Not necessarily. It may be optimization between what you give now and what you keep for later to make more, with the total effect on others’ well-being being the criterion. I mean, theoretically.
If you make a dime and immediately give it away randomly, you are making a worse decision than keeping it by this criterion. If you immediately give it away not randomly, but to somebody you think needs it, still possibly worse because you could try and make much more and then, say, open a pharmaceutical company.
Say, with cattle you’d use some for meat and some to make more cattle to feed more people. You wouldn’t just slaughter the whole herd for meat. It’s worse.
I mean, one can build it NITBY, just with functioning public transport to TBY, so that it could function. There’s plenty of available space on the planet.
Apple has deployed a system called Private Access Tokens that allows web servers to verify if a device is legitimate before granting access. This works by having the browser request a signed token from Apple proving the device is approved. While this currently has limited impact due to Safari’s market share, there are concerns...
All those people who’ve been trying to keep corporate technologies “open” were, in fact, working for the corporations to make people come to them. Most unknowingly, maybe. It’s just, well, litany of Gendlin case. You rely on corporate power, even if you are trying to hide it and talk about “open Web”.
The most important thing is that we take ideologically corporate technology where it’s not needed (there’s been plenty of hypertext systems in history, some kinda successful, and all that JS and AJAX stuff and various frameworks on top are so complex not because of any usefulness, but because of the corporate goal of backward compatibility, lumping everything together and even intentional complexity to cut off competition, and a single space).
We’d be just fine with a bunch of incompatible between themselves Hypercard-like things working over network. That’s what I think.
I really dislike Apple for what they’ve been in my somehow conscious years (born 1996), but things like Hypercard and Hotline (or KDX) from their older time seem to be just the right way to use personal computers.
Any single space with propaganda of “fragmentation being bad” is either not immune to what has happened to the Web, or already compromised.
About 8 months ago I got pretty tired of seeing billionaire spam online. I could not bear to read about yet another rich guy who launched themselves (or their $200,000 car) into outer space 🚀 . I did not care about their expert opinion on the latest meme coin back then. I do not care about their expert opinion on the dangers...
Cool, I really want something like RPi, but with SATA on RISC-V. Maybe somebody will make “laptop” cases with normal deep travel keyboards for these too. It’s a possibility, at least.
looks like rendering adblockers extensions obsolete with manifest-v3 was not enough so now they try to implement DRM into the browser giving the ability to any website to refuse traffic to you if you don’t run a complaint browser ( cough…firefox )...
Well, I’ve made the point yesterday that it’s unfair if another person expects me to always use what’s convenient for them, but never returns the favor. And that there’s no desktop client for WhatsApp for Linux, and that my wrists are bad with touchscreens, and that Meta are bad guys.
It was unexpected, but this worked and I now have some XMPP contacts, relatives, of course, who else would listen to me on that.
It’s endgame for old WWW. Well, maybe Gemini will have its market glory moment, though commercialization is explicitly what its creators and users don’t want.
It is static pages with hyperlinks, only in a different protocol. It’s supposed to be like upgraded Gopher with some good things from modernity and HTTP.
Static pages with hyperlinks have evolved into a certain horror we all know. One of the stated goals is that Gemini is not extensible by design. It’s not intended to easily grow additional features, even server-side theming of pages.
Why new protocol and clients - because of control. It’s a small protocol, clients are simple, they don’t need all the sandboxing and interpreting and DOM that web browsers have.
I mean, there’s the FAQ for this question among others, and it’s like asking why Linux and not some Windows 1337 Pr0 B00tl3g Edition.
This is a neat idea, but the requirement of installing a whole new piece of software just to decide if it’s worth exploring is already a non-starter.
That “whole new piece of software” takes many times less than loading a webpage FFS, how often do you visit new webpages? And some people also play games, is installing a game a non-starter?
Judging by the way older people treat correspondence and even verbal interactions and timing and appearances in Russia - capitalism actually alleviated this a bit.
See, in a planned economy of Soviet kind you as a worker are a resource. When you are fired from some place because they don’t like you there, you are going to have hard time explaining that it wasn’t a big deal to get another job (not as a janitor, I mean). And that’s if they didn’t write some particularly shitty thing into your labor book (there was such a thing in USSR, basically a story of all your past employments, like CV, only written by employers, which you’d bring to a new place). If they did, even becoming a janitor would be an achievement. It would be possible to become really unemployed even, and have problems with law due to this as being unemployed was illegal in USSR.
