There are a myriad of news articles here on Lemmy that display the abhorrent influence billionaires have on our society (especially the US, where I reside). I consistently read comments where the posters appear hopeless and despondent of the situation, while others jokingly refer to the guillotine....
So many thoughts on this. I’ll try to parse some out, one post at a time.
Part of the problem is the standard of legality. Late-stage capitalism is defined by the state serving the ownership class rather than the public. It’s why the state cares very little about wage theft, or addicts dropping dead from opioid overdose, or homeless freezing to death in sub-zero Minnesota but are arresting immigrants who are otherwise well-behaved (and paying their taxes) or raiding repair shops that fix iPhones without an Apple authorization. It’s why media agencies are so worried about piracy even as they try to lay off their development teams if they can be replaced with AI software.
Laws and the legal system work for the ownership class, not the public. Any legal efforts to strip billionaires of their wealth, or even reduce their profits is going to quickly get neutered. This is why the protections afforded by the fourth, fifth and sixth amendments of the Constitution of the United States have been thoroughly gutted with carve-outs. It’s why asset forfeiture is not only a thing, but takes more from Americans than burglaries.
And this is why law enforcement is already attacking mutual aid organizations based on licensing issues, because it’s not actually illegal but facilitates other threats to the ownership class, such as labor actions. There is no rule of law in the US. Your rights go only as far as your lawyer’s means to enforce them, and if you’re depending on a public defender, they just don’t have the time or funding.
The ownership class will (according to Marx) tremble before a communist revolution because we will have ruled out all other alternatives, though we may try a fascist autocracy and a massive genocide machine to dispose of all the underclasses, first.
And that’s the problem. The Holocaust was legal too. Leaving workers hungry and cold to the elements during the Great Depression was totally legal, and at the time communism as per the Soviet Union was looking pretty good to those of our great grandparents who weren’t Carnegie or Rockefeller. This is not our first rodeo. What the state likes (id est, what is legal ) is not a fair moral standard. Nor is what religious ministries like (id est, what is sin ). We have to decide for ourselves what is right and wrong, and if we’re willing to die for our pacifistic standards when law enforcement decides we are intrinsically unlawful
This is why some are arguing the climate crisis warrants resorting to violent sabotage (say, blowing up oil pipelines) since the alternative is to let industry pollute us to global catastrophic risk (of extinction). If you want a sustainable civilization, if you want wealth and power distributed fairly, if you want a public-serving government, then you’re going to have to give up on lawful action. And if you want to stay within the confines of law, you’ll have to give up on equality, a functional state or a future.
Actually safe autonomous transport and delivery would be a great next step. But the enterprises are putting their pre-alpha releases into the public and killing people which is souring the public to the notion.
It’s still a valid sentiment. IP law as it is today protects established propert at the cost of both innovation and a robust public domain, which were both mission parameters of copyright as established in the Constitution of the United States. (Other nations may be more deliberately feudal with their foundational IP laws, but I don’t know.)
The public would be better served to abolish intellectual property entirely than retain the system we have, but our regulatory agencies are long captured to preserve the property rights of the wealthy, even when it harms or kills the public.
My kiddo and I are having a fruit and vegetable challenge. Each month we’ll seek out a fruit or vegetable we’ve never tried and taste it. My BFF is trying to walk all the greenways in our county (that is county not country, low stakes! Attainabl!). How about you?
Install Debian Mint on my old laptop and see how much I can get working on it. My ultimate ambition is to replace all my Windows 10 activity entirely by the end of 2024
Apply math and the object flies in a parabolic arc (not accounting for air friction and wind)
Launch it high enough and the arc start looking elliptical. Gravitational force looks less like a constant rather is tempered by distance². If the acceleration closes the ellipse without hitting the (circular at this scale) ground, your object is now a satellite in orbit.
Keep accelerating and eventually (a whole lot of acceleration) and special relativity factors affect the trajectory…and mass…and time dilates between the object and observers.
Lightning never strikes the same place twice. In fact it favors repeated strikes at the same arcing point.
In the middle ages churches would ring the steeple bells during a thunderstorm in an effort to soothe God. (it was assumed the Christian God was directly responsible for lightning.) This resulted in such an epidemic of lightning deaths among parish priests that ringing church bells in thunderstorms remains a criminal act in some regions of Europe.
Modern cathedrals and statues are fitted with replaceable lightning rods, in an admission God is content to let the mechanics of static electricity guide His thunderbolts.
Just curious as I’ve never been on the other side of the counter, how does this sort of thing tend to work at restaurants? Fast food and fast-casual places are where I’ve heard customers say things “pile as much lettuce on there as you’re allowed to” - is there ever a limit your supervisor instructed you for things...
