This is so good

Yes, but they’re not evenly distributed across regions. You could take out every non-US and non-EU AWS region, and most of the top-500 traffic AWS sites would still be up.

I hate to say it because I’m on the side of cars being both an effect and a cause of major negative social issues, but he’s right that you’re dismissing the fact that society forces people to interact with it as it dictates unless you have the money to force otherwise, whether that’s building a whole-ass off-grid house because you have the money, taking a helicopter instead of a car because you have the money, or taking a bike instead of a car because you have the time (which is only going to be the case if you have the money to not have to rely on a time-sensitive wage-based job).

The alternative is often being jobless, which usually means being unhoused, which has so many negative knock-on effects involved that it certainly should not be held up as a reasonable alternative.

Valve isn’t public. That’s the healthy business model.

Any time you attempt to convert it into a usable asset, including using it as collateral or citing it as an asset for loans or investment capital solicitation, it should be taxed. Once someone accepts its value in exchange for something, it’s no longer speculative.

He just wanted to make sure Cortana has image-gen training data.

I was heading to reply to your comment when I discovered my previous one has been deleted. Didn’t seem worth continuing to debate the topic if mod tools would be used to excise the bits of my arguments that you didn’t like.

I certainly haven’t revised Marxism any more than Lenin did by your own argument (since advancements are literally revisions anyways).

“Political class” was me attempting to avoid getting into what I assumed would be an unproductive debate about how the politburo and other central committee members were clearly not of the working class based on their power and lifestyles; I was not asserting it as an actual part of Marxist class hierarchy.

And using “we’re collectivist not horizontalist” is a great euphemism for saying “we’ll recreate the vertical structures of class stratification, but claim the collective Will as we do so”.

Look, I think you and I probably agree at the root about Communism vs Capitalism. I think where we diverge is that I don’t think Marxism needs to be “advanced” to function within the confines of a State-dominated Capitalist world and operate as peer-states, which is what Lenin was trying to do.

I think the beauty of Marxism (as well as many other forms of Socialism, including ones Marx considered Utopian) is partially that it rejects the instinct to play using the rules and language that Capitalists and Statists use to order the world (and the language absolutely controls the mental and therefore social models).

If you start trying to alter it so that you can just have a peer-state operating under a Socialist model of labor organization, you’re still going to fall prey to the inherent re-structuring that States as structures naturally undergo due to how inter-national power works.

Why did the USSR collapse? I think you and I both agree it’s not due to it failing on it’s own, nor due to it being somehow destroyed by the US and their cronies (though they certainly did everything they could to harm it, they couldn’t ever destroy it without military action, which is capitalism’s go-to method of “competition”). In my view, it’s because its Statist governing* model was intrinsically incompatible with its Socialist social and labor model in the long run.

Yes, absolutely. Laziness (on anyone’s part) isn’t the result of or unique to AI use. That includes laziness on the part of schools in not doing their job in staffing properly, and pushing professors and teachers to pick up the slack.

Calling my comment where I’m arguing for Marxism “anti-Socialist” is hilarious. Guess only the one form of Socialism that the mod likes is real Socialism, huh?

The article is really discussing bachelor degrees, and this is mostly true for those. Masters and doctorate degrees (or med school or law school, etc) are where specialized learning that actually sets you up for specialized roles happens.

The pre-med student who stopped after getting their bachelor’s is not meaningfully better prepared to be your doctor or psychologist than someone with no degree. You wouldn’t trust either one.

It’s not just posers, it’s also an issue of just being easy, so even a seasoned, experienced professor can use it to avoid hours of prep for materials that would then be above the cut of the LLM content. Still lowers the standard, but without even changing the professors.

I just started a new job, and after I (imo) aced the remote interview, they brought me in for an in-person, which didn’t seem unusual. I was surprised when they started asking all the same questions as in the remote and take-home interviews, but clearly they’ve been hitting issues with this.

