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@zedalpha

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FARSCAPE āĀ Won't Get Fooled Again
Not mine. Searched "cheese London" and this was first.
Capitalist propaganda: "Monthly food rations per Polish citizen in the early to mid 1980s. But next time socialism will work."
Michael: "Can someone please explain why so many people still take socialism seriously? It has always failed badly, every sing time."
Comrade Jake: "This kind of propaganda completely falls apart when you understand that ration cards were not a limit on how much food you could have. They were a guarantee of your basic necessities. You could still buy surplus food in addition to your rations."
Based on my mom's experience living in Poland in the 70s and 80s, the ration cards were kind of a guarantee that people would get the basics. Often people could have afforded to buy more beyond that, but it just wasn't available. My mom often talks about how store shelves were empty except for vinegar. People knew what day food was delivered to the store and lined up to be able to get some before it ran out and shelves were empty again. That's part of why my mom was so awed when she first came to the US, and why she worked so hard to try and find a way to stay here and raise her kids here. Grocery stores with shelves and shelves of food you could just get any time? It was like a wonderland to her.
It's also part of why I have such a hard time talking to her about anything socialist. Because her experience of it is living under an oppressive Soviet puppet state. It is frustrating but also understandable, because even though I consider myself a socialist, it's hard to argue with someone who grew up and escaped a very fucked up version of it.
"People could have afforded more, but there was nothing on the store shelves" vs "The shelves are laden with unimaginable abundance, but no one can afford to buy it."
Also a lot of the time making / distributing more food in exchange for money was illegal because that would have been capitalism. Farmers were allowed to raise livestock for their own purposes but not sell the meat to shops, so when I was an anemic toddler, my mother had to conduct a legit espionage operation to find out who was already illegally buying meat from a farmer, so that our apartment was added to the weekly rounds of a middle-aged woman who toted around like half a calf in her bags, freshly slaughtered meat wrapped in old newspapers. I remember how the fresh blood smelled.
(I also have my old health card with a prescription written by a doctor. The prescription was for extra cheese and butter beyond the ration cards. I was two years old.)
If someone reads all of it and wonders why communism was considered giant success by many: the lacking piece is life of average peasant before communism.
My grandpa remembered until his death young lord who didn't want a boiled egg. On one side of a ridge, local noble's garden, few years old lordling running and screaming he doesn't want to, and governess chasing after him with egg on a spoon, or maybe in a bowl; on the other side peasant children, hungry, watching over geese on a pasture, absolutely sure they would eat that egg with the eggshell if given a chance.
Grandpa was over 70 and still couldn't get over it. How hungry they all were, next to a lordling who didn't want a boiled egg, who never knew hunger.
It is about the tamest image one can get for how commonplace hunger was. History sources say that in Warsaw between WW1 and WW2, where poor flocked in hope for work, at some point street prostitutes took 2 kilograms of onions as a payment.
In same Warsaw, rents were so high and evictions so frequent, that newspapers only informed of those that were somehow special, like widowed father jumping from 6th story window with two small daughters due to eviction; or bed-bound elderly evicted with the bed. Those, on themselves, filled weekly newspaper column.
It was also common practice for middle-class to fire their all-chores housemaid in June, before traveling to countryside or spa for summer, and hiring again in September. About 30% of women in Warsaw were domestic servants. No all-chores housemaid earned enough to survive two months from savings. Starving servants were seasonal occurence.
I'm not even starting on life of a peasant in tsarist Russia.
And yet, everything told above about hardships of living under communism is true. Soviet communism was both a success and a failure.
One of the socialist things Iād like to see ALONG WITH UBI (not instead of) is a government option for all basic neccesities. I am aware that the government option would -suck- and as long as itās survivably functional, Iām fine with that. When I was a kid, we got monthly commodity food boxes. Theyād be filled with food that looked like this:
And in lean months, it would be that and whatever we could get from the garden, or forage/fish, or trade with friends and neighbors. My mom had this awesome recipe for peanut butter balls that utilized the powdered milk, shit-quality peanut butter, and maple-flavored corn syrup that we routinely got in our box and actually made it good.Ā
I think that these things should be available for purchase at every supermarket, and that the prices should be fixed with relation to the minimum wage. All brands should have to compete with the government option - if SPAM is going to be more expensive than LUNCHEON MEAT in the silver can, then it needs to justify that cost by being better quality.
