Thank you, been looking for a replacement for my soda stream but have been hesitant since it’s so easy to get canisters for them, but none of the competitors.

Fuck soda stream, not only because there Israeli and had a factory in the occupied territories until backlash forced them out, they’re also anti-repair.

I have one and one time I pumped it a bit too much and heard a pop and it would no longer work. I opened it up and found that a piece of foil had been ruptured, and found a video online of someone replacing it by unscrewing a plastic bit and replacing the foil. I eventually stripped the screw trying to get it out only to find in the comments of the video that they glue that screw in now . They don’t sell a replacement part for it either so I eventually just had to use hot glue to seal it, which doesn’t feel safe.

The foil seems designed to pop as a safety pressure release mechanism, but it basically bricks the unit afterwards and you have to buy a new one.

They moved there factory out of the west bank, after heavy protest. Unless your referring to “Israel proper” as settled territory, which it is, but so is the u.s.

Demand goes up but not production. Adding UBI doesn’t increase the amount of wood harvested, or bricks produced or construction workers. In fact some construction workers may quit and go on UBI, lowering the production.

If demand goes up without production increasing, and thus supply, prices go up. This is part of the reason for the latest round of inflation, demand shot up after the pandemic but production was still at pandemic levels and yet to ramp back up.

Production in a lot of other places can ramp up relatively quickly to match demand if the infrastructure is built out already. In housing though production in general is slow and also slow to ramp up. It can take 2-3 years to build a house, and housing production takes years to increase. That’s part of the reason housing is still so high right now, housing production plummeted after 2008 and we haven’t gotten back to that even though prices and demand has skyrocketed.

All this is to say if UBI goes in it’ll take years for the supply to increase, I think they’re estimating housing production won’t get up to match the current new high prices now until 2030. Meanwhile your landlord is increasing your rent as soon as you renew, and rents don’t tend to ever go down after they’re set. This is if new housing can be built at all, a lot of places in America are zoned for single family housing and all the land is taken so no new housing can be built, housing production is limited by desirable and developable land and that just doesnt exist in a lot of places.

This is all if you don’t increase production, which the government can do, but they don’t right now and they definitely won’t if UBI comes in and replaces section 8 and all other welfare. If you do a universal jobs program though you can use those people to build affordable and public housing.

It won’t drop to zero since someone else will come in who will give them the extra $1000 because they need a place to live. Market forces don’t dissappear with UBI, that’s why when aggregate demand goes up and supply stays fixed, such as with housing, prices go up.

Say you pay $1500 for rent and there’s another guy who pays $1200 and wants to upgrade to your apt. They get the $1000 UBI and now they have enough to bid up to $2200 for your apt. Now either you pay $2300 or your landlord evicts you to get the higher paying tenant. This percolates up and down the housing ladder from the homeless person who gets $1000 only to see rents increase to $1500 to the millionaire who now has to pay an extra $1000 drop in the bucket for there high-rise in Manhattan.

In capitalism your standard of living is determined by your ability to outbid the person on the rung below you to maintain that lifestyle. If everyone moves up a rung then nothing changes.

I’ve soured on it recently, if you gave everyone $1000 a month then your landlord is just going to raise your rent by $1000.

If full socialism is out of the picture, and we could enact something like UBI I think we should expand disability and social security for those who can’t work and then do a universal guaranteed jobs program for those who can work because:

1. It’s way more politically viable. It’s going to be almost impossible to convince a majority of Americans to “pay people to sit around all day”. They’d be way more open to it if they’re doing a job.

2. We could use the labor on fields that the market doesn’t value, such as building green infrastructure or social work for low income individuals. This would go along with expanding the definition of a job to any work that is benefiting society. If you’re a parent spending all your time caring for a young or disabled child then that’s a job and you should get paid for it.

3. It you increase the wage for these guaranteed jobs that effectively raises the minimum wage since the private employers have to compete with the government. Why work at McDonald’s for $10 an hour when the government is paying $15. If you raise UBI that may decrease wages as employers will use it as an excuse to pay less.

4. Even for people making above minimum wage it gives the worker more bargaining power since your employer loses the threat of throwing you onto the streets. This is also true for UBI but only if it’s enough to fully cover a comfortable life which I don’t think will happen due to the inflation it may cause.