A friend of mine managed a pizzeria and said all the parts were portioned out. Extra usually meant an additional portioning of that topping / fixing would be added to the assembly.
There is an upper limit when a large party walks in expecting food, but it could feed like twenty people. For anything larger you had to request in advance so he could have the supplies on hand.
This was Texas in the 1970s which involved frequent people wanting to work an hour for a slice so he’d require them to wait for a rush (they wouldn’t have to wait long) and then would get a meal of food for their hour.
Gaza (with the IDF nearly expanding into Syria) reduced my Christmas spirit to 10⁻⁷ well before today. A second cold in the season (with distinct symptoms different from the first) kept me from the family dinner today.
But my wife was dismissed from a 13-year job as an chief administrator of a medium sized general contractor, having been the boss’ personal assistant above her office duties. He retired, and the new exec is cleaning house (and is making some bad management decisions). So ours is going to be an It’s a Wonderful Life Christmas until we know what our future looks like, and whether we get the good ending or the bad ending.
Update 2023-12-27 Today my wife was hired. It’s a significant pay cut, but it’s working for a nonprofit she believes in serving a good cause (which is way better than the cutthroat construction industry). I anticipate she’ll be happy there and all that’s left to work out is how we’re going to pay a few more bills. So, we’re headed for the good ending.
My USMC recruiting officer didn’t want me to go home and confer with family, but sign the papers right away before I walked out of the office. That’s when I decided he seemed a bit too desperate.
Dozens of stories from vets later (many with TBIs who couldn’t get proper treatment) I engage in counter-recruitment now.
The public has been forgotten in our intellectual property system. The intent of copyright and patents in the US Constitution is to develop a robust public domain, but it’s taken this long for Steamboat Willie (Mickey Mouse, 1928) to finally be free to use. (I say that as if nothing is going to stop it before January 1st, 2024).
Copyright is rent-seeking. It’s worse than theft. Its closer to extortion. But because it is done by the owner class, it is condoned or celebrated by the state. A state that has forgotten its people.
People who assert property rights (including limited monopoly rights on intellectual property) are doing mental gymnastics too. We’re just used to them, thanks to a century of propaganda after the great depression.
The current state of wealth distribution a century later doesn’t seem to carry the promise that capitalism can be fair.
In fact, IP maximalism (Thanks, Walt!) has denied the public a robust public domain, and our courts struggle to do the mental gymnastics to understand why we have a public domain in the first place.
That is to say, the US and EU have totally lost the plot.
If someone tried to ram someone else with their truck because of a disagreement on policy in Israel, that counts as doing a terrorism. It may also count as doing a hate crime.
I suspect this is not going to go well when they find poor people who torrent for the community and try to squeeze them for blood in the courts, or find that an academic server is used to seed in it’s idle time.
This figured into the cruel, heartless reputations of the MPA and RIAA that persist to this day.
Trust me. We’re totally not proud of our democracy and freedom. I grew up in the early 80s while what was left was being undermined by Reagan and Falwell’s Moral Majority.
As a credulous kid who believed the American Exceptionalism ideology, I grew up very disappointed. And in the aughts when George W. Bush started going severely autocratic, post PATRIOT Act realized then this was the direction we were going. Now I’m outraged that America is just a slave state with extra steps.
Trump’s 2015-2016 takeover of the Republican party was inevitable, and if Trump dies or becomes untenable as a political leader, it will only be a matter of time until the next #MussoliniFan seizes the party by being obnoxious in a pool of Aynn Rand idealogues.
We might be able to hold back the neutering of (our meager) democratic features in order to keep it from becoming a one party state even for a decade or three, on the grounds the US is big and complex and can be hacked the way dinosaur clones on Isla Nublar bred, migrated and survived a lysine addiction. Heck we may even engage in some sabotage.
But enough of us know where this is heading that it could be a difficult fight, while the knives are out in Republican-only spaces.
At the same time, yes, Christian Nationalist militants might start a civil war.
Anyway, tickets to ride this (proverbial) train were bought in the aughts. And the plutocrats who paid for it all have commissioned the railway in the 1960s after interracial marriage and the end of segregation. So you’re only seeing the last bit of the story. Check out our prisons and detention centers, if you want a taste of, well, you know.
Image description: a screenshot from the Wikipedia page for the Doctor Who TV series, with a user-added caption that reads “Preserve the media you can before it’s gone forever.” The Wikipedia article reads, “No 1960s episodes exist on their original videotapes (all surviving prints being film transfers), though some were...
Really interesting read about the history of YouTube adblocking, how the new detection works, how uBO is responding, and how not to block the new popups.
