Communism, socialism, and the theoretically fairer alternatives I speak of have a number of possible implementations and, for the reasons I mentioned above, virtually no untainted historical examples for us to cleanly learn from. Every time someone takes a crack at it, the circumstances are unique and the powers looking to sabotage the system or seize it for themselves are different. It usually gets dismantled or becomes so corrupted as to be nothing more than another attempt.

I know nothing about what happened in Egypt and I’m commenting solely on my general knowledge and the words you have provided me.

The president back then decided to take a big chunk of land from the ultra rich and divide it among the farmers. Factories were nationalized, big chains and businesses were taken away.

When a land lord owned vast amount of land, he had enough money to buy most advanced equipments and most talented and experienced engineers in agriculture but when the land got divided among many poor farmers, they couldn’t afford any of that and productivity went down fast and the effect is lasting until now.

So the farmers had no assistance and no plan to implement this massive change? Land was just taken from a large owner and haphazardly distributed to poor farmers?

While I don’t doubt that the loss of productivity has had a detrimental effect and caused harm, how were conditions for the laborers and those in poverty before this happened, when “productivity” was great? I’m not sure what the greater “good” conditions would be since I’m not familiar with the situation, the region, or its struggles. It is just notable that your description focuses on productivity.

Nationalized factories and businesses were given to people who - at best - didn’t worry too much if they’d succeed or not and at worse wanted to make as much cash as possible. Add to that people feared of succeeding too much least their possessions get confiscated.

Nationalized tends to mean state ownership rather than distributed or worker ownership. Who were the factories “given to” and what does that mean? Again, was there a plan or were they just seized and handed off without serious consideration for how they should be managed and maintained?

Perhaps there is a reason I’ve never heard of the Egyptian communism you speak of. It sounds like it was not implemented with any kind of long term plan and, unsurprisingly, didn’t achieve very much. Or it might just be that it received little attention because it wasn’t a country of “white” people.

What shakes me to my core is that any attempt to establish a fair system is immediately bombarded by countless external and internal malicious actors looking to either exploit any loophole they can find for their own benefit or sabotage the system to prevent it from gaining any traction because it threatens their power.

I don’t think capitalism or any of the similarly exploitative systems that came before it are superior solutions to proposed fairer alternatives, but the wealth disparity they have created and the perverse incentive structure they push on society leave us ill equipped to transition away from them. Right now, our economies are all so interconnected and interdependent that it’s impossible to exist outside of the influence of capitalism or it’s awful predecessors.

I overheard someone considerably high up in my organization struggling to understand the concept of an email BCC (Blind Carbon Copy).

He was trying to figure out how to notify a large number of people via email without letting them know who else was receiving the email.

Some things may fall under IT but they should really fall under the category of things every professional should understand.

Sorry, the best I can do is install a camera and microphone on our next model, to spy on you and force interaction with advertisements.

I mean video conferencing from your living room. How neat is that?

That’s the spirit!

Or they use AI to just alter the photo…

IT is a very wide field, and maybe that generalization is actually not good

That was what set me off. I was having a bad morning and misread the tone to be more dismissive than it likely was.

I’ve misread the tone, I agree. I apologize for that. However, I find that his complaints were not about things that are always “fundamental core principals of working in IT”. For some, sure, but where I work I’m by far the employee with the most familiarity with CLI/powershell and scripting. Almost everything is done via a GUI or web interface if it can be. I would tell any of my coworkers that maybe IT isn’t for them.

I also, in a rush to finish, misremembered and incorrectly reread some of your words too quickly. You did not recommend the “clone a repo” solutions, you advised against them. Again, I apologize. I still am suspicious of this massive collection of self hosted services that work perfectly with each other after like 20 minutes of tweaking and little maintenance. That was what I was trying to imply with that section. I’ve lost close to a dozen 6-10 hour sessions on Saturdays pulling my hair out because I can’t seem to find out how to do some specific things that it seems like I need to do to make some “easy” new service to work with my setup. It’s like that Malcom in the Middle (?) clip of the dad 5 projects deep at the end of the day trying to fix some simple problem in the morning.

I’ll try to document some of my issues this weekend. I would honestly appreciate any help or recommendations.

That being said, I think there’s a bigger issue at play here. If you “work in IT” and are burnt out from “15 containers and a lack of a gui” I’m afraid to say you’re in the wrong field of work and you’re trying to jam a square peg in a round hole.

Honestly, this is the kind of response that actually makes me want to stop self hosting. Community members that have little empathy.

I work in IT and like most we’re also a Windows shop. I have zero professional experience with Linux but I’m learning through my home lab while simultaneously trying extract myself from the privacy cluster fuck that is the current consumer tech industry. It’s a transition and the documentation I find more or less matches the OPs experience.

