hongdao

joined 2 years ago
 

Related, what if we protected the privacy of everyone by default (which is an absolute joke in bourgeois society at the moment), but reserved technological surveillance as a measure applied to violent offenders? I think it would enable us to be less punitive, rather than being moreso - offenders could be released sooner and with more confidence of collective wellbeing, if they could be "sentenced" to constant surveillance with your Militia or whatever ready to intervene in moments possibly before they even offend (eg., when a situation starts becoming very heated)

Dystopian maybe, but less so than caging and psychologically torturing a human, just less familiar...

[–] hongdao@lemmygrad.ml 14 points 3 weeks ago

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.

[–] hongdao@lemmygrad.ml 21 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

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.

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submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by hongdao@lemmygrad.ml to c/comradeship@lemmygrad.ml
 

Maybe it is not unreasonable but a sober evaluation of the situation. I think the lid is gonna come off this whole thing within 30 years, that is, the relatively good living conditions of the imperial core, low to medium levels of unemployment, steady food supply, etc., and North America will see, or is already in, a years of lead situation. And I hope that should we ever have Black Hundreds or Brownshirts - which we do already - we will also have Red Guards... which we don't yet. I guess looking at the aggressive advances of the fascist movement it is more poignant than ever to say "without a people's army, the people have nothing". Gotta build a movement first, and the movement's means of self protection and force will come from that.

[–] hongdao@lemmygrad.ml 3 points 4 months ago

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.

[–] hongdao@lemmygrad.ml 6 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

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.

 

I feel like even in these govt funded student project internship, less than 2 months long and low pressure in my experience, i get a taste of recruiters not being sure what they want slash not updating their job descriptions lol.

Genuinely looking forward to this project where I will be making a pretty simple web app full stack but the job posting originally only mentioned an API and had no mention of the React Native frontend I'll be doing too. Just a little funny. I have some really basic react experience so I think i can keep up with this and my hours are capped at 60 anyway so I'm not as worried about getting overworked or w/e.

 

I keep waffling about what domain of software dev I should focus on: web, data, games, who knows. It is like Sylvia Plath about the plum tree, but more nerdy and less personal. But I am thinking that "security dev" might be the perfect niche for me; I would love to learn to read assembly code, reverse engineer, etc. Don't want to be too far from development, would love to develop skills that could hypothetically one day be used to protect the people's movements from attacks.

[–] hongdao@lemmygrad.ml 23 points 5 months ago (10 children)

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.

[–] hongdao@lemmygrad.ml 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Where should I start with Immanuel Wallerstein and Arghiri Emmanuel?

 

Sociology courses have been nice and all and my last two profs in it were left-liberals who were fairly civil and nuanced about Communism as far as liberals go. but my new one, on day 1 of a course titled Inequality, described it as a "bloodbath", said Mao "killed several hundreds of millions" (to hell with Courteois and his 100 million, I think we can get to a billion) and asserted that the Russian and Chinese revolutions produced societies with greater income stratification than.... imperial core countries like US and Nordics today.

Animal Farm theory of Communism being "make everyone equal overnight", undialectical liberal worldview, numbers multiplied several times even from what was in the Black Book... This is more what I expect to hear from a high school teacher.

[–] hongdao@lemmygrad.ml 6 points 11 months ago

thank you, this checks out

[–] hongdao@lemmygrad.ml 4 points 11 months ago

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.

 

Marx:

Today's wage-labourer is tomorrow's independent peasant or artisan, working for himself. He vanishes from the labour market - but not into the workhouse.

Sakai:

A study of roughly 10,000 settlers who left Bristol from 1654-85 shows that less than 15% were proletarian

many English farmers and artisans couldn't face the prospect of being forced down into the position of wage-labor.

Is it the difference of time periods? I just noticed now that the time period Sakai is talking would be a pretty early period of colonization, wouldn't it? So it may be that by Marx's time of writing (late 1860s-early 70s?) it was proletarians headed to America and had been in recent historical memory?

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submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by hongdao@lemmygrad.ml to c/thoughts_on@lemmygrad.ml
 

Does the Montessori model provide a model for how everyone could be educated? Should a socialist project attempt the reconstitution of public education informed by the principles of Montessori education?

[–] hongdao@lemmygrad.ml 4 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] hongdao@lemmygrad.ml 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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...

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IT or software dev? (lemmygrad.ml)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by hongdao@lemmygrad.ml to c/comradeship@lemmygrad.ml
 

I'm a little over half done my CS degree. I love programming, Linux, etc. I am considering getting CompTIA A+ and Linux+ this summer with pirated Udemy courses. I do coding projects too, like I am almost done my homebrew NDS game, threw together a Tkinter pomodoro app last week, and in the past I made a command line program that computes a readability score on a body of text. Finally, I am participating in 100 days of leetcode problems together with my CS club. So I've done a lot to move towards coding professionally.

The question is what kind of career should I go for to suite my goals in life. I would like to be able to own a place to live in Quebec (don't live there yet) whether it is in MTL or a rural area, not sure what I want yet. So software dev. gets a point for higher income, I think, plus it's what I've studied for, mostly. But it's important to me too that I have free time outside of work and so can participate in social movements. Would working in helpdesk allow a better or worse WLB? Would it be more likely to be unionized and thus a better place from which to participate in tech labour struggle? I'd really like to achieve fluency in French and Chinese (currently a beginner and intermediate learner respectively) eventually, and maybe the IT world would have me talk to people more. Is it easier to break into than software, like, so much easier that it would be worth changing course, or just doing IT as a stepping stone for my first co-op (internship program in Canada) or two?

Interested in others thoughts on how to proceed here.

For the meantime I think I'll start the A+ course because it can't hurt, and keep working on my DS game, cuz it's almost done.

I don't even know if I want to do either of those professions, I could see myself teaching English too, to Francophones and Chinese especially as I want to learn those languages...

[–] hongdao@lemmygrad.ml 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] hongdao@lemmygrad.ml 11 points 1 year ago

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.

 

Hi folks. I am a CS major taking a 3rd year course in relational databases. The example DBs we study are pretty much all either a school or a company. On the bright side we get to do a project of our own design with C++ and Oracle DB. Has to be some kind of program that makes use of a reasonably sophisticated schema.

I was thinking I could make a DB program that does economic planning, but I don't know what direction to go with it, really. Maybe the kernel of it, the usefulness could be, computing everything down to hours of human effort using the LTV. Labour time accounting. For example, we create a profile for what we want the living standard to be, like private and shared square feet per person, food choices, clothing choices, level of convenience of transport etc. Then the program could use a database containing information about the SNLT to produce different products and services to compute what professions would be needed and how much we all need to work, basically.

But like any idea this is starting out huge. So does anybody have ideas for how to make this small but extendable? Or different directions go with it, or totally different ideas that you have?

 

Not kidding either, it'd just have to be a very low priority and part of a broader campaign to socialize the internet.

 

My hunch is yes, because of how successful English agrarian capitalism was early on... but likely more slowly?

 

According to Marxist historians writing on the origin of capitalism, namely Ellen Meiksin Wood (Origin of Capitalism) and Ian Angus (War Against the Commons), the first capitalism was defined by a particular triad arrangement: landlord, yeoman / capitalist tenant, and wage labourer.

Does anyone know good sources to particularly examine the circumstances and lives of each? Short little descriptions of the daily life of a landlord, capitalist tenant, and wage labourer in 1400s-1800s England?

Btw, I was taught Northanger Abbey for a class last year and I think I could pick any random character to get a depiction of the life of a landlord or hanger-on, just kidding, looking for non fiction anyway.

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