archomrade [he/him]

  • 32 Posts
  • 503 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • Most of the people here would still vote for Biden if he was wheelchair bound and communicated with a bell zipp-tied to his armrest like Tio Salamanca.

    The question isn’t “is he better than trump”, it’s “will enough people be motivated to go vote for a candidate that’s slipping into a waking coma?” and every day that Biden opens his mouth in front of a camera like tonight he looses more people who don’t give a fuck about politics.

    There is no good news from this debate. If the democrats have a single other option to replace Biden on the ticket they should do it now or else ensure a trump presidency.







  • It cannot be that profitable to have just a bunch of random data on their servers. I have so much junk and random bullshit on my drives, it would take a week of labor just to clean my shit well enough to use it for AI training and as soon as I got any notification about cloud space being full i’d turn syncing off - i sure as hell wouldn’t fork over any money for a subscription. This is such a big bridge to burn, and the server overhead must be massive… I just don’t understand how they could possibly think this is a good business decision.

    Idk, maybe i’m just too deep into privacy/FOSS/selfhosting headspace to see things clearly from the normal-consumer standpoint but I just do not understand this. I really wish someone would leek an internal conversation at one of these companies that explains the big-picture strategy with this move.












  • I could get on board with some militant union organizing and class solidarity. But that’s about as likely to be successful under our current government as a class revolution: police are armed to the gills and even a union-friendly administration isn’t going to tolerate the kind of union action that we’d need to make a noticeable dent in our economic organization. Even a pretty light rail strike was quickly intervened on (I’m aware of the concessions won with the administrations assistance after the fact, you don’t need to elaborate on it for me). The reason why that example isn’t a good sign is that the kind of damage a strike like that threatens is kind of fundamental to all potential strikes in the future… That a union strike like that with real leverage couldn’t even be tolerated for a moment is… well it’s not encouraging. Can you imagine something like an energy strike, or a roadworker strike in the form and style of the Pullman or Homestead Steel? An entire city’s industry shut down by armed union workers? God forbid a general strike…

    Idk. And I also really doubt that a new-deal economy would work today… Capital just isn’t as reliant on labor as it used to be. It’s my ardent belief that we’re already way overproducing ‘goods’ (I like the marxist term ‘treats’ to describe most of what we produce now); how would unions help reverse that kind of overproduction and over-consumption? How do unions dissolve the kind of wealth that’s accumulated around old-money industry and redirect it? The free market has distorted the capital landscape so much that the kind of action we need isn’t achievable without an external pressure… Unions work well to redistribute resources between industry and labor but aren’t able to pump the breaks or redirect it elsewhere.

    I think our economic options are just… really really bleak. And it’s happening as we’re entering into another cold-war style conflict with China… Yea. I’m of the opinion that things will get way, way worse before they get noticeably better.


  • strengthen unions, bring domestic manufacturing back, and make corporations pay their fair share.

    That’s what I mean though, those things aren’t the problem. They fit within that neoliberal economic picture really well but it doesn’t address the declining state of middle class’ economic stability. We’ve been operating under the assumption that when our productive output is high, everyone benefits (which is why bringing manufacturing stateside is valuable), but over the last couple decades those jobs have had a steep decline in quality (it used to be that a manufacturing job could support a family of 5, but that’s just not the case anymore) due to automation and the relative productivity of capital against the productivity of an individual worker. We’d have to continue consuming well beyond a sustainable level in order to produce enough manufacturing jobs for everyone, and those jobs just aren’t as good as they used to be. Even union protections are ultimately just a finger in the dam, when fewer and fewer jobs are needed for higher and higher output. And none of that picture addresses home ownership and generational wealth transfer.

    Things are as good as they can be without fundamentally challenging the neoliberal economic hegemony, but that’s exactly the problem with the picture. Those metrics suit that way of thinking but they simply don’t address the reasons why the American public is struggling.

    I’m just so sick of seeing these accomplishments paraded around as if they address the problems normal people are actually facing. You’re going to be chanting “things are really great actually!” as we all get chased out of the country by a nationalist movement driven by economic disenfranchisement. We can’t keep doing this.