I would love to, and fully expect to be able to before long, one day fully migrate to Chinese computer hardware… just because it will probably not have Five Eyes backdoors built in.

I have doubts that global capitalism will even be functioning in 100 years in any way that is recognizable to us, where, by contrast the situations of 1925, 1825, are basically recognizable.

LMAO it’s a scraper now. I can’t imagine they’ll try and change it again as I’m getting started in a couple days but 3 different job descriptions in a week is a new record.

Pointing out the fact that Trump is a Zionist and will act in the interests of Zionists is not one of those bad takes.

However, the specific phrasing promotes the “tail wags the dog” theory, which in my view is backwards, Israel is an asset to American imperialism to a greater extent than Israel exerts control over the US (of course, Israel lobby IS powerful still). Biden put it, if there were not an israel to advance American interests in the region they would have to create one. The tail-wags-dog theory on the other hand lends itself to “ZOG”, a genuinely antisemitic and reactionary slogan, as I understand it. None of us would say that the American govt was infiltrated by Koreans (from the yankee occupation state) or Taiwanese, right? We would see that those countries are if anything subordinate to Washington and not the reverse.

Appreciate how you handled this. Recently came out that a student in my university department is a pedophile and possessed CSAM. We were all blindsided but came to a simple conclusion: we won’t attempt any vigilante violence but that person is never welcome on campus again, enrolled or not, and we can enforce that ourselves if it ever comes to it. But this person has not been seen since the local news article dropped.

Where should I start with Immanuel Wallerstein and Arghiri Emmanuel?

thank you, this checks out

It appears that Sakai’s answer is that land hunger was so severe that, yes, petty bourgeois individuals would be willing to endure it to have something like the standard of living they had been used to.

the sons and daughters of the middle class, with experience at agriculture and craft skills, were the ones who thought they had a practical chance in Amerika… What lured Europeans to leave their homes and cross the Atlantic was the chance to share in conquering Indian land.

Here is a quote he takes from ““Social Origins of Some Early Americans”. In SMITH, ed., 17th Century America. N.Y., 1972.”

Land hunger was rife among all classes. Wealthy clothiers, drapers, and merchants who had done well and wished to set themselves up in land were avidly watching the market, ready to pay almost any price for what was offered. Even prosperous yeomen often could not get the land they desired for their younger sons…It is commonplace to say that land was the greatest inducement the New World had to offer; but it is difficult to overestimate its psychological importance to people in whose minds land had always been identified with security, success and the good things of life.

maybe instead I should be criticizing UBI for being too flimsy (can be reduced by legislation, can be held back by inflation so that costs surpass, etc)

ty, i will check this out!

Thanks for your viewpoint and I think I’ll do that and keep working towards my first dev co-op etc. Nice to have the flexibility to transition down the line.

Thanks for your input. Web dev seems great and I’ve considered trying to deploy some kind of useful REST API, like for computing directions from one place to another on campus, probably with FastAPI in Python. Doing something with Docker is also on my todo-list…

I just started Forces of Production the other day. It’s interesting.

The other day I started reading a Chinese scifi novel 猫城记 Cat City/Cat Country. I thought about trying to translate it even though it’s above my reading level by just looking up all the words as I go. But I’m below that threshold of 95% understanding or whatever and have to look up many phrases on each page.

Behind the Urals is great. John Scott was a fellow traveller or party member in New York as I recall. Immigrated to the USSR to work in Magnitogorsk.

this board is a godsend.

I’m starting to think I should make this my whole undergrad research project. I could develop a tiny part of it for this DB course. Thanks for your response, lots of helpful stuff here and will come back to it and others’ comments…

Haven’t done any linear algebra or dug into matrices yet… do you think light study of the basics on KhanAcademy would be enough? I’ve done calc 1 and 2 and discrete math.

I read it years ago, and I should definitely dig in again and review. Big part of why I want to do everything in labour time as much as possible. However I think he suggests the use of a neural network at one point which is a little over my head for now. I am thinking simpler like the pen and paper material balance planning the Gosplan cdes used to do…

interesting thoughts

I’m asking because I wondered if dependence on colonial wealth could inform an argument that capitalism is historically contingent, that it was possible for there not to be capitalism