It’s about as productive as trying to turn a lion vegetarian.

I’m perfectly calm and nobody is upset here. I’m simply explaining to you that your argument does not make sense. If you want to look at negative sides of the trade-off then come up with some arguments that make logical sense. It’s quite telling that you start making personal attacks when you can’t actually address the points being made.

I genuinely don’t know what you’re arguing anymore, because your logic is completely backwards. You’re blaming the GPL for “enshitification” and bloat, which is utterly nonsensical. The license has fuck all to do with how lean or bloated a piece of software is, that’s a result of developer priorities and corporate roadmaps. The GPL’s entire purpose is to enforce freedom, and a key part of that freedom is the right to fork a project and strip out the bloat yourself if the main version goes off the rails. You then admit that corporate contributions are valuable, but your proposed solution is to letting them keep their work proprietary which is the very thing that accelerates enshitification. You’re arguing that to stop companies from making software worse, we should give them a free pass to take public labor, build their own walled gardens, and contribute nothing back. That’s just corporate apologia that encourages the exact freeloading the GPL was designed to prevent. Your entire point is a self-contradictory mess.

No, GPL does not force companies to do that. It forces companies to make their source code available. There is zero requirement that it has to be contributed to the original project, nor do the maintainers of the project have to accept changes they don’t want. You’re completely misrepresenting the how GPL works here.

Centralization, bloating, and GPL are all orthogonal concepts that bear no direct relation to each other. A centralized project does not necessarily become bloated, nor does GPL play any role in whether a project is centralized or not.

GPL because abstract freedoms are meaningless. The goal should be to ensure that the code stays open and that corps aren’t freeloading of it.

Yeah, Russia should’ve just let the ethnic cleansing in Donbas continue. At lest you fascists have consistent values from Gaza to Donbas.

China has an actual carbon neutral plan, and short term use of coal is part of that. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/chinas-energy-transition-in-5-charts/

A study showed that China’s use of coal is perfectly in line with their targets https://www.carbonbrief.org/chinas-2060-climate-pledge-is-largely-consistent-with-1-5c-goal-study-finds

the key bit of the article

China is now making more money from exporting green technology than America makes from exporting fossil fuels. This trend will continue simply because renewables are cheap; if you doubt the appeal, count the solar panels on Pakistani roofs. The work China does on cutting emissions at home—ever cheaper renewables, more abundant storage which makes those renewables more useful, better electricity markets, long transmission lines and all sorts of associated expertise—will thus be increasingly relevant, and sellable, beyond its borders.

that’s right, authoritarian just like your bedtime

To make sense of our current political moment, and to understand why electoral politics under capitalism is a stage managed by and for the wealthy, we must turn to one of the most consequential political thinkers of the last century: Vladimir Lenin.

If you were educated in the US, you almost certainly never encountered Lenin. Not in your high school textbooks, not in your university lecture halls. You will not see his ideas debated seriously on the corporate news channels. No mainstream politician, not even the most progressive, would dare utter his name.

It’s rather is a curious omission, is it not? For a man whose ideas shook the world, inspiring millions of workers to shake off their chains and establishing the official ideology of some of the largest countries on the planet.

So, in the land of free speech, why is the work of such a globally monumental figure treated as a forbidden text? Why is a thinker who provides a master-key to understanding modern imperialism and state power so diligently scrubbed from the curriculum?

Even at the most elite universities, in political science departments that posture as fonts of rigorous inquiry, you will not read Lenin. You will not be asked to critique him.

You might find a sanitized, fleeting reference to Marx, often dwarfed by the required reading of boosterish pieces from The Economist. In fact, at places like Harvard, the curriculum often reads less like political science and more like a corporate training manual. So why is Lenin a forbidden subject of study even in an adversarial way?

The answer is not complicated. Lenin’s genius was to lucidly dissect the rotting core of the capitalist system, exposing contradictions that cannot be patched over with mere reforms. And he did not stop at critique. He was not a moralist or an utopian, content with moral posturing.

And that is his unpardonable crime. Lenin wrote about the actual mechanics of seizing power, about smashing the bourgeois state and building a proletarian one. He provided a concrete analysis of how to win. This is the kind of dangerous knowledge the system cannot abide. It cannot be refuted, so it must be disappeared.

Consider the irony of how we would rightly condemn the Soviet Union as a brainwashed society if its citizens were taught to hate capitalism without ever reading Adam Smith. We would call it crude propaganda. Yet, millions of Americans are taught to reflexively recoil at the word communism by a system that ensures they will never encounter its theories.

What we find in practice is not free speech and academic freedom, but ideological policing. The very question of whether we could organize our economy differently is rendered unaskable. Those who advocate for a world beyond capitalism are systematically excluded from every institution that shapes public thought.

So, if you have any genuine belief in free inquiry, you have a duty to seek out the ideas that the guardians of power have placed beyond the pale.

Resources on Lenin:

State and Revolution https://marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/index.htm

What Is To Be Done? https://marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/index.htm

Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism https://marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/index.htm

it’s just such a great meme, you don’t even have to edit it, it’s perfect the way it is

Big corps never really wanted people to be able to run their own software and have control over their devices. What they want is to sell appliances as opposed to general purpose computing devices.

almost as stupid as thinking you can stop American air power

meanwhile in the real world https://www.twz.com/air/how-the-houthis-rickety-air-defenses-can-threaten-the-stealthy-f-35

The initial statement was nonsense, and it’s incredible that you keep doubling down on it.

Yeah, this is a key point that a lot of Western libs completely miss because they’re so caught up in their own moral grandstanding. Before the whole war kicked off, Putin actually had to deal with real internal opposition. A significant number of people, especially in the bigger cities, genuinely wanted more integration with Europe and the West in general.

But then the war started, and the mask came off. The West’s response wasn’t just sanctions on oligarchs or the government. It immediately devolved into this insane, open season on anything and everything Russian. We’re talking about regular people getting banned from sports and arts, calls for collective punishment, and just a flood of the most vile, racist garbage directed at Russians as an ethnic group. It went from “we hate Putin’s regime” to “we hate you people” in about five seconds flat.

And that was a gift from heaven for the Kremlin. They’ve been saying for years that the West secretly despises all Russians and wants to see Russia broken up and erased as a culture. Suddenly, they could just point to the news and say see? we told you so.

This completely nuked the domestic pro Western opposition. What were they supposed to argue for? Hey, let’s be friends with these people who are calling for us to be shoved back into the stone age? Their entire platform was instantly irrelevant.

So instead of turning on Putin, a huge chunk of the population, including many who didn’t even like him, circled the wagons. When you’re being told by the entire “international community” that you’re subhuman orc because of your leader’s actions, you tend to rally around the flag as a form of self defense. The West’s blatant chauvinism and racism ended up solidifying Putin’s power in a way he could never have managed on his own.

Love how you refer to me stating basic facts as gaslighting. Take care.

Dude, mainstream western media openly admits that Putin has mass popular support in Russia, but you keep on doing your copes I guess. Nobody is talking about Putin being any sort of hero here. What’s being said is that there’s no evidence to suggest that elections in Russia need rigging. Meanwhile, the idea that Russia is trying to replace the US as the global hegemon is beyond laughable.

you should let CNN know

But Putin undoubtedly has reaped the rewards of a political landscape tilted dramatically in his favor. The Levada Center, a non-governmental polling organization, consistently reports Putin’s approval rating at over 80% – an eye-popping figure virtually unknown among Western politicians, and a substantial increase on the three-year period before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/14/europe/putin-russia-election-explainer-update-intl/index.html

For sure, these things always take on a life of their own and they’re impossible to control.