Employee-owned co-ops are extremely common in Southern Europe. The Mondragon Corporation has 81,000 employees. Your ideological bias is showing if you think this is even a question. Empirically speaking, the answer is a resounding yes.
456 karma · joined September 26, 2022
I do not understand why you'd self-censor on this basis alone.
The UK NHS is a socialized healthcare system. The profit motive is not allowed to corrupt any part of the system. Pharmaceutical prices are strictly controlled (none of this $26k/year Alzheimer's drug nonsense). It is fully nationalized. Nationalizing an entire industry in peacetime is often (but not always) associated with socialism.
Even Canada's single payer system is not socialist in any sense of the word. It's just a government-run insurance plan. There are many multi-payer insurance systems in the world that perform far better than ours. Single-payer is not a panacea without price controls. Price controls are somewhat socialist. Funnily enough, the last US president to enact price controls was Richard Nixon, known friend of Marxists across the globe /s.
There's nothing socialist whatsoever about Social Security. It does not redistribute wealth. The tax is infamously capped at the first ~$130k of income you make per year. Any income above the cap is untaxed by Social Security. Your benefits are proportional to what you paid into it. Social Security is definitely not "wealth distribution." It is an income tax. It's income distribution if anything, but that's still pretty ghoulish framing for a stipend for retired folks that barely keeps them out of poverty.
> I've seen estimates that in the most progressive states, welfare benefits can amount to as much as $42,000 a year for a small family.
No citations, just some half-remembered statistic from a right-wing propaganda outlet that conveniently adds up to the weed number. Very believable. Very representative of the average person's lived experiences. I cannot overstate how pathetic you have to be, in order to be resentful about welfare benefits while making a tech worker's salary.
We have some very limited vestiges of social democracy, but social democracy is not socialism. Socialists and social democrats were not allies. Google the meme: “SocDems killed Rosa.”
What you’re observing is what unregulated capitalism will always devolve into. It goes by many names: capitalism, crony capitalism, neoliberalism, corporatism, oligarchy, fascism. But the idea is the same. Labor is violently oppressed. The State only serves the interests of capitalists. The State and Capital are often indistinguishable. There is no competition. There are structural barriers that stifle small businesses and enrich rent seeking trusts. It’s a new Gilded Age, brought to life by a new Lochner era for the Supreme Court.
I have good news and bad news: this system, whatever you call it, is extremely unstable. Its collapse is inevitable, well within the span of a single human lifetime.
I’ve mostly worked with Python and JVM languages, which probably explains why I’m less passionate about the counter-argument than you are. Ecosystem definitely matters a lot. VanillaJS is the only good JS framework IMO.
LotL is too advanced for script kiddies to pull off. You’re already dealing with an adversary with some sophistication, who likely have the time, skill, and resources to create their own LOLbins (or buy them on darknet forums). Infosec is an asymmetric conflict: the adversary has a much easier job IMO. It’s always easier to break something than to build it.
Blue/purple teams have little incentive to build their own LOLbins. There is another asymmetry here: blue teams are developing these to target only their networks. Red teams are developing them to target every network. Open source is the way to resolve that asymmetry.
With these becoming public, blue teams can simulate a LotL attack, develop indicators of attack, and write rules to trigger alerts.
In general, adversaries prefer their tricks to remain trade secrets. Once they’re known, documented, and commodified, they become far less useful.
SEO becomes a lot more difficult to pull off when there isn’t one search algorithm used by 99% of users.
Pretty much everyone has heard of crypto by now. The Ponzi scheme is out of marks. There will be no next time. Sell now if you’re still holding the bag.
We’ve been here before. ChatGPT isn’t functionally all that different from ELIZA from the 1960s. It’s tricking people just the same, into thinking it’s more than it really is.
I’m also eagerly awaiting the discovery process that will show that all of this generative AI was built on mass copyright infringement. OpenAI certainly ingested the entire z-library. They’d have to be stupid not to, right? If they didn’t use it, less ethical competitors would have beaten them to market.
Oh, I’m sure they used some sketchy subcontractor to do it. We’ve all seen a variation of this in our careers, where a dataset was acquired under questionable circumstances, and you don’t ask and don’t tell if you want to keep your job, right?
And that’s just speculation. There’s hard evidence for the Getty Images lawsuit.
It’s all cyclical. The decadence today will eventually give way to another recession, and we’ll build something better from the ashes.
I’m also growing increasingly disgusted by the state of the industry. Things weren’t so messed up 10 years ago, but salaries were also not so ludicrous at the time. I suppose I should be careful what I wish for, but I’d appreciate some disruption right about now.
I could live with apathy towards documentation, but it goes beyond apathy. There is often outright hostility to anyone who “wastes time” writing documentation or doing design work. Agile grifters have absolutely ruined this profession.
That mediocre dev is a straight shooter with middle management written all over them…
Of course, it’s a logical response because the neoliberal university saddles students with far too much debt. 90% of what an American university does today is useless waste. Most classes are taught by starving grad students and adjuncts. Running the courses themselves are a rounding error on budgets. Administrators are robbing the kids blind. Education is an afterthought at many institutions.
You don’t have to look very far for ways out of this crisis. Look to European universities and their four-figure semester tuition bills, even for foreigners. Look at community colleges, which don’t have dorms, lazy rivers, hundreds of parasitic administrators who do nothing, or Kafkaesque admissions processes. Look at how much more affordable online courses are, from highly respected public universities, when you excise all the useless overhead.
The problem is that America is infested with rent seeking parasites who have turned every social good into a scam. Our healthcare system is the most expensive in the world, and yet we have a lower life expectancy than Cuba. We have the most expensive education system in the world, with little to show for it.
Why are we devaluing education itself, just because far too many colleges are being run by despicable businessmen? Why are we accepting their rigged game as fixed? Boomers went to college for next to nothing. Gen X didn’t have to pay that much either. The neoliberal corruption of higher education, from a social good into a scam, is a very recent phenomenon.
The root of the rot is all the pointless add-on services. Colleges don’t need to run dorms, meal plans, health centers, or any of that. The only thing that should be offered is academics. 18 year olds can go to war. They can manage to live independently, and the ones who can’t will receive Darwin Awards.
Jericho is the nearest town, 18,000 people, 8” of rain a year, 2 miles from the border. They presumably get their water from that desalination plant. No towns that far south are getting their water from it. The river barely even makes it to the Dead Sea anymore. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_River#Main_environmenta...
Adding a bit more salt into the famously-salty Dead Sea are the least of their problems in that part of the world. Where else would you put the salt, anyway? Putting it all into the Dead Sea would be even worse —- at least this reduces the amount that makes it back there. Putting it into any other watershed would cause vastly more harm.
It seems like a good enough solution to me. If you think about it, it wouldn’t be in Israel’s interests to inflame tensions with Jordan over this, if it were really an issue.
No one should be allowed to have a billion dollars.
Trying to get off the hook of a contract on such a frivolous technicality was bound to end poorly for the plaintiff. I can see right through their intent, and surely a judge can, too. It’s a grift, and probably a premeditated one at that.