acomar

if profits don't go up, shareholders get mad and the stock price tumbles. this is just capitalism.

people make grammatical mistakes often enough when typing that you kind of need to parse sentences in the way that makes the most sense. this sometimes means parsing correct grammar as a mistake because the fixed version makes perfect sense. then you read the article and laugh at yourself because yep, both kinds of proton are quite complicated.

and if the state actor happens to be the US? which of these tech companies do you expect to look after you then?

it's about control.

I agree with you that it's an attempt to side-step the tendency of the rate of profit to fall but I'm not sure it's particularly well-understood by anyone involved. and even a cursory examination of the material basis for so-called imaginary property can't help but identify that such property only exists insofar as computers continue to make them accessible. this transition cannot prevent the death of this society to climate change.

when people make things because they want to, they make things that other people actually want to use. when capital directs people to make things, they do so for the purpose of creating more capital. we pretend that "making money" and "making something useful" are synonymous but they're not. look at advertising - an entire industry where nothing useful is produced but billions of dollars are spent simply manipulating people's wants and needs. at some scale, people stop being able to self-fund these projects - it's when that threshold is crossed that people start making what seem like truly bizarre decisions to hamstring the use-value of their own products, because they're instead trying to maximize their exchange value instead.

> natural state of being, having to work to survive

yes, the natural state of all human beings is to derive value for shareholders. the profit of our masters before all. it's just in our DNA.

to live requires maintenance and upkeep and work. to live together in a society means doing things for one another. but where in that do you derive a natural state in which people produce things so someone else may profit on their work, and keep the greater part of the fruit? people aren't objecting to the notion of necessary labor. they're objecting to being forced - literally, by threat of starving on the streets - by the organization of the society to labor on behalf of others for produce they will never enjoy.

you're using relative terms to justify an absolute judgement. those jobs can be literally better than 100% of all other jobs available in a particular market segment and it STILL doesn't qualify them as "good" jobs because "good" is a moral qualifier. should people be forced to work jobs as shitty and destructive as Amazon's because the alternatives are either worse jobs or starving on the streets? you're answering that question with yes and using rhetorical sleight of hand to hide the fact.

it's a synonym for "job", in most places. the repetition serves to reinforce the point: enforced waged labor is destructive to the person.

the monetary cost is misleading. you can't take 4 billion dollars and use it to hire developers for a year and then expect something equivalent to the linux kernel after a year. money doesn't actually translate on its own into valuable things - people have to actually do work to make that possible. and not every task is infinitely divisible such that it can be worked on in parallel by many hands.

the actual cost is in person-years of work, not dollars, and even then you can only speed up the time it takes so much by throwing money at the problem.

it's hard to do (it requires a specific skillset), it requires capital investment (servers cost money), and you become fairly indiscoverable. these are surmountable problems given adequate money but without it, a major platform like etsy has a real moat.

as pointed out in the parent comment that started this chain, politicians are captured by the same assholes who benefit from the system, as structured. if you change the politicians, they either buy or destroy their replacements. so if the system must change, what is to be done?

so-called "left-wing elites" still favor privatization while public ownership is never in the conversation, so yes.

from where does the donor class derive their wealth? they pay you a wage or collect rent, profiting either way. in all cases, they derive their wealth because they own the things that allow us to produce value. perhaps those things should be commonly owned instead. then these class distinctions would evaporate.

consider engaging with the content rather than the tone. you might learn something.

judgements from the usual court system are enforced by the police, who are authorized to use force - i.e. violence - in the event of non-compliance. this is not a unique feature of the drug trade.

we're going to have pograms over the next 5 years and we'll blame the people who fight back.

because "trust us" has such a great track record.

this is extremely not true. federal authorities can compel the bridge operators to log messages sent over the bridges and disclose them on receipt of a national security letter or other sealed warrant. this is just not the case right now - messages sent between parties on signal cannot be intercepted. that the communication endpoints are vulnerable is and remains true but this creates a new vulnerability in the interlink.

worse:

