It’s important to keep the internet full of erroneous information, conspiracies, and confusion ahead of the next federal elections; otherwise, Jim Jordan’s allies don’t stand a chance.
@ubiquity75
With all the fixings. One count per charge per person involved.
H.R. 4310 may be an amusing option, though it's probably a non-starter. It specifically allows the federal government to dissolve contracts on military affairs with those involved in human trafficking. It would stretch a point, but it surely would be a terrible thing if, due to Abbott's proclivities, Texas in general were cut off from those federal military dollars, wouldn't it...?
It doesn’t take much of anything to threaten the powers that be. So very little, in fact, that it makes me have hope - probably the very opposite of what was intended by the destruction of this public artwork.
@ubiquity75 As a consultant to multiple contracts, I have multiple email accounts that I only read monthly. I have pretty robust rulesets for dispatching the not-relevant-to-me emails my accounts are (mostly) Cc'ed on. Unfortunately, my customers disable server-side rules on ther,mail-domains. When I first fire up my email client after a month's time, it can take 15-45 minutes for the client-side rules to do their thing.
He’s just a regular president guy, presidenting once again, calling for all Turks to unite, which is definitely not a call for ethnic animus against, oh, I dunno, the Kurds. And definitely isn’t heard as a threat by many dissidents. Cool.
Capital’s project and fundamental tendency is to extract the most production from workers for the LEAST POSSIBLE remuneration. To the point of absurdity. To the point of wage slavery. This is just a fact. The only way to stop it is to resist it. Think about digital tech automation in these terms. It’s not intended to render people unemployed, it is intended to shift the nature of their work, devalue their contribution and therefore place them, ultimately, into subsistence employment.
@ubiquity75 I may have misunderstood your post, and definitely did a poor job explaining mine.
Mainly, I disagree that digital tech is "not intended to render people unemployed."
There very much is a desire to lay people off. This not because the capitalists are grinches that enjoy seeing poverty, but because each individual enterprise wants to produce as profitably as possible. If they can maintain production while halving their outlay on wages, it will either enthusiastically do that, or competition will begrudgingly compel it to do that sooner or later.
(This in addition to devaluing their work in the literal sense of reducing the amount of value contained in the commodity labor-power.)
@schalken You are reading into it. Being forced to move into a different type of work is not unemployment. My entire point is to articulate that this is classic capitalism. I’m not really interested in you continuing to describe my own point to me.
ChatGPT took their jobs. Now they walk dogs and fix air conditioners. Technology used to automate dirty and repetitive jobs. Now, artificial intelligence chatbots are coming after high-paid ones.
@whorfin No, I feel you. That’s precisely the reason I stressed a political economic analysis in my interview. Let’s not get distracted by the tech; the project remains the same: deskilling workers and undervaluing/underpaying their work. Reducing wages as a form of social control. Always the same story.
The wonderful @parkermolloy shared this in her (also wonderful) newsletter today. And it’s absolutely spot-on. But I would be remiss were I not to point out that Substack is worrisome in many of the same ways.
@ubiquity75@parkermolloy
Liked it very much. But this bothered me a little:
“I am comfortable reacting to breaking news to my much smaller audiences on Instagram or TikTok or Bluesky or this ethically compromised newsletter website.”
Reading it here, on #mastodon, in the #fediverse I can’t help thinking “What are we? Chopped liver?”
For the most part I agree about Parker's wonderfulness, but I'm not sure Chris Best is passing that bar Parker suggests. Maybe he's passing in the dimension of the struggle for civil rights of gay people –although I would have to see proof of that to believe it– but Best definitely isn't passing in the dimension of people most likely to be persecuted by Nazis. Either funding Nazis is totally not passing the low bar, or Parker's bar is subterranean.
During the height of COVID, rental assistance, job assistance, food assistance and more were given to those in need. Student loan payments were paused. The US did not collapse due to these policies. In fact, consumer spending went up.
So, given that these things are possible and even economically favorable, one can only conclude that ending them benefits some small but powerful portion of the populace who wants to keep the rest of us under control and in relative, if not full-on, poverty.
And I keep being asked about job “losses” due to automation, e.g., generative AI, and all I can say is, these are not people being replaced by AI as such, but their work moving to a different place along the same production chain, then cheapened through a process of deskilling that provides the capitalist class with further excuse to underpay and undervalue. But there is no “generative AI” without human labor, so look to find where it is.