Do you prefer what I’ve described (no exaggerations at all, I can’t make you believe me, but this is just how it normally was) to capitalism?
7 out of 11 countries believe the end of the USSR harmed their countries rather than benefited them
That’s because USSR was designed intentionally so that its end would be a catastrophe. To prevent that end. However, since it was simply unable to exist further even on life support, what happened happened still.
End of USSR being bad doesn’t mean USSR being good. It’s just a choice between horrible end and horror without end.
Didn’t the USSR just do state capitalism, and not actual communism or socialism?
The Soviet idea was that 1) if it’s state-owned, then it’s people-owned and not capitalism, 2) it’s people-owned, because USSR is a union of soviet republics, where soviet is a democratic (initially) entity, 3) it’s socialism, not communism, as we’ve not built that yet, 4) it’s still socialism as we use money to buy things and not receive them as we need automatically, as the planning precision doesn’t allow for this.
(A soviet is initially like an elected body, where every member on level zero is elected by constituency, like certain factory’s workers or inhabitants of some street, as this thing was static in the USSR, or on every level above zero by an underlying level soviet ; the main difference between this and normal democracies is that those factory workers or that underlying soviet can vote anytime to recall and replace their representative, which turned out to make it more authoritarian all by itself ; well, also obviously these in fact decided nothing in the USSR anyway, the party structures did).
Moscow, I also had relatives in SPb (not anymore), other relatives in Nizhny Novgorod, other relatives in Voronezh, and some in Rostov-on-Don.
and what do the local people over 60 that actually lived in the USSR have to say
Different things for different people.
Educated people in general have to say on politics the same things that I said earlier, but they are very nostalgic over less criminalized popular culture, better technical education and rules being followed. So am I to some extent actually.
Less educated and poorer people would have uncritical approval of whatever they approve now. USSR, because “people had everything and everything was cheap and deficit is a lie”, even though they lived to see it and themselves mention it in unconnected conversations, but it’s always some enemies behind it, or maybe Putin and so on.
Can be seen with my aunts in Armenia too, one of them is a pharmacist and sees things adequately, if pessimistically. Another is an accountant and goes into complete denial in any honest conversation about anything political, she just can’t bear it as some people can’t bear honest conversations about sex.
There may be gradations.
I already know of course and could post video interviews of such
That’s not an argument. You can make video interviews with all kinds of people of all kinds of demographics to say what you want. That’s what propaganda does since “video” became a thing. Discarded.
but perhaps you could tell the thread what those people say.
Yes, see the above.
Forgive me for assuming but I’m willing to bet you’re in your teens or twenties, making you at best 10 years old when it ended, meaning you have little to no actual recollection of what living and working was like. I could be wrong of course.
No recollection at all, I’m 1996, but since transition from USSR to modern Russia didn’t happen in an instance, in various institutions and organizations you can still see in some ways how it was. More in my childhood than now, but still.
Also naturally I have parents and grandparents, and friends’ parents and their grandparents, and parents’ friends, and so on, you get the idea.
I live in this society and you don’t, so I know more than you, which could help you if you weren’t in denial.
That’s why we need science fiction, to not be afraid of all the abhorrent and abhorrently efficient weapons the future holds for us.
And yes, Star Wars is a very perceptive choice of name on part of George Lucas.
The scary part is that we all sit on our sweaty bottoms while such things are being developed not by bad guys and good guys to fight each other over us, but by bad guys and bad guys to fight each other over us.
I would answer that like any normal person I have plenty of stuff to hide which I don’t consider any legitimate concern of others, and rightfully so.
And that if that person has no dignity, they may bend over as much as they want, but they are also spitting in others’ dish by making that bending over acceptable and common.
I’m interested, would it be different if 10 years ago you were anti-LGBT, anti-abortion and fascist, but changed your mind? Would you consider others judging you for that now acceptable?
It’s a random thought, no deeper meaning or provocation.
It’s simpler actually, despite all the words the state still communicates a certain atmosphere of intimidation. When you submit something to the police, it’s not because you consider it obviously right, it’s because you obey their order.
So despite legalities being different, for privacy people still feel afraid to say that they’d hide something.
It’s a matter of emotion. They are not afraid of you, but they are afraid of police. For some people this means that showing something to you is fine and to police not, for others (the majority) - the opposite. You won’t hurt them, police may.
People randomly judging you can get quite similar to a whole government, or a whole government may be no more of a nuisance that people randomly judging you.