I research, pick what seems to be the best for my situation (often most popular), get it working with sustainable, minimal complexity, and in short time find that some small, vital aspect of its setup (like reverse proxy) has literally zero documentation for getting it to work with some other vital part of my setup. I guess I should have made a better choice 18 months ago when I didn’t expect to find this new service accessible. I find some two year old Github issue comment that allegedly solves my exact problem that I can’t translate to the version I’m running because it’s two revisions newer. Most other responses are incomplete, RTFM, or “git gud n00b”, like your response here

Wherever you work, whatever industry, you can get burnt out. It’s got nothing to do with if you’ve “got what it takes” or whatever bullshit you think “you’re in the wrong field of work and you’re trying to jam a square peg in a round hole” equates to.

I run close to 100 services all using docker compose and it’s an incredibly simple, repeatable, self documenting process. Spinning up some new things is effortless and takes minutes to have it set up, accessible from the internet, and connected to my SSO.

If it’s that easy, then point me to where you’ve written about it. I’d love to learn what 100 services you’ve cloned the repos for, tweaked a few files in a few minutes, and run with minimal maintenance all working together harmoniously.

I’ve wanted to do this for a long time, really, truly.

When I look, credit unions advertise great savings rates for balances of up to $1,000. After that, it’s depressingly small: 0.05% or 0.10% vs. competitive rates of 3%+ which I currently get at my evil-corp-mega-bank. 3% doesn’t even come close to inflation and fractions of a percent feels like pissing my money away while saving for the pipe dream of owning my own home. Maybe I’m misreading something? “Finance” is not something I’m particularly confident about.

Do you know of any tools that would help people shop for ethical, local credit unions? I don’t trust any results from a web search at face value these days and I don’t have the patience to research every result to see how legit it is and do a background check to find that their board or whatever is run by fascists or something.

When new video game stores were opening that charged much lower commissions than Valve, I decided that I would provide my game “Overgrowth” at a lower price to take advantage of the lower commission rates. I intended to write a blog post about the results.

But when I asked Valve about this plan, they replied that they would remove Overgrowth from Steam if I allowed it to be sold at a lower price anywhere, even from my own website without Steam keys and without Steam’s DRM. This would make it impossible for me, or any game developer, to determine whether or not Steam is earning their commission. I believe that other developers who charged lower prices on other stores have been contacted by Valve, telling them that their games will be removed from Steam if they did not raise their prices on competing stores.

https://www.wolfire.com/blog/2021/05/Regarding-the-Valve-class-action/

It seems it was not explicit in the agreement regarding non-key sales, but allegedly threatened and possibly enforced in practice.

The practice I’ve found the most concerning is the alleged “most-favored nation” clause/provision in the Steam Distribution Agreement. I haven’t been able to actually find the actual Steam Distribution Agreement anywhere, which itself is concerning. I just see it mentioned alongside an NDA that must be signed.

The MFN basically requires that Valve never be undercut in any way, whether or not the game is distributed elsewhere using a Steam Key or not.

No discount. No bonus content. No perks. Steam key or direct download from your own website without any involvement of Valve whatsoever - it doesn’t matter.

Edit: It seems it was not explicit in the agreement regarding non-key sales, but allegedly threatened and possibly enforced in practice.

When new video game stores were opening that charged much lower commissions than Valve, I decided that I would provide my game “Overgrowth” at a lower price to take advantage of the lower commission rates. I intended to write a blog post about the results.

But when I asked Valve about this plan, they replied that they would remove Overgrowth from Steam if I allowed it to be sold at a lower price anywhere, even from my own website without Steam keys and without Steam’s DRM. This would make it impossible for me, or any game developer, to determine whether or not Steam is earning their commission. I believe that other developers who charged lower prices on other stores have been contacted by Valve, telling them that their games will be removed from Steam if they did not raise their prices on competing stores.

https://www.wolfire.com/blog/2021/05/Regarding-the-Valve-class-action/

The Insurrection Act would fast track and legitimize (in their eyes) the process. They do want that. The key for the rest of us is to be as peaceful as possible until it becomes socially untenable to let it continue - allow it to achieve critical mass. After that, something will happen and the situation will change, through whatever means it takes.

It’s more like the GOP hires bloodthirsty, racist thugs who are beating the shit out of anyone they can with total immunity. Then the GOP is shrieking from the rooftops that they are fighting a brutal, dangerous civil war and that it most definitely qualifies as insurrection so the other side keeps encouraging peaceful resistance. Then the completely disconnected, useless fuckwits pretending to represent the rest of America pass a funding bill to fund the hiring and paying of the bloodthirsty, racist thugs while politely wagging their finger and saying, for the umpteenth time, “if they don’t calm down, we’ll actually do something next time!”

if they think they are oh so clever while doing some of the dumbest shit one could imagine.

Yes, shitbird, they do think that don’t they.

Be quiet 🤫

Never.

That was my shower thought this morning. Maybe some good will come of these circumstances in the form of optimization.

They use a different kind of RAM.

It’s the capacity to make RAM and the materials required to make RAM that is going to datacenters.

The Nobel prizes are silly to begin with. This just makes that more plain to see.

Hey shitbird. ♥️

Encouraging those people to rise up and act:

✅ Helpful!

Shaming and mocking people for choosing their conscience instead of understanding game theory, well over a year ago:

❌ Being a shitbird

they keep like 1 billion of workforce just sit on their ass

A common, but inaccurate, assumption.