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Are We Transitioning From Capitalism to Silicon Serfdom?
  • I read a similar article a few weeks ago, and I think your concise summary is better than the article linked in this post.

    I think Yanis goes a bit overboard with stating that capitalism kinda no longer exists, since it really is about a new group of rich people simply inserting their companies as evil middlemen who leach money off the whole system.

    I'm not sure the solution has to be revolutionary or super complex. I'd think that large countries and groups of countries (e.g. USA, the EU) could implement their own mega marketplaces, leaching off much less money and avoiding the sort of corrupt BS that Amazon etc do to keep prices artificially high, and these governments could also stop allowing the mega platforms to do business in their region. Big countries want to facilitate an economy, and if private industry is proving to be too broken with their current approach, governments could step in to create more functional marketplaces that still work nicely in the internet age and don't have horrible middlemen crap dragging everything down.

  • Construction worker at the Hoover Dam, USA, 1931
  • 'Make sure you wear the hard hats, boys. The shirts can go, though, and underwear...yeah, lets skip that as well. You should all be, uh, comfortable'

  • TIL John Lennon made a song "Working Class Hero" that was intended to jolt the system
  • Great song. Powerful strategic use of dropping the f-bomb, and just an emotionally powerful song overall. It didn't dramatically change the world, but it got plenty of airplay and it made it's point.

  • Early Morning Prague [OC]
  • Old Town Prague is one of the most beautiful city areas in the world. It must cost a fortune to keep that place constantly clean and free of graffiti, but it's money well spent.

  • 19-year-old EverQuest II’s 20th expansion, Ballads of Zimara, launches today
  • Everquest II was released in 2004. It is pretty crazy that they are still releasing expansions for it. And it's kinda crazy that I played it for at least a hundred hours earlier this year during a nostalgia binge.

  • “Made in America” Never Meant More Ethical | The Nation
  • Laws need to be enforced, not just created. The article seems to imply that it's up to individual exploited workers to file official complaints, but many of the exploited workers are illegal aliens or feel way to vulnerable to 'rock the boat'. Essentially, government should enforce these laws, and be functional. Expecting super poor people living in fear to suddenly fight back one at a time, or expecting them to even find out about new laws that get passed, is very unrealistic.

  • Verna Eriksson, smuggler for the Whites in the Finnish Civil War, poses with some contraband weaponry, 1918
  • Yikes. Don't fukin mess with Verna. Verna is not playing around.

  • is there a universal translator for Lemmy?
  • Kbin and Lemmy etc should simply allow options for preferred languages, and people can select whatever they prefer. Giving them the option to not see posts or see translated posts should work out fine. I bet this problem get resolved eventually. In the meantime, I'm not too bothered by blocking magazines/communities that are non-english. No biggie.

  • German government faces budget crisis
  • Indeed. This article is nonsense. Germany should declare the climate crises an emergency. And if they don't like the debt limit rule they passed a few years ago, they can change it. Calling it a 'budget crisis' is overblown. It seems that the main problem is that their political parties are currently not working together well. That is not exactly some existential problem at this point. The German economy is way too large to consider a 60 billion euro problem a 'crisis'.

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    *Permanently Deleted*
  • It's mostly a solo game. You explore, build bases, buy and upgrade ships and tools/weapons, and other assorted stuff. More than anything else, it's a cool random planet generator, so you travel around checking out planets until eventually that gets boring, which might happen soon, of after a couple hundred hours.

  • Grab a teaspoon of neutron star core. Teleport it into Earth's atmosphere. What would happen?
  • You mean like....ALL life on Earth? From a single teaspoon full? I doubt it. Would it kill the drunk camper who picks it up and decides to use it to keep his sleeping bag warm? Maybe.

  • Chicago Is Considering Opening a Municipal Grocery Store
  • This seems like a really good idea, and I love that the article actually acknowledges that there are other countries in world which sometimes have good examples of how to do various things. Virtually every neighborhood should have reasonably quick/nearby access to a decent grocery store.

  • ‘Capitalism is dead. Now we have something much worse’: Yanis Varoufakis on extremism, Starmer, and the tyranny of big tech
  • And Apple customers were doing this a decade or more ago. They bought into an entire ecosystem, and became APPLE_PEOPLE, for better or worse. And the companies that sell stuff on e.g. itunes are the rent-paying serfs, paying Apple to be vassals and do business. The people with Apple products are maybe a bit more like farm animals...they just get fleeced over and over. They don't have much input into anything, unless they make a serious break and quit using Apple stuff.

  • There's a bird out there
  • Shouldn't I be out there hunting and killing right now?!

    That bird is mine!

    bird

  • Welcome to the ‘nepo’ housing market: 40% of homebuyers under 30 get family money to cover their down payment
  • This has kinda been a thing since the invention of money and real estate

  • Best privacy tv's? Or dumb none smart tvs?
  • Dinner or drinks first, or it's likely to not work out. But I wouldn't care about a TV tuner, so you can safely cut dinner (but leave in at least a drink or two...I mean come on)

  • Starfield is Bethesda's Least Buggiest Game to Date, Say Sources
  • neither. They probably just haven't implemented default facial expressions yet (but probably have support for them).

  • by Max Ernst
  • Pretty nice example of one of the many Ernst 'collage' art pieces. To me, he seemed to have a really cool view on what surrealism was all about.

  • [How is your day going?] 16th of August
  • Good for you. Luckily for random stranger lady, you didn't take advantage of her situation.

  • pretty_women @lemmy.world PositiveNoise @kbin.social
    Jessica Alba
    0
    Please delete empty, opportunistic magazines created during the rexit

    There are a fair number of totally empty magazines created during rexit, with no threads, yet a fair number of subscribers (because the name matches a popular sub from Reddit). I clicked on one this morning, because I saw it in random magazines side bar section. No threads. Created a month ago by a user who hasn't posted a single thread or comment on Kbin.

    This is like obvious scammers during a gold rush. Some people just wanted to reserve magazine names with no intention of doing anything helpful. Maybe they just wanted bragging rights by claiming to be a moderator. Maybe they think they can sell control of the magazine later. It doesn't matter to me. I just think an admin should delete these sorts of magazines. Anyone who starts a magazine should at least post a few threads. Absolute 'no effort at all' owners contribute nothing.

    I just think Kbin would seem more functional and positive if the magazines that exist actually had some content.

    Edit: based on a comment below, it seems that Ernest has a tentative plan in place for this sort of situation, which is great :)

    31
    PositiveNoise PositiveNoise @kbin.social
    Posts 3
    Comments 58