> currently bridged conversations are not stored end-to-end encrypted in Matrix (they will be in the future)

suggests some kind of re-encryption for storage which appears to resolve the issue but does literally nothing to solve the problem. if the bridges have your keys and can decrypt your messages, you're exposing yourself to attacks on the bridges themselves.

not to mention that we're speaking of colonists who intentionally set out to genocide the native population on a regular basis. and most were slavers, putting the lie to any talk of freedom. in the end, little mattered to them in that revolution than removing English fetters on themselves. that people identify with a group that would almost certainly would have denied them the right to legal personhood and look to them as guarantors of freedom only speaks to their historical illiteracy.

> It always blows my mind seeing the things people who work at google/fb are willing to "walk out" / "protest" over, and then these insidious things they're willing to just sit back and let happen.

symbolic action is always easy. but you're asking them to strike (refuse to work) in response to unethical demands, without the collective backing of their peers, in an industry that views union activity with - at best - suspicion or outright derision. we all like to fancy that we'd be the ones to refuse to play along but the reality is that when it's you and your job and you're facing the possibility of not paying rent or eating food after being blacklisted from the industry in response to your actions...

don't judge the people who are doing what they have to in order to survive. they were compelled by people who had leverage over them and our ire should be for those people.

why the eff are you lot fighting each other? it's your managers putting the expectation on you that you can pick up the slack for your coworkers going home on time. who's really out of line here? the people going home to take care of the rest of their lives, the people staying to "pick up the slack", or the people who insist that it's reasonable to ask you to do that in the first place, instead of, I don't know, hiring adequate numbers of staff or paying you overtime for the extra hours worked?

> A blockchain is also a k-of-n trust model; it requires at least half of miners or proof of stake validators to be following the protocol, and if that assumption fails that often results in a "51% attack". So why is a blockchain better than a special purpose bulletin board? The answer is: setting up a k-of-n system that's actually trusted is hard, and blockchains are the only system that has already solved it, and at scale. Suppose that some government announced that it was making a voting system, and provided a list of 15 local organizations and universities that would be running a special-purpose bulletin board. How would you, as an outside observer, know that the government didn't just choose those 15 organizations from a list of 1000 based on their willingness to secretly collude with an intelligence agency?

just admitting you have the same problem then trying to brush past it doesn't work. why on earth would intelligence agencies allow anyone but groups they can influence or outright control to be miners and why should anyone trust that this isn't the state of the system?

you're solving the wrong problem. you can't technology your way out of political problems: those still need to be hashed out between people.

the first truly revolutionary product

> growthism

any day now, the moral, upstanding, self-restrained capitalists will buck the profit motive and save us from the unsavory sorts who rule our world today.

this isn't what a dogwhistle is. it's just explanation by analogy to a model presumed to be shared by the intended audience. a dogwhistle offers a surface meaning to the uninitiated that's anodyne but communicates a hidden, coded message to those who possess some undisclosed, shared knowledge with the author. this kind of analogy entirely lacks the surface meaning and the message shared via jargon also communicates something about how you might learn enough to understand the analogy.

I spent some time thinking about this last night and want to re-emphasize this question. I'm serious. I genuinely can't think of something I might miss out on. when my friends are doing something, they text me. when something is happening in the world, the people around me are talking about it. and if they're not, who cares? how is it relevant to my life?

more importantly, FOMO, when applied to real relationships, leads to this utilitarian mindset where you view other people and your interactions with them in highly objectified ways, centering the possible opportunities your relationships with others might provide. other people don't exist for your benefit. this is a form of non-sexual fetishization, where you start to view actual people as tools and grant those tools metaphysical power over your life - not interacting with them might lead you to missing out on something /critical/.

treat people like people. spend time with people because you like them and enjoy your time with them. don't fixate on your own ends and make means of other people.

what would I miss out on?

a rebuild of Haskell that got rid of the dynamic exception system and put laziness/strictness in the type system as an effect is my dream.

you've described wage slavery and class dynamics under capitalism. congratulations. your dystopia is already here.