MrMakabar

MrMakabar OP , 11 days ago

Nope, they just put up their version of the billboard on some ad companies infrastructure. It is illegal, but does not carry a big punishment, and even so it is not enforced by the police. They even have a guide on how to do it:

http://brandalism.ch/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Brandalism_Subvertising_Manual_web.pdf

MrMakabar , 1 month ago

Oil companies usually do not, but electricity companies do. The problem is that oil companies are great in geology, drilling and chemistry. Geothermal is a similar skill set and chemistry can be used in other products, but the first is small business and the other not renewable nexessarily.

MrMakabar , 1 month ago

And communists and anarchists do not necessarily a problem with personal possessions. The idea is to seize the means of production aka companies and to use those for the public good by transferring them into public or collective ownership. However for consumer goods like clothes, furniture, food, bicycles and so forth would in most cases remain private property, within reasonable levels(no mansions).

So most people would actually gain property in this case, as they have a share in public and collective property.

MrMakabar , 1 month ago

Just to say it the Lower Saxony example is not quite correct. The situation is that they started using Solaris a Unix system in the 90s in the tax department. When Solaris was no longer really developed, they opted to switch to Linux, as it was easier to migrate. However to unify German states tax departments, the previous state government opted to move to Windows. However the migration has so far failed. Mainyl due to the systems never having been designed for Windows in the first place. The other large user of Linux in Lower Saxony is the police and although they migrated from Windows to save some money, they too had problems migrating back as it was just too difficult.

That is just the reality of it. Software is sticky and once you migrate it often stays. Even when politicans do not like that.

MrMakabar , 1 month ago

When you retire, you have to have other people do some work for you. That is kind of a given. Nothing inherintly wrong with it as long as the system is fair.

Also capital has to be held somehow. Obviously things like cooperatives are much better, but workers owing less the average wealth in stocks and housing is not exactly unfair.

The problem is that owning stock is a tool used to bring workers to believe they are capitalist and therefore support their actions

MrMakabar , 2 months ago

Most municipalities do either not care or actually like it, as long as you do it on public property and it is clearly better then the current situation. So badically a site with a lot of weed.

MrMakabar , 2 months ago

Stupid question to the Americans. Why do you not try to built up a further left party in the blue states? Obviously taking the role of president is going to be impossible, but Congress and Senat should be possible for a further left wing party to reach. At that point coalitions have to be formed and that means left wing politics can be inserted. The California Senat is like 80% Democrats, so it should be possible to get maybe 12 Senators in from a genuine left leaning party.

MrMakabar OP , 2 months ago

A lot more. They mobilize workers into political action of all sorts. This means a stronger political left.

MrMakabar , 2 months ago

Macs naturally can not be stolen or obtain second hand as a gift or in some other sort of deal.

MrMakabar , 3 months ago

Which is honestly a huge problem. That old and young people just do not meet outside the workplace anymore. Especially since the very young do not work and the very old do not work anymore.

MrMakabar , 3 months ago

I am gettting Captain Nemo vibes

MrMakabar , 3 months ago

And that is why GDP is such a badly flawed metric and why we should not use it as the one and only way to measure progress.

MrMakabar , 3 months ago

CPI is not good either. Inflation can be fine for most citizens, when they have enough negotiating power to raise their wages with it. In that case it wipes out lenders. That happened in Weimar Germany after WW1, as the unions were strong enough to raise wages fast enough.

Imho something like Genuine Progress Indicator does a better job at measuring how well an economy is doing.

MrMakabar , 3 months ago

Conveniantly for the rich that is.

MrMakabar , 4 months ago

It makes sense in any economy, which has enough material to provide the basics to everybody. We indeed could do it today, even though we have material constraints as we can see with the climate crisis for example.

MrMakabar , 4 months ago

I thought you were genuinly argueing that landlords keep crackheads of the street. Should have been more forgiving.

MrMakabar , 4 months ago

As for the Nordics. With the fall of the USSR you had a massive worker pool starting to compete with the Western workers for jobs. Especially China opening up allowed companies to not negotiate with unions and just offshore jobs. At the same time you had massive growth in the global work force, just from population growth. That gave capitalist the option to offshore jobs and that weakened the labor movement. That really hurt the left in the West a lot, as they obviously had the most expensive workers in the world.

The good news is that this is changing. China and the US are in a trade war. Russia is in a real war. Most of the world already has opened up to capitalism, so the number of locations to offshore to are limited. Population growth is slowing down, with the working age population growing much much slower.

We can already see some changes. Unions are getting stronger in the US. Same story in Europe, with some truely large strikes recently. That probably means better workers rights and so forth in the future. If not with the unions then some other way.

MrMakabar OP , 4 months ago

For sure challenges are a good thing, but freedom is to choose your own challenges and not be forced to do something you do not want to do to survive.

MrMakabar , 4 months ago

So you voted twice and the harm reduction canidate you voted for was not elected. A lot of harm was done by the winning canidates, which were not the harm reduction once. I believe the problem in that case is that the harm reduction canidate was not elected.

Seriously voting takes less then an hour of your time. It is rather easy and if it actually works the consequences can be powerfull. Here in Germany you can really see the differences in new renewables construction depending on the party in power in a given area and time. In the UK there was a wondefull graph showing waiting times for the medical services under Labour(going down) and the Tories(going up).

As for the US there are referendums on a lot of issues, which are run at the same time as big elections to make things easier. Those can have big results. That is how California HSR referendum was done at the same time the first presidential election Obama won was held for example. That was a big win for climate and transport in California and certainly worth going to the elections for. At that point making some more crosses takes something like a minute and worse case they are both corporate dicks and at best the one you voted for actually does something good.

MrMakabar , 4 months ago

It is absolutly a privilege to be able to easily vote and be able to make a difference with it, but that makes it all the worse to throw it away instead of using it for good.

MrMakabar , 5 months ago

I would have thought school maths would have prepared you perfectly for life. In school you learned it with 18 apples, which is clearly to much for a single person. In life you learn in with a paycheck of $500, which is clearly too much for a single person.

MrMakabar , 5 months ago

Unless you have fully automated luxury anarchism you have people working and for a lot of things working in a team is just the way to go. So yes most realistic societies will have Monday. Shitty work has to be done and as you are just not going to be able to have all tasks done by somebody who likes doing them.

That being said without capitalism we can rethink how we use the machines we have and just produce less. We are already able to produce more then enough to give a good life for everybody on the planet. For rich countries halving the workweek is already entirely possible with easily meeting everyone's basic needs rather well. You have to reduce a lot of waste though, like most cars, packaging, flying and so forth.

Also people will probably go to some kind of education. So that is not going to go away. Any society needs skilled people and they need to be taught somehow. So some kind of school would have to be around.

MrMakabar , 8 months ago

Seriously public housing and universal basic income should make sure that I do not have to see some improvised shelters on public squares. This should not happen.

MrMakabar , 8 months ago

Why do you think public housing and universal basic income would not solve the actual underlieing problem of forced homlessness. I have no problem with people camping and large tent cities are perfectly fine, but there needs to be facilities around, which provide some basic services like toilets, waste removal and so forth. So I rather have nomads living in places with some infrastructure to help them out, rather then some random street. However I suspect a lot of people would rather live in proper public housing then in a tent like that.