Notices by Passenger (passenger@kolektiva.social), page 3

@vidar @TruthSandwich @jhavok @futurebird

I'm not sold on automation being the important part here. During my lifetime, the main driver of capitalist "productive" improvements (productive being in scare quotes because it increases shareholder value but not meaningful production) has been reorganisation, not automation.

I've worked for some very big companies and the rise of office software hasn't led to the decrease in head office staff or management, just the rise in what Graeber called bullshit jobs. Airbnb, Uber, WeWork and the other tech unicorns haven't created leisure, just precarity.

Meanwhile, my clothes are made by child slaves in whatever country won the race to the bottom, and my food is picked by undocumented people whom farmers employ because they can threaten them with migration authorities if they unionise.

Maybe it's because I'm under 40, but I think Marx's belief that capitalism would drive automation is one of the things that's aged worst about his beliefs.

@CosmicTrigger

Has Rollins shit on himself yet? I'm kinda worried that it's a when rather than an if.

@betsyvr @mw @carnage4life

Jumping in here as a union organiser who's also been trying to organise tech workers.

You and I are working class, because we survive by selling our lives an hour at a time, and if we don't we'll starve.

Our work generates value. We are then paid a part of that value back as a salary, which is basically the same as a wage. The rest goes to owners, to help them survive without selling their lives an hour at a time. The reason we let owners do this is because they have the keys to the systems and without them we can't work.

We do this work with computers rather than welding torches, but we're really no different from any skilled worker like a plumber or an electrician. By and large our pay tends to be close to theirs, too. An experienced data scientist and an experienced plumber make about the same.

The division between the two, and the "pink collar" service workers, is something we have to learn to erase. Once we do, I think we'll find it easier to unionise - most of the tech workers I've tried to organise have stumbled not just for fear of bosses, but because they don't see themselves as "that sort of worker."

@abolisyonista

Sub-Neptunes are easier to detect, especially by gravitational methods, and especially especially when they orbit smaller red stars, so we have detected lots of them.

Our Sun is larger than most stars, although is still tiny compared to some out there. Earth is a small rocky planet; there is some supposition that no planet smaller than us would be heavy enough to retain an atmosphere, so we might be as small as it gets. A small planet orbiting a large star is more difficult to detect than the other way around.

The universe might be full of planets like Earth orbiting stars like the Sun, and we just wouldn't know. We're getting better at detecting them every year, though, but this is a game that takes time.

@scorpiontongue

This is awful.

This is just speculation, but it sounds like the professor saw something of himself in the little boy and didn't want to tell him no because he didn't want to think that he would have been told no back when he was that age.

And this is how patriarchal misogyn perpetuates itself.

@abolisyonista

You have my attention, comrade.

I'm boosting this piece not because I agree with all of it, and certainly not because I stand behind what the writer has said elsewhere (she and I differ sharply over the whole TBS issue) but because she was a friend before this went down, and has asked me to boost it in the hope of unburning some bridges, and that's something I want to support.

She is aware that I think her levels of Whiteness on this matter are disappointing.

If you have an issue with my choice of friends, please feel free to not include yourself in that number.

@BigJesusTrashcan @fcktheworld587

That's pretty much what Marx spent his time doing (the nineteenth-century equivalent, anyway), I believe? That and drinking brandy on Engels's tab?

@thisismissem @anarchopunk_girl

(Apologies for the long post but this is an interesting point.)

Since you asked specifically about the medieval era (that is, in Europe between roughly 1000 and 1500, which is what we normally mean when we say "the middle ages") diet was a complex thing for several reasons, made more difficult to study by the limited number of written sources about the lives of peasants.

Firstly, meat was a status food. In some parts of Europe, records use people's poor diet as a byword for how poor they are, and this sometimes references meat. For example, there are records from Scotland saying things like "this widow was so poor that her only meat was an occasional bit of bacon in her stew." On the opposite end of the spectrum, aristocrats often suffered dietary medical problems which we now recognise as being due to a diet with too much meat and too few vegetables. Chaucer uses "meat" as a synonym for "aristocrat food", and there are references from Poland where aristocrats react with alarm to lowborn-but-well-off people eating more meat than their station in society dictated.