I want the same thing for housing. I want fucking Commie Blocks to be an option.
This would combat runaway inflation by putting a price cap on survival needs. It would guard against shrinkflation, because a consumers could compare the Government Standard portion to the brands. UBI ought to be such that it covers The Government Option for food, housing, clothing, transit etc. with generous wiggle room for emergency savings and little joys in life.Ā
Everyone should get their own UBI account in their own name at birth, along with their social security number. It should follow the individual regardless of guardianship. Parents/guardians should have incrementally less and less control over said funds as the child gets older, and should have to provide itemized receipts of how money taken from a childās account is spent (Similar to what you have to do if youāre in control of an elderās social security money).
https://www.ssa.gov/ssi/text-repayee-ussi.htm
'Each year, we will ask certain representative payees to complete a Representative Payee Accounting Report showing how they spent and saved the money they received for you during the 12-month report period.'
These are steps that would could easily institute tomorrow be reallocating funding, and theyād have a huge impact on cost of living for everyone.Ā Ā
This rant brought to you by the fact that store brand canned luncheon meat in my local grocery held fast at a dollar for the better part of two decades but now costs $2.18.

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I just realized that many many people have jobs
Rb with your job, wtf do you people do while offline???
Just consider the fact that Vetinari wears the lilac for a second.
Itās one hell of a political statement, coming from a man who is typically all about being very subtle and understated and keeping his cards close to his chest. Just consider how much of aā aha⦠ballsy move that is.
Heās openly stating with each passing year that he believed in the Glorious Revolution, that he believed that Lord Winder should have been assassinated, that he believed that police brutality on that scale needs to be stamped out once and for all.
That he believed, and still believes, that unfit rulers should be overthrown.
He meets with aristocrats and theĀ āperennial waverersā as they are termed in the book with a lilac bloom pinned to his robe. He wears a symbol of the hopes and dreams of his youth, every year.
It almost reads as a throwaway statement at the end of an incredibly emotional book, but itās far from it. Thereās so much meaning in the fact that Vetinari wears the lilac and visits the little graveyard each year under the cover of darkness. Is it any wonder that he wound down a corrupt City Watch, and is so vehemently against the prospect of war and loss of life?
He believed that police brutality on that scale needs to be stamped out once and for all.
Oh Gods, thatās why he did it. Iāve read these books so many times and Iāve never realised why Vetinari wanted the Watch so diminished and powerless in the early books. Why the whole Guild System exists. Itās not just politics and economic policy. He saw how bad it got under Swing and Winder and he saw the best man heās ever know try to stop it from the inside and be killed in the street for it. The whole system had to go and Ankh Morpork would be better off without a state run justice system than risk it having that much power again. And itās only when he sees John Keel come again to lead it, whether Vetinari consciously knows it or not, that he decides that they can be allowed to rebuild
I'm rereading Night Watch and every time, every time the tragedy of being John Keel hits me like a ton of bricks. You are a seasoned policeman, coming to a new town in the middle of your career for a better pay. You get to Ankh-Morpork alone, no friends, no family, you have to start again. And the first thing that happens is that you get robbed and killed without no one ever knowing you, just your name. It gets remembered carried on through the decades only because in a different timeline you made such a strong impact on the life of (1) new recruit that years later he will be thrust in your place in a cruel twist of fate and decide to be you, because someone's got to be. And he will be the only one to grieve you, the actual John Keel. And when he is gone people will keep saying your name but not know it belonged to you. You were gone before the story even started.
annoying bloggers are having another Gossip Season it seems and its mad stupid and evil but this is making me laugh so hard im gonna throw up. fuuuuuuuck #staysafe
reblog if youre a full blown freak addicted to puffy fat nipples.
I love how Discworld uses the fact that the world is a disc for its world building in actually interesting ways.
Not just the obvious stuff like the danger of people falling off the edge, but how instead of the cardinal directions, they use "hubwards" and "rimwards" because the mountains in the center of the disc can be seen from pretty much anywhere.
Or how the speed of light is significantly slower, which makes earth-like sunrises and sunsets on a disk possible. But this also leads to lines like "On a clear day, you could see all the way to last Wednesday" and descriptions of sunlight literally flooding over mountains like glowing honey.
But one of my favorite bits of disc related lore are the clacks towers.
