At a time when people increasingly feel disempowered and without outlook, the "mill girls of Lowell" offer an inspiring story of human triumph in face of withering conditions.
While Baldur's Gate 3 is being widely celebrated by fans and developers alike, some are panicking that this could set new expectations from fans. Good.
Trust me, I get it and I agree, #capitalism sucks. Mostly.
But that's not how it works.
You can't just take an arbitrary event and claim it came to be despite the circumstances, not because of them.
Like, that's not how causality works.
Besides, It's a way stronger argument to point at the overwhelming amount of bad games and bad features and say those got produced under capitalism and that's why it's bad full stop.
"The property in the soil is the original source of all wealth, and has become the great problem upon the solution of which depends the future of the working
class" (Marx 1872)
Hey everyone if you're looking for a new podcast then check out A History of Capitalism! We're going to get into everything from the Black Death to Black Mondays.
The Economist is worried that the hedge funds are worried that Alphabet (Google) is not making enough money.
But as a layman I'm more concerned about why I should worry about a Trillion dollar company not making enough money to please the hedge funds? Granted, I may be an investor in Google and would like it to continue growing but I'm more worried about the impact of these Trillion dollar companies and their Billionaires have on the society and the planet.
It's inceribly freeing to realize that after decades of poverty and now working in a middle class income lvl job the income has no real power over me.
If the conditions worsen, I'll just withdraw my labor. Doing this gives me zero anxiety. I know perfectly well that I'll be fine regardless.
In many ways poverty makes you ungovernable. And also reveals our real power as workers. And I suppose that is why the ladder to decent income has to be kept as steep as possible, so not too many find this out.
Amazingly, there are people — many, I'm afraid, in positions of power and influence — who continue to assert that technology will surely save us and that capitalism can find the answers.
Uh-huh. And how's that going so far?
Although most climate scientists, when asked privately or off the record, admit they now expect a global temperature rise of 3°C to 4°C or even higher before the end of this century (see https://climatejustice.social/@breadandcircuses/109642315870697356) a few happy optimists are always ready to assure us that while a “temporary overshoot” beyond 1.5°C might occur, it won’t last because, um, because magic will happen!
That's not quite what they say, but it's almost as bad since they’re asking us to depend on carbon dioxide removal (CDR), a hopeful fantasy that we can someday cheaply and effectively remove gigantic amounts of carbon from the air and put it back in the ground.
Instead of, you know, just doing what we should have done in the first place — leave it in the ground!
Here is the truth: To avoid catastrophe, to prevent the collapse of civilization, to avert the possible extinction of the human race — we MUST stop emitting carbon into the atmosphere. This requires urgent, immediate emissions cuts, phasing down to full ZERO (not phony greenwashed "Net Zero") within a matter of years.
The science is unequivocal. The messages we are receiving from Gaia could not be more clear. If we don't change our ways, and quickly, it's game over for civilization.
I want to punch whoever thought up 'proprietary screws' in the face... I refuse to throw away an $80 controller because some moron decided to not use standardized screws.
Hi, we're a tech startup run by libertarian Silicon Valley tech bros.
We're not a newspaper, we're a content portal.
We're not a taxi service, we're a ride sharing app.
We're not a pay TV service, we're a streaming platform.
We're not a department store, we're an e-commerce marketplace.
We're not a financial services firm, we're crypto.
We're not a space agency, we're a group of visionaries who are totally going to Mars next year.
We're not a copywriting and graphic design agency, we're a large language model generative AI platform.
Oh sure, we compete against those established businesses. We basically provide the same goods and services.
But we're totally not those things. At least from a legal and PR standpoint.
And that means all the laws and regulations that have built up over the decades around those industries don't apply to us.
Things like consumer protections, privacy protections, minimum wage laws, local content requirements, safety regulations, environmental protections... They totally don't apply to us.
Even copyright laws — as long as we're talking about everyone else's intellectual property.
We're going to move fast and break things — and then externalise the costs of the things we break.
We've also raised several billion in VC funding, and we'll sell our products below cost — even give them away for free for a time — until we run our competition out of the market.
Once we have a near monopoly, we'll enshitify the hell out of our service and jack up prices.
You won't believe what you agreed to in our terms of service agreement.
We may also be secretly hoarding your personal information. We know who you are, we know where you work, we know where you live. But you can trust us.
By the time the regulators and the general public catch on to what we're doing, we will have well and truly moved on to our next grift.
By the way, don't forget to check out our latest innovation. It's the Uber of toothpaste!
Capitalism, as a system, doesn't do well in anticipating problems or at preparing for crises. That's not how it works.
The only goal of capitalism is creating profits for capitalists, thereby increasing their capital. Short-term, immediate gains. That's all that matters.
So, when the things you expect to find at the store suddenly begin disappearing off the shelves, and no one has an answer for when they'll be back, now you'll know why.
It’s not an exact correlation, and there are of course outliers on both sides — but it remains a proven scientific fact that the higher an individual ranks on the scale of financial wealth, the lower they score on measures of personal goodness. And the same is true in reverse.
Giving a talk tomorrow, Jul 13 on #imperial history and contemporary #gentrification in the #Balkans at UniKonstanz. It will take place via Zoom (link below).
Do you want to know why certain historic buildings are restored, and what that has to do with rising rent? Are you interested in #Habsburg and #Ottoman cities? Do you care about post-industrial #urbanism? Come check it out!
I’ll be blunt. We have no hope of averting climate chaos or preventing the catastrophic collapse of our modern society without SYSTEM CHANGE.
Keeping capitalism in charge means a death sentence for billions of humans — most of them poor and in the Global South — along with complete extinction for uncounted plant and animal species.
The fake “democracy” we have in the Global North is nothing but a game show owned and produced by oligarchs. As long as they remain in control of the system, nothing meaningful will change. How you vote doesn’t matter, because every important candidate is approved in advance, vetted and managed by those men behind the curtain.
Either capitalism dies or we die. It’s that simple.
A thing @ploum wrote about corporations wrecking and killing decentralized things (in this case, Google and XMPP) -- and why it's essential to learn from history to resist further corporate destruction:
The enforcement of copyright law is really simple.
If you were a kid who used Napster in the early 2000s to download the latest album by The Offspring or Destiny's Child, because you couldn't afford the CD, then you need to go to court! And potentially face criminal sanctions or punitive damages to the RIAA for each song you download, because you're an evil pirate! You wouldn't steal a car! Creators must be paid!
If you created educational videos on YouTube in the 2010s, and featured a video or audio clip, then even if it's fair use, and even if it's used to make a legitimate point, you're getting demonetised. That's assuming your videos don't disappear or get shadow banned or your account isn't shut entirely. Oh, and good luck finding your way through YouTube's convoluted DMCA process! All creators are equal in deserving pay, but some are more equal than others!
And if you're a corporation with a market capitalisation of US$1.5 trillion (Google/Alphabet) or US$2.3 billion (Microsoft), then you can freely use everyone's intellectual property to train your generative AI bots. Suddenly creators don't deserve to be paid a cent.
Apparently, an individual downloading a single file is like stealing a car. But a trillion-dollar corporation stealing every car is just good business.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is Causing Some Developers to Panic (youtube.com)
While Baldur's Gate 3 is being widely celebrated by fans and developers alike, some are panicking that this could set new expectations from fans. Good.