Notices by Aven (aven@shitposter.club), page 3
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Aven (aven@shitposter.club)'s status on Sunday, 04-Feb-2024 04:42:41 JST 
Aven
@icedquinn @incognitum @olmitch
>i suspect the government has no socialists
No one at the government wants the government to own the means of production? -
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Aven (aven@shitposter.club)'s status on Sunday, 04-Feb-2024 04:38:08 JST
Aven
@icedquinn @incognitum @olmitch
>capitalism tends to have everything owned by a financial caste
That's kind of a strawman, because one could say that The Party is the "financial caste" in socialism. People with big money exist regardless of the system, and I'd argue that socialism is even better for big money people because then they control everything, not just capital. The definitions I'm working with are "capitalism is private ownership of capital and free markets" and "socialism is public (government) ownership of capital and regulated markets"
>worker co-ops are actually owned by the citizenry
So are publicly-traded megacorporations. The difference is size and whether the owners also work there or not. Private companies and small business are not "functional socialism", they're actually more capitalist than megacorporations. Small business owners or worker co-op workers are the most capitalist, because they own the capital at their organization.
A socialist hackerspace or worker co-op would look like lobbying the city or the federal government for a taxpayer-funded grant to create a makerspace or co-op, where the money for it has little to do with how well it is run or what it makes or if the workers are happy. -
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Aven (aven@shitposter.club)'s status on Sunday, 04-Feb-2024 04:38:07 JST
Aven
@icedquinn @incognitum @olmitch which is why socialist activists most hate small business owners, never turn their organizations into co-ops, and gleefully shut down small businesses during lockdowns in favor of "essential businesses" like Walmart and Amazon. It's why they hate indie game devs and prefer AAA, "because AAA can pay workers a steady salary, whereas indie is cruel to the worker who might work for the equivalent of less than minimum wage if their game does poorly".
They always seem to have some reason to prefer the big player over the small player. Then things get worse as the big player gets complacent due to lack of competitive market.
Then they demand government step in, and big player becomes "too big to fail".
Then things get worse, as there is no alternative, no free market.
The more they "win", the worse things are for them (and everyone else). -
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Aven (aven@shitposter.club)'s status on Sunday, 04-Feb-2024 03:57:32 JST
Aven
@icedquinn @incognitum @olmitch that's just small communes and private business. That does work, but it's not socialism. It's actually capitalism. The people involved own the means of production on a private basis. Even if shared, it's still private for the group, and is therefore a corporation.
Socialism is necessarily government and large-scale centralization of power. Also
"The purpose of socialism is communism" - Lenin -
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Aven (aven@shitposter.club)'s status on Sunday, 04-Feb-2024 03:50:56 JST
Aven
@icedquinn @incognitum @olmitch my point is that in socialism you cannot refuse to work, and you cannot strike for better working conditions. In socialism the worker has far less power and freedom, and the state will consider refusal to work as sabotage or disability like Sluggish Schizophrenia, which the USSR used to put political dissidents into asylums.
The more socialist activists "win", the less power they have and more more miserable they become. Socialist activist "helping" is Munchhausen Syndrome By Proxy against workers, making workers weaker under the government than they were under private industry. See unions for which it is illegal to strike. -
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Aven (aven@shitposter.club)'s status on Sunday, 04-Feb-2024 03:47:17 JST
Aven
@thendrix @icedquinn @incognitum @olmitch the CIA is fascist and therefore benefits from socialism. I forget who said it but it went like "The very portrait of fascism is the man sitting at the FBI desk at Twitter".
You can't have an FBI desk at every fedi instance admin's house. That's why they need a monopoly that needs to be regulated such that it becomes illegal to run a fedi instance. For instance, legally requiring real-time moderation that is impossible for anyone but a megacorporation to do, and removing the concept of "posts are property of their respective users".
