Uriel238 [all pronouns]

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • He’s doing a suck job of it. The things he’s gutting are pennies towards his dark-souled oligarch masters. Cutting small government projects like the NEA, PBS or like FOSS grants is only used as an appeal to fiscal responsibility conservatives that aren’t willing to cut into old-people benefits like Social Security and military sacred cows. Not because gutting tiny projects does anything useful, rather it gives the vibe that representatives are doing something.

    This is an appeal to the imbicile MAGA though the tech bros might have specific FOSS projects that compete with their own commercial offerings. Not enough to cut all FOSS grants, though.



  • As Richard J. Murphy notes, when money goes into the hands of billionaires, it leaves the economy, getting tied up in bank reserves (or corporate reserves if invested) and into literal vaults. That money is no longer in motion, propelling trade, but gets trapped dormant.

    This is why when wealth distribution graph is deeply bowed, the economy gets austere.

    And as Leeja Miller notes, historically the only way such wealth ever gets redistributed to public interest (either directly to the public, or into a good-faith public-serving state) has been through violence.

    Disclaimer: This is not a call for violence, only that corrections in history have involved piling aristocratic heads high after a takeover by force. The 20th century has seen a lot of progress in non-violent revolution.

    Right now the ownership class has a powerful propaganda machine to dissuade protest, and mass suffering tends to lead to violent reprisal, especially when families see their own vulnerable suffering and dying, so if we don’t figure out some peaceful action that creates movement, we’ll end up with a lot of self-radicalized folk eager to die in action just to express themselves.



  • Governments have long wanted backdoors on secure private communication, and so long as we have an ownership class, they always will.

    And backdoors will always be more useful to hackers, industrial spies and terrorists than they are these departments of state looking to ensure national security (or watch for proletariat unrest. We’re already pissed.)

    And the private sector will always route around these backdoors, possibly by modding the client or offering new services that are still secure.

    States should get used to disappointment. Investigation bureaus should prepare for going dark. Once upon a time they had to rely on detective work rather than asking Google whose phones were near the incident or what web-surfers were asking questions about the circumstances pre-hoc.