rgegriff

rgegriff, 10 months ago to random

The year is 2130. Google launches Google Life; a free mind backup and restore service. In return, thousands of instances of your backup are subjected to advertisements every second in order to determine which ad is most likely to result in a purchase, by you, at any given moment

rgegriff, 10 months ago to random

Let's say you wanted to build alternative structures to supply communities with life necessities that existing state and capital structures fail to provide.

Short of some revolutionary mass insurrection taking power, liberating capital resources, and upending the economic status quo; any attempts to build these alternative infrastructures would necessarily exist within, and interface with, currently existing capitalist systems. Let's start with the "modest" goal of providing food, dignified shelter to anyone who needs it; forever.

One assumption that is critical to this imagined pathway is that enough people with moderately high-incomes are not so far-gone that they would be willing to, if presented with the opportunity, pay more for things knowing they are directly subsidizing their neighbors.

Let's say you are able to somehow pull together 20 million dollars; maybe you have a lot of sympathetic patrons, maybe you really lucked out when the evil startup you worked for in your 20s IPO'd; maybe you inherited a bunch of money from someone who got it by being awful and you can't stand personally benefitting from it, maybe you just have a lot of friends who believe in you and share your vision.

Either way, you have some cash and the dream to try and boot up socialism from inside of a capitalistic operating system.

You use that money to start or buy a farm. Eventually, the goal will be to feed people directly with farming output, but for now you need to keep things self-sustaining, so the output of the farm gets sold. You pay the people working the farm fairly and avoid using the worst environmental practices. The farm turns a profit, but not a "maximal profit". You don't have shareholders, so you are allowed to do this.

These profits are split between donations to grassroots community organizations dedicated to feeding people, and reinvestment into the farming organization every year; continually growing outputs and increasing margins purely through scale while continuing to mind your environmental and labor responsibilities. You never pay yourself more than anyone else who is working for the project.

If this manages to become self-sustaining, you can take some of the excess and begin opening community cafeterias.
The goal of these cafeterias would be to efficiently serve healthy, desirable, meals each day from a daily menu that accounts for various dietary-restrictions in a friendly communal atmosphere.

Meals can be purchased a-la carte or through a subscription plan; The cost of a meal is on an income-based sliding scale; Diners with high-incomes pay more and directly subsidize lower-income diners. You remind the high-income diners of this as much as possible. Rich people love no-effort ways to feel like they are helping.

If someone is hungry, they get fed, no matter what.

Assuming the food supply side of the equation is able to grow sustainably; start buying mostly empty apartment buildings and converting them into housing co-ops. Since you own the building, you can work with some credit unions and extend low-interest mortgages to existing tenants at relatively low risk to yourself. They have the option to continue renting until they move out, but you structure the mortgages such that the monthly payments are lower than what the monthly rent to a landlord would be. There is also a monthly income-based co-op fee that would pay for maintenance and a blanket insurance policy for all units. This co-op fee would also go towards subsidizing several units from each property as housing-first opportunities for unhoused individuals and families. These opportunities would be provided without any pre-conditions such as seeking employment or entering into drug/mental health treatment.

Purchasing a unit comes with some strings, though; you must live in the unit as your primary residence for the majority of the year; if you move out, you are required to sell the unit, either back to the building at the fixed unit price, or to anyone else who wishes to buy it from you on the same terms. You can get a roommate, but you don't get to rent out the whole unit or collect properties as if they were pokemon cards. This is housing, not an investment.

Start replacing landlords with homeowners.

All the while, you are going to need to build ties. You will need to serve others wherever possible, and get people invested in the vision of this project. You will need to gain support and protection from people in power; Once you start to appear like a threat to capital, you will face attacks.

foone, 10 months ago to random

given the way I post (lots of long threads that I continuously extend over hours or days), it'd be handy to have, like, a "thread view" for mastodon. like it'd be shortened versions of all non-reply posts I've made recently, with a counter for how many replies there are, with a link to the last post in the thread

ifixcoinops, 10 months ago to random

Nextcloud is bollocking about with AI now, so the question's gotta be,

🙂 which project,
🕶️ 🙂 is gonna be,
😎 the NEXT
👈😎👈 CLOUD
🕶️😉

kusuriya, 10 months ago to random

Lotto/Fuck you money canary

If this toot is still here I havent attained fuck you money yet.

rgegriff, 10 months ago to random

The Oppenheimer of weaponizing incompetence

thegibson, 10 months ago to random

We back!

thegibson, 10 months ago to random

I’d take Zuck’s cage match challenge.

