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Cake day: March 5th, 2022

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  • Worker’s Cooperatives are about as good as you can get in capitalist conditions. You get a democratic say in co-op governance, have equity, etc, but it has limits. Here are a few:

    You are still in a Capitalist system, and thus your co-op must compete with other companies. This means your co-op puts a division between you and other working class members not in your co-op.

    Because your co-op is forced to operate in a Capitalist context to stay competitive, you are often forced to vote against your own interests as a working class. For example, if another company is reducing labor costs to eat your co-op’s market share and reduce co-op revenues, this may force co-op members to vote to lower their own labor costs (ie reduce benefits, incomes, or even layoof fellow members) to keep up.

    Because their are still divisions between the co-op workers and the working class at large, sometimes co-ops can acquire reactionary stances. Looking at you, REI…

    Those are just a few examples, and Comrade Hakim has a great video somewhere on Youtube where he goes deeper and explains better. If I weren’t using my phone right now I’d look for it for you. My best role in a revolution is not teacher though, so pardon my incomplete answer and halfassed handoff.

    Either way though, it is still the best you can get in Capitalism. You get some democracy, which means workers can at least look out and protect themselves better within the cooperative. It also cam help teach people that democracy isn’t just about pushing a few voting buttons every few years then forgetting about it, that democracy can apply to all facets of life. Also, the fruits of your labor will belong to you in a cooperative for the most part (of course there is still likely to exist some issues up and down the supply chain, but that is more typing than I want to do on a tiny cell phone screen).

    So ultimately, if you have the chance to make or participate in a workers cooperative, I’d say go for it, then work to resolve or alleviate some of the problems mentioned.


  • bleepingblorp@lemmygrad.mltoGenZedong@lemmygrad.ml*Permanently Deleted*
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    1 year ago

    I know and am also not what people would call normal. I have panic attacks on the regular in crowds and can’t even grocery shop during certain hours of certain days because of it. Also been involuntarily hospitalized a few times as well. Since I’m also a USian this stuff costs me between $10k - $20k USD per year, the variation depending on how good my insurance is amd how bad a given year is for me.

    I’m not the flavor of neuro diverse Greta is, but I try to be aware of these things.

    Greta, I’ve noticed, exudes a lot of confidence and poise when she is in her element, which is the environmental activist sphere. As I suspect she should be since she is actually very well educated in. When she speaks or poses for pictures or whatever while doing things related to these matters, she is clearly confident.

    But she isn’t all that knowledgeable about imperialism. Or geopolitics. Or socio-economics. Or the NATO/Russia/Ukraine relationship.

    So here she is, likely having already spent several hours already with these people, who would’ve been talking to her about shit she knows next to nothing about, appearing uncomfortable in the photo shoot. Because she is out of her element and knows it.




  • We have exterminated parasites before, why can’t we do it again?

    The fact that we’ve done something in the past doesn’t mean it is justified. Going to advocate for killing more wolves, tigers, lions, etc because we’ve killed them in the past for being “pests” too?

    I don’t see many people going up to bat for the Guinea Worm.

    We also don’t know what other roles they played in the natural ecosystem, and what problems removing them has caused. If it caused no harm, yay lucky us! But we do know dozens of birds, bats, etc rely on mosquito populations for food. If we keep taking organisms out of the picture because they are somehow inconvenient, eventually all we’ll have left are pets and livestock.

    Also all of that is wonderful and all, but natural land features such as wetland, swamps, floodplains, and river deltas prevent that from working… What are you going to do? Drain a wetland or pour kerosene into it and cause devastating damage to the local ecosystem and human population?

    By building sewage, sanitation, and drainage systems in populated areas, you prevent standing water from being a major concern. Less standing water means less breeding grounds. Also, since this infrastructure also includes water purification plants, sewage treatment, trash/garbage management, etc., you also prevent the mosquitoes that do manage to breed from getting the diseases they like to spread in the first place.

    This is why even though mosquitoes are everywhere, including the ““developed”” areas, the regions with good infrastructure have less mosquito born diseases going around.

    So stop trying to insinuate that I am advocating for ecological destruction. I’m talking about funding and building sewers, hospitals, clinics, waste management, etc in cities, towns, villages, and other places where people live. Natural places need to stay untouched.


  • Humans have an awful record of shortsightedness and unforeseen consequences. While yes, mosquitoes have the highest humam kill rate of any other thing that can kill people, it can be mitigated or eliminated with adequate sanitation and healthcare access for communities being harassed by mosquitoes.

    The better solution to the ails caused by these insects is to improve drainage and sanitation infrastructure, build hospitals and clinics, and enact policy which gives access to this infrastructure to everyone without exception.












  • Art is a skill anyone can learn with practice and determination, while also having low barriers to entry and the capacity for great fulfillment. This makes it dangerous and in contradiction with the interests of the elite, since workers tired of working for their bosses can learn to create art and sustain themselves on various platforms.

    So of course they’d target that early on. It is no coincidence that coding is another task these AI are taking, as workers who know how to code have a lot of power, hence their often bloated incomes. Unfortunately in the case of AI making a lot of coding tasks easier, the power is not being more evenly spread between workers that code and workers that don’t, but rather being taken away from the coding workers by the elite altogether increasing their own power while taking another option of reprieve from the working class.

    EDIT: spelling