ProdigalFrog

joined 2 years ago
MODERATOR OF
[–] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 5 points 4 months ago (3 children)

No one would take your potatoes. Anything you grow or build by yourself is your own personal property that is yours to do with as you wish.

The grand idea of an Anarchist society is that if we collectively worked toward just meeting everyone's basic needs, it would remove the ability for people to coerce others to work for them under threat of homelessness or starvation otherwise (our current arrangement in society).

This basic work to meet the essential needs of everyone, if mostly automated with the aid of machinery and computers, would realistically mean everyone would collectively only need to pitch in about 3 months of their time per year to maintain a reasonable standard of living, the rest of the year would be free time to do with as they please, to form cooperatives with people on equal footing, to spend time with family, to garden, or to create art.

This collective work could not be enforced with violence, coercion, or a state (as none would exist, ideally), otherwise it would quickly descend into authoritarianism. It would have to be taken up willingly by individual communities, and it is very likely they would do so once the benefits are made clear and they are not under the yolk of capitalism coercing them to worry about themselves above all, and instead begin to think on a collective as well as an individual scale. It would be a stark improvement in quality of life of 95% of the population, something unseen in history except briefly during the Spanish Revolution.

[–] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 5 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (5 children)

The New Deal ultimately was a band-aid to prevent a violent revolution from taking place, a desperate plea from Roosevelt to the rich to ease off before the top blows (and even then, the rich were pissed off enough by that to try for a coup attempt).

WWII and strong unions caused those changes to stick for a time, but the problem is history has shown us that with capitalism, it's only ever temporary relief. Eventually the rich simply can't take it anymore, and they plot against the common man with renewed vigor. They finally got the ball rolling for their benefit in the 70's, and its been a steady decline since then, as they spread doubt, bust unions, bribe politicians who are all too willing to help for a pitiful amount of money or a free camper. Then when the rock is almost entirely milked, as it is now, and as it was back in the gilded age, instead of letting up, they squeeze harder.

You would prefer another New Deal, another breather for the working class where the rich capitulate and give up a slightly smaller piece of the pie again, and let us live a little better for a few more decades.

Problem is, the world wasn't on the brink of climate collapse in the 1930's. A repeat of that solution, for capitalism to be reigned in, but still relying on infinite growth to survive, simply isn't compatible with a livable biosphere for 10 billion people. If we try another New Deal reset, we'll simply make the lives of the working class in first world countries a little easier while the equator burns, and the poor die en-masse as they migrate and struggle for water.

Authoritarian communism certainly isn't the answer, history has proven that time and time again. But if we're to survive, capitalism must end soon, that much is assured.

Anarchism has shown the most promise in history before being quashed by the authoritarians. The rich and powerful will fight it violently, but if enough people come together and resist through merely withholding our labor, we could implement it mostly peacefully, and once that genie is out of the bottle, I very much doubt most people would prefer to go back to capitalism (I'd highly recommend reading The Dispossessed by Ursula LeGuin, to get an idea of what that sort of future could look like).

Whether or not markets in some form exist is another matter, and one that would need to be experimented with, but basic essentials to life should be free to anyone. Markets could exist for non-essentials.

[–] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 17 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (7 children)

It doesn't have to be violent. We could just collectively decide to ban capitalist corporations in favor of all businesses being worker owned cooperatives. That would get you pretty far towards a more equal and fair society.

[–] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 6 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

I'm afraid that's quite outside my field of expertise. I can only report how my experience on XMPP has been as a user, though perhaps @poVoq@slrpnk.net, who hosts it, may be able to weigh in on that. Edit: ah, I see you already have 😄

Though from my untrained eye, it seems that Jabber.ru was compromised due to not enabling a particular feature on their server

"Channel binding" is a feature in XMPP which can detect a MiTM even if the interceptor present a valid certificate. Both the client and the server must support SCRAM PLUS authentication mechanisms for this to work. Unfortunately this was not active on jabber.ru at the time of the attack.

And it seems that hosting it externally on paid hosting service (hetzner and linode) left them particularly vulnerable to this attack, and tgat it could've been mitigated by self hosting the XMPP locally, as well as activating that feature.

