That only matters if you care. I do not care one bit if people stalk me so much that they can dox me. I can't be easily hurt under capitalism. I'm not going to make it easy for anyone and I don't think anyone would care enough to stalk me to that extent but if they do then have at it.
I'll ignore planned obsolescence even though it's a massive part of the problem, since others addressed.
It's definitely possible to have fair compensation and not slavery and sentencing people to brutal lifelong health complications for mining and handling in manufacturing the kinds of minerals necessary for modern microprocessors and other electronic components. It's also definitely possible to recycle components and materials to build newer electronics, but all of this adds to the cost. Ultimately the reduced expenses from slavery and exploitation account for why it's done this way. Nobody could realistically compete on cost while ethically producing microelectronics, if everything from supply chain to factory assembly to shipping were devoid of slavery or things worse than slavery you'd see a $1000,USD laptop today at least quadruple in price, and honestly I'd expect that to be more like a ten-fold increase because every company and paid off bureaucrat along the way needs to grift some off the top (efficiencies of capitalism yada yada). With neoliberal markets being entirely transnational, except when sanctions divide them and create proxies and the need for misdirection, any national attempts to regulate supply chains to discourage exploitation will just make your economy less productive. Every "service" economy needs microprocessors, kneecapping your domestic information industry will just shift the demand elsewhere, but the demand will never slow down. We need more and more software developers to write more and more highly abstracted code, which runs worse and requires more memory and processing power to crunch, so that the boss gets paid and the shareholders are happy. The server farm can move to anywhere that fiber optics and relatively reliable electricity are available. The states managing the mines and factories have little interest in reducing exploitation, for a lot of reasons. Multinationals use their power and money and their influence over states they control like the US to weaken the regulatory capacity of those places that are rich in mineral and human resources, specifically so that they can exploit them.
For context, I've designed and manufactured PCBs for various projects, like FrankenPads, with a friend from Guangdong and a friend from Finland. These are older (10-11 years) IBM/Lenovo ThinkPads that we repurpose and equip with modern engineering sample CPUs like i5-10500U, DDR4 memory, NVMe hard drives, and even displays from Microsoft Surface tablets. And we're doing this with recycled components, prototype boards, engineering samples of components that would otherwise just end up in the ocean or landfills.
The downsides are mostly cost. We're still able to make these cheaper than equivalent modern Lenovo products because we don't suck and there's such an abundance of components... But their origin was unethical to begin with so accounting for that I'm certain the prices would skyrocket if people digging it up and processing weren't dying destitute at 40.
It's very melodramatic. Either wear the mask and do whatever you had planned or don't wear the mask and do something else. Why the author would think anyone would care, why any editor would think this is worth publishing, etc is baffling.
And yes, masks are laughably ineffective unless it's something like a KN95 or N95. At least countries with wide access to those masks fared much better than ill-equipped populations like the US and UK during the same periods, and with neighbouring countries as well. I still wear them because it makes stealing a breeze.
Profesionally, our counsel suggested filing criminal charges federally and it’s likely we’ll be proceeding this way.
Sounds like a decent but elaborate troll, I think this line gives it away too much.
I'm also not sure what legal recourse they actually have. Nobody forced them to update their dependencies without checking them. What crimes exactly are broken by an open source developer modifying a package to do something like this? If their modifications otherwise broke this NGO's data collection/deleted files by accident, is the developer liable? Almost certainly not, I haven't checked node-ipc's license but I don't think you can spin a CFAA charge if the code is open and the developer is free to modify as they see fit...
Idk, I got fired for not getting jabbed (from a remote job in the US where I would conceivably never go to an office) and I'm still very much a leftist. I never told HR directly that I'd already been pozzed up at some point in the past, since I had antibodies already when I had routine blood work done, as early as Jul 2020 I knew I'd already had covid but no symptoms so no idea when, but I don't think they would have cared.