These towers use the six lights on the top to relay messages over huge distances. Much greater distances than would be possible on earth, since the horizon would get in the way after 10 kilometers or so.
It's basically Discworld's version of radio towers before the discovery of electricity, and it's something that would only work that well on a flat world.
Oh, and they're called clacks because the shutters make a clacking sound when in operation, which just feels so realistic as far as nicknames go, like, of course people would call them clacks or clackers or something like that.

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i read my first discworld novel around 25 years ago. i was 10 or 11 maybe. and when i say that discworld raised me.
it snuck in through the cracks and seeded better philosophies into a young mind that was being brought up in a cult, and as i grew, those things took root in me, crumbled the cult rhetoric like so much shitty concrete and let something a bit more alive have a chance to blossom.
discworld met me where i was at--in my youthful impotent rage, in my cleverness, in my fears.
discworld said that monsters were real but i was allowed to carry a frying pan and some string. discworld said it was okay to care an irrational amount about pedantic things but it wasn't okay to be an elitist asshole about it because everyone else is people, too, and if you're so clever maybe you have a duty to use it rather than a right to lord it over everyone. discworld made me think about my thoughts.
discworld gave me socks to shove down my pants when i was 14 and didn't know how to have words for not being a girl and it laid out a framework for understanding my autism almost 20 years before i knew what it was. it told me i was allowed to have agency and if i didn't then i was allowed to take it from whoever was trying to keep it from me.
discworld said there are words for that feeling of always watching myself, that it doesn't make me evil for needing to be my own built-in leash. and that it's okay to think the world is full of idiots and bastards as long as i understand at the end of the day they're just as human as everyone else and that has to matter or everything breaks down.
discworld, in particular, drove home just what that humanity meant. what it meant to be part of it, when i had grown up too isolated to understand in any organic way.
discworld was there for me as a kid and it was there for me as an adult revisiting my favourites with eyes ever made fresh by adult worry and grief and exhaustion and hope, understanding me every step of the way. it reminded me again and again through the difficult years that i had to care because caring is all we've got and if we don't care, what's the point?
and it did all of that while making me laugh so hard i couldn't breathe. helped me consistently value joy and humour against a painful world, even at my lowest.
i wouldn't be this me without discworld; i would be some much worse version of me, and that would really suck.
i don't have anything terribly poetic or moving to say today. i'm just full of gratitude and gladness and melancholy and assorted other soft feelings.
it's the 25th of may. i've been wearing lilac in my hair since before i was even old enough to know why.
i guess all that's left to do is track down a hard-boiled egg.
maybe there never were any twin towers. like did u ever see them?
So I know all you kids are joking around but no, youāre not allowed to make jokes about this. No.
Canāt just leave this in the tags, @the-starboy-symbiont
Night Watch is one of Sir Terryās most hopeless novels - and, by the same token, because of the same things, one of his most hopeful.
Itās a parody - and I use that word very loosely, because thereās really nothing funny about it - of Les Miserables. Itās about a failed revolution, and a barricade, and the people who fought and died there for nothing. Nothing changes. Politics with a capital P goes on, and even the most pure and noble of intentions only becomes food for the pit of snakes who pull the strings. The powerful remain powerful, the powerless, despite their solidarity, their desperation, their violence, their hope, remain powerless. Their little lives donāt count at all. Things continue exactly as they always have, minus a few faces in the crowd.
It is also, I think, where we see Sam Vimes at his lowest. Sure, Thud! does similar things in stripping him down, but that is under an outside influence, and he has his family to think of. He has something to fight for.
In Night Watch, though, all of that is taken away. Sam Vimes, eternal cynic, for once has Cassandraic knowledge that his cynicism is absolutely founded. He knows how this will end, and thereās no Corporal Carrot to make the world magically better around him, no Sybil and Young Sam to push through for, no city to protect. The absolute best that he can expect is to succeed, and lose that family, that future, forever. The absolute worst? He dies. Everyone he cares about here dies. And itās all in vain.
Sam Vimes is an alcoholic. Itās something that we tend to bring up when weāre talking about how amazing he is, how much heās overcome, but gloss over otherwise. Which is a little sad, because itās fundamental.
