Exactly. In the case of Zanon, the former owner claimed, "the government will give me back the factory." He wasn't wrong, the government did attempt to take the factory back from the workers, sending police with semi-automatics. The factory workers had to organize against this; they kept 24-hour shifts to ensure nobody came and changed the locks, and when the police came, they armed themselves with slingshots and fought them back by firing marbles at them. Guns versus slingshots, but it did work, and after protracted litigation, with the support of the larger community, the co-op gained legal recognition as the legitimate owning entity.
More broadly, co-ops are incredibly difficult to start from the ground up. Most businesses start with a bank loan, and banks tend not to loan to co-ops because they tend to be less focused on profit maximization, which a bank wants to see so that they are more assured the loan will be paid back with interest. There's also what I mentioned above, the inherent risk in trying something with less historic precedent to base it on. There are many different ways of organizing a co-op, no single "optimal" approach has been found, and lots of the concerns are contingent upon the particular industry, the geographic market, and any number of other variables. All that said, despite the unique challenges, there are many examples of successful co-ops, big and small, in industries as wide ranging as cafes to boat building.
I will refer you to this fragment which argues against the notion that stock ownership is equivalent to democratic ownership of the means of production:
For an example of worker ownership which has saved factories that would have otherwise been shut down (not for being unprofitable, but for not being profitable *enough*), look into Argentina's "recovered factory" movement, specifically FaSinPat ("Factory Without Bosses", formerly Zanon). In the latter case, the factory and the jobs were about to disappear, but the workers refused to stop coming to work; the factory is now more productive than ever, its worker-owners are better compensated, and enough surplus product is produced to be given freely to local community development projects.
There are many ways to run a co-op. As with any innovation, there is more risk when you have few templates from history to work from. But even a worker-owned enterprise must contend with the ordinary concerns of business cycles. It's not as though a worker-owned enterprise spends every dime of surplus on paychecks and other benefits. Surplus can be reserved to keep everyone fed during hard times. The thing is, workers have a say in what is done with the surplus. To contrast, the typical way a private (or publicly-traded but with decision-making power effectively concentrated in the hands of a CEO or board) enterprise handles recessions is to lay off huge numbers of workers. So yes, there are certainly trade-offs between the arrangements.
I've been reading Slashdot since the early aughts and it's been pretty disheartening to witness the quality of the comments section degrade as it has. Any time there's an article about climate change or a handful of other topics it becomes an absolute cesspool.
A friend of mine lost the recordings from his high school band, which was just two poor kids from rural Kansas in the early aughts working with whatever equipment they could dredge up. That equipment didn't include spare hard drives, which weren't as cheap then as they are now. Even if they had backups, it's likely that the paths their lives took since then, which included moving cross country in search of a job, and living in and out of a car, would have resulted in the drives being lost or damaged at some point anyway.
For what it's worth, the music was quite good for a high school act, and in fact I became aware that something was probably wrong at MySpace months before this story was reported because I had gone to their page on a fairly regular basis to listen to them, and one day the player just didn't work. I let my friend know, and he went searching for any copies he might find, but no luck.
Obviously it's best to keep your own backups, and these days I'm moving as much off cloud services as I can, time allowing. But shit happens, and there's a difference between using the event to teach an object lesson and some of the callousness I've seen toward the people who actually lost something here. On the balance, I'd say it's not unreasonable to ask that a company which formed a business model (and, for a good while, made money) on the basis of distributing content produced by artists willing to upload their work for exposure should be expected to do the minimum so many other companies of all sizes manage to do, that being to have a backup. And if, as I kind of suspect, this was just a dying company's way of dumping costs ("oops looks like we lost everything"), it would have been decent to at least do what Geocities did and give enough warning for interested parties (including Archive.org) to retrieve what they wanted.
Anyways, I'm gonna check out this archive and see if Lady Does A Horse's songs are in there.
A thing working properly is not the end of moral criteria. To make an extreme allegory, you would hopefully not fail to see the problem with a government using chemical weapons against peaceful protesters simply because the poison gas was working as designed. What's being criticized is not the effectiveness of the recommendation engine at making accurate recommendations, but the unintended consequences of such a thing in the context of a world that largely exists outside the heads of software developers.
A big problem I have with streaming service silos is they each present their own (bad) UI and search space. So if there's a show I want to watch, it's quite difficult to figure out which of the services will have it other than to go to each Roku app, find its search screen, type in the query one letter at a time into the on-screen keyboard, find out the show isn't there, and repeat until I've exhausted all my options and, maybe, resort to just finding a torrent and having it in less time than that just took.
You can search the web but "which streaming service is show X on" is a surprisingly difficult query. At one point I investigated starting a website that automatically cataloged this information. Turns out these services tend not to have a usable API, and also tend to go out of their way to make screen scraping difficult as well.
Starts to make possessing your own digital media library more appealing, not just to avoid the silos, but to have a sane user experience.
It's really incredible how quickly a product developed in the US, by a US-based company, to sell to US-based culture, automatically gets attributed to China. Almost like the US is quite sophisticated at directing the national narrative such that even our own output is reattributed to our global rivals in less time it takes to think a thought. And if Slashdot moderation points mean anything, this happens to applause!
