might be as much as you can do as a single individual.

Therefore, do all of that but also: organize. Collectively, we have more power. Depending on one’s situation, e.g. a union, tenants’ union and/or mutual aid groups can be things that not only help your own life, but also build power against the oligarchy and gives the feeling you can enable change.

No, definitely not.

I’m not that experienced with http(s) hosting, but for the two sites I host, I used Certbot with nginx. It seems the combination of the two does the same thing as caddy which was suggested a few times.

So you could either install certbot and point it to your working nginx http config (then certbot will try to get the ssl certificates and modify the nginx config so it works for https and https connections are preferred) or ditch nginx for caddy.

That’s a weak argument because everything used by normal citizens is, in practice, always used by the big corpos against the normal citizens in much greater quantity and with much more force.

Now that I think of it, it’s no argument at all because I already admitted, that under capitalism, you might not have another choice to get paid for your work. That still doesn’t make it morally good or logically sound.

Of course it’s work finding solutions to problems and you should be able to live off your work. And in capitalism, a patent sometimes is the only option to do so.

However, patents and other forms of “intellectual property” are absolutely illogical and amoral. Nobody ever made a completely new thing. Every innovation builds on so much knowledge accumulated by so many people that came before. It’s absolutely nonsensical that an advancement that’s 99 % an achievement of humanity and 1 % of a single person should belong to that single person.

Is what you describe really socialism though? Western leftists would probably call these policies social democracy. And yes, they make the life of people in that country better! Relatively high minimum wages, limits on prices (or price increases) for certain things (especially housing), mandatory paid sick leave, mandatory unemployment insurance, and so on are all things that some European countries have in some form or another. And yes, that makes most of our lives (I’m German) relatively great.

However, most of the housing, factories and land are still owned by capitalists. They still exploit their workers and tenants, the policies only soften the blows. In recent decades, the concentration of capital in a few families’ hands has also skyrocketed here, which gives them political power (sometimes openly, sometimes covertly) and led to the erosion of many of these social democratic benefits. Also, a lot of the high social security in the west in the past century was only possible thanks to exploitation of people and nature in the global south.

That’s why many leftists, at least in the west, don’t think that social democracy is enough in the long term. Many even see social democrats as stabilizing the fundamentally corrupt capitalist system by covering up that corruption. For most of us, socialism would mean that, at the very least, big corporations are owned and lead by the workers themselves. That could be cooperatives in markets (market socialism) or that could be some kind of planned economy (not only state central planning, there’s also proposals for somewhat or even totally distributed/decentralized schemes). The point here is that there are no more owners of productive forces, who don’t participate themselves in production, i.e. capitalists. The existence of a separate capitalist class with a lot of power and opposed to the workers is a common denominator for unneccessary misery in this world. Eliminating that class (that doesn’t mean eliminating the people, only expropriating them) would not magically solve all problems in the world, but it would make us freer to seek effective measures.

It was considered by some, I believe. This author wanted to avoid displacing anyone, though. Of course, many in Germany at that time were guilty in some way, so it would have been justifiable. But it would have always been a cause for tension, which, no matter how justified or morally right it would have been, in practice would lead to tensions similar to those in Israel/Palestine today.

If they really carry out war operations from civilian hotels and office buildings, that is a huge war crime. It’s telling that the NYT doesn’t mention this and I have heard nothing of it in European media.

No, it’s not. Not seeing that it’s capitalism is the reductive view. Instead of trying to type down a huge text while I’m tired, I’d like to introduce a 112 year-old text that still seems extremely relevant today:

