor (see global fossil capital and climate change), there’s also lots of astroturfing that goes on
And if lobbying were the issue, we could just ban it…
Even if you outlaw lobbying capitalists will still control the government in a myriad of other ways, capital flight being an example I didn’t mention in this reply yet,but this one is very strong and the US/WTO/IMF enforce it on as many countries as they can, the only way to have actual democracy is through forceful suppression of the capitalist class, only then you could imagine having a government actually controlled by the people while still having a capitalist market and a capitalist class
You are impressingly wrongSocialism is when the government does stuff, and the more stuff the government does, the more socialist it is. If it does a whole lotta stuff it’s communism <- This is you, but unironically. Educate yourself on the subject of which you claim knowledge.
There is a difference between being a hard opposite and being mutually exclusive. They are not hard opposites, but they are mutually exclusive, like being a plant, fungus, or animal. None of those categories are the opposite of any other, and they share many interesting commonalities, but one cannot be both.
It just wouldn’t have existed at all without VC funding.
Lemmy exists now because Reddit already existed, built the model link sharing site, and over years of ad revenue and VC money, convinced communities to gather there and then convinced those same communities to move to lemmy
It was a pedo networking tool reknowned worldwide for it’s jailbate and non-consensual creepshots. These moderators received awards from admins. Then it got too much attention and got a PR workover, burning a woman CEO at the stake to satiate the gamer-fascists before becoming a bland Atlanticist CIA sockpuppet front of bland corporate posts.
At no point during this entire thing did it ever approach anything comparable to greatness
That’s not the point of sarcasm. Do you even know your linguistics? Sarcasm has no point - No tonal conveyance really does - but if you wanna get theoretic with it the point of sarcasm is to deliver critique without the sting, or to subvert expectations and deliver a joke. There isn’t a lot of methods of communication were the point of it is to be hard to understand - though some methods are of course used to carry dual meanings to different audiences.
LOL. Lets not forget it was you that didnt realise I was being sarcastic and had a hissy fit over it. Are you American or Canadian? One doesnt get sarcams and one really doesnt get sarcasm.
Not the first time someones told me my sarcasms wrong cause they didnt get it dude. Learn. And grow
I refuse to learn. My mind is perfectly smooth, free of nasty wrinkly crevices or filthy neurons firing wildly.
You should refrain from using /s though, but tone signifiers are never a bad thing! It’s a weird double standard I guess.
There is no balance though, the shit-ification that happened to Reddit is a necessary function of capitalism. What we saw as Reddit at its best was, from a capitalist’s perspective, Reddit at its worst. I’m sure you’ve noticed a similar process taking place in lots of other areas as well.
What we saw as Reddit at its best was, from a capitalist’s perspective, Reddit at its worst.
And capitalists will allow this “at its worst” phase in order to capture the market, before squeezing it. This pattern is consistent in many industries.
Engineers and designers made it great. Reddit could very well exist without capitalism (see Lemmy). What fucked up Reddit was explicitly capitalist incentives.
Aaron Schwartz did not author reddit in search of capital. He created it because he thought it would facilitate internet communication. Ohanian thought he could profit off of it.
When did capitalism make Reddit great? It took a while for capitalism to take effect, and it was still ok. Capitalism took effect, and it was bearable. Now it’s shit.
Profit motives may have been a driver for reddits decisions, but we don’t need to pretend that foss doesn’t have its own share of unpopular or controversial decisions.
It’s about choice and foss makes it much easier to reject and do your own thing.
You left reddit because of capitalism. What is an IPO? It is the launch of a business onto the public capital markets to release equity and to enrich its existing owners. What do all businesses on the markets operate on? Short term growth for the next financial quarter optimised to enrich their investors (shareholders) in the shortest amount of time possible.
Capitalism consistently destroys everything you enjoy and yet you defend it relentlessly while asking for long term thinking, which is not a feature of capitalism. When you wake up to this reality you might actually start to question “maybe the socialists are right about a few things” and spend some time with us learning what we actually believe.
But you know what happened after Reddit turned to crap? Because no one actually has to use Reddit, because Reddit is just a bunch of bored nerds and Reddit is just a bunch of forums, eventually someone realised: “wait a minute, I can code this in a few weeks and make it way less crappy than most social media. And maybe if I make it all open, a whole ecosystem of social networks can grow together”. And when Reddit turned to crap, “the invisible hand” acted and people slowly started to migrate over to lemmy and other social media and now reddit is just a bunch of bots
Mate please check my profile. I have been here for 3 fucking years. Lemmy did not magically appear in a few weeks that is incredibly offensive to the sheer amount of work my comrades have put in to make it.
And calling their work “the invisible hand of the market” is also nonsensical. Because the forces driving its creation, and the rest of us communists that support it, are the destruction of the markets. There is not one single jot of profit motive involved in Lemmy. You seem to recognise some of the problems of capitalism but consistently come to incorrect conclusions about everything because you have spent no time whatsoever getting a real political education and understanding the forces at work.
