Maoo [none/use name] @ Maoo @hexbear.net

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2 yr. ago

The NLRB always has nice-looking rules on paper and then fucks around with enforcement. For example, setting a very high standard of evidence for what counts as union busting. This exact NLRB still hasn't reversed the Electrolux standard despite having many opportunities.

The time to get hyped is if they actually start granting recognition on a large scale. For example, basically every Starbucks that has tried to unionize should now only need to file a petition for automatic recognition. I will be surprised if they follow through, but that's the thing to look for and I hope I'm wrong.

He's a union man so you could've done a lot worse

Using a USB device might work well for this! You can do basically exactly what you want but your whole OS is on a USB drive. You'll get native performance for everything except disk read/write. If you use a fast device with a fast USB interface you might not even notice.

There are a few that are nice.

QEMU-based options work well. Boxes for GNOME uses this.

My backup option is always virtualbox with guest additions installed.

Arnock, on the night of his joining

The article suggests they just openly bought materials to produce this stuff lol.

Though it would be cool if they did "steal" it, IP is bullshit and particularly when used to forward unequal trade relationships internationally, depressing wages and creating US-centric systems of control. Using common ideas to create cool new stuff and circumvent US sanctions would be a good thing.

In case the things I'm saying seem alien, international IP rules were set up to favor colonizer nations at the expense of colonized nations, as there is an advantage to maintaining monopoly control over technology when the relationship you want with other countries is purely to extract their labor and natural resources. It is a means by which to prevent the redevelopment of countries ripped apart by colonial activity, as this would threaten domestic profits.

It is also a race against the other impact of protectionist policies, however: preventing that tech export to China is actually going to subsidize China creating its own tech, as they'll only be able to attain it through domestic production. This is how imperialist powers developed their own industries: the British Empire, for example, forced India to destroy its own fine textiles industry, export cotton, and import British-made textiles. Export and running of textile tech to India was explicitly banned alongside flooding the market with British factory-made textiles.

The US is using the only weapons it knows how to use - ones intended to limit others' ability to develop - but they will often backfire because China is not in as weak of a position as the countries the US usually bullies and/or tries to destroy.

The originsl artist is fash. Unfortunate, because they're talented and have a nice style.

They still get the wall tho.

Capitalism, in a mature and productive form, usually prefers wage labor, actually. It incentivizes the establishment of a working class, and that class is now global due to capitalism's simultaneous establishment and conquest of all states.

A slave class is bound by a relation other than wage labor, like being tied to land, a feudal lord, or aristocracy. Capital wants all the stuff those alternative ruling classes have, it breaks up and reforms e.g. feudal relations so that it may own the land and employ (exploit) laborers (by its nature).

Of course, elements of other systems remain even after capitalism became dominant and capital finds ways to either incorporate or destroy them.

Anti-blackness served and still serves a useful purpose of marginalization and division, mirroring its origins in preventing uprisings like Bacon's Rebellion from reiccurring by pitting everyone against black people. Marginalization creates space by which oppression is made tolerable to most.

Slave labor is maintained in the margins for several reasons (in the US). Obviously it's cheap forced labor, you can make a lot of money off of that in the right circumstances. In this case, a feudal-capital-state fusion wherein private companies get low costs, those who run prisons or otherwise directly benefit get little kickback fiefdoms (monopolies in which to impose the social relation of slavery), and the state bears the costs, acting as an agent of the other two powers while also finding its own uses for the project, namely the ability to disable any group that organizes against them, even make their labor work at odds with their projects. The state is primarily an agent of the true ruling class, but there needs to be specific mechanisms by which that occurs.

Anyways, capitalism, like industrial capitalism, would usually trend against a slavery relationship. But it will tolerate and even promote pockets of it as part of intertwining systems of control that maintain its own dominance. In this case, a modestly self-sustaining marginalization machine predicated on (re)creating race itself and racial divisions created in support of the chattel slavery system, now repurposed to both maintain and control underclasses the system requires. Hyperexploitation exists in the United States, but it's reserved for those whose ability to organize against it has been broken (more accurately, capitalism reacted successfully to those organizing against it, so the system was maintained). Undocumented immigrants and black people, predominantly.

