Udrub udrub tel aviv

They meant that they wanted to do a test to see if they would get any gpg-encrypted emails from people who saw the hat in real life; the “experiment” doesn’t work if you allow internet strangers to email you too, as then you don’t know where a person may have gotten the email address/key from

Moved to an English-speaking country where I lived for some years as a child.

That’s great but do you know why the patch was rejected in the first place? If the patch isn’t up to standard I think you should at least raise it however Fedora does their package development so they can address the issue properly

Most significant digits first.

That would only make sense if the US wrote the year first, but they don’t. They just seem to slap the date together in a random order

Depends. I read the PKGBUILDs of all AUR packages I install at least, which is not the same as reading source code but it’s something. If it’s a very widely used piece of software I don’t bother—if all these people haven’t spotted some secret backdoor, I as a lay person am not going to be the one to spot it. I will read small things like bash scripts or in general the more “obscure” software I run will be some kind of script. But also if you’re going to publish malware in a script you’re probably obscuring the malicious function so that someone doing a preliminary read won’t spot it.

ime as a subreddit mod that was nearly exclusively used for harassment, usually transphobic harassment. In the one or two cases where there was a report for someone who had suicidal or self-harm ideation, there’s still zilch I could have done; I would just approve the post so the user could get support and speak to others (the subreddit was a support group for a sensitive subject, so it wouldn’t be out of place for a post to say that the stress of certain things was making them suicidal).

You don’t have any way to find out about these things outside of Discord and Snapchat from your classmates??? How do your classmates find out then? It’s not going to spontaneously generate into a Discord server. There has to be an official channel where people find out about these things.

I don’t know what info is so critical that you can’t miss it but also can only possibly get it on Snapchat or Discord. If you use it to talk to other students you could get them to talk to you on another platform, otherwise it doesn’t really sound like they’re worth talking to, but you do you.

Fair, I don’t live in the US and IME cops haven’t stolen my cash, although tbf I’ve not really had cash lying around when raided or arrested.

Forced? How? Why can’t you just uninstall them?

But that’s better than cash, where you can’t make a backup

Depends on threat model, eg police will seize phones/computers/devices all the time but will only seize money if they think it’s related to a crime. As long as you’re not being arrested for a money-related charge then your cash would most likely be untouched but your devices will be lost. But of course that issue is circumvented with just off-site backups which are probably just as safe as your cash if cops aren’t interested in your cash.

I think if you just publicly practise decent privacy, people will be more inclined to do the same. e.g. all my friends know I’m not on WhatsApp and don’t use proprietary software in general. They know to talk to me on other platforms, and the fact that I’m like this means that others will likely feel more able to do the same if they are inclined. Nobody ever told me to care about privacy; I have always thought it was creepy if others can see all my personal business. I can’t imagine that that’s such a rare innate mindset to have, so other people who feel the same way should feel more able to put that into practice if they see you doing so. If they really want to broadcast all their personal data to the state and tech companies then they are within their right to, and I don’t see the point in trying to convince them to not do what they want to do.

🥳

When you have hundreds of millions of people in your country, it’s not as black and white as that, even just logistically speaking…

Come on, it’s clearly a simple description of a mode of doing things that is not “make line go up”. If you need me to dumb it down for you.

I don’t understand the idea that any of his criticisms were oriented at neoclassical economics, or could’ve possibly taken it into account.

Many things happened after Marx’s death and his critique still applies to. There may well be reactionary theories formulated in the future that my current politics would take account of anyway. Neoclassical economics is a continuation of bourgeois political economy that Marx wrote against. Not to mention that Marxists who have continued Marx’s project after his death, have very much written against modern economists.

a neighborhood of people that has like a local nonprofit grocery store that is managed by the people who live there specifically so that people can have food and for no other reason. but maybe like a handful of people notice some problems with the way the grocery store is being run, but are having trouble actually getting people to listen to them so they decide to just show everyone what they mean by starting their own grocery store in the neighborhood too under the same exact community managed model

That sort of thing you describe is a common conception of what life ought to look like by a lot of anarchists, which is opposed by communists precisely because it preserves exchange, implies a division between town and country, and implies the preservation of many things which communism abolishes. It’s also worth noting that when we talk about communism as a mode of production we are talking about society as a whole; for instance, a kid deciding to start a lemonade stand in a communist society wouldn’t recreate class society as the kid is doing exchange.