And you fail to ask yourself what happens to your “market forces” alternative to reddit. In any scenario where the market is responsible for replacing reddit the market will also bring it back to exactly the same point of self-destruction through pursuit of capital. You will hurt yourself all over again.
Yes because people never communicated over the Internet before Glorious Visionary Entrepreneurs from the Great Private Sector took hold of it and gave us all these Valuable Products, they just sat on their ass wondering what to do with such technology like complete idiots.
I swear free market ideology is the dumbest shit you can possibly believe in, I’d sooner become a fucking Mormon.
How would you have communicated without someone owning a server and paying for it? Reddit and other centralized platforms emerged for some reason… You would have to literally make that illegal, i.e. make it illegal to host your own server and let users use it.
You can’t just imagine some fantasy utopia, and compare that to the current system.
How would you have communicated without someone owning a server and paying for it?
You do realize the Internet first started being used by universities and the military, not the private sector, right? I see literally no reason why Internet infrastructure couldn’t be publicly owned. It could function pretty much like any other public utility.
Sorry I just don’t buy into the ideology that the free market has this kind of “magic sauce” that makes everything innovative and better.
The early Internet was filled of people doing all kinds of cool things for free just because it was interesting to do, the only thing the private sector did is provide the base infrastructure, this is something the state can easily do too. All kinds of communities, FOSS software and media popped up and none of them had VC funding or expected any money out of it.
It was only in mid-late 2000 that capital really sank its teeth into the Internet properly.
It did though? I don’t know what point you think you’re making but the internet did in fact grow from a technology limited to universities and the armed forces to a publicly accessible network, mostly off the back of publicly funded researchers and various techies that started their own neighborhood ISPs.
How would you have communicated without someone owning a server and paying for it?
I’d probably have posted on one of the many voluntarily run forums that existed before reddit swallowed everything.
How would you have communicated without the telemasts installed and maintained by the state, which are now privatized and slowly falling apart?
The internet wouldn’t exist without socialism lmao, and you wouldn’t be able to type that idiotic statement without the state funded infrastructure that supports your internet connection.
The “free” market doesn’t innovate, at the very best it creates redundancy.
Reddit itself began as a passion project made voluntarily, inspired by and built upon other similar projects.
The “free” market doesn’t innovate, at the very best it creates redundancy.
Competition drives innovation. And capitalism has the most competition. This is not to say that socialism and capitalism are mutually exclusive though. The US, for example, is too capitalist for my liking but the free market there certainly does innovate.
A “social market economy” like Germany has it is pretty spot on IMO.
There is no proof for this, it’s just something we like to say. There is also no real way to test it - Non competing versus competing? We can however look at historical and current examples. The Soviet Union led the space race, the Soviet Union made many innovations without the need for competition. Cuba has a higher life expectancy than the us and a stronger healthcare sector. China leads in published scientific journals. Both the Soviet Union and china eliminated famines. Both the Soviet Union and china drastically increased industrial productive capacity in decades - something that took capitalists more than a century.
Even if competition led to innovation, it also leads to incredible redundancy and waste. The idea that two people working against each other creates a better product than two people working with each other, is absurd. It has no basis in reality, it’s just a vibes based thing we like to say. At best we end up with two similar products. Had they people collaborated we would have had the same amount of manpower focused on making one project - typically meaning higher quality, faster innovation. We highlight the times people choose to go against competition (The three-point-seatbelt, the Polio cure and insulin) as “good things” that had an immense influence. It is not a coincidence that when we choose to go against this competetive nature of capitalism, the gains are immense.
Competition drives specifically innovation that increases profits, which generally means making things more shit. Jeff Bezos innovated how to fuck over his workers so they could work harder for less. Uber innovated how it could fuck over taxi drivers. The tech firms innovated how to make walled gardens, and the hardware world at large innovated “planned obsolescence”.
Germany’s “social” market has a high amount of homeless people. It also has a high amount of underpaid immigrants being exploited for their labor. It relies - like all western capitalist states - on the exploitation of the third world as well.
The Soviet Union led the space race, the Soviet Union made many innovations without the need for competition
They were very much competing (against the USA) in the space race, why else would it be called a “race”? There may be no proof for my statement about competition driving innovation but would you just innovate for the sake of innovating without any rewards? I would not…
Also, I do notice that monopolies tend to be less innovative than multiple competing businesses in a market.
2.Agreed but if something is completely redundanty it will die out in a capitalist market and more importantly, what would be the incentive to innovate at all if we had one monopoly?
Completely agee on this one and I do think there should be regulations regarding the market (not like in the USA for example).
high amount of homeless people.
Because it doesnt work like its supposed to, but from a theoretical point of view, they all have the right to food and shelter and everything they need to keep their dignity…
I never knew how much I needed Star Trek memes in my life until Stamets and The Picard Maneuver graced us with their presence. Walk with the prophets, my child.
I did at first, but I don’t miss it at all anymore. Too many assholes at this point. It stopped being useful a long time ago. Finding old Reddit threads can be helpful sometimes, but current Reddit is a shitshow.
