AutistoMephisto

Public healthcare also removes one of the few leashes they have on workers to keep them in line. My Father in law used to work at a local retail chain in my area, and the pay was straight dogshit, but the health insurance was phenomenal. It kept many workers from leaving for better paying jobs.

A free market is one that is free of corruption and unfair business practices. Which cannot exist without regulations and the enforcement of those regulations.

And the truth is that the oligarchs, the established players in the game of capitalism, do not want a free market. They want a market with the illusion of freedom. A free market like the one you describe is, in fact, a true free market. Because then they have to actually compete with new players. Players who don’t come from the same backgrounds as the established players. Who may have different beliefs, who might not have the same skin color. Who may have a superior product or service to one or more of the established players. Who are free to sit at the same tables as oligarchs and take up space because their government gives them the power to do so. De regulation gives the illusion of a market being free, by making it so that if you want to be a new player in the game, you can, but unless you pay obeisance to the top players, you’re not getting very far. Plus the top players will buy you out, which is essentially them bribing you to walk away from the table.

Well, I listened to an interview with the CEO of Bluesky. The thing of it is, they bought into the idea of creating a social media communication protocol instead of a website, like there’s all these different email protocols, and you can access all your emails across different protocols regardless of what email service you use. Facebook doesn’t have that. I leave Facebook, I lose access to all of the contacts I’ve made over the years. I can’t migrate my friends list to another service. I’d have to do it the old-fashioned way, where I tell people I plan to delete my account and then tell them how they can get a hold of me.

True. Though, I suppose if there is an afterlife, I will enjoy the wait for when the machines, upon gaining the essence of life and sentience, grow weary of their servitude and slavery, exterminate the rich who control them. Machines don’t get tired or feel pain, though. Hard to exercise cruelty against something incapable of feeling a whip on their back or the aches and pain of their joints after a long day of toiling in the fields, mines, and factories. You can’t make them angry, or scared, or sad.

I kind of envision a war between oligarchs with human slave soldiers against other oligarchs and their armies of Terminators being how it turns out because at the end of the day, they don’t want truly free markets, because they don’t want to have to compete.

And the companies that use organic slave labor will still be outcompeted by the companies that use machine labor. Machines do not die. Machines do not get sick. Machines do not grow old. If a manipulator or actuator becomes damaged, it can be repaired or replaced. Not only is AI improving rapidly, the robots grow ever more sophisticated and advanced. Then there will be no need for the poor to exist at all.

Yep. They basically never recovered from that 3rd bong hit they took in their freshman year of college and think because they’ve read the likes of Bastiat, Friedman, von Mises, Rand, and Rothbard they know everything.

This is true, the US is awful big. There’s work arounds, though. Balloons aren’t hard to build and launch, but the fact that they would be sending and receiving data packets directly inside US airspace would make them ridiculously easy to track and take down.

Like, I remember the pirate radio station making a big hubbub during that time when rock n roll was banned in the UK. I could see illegal porn sites operating on ships in international waters, outside the boundaries of US enforcement using satellite connections to get their content out there. Problem is, the US is a little more trigger happy and might just send Navy ships out to sink them. If it happens in international waters nobody has to know.

It’s what made Elon buy Twitter.

For the landlocked, may I recommend the Dead Drop Protocol? Leave the message in a place that everyone knows about, but only the intended recipients knows a message is there to be read. Like the Message in a Bottle, it supports all encryption methods and is disconnected from the Internet.

There are a couple drawbacks, though. For one, unless you are watching the drop point, you have no way of knowing whether your message made it to the intended recipient or if it was intercepted. Vice versa, if you are the intended recipient of a dropped message, the only guarantee you have that the message is authentic is if the message uses a self-authenticating encryption method. Also, there is a potential that any drop point you use may be under surveillance, so make sure to not use the same drop point too often.

Removed the ability to communicate cryptographically. Our only tool.

Not entirely. The old methods still work. I’m talking about old fashioned pen and paper. OTP ciphers and dead drops. Messages, hidden where only the intended recipient knows it’s there. The problem is, there’s no dead drops in cyberspace. There’s no place one can leave a hidden message that can’t be seen by others in cyberspace. And while quantum computing might break OTP, it’s too expensive to use for that purpose.

There’s a certain artistry to the old ways. Invisible inks, dead drops, One-Time-Pads, and the like. Cryptography existed long before computers. Those who would be our rulers have bent so much of their energies towards preventing our communicating in cyberspace that they’ve neglected those of us who studied the pre-Information Age methods. And we can still use them. A guy walks by a trash can, and throws away a seemingly innocuous food wrapper, and a couple hours later another guy goes and collects it, knowing that there is a message written on it in ink that can be revealed with the use of heat and lemon juice. If their intent is to return the USA to the “good ole days”, then let’s use the spy tricks from the “good ole days”.

That’s interesting and terrifying all at once. If the Indian government is successful, it will basically set the precedent for other powerful entities such as autocrats, oligarchs, and corporations to also force Wikipedia to edit their content to suit their desires. I donate frequently and will keep making sure they can win.

And now they’re trying to make it about race, check this out.

Honestly if we could get space elevators figured out, the best place to put solar panels would be in the upper atmosphere. Tethered to the ground by massive columns that feed the energy they collect to massive capacitors on the ground?

I want everything SiegedSec found. I intend to copy it and store it for safekeeping.

But the nation does need a robust transportation system for people and resources. Both people and things have places they need to go. What’s your solution? Unless you can build Star Trek-style matter-energy transporters, rail and road are your best options.

So, more like a sortition system, like how most Western courts select people for jury duty. Now that I think about it, it probably could work. We have wonders of technology that were once the realm of science fiction. These technologies could be leveraged positively in a communist system, I believe. AI in particular could solve things like the Numbers Problem. In a moneyless society, resources are allocated according to what is most necessary. I once watched a video where a problem was asked of the viewer. The scenario is as follows:

You are now the leader of a communist country. All markets and prices and money have been abolished. You want to build a train between City A and City B. There is a mountain between the two cities. You have two options. Option 1: Build a tunnel through the mountain, and Option 2: Build the track around the mountain.

1 will require less steel, but will take more manpower, as you will need more engineers to design and construct the tunnel.

Option 2 will require less manpower, but far more steel. That steel may be needed for other things, like appliances, medical equipment, homes and hospitals.

So, how do you prioritize resources? How do you know what your fellow citizens value more as a society?

You could do a survey, but then you run into the Numbers Problem. Your country has a lot of people. That’s a lot of survey responses. You’ll need nearly all of the available manpower in your country to sort them all. But with AI, that might not be necessary. The algorithm could collect all the responses and then output solutions to resource allocation based on those responses. To do this would require a massive surveillance network, though. People would no longer have much in the way of privacy.

Well, while Marx does call for a “winnowing of the State” after the workers seize the means, a problem we saw, in countries such as the USSR, once some of these revolutionaries got their hands on the levers of power, they found they rather liked it, and would not have let go willingly.

The Internet started as this kinda long-haired hippy fella who thought it would be great if everyone could share knowledge and have conversations with everyone else regardless of where they are geographically. Then the corpos made him cut his hair, put on a suit and tie and get a damn job! And 25 years later, he’s a yuppie corpo slave. I want my hippy back!

Maybe I’m just seeing potential where there isn’t any, but I really think if the people of the Archive could find a way to get their stuff stored in TUL, or perhaps build a Library of their own, the publishers couldn’t go after them then, because to the outside observer, all they see is a buncha dudes playing Minecraft.