I'm personally on team "cheap used laptop from ebay but with Linux", for whatever that's worth.
A1: Yeah, that's why I said "plutocrats" and not "entrepreneurs".There certainly is top-level organizational work to be done in any enterprise of any size. Plutocrats are the people who buy in after the machine is going, and figure out how to squeeze out the maximum short-term gain for themselves.
Musk, as I understand it, is one of those. SpaceX and Tesla succeeded early on because they had layers of bureaucracy around him to limit the damage he could do.
Bezos I will at least credit with getting the machine going in the first place, and "being a good parasite" as far as his businesses are concerned.
Neither of them give half a rat's ass for the larger socio-economic systems that created the technologies and raised/educated the workers that they now ruthlessly exploit.
B2: Yeah again -- they're fixated on control, so that they can take whatever they think they deserve from whatever they "own".
B3: Yeah #3: That's something I've been saying for awhile now. As tempting as it is to say "burn it all down", a lot of these companies (even many of the the evil ones) do provide a lot of good, and don't have to do the bad stuff in order to continue doing the good. We need to recapture them, generally, not destroy them (...which isn't to say that acts of property destruction against such companies, for socially-beneficial strategic goals, are a bad idea).
Plutocrats "make money" like mosquitoes "make blood".
Naah, dude, you didn't make that stuff. You didn't do the work. You just extracted it from the system and then put it inside yourself, where it seems like a lot by comparison.
@Npars01 They don't understand how "the swamp" is necessary for their wealth.
They're like a parasite that hasn't figured out it needs to not kill the host -- a cloud of mosquitoes that will bleed us dry because they can, believing that their "success" at "making blood" proves they should.
Cancerous manifest destiny.
@Npars01 'recessions are good because they purge the economy' -- this puts "drain the swamp" in a whole new light: to them, we are the swamp. The government programs they destroy, which keep the world stable and prosperous, are the swamp.
The corruption we think of as "the swamp" is, to them, the goal of the entire system: personal wealth (victory) for the "winners" who played the game right, which means making the right "friends".
Making the world more chaotic just makes the game more interesting, to them.
So... how about a Union of Itinerant Workers (anyone in the workforce but not formally employed full-time)... I'm thinking if enough people joined it, then the union could threaten something close to a general strike if employers didn't agree to pay in enough to support basic living expenses for all members, currently employed/contracted or not -- but I'm not sure how the numbers work out.
Welcome to our Clowder of Compucatination, @Blazulite ! I hope we're what you're looking for :tootcat: :blobcatthinkingportal:
Dutch-American Friendship Treaty
(For entrepreneurs / business owners interested in moving to Nederlands)
UPDATE: this little pup has been claimed! Thank you everyone for your interest and support!
Can you make good use of an original Commodore PET computer? This one is yours for free if you can pick it up in Los Angeles (near USC). My parents bought it in 1978. It has the famous chiclet keyboard and integral cassette tape drive. It doesn't work at this point, which someone told me is probably due to some bad RAM chips but I don't actually know. The screen shows random squares when it's on.
Boosts for reach appreciated.
ETA: email me at adrian@foutu.org or DM me here.
Without sharing the reading list I just emailed to a friend, here's what various feminist writers/thinkers have posited as ways to smash the patriarchy.
IOW, we *have a roadmap.* We don't need to flap our hands and say, Oh noes....the Patriarchy is too bigs!
intersectional collective action.
align feminism with global anti-capitalist movements.
build power through difference, not by flattening it.
abolitionist frameworks as gender liberation
integrate feminist choices into everyday life.
reclaim maternal power while rejecting compulsory roles.
collectivize care; de-privatize parenting
wages for care, refusal of unpaid reproductive labor.
reproductive justice = autonomy + material conditions, not just “choice.”
chosen family as infrastructure.
abolish biological family as destiny; redesign kinship.
1/
If, say, FB started requiring systems to report birthdate, they'd have to get that information through the browser -- which would then have to be implemented by multiple vendors, and what's to stop them from just allowing you to enter whatever birthday you like? (For that matter, what's to stop a system user from filling in whatever birthday they like?)
This requirement looks to me exactly like a typical political "be seen to be doing something, even if it's really stupid".
@hellomiakoda Today has been like that for me too. I figured it was just that yesterday was a bit of spoonsaster...
I'm not sure that's the best solution either -- though I see no reason why it couldn't be a per-post or per-user option.
I'm sure that'd get shot down, too; there's been a lot of "not invented here" syndrome at Masto Central. Maybe now that it's under new(ish) leadership, they'll reconsider some of these decisions?
Failing that: one of these days, I will dig into the code...
@servelan What an amazing invention -- a coin with negative value!
Instead of taxing the rich, the government can just send them billions of these.
(Side note: the gift-link still requires a login. Make of that what you will.)
