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3 yr. ago

  • Ultimately worker coops by their design limit the amount of excess money that can be siphoned off and concentrated to CEO's and shareholders, so capital holders would likely refuse to invest in co-ops in fear that were they to become the standard way of organizing businesses, they would get a smaller and smaller piece of the pie globally, as more wealth is distributed to the workers themselves instead.

    The current system of capitalism is inherently designed to oppose all forms of more equal distribution of power and wealth.

    If co-ops were to become successful in spite of that, the capital owners would likely attempt a military coup to literally fight back against it, just as they attempted during the Business Plot in response to FDR's economic reforms.

    The capital holders hold a tremendous amount of the power to influence the globe to their will due to their concentrated wealth, which is only possible to accumulate due to the accepted exploitation of labor. They will do everything in their power to prevent the loss of that power, even if it means sub-optimal profits.

  • I didn't say there would be no conflict, but significantly less.

    If everyone is an owner, there is no incentive to withhold labor and strike, as they can simply come to a consensus with the other co-owners instead. The only reason unions exist and strike is because of an imbalance of power between the capital owners and the workers that generate the capital, so the unions must leverage their labor as a bargaining chip to try to get a slightly more fair deal. That dynamic is not present in a worker owned co-operative, since everyone is an owner and has the same incentive to increase profit, since it benefits all instead of the few.

    This would make everyone pay attention because people don’t really care about anything but long term growth independent of the company’s operating system.

    All traditional companies have an incentive to fight the formation of unions, even if they do generate more profits, as CEO's and shareholders do not wish to split up those profits to the workers any more than is absolutely necessary to retain those workers to begin with.

    CEO's and Shareholders are virtually all extremely self interested, often times combined with dark triad traits which both encouraged and enabled them to reach those positions to begin with.

    They do not act rationally purely in interest of profit, as if that was the case, then they would've already adopted lower working hours, work from home, better benefits, and given partial ownership of the company to the workers voluntarily. Instead, history has shown time and time again that they would much rather let an entire company be destroyed rather than give up power to workers.

    You will not have any success whatsoever of convincing existing corporations to embrace unions by proving an example.

    A co op would be so different from existing systems that I fear people would think hey that’s neat but we can’t replicate it unless we started over.

    There are plenty of examples of worker owned cooperatives, even huge successful ones like Mondragon, which is a multi bullion dollar coop that employs 70,000 workers.

    Virtually no existing corporation nor its shareholders would want to become a co-op, because it would mean the inability to exploit and profit from their labor force. Just as they do not wish for unions to impede on their ability to exploit their labor force.

  • A worker owned cooperative would be more ideal than a unionized but otherwise standard corporation, and is less likely to have internal conflict.

  • Getting to know your neighbors and joining or creating mutual aid groups is a good way to build community. This can include informal networks through friends, tenant/renter organizations, solidarity groups, and industrial unions.

    Check out this handy guide to find existing groups in your area.

    There's also some projects you can do that help build community (and can be fun in themselves!). My instance put together a list of ideas, just scroll down to the "Fun Projects to Build Community" section

  • It's Mint's built-in version of redshift, it reduces blue light at night by tinting your screen orange to be easier on the eyes. It is installed by default on all cinnamon versions of Mint. It is not included with Xfce (not sure about MATE).

    If you want something similar on Xfce, you'd have to install Redshift and manually configure it with either a schedule or a location for it to work automatically, as it has been abandoned and the automatic location finder is broken.

  • OpenMandriva is now a hard right distro. Mageia is the better option for those who want a successor to Mandrake/Mandriva, though Mageia is struggling to retain an active community and maintainers, I believe.

  • I recently learned that OpenMandriva's president (warning, lunduke link as evidence) has declared the project "non-woke" and "anti-DEI", which has resulted in it attracting a hard right community.

    So uh... Can't say I feel too bad for 'em having this unique issue.

  • 4k blurays are usually more expensive though, as are the players, and aren't really that noticeable of an improvement unless you have a particularly large TV. It's much more affordable to stick with standard 1080p blurays.

  • I personally dislike vinyl for how damaging they are for the environment during production, but from the testing I've seen, they don't really degrade in any meaningful way just from playing them.

  • A consultant reported that billionaires, when confronted with the idea that the private security team have no incentive to continue to obey the billionaire once society had collapsed, asked the consultant how they could maintain control of the security team, such as if shock collars or locking up all the food would work.

    The consultant suggested they simply treat the security team really well beforehand, like just being a good friend.

    The billionaires then became concerned, and I shit you not, asked "but where does that end?"

    I'll try to find the link to add it here.

    Edit: Here it is.

  • They are nationalist racists trying to cloak themselves with populist leftist ideas. This is the leader of that party:

    https://www.friatider.se/markus-allard-om-andra-generationens-invandrare-de-ska-ocksa-ut

    Örebro Party leader Markus Allard goes to the election on expulsions. He opens to withdraw citizenship and also expel second generation of immigrants – even if they were born in Sweden."I'm prepared to cross corpses," he said.

    One suggestion that he has is that citizenship and permanent residence permits can be torn up – with reference to "Sweden is the country of Swedes".

    In a section of Yoshi's Podcast, Allard develops his view on expulsions and explains that he prepared to "go over corpses" to bring home unwanted immigrants. The host notes that there will be no beautiful sight when, for example, immigrant mothers who have been on maternity leave for 15 years are to be deported together with their children. "It's not going to be pretty to send these people home," he said. Markus Allard agrees, but says: I think you can handle that optics. Even the children will need to be deported, he explains.

    He further explains that many of the problems relate to second-generation immigrants. They are going out too. Even if they were born in Sweden, because they have no natural connection to Sweden. They are not Swedes. They have not become Swedes. It says Sweden in the passport, but they have not been interested in becoming part of Sweden. There's a difference. It's a qualitative difference," Allard said

    Remember; the Nazi's did the same thing by strategically calling their party the National Socialist German Workers' Party, despite them not being socialist nor a working class party. This was chosen because Socialism was gaining popularity, and thus the Nazi's thought it would help their chances of getting votes and public support.

  • The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin.

    Few other sci-fi books do as good a job of depicting how a gift/library economy could work like in practice. It's quite a hopeful vision of where we can collectively go in the future.

  • Flohmarket is just the name of the software, which as another said, is the German word for flea market. I suspect the creator is German.

    Anyone who self-hosts their own flohmarket instance can call their instance whatever they want.

  • Movim is a federated Discord alternative, though not part of the fediverse/Activitypub, as it is based on XMPP instead. It's still a bit clunky in the UX department, but is currently the most full featured federated alternative.

    Also @HubertManne@piefed.social

  • The CEO of Commodore appears to be completely out of touch on people's perception of AI use, as they've been using it a fair amount in videos and the advertising for this phone (AI music and AI video generation) since buying Commodore, and poorly justifying it in the comments of their videos with links to their FAQ.

  • AFAIK they've already fully paid off the commodore IP acquisition from C64 ultimate sales, but as you say, that cannot sustain them forever.

    The phone is pretty much entirely just the CEO's personal opinion of what a phone should be, which he's been making videos about from before the acquisition, and they appear to have done almost zero market research what the customers would want and be willing to pay..