Reading this, I feel less offended (really, I don't understand the use of that word in politics) and more scared and threatened. I'm a :sparkles: gender minority :sparkles: so politics can get really directly influential really quickly, and the picture of a gun-owning person who thinks taxes are theft is less than encouraging: that type of ideology usually does not account for people like me's existence. It's possible that it's just a hobby (heavy benefit of the doubt here), but it reads like a political statement against my ability to live freely.
Anyway, you asked: that's why I'd be scared to put much into the OP's hands.
thanks for the reply - no idea why you're getting downvoted as this strong contrast of perception is what I was interested in hearing about.
Do you feel like your fear is rational? Statistically my gut instinct would be to think you have virtually zero chance of being physically harmed by a business owner with a family, regardless of how many guns they own. Not that I would discount your fear, just wondering if this is something more akin to my fear of heights as opposed to my fear of driving through a high violent crime rate neighborhood at night with my gas tank indicator saying "empty".
As an addition to your request, I'd recommend reading some philosophy. If you want left-leaning, you can jump straight in with Marx, Foucault, and Judith Butler (some of my favorites), but you don't really need to.
I'd just recommend this because the news is useless without a meta-understanding of its purpose in public opinion, ideology, and power. If you want to skip dense philosophy readings, just make sure to ask yourself, "Who benefits from the story being told?" Try to seek out a large variety of sources in respect to this answer. The reason that this is hard though, I'll personally leave to Marx and Goldman.
The above x100. Technology isn't a cheat code for a hard problem, it's just another tool. When we assume that tech fixes everything with no further research, everyone gets a lot worse off.
I can see how somebody would go down this line of reasoning, but I wouldn't. It requires too many steps when compared with my personal alternative: literally just some paper, an email inbox, and a semi-structured directory of notes available for grepping. I have no brain cells, so anything more than this distracts and overwhelms me to the point of counter productivity.
Are there any more differences with qute? I've found the best solution to the web being broken is to use as little of the web as possible, but qute was the closest I think I came to tolerating it. Would I prefer Vieb?
Having used this for about 30 minutes total, I can tell you this goes MUCH further than any Vim-inspired browser I've ever tried, and I (think) I tried them all.
The window/buffer management in particular is very good, but UI-wise in general it's a very smooth experience. I really see myself using this, it's really very good.
I'd go one step further in that analysis. Why does it feel that large companies are the most representative to the people (like me) claiming that consumption under capitalism is unethical?
Well, I'm a bit of an anarchist, so I'm going to go down the 'distribution of power' line here. It doesn't matter that purism or system76 is ethical when Google controls my every waking moment. When the mega evil Corps have all the power and the influence. When they control not just my life but also the ecological and political environment around me. Denying the power of Google is akin to climate change denial. So yes, I'm not going to point to a small company built off of open source and pretend that my life is okay.
Or I could go a bit further down the Marxist line, and say it's because capitalism requires large scale exploitation at a large scale. Ignoring that exploitation is supporting that exploitation, and is immoral. I'll not get into the theory to support this in this comment, but when Amazon warehouse workers literally work themselves to death for my shitty orders, we've got a problem. And it is immoral to point to the existence of Purism and say that everything is fine.
This is coming off more intense than I intended. I'm sorry. I swear this isn't personal criticism, just an attempt at productive engagement with ideology, but the world is breaking. It's really fucking hard to be kind.
Honestly I think this opens up a really interesting discussion in open source. I know this is satire, but bear with me.
If I see a project, and I get curious about its test results, I can just look at the logs of the tests running and the ways in which they're run. I can see exactly what's going on, and if something weird's going on, I can fork the project, enable tests, and start a discussion with the maintainers. Maybe it's important enough that the tests are enabled and the code is fixed.
What's really interesting to me about this is that there's no competition in sight. There are no market pressures that make someone look at the code or fix it, it's just the desire for good code. Whereas with market pressures, I'm incentivized to lock down code and hide test results! You can say that's an edge case or uncommon, but the fact of the matter is that it happened. Anyway, this makes me curious about two things:
1. In software specifically, does the reduction of competition necessarily contribute to a more collaborative and more productive development process than what we expect with traditional systems?
2. If 1 is true, how widely does this scale? What could be better if some of the control of owners was removed? For instance, if the test processes of VW were public, none of this would have happened.
I've spent so long being told that competition is the be all and end all of productivity, so I'm just curious about what's happening here, and I want to know how far it goes.
I don‘t think it‘s true that there is no competition in the example you give, rather competition simply happens along a differen axis.
In the open source space there are certain characteristics that make your project more likely to succeed. Being, well, open is obviously one of them, just like passing emission tests is a factor in cars. So, open source projects have to be competitive along the openness axis in order to succeed, just like VW needs to pass these tests, one way or the other. To me it seems like the same mechanism really, just fed with different incentives.
Are the produced mechanisms really the same when the incentives change? That's not really something I can quite get myself to believe.