My mommy wouldn’t stop it… because she knows a punk when she sees one.

rgegriff, 10 months ago to random

It's not enough to block meta.
It's not enough to defed meta.

Work must be done to actively disrupt the meta

rgegriff, 10 months ago to random

Why come "kleptomaniac" and not "devoted anglophile"?

thegibson, 10 months ago to random

You ever just stop and think about how weird it is that devices like the Power Glove existed at all in that time period?

rgegriff, 10 months ago to random

Are there any communications netwprks that are built on TOR? Trying to imagine a chat platform that could allow people to organize secretly, without needing to initially trust any other member of the network

rgegriff, 10 months ago to random

Remember to like, comment, subscribe and 🎵​Riiiing my beeeellllll, ring MY bell 🎵​

majorlinux, 10 months ago to twitter

Hey, you know what doesn't limit how many posts you can read?

You should definitely hit me up over at https://majorshouse.com/contact for more information!

Twitter tells users to touch grass, adds new rule limiting how many tweets you can read per day https://9to5mac.com/2023/07/01/twitter-limit-on-how-many-tweets-you-can-read/

#Twitter #MuskyMusk #RateLimiting #Tweets #TechNews

rgegriff, 11 months ago to random

https://youtube.com/watch?v=YE9rEQAGpLw&feature=share8

eniko, 11 months ago to random

I wish people understood the difference between multinational billion dollar corporations and small businesses that are basically just a legal entity wrapped around a small creator to shield them from losing everything if something happens to put them far enough in the red

rgegriff, 11 months ago to random

Verry disappointed that I smell neither sex NOR candy.

TheDarkHorse, 11 months ago to random

This guy just said he doesn't like disturbed because it isn't heavy metal???
MY BROTHER ARE YOU FUCKING DEAF
YOU LIKE SIMPLE PLAN
SIMPLE PLAN
YOU FUCKING ROTTEN TOE

lori, 11 months ago to random

Cohost's financial update is a poster child for what I and others have been saying for a long time now: the internet won't survive without decentralization. You can't just make the next Twitter or Reddit or Tumblr. That's a joke. Cohost was against decentralization but they've now learned why centralization isn't feasible: only massive corporations with infinite VC can afford it, and they hemorrhage that money and close eventually too.

The internet is too expensive to work this way and it won't long term. We just got complacent while there was enough VC to go around. It's pets dot com again. It doesn't last.

And this isn't even about AP/fedi, while I like fedi this is true with or without it. We have to go back to having websites. Not The(tm) website for whatever, but lots of them. If you don't want to go to more than one? Too bad, it's how things will be regardless. Having One website isn't sustainable for corporations and isn't even vaguely feasible for little guys.

You have to have lots of websites. I can run a small community for a bit of my entertainment budget for the month or donations from a handful of users who like what I'm running. You can run a mastodon instance for a small crowd for very little. You can run a website off an old laptop laying around. You cannot run a 130k user site and pay you and your friends $94k a year to run it. It's not sustainable. I wish it was. It isn't. Sites have to stay small, and there have to be enough of them spread out to spread out the financial load to hobbyist levels. Sorry that you can't make a living running a site for your friends to hang out on, but it's just how the math works out. Reddit can't make money doing it, Twitter can't make money doing it, Patreon can't...they only survive on being Huge Corporations Who Can Bleed Money. You can replicate bleeding money on a small scale all you want but I wouldn't advise it. You can however run a forum for your friends for the cost of Netflix or whatever.

thegibson, 11 months ago to random

More adventures in home electrical work.

I want to be done here very badly.

rgegriff, 11 months ago to random

🐧 :cyber_heart_sparkle:​

rgegriff, 11 months ago to random

Chicago has the superior pizza and New York has the superior hot dogs and idgaf if this gets me cancelled