I already use Linux and FreeBSD.

IMHO modern personal computing is as bullshit as XV century tournament armor.

Something should be done.

Your reading comprehension skill means you can’t have a serious conversation period.

I won’t try a third time.

Why are you arguing about USSR not knowing anything of it?

90% of your comment boils down

No, it doesn’t, that’s what I’m trying to explain you, these things were not because of some economic power disadvantage or even connected to it. It’s not about economic power.

You really don’t understand that the same goods would be available aplenty where they were produced or imported. It was because of Soviet logistics and planning not being functional, do you understand that? What private businesses do in your country, only the state could legally do in USSR, a private citizen trying to do that would be put into fucking jail if caught. And the state couldn’t manage the complexity of planning. The state also didn’t have good feedback for planning due to corruption, gaming metrics, all the things that happen when people providing feedback are the same whose performance is being measured. You don’t have to trust me on that, there are lectures and interviews by people who worked in Gosplan, one can find them in the Internet.

An example - red caviar was rare luxury in most of USSR, but in the areas where it was produced nobody would be able to eat it anymore, so fucking full of it they were. Same with kinds of Soviet beer that nobody far from the brewery’s location remembers actually seeing sold. That example can be repeated for almost any kind of goods.

And about exploitation of global south - LOL, yeah, USSR exploited itself. The thin layer of party official families and foreign communists (Soviet elite had that inferiority complex, so any foreigner in USSR enjoyed special conditions) and komsomol leaders was similar to European settlers in some African country, the rest were like aboriginal population.

That is almost a fundamental statement, requiring logical proof.

It’s like with a computer program that can contain vulnerabilities - fixing vulnerabilities might introduce new ones, and new functionality intended for security can contain new vulnerabilities in itself, possibly making the whole even less secure than without it.

Yes, it’s also that authoritarian leaders grow plenty of friends and relatives who’d done really fucked up things. It’s not in their control to just do the oppression legally and possibly to explain (as in “it was such a time”, “those were imperfect measures and we’ve found a better way”), if they don’t do serial murder\rape and drugs trade and racket and theft, someone of their surroundings will.

That’s probably also why western political climates are slowly becoming more authoritarian - it’s the same mechanism, just much smaller and slower. Maybe it’s not drugs\murders\theft, but it’s gray legal area tax evasion, suppose. Then after a few years it’s something a bit worse, and so on, gradually.

Like it’s impossible to make an eternal engine, it’s impossible to make a political system without this.

Only really true for higher education. It was seen as a sort of “social payment” in exchange for the free education. Better than tuition loans IMO.

Ah, yes, USSR had plenty of “social payments”, it was considered that the reason wages are not so big is that you’ve been given the rest in the form of education, healthcare, everything else. People who were allowed to leave USSR in the 70s had to pay a sum approximating like a year of wages, to “compensate” the state for their education.

Uhhh… Do you think that doesn’t exist in the west right now? What do you think the SCHUFA does in Germany? Do you seriously think high tech companies don’t have a gray-legal-area history of your employment? At least back then it was a thing you could check…

It was worse, an employer could “lose” your labor book, then you were fucked a lot. These things are kinda the opposites of each other, in the USSR the power of that document was the problem I meant. It was like losing an ID. Modern problems where everyone has the information about you, augmented by interpretations and perspectives of various jerks, are different.

…as opposed to capitalism, where you’ll be left unemployed and without a wage if your boss doesn’t like you. What do you prefer?

Such a characteristic would possibly make it very hard to find a new job. In USSR, yes. And not having a job was illegal.

Housewives existed, what are you talking about?

If you mean staying at home all day and not having a job, no they didn’t. Anyway, most Soviet citizens didn’t make enough money for one of the two to not have a job.

If you mean that USSR had kinda backwards views of gender roles, so a woman would not just work all day, but also get back and then do laundry, cooking, cleaning and all that stuff, - then oh yes. That’s what you see in Soviet movies, not housewives in the western sense.

The only way to obtain an income in the Soviet Union was throughout work or throughout a pension (think widows, disabled, or retired people). This was by design, and it’s in my opinion a moral good.

Living off a farm where you alone work would be illegal, for example. Or selling things of some craft.

People on those pensions needed support from their friends and neighbors. They were bad even by Soviet measure.

Colour me surprised: there were racist people in the mid-20th century?! I’m sure that’s exclusive to the Soviet Union!

The particular economic system in which they couldn’t avoid being unemployed or barely employed due to that was.

Tell that to the millions of unemployed and homeless in the USA.

I agree that the lowest of the low was higher in the USSR than in the USA, maybe notably. But the average and the median were much lower.

We are also not talking modern USA, we are talking, suppose, 80s’ USA.

The average material conditions in the Soviet Union, a country that begun to industrialize in 1929, were worse than in the USA, the literal core of world colonialism and imperialism which relies on exploited labour all over the global south, which industrialised in the 19th century. Hmmm, I wonder why that was…

The signum is not surprising, I mean that the scalar is much bigger than you think.