I’m irritated (upset too, but that for offline reasons of mundane nature) because I wrote one simple thing initially (that slavery, prison labor and child labor are not in any way exclusive to capitalism, unless you call all of human history that), which is not what you were arguing against for some time.
Also because I’m again having the thought “WTF I’m answering all those comments for” too late. This happens with friendly discussions too, they somehow start degrading in complexity in the moments where the subject is locally exhausted, but the conversation doesn’t end.
Most people do that at least once. Some never do though, but that’s what’s called a wasted life.
your defense of this evil system and this evil society is immoral
First, thieves won’t teach me morality, naturally, second, no person under this post has even tried to reach the point in conversation where I’d be able to say what exactly I would defend in systems and societies.
Which means …
Say, if there’s a murder, and if you are a suspect, who can’t be proven to be the murderer, but you actively destroy the evidence ascertaining who that is, then it becomes likelier that the murderer is you.
If you are using manipulative or aggressive tactics in a conversation, trying to give your opposition as few chances as possible instead of as many as possible, - then because of this alone you’ve discredited yourself and your point of view and you’ve lost. (No, it’s not a subject for a vote)
Most of this text is your attempts to describe me instead of myself. Which is worth less than used toilet paper. Also usually called a strawman argument.
And you’re really powerless to stop us.
Now this is the main emotional message you are carrying.
I don’t know whether the literal statement is true, however since you have to persuade yourself that your enemy is powerless, and I don’t, being fine with my enemy being possibly stronger than me, possibly hopelessly, - I think it’s wrong and I am not.
So to call prison labor capitalist you use a logical OR (any piece in the chain is capitalist, so it’s capitalist), but to call it communist you use a logical AND (unless all pieces in the chain are communist, it’s not communist)?
Source is living in Russia for 27 years and talking to people, also reading stuff from various leaks etc. And obviously mass media. If you are asking about Russia.
If you are asking about USA, then my only sources are mass media and Reddit.
Yes all profits are theft, you worked to make $100 profit for the company, they paid you $10, $90 is taken, it’s not hard.
So paying for union membership is fine, but paying for company membership, where you can make money, is not?
If you don’t like the architecture of this with the owner and his employees, or many owners, look at cooperatives, a very old anarcho-syndicalist idea, which, believe me or not, does work. It’s not very popular, but cooperatives and things similar to them do exist. Like kibbutz in Israel (I’m sure there are more mundane examples).
I mean, it’s the same logic. Working as part of a system has different efficiency that working alone.
Walmart: Please, PLEASE defend the billionaires that own Wallmart… #1 in stealing wages, yes, wage theft, actual theft. Please look it up. Even not considering Marxist ideas, just plain old theft of wages. Their employees have to live on government handouts, IE: You are paying more in taxes because Wallmart won’t pay their employees a living wage… They’re stealing from you… Like, this isn’t hard.
So a company is not fulfilling its obligations systematically, does not get sued sufficiently bad to stop, and you are blaming capitalism, not the judicial system, not lawmakers?
C’mon, just because it isn’t illegal doesn’t mean it’s not theft. Also wage theft, Amazon commits massive wage theft…
It is very illegal, just like what Microsoft has been doing for half the 90s. And maybe 10 or 20 years from now, when Amazon is not that strong, it’s going to lose a suit without real repercussions, just like Microsoft.
Only I don’t get how this is connected to capitalism. This actually (still being illegal, but being unlikely otherwise) utilizes trademark, patent and IP laws, which I’m against exactly because these are very notably not capitalist.
And plain power, which is not capitalist as well, it’s just a fact of life. Some enemies are orders of magnitude stronger than you. You can’t just vote for making them weaker and expect that they’ll magically just do that.
Same with Apple.
You are being contrarian for no reason.
That’s called the iterative process of improving oneself and the society around. I’m arguing so that we both could find and fix flaws in our worldview, only you are not even trying to do that, why?
Anyway, profits and competition and power and evil people exist, these are, again, facts of life. There’s no option to vote for ruling these out, and a vote can’t by itself make any radical change. So when you want something, consider how the balance of power would change, because that power won’t go away or be magically transferred to different people.
Powerful people can more effectively influence one center than many (that’s just logic and probability theory, nothing else). This means that more centralization means less checks on them, not the other way around. Many politicians promise this, but in reality the singular center never goes against power.
Oh, really a lot, but thanks. I’ll try to answer where I have an answer.
