silent_water [she/her]

wait, no, this is how everyone does math. right? …right?

yes, this is true. no, this isn’t why wages haven’t kept up with productivity growth or why you must work 40 hours to sustain yourself. you have to work because profit earned must increase and paying you even one iota more than you need to be able to show up to work again tomorrow is a loss of profit. if they could make you work 80 hours a week or 160, they would in heartbeat.

thankfully, this is outlawed because labor movements of the past fought to enshrine in law a limit on how much you can be forced to work and set a minimum bar for how much they can pay you. these laws are under fire - I explore why in the rest of this reply - and will be repealed eventually if labor does not resist collectively.

however, the rate of profit always decreases on a long enough timescale because of dead labor (technology, machines, etc), inter-capitalist competition - capitalists will steal profit from each other if there’s more to be had - and because infinite growth is impossible so eventually externalities will always overcome the creation of new capital.

consequently, capital accumulates in the hands of the capital-owning class - an ever-shrinking group of them, at that - and this continues until you, the worker, make so little that you cannot actually show up to work the next day - the loss of social reproduction. reproduction here doesn’t only refer to progeny but also feeding, clothing, housing, etc. yourself and your family, the meeting of the basic necessities that allow you to continue working, including your health - physical and mental. capital eternally strives to reduce what it must subsidize on your behalf as ensuring you can take better care of yourself reduces profits. a capitalist that makes more profit outcompetes and drives out of business all others who choose to make less profit, eventually.

this is also why capitalism has cyclical recessions, a fact predicted in the 1870s and termed crises of capitalism, when capital has accumulated in too few hands, profit can no longer be made, and workers struggle to feed themselves. you’re just noticing Marx’s second law - the law of capital accumulation.

no, it’s not a hypervisor. it’s a a bit of hardware with access to the network stack that allows firmware updates and monitoring (in the “is the computer on/overheating” sense - it gives access to the low level sensors). it’s supposed to be disabled if you don’t pay money to turn it on (ie enterprise customers) but there’s no way to really know because the motherboard chipsets don’t expose access to it. it /shouldn’t/ be able to function because the motherboard needs to cooperate in order to make it function but we don’t really know what the chipsets/bios do/don’t implement. so it’s a theoretical attack vector by the USG.

the AMD version of the same is much more limited and doesn’t even exist on consumer chips, if you don’t buy workstation or server hardware. and if you do buy those, the motherboard exposes the control functions with documentation on which network interfaces it’s able to use. it’s also frequently open spec these days so you can run your own FOSS management firmware. very handy if you e.g. need to access the bios when the video card won’t turn on or your overclock is busto.

Intel is basically just stupid and too lazy to only include the extra silicon in chips where it’s actually possible to use it. and too greedy to open up the specs to make it possible to control it yourself on chips where it can be used. don’t give Intel money. AMD appears to be all in on open source specs and actively contributes to the open firmware/open source bios initiatives so it’s likely that it will become standard on their hardware over the next 5ish years (their code sucks ass so it’s very hard for projects to merge/debug quickly so it’s a slow effort lol).

the x86 instruction set is public. implementing it breaks copyright law, if you aren’t AMD or Intel. it has to be public or compilers/interpreters/assembly code couldn’t exist.

they extended one set of assembly instructions with a bit of another. instruction sets are determined by the hardware and are called the architecture. RISCV is an extensible architecture meaning you can add in additional instructions without breaking compatibility with programs targeting the architecture.

China also appears to be improving on this in real time, though official policy still lags behind e.g. Cuba.

idk, I just know that the old instance already have problems with power users and reifying that will make the problem worse.

I think this was always an intended feature (I’ve certainly been hearing about it for years as something people want/devs want to add), in addition to a user tagging system (i.e. users adding tags to their own usernames (e.g. pronoun tags). the main difference, though, was that it was something the poster or mods/admins could add and not something for the userbase at large to vote on. I think making it a voting system allows abuse. like consider a large group of transphobes adding tags to posts in trans comms, for instance.

a trusted user system is it’s own can of worms.

unfortunately other data is not encouraging , the number of servers is both down since the exodus and in the recent month.

this is normal. we’ll go through a lot of similar waves. people start servers, realize they’re a lot of work, and then abandon them. servers that foster a healthy community will survive. hexbear’s worst cycle involved losing the entire administrative team just weeks after a large percentage of the website left. don’t sweat the growing pains - work together to learn, grow, and change.

the British took over Palestine from the Ottomans, suppressed decolonization movements, then partitioned it to form Israel. during the formation of the Israeli state, Palestinians were slaughtered and driven out of their homes in an event known as the Nakba - which translates as “The Catastrophe”. since then, there have been a series of wars resulting in the slow but steady encroachment of the Israeli state - look ip maps of the region over the decades - and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. in such an atmosphere, nothing but mutual hate is possible.

lol the US security apparatus is bad but it’s not that bad. you might get put on a watchlist though.

nothing shitty about it. controlling nukes ends the occupation. Palestine is the greatest concentration camp on earth. there is no price too high to pay to end that. it must end.

unironically, nothing would end Israel’s belligerence faster

https://hexbear.net/comment/4080366

so to be clear, when Israel bombs schools and hospitals, when they cut off food, water, and electricity, those things should be done to Israel?

FOSS hacks the copyright system to build a software commons independent of corporation, guaranteeing the freedoms of users and developers - what part of that statement isn’t political?

how can privacy ever be stripped of political content? it’s inherently about social forces - ie politics.

I mean it will wind up warmer than Siberia is now.

youtubers/streamers have a parasocial thing going with their audience that makes the idea of donating a smaller mental step for their audience (senpai might notice me if I donate type brainworms). FOSS projects historically have really struggled with funding, unless they’re able to secure funding from an org/corporation.

adhd posting tip: when you inevitably write a 2000 word response to someone, go back when you’re done and rewrite the first paragraph so it actually sets up what you ended up writing about - cause otherwise it’s confusing for other people to read.