kodemager

I think it’s a bad stunt that outlines an issue with mega corps using oss and blindly updating their packages. Or anyone blindly updating their packages really.

But I don’t see how GitHub has the right to suspend him and rewind his work. I mean, that has to be a copyright infringement if there ever was one.

That was sort of my point, but I may have drowned it in a little too much negativity.

I do however think we should work with capitalism as a model though. It’s quite obvious to me that it needs a strong political regulator to make sure it doesn’t run amok. I’m not against inequality for the sake of being against it, but I do recognise that too much inequality and too few opportunities for a lot of folks is potentially dangerous.

I’m not going to name my employer, but I agree that it’s an excellent vessel for the upper middle class to invest their money.

I wish more entrepreneurs saw the value in semi-professional and maybe even small time investors and green energy investment. Exactly because it gives people more opportunities when they rank up the 100k Danish kroner to reach the negative interest, and green energy is still in a place where everyone can have an impact and see nice returns.

Everyone wouldn’t have the same money. 80 years ago we taxes the rich around 80% on their over all income, then thatcher and regan paved the way to the world we have now, which is obviously having issues.

I may have come off overly negative toward capitalism because I posted early in the morning, but my general point was that it’s the only economic engine that works.

It sort of breaks down when it’s not regulated though, which is why I think we’re seeing so many issues tied to financial inequality in the world today.

I don’t think the solution is for everyone to have the exact same amount of money, but I struggle with how you can look at the current state of the world and think that it’s great. We need to help poor people get better opportunities, without ruining the systems we have for everyone else. I mean, history has shown us again and again what happens if we don’t.

I think it’s hard to look at what capitalism has become today and say much positive about it.

I say this as someone who works in investment finance where we sell semi-rich semi-professional investors the opportunity to become richer by building solar and wind power plants, and selling them when they are fully operational. Which is about as positive as it gets in capitalism in my experience, considering we’re actually helping the world move in the right direction as far as climate change goes.

It is, however, still contributing to the inequality in the world. I had a lot of experience from the Danish public sector digitalisation before joining my current company, and I have a second job as an external examiner for CS students, so it is fair to say that I’m likely in the top 10% of paid developers in my region. If you invest with us, you can make 10 million Danish kroner into 20 million Danish kroner in 5-10 years, and while you do so by fighting climate change, I make around 1 million Danish kroner in savings over 10 years, as one of the better paid non top-level managers in my country.

As you’ve probably guessed I’m Danish, and we’re probably famous for our take on society in that all our political parties are basically a different colour of social democrats, and we have been like this since what is essentially the dawn of modern Denmark, so equality is a big part of our society, as in, if a private company builds an apartment complex in the most attractive part of our city, they are required by law to make at least 10% of those apartment available for rent to the “common people” at the cities disposal. That’s how much we care about equality, and the best example of capitalism we have is making rich people much richer by basically doing nothing.

Another thing we are famous for is community ownerships. The best example is that we have two major supermarket chains, one is owned by investors the other is owned by the people who shop there. Guess which one has been driving positive change forward, repeatedly been reinvesting in its own business and it’s employees and under covid sent 100% of its profits on things like clothes on to small clothing stores that were closed due to lockdown?

Now I’ve ranted for a while, and it may sound like I’m getting somewhere, but I’m actually not. Because the issue with co-operative ownership is that it makes it very hard to start something new. The big co-operative ownership organisations we have typically came to be by a lot of smaller organisations joining together after they were established. The solar farms we build are a good example of this in play. We’re going to build a couple of thousand of them over the next five years and while non-profits movements have certainly helped made it a profitable area, no one outside of private investors are going to build even close to this amount. So how do you change the world without capitalism?

The answer is probably in taxing the rich, but good luck with that.