I see a lot of people think that big corporations do nothing wrong and everybody is just being crybabies.
Well, I subjectively don’t meet such people. This was definitely a problem with big tech corporations somewhere in 2006-2016, but it was specifically due to the common irrational belief that they are making the magnificent future closer, so wasn’t about corporations in general, just tech ones.
So what enables corporations and their very wealthy individuals to support this? Their massive profits. Capitalism incentivizes’ lots of profits and a high profit margin. Those profits go to the owners of the business, either in dividends or in stocks or in salary or bonuses. Either way, they get that money, not you.
Well, that’s where I don’t agree, because the ultimate incentive is survival. Some of the games we play for survival are zero-sum ones. And profit means strength. And those stronger are likelier to take power. And those who take power decide the future of our society.
So what you call capitalism here is as massive and natural as the Sun. Between draining the sea and making seaworthy ships the latter is more practical.
If you want to fix its problems, you need a strategy which wouldn’t put you at a huge evolutional disadvantage while doing that. Otherwise you are still going to participate in the same game, only as a target for beating.
Therefore, capitalism is the source of dirty politicians, which is the source of dirty lawmakers, and a bad judicial system.
So if I agree to such a definition of capitalism, and agree to this, we come to it being practically impossible to drain that source. Or the solutions being a kind of healing headache by decapitation (20-s “war communism” or Khmer Rouge, and neither did remove the problem of dirty politicians).
About smaller notes:
If a company can make it work, great, but capitalism doesn’t reward an awesome self-starter group working together to make their jobs better, it rewards profits for the already rich.
Well, it is normally harder to start than to improve on something big that you already have. The question is, how can one improve the protection of cubs from other males, if we use the lion analogy.
Wage theft is illegal of course, I was referring to the “other” things (Paying less than you make for the company, paying less than a living wage, etc). I hope you didn’t copy that out of context on purpose 😉
Oh, that was about non-competitive practices. I meant the fact that Amazon is a monopoly and the means used to remain such.
Capitalism is one group exerting power over another. You can’t live without a job, they have the jobs. This is power, money or no money. I also reject the notion that this is a fact of life. I think you should read about what socialism and communism really is, there are better ways.
There may be other ways, but I’m discarding those which lead to extinction, because following them means that in every generation (literal or figurative) the proponents of your idea will be of smaller and smaller relative power. That’s not a way to change the humanity.
I don’t see it going that way, therefore, revolution is what it will take.
Suppose I agree to that. But a revolution requires a design of the force to make it reality, and a design of the system which it will install. Both very specific, as systems intended to work very reliably.
Similar to the same topic, but the idea of Socialism -> Communism is to remove the ability to gather power for the capitalist class.
The known attempts resulted in another class gathering power.
So long as laborers are in charge of the system, we can make change in the right direction.
This is an assumption of not only having the same goal and interest as many other people, but also being able to trust most of them.
Start by getting rid of private enterprise, then accumulation of wealth is nearly impossible, then eventually you can provide, for free, the necessities of life, and eventually remove things like money, thus completely removing the majority of the possibility of holding power over someone else.
Who is going to provide those necessities? The answer is also who will become the point of failure.
There is no utopia, and socialists know this, but we can do better than what we have now, which is, in my opinion, just leaning into the power struggle and simply letting a few people hold authoritarian control over the population.
Change is usually better than stagnation, but otherwise the result is likely going to be the same.
This depends highly on who is in charge. I don’t know how to solve this problem, but I believe that, for example, if we remove private business (nuance here, coops and whatnot would exist, and without capitalism would work just fine), and we remove the ability to pay off politicians (Pretty much requires interrupting the system we have and starting over, IE: revolution), then we can have democracy based on real peoples opinion, and not the opinion of a handful of oligarchs.
Oh. Here’s the problem. You don’t need official money to buy someone, to gather power, and to influence reality. You may use booze, or you may use medicine, or you may exchange favors. Money is standardized and monopolized by states, yes, but that doesn’t mean that if the state abolished it, there’ll be no universal equivalent (that is, money).
Supply and demand, sorry, these are real.
In USSR there was a developed social mechanism of favors, where you’d owe someone for helping you out, but your acquaintance or a relative would be a doctor, and the person you owe to would have an acquaintance who’d need to see a doctor (and not in the district clinic, that’d be useless at best), and so on, and somehow all those favors would be balanced out in the network of people.
