472 karma · joined February 3, 2019
Labor protection does not "cost money". It is a limit on the degree to which workers can be exploited.
The GDP/capita of e.g. France is 10x what it was in the 1970s. There is nothing "unaffordable" about the European social safety net, except that there are political pressures to dismantle it (right-liberals like the Economist)
Driving is an absurdly dangerous mode of transportation, so it’s probably not the best comparison.
While I agree with your larger point and am no fan of Google's privacy practices, they stopped this specific behavior in 2017
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/06/26/534451513...
=> https://git.sr.ht/~vdupras/duskos/tree/master/item/fs/doc/sy...
Virgil's "collapse" mindset, to me, is about building resilience and independence, and IMO Dusk OS is fantastic at this purpose.
The core system is about 8000 lines of code. The C compiler is 1400. Its memory footprint is extremely small (1MB to have a C compiler running on bare metal in the PC architecture). From here, you have a system capable of building C programs as well as bootstrapping itself.
This is level of simplicity is staggering and empowering -- it is completely reasonable to read and understand every single line of code in Dusk OS. This would be incomprehensible in something like Debian.
Capitalism does not drive towards 'efficiency' in some general sense. It is full of dead weight, destruction, forced scarcity, waste, and bloat. This is not accidental, it is essential to how the system functions.
This all sounds to me like DG's definition of 'bullshit'. David Graeber is an anthropologist, ie, he takes a wide view of humanity: many societies, including societies not that alien to us, manage to function without this kind of work. Why is it suddenly indispensable? It is not a business advice book about running an individual institution, it is a wider social critique about how we have set up our society and economy.
> let him spend a year managing a mid-size organization, say 60-80 employees,
Graeber is an anarchist anthropologist and would critique the idea of a top-down capitalist firm itself (ie, the deeper question: why do we insist on structuring labor this way?). He is not telling anyone the best way to run it.
This is a bizarre argument. Cars are heavily policed: they must be registered and licensed. The state tells you where you can park it, and your ability to operate it is completely controlled by the state and can be taken away from you. In order for car infrastructure to function, there is a huge increase in police presence in people's lives to enforce traffic rules, parking, etc. None of this is true of, say, walking, biking, or taking transit, all of which are pretty unregulated, even in New York City.
Don’t get me wrong, I acknowledge these are problems. But I have so little faith in big platforms these days that I don’t really see an alternative.
m15o has built a ton of examples along these lines. There are other communities and tools too, loosely referred to as the "small web"/"smol web"
Sobriety is not a condition of housing. Many housed people drink and do drugs and don't get kicked out of their apartments for it. Why should we apply a harsher standard to our most vulnerable population?
- Nonprofits
- Public funding
Ads make the internet suck