5. It increases production which can help to increase supply and cover for the increase in demand giving people that much money will cause so inflation is checked more.

6. People neeed a job, as in the expanded definition I gave above, it’s a big part of how people make meaning in there life. The best case for someone not working would be they just play video games all day, worst case they turn to drug use.

There was a falling out between them after the board picked altman instead of Elon as ceo.

Now Elon is suing openai nominally because there renegging on the whole non profit thing, but really because he has his own xai that is competition and because of the grudge because he’s a petty manchild.

Pacemakers have batteries and modern ones broadcast a lot of telemetry, and last up to a decade. Not sure how much more power would be needed to broadcast to a satellite or cell tower though.

Yes, marx always thought a socialist revolution would come in the late stages of industrial capitalism. Everyone thought it was going to be in Germany up until WWI. The problem is capital becomes entrenched and people become comfortable, especially if they benefit from imperialism and exploitation abroad or of a minority racialized underclass.

Another problem with skipping the first revolution and industrializing under socialism is it gets blamed for the the horrors of industrialization. The early stages of industrialization are always horrific with long hours, bad working conditions and slum living conditions. Combine that with general conservatism and desire to stick to a traditional life and you have to coerce the peasents into going into the cities to become industrial laborers. Capitalism did this through enclosure and farm consolidation, the soviets did it more blatantly, sometimes at gunpoint. Either way it builds an animosity with the system that robbed you of your traditional life.

One thing I’ll add that I haven’t seen mentioned is communisms relative weakness in the propaganda department. If you look at democracy as a bunch of competing interest groups i.e. parties trying to win the masses over to there side to win, then there main tool / weapon is information that will make the opposition look bad and your side look good, i.e. propaganda. Good propaganda requires intimate knowledge of people’s desires and a knowledge of how to shape those desires to the benefit of your program. Capitalism is very good at this due to competition forcing them to better understand there customer so they can sell them more. Capitalism creates great salesman which is fundamentally what you need to create good propaganda. You can see this expertise most plainly in advertising pushing the message that consumption is good, fulfilling and will make you happy.

This expertise combined with the large amount of resources capital can Marshall to push there message makes electoral politics extremely difficult for communism or any program that goes against consumption like environmentalism. Even if you completely eliminate capital and it’s control over media in one nation foreign actors will still come in using the same expertise and resources to try and bring back capitalism. So since communists can’t compete electorally with a free press they go towards autocracy to keep power.

but you have many capitalists competing, so the power is kinda distributed inside the capitalist class.

This isn’t always true, and is arguably not the natural state of capitalism. Capitalism, without state intervention, will tend towards monopoly as economies of scale and market power push out any competition.

Note: all of this is steal manning dengism, I am not a tankie advocating for it

They are in the first stage. Classical Marxist theory divides development into two revolutions / stages:

1. The first revolution is the bourgeoisie overthrowing the feudal order, eg. The American revolution, the English civil war, French revolution of 1830. After the bourgeoisie take over they will use the proletariat to industrialize and develop the means of production. This will eventually lead to a boom in efficiency and production, the peasants moving from the countryside to cities, and abundance of necessities. Eventually though everyone’s needs will be met and without an expanding market to profit from capitalist will be forced to produce more efficiently with less labor to get profits from there now limited market. This will lead to mass layoffs and unemployment which leads to

2. The socialist revolution where the proletariat overthrow the bourgeoisie and sieze the productive forces. They will then distribute labor fairly so you have 8 people working 10 hours instead of 1 person working 80 and 7 others unemployed. This then leads to communism where people have control over production and use it to guarantee well being and leisure instead of profit.

In order to get to this communist phase though you need to industrialize and develop the means of production so you can provide people with basic needs with little labor. The problem is the two major countries where socialism took hold, Russia and China, were still largely agrarian feudal societies. So they had to develop the means of production, Russia, and maoist china did so with 5 year plans, which had some success and some catastrophic failure but was ultimately pretty inefficient. So after mao a new leader in China named deng Xiao ping took over and followed a policy of allowing capitalism into the country to develop the means of production and industrialize. This unleashed powerful forces in the country that needed to be tamed by an even more powerful state, otherwise they would take over like they did in other capitalist countries. Then all the bloodshed from the original Chinese revolution would be for not as they would have to do another revolution to remove the bourgeoisie again. So the state maintains tight control to avoid “regressing” into a capitalist democracy until they fully develop and industrialize. At which point they will use that powerful authoritarian state to disposses the capitalist class and usher in communism.