Consolidation of the market under a few giant umbrella companies is great for the government, and is worth bailing them out as they get less and less competitive. Everything gets shittier, but the fascists gain increasing control over an ever-shrinking pie. If Marxist revolution comes, it'll just be a CIA coup to remove the remaining publicly-elected officials and non-government power, and crown themselves (the TLAs) kings, making what they were building all along official. -
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Aven (aven@shitposter.club)'s status on Sunday, 04-Feb-2024 03:21:03 JST
Aven
@icedquinn @incognitum @olmitch I'm sure there was some of that because the CIA is evil and should be destroyed. But also communists lie and blame the CIA for literally everything. The USSR did the vast majority of it to itself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrecking_(Soviet_Union) -
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Aven (aven@shitposter.club)'s status on Sunday, 04-Feb-2024 03:14:50 JST
Aven
@incognitum @icedquinn @olmitch socialist activists seem to pretend that abolishing capitalism means that corporations and industry would cease to exist, in a "food comes from a grocery store" mindset. In reality, it means that companies are nationalized and seized by the state (which communists call "the workers" or "the people") and become state-owned corporations.
State-owned corporations operate on a different set of incentives: money and growth of their corporation don't come from profit (revenue minus costs) or happy customers, it comes from The Party (bureaucrats with politically-correct opinions). Therefore state-owned corporations tend to be very inefficient, very polluting, miserable to work for, an miserable to buy from.
The post office is a good example, with the expression "going postal" coming from how happy their workers are with their jobs. In terms of customer satisfaction, I'd point to the VA (Veteran's Administration) as the state-owned corporation for single-payer public-option healthcare. Public school teacher low salaries, public school teacher child abuse (and inability to be fired for it).
Socialists seem to think that all industry and corporations should work that way, and point to the most regulated and government-controlled industries as examples of how capitalism is failing, demanding even more merger of state and corporate power as the solution. Socialism was never about ending corporations, it was always about making them too big to fail and then incorporating them into the government.
Full-blown communism is when you have to go to work and your shitty abusive job, and refusing to do so is unpatriotic and criminal. There is no unemployment or homelessness in communism because they're rounded up and put in sweatshops. If they refuse to work, they're imprisoned and enslaved and sent to more remote areas. Look up "Wrecking" in the USSR. -
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Aven (aven@shitposter.club)'s status on Wednesday, 31-Jan-2024 20:28:09 JST
Aven
@hj
Nice screenshots. Timberborn is such a beautiful game, I love its volumetric-ness.
>and even if you do build floodgate over a leeve (or dam) you are sill limited to the capacity of 3
It's possible to make a more than 3-high reservoir if you're willing to demolish levees to let the water out, which at that scale is cheap to do each drought.
>water source can't really flow "upwards"
It can if it's not at the edge of the map. But as you mentioned, which ways are possible to solve the map depend on the map, and some maps only have sources at the map edges.
I've also not played much Iron Teeth, as I don't like their theming so much. I should give them another try sometime. -
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Aven (aven@shitposter.club)'s status on Wednesday, 31-Jan-2024 08:58:20 JST
Aven
@hj I've started feeling like stacking levees is just overpowered. It would be interesting to limit how much they can stack or at least make it more expensive to stack them somehow, to make it less easy to "solve" the map.
Though in your screenshot, that one looks doable without even stacking levees. -
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Aven (aven@shitposter.club)'s status on Wednesday, 31-Jan-2024 08:41:01 JST
Aven
@hj U-turning the badtide off the map? -
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Aven (aven@shitposter.club)'s status on Saturday, 28-Oct-2023 22:39:18 JST
Aven
@Moon @leyonhjelm @SuperDicq
>Even before this I saw the anti-Russia rhetoric ramp up, I am convinced that she was just obeying her masters.
I don't remember that, but I don't disbelieve you.
>There are plenty of reasons to hate Russia but to these people it solely is about Russia's ability to resist American hegemony, human rights abuses and totalitarianism are okay if you're our ally.
