woodenghost [comrade/them]

The full text of the communist manifesto in fine print on the inside and this on the outside:

Usenet came long before torrenting.

Yes, for example ublock origin.

Yes, there are entire companies full of lawyers doing nothing but sending out these letters to people who torrent. They also use harmless looking paid ads on piracy sites (including streaming and direct download) to place trackers on the site and track down users.

Okay, I’ll be the silent part

Juggling. I’d find some nice stones or pinecones and teach everyone how to juggle and do some tricks. I also know an ancient game you can play with stones or knuckle bones. And I know some songs. And stories. People in the stone age had lots of free time to pass, so all of these would come in handy.

I think, Venice is still the only city literally charging an entrance fee. They do that, because they got more tourists, than the city could handle. But I think what you have heard might be about tourist taxes. Many cities charge those per night. But you won’t notice it directly, it’s just that, if you’re staying in a hotel, they’ll automatically add it to the price of the room.

I second Prague. It’s beautiful and worth it whether you come for the history or the culture or the atmosphere.

According to the article, they haven’t cut the exports yet, just made it legally possible. Hope they do.

An afterlife. Might be nice.

You’re out of touch with reality with this idealist conception of wages as a result of knowledge. The value of labor is the cost of its reproduction. Capitalists pay workers exactly as much as they need to for them to turn up again the next morning. Knowledge does not directly factor into their calculation. Don’t expect to be rewarded for the work you put into your education - the system isn’t fair and doesn’t work like that.

Instead, wages are the result of a collective power struggle between labor and capital. High wages occur either when labor is strong and capital weak or when you betray other workers and aid capital in their exploitation.

Now expert knowledge is one of many things that might help by increasing bargaining power in the struggle with capital, but it’s neither necessary nor sufficient. For example an automotive engineer might have just as much knowledge as a chemical engineer, but where I live, chemistry earns you about 50% more, because the chemistry union is stronger.

So union power, strikes and social movements are a big factor. Others are location, the average rent, international competition, the reserve army of labor. At any specific time, the boom and bust cycle of periodic crisis strongly effects wages.

The organic composition of capital plays an indirect role: If the degree of automation suddenly rises, this will lower workers bargaining power short term and lower profits long term which increases pressure on wages.

So if you want a career with stable, high wages but don’t want to help exploit others, look for sectors with a long-term chance of a strong bargaining position for labor.

Private space. I used to share one room with my siblings. It was alright as a child, but I don’t want to go back. And I know that many families around the world have very little space for two, three or four generations living under a roof.

If reddit and lemmy (to a lesser degree obviously) have anything in common, it’s that they both desperately need perspectives from outside the US to be heard more. I mean just knowing what is meant by “foreign”, shouldn’t happen. Like foreign to which country? Oh of course the global hegemon again… Why is this the default on an anti-imperialist site?

It’s remarkable how there are uncountably many non-normal numbers, yet they take up no space at all in the real numbers (form a null set), since almost all numbers are normal. And despite this, we can only prove normality for some specific classes of examples.

It helps me to think, how there are many “totally random” or non computable numbers, that are not normal because they don’t contain the digit 1.

Because they are old. Ghosts are just the anthropomorphic manifestation of people’s fear of growing old. Religious framings are just an add on.

Trauma and grief can’t run their course if your mind is so senile and your short term memory so feeble, that you’re basically forced to live in the past. Forever repeating old arguments, reliving past trauma and never overcoming old fears. With your mind so set in it’s tracks, that you can’t even imagine leaving the place where you lived all your live — your “old haunt” so to speak. How could you live in the present, if you can’t even recognize your own children half of the time? But the long term memory often still works. Ghosts are real and if you’re lucky enough to live that long you might well become one. Of course aging isn’t always like this, it can be graceful and dignified but when it isn’t, that’s what people are afraid of.

People are scared, when they see older relatives acting stranger every day, especially in times before any way to diagnose Alzheimer’s and other forms of neural degradation. They might seem like they are not quite here anymore, like the person they were had long since died and yet, something lingers. Ghost stories are a socially acceptable way to express those fears.

Just observe the effects ghosts have on their victims: first, they are reminded of their own mortality. Then their hair suddenly turns white or gray or falls out, they lose sleep, wake up tired or grow old over night. They might lose their mind or die themselves. That’s all just normal aging.

Here is a handy key to select monsters and their meaning:

• ghosts 👻: aging, death, old people
• vampires(folk believe): plague, infection
• vampires(literature): landlords, feudalism
• zombies(modern): alienation, capitalism
• witches: women who stand up to patriarchy
• Frankenstein’s monster: the proletariat gaining class consciousness (no seriously)

I recommend the podcast “the horror vanguard” for details.

The Germans teach about the genocide they committed, because they get a sick sense of moral superiority out of pretending to have denazified.

All the while it does nothing to prevent their complicity in the ongoing genocide in Palestine.

Ah, that makes sense, thanks for taking the time!

Good effort comment, thanks! Are you sure about merit based evaluation for MJ? Wouldn’t people just strategically exaggerate their grades?

MJ encourages honest evaluation because exaggerating grades can backfire if too many others don’t follow suit.

I guess I don’t quite understand this point. Why wouldn’t everyone exaggerate grades?

Dolphin liberals would just tell all the dolphins to give dolphin Harris an excellent grade, insisting she was excellent in comparison to dolphin Trump. (Sorry to break out of the thought experiment.) So this:

This can help identify when all candidates are weak

wouldn’t happen when all the dolphins try to game the system. Did I misunderstand?