kravietz 🦇 @kravietz@social.privacytools.io

#Facebook “uses precise location even when you’re not using the app” #privacy https://www.theregister.co.uk/AMP/2019/09/10/facebook_location_tracking/

- A kid was harassed by a gang if nihilists
- OMG, what have they done to him?
- NOTHING!

Someone recommended Jitsi https://meet.jit.si/ for interoperable (Linux, Windows, mobile) #screenshare #videoconference and it works brilliantly. So much easier than the whole Zoom/Skype/Team "download a helper app" crap that only works on Windows...

@yogthos It's like saying you can't make round gingerbreads just because in USA they make them square by tradition. Capitalism is just a tiny part of society. You absolutely can make a capitalist economy that has low inequality and is sustainable. Plenty of laws were introduced against simplistic "capitalist" interest, such as labour laws, anti-tobacco laws, environmental laws etc. So it's possible - we just need more of that.

@yogthos If "the nature of the work should be such that it benefits majority" then what about minorities? What about, say, Mastodon? Does it "benefit majority"?

@yogthos What do you mean by "democratic workplace" precisely?

@yogthos You're talking about "increasing gap" all the time, even after I have shown graphs that clearly show Gini indexes decreasing in some countries?

Can you recommend an automated document/image classifier for Linux? One that would take a whole mess of PDF, txt, DOCS, ODT and image files and tag them with topics, sort by dates, topics etc?

@yogthos What "process" do you mean? Are you talking about Marx's "inevitability of revolution" here? But Marx predicted - and called for - "inevitable global revolution" for over 50 years and it never happened. It's because Marx's historical and economic determinism always was a pseudo-science and it failed.

When SPD called for evolutionary change (rather than violent revolution), Marx called them traitors and reactionaries. But it was SPD who was right and Marx was wrong.

@yogthos Do you mean dissolution of the Constituent Assembly in 1918 and arrests of SR and Menshevik?

Oh, that was easy from ideological point of view. They just said that only Bolsheviks properly represent the interests of proletariat and the Revolution, and the others don't and are actually reactionary and counterrevolutionary. And throw a few citations from Marx & Engels.

They did it all the time.

@yogthos Yes, I too believe we're pretty close. I'm however quite strict about semantics this is why we went through the whole exercise of "what do you mean by socialism". And this is why I don't like politicial design based on labels (like "socialist", "liberal" etc) because they oversimplify something that needs to be flexible and pragmatic rather than tribal divisions.

@yogthos It's a multivariate equation. You can prevent excessive accumulation by progressive taxation, property tax and inheritance tax. To prevent capital flow and informal sector economy however you need to create a system that is attractive to investors at the same time. This requires good infrastructure, citizen-friendly regulation, science-based decision making and effective administration.

@yogthos You seem to attribute many reasonable things to Marx, who never proposed them.

Public schools and "moral economy" was proposed by Adam Smith half century before Marx. Trade unions, labour laws etc - by Liebknecht and other social-democrats, whom Marx called "renegades"

Regulation of free market in order to prevent oligarchy and monopolies - that's Friderich von Hayek.

Marx's plan was in essence to first destroy everything and then rule with the iron hand of the Party.

@yogthos Bolsheviks did everything correct:

"A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists." (riedrich Engels, On Authority)

@yogthos I'm not saying "planning is bad". I actually said every enterprise and state *does* planning. What you mentioned - the spatial planning - is very important.

But no country except for USSR planned the production of toilet paper or wheat for the next five-year cycle with fixed prices.

It just doesn't work.

@yogthos "Contradictory"? Oh, welcome to the world of Marxism! It's full of contradictions.

Here's what Bertrand Russell (a British philosopher and socialist) said after visiting Soviet Russia in 1920: