@cdarwin@c.imRepublicans are all abuzz about socialism because the party’s political prospects look dire this fall.
Donald Trump’s approval ratings are in the thirties,
Americans are experiencing surging energy prices,
and Trump and other Republicans are engaged in open corruption while cutting vital government programs.
They need something, and in a pinch, socialism has always been the go-to emergency button for the right to push.
@hex@kolektiva.socialLogistics in the technical sense (part of supply chain management) is a subset of logistics in the vernacular sense ("the handling of the details of an operation"). You can explore this second and more general sense, and thereby build an understanding of the first and more technical sense, by iteratively asking the question, "how does one make that happen" and follow questions from there.
A big part of organizing is figuring out the (vernacular) logistics (and helping others figure it out). You want to organize a seed swap? Ok. How does one make that happen? Well, you need seeds, people, a place, and perhaps a time. How does one make that happen? You can forage seeds or you can buy seeds for a garden and swap extras. How do you get people to come? Well, figure out where you want people to come from and choose an accessible place. What's the easiest thing to do? Get people from your neighborhood. How does one make that happen? Well, maybe put up flyers. How does one make that happen? Well, print them on your printer if you have one, or at a library, then go post them up. Etc.
Keep asking questions until you either find a roadblock that you can't find a way around, or you find things you can do yourself (one of those things you can do yourself is asking friends to help).
If you practice the exercise of thinking about how things happen, you can start to find things that you can do yourself. You can start to understand what exists now, and you can imagine what's possible. By thinking about logistics, you can figure out how to replace things when they collapse or are dismantled. You can also identify things that can't easily be replaced, and try to figure out alternatives.
This practice is good for figuring out how to build, but it can also be a valuable practice for figuring out how to resist. Concentration camps and ethnic cleansing also require logistics. Mass displacement means moving people. How does one do that? People are generally going to be moved in planes or buses. How does one do that? Well, people get loaded on to planes or buses in specific places. Planes and buses need fuel. Planes are fueled at their airports, which may well be the same places where people are loaded on to them. There is a fuel depo and a fuel truck that makes flying people out of a specific place possible. How does the fuel get to that fuel depo? Well, that fuel is probably also delivered by truck. Someone drives those trucks. Someone fuels those planes. Someone clears the planes for takeoff. Someone fuels those busses. Someone drives those busses. And so on.
Logistics networks can be highly complex. The more complex the operation, the more possible points of failure and more possible points where pressure can be applied, where operations can be disrupted. Ethnic cleansing is a complicated operation. The logistics of disrupting complicated things tend to be much less complicated than the logistics of the complicated things themselves.
The Right has exploited this fact for a long time. Centralized social services are logistically complex. Public infrastructure is logistically complex. By destroying these things, they can loot public resources by privatizing the infrastructure and functionality.
But the things that support the Right are even more logistically complex. Oil, cars, AI data centers, internal paramilitary, these are extremely complicated and fragile. There are numerous pressure points, all of which can respond to numerous strategies.
If we want to win, we should reduce the influence of politics over the things we care about. We should focus on building distributed mutual aid networks that don't rely on state funding and aren't subject to the whims of politicians. This is also known as "dual power." That is, creating counter-institutions outside of the dominant political system. The Right already does this in the form of churches and corporations.
As we reduce our complexity, we can then press our complexity advantage against the things for which the Right *needs* the state: the apparatus of violence needed to maintain capital and enforce the dominant order.
@ripienaar@devco.socialAnd the cycle of gullible UK electorate thinking this new politician is the one who isn’t going to be a utter piece of self serving shit and then inevitably being disappointed continues right on schedule
@hex@kolektiva.socialI keep seeing the "cars replaced horses" thing related to "AI."
People keep comparing "AI" to cars (positively) without thinking about the fact that cars were forced on people (AAA bought up and destroyed tram lines, there were massive protests, etc), and are the primary driver of climate change that is currently on track to make complex human society impossible. Meanwhile, cities that weren't destroyed for cars, or that have reversed most of the damage, are some of the most desirable places to live.
Maybe we could take the car analogy as a warning. Maybe it could be a reminder to think about how forcing technology on people against their will can reshape society in a profoundly negative way.
The answer for cities has been to right-size transit. Eliminate cars wherever possible, maintain emergency vehicles and mobility aids, and find more efficient alternatives (bikes, trams, metros, and trains) where possible. I feel as though we can extrapolate from the metaphor.