[–] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 38 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (37 children)

Slrpnk hosts an XMPP/Jabber for our users, mods and admins to communicate. Its worked pretty darn well for the past couple years, with very low resource needs.

The clients are pretty slick now too, such as Cheogram or Monocles for mobile, and movim is an excellent web app with support for group calls.

I'd certainly recommend it over Matrix/element.

[–] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 28 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

Reposting a comment I made on a similar post about the 180 mental gymnastics MAGA are displaying.

What you're witnessing here is described in When Prophecy Fails, a study on cults and how they justify continued belief after experiencing events that should disprove their belief.

Cult members will simply invent new reasons to continue their belief and remove the cognitive dissonance they may feel, which oddly results in a further entrenched belief, instead of a weakened one.

[–] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 5 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

You can read more about it here: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Debian-More-Newcomers-LLMs

They also seem to have voted on this subject back in may, but I don't know how to find the results: https://www.debian.org/vote/2025/vote_002#secondsa

[–] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 32 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (4 children)

He wouldn't have any problem whatsoever if Debian was publicly endorsing right wing views and losing leftist contributors.

Linux and the GPL FOSS movement is inherently leftist, snd right wingers have been wailing about leftist views in various FOSS projects for over a decade. I recall many threads on reddit accusing Linus of having been made 'woke' by his daughter when the CoC was introduced, back during the gamergate era.

It's all the same shit, all the same complaints, and all a waste of time. As the US descends into extreme fascism to the cries of approval of the MAGA cult, it becomes harder and harder to stomach them in a project.

The more concerning thing going on is Debian potentially embracing AI, which I am very much not a fan of.

[–] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 26 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I don't mean to make light of 3 people being in critical condition but... It's simply too fitting, I'm afraid.

[–] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 7 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (3 children)

Older desktops can have a somewhat hefty idle power draw due to the overall system consumption contributing more than expected, such as the southbridge. According to this old review of the i7-2600k, the system idles at 74w, which at $0.12 per KWh, would cost you roughly $77 per year. Though you might want to confirm that with a Kill-a-watt meter if you can (libraries sometimes lend them out), since I'm pretty sure that total system power chart includes a discrete GPU, so the real number for a GPU-less system is probably around 40 or 50w at idle.

If that is accurate, you could potentially replace your i7-2600 with a used Dell Wyse 5070 thin client from ebay for about $40 (in the US), and that idles at 5w, which would only cost you $5 a year at the same rate.

Older thin clients and laptops tend to have much better idle power draws compared to desktops. For other people reading this, if you're using a desktop for a low-power use case, it's probably worth finding out what its idle power consumption is and doing the calculation to determine if it'd be worth replacing it with a more efficient used thin-client or office mini-pc.

[–] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 17 points 5 months ago (4 children)

If a DOCSIS 3.0 modem still can't be saturated by the tier of internet someone is paying for, what advantage would 3.1 have?

[–] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 25 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

The political system is completely fucked. Going grassroots with direct action is currently the best way to both resist, and build horizontal decentralized power that isn't prone to corruption.

  1. find local communities and get involved to make connections
  2. We can effect things drastically with a general strike. This targets the establishment's income streams, and can bring a fascist government to its knees if done on a large enough scale.
  3. Contact a union and attempt to unionize your workplace so that the general strike is even more effective (plus, ya know, better pay and working conditions as a bonus!)

This method would not only work in the US, but anywhere in the world.

Union Suggestions:

  1. Continuing to participate in publicly visible resistance demonstrations like 50501 (the next one is July 17th) to encourage others to stand up with you and prove to that there are millions of others who will join them in the fight. A large part of Nazi Germany's success in taking over the country was a lack of massive public demonstrations against the new regime, making people feel helpless and afraid to take a stand.

If we put in the work, we can resist this and we can win. Look at how effective these methods were when used in Chile in 2019.. If we completely reject the political system and rebel on a mass scale, there is NOTHING they can do to stop us.

view more: ‹ prev next ›