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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: August 30th, 2021

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  • I mean I couldn’t do that either, not for very long at least. I have the tendency to walk around aimlessly when doing something like that (same when I’m on the phone), which means I have to clean the floor after. So mostly I either brush my theeth in the shower or I sit down/lie down.

    Damn, I just noticed that my theeth brushing habits are probably very weird, bit hey, at least that way I do it 2 - 3 times a day.


  • I used to fuck around with desktop shortcuts for fun. For example, replacing the internet browser shortcut with a shortcut to a script that starts the browser, but also does other weird stuff, often only after a certain time.

    So somebody would “start the browser” and every 30 seconds, the script would open another browser window, or word, or close a browser window, or shut down the computer, etc.

    I thought it was just harmless fun that was easy to fix and figure out, but the school IT would look everywhere to fix the strange issues and believed that students had installed a “hacked version” of firefox…



  • If you seriously compare socialism with opensource then I’m sorry for you.

    This is how big tech saw free software until quite recently. Microsoft used to call linux communist.

    FOSS basically goes against the concept of private property of software and embraced common ownership of software. Without private property, there is no capitalism. I wouldn’t call FOSS communism or socialism, but there are elements in it.

    You wouldn’t have react.js without capitalism.

    Ok, and what’s your point? If you read Marx, one essential point he claims is that without capitalism, there cannot be socialism.

    They could have used different library for js. one made totally by volunteers, but they haven’t. Why?

    Probably because they saw no use in reinventing the wheel? And why should they?

    It’s as if you told a revolutionary during the French revolution “You used weapons that you looted from the Bastille, weapons that were produced by the king.”. What exactly would be the argument here?


  • the disastrous YouTube monetisation policy comes in part from a desire to keep the site “child friendly”

    Sure, but the reason why they want to keep the site “child friendly” is because content for children is incredibly profitable and because advertisers don’t want their ads getting related to “controversial” content.

    Even if YouTube was run by a worker co-op, or was a state enterprise those two factors would likely still lead to stringent monetisation rules.

    This is the reason why I don’t like equating socialism with “workers owning the means of production”. Worker-cooperatives can exist in a capitalist economy, which means they have to follow capitalist rules (including the drive to generate profits).

    When leftists say “workers”, they generally mean “the 99%” or “the working class”, not individual workers. When leftists say “the means of production”, they mean the economy/industry overall, not individual companies.

    If youtube was owned and operated in common, it would not be bound to profitability, but to use.

    We can also look at something like peertube, which is essentially a commonly owned version of youtube. Instead of being guided by profitability, it is used based on many different use-cases. There can be peertube instances that are completely private, there can be peertube instances that are used for a specific topic or community (for example kids) and there can be peertube instances which are not for children at all.



  • aski3252@lemmy.mltoMemes@lemmy.mlWe can all agree on that, right?
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    1 year ago

    Yeah I’m not sure why it’s nowadays common to simplify socialism as “workers owning the means of production”. It’s not exactly wrong, but it is often misunderstood.

    A company being owned by it’s employees is not necessarily “socialism”. In today’s global capitalist economy, there are worker-cooperatives as well, but they too exist within the capitalist economy and have to follow its rules, which is above all the profit motive. If you don’t orient yourself based on profit, you will be out-competed eventually.

    Traditionally, when socialists talk about “workers owning/seizing the means of production”, they are not talking about individual workers or individual businesses.

    Workers means “the working class”, which would be pretty much everyone (“the 99%”). Means of production means industry and the economy overall, not individual factories and businesses.

    What makes FOSS special is that the software is not privately owned by anyone, not by the devs, not by a couple of programmers, not by a company. It is commonly owned, anyone can use, copy and alter the code however they want without any artificial barriers. This of course makes it a lot harder to extract money from users.