No, I'd say that "financially independent" really means your dependent on capitalism, and that dependency will lead you to defend capitalism from any challenges. That is the bourgeois position and puts you against the proletariat. Their are other classes though besides proletariat and bourgeoisie with different relations to capital. Petite bourgeoisie are neither bourgeoisie nor proletariat but there interests align with the bourgeoisie/capital and against the proletariat, but they are not completely dependent on capitalism so they won't defend it as zealously. There is also the independent worker class who work for themselves outside a corporate structure, eg. An independent farmer, whose interests don't align with either the bourgeoisie or proletariat.
It's not a matter of doing work, more who you work for. If we all worked for each other and collectively decided what to produce instead of the capitalist class we'd all maybe decide to work 20 hours less a week if that means a small minority of people didn't get jets, yachts, mansions etc.
They are petit bourgeoisie, they work for a living but their interests are aligned with capital as they're hired by the owners to extract as much surplus labor as they can and will often get bonuses tied to how well they do that, they're the overseer.
Software developers work and contribute to the company, they are the ones whose surplus labor is being extracted. They may get a larger chunk of the value they create but they don't get all of it. They are still in class conflict with the owners to get all the value they create. They're house slaves, treated better but still fundamentally against the owner.
I think you overestimate what the average software developer is doing.
Do I think in 10 years ai will be patching the Linux kernel or optimizing aws scaling functions, no. Do I think it will be creating functional crud apps with Django or Ruby on rails, yes, and I think that's what a large amount of software developers are doing. Even if it's not a majority a lot of the more precarious developers without a cs degree will probably lose their job. Not every developer is a senior engineer working on ML.
Plenty of people live comfortable lives under dictatorship, you can compare that office worker to a citizen in Qatar and they'd probably live similar lives materially.
You could also compare the sweat shop worker for the company that office workers company contracts their manufacturing out to, to the migrant pseudo-slave workers in Qatar.
I feel like most ukrainians aren't fighting for democracy. They're kleptocracy is marginally better than the one in Russia, but not worth dying over. Their fighting either for nationalism and hatred of Russian imperialism that's oppressed them for centuries, or personal honor and fear of being called a coward by their wider social group.
In general nationalism and personal honor are the main reasons people will voluntarily sign up, outside of personal gain and mercenaries. In the west that nationalism gets tied up with ideas of democracy, but if a dictatorship took over the u.s. I doubt there'd be much of a difference in volunteers for the next war.
They don't seem to remember the last time we invaded, bungled around for a while and left without accomplishing anything, which is what this will turn out to be.
I'm guessing their bracing for winter without Russian oil. Which will hopefully be transitory, but also sort of delays the inevitable. If they can't survive a winter without fossil fuels they need to figure it out quick.
For some more context this place, reems, really isn't a bakery so much as a middle eastern take out place. The main store is currently closed down though so the only place they have open is a counter serve food court style place in the ferry building, so the cops didn't get kicked out of the place, they either went to the counter and the cashier refused to serve, or more likely, they saw the new policy online and threw a hissy fit without actually going.
The founder is a Palestinian leftist, so this probably was targeted towards cops/military.
I'd highly recommend going here if your on a tourist trip and end up in the ferry building, not just for the cop hate, but there wraps are great as well.
For some more context this place, reems, really isn't a bakery so much as a middle eastern take out place. The main store is currently closed down though so the only place they have open is a counter serve food court style place in the ferry building, so the cops didn't get kicked out of the place, they either went to the counter and the cashier refused to serve, or more likely, they saw the new policy online and threw a hissy fit without actually going.
The founder is a Palestinian leftist, so this probably was targeted towards cops/military.
I'd highly recommend going here if your on a tourist trip and end up in the ferry building, not just for the cop hate, but there wraps are great as well.
Putin is not Hitler, for many reasons, but chief among them is his incompetency. Hitler didn't get bogged down in czechoslovakia for a year. Putin has almost no chance of conquering the whole of Ukraine, much less the entirety of Europe.
While I agree in principle, the project is already significantly delayed, over budget and under funded. Adding a requirement to bootstrap a high speed train industry in the u.s. would doom the project which is already on Shakey ground.
We don't want this to turn into an unfinished boondoggle that every oil backed think tank can point to and say HSR won't work in the u.s.
This doesn't really effect Californians though, except that security guard, rip. The only people it effects is the owners of Nordstrom who lost $500 of stuff they bought from Vietnam.
Not all bad, compared to crypto the vector transformations done for ml are relatively similar to those done by graphics processing. So any innovations on the ml front will probably yield improvements in graphics.
Yes the middle class liberals and some workers viewed republicanism aspirationally but most of the peasents and serfs didn't. During the French revolution a lot of the peasents resented the republicans in Paris, mostly for religious reasons, shown most clearly in the war in the Vendée. Even after the revolution they were against republicanism. They did like the nationalism of the revolution though. This can be seen in first mass election for president in 1848, Louis Napoleon won by a landslide in the countryside off nationalist fervor with little respect for the republic he would soon overthrow. Even after he failed spectacularly and lost the country the first election after he was ousted saw a majority of conservatives and cryptomonarchists elected. Republicanism didn't lose its reign of terror association in the countryside until the late 1800s.
With regards to those who suffered it was, like in the reign of terror, mostly political dissidents. Don't get me wrong they did suffer by the guillotine and the gulag, but your average worker by the 1960s had a middling quality of life. The poor especially had better economic security then they do now. Most of the resentment for the Soviet Union was built up on nationalist and anti-imperial lines. Communism came to represent the Russian imperial apparatus that stood over them. Much like republicanism came to be associated with the French empire during it's domination over Europe. This is why you see a majority of Russians having favorable views of communism, because taking away the nationalist aspiration the only other upside to the post soviet system was the lack of political repression and quality of life improvements, both of which were promised by capitalism but were never fully realized for the average person.
It's hard to remove the idea from the foreign power trying to force it on you, but not impossible. It's just a matter normalizing the term and asserting it's true meaning, separate from the foreign power that tried to use it as a means for imperialism.
Yes to taxing, no to illegality. It's not as if gambling was better when the mob ran it.