Coming out of the military with a decent MOS or G.I. Bill is one of the few paths to real class mobility left for a lot of people.

For now. They have already screwed over a huge chunk of people who were enrolled in loan forgiveness for federal service and continually screw vets over with the intentionally horrible VA system. I’d not count on the GI Bill surviving Trump.

Now they’re prompt kiddies

It’s also, I find, much more widely supported on a wider variety of hardware and with easier config automation.

Not really. They were going that way but backpedaled after having it made clear that they’re never going to be BambuLab. I have a K1C. It gives root with an on-screen disclaimer. The only real challenge is that it overwrites everything when updating. It’s Linux though, so, if I spend the time, once I setup my home server, I should be able to automate reloading the config.

Platinum Preppy. Cheap and cheerful with the capability of taking a converter, different nips, and being converted into a refillable marker. Amazingly versatile pen.

Oh it’s the same shit as feudalism, but with technology… Thanks for letting me know that’s what Techno-Feudalism means.

Understanding the meaning and context of terms is very important.

… I guess we could add “global” to the front of it so you know it’s not just happening in a castle in 14th century Europe, but all across the planet.

I find “neo-feudalism” more appropriate. The previous incarnation already spanned the known world at the time.

Like, how many castles were in Europe? Okay, compare that to how many Amazon’s there are? It’s not the same thing at all

That’s really a comparison that makes me think that, perhaps, learning more about feudal history would do us all good. A more apt comparison would be “how many Vaticans were there?” (depending on the time period, two).

Rome was the seat of power through much of feudalism in the Common Era in Europe. Castles were extensions of the theocratic empire centered there, providing physical and visual/psychological enforcement of that power. Despite all of the war and megalomaniacal bickering, the feudal lords and kings all had the same boss.

There’s less difference than you apparently think.

Sorry, I don’t have time for this mind dulling discussion.

I’m sorry that you don’t know enough about history to understand how nearly identical the two are and didn’t mean to cause distress, not knowing how attached to the term you were.

G’luck.

Exactly. And it makes it seem more special or at least a new idea. It’s not. We already have historical knowledge of what has worked in throwing off the shackles of monarchy and what hasn’t.

I’ve read Varifakous and don’t find his claim that it’s anything new beyond the technologies used to be at all compelling.

So no, the use of fuedalism isn’t to indicate something about old school mechanisms of war, weaponry, brutality, or repression. It’s a reference to the role of economic serfdom and the economic aspects of fuedalism.

Teotihuacan was the center on an empire but it had no military.

What I’m saying is that they even go with divine mandate at this point. Just because their not jousting and are using abstractions that are enabled by modern technology instead of castles doesn’t make it fundamentally a different, new thing. Commerce and who could engage in it was heavily regulated by feudal lords and organizations that they ran or allowed to run.

It’s literally just the same shit with better technology. The far-right isn’t that creative.

Criticizing an Arab for voting for a Jew is peak antisemitism.

Know how I can tell that you are not communicating in good faith? Take a guess.

Would you care to explain how Stein’s religion, which I neither know about nor care about, is at all relevant? Or how disliking her as a politician, as well as human being, for her links to oligarchs and consistent lack of plausible effort to improve the US through political means has anything to do with what you suggest her religion is? Because claiming that involvement in that shit is stems from judaism seems pretty damn antisemitic of yourself (none of my hebros are inclined to associate with authoritarian dictators and I’d wager that they do more to affect positive change in their communities than she has in her lifetime).

Now, maybe you made some incorrect assumptions in a heated context. You can feel free to own up to that, if it is the case.

millions will starve in developing nations and 100s of thousands more will die from preventable diseases.

It’s also literally in-line with the faux-left accelerationists’ dogma:

Phase 1 - Make the world worse by helping the far-Right take over governments. This will lead to increased suffering domestically and internationally. Phase 2 - ? Phase 3 - Working class solidarity and uprising resulting in socialist utopia.

(Phase 2, historically, likely involves either a few centuries of oppression, and/or global armed conflict and genocide, but that’s a sacrifice that they’re willing to make.)

The lesson: People find your views on pesto reprehensible.

The other parts about continuing to make one’s own food are ok though.

Welcome!

Techno-Feudalism

I’ll say it, yet again. It’s just feudalism. “Techno-Feudalism” has nothing different enough to it to differentiate it as even a sub-type of feudalism. It’s just the same thing all over again, using technological advances to improve the ability to monitor and impose control over the populace. Historical feudalists also leveraged technology to cement their rule (plate armor, cavalry, crossbows, cannon, mills, control of literacy, etc).

Oh. You voted for a different Putin puppet whose party has made no attempt to run a real campaign in the US and clearly (and vocally) had no intent on winning. Very helpful.

EDIT: Oh. I see that you are a tankie from the grad. Bad faith to be expected.

Mathematically, that is the case.

That would be reasonable. The people running these things aren’t reasonable. They ignore every established mechanism to communicate a lack of consent to their activity because they don’t respect others’ agency and want everything.

They are not smart. They are just pathologically greedy people born to wealth.

I am not exactly defending this particular scheme but the source code is available under a free software license. It’s only the binaries that are under a proprietary EULA.

I’ll believe it after review and approval by the OSI. It still is philosophically in direct conflict with the Open-Source Movement by making software less accessible to end users and especially non-technical users than it is to corpos.

Look. I get you. But, it it were up to me, I’d have been gone during the Bush II years and I’m still stuck here.

This place has fucked me up enough already. Despite doing “everything right” in my studies, my first career, in scientific research, died before it began, thanks to the ultra-wealthy causing a global recession. Every day I wonder if it’s going to be the day that I hear that my trans sibling has been taken or died a death of despair. I lost a cousin to cancer because she couldn’t get treatment due to the nazi’s handling of COVID. I’m in therapy because of serious childhood trauma. I’m childless, despite wanting to have children my whole life (have never been in a position to afford them and my spouse is disabled, so, I’ll likely never have the energy to parent anyway). I know that, no matter how much I put into a 401k, it’s never going to be enough for me to retire. The current head of the CDC has suggested putting people like me in forced labor camps.

I spent decades being politically active and trying to get others active, voting, and engaging with reps only to have tankies and centrists actively sabotage any attempt to realistically pull the country Left without the massive amount of death and suffering (especially experienced by vulnerable people) that tankies circlejerk about trying to cause.

Nothing that I do here has any ability to change things in the country for the better within my lifetime, which is likely to be cut short due to living in this country during the ongoing fascist coup that everyone around me is still in denial about. Sure, I help out neighbors and the like as they need it and I’m able. If we meet and you need help, I’ll absolutely help you if I can.

I’m not going to Luigi someone or join the Maquis - I am needed too much by my family. Nor am I going to opt-out - I’m too filled with spite over what was stolen to make things any easier for them. And I’m sorry but, if I can get my family out, I will.

What right does Moscow have to impose its will on other sovereign nations? None.