Secondary, Christianity at the time had dietary laws about which foods one could eat when. These weren't always obeyed, or even enforced, and we know this from the sheer number of records from church people getting angry and demanding that "from now on, the dietary laws must be obeyed." However, even if not always obeyed, this gave a social context to abstaining from meat: it was seen as a godly thing to do, admirable if perhaps unworldly.

These two things combine in many sources, because medieval Christians (and many Christians today) viewed humility as a good thing, and this humility often meant varying the amount of meat in your diet. Many pilgrims abstained from meat during their pilgrimages, and some holy figures like St Francis ate what we would interpret as vegetarian or vegan diets.

How did people view them? Well, as literal holy people, but also as kinda sanctimonious. Literally "holier than thou", if you will. Nobody was going to call St Francis a prick in writing, but many people called pilgrims pricks, and in some areas like Germany or Spain we have some sources referring to them as what we'd now call "poverty tourists."

However, this sort of poverty tourism was extremely popular in the medieval world: people liked festivals where they acted as if they were temporarily higher or lower in the social hierarchy, whether that was being "king for a day" or living like a pauper to ask repentance of sins. Doing it long-term or permanently was more unusual.

So, did principled vegans exist at the time? Yes, absolutely. St Francis talked about not eating animals because it was cruel to the animals, and he was an extremely popular figure. But it was understood in a different context from today: radical Franciscans were seen as revolutionaries (and many saw themselves as such) because their insistence on meat-free diets was interpreted as a threat to social hierarchy, rather than as an animal-rights or sustainability issue.

This is a subplot in Umberto Eco's novel Name of the Rose, interestingly.

(I won't talk about monks here because they are a really interesting part of this topic but not one that can be covered in brief.)

Hey, Kolektiva seems to be working great again. Thanks for all your hard work, everyone!

@anarchopunk_girl

That's really interesting. Different people have different responses to video games. Personally, I'm aware that my relationship to them is potentially quite unhealthy. I get addicted to things easily, and so I'm careful to not take drugs and to drink only in extreme moderation. Likewise, I'm careful to play games which have definite and regular break points along the way, which push me out of the fantasy and let me do something else for a change.

When I was really into Elder Scrolls games, I would end up going for a walk with my virtual body and making sure it was well rested and well fed, while not doing those things with my physical body. I didn't like that experience and don't really want to repeat it.

@anarchopunk_girl

That's really interesting. Different people have different responses to video games. Personally, I'm aware that my relationship to them is potentially quite unhealthy. I get addicted to things easily, and so I'm careful to not take drugs and to drink only in extreme moderation. Likewise, I'm careful to play games which have definite and regular break points along the way, which push me out of the fantasy and let me do something else for a change.

When I was really into Elder Scrolls games, I would end up going for a walk with my virtual body and making sure it was well rested and well fed, while not doing those things with my physical body. I didn't like that experience and don't really want to repeat it.

@anarchopunk_girl

I don't play Bethesda games precisely because the open world is too addictive for me. Paradoxically, if this game manages to restrain it, it might work better for me.

@anarchopunk_girl

I don't play Bethesda games precisely because the open world is too addictive for me. Paradoxically, if this game manages to restrain it, it might work better for me.

@anarchopunk_girl

I don't play Bethesda games precisely because the open world is too addictive for me. Paradoxically, if this game manages to restrain it, it might work better for me.

@anarchopunk_girl @lethargilistic

Let's also remember that many really important artists had their work almost entirely forgotten for many years until it was "rediscovered" and popularised.

Johann Sebastian Bach is the exemplar who immediately comes to mind.

@cstross @Remittancegirl @anarchopunk_girl

I would buy a novel-length book which is nothing but a Nietzschean villain monologuing to themselves, possibly in the shower, about the events of each passing day.

Wait, that's just Dr Horrible's Sing Along Blog.

@Pythia

The crowd explodes in applause as Vivek Ramaswamy lifts Mike Pence above his head and piledrivers him into the floor. "I AM THE PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE!" he roars.

@Pythia

I think we need expert opinion on this. @theleftfist, any thoughts on who would come out on top?

@BigTittyBimbo

When unionising, my main piece of advice is to let the other person talk themselves into it.

Literally everyone hates their landlord, so this isn't hard. (If you're a landlord reading this, yes, everyone hates you.) However, people often find the idea of doing anything about it to be frightening. So, at first you have to normalise the idea of talking to one another about what a scabrous piece of shit the landlord is. Ease people into it. Let them think they're coming up with ideas.