The Dems are gonna continue to lose legitimacy among the broad left and working class. The role of Marxists now is to provide an alternative legitimacy-- politically and ideologically. Various strains of fascism will be attempting to do the same thing.
The death of the democratic party is necessary for progress, but it doesn't guarantee progress if there isn't a real worker's party to fill the vacuum.
I wish I had it in me to hop on the grift train. So many people begging to broadcast their identity with overpriced nonsense that immediately gets put in an attic or garbage.
There's hope and there's hopium
And then there's... this
The degree to which people become Marxist in or as a result of academia is almost entirely siloed off from any levers of power. If anything the mechanism is capturing people that might otherwise have led worker strikes, instead spending their lives applying Derrida to this or Foucault to that. Don't exile Lenin, give him a somewhat comfortable job where he feels like he's contributing to theory (but poses no threat to capital).
Source: my ass.
AI companies are working on that
Feel the same way about soda shops. Some of them have literally just a gas station soda fountain and shitty Styrofoam cups, but charge like $8 for a drink. And people fucking order them through door dash so it costs them like $15.
Selling effectively nothing. It's an echo of an economic mechanism, like the fast food business model distilled to its pure essence devoid of any value whatsoever. A person getting paid minimum wage to stand behind a counter and perform a ritual that only resembles the function it used to be.
Like sicker versions of the Potemkin shops Americans believe exist in North Korea.
There's a degree to which this is a supply that creates demand, I feel. Maybe there's a better way to put it.
When I had a 720p laptop, it was perfectly fine. I played games and watched movies and never felt like I was viewing things in low quality. Once I got 1080p, I could tell things were better, but they weren't like shockingly, orgasmicly better. 720p, though, felt borderline unusable once I got used to 1080p.
The same thing happened prior to this with old box tvs/monitors, and with older video games. I played the shit out of FNV and the graphics and gameplay seemed fine. Having played modern games, though, FNV feels janky and LQ (despite having better than average writing).
I'm consciously avoiding 4K for this reason.
I'm coming around on audio to some degree, but still prefer to hit the "80% of perfect" before diminished returns start curving up, wrt earphones and such
God my current setup is patched together and hanging by a thread. Not super tech savvy so it usually takes a dedicated deep dive for me to set everything up (and all the focus and motivation that entails). So if something goes wrong while I'm trying to work, I'm more likely to find a quick workaround and make a note to fix things later.
Except five years later I haven't truly fixed anything lmao. Gonna just do a clean install one of these days, if I can decide on a distro.
Class is just a conceptual category. We're looking at a broad array of diverse individuals or entities, perhaps the flows of resources or power going towards and away from them, and making generalizations to help identify patterns and build some sort of framework of understanding. Categories are useful tools, but they don't exist in and of themselves.
As such, the categories of a framework constructed in 19th century Europe aren't going to perfectly fit other times, places, and relationships. The ability to see these categories as loose and malleable is important to scientific Marxism, we can see how definitions and categories have been adjusted and applied to different revolutionary contexts, e.g. the proletarian-peasant class(es) of prerevolutionary Russia and China.
Legal ownership is a social construct that is arguably superstructural to material flows. So if a sentient AI emerged and was capable and motivated to shape the world around it, society and culture would evolve. The concept of property as we understand it is largely an invention of capitalism, so if material flows change, so might our understanding of property.
The non-human nature of the AI might also force an adjustment to most class models that are based on human motives and needs.
Depending on the med GoodRx can do online telehealth prescriptions or emergency refills. There's other online script mills but they've been getting pretty expensive lately.
I've been jumping from telehealth to telehealth every 1-2 months for the last couple years. It's barely cheaper than illegally importing the med from India
Huh good timing, I just watched Threads last week
Lol I do the same thing
Ooh I like that reading of the movie. I felt like it was saying something that I didn't quite pick up on, but really didn't feel like rewatching it.
Damn climb the barbed ladder is really good, is that original or from something?
What happened to beyond a reasonable doubt?
Jk it's never been the reality, proles get convicted on hearsay and less all the time, pigs and ceos can have literal video evidence against them and get off.
Jesus Christ how has it been 8 years
They're kinda fun although many tend to jam causa rimfire
About the only way to have fun with full auto unless you're rich tho, 5 cents a pop instead of 70-100