Moreover, capitalist production, by its very nature, cannot be restricted to such means of production as are produced by capitalist methods. Cheap elements of constant capital are essential to the individual capitalist who strives to increase his rate of profit. In addition, the very condition of continuous improvements in labour productivity as the most important method of increasing the rate of surplus value, is unrestricted utilisation of all substances and facilities afforded by nature and soil. To tolerate any restriction in this respect would be contrary to the very essence of capital, its whole mode of existence. After many centuries of development, the capitalist mode of production still constitutes only a fragment of total world production. Even in the small Continent of Europe, where it now chiefly prevails, it has not yet succeeded in dominating entire branches of production, such as peasant agriculture and the independent handicrafts; the same holds true, further, for large parts of North America and for a number of regions in the other continents. In general, capitalist production has hitherto been confined mainly to the countries in the temperate zone, whilst it made comparatively little progress in the East, for instance, and the South. Thus, if it were dependent exclusively, on elements of production obtainable within such narrow limits, its present level and indeed, its development in general would have been impossible. From the very beginning, the forms and laws of capitalist production aim to comprise the entire globe as a store of productive forces. Capital, impelled to appropriate productive forces for purposes of exploitation, ransacks the whole world, it procures its means of production from all corners of the earth, seizing them, if necessary by force, from all levels of civilisation and from all forms of society. The problem of the material elements of capitalist accumulation, far from being solved by the material form of the surplus value that has been produced, takes on quite a different aspect. It becomes necessary for capital progressively to dispose ever more fully of the whole globe, to acquire an unlimited choice of means of production, with regard to both quality and quantity, so as to find productive employment for the surplus value it has realised. From Rosa Luxemburg: The Accumulation of Capital, Chapter 26 - The Reproduction of Capital and Its Social Setting

This passage is kind of an introduction to Rosa Luxemburg’s definition of imperialism. Back then, capitalism was not yet developed in the whole world and she argued that simply because it’s a question of survival for companies, these companies will push for the right to exploit the whole world. And now, 112 years later, I’m pretty sure we can agree that happened. And in the past few decades, when they can’t expand spacially, now it’s all about squeezing every last bit of profit from nature, the workers and the consumers.

The particular ideology oligarchies are using to justify their rule is incidental.

Here, we have a point of agreement. The USSR developed into something that was no better than capitalist states. In my opinion, that’s because it’s bureaucracy developed into something very similar to the burgeoisie in capitalism, resource hoarders led by self-interest.

But I believe your answer built on another false dichotomy here. The alternative to capitalism I have in mind isn’t a one-party state with central planning and communist aesthetics. I’m more of a proponent of decentralized power, dismantling the state and people governing their surroundings cooperatively.

That’s a false dichotomy. We can also improve our technology while ditching capitalism.

Nothing factually wrong with the article, but it has this sound of “this technology will solve all our problems” to it that I find highly problematic. Seven out of nine planetary boundaries are exceeded, climate change just being one of them. And all of them are exceeded because of our wasteful and growth-oriented way of life.

with lfp at about 200 Wh/kg which still is less than Lithium Ion.

LFP is a lithium-ion technology. You probably meant “worse than NMC”, which is another, older, higher density but less safe lithium-ion technology.

Yeah, uneducated people might say something like that.

I’ve been lurking on r/thedeprogram for about two years and have seen Smith’s opinions on landlords there multiple times, and upvoted into the thousands. Pretty sure you don’t know what you’re talking about.

Edit: high hundreds, not thousands.

Sadly, my internet connection where I’m at is abysmal and lemmy doesn’t let me upload some examples. Fun fact though: OP’s meme was posted on theDeprogram two years ago.

Tankies also love to rub Adam Smith’s opinions under liberals’ and conservatives’ noses…

Not OP. I’ve been using Ecosia for years and was glad they didn’t do the AI summary shit so far… But a few days ago I got an AI summary on Ecosia as well. I fear they’re also hopping on this train and in that case I’ll look for another search engine.

In other languages that shouldn’t be equal either though, right?

Maybe you meant

if (2){
console.log("nonzero ints are truthy")
}
else {
console.log("no they're not")
}

Which would output

nonzero ints are truthy

and that would actually work in all languages I know. But that’s different from being equal.

It’s not. Just tried in my Browser Console:

2 == true // returns false

Mh, ‘0’ is a nonempty string, so !‘0’ returns false. Then of course !(!‘0’) would return true. I’d absolutely expect this, Python does the same.

And the second thing is just JavaScript’s type coercion shenanigans. In Python

bool('0') # returns True because of nonempty string
bool(int('0')) # returns False because 0 == False

Knowing that JavaScript does a lot of implicit type conversions, stuff like that doesn’t strike me as very surprising.

No, OP refers to Bill Clinton allegedly having been an Epstein client.