Sam Vimes faced this exact dragon, years ago. Sam Vimes saw there was no way to slay it. He saw the ants eating at the heart of every hope, every effort. He saw the first man he really knew as a good and kind and just - but never passive, never weak - man die, horribly, slain for no reason but petty grudge and Politics. He saw John Keelās garden wither and die in its bed. He saw the hope of a better, brighter Ankh-Morpork squelched, and the sacrifice of a good man wasted. He saw the world, in all of its rotting, miserable, pestilent despair, spoiling every good thing that dared show its face, its only ordering principle the slow decay of entropy.
Young Sam Vimes had no anchor. Young Sam Vimes had nothing left to turn to but the bottom of a bottle and the smelliest part of an Ankh-Morpork gutter.
Sam Vimes, as of the events of Night Watch, is back there. Not only physically temporally displaced. He has nothing. There is no reason for him to stand up, to take on the role of John Keel, to take responsibility for the barricade, to try to bring Carcer back to justice. To fight the doomed fight. There is nothing between him and finding a quiet seat at the Broken Drum, ordering himself a pint, and giving up. There is nothing between him and despair.
But he gets up anyway. He intervenes anyway. He tries to help anyway, even when he canāt believe it will make any difference. And it doesnāt, in the end.
Except that people lived who, save for the actions of John Keel, would have died. Except it quite literally meant the world to them.
And thatās where the hope is hiding, in this hopeless, bleak, despair of a book. There is no glory. There is no revolution. There is no good thing that cannot be corrupted. There is no point. Except.
The Disc turns on the āexceptā. Always has. Always will.
The hope across the whole arc of Discworld is that things can, if good people try very, very hard, go from extremely awful to only very awful, and thatās worth it.
Overall, the Discworld series is very hopeful about the grand scheme of things and the effect people, no matter how small, can have on it. But Night Watch is not about that. Night Watch is about what happens when āthingsā donāt get better. When the grand scheme of things isnāt impacted at all, either way, by the actions of individual people. Night Watch is about what happens when the hope runs out. When the āworth itā runs out. When all thatās left to do is save what little you can, because you can.
Thatās why there are no monuments to the Glorious Heroes of Treacle Mine Road. In the grand scheme of things, nothing they did mattered. But they are remembered, because they need to be remembered. Because sometimes what we do does not matter.
And when that happens, all that matters is what we do.
(USAmerican trying to imagine a societal environment) Okay, so picture a highway,
inability to correctly perceive 3d objects is in fact far more dangerous when someone is driving a car next to you then when they're like, sending emails to you.
can we focus on the gnome for a second
wait sorry i was not wearing my glasses. that is a cat

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kink: deleting someoneās pointless comment by reblogging the post from the same person they did
I mean, thatās censorship but okay.
ksvskwbidbwkdbskbsjw
"This week I discovered the same pattern, executed by Google. Google Chrome is reaching into users' machines and writing a 4 GB on-device AI model file to disk without asking."
Google Chrome is downloading a 4 GB Gemini Nano model onto users' machines without consent, with no opt-in, no opt-out short of enterprise t
pretty sure I did the chrome//flags thing a while ago, but also i switched to firefox, which is not without the occasional bullshit, but is vastly less bullshitty than chrome. This is why I treat genai "features" like the invasive blackberry bushes they are: cut, root, burn, and vigilantly watch for new shoots to uproot. I'm 54 years old and the world got by fine without genai for most of my lifetime.
tags via@KKglinka #psa#having read the article#it's not clickbait#chrome is reaching#across all chromium browsers#to link a prepatory structure#this malware packet#will therefore occur#with all chromium browsers#it has nothing to do#with the actual ai interface#instead chrome is either#using your personal computer#as part of a cloud server#the way bitcoin malware works#or it's recording your own#actions on the computer#with a continuously active#background module#either way#that's malware#a 4gig trojan virus
The only ways to make the deletion stick are to disable Chrome's Al features through chrome://flags or enterprise policy tooling that home users do not generally have, or to uninstall Chrome entirely
...
Adding the file took zero clicks. Removing it requires (a) discovering the file exists, (b) understanding what it is, (c) navigating into a hidden user profile path, (d) deleting it (and on Windows, also clearing the read-only attribute first), and (e) accepting that Chrome will silently re-download it on next eligible window unless the user also navigates chrome://flags, enterprise policy, or platform-specific configuration tooling to disable the underlying Chrome Al feature. None of those steps is documented in the place a normal user looks - none of them is even hinted at in default Chrome.