It just proves that property rights are, and always have been, arbitrary, based on power and material incentives. Not the inalienable rights that liberals think they are.

Tbh I can’t remember the last time windows troubleshooter actually solved a single problem when trying to help people with their PCs. And there’s like a fraction of a percent of the amount of discussion and documentation online for Windows versus Linux. A lot of problems for the former are literally just unsolvable.

“Now look how the bosses do things! They have a good wish to make out like honest people with the worker from whom they buy labor power, with the merchant from whom they buy raw materials, but they have an eternal flaw, and the rest of us workers, who know how the industry works, shall go on strike. But to sell a commodity for more than it is worth is like selling with false weights, which is illegal. Therefore, if the workers were to expose their bosses’ tricks, they would be forced to close their factories; and to produce goods based on need, maybe they would open large government facilities; that would be much better.”

So the daydreaming worker arrived at home; and there, dined, went to bed, and slept deeply, dreaming of the disappearance of bosses and the creation of government workshops.

Sleep, poor friend, sleep in peace, while hope still rests within you. Sleep in peace, for the disappointing day will soon come. Soon you will learn how your boss can sell their goods for profit, without defrauding anyone. He will make you see how one becomes a capitalist, and a large capitalist, while remaining perfectly honest.

Now your dreams will never again be so peaceful. You will see capital in your nights, like a nightmare, that presses you and threatens to crush you. With terrified eyes you will see it get fatter, like a monster with one hundred proboscises that feverishly search the pores of your body to suck your blood. And finally you will learn to assume its boundless and gigantic proportions, its appearance dark and terrible, with eyes and mouth of fire, morphing its suckers into enormous hopeful trumpets, within which you’ll see thousands of human beings disappear: men, women, children. Down your face will trickle the sweat of death, because your time, and that of your wife and your children will soon arrive. And your final moan will be drowned out by the happy sneering of the monster, glad with your state, so much richer, so much more inhumane.

Try for yourself https://github.com/ShiftHackZ/Stable-Diffusion-Android

But that’s (very clearly) beside the point, which is that you can run a variety of models locally on your PC or phone for miniscule energy. Once a model is trained the damage has already been done.

As always, it’s the corporations using the resources and doing the damage, so pearl clutching about random individuals is less than useless.

Training models takes a stupid amount of energy. Using them after the fact uses very little.

I could generate something like this on my phone using any of the dozens of local models.

Trotsky is good at appearing “right” because he plays fast and loose with the details so he can retroactively claim to have been for or against something after it already happened.

One example off the top of my head (forgive me if I misremember the specifics) is the NEP, which according to Trotsky and Trotskyites was originally his idea that Lenin initially disagreed with but eventually came around to. But, ignoring the fact that timing matters and a year is a long-ass time in a revolutionary period, the details also matter, since the goal wasn’t to retreat to capitalism but to very carefully reintroduce certain market incentives to help develop certain sectors of the economy that had been obliterated during the war. So you can’t just claim “oh I had this idea first” when your idea, at least according to Lenin, would overly benefit the Kulak class without adequately fostering a respective proletariat (or something along those lines). Lenin goes into this in great detail both when he dismisses Trotsky’s plan and also when he introduced the NEP.

But he was also an asshole, notoriously elitist and dismissive of anyone he deemed intellectually inferior.

Honestly reading through the debates and speeches from the party meetings and congresses is great for breaking through a lot of the ahistorical western bullshit.

Long history of wrecking/coopting movements and orgs.

I know good individual trots, but the trot orgs in my area are all white college students that show up uninvited to things they had no party in organizing, then selling shit or starting fights. We have a lot of coalition building among MLs, anarchists, and DSA types here, and it’s always the Trots that refuse to find common ground or show any support whatsoever. Their praxis consists of wrecking/splitting, raising money, and defending sex pests.

eBay Thinkpad all the way. T460-480 are what I usually go for. Easily less than 200 bucks.

Lmao imagine the Chinese equivalent to Epstein is getting photos of people with Winnie the Pooh contraband and using that to keep them in line

Power dynamics

I’d be happy paying taxes if they went to social works and infrastructure and whatnot, but yeah.

Now let’s talk about spending 60-80% of my remaining income on rent

Just a stupid joke on the tendency people have to try to reconstruct etymology from the top down rather than bottom up, often using tenuous logical connections lol

Boomers are called that because they were born after the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Zoomers are the generation of high speed rail and fast cars

Gen alpha are all chads due to the hormones used in agriculture

By that logic, there must have been a baby zoom in the '90s

lmao what is it with people trying to map abstract political concepts onto geometric and spacial shapes?

The colloquial meaning of “liberal” used by some Americans does not align with how it’s used in political theory. That’s okay, words have different meaning in different contexts.

“Left” and “right” stem from the French Revolution (1789!) where the people who sat on the left of the National Assembly were progressives that supported the revolution and people who sat on the right were conservatives that wanted to preserve the old system. Liberalism (as defined in political theory, not colloquially) is the dominant global ideology and thus is no longer progressive or radical. It may have been progressive when monarchy was the main form of government, propping up feudalism as the main economic structure. But that’s obviously not how the world works 200+ years later

Liberalism was “the left” in the 1700s and has desperately tried to maintain that label ever since, all while doing anything it can to preserve the status quo with violence.

Government itself arises out of conflict between classes, and the fundamental mechanism of capitalism is accumulation. The former means without pretty intensive upheaval and reorientation of governmental systems, the institutions are unlikely to interfere with the core function they were designed to protect. The latter means that no matter what protections you put in place, by the very nature of how it works, capitalism will trend towards monopoly.

Magnolia is probably his best performance, but hard to say how much of that is him disappearing into the role versus the role giving us a peek behind the mask lol

Seems like a pretty reasonable semantic shift to me.

We have will, it just isn’t perfectly free. Our consciousness emerges out of a confluence of intersecting forces, and itself has the ability to influence the flows around it. But to pretend it’s removed from those flows and forces, or exists in some vacuum, is nonsensical, as is pretending that there isn’t some essence behind the signifier “self”.