That kind of makes it sound like Russia wouldn't be as bad or worse if it held the hegemonic position instead. I personally think it's more along the lines of the bogeyman thing: creating an external enemy/threat to unify against. It's less about fighting that enemy, and more about forcing your detractors at home to fall in line. Heck, if the threat is bad enough, you can suspend elections and ban opposition parties and become dictator for life.
It's a classic dictator's strategy, and is why countries like Iran and North Korea have so much anti-American propaganda. It's less about America and more about consolidating and maintaining power in their own country.
Disclaimer: I'm not saying Iran and North Korea don't have some valid reasons to fear/hate America, nor that some of the animosity isn't real and can't lead to war/invasion. Also I agree that America is hypocritical about human rights abuses, though to be fair, every powerful country is. -
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Aven (aven@shitposter.club)'s status on Saturday, 28-Oct-2023 22:22:27 JST
Aven
@Moon @SuperDicq @leyonhjelm but the reason why I think of that is because I have the impression that Clinton developed a very personal animosity toward Russia, perhaps during that time. -
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Aven (aven@shitposter.club)'s status on Saturday, 28-Oct-2023 22:16:30 JST
Aven
@Moon @SuperDicq @leyonhjelm I don't know the details of that, but the first thing I think of is the "Russian Reset" with Hillary Clinton.
I just did a quick search and found this funny tidbit I didn't know:
>On 6 March 2009 in Geneva, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton presented Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov with a red button with the English word "reset" and the Roman alphabet transliteration of the Russian Cyrillic alphabet word перегрузка ("peregruzka"). It was intended that this would be the Russian word for "reset" but actually was the word for "overload". (The correct translation would be перезагрузка ["perezagruzka"].) Additionally, the button switch was the type commonly used as an emergency stop on industrial equipment.
The button was labelled "overload", not "reset", in Russian. I don't even. -
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Aven (aven@shitposter.club)'s status on Saturday, 28-Oct-2023 22:06:38 JST
Aven
@leyonhjelm @SuperDicq @Moon
>before 9/11 there was a neocon think tank plan for the USA to invade several countries and those plans did not hinge on a particular party becoming president.
Yup, this is true. General Wesley Clark described it publicly:
>In Clark's book Winning Modern Wars, published in 2003, he describes his conversation with a military officer in the Pentagon shortly after 9/11 regarding a plan to attack seven countries in five years: "As I went back through the Pentagon in November 2001, one of the senior military staff officers had time for a chat. Yes, we were still on track for going against Iraq, he said. But there was more. This was being discussed as part of a five-year campaign plan, he said, and there were a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and finishing off Iran." Clark regards the 2003 invasion of Iraq as "a huge mistake".
I wish more people knew this. -
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Aven (aven@shitposter.club)'s status on Friday, 20-Oct-2023 23:58:15 JST
Aven
@lain I'd like to have a computer program simulate walking away from the screen and closing my eyes, in a sped-up time-frame, on my behalf. -
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Aven (aven@shitposter.club)'s status on Tuesday, 17-Oct-2023 01:32:49 JST
Aven
@lain every. gosh. darn. day. -
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Aven (aven@shitposter.club)'s status on Tuesday, 17-Oct-2023 00:56:32 JST
Aven
@lain that's how the quality of the industry improves from its current fallen state! -
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Aven (aven@shitposter.club)'s status on Monday, 16-Oct-2023 01:33:11 JST
Aven
@a7 @Moon that's an interesting insight. I think there are definitely people who are genuinely racist as a matter of principle and genuine belief, but a lot of them are social chameleons that just "when in Rome" with agreeableness, and will be racist or not-racist depending on what is socially acceptable.
It would make sense if agreeableness and outgroup-hate were correlated. Like they don't actually have an opinion, but just want to get along and be popular.
Also, maybe more to your point, there are covert racists who just don't want to get into it if there's a high social cost to speaking their true opinion. I wonder whether that can be simulated with AI. -
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Aven (aven@shitposter.club)'s status on Monday, 16-Oct-2023 01:11:59 JST
Aven
@thendrix @lain it is, and "ok boomer" is great for breaking family ties.
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