Huh? Google is a corporation. Are they licking their own boots?

I’m just trying to point out that it doesn’t make sense to classify a plant as a monoculture because monoculture is a planting style that can be applied to any plant, and any plant can also be planted as part of a polyculture.

Three sisters companion planting begs to differ. Any plant is a monoculture if you plant it alone, and isn’t if you don’t.

No nukes yet, but there’s still 4 months left in the year…

For anyone who doesn’t know, MSP stands for Managed Service Provider, which is basically an independent contractor IT company that stands in for businesses’ internal IT department if they’re not big enough (or can’t be bothered) to have their own.

It’s not a good idea at all. The problems it creates are greater in both number and difficulty than the problems it solves.

You have friends that have made a therapeutic ritual out of using essential oils which helps them only because the placebo effect can be very powerful for pain. Literally anything could stand in for the essential oils. Swap their oil vials out with convincing fakes and they’ll never know the difference because it’s the ritual of smelling and/or applying the oils that’s helping them, not any real physical mechanism of the compounds in the oils interacting with their biology.

What I wonder is how exactly are they going to enshittify it? It’s extremely barebones and modular in a way that anyone can design add-ons and accessories for it. I can see them doing subscriptions and the like for various add-ons but you can always just get the base model and get add-ons elsewhere.

Also I have no idea whether this comic is progressive or conservative…

Neither, it’s just cynical. Signs in the background suggest the artist may be progressive (or at least supports unions), but the message of this particular comic is an exclusively cynical one.

I don’t think Rossman is a leftist. He’s pro-consumer and sticks up for the little guy against big corporations, but he’s not anti-capitalist.

CRTs have something called an electron gun inside aimed at the back of the screen TBF. It’s not that crazy to think that the giant glass tube that makes a buzzing sound and produces tangible static electricity aimed directly at your face might be harmful, especially when the technology was new.

Base 1 is a tally system. The symbol can be anything as long as it’s discrete.

I somehow doubt the owners of Anthropic are revolutionary socialists or even just pro-union.

I’m not saying that imperialist aggression didn’t / doesn’t contribute to the collapse of socialist states - it most certainly does - I’m saying campists tend to get tunnel vision and think that it’s the only reason they fail. Cuba has actually been quite successful at enduring in spite of imperialist aggression, and I think there’s a lot of benefit in asking what it is they are doing better than past socialist states. In my opinion the answer lies in the fact that their governmental structure is far more horizontal in comparison to other attempts at socialism such as the USSR, and that has resulted in policy that is far more responsive to the specific material needs of local communities within Cuba. Contrast the USSR in which the pseudoscientific beliefs of a central authority figure turned what could have been a brief and localized food shortage into a full-blown famine spanning the entire union.

With regard to China being state capitalist, I skimmed the essay you linked well enough to see that it does not address the anarchist critique of state “socialism,” namely that state ownership does not truly constitute collective ownership because the state is a hierarchical institution that centralizes decision-making power in such a way that the will of the people affected is often ignored. Don’t get me wrong, I acknowledge the undeniable successes and advantages of central planning when compared to the neoliberal method of not planning at all beyond the fiscal quarter, but those are not the only options. I believe that horizontal planning is superior to both, and is the only way for an economy to be truly socialist in character. Examples of this being done can even be found in the revolutions that created the USSR and the PRC before they seized state power. It’s also not a discrete binary; there is a spectrum between totalitarian dictatorship and full horizontalism, and the projects which are most successful tend to veer towards the latter rather than the former.

I don’t have a problem with communism, I have a problem with hierarchy and the consolidation of power under charismatic leaders who erroneously claim to be acting in the interest of establishing communism, but that’s not even what this meme is about.

This meme is about campism, which I also have a problem with. Campists are unable to cope with the historical failures of the socialist states established by vanguardist parties, so they blame it all on external imperialist aggression from capitalist nations rather than reflect on why those projects failed. This leads to them abandoning bottom-up organizing of working-class power in favor of picking sides in geopolitical power struggles between rivaling imperialist forces, believing that true communism is only possible after the big bad US empire crumbles. They get so caught up in the game of geopolitics that they convince themselves that the US is the only country that engages in imperialism and start believing fascist Russia and state capitalist China are the “good guys” of history.

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How does this make sense in response to a meme showing that I support Palestine? I know y’all love to use rule 1 to censor people for “bigotry” but at least put some effort into making it plausible.

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I’m responding to the meme which presents learning and critique as separate and mutually exclusive. In order to learn from something you have to critique it, and if you believe that China is not perfect then you know this and should agree with me.

There’s also another thing you’re doing that I see MLs do all the time, which is posit that Chinese socialism is uniquely suited to China and that it must be implemented differently in other places. While I do agree that this is the case, I often see MLs use this argument to excuse flaws in the implementation of socialism in China as necessary alterations required due to the particular conditions and historical circumstances in which it was created.

IMO there were many wrong turns and mistakes that China made in its socialist transition that have had lasting negative consequences, and though they can often be explained by China’s particular conditions and historical circumstances, that doesn’t excuse them.

Learning and critique are the same thing. If you look at China and go “this is perfect in every way and we should copy it,” then you aren’t actually learning anything at all. In my experience MLs don’t get angry with anarchists and others critical of China because they don’t learn from Chinese socialism, but because they don’t like the conclusions they’ve made.