The incentives in free software, in my limited experience, are to grow a productively maintained system, not necessarily a profitable one (assuming, of course, the existence of some outside source of stable income). And with that motivation, I feel that competition disappears. When I look at an alternative solution to a problem I'm trying to solve, it's more in the lense of 'oh, that's a good idea!' than anger that their solution is better than mine. Then, if I'm lucky, it might be the type of thing that can be refactored out into a library and shared across implementations. I still feel that competition precludes that, regardless of incentives.
Came here to say this. I also want to add that there are no solutions with the West's current consumption habits. If we all switch to electric cars today, oil might be doing okay, but we'll still be exploiting workers and raiding resources in environmentally costly lithium mines. This is not a technical issue. This is a political issue. The question we should be asking is how we reduce our consumption and how to increase our reciprocity with the environment, not at an individual level, but at a systemic and societal level. And here's the hard part: this isn't done through innovation. This is done through reducing the capitalist pressures to consume and produce. This is driven locally, slowly, and radically by pushing back against what capitalism has done.
Digging up lithium is nowhere near the same as mining fossil fuels. You're literally just washing rock with water and you can clean the water afterwards.
I do not expect this to be a popular opinion, but I am slightly entertained reading this from more of a Marxist perspective.
> We used to make things. Now we have meetings.
Well, of course. This is what happens when the purpose of a corporation isn't production but profit, and if the workers, the people who by definition exist in the company to make things, were to own their means of production, this would look very differently. But anyway, I digress.
Ah, if only there were still 'workers' left in the Marxist sense. But automation has eliminated them (in the West anyway). So all that's left is managers, engineers and other professionals.
Yes and no, there are still workers per se but I don't think they exist with the conception of themselves as that (as much). During the 20th century when the labor movement was strong class consciousness existed and there was an appetite for a conception of the self as a worker in relation to capital and society. I think it still exists but in a pretty inconsequential way. Technology has definitely played a factor in atomizing workers and automating away for labor intensive tasks.
So under Marxism, people don't need to discuss how to coordinate their work? That does save a lot of time. No wonder the Soviet economy was so efficient.
I grew up working on a farm. The person in charge was a foreman, and his job was to coordinate how the work was accomplished on the ground by a crew of 5-7 people.
At most fortune 50 employers today, you’d have a director 1000 miles away, a local manager, a supervisor, an auditor and compliance person reviewing the payroll records, and recommending to the director that the 2 workers utilize less overtime. The local manager would eliminate the OT and hire McKinsey to recommend outsourcing the 2 workers, and retain McKinsey to monitor compliance.
Modern companies are intensive responsibility-laundering engines. It's practically their primary function. That's always been a little true, but it's gotten a lot worse (at least in the US). It's a bunch of box-ticking so you can say "look, I did something!" if anything goes wrong—some of which box-ticking may require creating and hiring for new roles—and it's a downright miracle if the box-ticking activity provides any amount of useful value to anyone, aside from its value for responsibility-deflection.
IIRC, NPR ran a piece some years back covering how something similar happened to US military command (and, relatedly, its relationship to civilian oversight), some time between WWII and Vietnam, getting worse over time after that. Which, if that was accurate, is... worrisome. But that explains how you get a directionless and constantly-failing war in Afghanistan for nearly two decades, with non-stop reports of "yep, we accomplished the mission!" from every local command at the end of every deployment, and everyone in the command hierarchy just pretends everything's fine even though they know it isn't, and they are all allowed to do that with no consequences. Gotta evade, and launder, responsibility. That's job number one. Everything else is just a nice-to-have.
That's a great comment, but I disagree that the trend is ...worrisome.
The purpose of the military is to fight. And in the local sense, it is only increasing in effectiveness at its primary task.
But the primary task of a 20 year "war", is not fighting. It is the building a nation state.
That is something the military is not designed to do. It's absolutely insane we didn't have an entirely different branch of government whose job was to build a lasting system of compromises and coordination between local people. Even if the military did have that skillset and training, which they don't, the resentment from the local populace against the group of people they just fought against would be enough to compromise any mission.
It's like if we asked the same police officer to arrest a drug addict, then be the judge in the case, then be their parole officer, and finally help them find a job after their time served. It's a nice idea in a Utopian kind of way, but there are so many opportunities along that chain for the relationship to sour.
Oh, sure, the "winability" of what they were asked to do is also a problem. Lots of things were wrong with the entire enterprise, only one of which was the military's comfort with their own entire reporting structure openly lying constantly for years on end.
Just like ask to a service to protect the people from IT attacks and at the same the same service like to have backdoors to everybodys phones, cameras, alexas and computers.
Robert McNamara was secretary of defense for JFK and LBJ during the Vietnam War. Before that he was the president of Ford Motor Company. He's the one who introduced the charts that they used to show on TV with the number of enemy killed, clearly showing that the US was winning since the graphs always went up and to the right.
Anyway, you asked: that's why I'd be scared to put much into the OP's hands.