archomrade [he/him]

  • 15 Posts
  • 871 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • Most of the people here would still vote for Biden if he was wheelchair bound and communicated with a bell zipp-tied to his armrest like Tio Salamanca.

    The question isn’t “is he better than trump”, it’s “will enough people be motivated to go vote for a candidate that’s slipping into a waking coma?” and every day that Biden opens his mouth in front of a camera like tonight he looses more people who don’t give a fuck about politics.

    There is no good news from this debate. If the democrats have a single other option to replace Biden on the ticket they should do it now or else ensure a trump presidency.







  • It cannot be that profitable to have just a bunch of random data on their servers. I have so much junk and random bullshit on my drives, it would take a week of labor just to clean my shit well enough to use it for AI training and as soon as I got any notification about cloud space being full i’d turn syncing off - i sure as hell wouldn’t fork over any money for a subscription. This is such a big bridge to burn, and the server overhead must be massive… I just don’t understand how they could possibly think this is a good business decision.

    Idk, maybe i’m just too deep into privacy/FOSS/selfhosting headspace to see things clearly from the normal-consumer standpoint but I just do not understand this. I really wish someone would leek an internal conversation at one of these companies that explains the big-picture strategy with this move.









  • There’s maybe two problems with this:

    • public housing is a part of the picture, and so are public libraries. The solution is certainly not to cut library spending just because there are homeless people using it
    • Thinking there being homeless people around is an issue that needs solving is itself pretty bigoted. Like, maybe you have a problem with people who haven’t showered for a while? or people who use the library for personal activities because there are no better places for them to do them? But ‘these people are a problem’ itself becomes problematic because you’ve consolidated those qualities you find objectionable into a class of person, and that makes it really easy to forget/misplace/dismiss the humanity those people deserve.

    It’s a common attitude, so don’t feel like i’m picking you out personally to scold. More people should be aware of how that attitude dehumanizes people experiencing shelter insecurity.






  • I could get on board with some militant union organizing and class solidarity. But that’s about as likely to be successful under our current government as a class revolution: police are armed to the gills and even a union-friendly administration isn’t going to tolerate the kind of union action that we’d need to make a noticeable dent in our economic organization. Even a pretty light rail strike was quickly intervened on (I’m aware of the concessions won with the administrations assistance after the fact, you don’t need to elaborate on it for me). The reason why that example isn’t a good sign is that the kind of damage a strike like that threatens is kind of fundamental to all potential strikes in the future… That a union strike like that with real leverage couldn’t even be tolerated for a moment is… well it’s not encouraging. Can you imagine something like an energy strike, or a roadworker strike in the form and style of the Pullman or Homestead Steel? An entire city’s industry shut down by armed union workers? God forbid a general strike…

    Idk. And I also really doubt that a new-deal economy would work today… Capital just isn’t as reliant on labor as it used to be. It’s my ardent belief that we’re already way overproducing ‘goods’ (I like the marxist term ‘treats’ to describe most of what we produce now); how would unions help reverse that kind of overproduction and over-consumption? How do unions dissolve the kind of wealth that’s accumulated around old-money industry and redirect it? The free market has distorted the capital landscape so much that the kind of action we need isn’t achievable without an external pressure… Unions work well to redistribute resources between industry and labor but aren’t able to pump the breaks or redirect it elsewhere.

    I think our economic options are just… really really bleak. And it’s happening as we’re entering into another cold-war style conflict with China… Yea. I’m of the opinion that things will get way, way worse before they get noticeably better.