We do not have to repeat the mistake of reshaping society around a single, oversimplified, solution in order to benefit a tiny minority. Perhaps we can actually choose the right technologies based on use cases, rather than hype or dogma.
Cars didn't replace horses. Cars replaced walkable cities, tram lines and mass transit, and children playing in the streets.
"Cars replaced horses" to the benefit of a small group of elite men, at tremendous cost to literally everyone else. When people say, "AI is the new 'cars replacing horses'" they are saying something very specific about their privilege and intentions.
@sherold@mastodon.onlineI'm rrrreally looking forward to the #Pika Pulse reboot, and I think it's good that @… is taking its time with it. In my opinion, it doesn't have to be perfect right from the start.
Thank you, @…
@bobmueller@mastodon.worldLove seeing a former supporter of the #deathpenalty come around in their thinking & call for an end to capital punishment. He's right when he says it's not a deterrent. I hope he'll commute current death sentences to life before he leaves office.
@philip@mastodon.mallegolhansen.com@… Quite frankly, I think I’d sit down, shut up, and find some smart humanities people to weigh in.
Software engineers thinking they’re the right people to make society altering decisions, is exactly how we got here.
@lightweight@mastodon.nzoss.nzJust thinking about the political discussion going on here these days... Seems to me we need better labels. 'Right' in English has the unfortunate connotation of 'correct', and 'Left' the connotation (but perhaps only among the better read) of 'sinister'... I think new terms without that baggage are required. I propose that the Left<->Right spectrum be replaced by the Nobel<->Ignoble spectrum, which is more objective accurate in any case.
@azonenberg@ioc.exchangeHmmm... How likely are platform specific memory safety issues in ngscopeclient/libscopehal? I'm thinking "not very" since almost all of the OS-specific stuff code is in third party portability libraries.
I ask because right now we do all of our CI builds as optimized release builds with the intention of creating nightly builds other people can download and play with.
But I want to do ASAN debug builds to catch memory safety issues during tests (there was at least on…
@elduvelle@neuromatch.socialThinking about #StarWars (the originals) with nostalgia for times where things were simple, with the good guys on one side clearly doing good things, and the bad guys doing obviously bad things every day...
Oh wait, that's actually the case right now in the real world 🙃
#MayTheFourth
@pre@boing.worldI read Naomi Klein's "Doppelganger", mostly by the pool or the beach while on holiday last week.
It isn't really about her being confused with Naomi Wolf, except on a surface level. Or even really about Wolf moving from left feminism towards right wing conspiracy theory.
Really it's about how political culture has changed as the world has moved more online and suffered the consequences of a pandemic and the often wrongheaded political responses to that.
Conspiracy thinking and a whole culture concentrating on reticence and reactionary thinking instead of evidence and logic.
While reading it I was hanging out with some folks who are much more right wing than I generally do. Here's some things they said:
I don't believe in Sunscreen. Isn't it funny how skin cancer rates have gone up as sunscreen becomes more popular.
I don't believe in COVID.
Carbon Warming models don't even take into account the sun.
I thought Chemtrails were a conspiracy theory, but came to believe it.
Claiming to believe in freedom while also wanting a crack-down on asylum-seekers, thinking they are destroying society.
So it's easy to believe Klein's basic thesis here, the worry that reactionary conspiracy thinking is breaking the entire body politic.
I don't think it's that people have lost all rationality. It's that people are wearing their conspiracy theories as badges, identifying them as a member of a group. Like religious beliefs that bind a group, the more stupid and outrageous they are the more those badges work to identify the ingroup from the outgroup.
The worry is always when they decide the outgroup need punishing for not taking on those conspiracy beliefs and turn to suppression and violence.
#reading #books #worldPol
@andres4ny@social.ridetrans.itOnce again , I find myself thinking about how much nicer this playground would be without a highway right next to it. #BanCars
@inthehands@hachyderm.ioIf nobody’s talking about what you wish everyone were talking about, be brave. Speak up.
Right before the session deadline, I looked at the schedule and thought, “Nothing about ICE?? Really?! After all we’ve been through in MSP!” Feeling a little desperate, I created this session:
https://sessions.minnestar.org/sessions/2108
I quickly got a DM from the inimitable Eryn O’Neil, who’d been thinking exactly the same and was halfway through writing up a session when she saw mine come in. We quickly determined our two ideas were complementary, so she created hers:
https://sessions.minnestar.org/sessions/2126
13/
@UP8@mastodon.socialProbably the last festival goer photo from Juneteenth, I'm thinking where I ought to go for the 250ᵗʰ
#photo #photography #groupportrait
@cowboys@darktundra.xyzCowboys Should Consider QB Brendan Sorsby in Supplemental Draft https://www.si.com/nfl/cowboys/onsi/cowboys-should-consider-qb-brendan-sorsby-supplemental-draft
@azonenberg@ioc.exchangeThinking more about energy upgrades in the lab: i have a 2U that just acts as a host for a bunch of FPGA devkits to run jtag/uart hosts etc.