A lot of communists stray away from “positive” concepts of communist society because it’s much easier to derive what communism doesn’t have than what it does have. We can, of course, look at humanity before class society, but a lot of things have changed since then, and it is unlikely that the abolition of class would lead to the primitive pre-class societies that used to exist. I’m disclaiming that not as a cop-out but because I think it would be facetious if I tried to give you an outline of what communist society would look like when really I don’t think anyone can know for sure. But, most certainly I can say that what you outline does not sound like something which would exist on a large scale in a communist society. Most communists believe that central planning is a necessary part of a communist mode of production, myself included. Deciding that you don’t like a “grocery store” and deciding to start your own sounds rather like capitalism, and suggests an individualistic economy rather than one where society as a whole collaborates. In a communist mode of production there is no economic distinction between individuals, between “grocery stores” as you call them, or between the individual and society. Like I said above, one person deciding to start a “grocery store” wouldn’t cause the rebirth of class, but if that’s happening on a large scale that doesn’t sound like you’ve achieved a communist mode of production.

“well in capitalism ‘stores’ are places where people spend money so there’s literally no way anything remotely resembling this could happen in communism, not even if the food was free”

Things being “free” doesn’t necessarily make it not a store or not capitalist, but a lack of exchange (among other things) does suggest communism, and I don’t think the concept of a “store” makes sense without exchange. The abolition of property abolishes exchange. For instance, a food bank is not communist despite being a site where items are distributed for free; its existence relies on the alienation of the means of subsistence from a group of people, ie the existence of property. (that is also ignoring the fact that most food banks rely on a voucher system, which again is exchange, but if we were to pretend that food banks just give away food to anyone who comes and asks)

Well, since you still haven’t told me what you think the word means in like a formal, well-defined, academic sense, I can’t really tell what your objection to it is.

Ok, to put more clearly, I have no definition of “utility” and therefore no objection to it. I am objecting to what is implied by the term “maximise utility”; in a communist mode of production, nothing is “maximised”. The implication in that phrasing suggests to me that it refers to an intention to maximise some measurable productivity, which is not communist.

I certainly am not using it in a colloquial sense and in fact, I have been using it in the Marxist one the entire time which is why I described a market economy where literally all of the firms are compulsively required to reinvest the very surplus revenue you describe back into the firm itself. So again I’m asking you: in that situation, where is the exploitation?

Investing surplus-value into the firm itself is exploitation… The workers still extract surplus-value from themselves. What’s not to get?

And then the next important thing is to simply realize that such an economy, whatever you wanna call it (because for some reason you seem like you don’t wanna call it a market and I don’t understand why, but fine) is completely consistent with what is called a “market” in neoclassical economics

I never said that such an economy is not a market. It is a market, which is why I am opposed to it.

The verb “maximising” suggests a measurable “utility” which can be “maximised”, rather than needs which are either met or not.

The important thing to understand is that even if you hate capitalism, neoclassical economics provide provides a pretty useful framework for analyzing and understanding it

It really doesn’t—which was Marx’s whole project as a critique of political economy, not “communist economics”, not “Marxist political economy”, etc.

But my point is that what people call a “market” in neoclassical economics is literally just any situation where you have a bunch of relatively autonomous groups of people all trying to accomplish various goals all interacting with each other

Communism abolishes the individual as economic subject, and the conflicts of interests found in a “market”. Communism abolishes exchange, and abolishes economies. So, no, there is no “market” in a communist mode of production, even by your definition.

what you think utility is

“Utility” is not a concept I subscribe to per se, unless you just mean use-values in the same sense Marx uses them. I am responding to the concepts you are using. In a communist mode of production, production is, in the famous quote, “according to need”; in a capitalist mode of production, production is divorced from need, and we find production for the sake of production.

who do you think is being exploited in economic institution that literally has to internalize all of the external cost

Marxists use the word “exploitation” differently to its colloquial use. “Exploitation”, in Marx’s critique of political economy, refers to the extraction of surplus-value. I’m not sure if you know what that means or not. I can explain it if you want but you can also look it up; it’s a pretty basic part of Marx’s critique.

Also believe it or not I didn’t actually express any political beliefs here so I would appreciate it if you didn’t just assume that because I’m challenging you on your conception of things, it means that I disagree with your politics

I’m assuming you’re not a communist because you don’t seem to be familiar with communist views, and seem to be advocating for/in defence of a mode of production that is not communist. I don’t know how exactly you label yourself politically but it seems based on this short conversation that we can exclude communism from the list of possibilities, meaning we disagree.