You're definitely right that working conditions are deteriorating in the imperial core and with arrangements that many people characterize as neo-feudal. For example, the gig economy where the employer vs. employee relation is changed into monopoly holder (apps and finance behind Uber, say) vs. impoverished "contractor". I would say these things are actually a form of reproletarianization of a deeply propagandizdd working class that has otherwise failed to recognize its own exploitation, and us grasping for terminology to use to describe the loss of the social democratic arrangement. A mobile, insecure labor force was and is the standard during capital-led industrialization, with employment irregular, needing to move every season or every few years. That's not feudalistic. That's how the proletariat suffers. Maybe most importantly, the gig economy is just a mediation of one party paying the other for a service and the whole thing ia built on a financialized housw of cards that will fail if they don't obtain absolute monopoly status. The mediation isn't actually that valuable or complex in terms of what the company provides, it's only valuable in that it may create a natural monopoly via the network effect ("I'm on Facebook because everyone else is'). In the US, these companies are starting to reach financial limits due to the increasing costs of debt, and are consequently raising prices rather than keeping them lower than they can sustain in order to increase market share. Thia disrupts their entire business model and they will fail during the next financial crisis. Basically, what I'm trying to get at is that the gig economy is really just a financialized tech bubble that will pop as soon as infinite debt is unavailable, which will eventually happen.

capitalism bad

Many people are saying this

Capitalist competition leads to monopoly by its very nature. You can "compete" best by gaining monopoly power and that power is self-sustaining. That power also enables company owners to pay their workers less for more work and will also operate internationally to impose corporate will on entire nations, with those monopolies tying the entire political system to their own interests.

The silver lining is that monopolies lay bare the practicality of central planning, a common goal of socialists in power. The system competes, eliminates its own competition, and still manages to more or less function via its own bureaucracies. Nationalize under socialists and you just cut out the redundant bureaucracies and begin making work respond to social need rather than profits.

Why do you want to do this? If it's just to try out different distributions, I would suggest using per-distro virtual machines or USB drives instead.

Bootlicking appeared to work for boomers, who enjoyed the benefits of many social safety nets and forms of government central planning and cost controls, all if which were getting dismantled just behind them.

Or, at least, this seemed to work for the cishet white ones.

It is a literal substitute for slavery in the US, drawing a direct historical line back to Jim Crow and the dismantling of reconstruction by a reascendant Southern ruling class - former slave owners recreating slavery-like conditions for black people (prison labor and tenant farming). The thirteenth amendment specifically excluded prison labor from the abolition of slavery.

Prison labor continues to be racialized - along with the entire criminal punishment system.

Our good friend Joe Biden's primary legislative legacy is in shoring up that system via the Crime Bill.

The core issue is ignorance and and poor abilities at investigation. School fails so many people. And, societally, most people seem to feel they're entitled to opinions even if they know nothing or very little about a topic, which helps keep them ignorant and unable to critically investigate topics and sources.

Finally, the "trust in institutions" issue. These institutions should not be trusted, they have been overtaken by capitalism. Healthcare is profit-driven and the tendency is towards poorer science that covers up dangers and inflates benefits. In addition, people have no sense of agency over the state (they're correct about that), so a feeling of understanding can temporarily substitute that.

The question is what to do about it. Well, individually, you can do very little. You can try to convince people through argumentation, like you mentioned, but this is very difficult. The example of vaccines makes it clear that this is someone that bought into these ideas without critically engaging. They probably did so for a number of reasons, including societally-ingrained hubris, peer pressure, personal experience, personality, politics, and the production value of whatever got to them first. Your task is to sow doubt (ask challenging questions) and try to rebuild from shared understanding.

The best way to combat this, more generally, is not as an individual, but as a member of an active organization that combats all of this at once, and with a plan for how to do so adequately. This would best be a socialist org, as the thing you're fighting is actually the discursive mass media and education aspects of capitalism. e.g. on COVID's origins, the common understandings and claims in the West are simplistic and unscientific, and only exist for political reasons, to scapegoat why a given country did so poorly at handling the pandemic, to isolate China in a new cold war. You could become an expert in the science, follow geographic phylogenies and the terminology of epidemiology, but you don't really need to: you really just need media criticism skills, which is all about politics, economics, and being a big nerd.

Gotta purge the right people

Read Das Kapital Volume I by Karl Marx

Chomsky palled around with Epstein so that's a very funny example.

Libertarians tend to be obsessed with lowering the age of consent lol. You sound confused.

This person definitely knows what 4chan geta up to

Aye y'all are transphobes that need reeducation