SpaceCadetJones

I'm confused, how does "serverless" play into this? I opened this expecting something about p2p architecture

Last I tried there were a couple of issues with autoindentation with the fsharp plugin for emacs, but they're well aware of the issue and have been working on it last I checked.

I don't see why you dragged minimum wage into this? The above poster is correct. Employee productivity has increased immensely the past 40 years, while wages have remained practically stagnant. Meanwhile costs of housing and education continue to rise. This isn't something related to low earners, we're all getting ripped off here.

I mean that's only if you have some over arching entity that does all of the planning that commands from the top down. Some people argue for planning at a regional level and cooperating on a larger scale as needed, or organizing work into industry wide unions where leadership is democratically elected, immediately revocable, and the unions go around to communities to gather input for what is needed. If people were being difficult they would likely be kicked out, like a company today. I would hope people still provide for them

Again though, I'm not here to talk about the failings of autocratic state planning advocated by tankies.

Wow, it really is a small world, I can't believe you replied to my comment. You're one of the only aliases I still recognize from those days as I was about 12 at the time. SCAR and the other scriptable clients were a huge spark for my interest in programming as a kid. Seeing something that could automate actions in a game I played all day blew my mind and I had to learn how it worked. Cheers to you for that!

Definitely have to agree with you. I do believe it possible to have a functional capitalist society, however it will always devolve into something like the present day as groups natural accumulate large amounts of capital and use it to tip the scales in their favor, continuing the trend and making it so damn hard to account for market externalities or ensure the working class has bargaining power. This also is separate from what I believe to be one of capitalisms greatest ills: worker alienation and the capitalist class expropriating what the employees produce. It creates a huge conflict in society. Collective work requires collective expropriation, otherwise people will feel cheated.

The point about organizing from the bottom up is spot on. I believe many of socialism failings were because of attempts to organize top down and not allowing people to manage themselves. This is why I'm particular to anarchism, as the focus is on creating freely associated communities that come together so power comes from the bottom up and there are no concrete hierarchies. Many also have abandoned the idea of some great revolution to topple the system and instead opt for building structures like co-ops, mutual banks, neighborhood assemblies, community gardens, and charities in hope of building a new society in the shell of the current one.

Note: I'm not an advocate of central planning. However, I do believe that technology could make it viable. Our purchases in markets are used as inputs to companies so they can plan and allocate resources. I don't see any reason this sort of interaction couldn't be emulated by people giving input as to what they desire. We also have to admit that the USSR and China saw possibly unprecidented growth with centralized economic planning, although I wouldn't really argue that's necessarily a good thing and came at great costs. Personally I believe in more of a transitional approach by converting all corporations to cooperatives and allowing communities to democratically manage property, and seeing where that leads us.

Income inequality is just the symptom, capitalism is at the heart of the problem. This is what happens when you get a saturated labor market and employers have all of the bargaining power as the vast majority of people are unable to obtain the means to sustain themselves without selling their labor. The way I see it is we can only solve this problem possibly through a livable UBI, or preferably doing a major overhaul of how property rights work. Rather than having individuals own productive property where they employ others and keep everything the employees make, the property should be collectively owned and managed by those working it.

If anyone is interested, I recommend reading up on socialist theory. If you like markets mutualism, market socialism, or collectivism may be interesting to you. If you think planning might be a better route for the 21st century check out syndicalism or communism. There's a number of other philosophies I'm not acquainted with. Also, inb4 "communism/socialism is big government and authoritarianism", I'm tired of explaining the failings of tankies.

Reminded me of the SCAR tool many of us used to use back in the day for botting on Runescape. Will have to look into this for QA automation, as Selenium isn't always too fun when you've got a hairball of ASP.NET WebForms, Vanilla JS, and Angular for a code base.

Great empty platitude there. Socialism is about economic democracy and worker self management + ownership, although the term has become increasingly nebulous in recent years. Classic socialism, as in what was spoken of by those like Marx and Kropotkin, had nothing to do about some redistribution of money. What is related is social democracy and conservatives using the label for any social spending they don't agree with.

Agreed. It does not address the high concentrations of wealth which allow a small minorty of people to be in direct control of the majority of our resources and economic activity.