I can shut it down if I can manage to connect the relevant USB devices to the VM server (and if they work in passthrough).
The problem is that the cable is going to have to go from the bottom of the rack at right up and over into the tray and down to the rack at left before reaching the hub.
What are the odds of this working well with …
@pre@boing.worldWell, the Makerfield by-election is over. Voting just closed.
I don't live there, but if I did I think you gotta vote Labour in order to destroy this Labour government.
Which is in itself pretty mad. Demonstrating the utterly broken nature of the whole political system.
This is surely the only circumstance in which I switch away from the Greens.
As I said last month, they absolutely should have stood and spoke in front of every camera pointed at the constituency. Dunno that they managed the second part. I didn't see much of her myself, certainly.
Anyway, the point is that there's only one candidate at this election which has any chance at all of changing the direction of this government.
None of the others might be Prime Minister by autumn. Nobody else who wins can do that. There's only one candidate who can probably unseat the failing prime minister.
Would be voting more in hope than expectation of course.
He won't be very different. Certainly he's the same on Israel's genocide, on taxing wealth, on fiscal rules preventing government investment, on private industry being better than government owned industry, on capitalism, on the bond market, on the monarchy, on the pointless drug war, on conflating protest with terrorism, on the house of lords, on AI, on Free Software, on copyright, on age-gating and surveilling the internet.
But maybe that one difference, "public 'control' without ownership of industry" is at least a bit better than just Starmer thinking the state is powerless against American AI? He might try a bit harder to build more houses?
So not voting in expectation of anything really changing here, but voting for the only candidate who will even be in a position to try.
If you dislike Starmer and prefer any of the other candidates, if you prefer Greens, or Conservatives, or Restore, or Reform, or Lib Dem, or anarchy or antifa or woke then you should vote for the Labour Party candidate to cause Starmer's downfall.
You should only be voting against Starmer's Labour Party if you are happy with Starmer's Labour government and want Starmer to stay.
And only like 75,000 people even get to mark a ballot.
"Restore" are the splitters from Reform (who are in turn the Nativist right wing party splitters from the Conservatives).
They left Reform because Reform weren't racist enough for them, mostly. Their vote count is key here. Will their vote be higher than the Labour/Reform margin?
I think probably it will.
So the Restore Party is the spoiler that forces the PM out of office by splitting the nazi vote and allowing in a challenger to the PM.
Insane election. 😵💫
Apparently nobody conducted an exit poll, so we'll find out in the morning.
#ukpol #makerfield
@cowboys@darktundra.xyzPlayers most likely to start week 1 from the Cowboys 2026 draft https://insidethestar.com/players-most-likely-to-start-week-1-from-the-cowboys-2026-draft
@luana@wetdry.worldSony wants to kill the one and only console advantage over PCs
And this comes right after they removed many bought movies from user libraries, providing no refund at all
At least Sony also announced they won't subsidize consoles as much anymore, so at least people will be less prone to get a console over a PC (even tho they're probably doing this thinking on fueling game streaming)
Oh and Sony also said they won't be porting their games to PC anymore so that sucks.
@pre@boing.worldFlower framework to deal with ai engineering work transition
Juliette is a game dev who was excited by ai then , oh, its disruptive and can software dev be ending?
So she made a model for thinking about the impact on teams and engineers.
It activities:
What is the work that might be affected? She has a list of things too long to read.
Define how each is done, standard best practice etc. How outputs of each are inputs to others.
Claude builds skills based on that.
Ai capabilities:
Can si do those things? Can it ever?
Probably not for many.
So what is the impact going to be?
If its all done by ai the job is thinking about the product not coding. That plus working out the odds its done it right. More importantly, philosophy! The job is to define what good software is and have the robot implement.
So sounds like she thinks were heading to the job being thinking about systems then wrangling robots.
But only if its reliable and cheap and not regulated away.
Which might not be the case.
Buy her book for the full list and analysis.
#devWorld #ai