So today, YouTube’s pop-ups rolled down to Views will be limited to one unless you remove your adblocker at which point the pop-ups ceased. (I was intentionally rolling them down). Have: Firefox, DDG Privacy Essentials, NoScript, uBlock Origin
Techs working to give me access: I love you guys! I really appreciate what you’re doing.
Fuck the hurtful comments, and do it to fight capitalism and enshittification.
That said, when I can no longer YouTube without ads, I will no longer YouTube, which also means no engagement on video forums. Useful, interesting rants is what I have to offer.
Windows as a software package would have never been affordable to individuals or local-level orgs in countries like India and Bangladesh (especially in the 2000’s) that are now powerhouses of IT. Same for many SE Asian, Eastern European, African and LatinoAmerican countries as well....
Even the MPAA and RIAA know piracy fuels culture and makes golden hits into platinum hits and boost sequel album sales and auxiliary items (toys and lunchboxes).
They can’t help themselves because to the execs and shareholders, it feels like lost sales and theft. And the DRM market capitalizes on those feelings.
What are the best steps to reduce the wealth of billionaires?
There are a myriad of news articles here on Lemmy that display the abhorrent influence billionaires have on our society (especially the US, where I reside). I consistently read comments where the posters appear hopeless and despondent of the situation, while others jokingly refer to the guillotine....
I'm happy he did actually say it
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/pictrs/image/c55c4a6a-b3bc-471c-8244-cb58aadf117f.png...
Film studios demand IP addresses of people who discussed piracy on Reddit (arstechnica.com)
What sci-fi-esque inventions are the most plausible and could happen soonest?
we need teleportation frankly
What's the best music streaming service?
I am looking to move on from spotify, what music streaming service pays the artists the best while still having a large library.
The "Steamboat Willie" debacle or: Why IP does us more harm than good (lemmy.world)
Hello frens,...
Looks like DRM prevented to watch movies in many theaters yesterday (www.theverge.com)
From the article:...
what are your fun, low stakes new year resolutions?
My kiddo and I are having a fruit and vegetable challenge. Each month we’ll seek out a fruit or vegetable we’ve never tried and taste it. My BFF is trying to walk all the greenways in our county (that is county not country, low stakes! Attainabl!). How about you?
Ancient wisdom often sounds like common sense now that it is commomly taught. What is some ancient wisdom that we no longer teach because it was wrong?
This question inspired by this post..
One of the Most Controversial US Spy Programs Just Got Quietly Renewed (www.motherjones.com)
Congress blew a rare bipartisan chance to protect Americans’ calls and texts.
Current and Former (Fast) Food Service Workers - How do you handle requests like “All the fries you can give me”?
Just curious as I’ve never been on the other side of the counter, how does this sort of thing tend to work at restaurants? Fast food and fast-casual places are where I’ve heard customers say things “pile as much lettuce on there as you’re allowed to” - is there ever a limit your supervisor instructed you for things...
So, who or what ruined Christmas this year?
What's the consensus on swearing here
Noticed not many people use curse words....
Those who chose "never" in a "now or never" moment. How is it going for you?
Thanks for sharing, and happy holidays
Amazon and Tolkein Estate force author to destroy all copies of his work. Only pirated copies will survive. (variety.com)
Internet Archive: Digital Lending is Fair Use, Not Copyright Infringement * TorrentFreak (torrentfreak.com)
If purchasing isn’t owning, then piracy isn’t stealing (fosstodon.org)
I am ashamed that I hadn’t reasoned this through given all the rubbish digital services have pulled with “purchases” being lies.
/c/fuck_weapons (lemmy.ml)
Dear consumer: do not operate this motor vehicle while experiencing emotion...
BitTorrent Pirates Won’t Receive ISP Warnings (It Will Be Something Worse) (torrentfreak.com)
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Piracy is Preservation (feddit.de)
Image description: a screenshot from the Wikipedia page for the Doctor Who TV series, with a user-added caption that reads “Preserve the media you can before it’s gone forever.” The Wikipedia article reads, “No 1960s episodes exist on their original videotapes (all surviving prints being film transfers), though some were...
Youtube’s Anti-adblock and uBlock Origin (andadinosaur.com)
Really interesting read about the history of YouTube adblocking, how the new detection works, how uBO is responding, and how not to block the new popups.
No politics inteded: Why isn't Trump after leaving office in any way or shape involved in politics say as member of congress or senate? (lemmy.world)
I know that after you leave office as POTUS it is some sort of unwritten rule that you withdraw from politics....
Random thought: Windows is largely successful because of Piracy
Windows as a software package would have never been affordable to individuals or local-level orgs in countries like India and Bangladesh (especially in the 2000’s) that are now powerhouses of IT. Same for many SE Asian, Eastern European, African and LatinoAmerican countries as well....