Fair enough, I'm definitely with you on the point of people not giving themselves enough credit. Unfortunately society tends to beat independent thinking out of us, and where I grew up it was definitely hammered into your mind that you "need" to go to college. I once had a teacher though that took a good 15 minutes aside one day, to lecture us how while this mentality came from a good place, we should really assess our future for ourselves and consider things like trade schools + apprenticeships.

"I did it, so anyone else can"

Do you have sources on this? Because from what I've learned in my cognitive psychology / neuroscience classes and talks, the brain works very much like a processing machine. Incredibly different than the electronic deterministic ones we use day to day, but it's still a processing machine.

I'm probably getting this wrong since I haven't looked into it, but I think they're talking about the idea of an infinite number of universes that contain the totality of all that is possible. When one dies, they only cease to exist in that universe, but continue to exist in others.

I wonder if a software shop structured as a co-operative would be good for this. Let the employees themselves control the workplace and set it up as they see fit. I know I'd personally be a lot more invested in my workplace if I had a direct voice in how it functions and the direction we move in.

Because they're an ancap. From what I've gathered they seem to believe markets should essentially determine everything

I'm not sure what you mean. Could you explain?

I don't think it's so much goal post moving as a lot of us never claimed it buys elections. My assertion has always been that generally speaking if you want to be competitive politically you need to scratch the backs of elites to get the proper funding to be relevant in elections. It's not an absolute, rather that there is excessive corporate influence that undermines the political process

A couple of studies from Princeton https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi... https://www.princeton.edu/~mgilens/idr.pdf

A biased write up on some of the findings, along with references to other sources at the end

https://represent.us/action/theproblem-4/

Are you sure it wasn't a mental issue? How were you measuring fat? 5'9 and 148lb isn't close to being overweight. I'm just under 140lb at 5'9 and I'm quite thin. It looks like I have some around my stomach due to poor posture, but that's it.

I imagine this would be a non-starter for a lot of people, it definitely is for me

This could very well be it. I was about to comment that I've been using OS X for about 10 years and I'm pretty sure I can count the number of kernel panics I've had on my fingers. Most of those happened a long time ago.

I haven't extended my use of org-mode outside of simple outlines for taking notes and todos, but for that it's been wonderful. Something always irked me about Microsoft Word, it didn't work quite right. I didn't like a number of other softwares I tried. Same goes for TODOs. Now I have a good place to manage both and I get to use that glorious evil-mode as well.

Thanks for clarifying, this makes a lot of sense.

Reviewing the common nature of the disagreement in replies is also a good way to practice presenting unpopular opinions. There's a lot of pitfalls I've learned to avoid when being tactful

Yes, with technical writing I (generally) just want the author to help me get the information into my mind with minimal cognitive effort. There are times where being poetic can help, such as selling me on a new programming model, but most technical writing out there is too long winded for my taste.

I'm a bit confused, where does the effectively paying less come from? I suggested they increase their pay while also giving them a discount at the store to give them an incentive to spend their new income at the store.

It's not a bug, it's a feature!

Just because it can be taken advantage of doesn't make it a bug. There are reasons these features developed, they were/are evolutionary advantageous. Things like bias are important because they help make us more efficient. They create blind spots, but they also allow us to more wisely spend our limited processing power. We have to compartmentalize things to understand them, we have very limited capacities. We have to do mental rounding in order to make sense of the world around us, there's simply too much information.

You mean to tell me a subject still in its infancy, studying some of the most complex and dynamic systems, has some bad findings? Shocking

As someone who studied psychology, I've always recognized a lot of it is a bunch of wankery (as everyone should). That doesn't mean you toss it out, it means you think critically about any findings. This is the same reason I'm wary of a lot of economic talk: it's another social science studying something possibly even more complex. People seem to often carry a definitive tone

I wonder if this is different for companies like Walmart / Costco / Meijer where they carry the majority of goods you need day to day. What if they started paying their employees higher wages, meanwhile giving them discounts at the store to encourage them to spend there? Maybe the lowered profit margins could be made up by the increased spending at their store. Not to mention it would also be a good PR move