If it gets to the point where left wing people are genuinely being rounded up, and there are no other options left, then being armed at worst lets us make the round up more costly in a last stand, or hopefully if there has been enough community building beforehand, helps us more effectively prevent a round up from occurring..

It would also help for a French resistance or Irish Troubles style long-term push-back.

From what I recall, only self-burnt CD’s and DVD’s degrade quickly, while self-burnt blu-rays last significantly longer, even if not m-discs.

Ultimately worker coops by their design limit the amount of excess money that can be siphoned off and concentrated to CEO’s and shareholders, so capital holders would likely refuse to invest in co-ops in fear that were they to become the standard way of organizing businesses, they would get a smaller and smaller piece of the pie globally, as more wealth is distributed to the workers themselves instead.

The current system of capitalism is inherently designed to oppose all forms of more equal distribution of power and wealth.

If co-ops were to become successful in spite of that, the capital owners would likely attempt a military coup to literally fight back against it, just as they attempted during the Business Plot in response to FDR’s economic reforms.

The capital holders hold a tremendous amount of the power to influence the globe to their will due to their concentrated wealth, which is only possible to accumulate due to the accepted exploitation of labor. They will do everything in their power to prevent the loss of that power, even if it means sub-optimal profits.

I didn’t say there would be no conflict, but significantly less.

If everyone is an owner, there is no incentive to withhold labor and strike, as they can simply come to a consensus with the other co-owners instead. The only reason unions exist and strike is because of an imbalance of power between the capital owners and the workers that generate the capital, so the unions must leverage their labor as a bargaining chip to try to get a slightly more fair deal. That dynamic is not present in a worker owned co-operative, since everyone is an owner and has the same incentive to increase profit, since it benefits all instead of the few.

This would make everyone pay attention because people don’t really care about anything but long term growth independent of the company’s operating system.

All traditional companies have an incentive to fight the formation of unions, even if they do generate more profits, as CEO’s and shareholders do not wish to split up those profits to the workers any more than is absolutely necessary to retain those workers to begin with.

CEO’s and Shareholders are virtually all extremely self interested, often times combined with dark triad traits which both encouraged and enabled them to reach those positions to begin with.

They do not act rationally purely in interest of profit, as if that was the case, then they would’ve already adopted lower working hours, work from home, better benefits, and given partial ownership of the company to the workers voluntarily. Instead, history has shown time and time again that they would much rather let an entire company be destroyed rather than give up power to workers.

You will not have any success whatsoever of convincing existing corporations to embrace unions by proving an example.

A co op would be so different from existing systems that I fear people would think hey that’s neat but we can’t replicate it unless we started over.

There are plenty of examples of worker owned cooperatives, even huge successful ones like Mondragon, which is a multi bullion dollar coop that employs 70,000 workers.

Virtually no existing corporation nor its shareholders would want to become a co-op, because it would mean the inability to exploit and profit from their labor force. Just as they do not wish for unions to impede on their ability to exploit their labor force.

A worker owned cooperative would be more ideal than a unionized but otherwise standard corporation, and is less likely to have internal conflict.

Getting to know your neighbors and joining or creating mutual aid groups is a good way to build community. This can include informal networks through friends, tenant/renter organizations, solidarity groups, and industrial unions.

Check out this handy guide to find existing groups in your area.

There’s also some projects you can do that help build community (and can be fun in themselves!). My instance put together a list of ideas, just scroll down to the “Fun Projects to Build Community” section

This BIFL community does not require that something literally last forever, just that it be more durable and lasting than other objects in the same category.

It’s Mint’s built-in version of redshift, it reduces blue light at night by tinting your screen orange to be easier on the eyes. It is installed by default on all cinnamon versions of Mint. It is not included with Xfce (not sure about MATE).

If you want something similar on Xfce, you’d have to install Redshift and manually configure it with either a schedule or a location for it to work automatically, as it has been abandoned and the automatic location finder is broken.

AFAIK the fairphone is the only phone on the market that is explicitly designed to be user repairable. It doesn’t have a headphone Jack, though.

I personally can see there’s some merit on both sides, where the change probably should’ve been more public and talked about before hand, and also that there can be some potential benefits to limiting votes in some fashion, since there are some instances where it’s been misused, such as some people using it as a mark-as-read, sometimes with downvotes (I can’t recall their username, but there was a user in the past who admitted to doing that, which I think has a negative overall effect since the first few votes of a new post have an outsized effect on if it gains traction or is more likely to be hidden).

I can’t really see this having giant negative ripple effects throughout the fediverse/threadiverse since it effects such a small minority of users, but I suppose we’ll see.

Andrewism has some good videos on the topic, and Unlearning Economics is pretty okay.

Then, based on the data, piefed.social would only potentially filter out the votes of a couple hundred people, which wouldn’t be noticeable.

Wouldn’t the outside user’s vote only be filtered on piefed.social if the outside user had also voted more than 240 times that day?

Or are you suggesting that a piefed.social user receiving a vote also contributes to that piefed user’s limit?

Throne of Miscellania

Ahhh, I loved that quest as a kid, was so neat to be able to fix up the island and then pop in to collect what they’d gathered.

I remember spending a lot of gold trying out different hair styles, nice that that’s free now too, as well as the romance options! :)

Huh, it’s free now? I could’ve sworn they charged gold to change gender back in the day.

I’m pretty sure one of the creators/writer of voyager was really disappointed that it never actually fulfilled the premise at all, so he went and made the Battlestar Galactica reboot in 2003 as essentially what Voyager should’ve been if the premise was taken seriously.

The shooting and movement mechanics of the OG Dooms are still great, but I can only tolerate them for a few levels due to the keycard driven gameplay combined with the maze-like level design, which I think aged quite poorly, and was something that bothered me even in the 90’s.

Tech workers have traditionally been allergic to unions for some reason, though that is starting to change. They should contact Game Workers Unite or the IWW.