Not ideologically pure.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: January 8th, 2024

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  • Fun fact: if you’re an artist on Spotify receiving less than 1000 streams in a year, they won’t even bother paying you. You also need a minimum number of unique listeners. That number is secret.

    Spotify is good for those already rich, and bad for those who isn’t.

    They also have Joe Rogan and Gwyneth Paltrow on their payroll, and they actively lobby for more relaxed AI legislatiolegislation in the EU.

    If you have a subscription, the best thing you van do is to cancel it, get your music from the high seas, and instead donate $12 per month or however much it costs directly to artists you enjoy by buying their music or merch online.

    AntennaPod is good for podcasts.




  • If your friend is willing to make the effort to combat this, she should get organized. She should find like-minded people, act locally to gain political power, and create a stronghold where the illegitimate government will face resistance. She should base this around ideological lines, rather than willingly subscribing to what experienced members in established political elites in her country are trying to make her say or do. She should write down whether values are and make sure to keep them close at all times, knowing that she just might be successful and that power corrupts.

    She should not give up hope, but she should give up the belief that others will change anything for her. She needs recognize that her country is already broken, and she needs to act to be the change.

    She needs to recognize that she’s not powerless. She can make a difference.

    Likewise, she needs to recognize that it’s a long and painful process. It needs to start locally, and it might always stay local. But that is fine.

    She needs to realize strength is in the community. Building the community of like minded people working for local action is crucial. She’ll be disappointed in them at times, but she’ll just have to keep going. There’s power in community.

    At least that’s what I think I’d advice her. But I don’t know your friend or her situation, obviously.


  • American capitalists are really, really good at cracking down on any civil attempt at unionising and/or improving society at the cost of the ultra rich.

    You could recite the extensive history of violence, but honestly the greatest achievement is in the propaganda. Solidarity seems to be commonly understood - by all classes - as having to take the bill for somebody even poorer than yourself, and nobody seems to be comfortable with the idea that they might themselves one day benefit.

    Americans can’t have good things before they start fighting back. Read up on union history. Organize. Educate. Teach people what solidarity is and what the Battle of Blair Mountain was. Learn what was taken away from you, and help others understand as well. Begin locally.

    Either that, or keep watching the fascists take over day by day, as they have been doing for decades.



  • Where are you based? US? If so, which state? Which field? Are you willing to travel far?

    There are huge differences in costs (from free to insanely expensive) and quality (not necessarily correlated with costs). But if you want to do a PhD, it could be a good idea to search out a research environment right away and to use the Master’s as an opportunity to familiarize yourself with their work.

    Edit: Oh, and be ready to change plans. Maybe it’s not so fun after all, and you redecide on the whole PhD thing. Or maybe you change your topic. That’s fine. Don’t force yourself to write a PhD you’re not interested in.




  • We should be hesitant to accept too many lessons from the American realist school of thought. Their great legacy is to narrowly steer clear of a nuclear holocaust, on several instances out of sheer luck, while repeatedly fucking up huge parts of the world beyond recognition.

    Somehow we celebrate this clown parade for the one disaster they nearly brought upon us, but we narrowly escaped. There’s no lessons to be learned from the Americans, except as a cautionary tale.

    Sure, MAD worked; we only came closer to our own extinction than we ever have in the process.


  • Build up defence, and a plausible threat using other less awful weapons.

    Nuclear threatens the civil population. Despots like Putin might not even care all that much about that. What we need is targeted weapons and intelligence. Putin should expect that, if he launches a nuke, it might not mean that Moscow will be transformed to ashes, but we’ll take out him and his crooks with targeted strikes wherever they may hide.

    The Russians have a history of burning their cities to the ground, and of sacrificing their population for strategic reasons. Targeting the civilian population is pointless. We can do a lot better with targeted strikes, and with modern technology it should be possible.



  • This comment section seems to assume that just because the cold war never went nuclear, it never could have. It also seems to forget the stress of living under constant threat of nuclear war.

    We need to get rid of nukes, not build new ones. One of our core projects as humanity should be to get rid of nuclear weapons. Our failure to do so is the fault of the Americans as much as the Russians, if not more. You guys sure love your bombs.

    So to answer the question: Nah, fuck that.





  • I have awful experience with recent T series ThinkPads.

    My Ideapad 510S that I bought many many years ago is much more robust, and has lived through a lot of use and abuse. Meanwhile I treat my ThinkPads like precious relics, and they still keep breaking down on me for stupid-ass reasons. I bought ThinkPad because I thought it could last me at least a decade ­— that couldn’t be further from the truth. What a pile of trash. I guess they were good ten years ago.

    Next time I’m gonna put good money into a laptop — and, as both charging ports on my T14s are currently failing, I’m afraid it won’t be long — I’ll get myself a Framework.

    For the lower end of the price spectrum I sadly have no idea. I’m just here to warn everyone about ThinkPads. It has become my destiny in life.