silent_water [she/her]

yes, this is true. no, this isn’t why wages haven’t kept up with productivity growth or why you must work 40 hours to sustain yourself. you have to work because profit earned must increase and paying you even one iota more than you need to be able to show up to work again tomorrow is a loss of profit. if they could make you work 80 hours a week or 160, they would in heartbeat.

thankfully, this is outlawed because labor movements of the past fought to enshrine in law a limit on how much you can be forced to work and set a minimum bar for how much they can pay you. these laws are under fire - I explore why in the rest of this reply - and will be repealed eventually if labor does not resist collectively.

however, the rate of profit always decreases on a long enough timescale because of dead labor (technology, machines, etc), inter-capitalist competition - capitalists will steal profit from each other if there’s more to be had - and because infinite growth is impossible so eventually externalities will always overcome the creation of new capital.

consequently, capital accumulates in the hands of the capital-owning class - an ever-shrinking group of them, at that - and this continues until you, the worker, make so little that you cannot actually show up to work the next day - the loss of social reproduction. reproduction here doesn’t only refer to progeny but also feeding, clothing, housing, etc. yourself and your family, the meeting of the basic necessities that allow you to continue working, including your health - physical and mental. capital eternally strives to reduce what it must subsidize on your behalf as ensuring you can take better care of yourself reduces profits. a capitalist that makes more profit outcompetes and drives out of business all others who choose to make less profit, eventually.

this is also why capitalism has cyclical recessions, a fact predicted in the 1870s and termed crises of capitalism, when capital has accumulated in too few hands, profit can no longer be made, and workers struggle to feed themselves. you’re just noticing Marx’s second law - the law of capital accumulation.

idk, I just know that the old instance already have problems with power users and reifying that will make the problem worse.

I think this was always an intended feature (I’ve certainly been hearing about it for years as something people want/devs want to add), in addition to a user tagging system (i.e. users adding tags to their own usernames (e.g. pronoun tags). the main difference, though, was that it was something the poster or mods/admins could add and not something for the userbase at large to vote on. I think making it a voting system allows abuse. like consider a large group of transphobes adding tags to posts in trans comms, for instance.

a trusted user system is it’s own can of worms.

unfortunately other data is not encouraging , the number of servers is both down since the exodus and in the recent month.

this is normal. we’ll go through a lot of similar waves. people start servers, realize they’re a lot of work, and then abandon them. servers that foster a healthy community will survive. hexbear’s worst cycle involved losing the entire administrative team just weeks after a large percentage of the website left. don’t sweat the growing pains - work together to learn, grow, and change.

oh interesting. I wasn’t aware of that. thanks!

scaling sort thing? do you have a link describing what you mean?

a functioning public transit system covers the whole city, nearly point to point, and it runs on a regular schedule with buses and trains arriving every few minutes.

but who’s going to pay for it???

it’s really a good thing no one has ever run the numbers on this and there’s absolutely no literature analyzing the costs of various forms of public infrastructure to determine which is the most cost effective. there’s no way at all anyone has ever done that.

have you ever been to an American city? everything is at the service of roads, cars, and space to park the cars. we have thoroughfares through residential neighborhoods, monstrous intersections that are unsafe to cross by foot, infrastructure that’s unsafe to use by any mode of transportation that isn’t a car – because the cars will run you over – and it’s all wildly more expensive and less efficient than a functioning public transportation system. think of it like this – if more people can get where they need to go by public transit, the roads won’t be so congested.

youtubers/streamers have a parasocial thing going with their audience that makes the idea of donating a smaller mental step for their audience (senpai might notice me if I donate type brainworms). FOSS projects historically have really struggled with funding, unless they’re able to secure funding from an org/corporation.

vegan archbishop also sounds pretty cool but then people are gonna assume you’re catholic

nix overall is a much better solution to this problem.

no joke it’s how I learned linux, bootstrapping a gentoo install from the toolchain on up, with a printed manual. it’s surprisingly effective, if time-consuming (took me about 2 weeks to get to a booted system, though most of that was compilation time - took ages back then).

redditisfun, it was a third party reddit app

learn Haskell, write better code

it’s probably not code golfed and the type signatures probably weren’t elided. because otherwise I’d expect it to be above javascript.

we’ve got fewer active users but have an outsized post/comment count

literally every other distribution can solve this problem but Ubuntu can’t?

it’s a play on "communism means no toothbrush*

look up the woman who runs their anti-evil team and where she worked last lol. so yeah, it is.

also [email protected] would appreciate this post.

of course they do. we actually understand that production doesn’t require middle men. we’re communists, fool.