kravietz 🦇 @kravietz@social.privacytools.io

@wbtd

Regarding competitive - ok, but where it isn't?

Competition is primarily about *individual* ambitions and these can be reinforced by the system but are not given exclusively by the system.

In Soviet science there was just as much competition as in the West and the greatest minds (like Sergey Korolyev) were quite a dicks in person. Same in open-source which is quite collaborative by nature but people like Linus Torvalds are both great and dicks at the same time...

@wbtd

> does *not*, by the way, mean that scientific research is paralysed

That what I was just going to point out - various biases and flaws of scientific processes in different countries are well known.

I could talk for hours about how science if broken in Poland and Russia, but none of these actually prevents them from doing *some* good science.

These biases and flaws just prevent them from realizing their full potential but this is far away from how it worked in USSR.

Pro-tip for those scared by toilet paper outages: most people in the world survive without it all the time. High-tech solution is "bum gun sprayer" (pictured), low-tech is simple 1.5 liter plastic bottle with warm water. Reminder: you also have showers.

Free conferences be like:

"Delegates agree to attend one-on-one business meetings and other group activities. You must attend all pre-booked meetings and sign the meeting registers. Non attended meetings will be charged at the full cancellation rate of £495 + £195 per non attended meeting."

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/03/it-will-cost-you-500-not-to-attend-this-conference/

@wbtd

Better examples would be precautionary principle, anti-GMO and anti-nuclear sentiments which consciously reject science to make place for ideology, but still nothing compared to Lysenko.

@wbtd A bit of stretch. Lysenko devastated Soviet biology, agriculture and genetics for 2 decades and decimated Soviet scientific community (Vavilov).

The current UK policy doesn't reject science, but science doesn't make risk analysis and policy decisions for you - it just provides you with facts to base them on. The UK government made a risk-based decision that is definitely driven by economy but is not unscientific in the way Lysenko did.

Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism":

@krruzic Here you go https://gist.github.com/kravietz/1c1ad16ee88c0cce5728d9d0dcebc3de

@krruzic
Sure, will do a bit later as I'm just getting off a train!

Want to help fight #covid19 ? Download client from foldingathome.org -> Install -> Set category to "ANY" is prioritized. GPU and CPU projects are up.

Default #minecraft service definitions as used by VPS providers are quite crappy. Here I replaced some horrible systemd file running screen -D (!) with a properly hardened systemd service

@resist1984
Same without Tor

@rysiek @nextcloud

Jitsi worked for me most of the time, just as any other teleconferencing solution that depends on network quality for real-time communications.

With Jitsi, remember you can self-host it for example if you have a QoS-enabled network, which would potentially greatly increase the reliability.

@micrackbiron @garfiald

It is absolutely possible and Marx's work has been dissected into simple statements many times - e.g. by Leszek Kolakowski in "Main Currents of Marxism".

The problem is that when dissected and stripped of the cryptic language, many fallacies of the Theory become obviously visible... but if you're a believer this is the last thing you want, so the only recommended way of ingesting is total submission to statements of the original text.

@garfiald

Main reason why Marx is hard to read is because in many of his statements he's plainly wrong, but because he very much wanted to be right, he invented a whole new alternative to logic - the dialectical materialism.

When you read Marx, you know he's wrong, but then you're being told that in order to understand the rest you just must disable all critical thinking (because it's "bourgeois") and accept his method.

When not forced to, it's obviously not an easy thing to do.