They denied my religious exemption, an earnest and deeply held opposition to intellectual property that prevents me from taking any patented medical products. I had explained there were upcoming vaccines that would likely be compatible with my beliefs, but that didn't interest the corporate masters there so I ghosted them and they ended up paying 4 months severance in exchange for my silence. Considering the lack of labour protections in the US preventing employers from requiring their employees receive totally unnecessary medical procedures, I took the money and took a month off having two jobs. Now I once again have two jobs, but this one pays a lot more and I now own 2,% of an airline after my shares vest.
PRC, in some cities at least, is back in lockdown. My partner is Chinese and her daughter-in-law keeps us in the loop on Pudong. She works in hospital so she has a little card to get out and about, but everyone else is limited to since extent in what they're allowed to do at the moment.
We'll see how long they can keep the zero-COVID strategy up.
For one of my jobs, I worked for a foreign company as a consultant and my actual job title in English in their HR system/email signature was "Superior Talent" - I guess to remind the trogs in their employ that they had failed and required external resources to get things done.
Found the badge lol https://i.imgur.com/niNXkiQ.png
Went to fight with the Kurds in late 2015, got shot in early 2016. Whole thing was very intel-adjacent but didn't seem like a total op. I liked the people though, shame everything's so fucked everywhere.
That would require an alternative to capital with which change can be affected, and that doesn't really exist. You can point to some amount of collective conscious coming out of online discussion, but it's not worth jack shit in a situation where Capital has decided to invest.
I don't imagine the US will forgive any amount of student loans. It's obviously only near the table when Dems are in power, which they won't be for much longer and then for a while afterwards. There's a big focus on "fairness" in public handouts in the US, warranted or not, and forgiving debt for people who have it at some point in time ignores people who did repay it. I don't see how politicians square the circle with the domestic constituency, people will go apeshit if someone's loans are forgiven and someone else just finished paying it off while forgoing x,y,z to do so. There will be 10.000 media accounts of such unfairness aimed at turning every Gen X and older millennial who did pay off their student loans away from such radical leftism...
Put me in the camp of people who opted not to go to school because of the costs, I absolutely do not regret that as I've been doing the work-from-home multiple-jobs scam for the whole pandemic but I'll always wonder what could have been.
Capitalists, particular in the US, love to dunk on Revolutions which had purges of any kind (even the very inoffensive purge of Batista-loyalists in the early years of the Cuban Revolution). Or state censorship of any variety.
They're deliberately missing the point, by avoiding any meaningful discussion of what rights to autonomy a Communist state has. Ignoring the historical context in which the US invests billions upon billions of dollars in anti-Communist, pro-capital propaganda in these countries to the point where it's necessary for the state to clamp down. Absent massive amounts of buying power/capital, what mechanism does a state have to fight incredibly well-financed, insidiously crafted and emotionally exploitative foreign propaganda? The only option is force, which the capitalists then decry as inhumane... I have a background in developing anti-censorship software, so I usually surprised people when I'm very neutral on Chinese state censorship (even today, in the very much not-Communist PRC).
Naturally, I make similar concessions for removing those financed by foreign capital. And I understand the deep paranoia that this stuff breeds. It's hard to allow a "marketplace of ideas" the closer in time you are to the Revolution, because it's impossible for the Revolutionaries to tell if you're just a harmless thinker misled by capitalist propaganda, someone who is genuinely worse off under communism because you were part of an oppressive class or just because you were a skilled labourer, or if you're an asset of foreign capital. It breeds deep paranoia which I think persists in the policies of states which shouldn't really be considered communist any longer. It has a lasting effect essentially, PRC and Russia are good examples of post-Communist states with lasting censorship regimes.
Things are reasonably going to be unstable post-Revolution, capital will immediately seize on that uncertainty to propagandize a population with the best outcomes of capitalism, and the state very naturally lacks the tools to combat that with 0 use of force. But the truth is much harder for most people to accept: Those capitalist states are naturally unsustainable and do as much as possible to obfuscate the human suffering inherent both domestically and within insidious neocolonial if not outright colonial systems of enslavement.
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That only matters if you care. I do not care one bit if people stalk me so much that they can dox me. I can't be easily hurt under capitalism. I'm not going to make it easy for anyone and I don't think anyone would care enough to stalk me to that extent but if they do then have at it.