This was all very complex and inefficient, but necessary, that is, in demand, with Soviet money being in fact coupons for Soviet stores, sometimes only good in combination with actual permission to buy something. And, of course, black market was something people would be more careful about.
What I’m trying to say - removing money you won’t remove all this dynamic of buying people. Even private businesses.
This isn’t just a made up theoretical example, this exists in Cuba today.
Frankly what I’ve read of Cuba says otherwise, but at least it’s becoming less poor.
Yes, it’s not. I mean, for Marxists it is, because Marx describes something similar specifically to XIX century Germany with state-supported enormous trusts, influential aristocracy, and so on. Which is for obvious reason of living there, just not very relevant, because real economists use the term differently.
In neither case does capital belong to “the people” as a whole.
Well, CCP is not different from CPSU in this case.
Communist means ideologically communist. Because “countries which have built communism according to Marx with stateless society with common ownership of means of production” etc are like Zeno’s Achilles and turtle metaphor. Only I don’t get why would anybody use such an unreachable by design criterion to judge on the effect of communist ideology on societies.
Well, I know a little country under genocidal threat from a couple of neighbors (one of which is in NATO) which “the west” is completely fine with. Those neighbors are even getting some green energy investments, simultaneously doing modern-day Nazi propaganda, cause nobody cares about brown people.
So - that little country has an “elite” which not only comes from the most ignorant, must dirty levels of society, but that elite has also robbed it for 30+ years. Its politicians and military people are incompetent, cowardly and immoral, they spend more effort on defending against competition or immunity in their own nation than on defending against genocidal neighbors. And they’ve made the judicial system and the military into their pocket tools.
If one could massacre all that elite, about 10k people, things would possibly change for the better. That little nation does have intelligentsia, it does have educated people, it does have very patriotic and passionate patriotic people still tolerant to dissent (something this community doesn’t have).
Some people would say the solution of massacring this group of people is Stalinist. Though there is no communism involved here, just when any legal means of fighting a virus are neutered, only violence remains.
There are gradations between “everything” and “critical mass” as well, and part of it is “private” property which can be easily confiscated or in some other way transferred to a more loyal person, just the system has mechanisms to prevent killing the golden goose (for now, it seems comrade Xi has some ideas with potential to affect this).
I mean, if you consider Nazi Germany capitalist, then China is too.
Anyway, it all depends on terminology. Some people think that “war communism” is the closest to real communism the world has seen. For others it’s not communism at all, because they don’t forget that “stateless” part. While Makhno’s republic is that. For others the Nordic countries are almost like communism.
Just like with Christianity, with Communism we should trace all branches of the tree, not just discard everything we don’t like as schismatic.
Elon Musk and company take @x handle from its original user. He got zero dollars for it. (mashable.com)
Japan’s population drops by nearly 800,000 with falls in every prefecture for the first time (www.theguardian.com)
Apple already shipped attestation on the web, and we barely noticed (httptoolkit.com)
Apple has deployed a system called Private Access Tokens that allows web servers to verify if a device is legitimate before granting access. This works by having the browser request a signed token from Apple proving the device is approved. While this currently has limited impact due to Safari’s market share, there are concerns...
Every click is ecstasy (lemmy.world)
"Block The Rich" is like an ad-blocker, but for obscenely wealthy people with overinflated egos. (lemm.ee)
About 8 months ago I got pretty tired of seeing billionaire spam online. I could not bear to read about yet another rich guy who launched themselves (or their $200,000 car) into outer space 🚀 . I did not care about their expert opinion on the latest meme coin back then. I do not care about their expert opinion on the dangers...
RISC-V Is Now An Official Debian Architecture (www.phoronix.com)
CHROME (google) is planing to implement DRM (kinda) into their browser (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
looks like rendering adblockers extensions obsolete with manifest-v3 was not enough so now they try to implement DRM into the browser giving the ability to any website to refuse traffic to you if you don’t run a complaint browser ( cough…firefox )...
Run! Run! Run! (i.imgur.com)
How i feel on Lemmy (programming.dev)
Computer chip with built-in human brain tissue gets military funding (newatlas.com)
Data privacy: how to counter the "I have nothing to hide" argument?
I know data privacy is important and I know that big corporations like Meta became powerful enough to even manipulate elections using our data....
capitalism ruins everything around me (lemmy.world)
Cream get the money Dolla Dolla bill yall
Big oil quietly walks back on climate pledges as global heat records tumble (www.theguardian.com)