Maybe Mastodon will see another surge as a result. One of the downsides of Mastodon was the lack of influential people to dunk on. If Mike Huckabee is able to simply hide every reply reminding him of his son's canicide then Twitter loses a big part of its appeal.
Elliot Abrams, the recently named special envoy to Venezuela, has a past of using "aid" shipments to smuggle weapons into countries south of the border, weapons later used to massacre countless civilians, and then lying about it in testimony. No government in its right mind would allow such a shipment. The Red Cross and UN have both decried this maneuver by the US as a political stunt. And Venezuela is in fact currently accepting aid, just not from countries which have a record of both using aid as a Trojan horse for contraband and invading countries after dubiously declaring their governments to be illegitimate.
But why should I expect any of this information to be in a Slashdot summary.
I use DDG as my default search engine everywhere, as for the last year I have been taking steps to de-Google my digital life as much as I can. That said, I can vouch that I end up falling back to the `g!` modifier to get Google results far more often than I would like. DDG is great, and I encourage everyone to use the best alternatives to Google's products available, but DDG search results definitely have room for improvement.
Came here to say this. As a typical US citizen, if some government is going to have access to my data, why wouldn't I prefer one that doesn't have jurisdiction where I live? On the other hand, a US company would obviously prefer the US government have their data, because the US government is generally interested in maintaining and extending the influence of US enterprise abroad; which isn't to say that the state wouldn't misuse the data (perhaps sharing it with domestic competitors in backroom deals?), but you'd be far less likely to suddenly have foreign competitors suddenly pop up with your trade secrets fully developed.
Too busy pursuing their mission outside the mission itself and the bounds of constitutional practice.
That said, I have trouble believing this, or really any offer of information to the public from government agencies. Sounds like a honeypot, or a false reveal of vulnerability. Who trusts any of them at face value?
All these Slashdot commenters jumping in front of this story like it's a bullet, just giddy to defend the international megacorp. I'm sure Bezos is very grateful for the free service.
Surely you're just as indignant about the existence of KeyWiki, where my name is on a list and where some of my friends have full pages dedicated to profiling them.
*someone who has never heard of KeyWiki, where my name can be found on a list and where I have friends with full pages dedicated to profiling them and their political activities*
This right here. And it's the younger generation changing this. For example, a friend of mine works on designing playgrounds that allow for riskier play, supported by research showing that kids need that kind of play to develop confidence. It's the older generation that put rubber bumpers on every acute angle; the younger generation is taking the bumpers off (among a thousand other things they're doing to clean up the various messes left by the olds).
Yeah this is wrong. I make close to a quarter million a year and I got up at exactly noon today. I tend to work later hours and I've secured a position in which not only does this not negatively impact my work, it has a positive effect because I'm able to work at my peak productivity hours. There exist reams of research which directly contradict your flippant and proto-fascist view of the clock. But don't let that stop you.
DuckDuckGo became my default browser on mobile. Before long, I switched to it on desktop as well, ditching Chrome for Firefox in the same step. And my primary email is now at ProtonMail. The Gmail account I've had since the year Gmail was announced is slowly withering away, getting fewer and fewer emails that actually matter. Before long I'll completely switch over and "delete" the Gmail account's contents (which I know they'll keep archived, as well as the data about me they've harvested from it over the years; I'll just consider it their last middle finger to me as I leave their services forever, and a lasting reminder of why I left).
I know it's a drop in the bucket, but honestly it feels pretty good personally, and well worth the very minor pain of switching over.
I'm a communist who listens to everything from classical to mathcore, including a majority of what you listed. I'm sorry your 15 yo's taste is awful, but if I'm honest most of what I listened to at 15 doesn't hold up either.
I grew up in a trailer park with a single mom who worked as many overtime hours as she could to make ends meet. But nice try. And regardless of how one develops empathy for the poor, your reaction is to question the source of said empathy? As though that has shit to do with anything. Are you high?
It's easy to say that if you happen to live in an area that will see benefits. As with all natural disasters and externalities of industry, the poor will take the brunt of the suffering, both for geographical reasons and for the fact that the poor have less access to physical mobility.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. In the case of Zanon, the former owner claimed, "the government will give me back the factory." He wasn't wrong, the government did attempt to take the factory back from the workers, sending police with semi-automatics. The factory workers had to organize against this; they kept 24-hour shifts to ensure nobody came and changed the locks, and when the police came, they armed themselves with slingshots and fought them back by firing marbles at them. Guns versus slingshots, but it did work, and after protracted litigation, with the support of the larger community, the co-op gained legal recognition as the legitimate owning entity.
More broadly, co-ops are incredibly difficult to start from the ground up. Most businesses start with a bank loan, and banks tend not to loan to co-ops because they tend to be less focused on profit maximization, which a bank wants to see so that they are more assured the loan will be paid back with interest. There's also what I mentioned above, the inherent risk in trying something with less historic precedent to base it on. There are many different ways of organizing a co-op, no single "optimal" approach has been found, and lots of the concerns are contingent upon the particular industry, the geographic market, and any number of other variables. All that said, despite the unique challenges, there are many examples of successful co-ops, big and small, in industries as wide ranging as cafes to boat building.