I miss the niche content. Lemmy isn’t big enough yet to have sorted into big “stupid” subs vs smaller niche subs that tend to attract smarter and more well-informed users. The result is that the signal-to-noise ratio on Lemmy still kind of sucks and any comment thread is likely to consist of three quarters banal gibberish and condescending idiocy and maybe one quarter actually intelligent, thoughtful and informed opinion.
I rarely make a comment on Lemmy without pissing off people on all sides of any given issue, which tells me that Lemmy’s users aren’t really good at nuance or complexity.
When looking something up, especially technical product information the best answer is still often a reddit link. That will change in the future but it will take time.
Old.reddit is the only way yo access this information without account but i paradoxically cant wait for them to shut it down cause the quicker reddit completely dies the faster other places will become knowledge hubs.
Ehhh, even for that I’ve had issues, even before the API stuff. The solutions I came across either came from casual word of mouth on Discord, tutorials on GitHub or forums other than Reddit.
It never was the pinnacle of knowledge, i am not on many different forums and only in the last year have started to avoid internet search where possible but often neither google or bing have satisfying results with only a single reddit link that may have the answer.
One subreddit I still check occasionally is just for Skyrim mods made by one guy. This community of mere hundreds is wherever he makes his posts, and moving would annoy some of his Patreon supporters. The switching cost is high relative to the benefits of switching.
Wait until you need to read an answer to a technical question which was only answered on Reddit. Can’t wait when such pages will be replaced with Lemmy.
I was trying to find if is safe to mix LSD with energy drinks and the only place where someone was answering that was on reddit, restricted because is 18+ somehow. Had to use the tip given from OP to see it outside the app. The general consensus (because this shit can’t be properly researched) is that caffeine in general is not recommended with LSD.
I wouldn’t take drug-mixing advice from some rando on reddit or lemmy or any other similar site.
That being said, please limit yourself to one substance at a time, get some fentanyl test strips and narcan if you’re able, and always have a wingman with you. Assuming it’s possible where you live, buy your drugs from a regulated dispensary or at least a source you know and trust (whose source they trust).
Have fun, but stay safe. The times they are a changing…even weed has dangerous shit mixed in nowadays.
I mean , you can’t exactly go ask a doctor how to use lsd. Sometimes you just want to read up on something based on someone else’s personal experience. The website might be doing some dumb shit lately but it’s hard to replace the vast number of people who have answered exact questions you’re looking for. Lemmy just doesn’t have the 10+ year head start
Problem is, many otherwise good doctors are not very knowledgeable about illicit drugs, particularly those that are comparatively rare/aren’t a public health crisis (LSD, while popular, is kinda niche compared to meth and opioids).
A big chunk of the time you’re just going to get “Don’t use drugs”, simply because they don’t have much else to say about it, and don’t want you taking risks based on something they’ve said. Doesn’t mean don’t ask*, but know you may not get useful harm reduction information from Dr. F. Practitioner.
*That said there IS a risk that such a question can paint you as a potential drug seeker, and so create barriers to care if someone decides to add that to your chart when you were just trying to minimize risk.
I don’t actively use it either, but sometimes you’re trying to fix some esoteric error that no one has experienced since the existence of the Western Roman Empire and the only place where a solution exists is Reddit. In those cases I kinda have to visit that wretched hive.
Same. However, I have rarely been able to solve a technical problem with Reddit posts or comments. It’s a better source for random experiences about something.
For random technical problems with new software or hardware, Reddit quality is not as good as it used to be, IMHO.
For somewhat niche hobbies, like my mushroom growing, subjective experiences may be helpful to take into account. Reading dozens of different opinions about a problem in a hobby that has hundreds of different variables has its uses. (For example, if you want to test something specific, you can get an idea about the range of conditions to test.)
Though you may be right, I have a feeling that he is facing formidable opposition. That may include anything from social engineering to full on psyops.
Bet he’s had people “happen” to bump into him IRL, and gets pull requests from bad actors that are very subtly trying to take the project in the wrong direction.
What’s “Mordor Intelligence” – is that a real thing, or a parody of the surveillance/‘defense’ industry companies that are coming up with names nicked from LotR? (‘Anduril’, ‘Palantir’)
Your second point is especially interesting, considering the recent xz backdoor. The bad actors manipulated a poor burnt out maintainer for it. In comparison, I’m impressed with gorhill for his perseverance and mental strength. I would like to know how he avoids burn out with such negative influences.
Insightful point. And it does remind me of the corporate purchase of the Don’t care about cookies extension for Firefox (And the Simple Mobile Tools for Android). Luckily it was forked. github.com/…/I-Still-Dont-Care-About-Cookies Open source FTW!
🙂 🐧
The VLC guy turned down what a quick search is telling me was “several tens of millions” to show ads. I can’t even imagine what getting people to drop ublock would be worth.
There is and isn’t one. For the add-on itself, you just need forks and more forks. For the lists it pulls from, those are already decentralized, but you’re constantly going to deal with the issue of only the best are used and only the used are maintained and only the maintained are the best.
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