The dictatorship of the proletariat was supposed to describe the will of a fully conscious proletariat majority being executed by and with the consent of that class. In other words a democracy unclouded by bourgeois interest and false consciousness.

The problem was that at the time of the Russian revolution the proletariat weren’t the majority, the peasants were, and what proletariat there were lacked full class consciousness. So Lenin used the vanguard party to emulate what a dictatorship of the proletariat would do, but that wasn’t an actual one as Marxist would’ve described.

It may not be for everyone. Lemmys growth has stalled out and barring musk buying reddit and turning it to shit i don’t see another influx coming. So we’re kinda stuck with the community that exists now. Its a pretty good and sustainable community which can provide a lot of general interest posts like news, memes and cats lately. But for other more specific topics if if it’s not already a large community here it probably won’t be. It’s not even just niche interests, professional sports for example has very little presence on here as a whole much less individual sports or teams, and I don’t see, for example, a baseball community taking off here no matter how much effort you put in since the current lemmy community isn’t much interested in it and your average baseball fan probably won’t be coming to lemmy to discuss things.

My recommendation would be to use lemmy for some of those general interest topics, and maybe some of the more popular niche communities if your into them, And go to other places, preferably independent forums or rss feeds, for other things. We don’t need one unified scrolling app, it may be a bit more convenient, but the internet is better off if you spread your traffic around.

It could just be for reducing churn and keeping the status quo. It’s a prisoners dilemma, if geico spends a million on advertising then they might gain some customers from say progressive. Progressive would then also also have to advertise to attract customers back so they will spend a million on advertising too, now both are spending a million to keep the status quo. If you take a step back and look at the big picture it’s basically everyday people paying higher premiums that go to the advertising company, celebrity etc.

The car insurance market is pretty static, there’s no opportunity to expand the market outside general population growth since everyone already has a car and has car insurance, so expansion is difficult especially since there arent many differentiating factors, so companies tend to advertise to just keep there current market share. Charity on the other hand has plenty of room for expansion, it can be as much as the disposable income of the country, if you watch an aspca ad and donate your likely to keep donating to the other causes you support, assuming you have the disposable income.

Seems a bit of an exaggeration to say everyone. The population at the time of the revolution was around 2.5 million. Of that maybe 500,000 were the land owning white male “patriots” that would support the revolution and of those maybe half read or were influenced by Thomas Payne so around 250,000. We tend to attach a lot of significance after the fact to the American revolution, and Adam’s, Payne etc. Since it spawned one of the greatest empires the world has ever known but at the time it was a relatively minor tax revolt.

this isn’t even a matter of the world in general was smaller back then, France at that time had a population of 28 million. Payne would go on to have less success in convincing everyone there on his ideas because the scale is just so much more massive. Same with modern day.

Yeah but this is a “needle in a haystack” problem that chatgpt and AI in general are actually very useful for, ie. Solutions that are hard to find but easy to verify. Issues like this are hard to find as it requires combing through your code , config files and documentation to find the problem, but once you find the solution it either works or it doesn’t.

I mean openais not getting off Scott free, they’ve been getting sued a lot recently for this exact copy right argument. New York times is suing them for potential billions.

They throw the book at us

Do they though, since the Metallica lawsuits in the aughts there hasnt been much prosecution at the consumer level for piracy, and what little there is is mostly cease and desists.

If it’s libertarian it’s libertarian socialist. There’s no property or capital on here, posts get boosted by collective voting, not based off your following or account. There’s not even an idea of karma, your account means basically nothing here. A capitalist libertarian social media would be something like nostr or what bluesky is claiming it’ll eventually do where you completely own your account and your following and you can use that social capital as you wish.

It’s an easy target but also a near worthless one. What does the CCP gain from getting a bunch of terminally online Linux nerds on their side? No one making real decisions that could effect China is on here.

4chan is also a soft target but you don’t see parties or governments investing in propagandizing there because it’s full of basement dwelling incels who can’t do anything besides maybe shoot up a school.