that’s not really capitalism’s fault

Inequality is baked into capitalism the same way it is in feudalism. Capitalism is literally based on the idea of a two-class society, capital owners and labourers. Social democracy is just the attempt to curb raw capitalism, but the inequality in capitalism is not a side-effect, it’s a core feature.

2 millenia ago, when everyone worked in their workshops and sold to the market, that was ultinately a capitalist economy

No it wasn’t, and also, not even close to everybody did that. The world economy was far more diverse back then, and selling your labor to a capital owner for a wage would have been a pretty wild concept pretty much anywhere.

I’m curious if you can expand on the alienation

Sure! It’s a long topic with books dedicated to it, but here’s two small factors briefly touched on: 1. your workplace is owned by somebody else and you don’t have a say 2. Commodification of culture and third spaces means that everything becomes a transaction

you’re not highlighting any

There’s a long long list, but market socialism or syndicalism might be most interesting for you to look up first. Basically the small step of making companies owned by their workers, while conserving markets.

socialism exists in the US

??? are you writing from a parallel universe or is this just “socialism is when the government does stuff”

Capitalism has always sounded great in theory, just the way you described. But in practice it has never worked, it always results in the accumulation of wealth in few hands, who can then use that power to subvert democracy and get their way.

Why do you think inheritance, wealth, etc is taxed too little? Because wealthy elites have abolished and prevented those taxes through lobbying/corruption. Many countries had the exact social democracy model you describe, but abolished and privatized these systems because rich people paid the media and politics to make it happen.

Not to mention this analysis focuses only on material wealth. Capitalism brings with it a complete alienation, communities don’t own their land, people don’t own their work, and everything that was once a common good is slowly commodified and robbed of its soul. Art, music, relationships, capital fijds a way to monetize it eventually. But now we have online shopping and fast food! Hooray, happiness achieved!

we have not theorized a better system yet

That’s an incredibly offensive claim. You just spat in the faces of nearly two centuries worth of academics and thinkers in myriad disciplines that have worked tirelessly, in the face of often violent or even fatal backlash from capital powers, to create and implement alternative concepts. Not to mention humans have experimented with various ways of living together for our entire history before capitalism.

Hm it fills a different niche than MS Word. They’re both janky but in canva I usually design a page or two, not write a multi-page text, so at least there’s no issues with page breaks

Canva is fantastic so this is a great endeavor. This does appear to be published two days ago and built heavily with AI. Somebody just opened the first github issue. None of that means it’s necessarily awful, but I would be very very wary self-hosting this and exposing it to the internet.

This guy was a piece of shit chancellor too. With his government, Germany explicitly underdeveloped southern europe by exporting more than the EU allows, and by keeping inflation far below the EU target. This was great for German export business owners, but it only worked by keeping German wages low too, so it’s not like Germans really had a huge benefit. Basically this guy ruined the fucking Eurozone for everyone. “Social democrat” my ass

They also knew that, ultimately, destroying the economic foundation for humans making content while also making it easy to generate slop by the bucketful, would wreck the internet—and, thus, their own content supply chain. Hecht warned that AI had started a “doom loop” that would “threaten the economic foundations of its essential suppliers” and eventually make the internet infinitely worse (a process for which the media critic Cory Doctorow has created the term “enshittification,” and that you may recognize from searching for… pretty much anything on the internet).

This is not at all what enshittification means. Doctorow used enshittification to describe the mechanisms by which tech platforms establish monopoly with a good product and then extract value from that monopoly with a shittier product until they die. This was already before modern LLMs rolled around

But I will say enshittification would be a fantastic word to describe the process above so I can see why the author got it wrong

that is another issue, their reason is that it helps prevent people create unlimited spam accounts I think? It also helps to ease the transition from WhatsApp. It’s a compromise I can live with

it gets worse

The feature currently requires Google Play Services, as payments run through the Play Store, making it such that devices without Play Services cannot access it

Was hoping netcup would be in the list, since that’s where I have my VPS

1.3 billion daily active users is a fucking joke of a statistic. Did you know my penis is 5 meters long?

It’s all bots lmao

I do release a Flatpak but I’m actually working against it. It’s designed for self-contained sandboxed desktop GUI applications and I’m releasing a terminal-based TUI that allows you to rampage around your machine and network. I’m passing some horrible “bad practice” flags to get it to work. Flatpak sandboxing is not a good fit.

Okay sure but is this really such an issue? Installing the app normally is equivalent to passing those flags anyway right?

Oulu, Finland, has snow all the time and people ride their bikes all the time. It’s a matter of infrastructure

complete BS. Think about it for literally 5 seconds. Do all Canadians live equally spaced throughout the country? No. They mostly live in metropolitan areas. The laws are deeply in favor of car-based infrastructure and actively anti-pedestrian. Improvement is possible, and whoever told you the density thing is either a car lobbyist or echoing their BS

This is some real torment nexus type shit but I don’t believe for a second this is really more efficient, not to mention reliability

Woah there. China polluting our environment? Unacceptable. It’s European heritage that we pollute our environment all on our own!

In the last 15 years?? 2. Ukraine and the Caucasus. Zero baltic state invasions. But I’m not here to defend Putin whatsoever.

Look at the countries in the middle east and count the number of invasions that the German military has been part of or supported with weapons and military technology in the last 15 years. I can promise it’s more than 2. And don’t forget one of those involves a genocide.

In Berlin, there’s a growing consensus that Putin won’t stop at Ukraine

What reality are they in? Putin has barely been able to invade part of Ukraine over multiple years, and it has cost him greatly. Who in their right mind thinks he has the power to march through the rest of Ukraine, and then Poland and then come all the way to Germany?

Fuck Putin but the reasons for this sudden military buildup are so sus. And it’s right as we come up on Germany likely electing the most right-wing government since you-know-when.

Also “defense of the continent”? How do you become Professor without knowing that Russia itself is a mostly European country?

The year is 2027. A beginner programmer searches how to access the last array element in a programming language she is unfamiliar with. The results come in. “Top 10 array accesses that will make you want to buy our sponsors product”. She sighs and asks Claude instead. She pastes the one-liner into her code. Finishes the remaining code. Tests. Double-check. Commit. Push. A notification appears. “Your account has been temporarily suspended for violating GitHub’s terms of service”. Forgot to mark claude as a co-author. She sighs again

tankies.