yellowbuilding

Large companies paid for the right to stay open, so they got what they paid for. If you don’t want a free market, don’t ask for it.

same with bosses and workers, and nobody seems to mind that.

Taibbi is one of the best journalists in America. Very thankful to have people like him doing this.

Working Americans have no voice.

False. It is no coincidence that as we enter an unprecedented period of economic depression, all the liberal media wants to discuss is racial disparities.

The ruling class is winning the class war, and as long as they can keep the working class fighting the race ware instead, nothing will change.

These protests are being milked for every last drop by the liberal media, in cooperation with liberal activist NGOs on behalf of the Democratic party.

If you don’t comprehend that the protests were a result of the historically unprecedented economic collapse, you don’t have a politically left bone in your body.

From the patents it looks like I can thank inventors Mr. Krause and Mr. Chernov for their freedom sucking, major appliance disabling, communist, 1984-esque idea.

GE is, historically, among the most anti-communist of all American companies. Its role in breaking and/or corrupting major unions and collective bargaining rights in the post-war era had few equivalents. GE, as well as the US patent system, exists in absolute service of the capitalist system.

I’m not sure if node has something comparable, but python’s splinter feels like the perfect trade-off for me. I don’t like browser tests and splinter lets me spend as little time as possible small tests that I don’t mind deleting later.

Labor rights have a very long history worth learning about. The short of it is that profit from labor is definitional exploitation; the question is how much exploitation we consider economically useful.

Right, and there must be competitors to compare with. This is why a federal job guarantee makes sense.

I have been using scoop for about 1.5 years and it’s wonderful. I contribute to it as well. It’s simple, robust, reliable. I might prefer it over what you’re suggesting for Windows. I just can’t imagine Microsoft getting that right.

It has nothing to do with what people want.

Gladiators

Most westerners, and certainly visitors to this site, have spent at least the past 30 years in the assumption that neoliberal capitalism marks, as Fukiyama spouted in 1989 as the wall came down, “the end of history”. It’s becoming difficult to recite why this claim was taken for truth but there was a reason it felt that way.

It’s more than just admitting we are wrong. We also have to find a way out, and there isn’t one unless we all do it together.

You’re exactly right that we urgently need to move beyond the blame and recognize it’s up to all of us to get out of this mess.

Historical trajectories point to 2 possibilities for the United States: denialism followed by Fascism, or a miracle followed by socialism (of some degree). The miracle is a shortcut through the contradiction Upton Sinclair articulates: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

Wow that is an interesting one. I thinking I might love it. I’ll give it a try.

Same.

Whenever evaluating a programming font, it’s really just a question of how similar to Inconsolata it is.

Inconsolata

Extreme distaste and aversion of the public internet.

Decentralization can only happen by meeting some prerequisites that we as a society are not even comfortable talking about.

I don’t want this and insist it’s not coming from defeatism. I say it because I desperately want to change it. I just have yet to be presented with a way out that makes a lick of sense.

I come from the advertising industry. The mindless assertion that private industry can be trusted in moral pursuit is breaking our society, and the modern web browser has accelerated that.

Decentralization is not a path. It’s a goal. There are two general paths:

One is through public regulation of the corporations that broke the internet in the first place and approach something resembling economic justice, making room in the public consciousness for decentralization to proliferate.

The other path, a shorter path, is to consider the internet as a public plaza. Equal access, free speech, defended by democracy instead of by capitalists. The public provides an ethical base set of internet services and regulates hiring and privacy practices in such a way that citizens can use these to pursue their livelihoods. Decentralization can proliferate from these spaces of unmitigated discussion, which are not reliant on the ruthless advertising economy.

These are each still well outside the realm of the public’s imagination, because people simply have no clue about the advertising regime that governs their lives.

Exactly. Growing extremely high quality weed is a piece of cake. The plant does all the work, and all you have to pay it is light and water (a large amount). Those things are mostly invincible.

It’s actually laughably easy. I did it once. I had zero gardening experience but did this indoors in a walk-in closet. It probably took a total of a regular work week of actual work and a few days of research beforehand, and I got over 1/4 lb. and was very high quality. But the main thing I got from it was a love of gardening haha.

When people use it, they probably won’t add “that was a britishism I just used”. You interpret that through... eh, cultural analysis.

On this note, a vast amount of human energy (surplus and sometimes not, in the aggregate) can be understood as mating displays. Of course, we have added gender to the equation, which complicated things quite a bit.

That is one good example, and there are countless more. Most people realize how the existence of “fake news” begs the question of what constitutes “real news”, but it’s become frighteningly apparent that very few acknowledge that trust requires more than mutual responsibility. Most importantly, it requires universal forgiveness and a right to interrogate faith. The acceptance of existing “fake news” is not a good sign.

I used to assume this idea was a direct result of racism, but that begs the question of what racism is. It turns out, that is one of the most complicated questions in the world.

Have a look at this (extremely recent) essay by an expert black historian for a lucid take on the baffling role that race plays in American society:

https://nonsite.org/editorial/what-materialist-black-politic...

Absolutely. In philosophy, and plenty of other fields with central concerns of theory, it’s common that an influence is also someone who one disagrees with, and is responding to. Most the middle area of this chart should be under Marx, and it is outright laughable that Keynes is not.

... And the result is clogging the gateways for doing one’s own research. Sales and advertising have nothing to offer. Customers would literally be better off without them, and so would art and entertainment!

You also seem to assume bringing another cook into the kitchen is going to make things better, as long as they have good faith.

Both of my parents were in sales. I truly believe they were the types you speak of. Their jobs were not easy, competing with dishonesty, but they did well in the right environments. Their careers were based building trust in the long term. This can never work in an aggressively corporate world as we have created today.

I want neither

Companies pursuing ethics will always be a trap.

First, for every ethical pursuit, a company must match it with a similar or greater effort to advertise it.

If the advertising is ethical, well, it might not work very well. But, ethical advertising might be another effort worth advertising about?

The thing is, companies will always be looking to replace material sacrifice with scalable idealism. Ethics don’t work that way.

Ethics concern big sweeping systemic complexities, but approaching them as so is never going to work for a company. If companies want to go big, it’s going to be in the mind, not in the bank.

The best solution for companies is to choose one or two issues and go all in. Why? Because that’s all it takes!

Human beings conceive of ethics as the big intertwined things that they are, and in a world with such little interest in ethics, addressing one problem in a big way is enough to get a company the gold star approval.

Also, companies can just trash everything else at that point!

Companies are for profit. And that’s not changing any time soon.

If you’re interested in addressing this problem, you need to look at economics.

The reasons are not simple, but the bottom line is race and gender focuse equality efforts _always_ fail to help the lower class. Always. Statistically, gender and race gaps in economic equality have only grown since the 1970s.

Capitalism does lend itself well to technical innovation, which is beautiful but not ethical. And with that beauty comes technical debt in it’s cultural form: decadence.

The societal accomplishments of capitalism are effectively distraction and insulation from the side effects of complexity.

Politicians and corporate leaders told us democracy is not worth it’s salt, and we believed them.