A young family having their own place, even if that’s one room, was not a thing. They’d live with the husband’s parents. Sometimes with the wife’s parents. Maybe with some aunts and uncles. Crammed like sardines. In those modular Khruschev-era houses (and that’s almost the optimal kind, say, I live in a flat in a Stalin-era brick house with high ceilings, that wasn’t common in any way, my grand-grandpa was a civilian railways analog of a general ; some people still lived in communal flats even in the 90s, that’d be one room per family, with common kitchen and bathroom), hearing and smelling all of your neighbors talking, sleeping, fucking, cooking and so on, with leaking walls, cockroaches etc.

There are things you don’t even think about and take them for granted. In USSR you couldn’t buy anything. There were a few basic kinds of goods that could be bought anytime. The rest would happen to be in stores occasionally. On those occasions there’d be enormous queues, people would stand in queues more than half of their time not at work, excluding sleep. People would take days off to stand in queues. To get things you can just buy if you have money. Like - some fruits. Or - some t-shirts. Mundane things.

That free healthcare was also not what you think healthcare to be, being a westerner. Dentists would work without anesthesia, a lot of surgeries would be done without it too or with very basic anesthesia. Doctors would have all kinds of medieval bullshit ideas, so people would be afraid to go to a doctor the normal way, they’d use acquaintances and connections and favors and barters to find a good doctor. Getting various nasty infections in medical institutions was normal.

How do I explain it to you - for a person 60-70 years old now, grown in USSR in a “normal” situation, foreigners, and especially westerners, are some kind of magical creatures from heaven. What you call bad and horrible is, for such a person, much less hopeless than their life when they were 20.

I think they have already switched and went back at some point?

You didn’t, somebody else did. Or maybe you didn’t know it. Or maybe you have such a metabolism. Whatever.

But I always put an effort into separating my clean clothes from my room stink, and making sure I always showered before I left the house.

There is a huge space called depression, in some parts of it people can shower, in some other parts of it people can’t leave the bed.

But I also have the high masking flavor of autism, so maybe that’s why that level of effort has come naturally.

“Masking” and “natural” kinda contradict each other.

Changing wars to be more democratic, so to say.

You might be right, but you are incapable of reasoning to support that.

Also quite a few people who’ve contributed more to the humanity than you or me have minds with much worse rot than mine. Mine is, strictly speaking, not rotting, just weirdly designed, so it’s faulty half the time. =)

There are guys whose parents have spoiled them, but impressed it upon them that they are not spoiled. Behaving like that.

There are also ones like me, whose parents … not neglected them, rather didn’t understand shit about parenting and didn’t really try and were very arrogant, but did that with enough effort to instill the feeling of being spoiled and the shame for it indefinitely.

Nose blindness is terrible when you’re autistic. Or when you just had a vacation with no plans and just spent it all inside killing time being depressed.

I think that other guy was joking and the problem was, I dunno, fearing to stumble when standing up.

How does being so particular in body wash and demanding for accommodations from another guy become compatible with manliness? Especially the latter.

It’s also a bit funny to read “I ain’t no bitch” with caps and punctuation and all that, as if intentionally spelled out. Produces the impression opposite of what they were trying to make.

I think all those movies and series, say, with Jon Snow not cutting his hair (shaving and doing a haircut are not very technologically demanding processes, and starting with Iron Age they were norm in most places), looking greased in shit and wearing an animal skin, and talking in that perpetually hysterical “roaring/whining” voice, and similar portrayals of “real man” as what would be called “gay sex symbol” 50 years ago, have given sprouts.

Encryption is easy, safe key exchange and extension (or whatever it’s called) for messages longer than the key is harder to make right. If every pair of people on the planet had a common ethereal endless source of entropy, then all they’d have to do is encrypt messages with it and provide address in that source.

OK, I should go offline for some time

Frankly movement is all that matters. Too deregulated looks like cryptocurrencies, too regulated looks like PSTN which every phreaker could own, because it relied upon laws for its defense, not technical robustness.

There’s no system that remains working when just kept standing, all that matters is that we can quickly rebuild any part of it. Which is why modern legal systems and modern Web suck so much, they’ve lost that trait.

No, I meant reduce distractions in the UI. Using all the same applications with native look. And reduce epilepsy-inducing elements in that native look.

I meant normal use.

I like GNU Taler, and I would like there to exist not just such a payment system, but also an electronic currency system without blockchains (global synchronization is a pain), unfortunately currencies are not like most applications.

I also wrote two smartass paragraphs completely wrong after this, and now thinking about it - Taler is as good a solution as possible. It’s basically what can be done. You can’t decentralize an issuer or a bank, except for the BTC way. If you can, then you can’t plug it in seamlessly , you need some synchronization (would be a shame if a failed transaction made it into Taler as passed).

If I understand that correctly.

Gosh. It’s year 2025, I’ve achieved nothing. I was blabbering on these subjects in year 2011! I’ll be 29 in less than a month. But so cool that someone is making the humanity better.

That happens to every currency, BTC is more volatile than many, but things can be priced.

Also until twiddling is made illegal, prices can be set by some other currency or some function, and be calculated in BTC from that, and displayed on electronic price tags for example.