Removed by mod

Marx never intended there to be a vanguard party, and Engels literally said, “Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat”. The universal suffrage that Marx explicitly did credit to the Commune, that made the Commune closest to real statelessness and classlessness, was totally abolished by Lenin (I think he actually called it “bourgeoise fetishism” in one critique).

Marx also never defined DotP in terms of violence, it was purely about class rule by the proletariat over the bourgeoise, as where Lenin explicitly defined it as requiring violent suppression of the bourgeoise by the proletariat. Marx always left open peaceful transitions to socialist rule, whereas Lenin explicitly ruled that out, and their definitions of DotP are at their core unaligned because of that. DotP was, to Marx, what happened as the state began to dissolve towards actual stateless Communism. To Lenin, it was (as I said before) a mandate to state power for the party (insert “stop resisting, you’re being liberated” meme).

Whether you think Lenin was justified given his circumstances, a minority class of ‘party-conscious’ executives “leading” the proletariat while also suppressing and later banning rival socialist parties and party factions, is absolutely not what Marx intended DotP to look like.

Lenin also asserted the inability of the proletariat to form class consciousness in ways that, to me as a non-Leninist look like a validation of Trotsky’s early criticisms (and obviously Trotsky was right in the end about ‘substitutionism’, and about Stalin). Lenin couldn’t openly disparage proletariat rule for obvious reasons, but he did attempt to draw heavy distinctions between the proletariat and revolutionary leaders themselves, such as asserting that the proletariat would only achieve “trade-union consciousness” without the party (leaders) there to essentially save them from themselves.

It’s funny you explicitly contrast Marxism against anarchism, because that feels like the colloquial meaning of anarchism? Otherwise, you’re essentially ruling out the eventual dissolution of State and Class, which is a form of anarchism.

Communism is not communalism, but it is heavily based on the Commune as a structure (I mean, Marx was literally drawing on the Paris Commune in formulating it) and means of governing by consensus of the proletariat.

Too many communists make a “survival of the fittest”-like mistake when trying to understand DoTP as Marx intended it, which was a descriptive state where the actions of the Proletariat as a body signify their collective will, and only conceptualize it as Lenin bastardized it, which was as a prescriptive mandate for authority by the State.

It is an awful lot of human life, but it’s certainly not all human life, by any measure.

My tongue-in-cheek quip about human evolution was in response to your hyperbole about human existence being threatened.

My version is: people calling themselves communists, but then extolling all the great things that a state can do by calling top-down social control “consensus” of the proletariat, and who clearly don’t actually want to engage with the ‘commune’ part of communism.

Sorry, what biological change in humans made it such that humans as a species require electricity to survive? Or that made it a prerequisite to “treating human life with value”?

Methinks you are conflating maintenance of the human species and maintenance of your desired quality of life.

Sorry, I think I wasn’t being entirely clear in my meaning:

The Internet is actually just sets of data transmission protocols. The servers that the Internet connects to each other are where actual content lives, but who they are owned by, and their content retention policies and choices, are completely opaque and variable. That’s why relying on websites for long-term storage is a bad idea. YouTube can (and has) deleted entire decades worth of content with no justification or recourse.

Communication is very different than data storage, and data transmission, which is what the Internet is at its core, is essentially synonymous with the former. It excels at facilitating communication.

But storage of data for any period? Unless you know the owners of the site, its financials, its data retention policies, etc, you don’t really have any guarantees that the thing you posted yesterday will be there tomorrow.

And I don’t think that’s bad, I think it’s just the nature of the Internet.

The Internet is a transmission medium. The content shouldn’t last forever, that’s the wrong use of the medium. Books are much better offline information storage, if longevity is your goal.

When I think back to the stories and posts I’ve published online over the years, do I really think others who aren’t in the group and time they were for really want to go back and read those? Would my middle school GeoCities sites really be benefiting anyone? Imo the recent pipeline of fanfic and YouTube creators moving into traditional media is a good thing, and is more likely to preserve (some of) the good stuff in a way that AO3 or YT alone won’t.

I think the thing we’ve lost more recently is medium-term information retention, mostly as forums die(d), but I think that’s a very solvable problem.