I will refer you to this fragment which argues against the notion that stock ownership is equivalent to democratic ownership of the means of production:
http://www.carlbeijer.com/2017...
For an example of worker ownership which has saved factories that would have otherwise been shut down (not for being unprofitable, but for not being profitable *enough*), look into Argentina's "recovered factory" movement, specifically FaSinPat ("Factory Without Bosses", formerly Zanon). In the latter case, the factory and the jobs were about to disappear, but the workers refused to stop coming to work; the factory is now more productive than ever, its worker-owners are better compensated, and enough surplus product is produced to be given freely to local community development projects.
There are many ways to run a co-op. As with any innovation, there is more risk when you have few templates from history to work from. But even a worker-owned enterprise must contend with the ordinary concerns of business cycles. It's not as though a worker-owned enterprise spends every dime of surplus on paychecks and other benefits. Surplus can be reserved to keep everyone fed during hard times. The thing is, workers have a say in what is done with the surplus. To contrast, the typical way a private (or publicly-traded but with decision-making power effectively concentrated in the hands of a CEO or board) enterprise handles recessions is to lay off huge numbers of workers. So yes, there are certainly trade-offs between the arrangements.
I've been reading Slashdot since the early aughts and it's been pretty disheartening to witness the quality of the comments section degrade as it has. Any time there's an article about climate change or a handful of other topics it becomes an absolute cesspool.
A friend of mine lost the recordings from his high school band, which was just two poor kids from rural Kansas in the early aughts working with whatever equipment they could dredge up. That equipment didn't include spare hard drives, which weren't as cheap then as they are now. Even if they had backups, it's likely that the paths their lives took since then, which included moving cross country in search of a job, and living in and out of a car, would have resulted in the drives being lost or damaged at some point anyway.
For what it's worth, the music was quite good for a high school act, and in fact I became aware that something was probably wrong at MySpace months before this story was reported because I had gone to their page on a fairly regular basis to listen to them, and one day the player just didn't work. I let my friend know, and he went searching for any copies he might find, but no luck.
Obviously it's best to keep your own backups, and these days I'm moving as much off cloud services as I can, time allowing. But shit happens, and there's a difference between using the event to teach an object lesson and some of the callousness I've seen toward the people who actually lost something here. On the balance, I'd say it's not unreasonable to ask that a company which formed a business model (and, for a good while, made money) on the basis of distributing content produced by artists willing to upload their work for exposure should be expected to do the minimum so many other companies of all sizes manage to do, that being to have a backup. And if, as I kind of suspect, this was just a dying company's way of dumping costs ("oops looks like we lost everything"), it would have been decent to at least do what Geocities did and give enough warning for interested parties (including Archive.org) to retrieve what they wanted.
Anyways, I'm gonna check out this archive and see if Lady Does A Horse's songs are in there.
A thing working properly is not the end of moral criteria. To make an extreme allegory, you would hopefully not fail to see the problem with a government using chemical weapons against peaceful protesters simply because the poison gas was working as designed. What's being criticized is not the effectiveness of the recommendation engine at making accurate recommendations, but the unintended consequences of such a thing in the context of a world that largely exists outside the heads of software developers.
A big problem I have with streaming service silos is they each present their own (bad) UI and search space. So if there's a show I want to watch, it's quite difficult to figure out which of the services will have it other than to go to each Roku app, find its search screen, type in the query one letter at a time into the on-screen keyboard, find out the show isn't there, and repeat until I've exhausted all my options and, maybe, resort to just finding a torrent and having it in less time than that just took.
You can search the web but "which streaming service is show X on" is a surprisingly difficult query. At one point I investigated starting a website that automatically cataloged this information. Turns out these services tend not to have a usable API, and also tend to go out of their way to make screen scraping difficult as well.
Starts to make possessing your own digital media library more appealing, not just to avoid the silos, but to have a sane user experience.
It's really incredible how quickly a product developed in the US, by a US-based company, to sell to US-based culture, automatically gets attributed to China. Almost like the US is quite sophisticated at directing the national narrative such that even our own output is reattributed to our global rivals in less time it takes to think a thought. And if Slashdot moderation points mean anything, this happens to applause!
Maybe Mastodon will see another surge as a result. One of the downsides of Mastodon was the lack of influential people to dunk on. If Mike Huckabee is able to simply hide every reply reminding him of his son's canicide then Twitter loses a big part of its appeal.
This can all be looked up readily if youâ(TM)re skeptical, itâ(TM)s not secret. Presumably you have internet access.
And of course it got modded as a Troll. This site has gotten more and more reactionary over the last ~5 years.
Elliot Abrams, the recently named special envoy to Venezuela, has a past of using "aid" shipments to smuggle weapons into countries south of the border, weapons later used to massacre countless civilians, and then lying about it in testimony. No government in its right mind would allow such a shipment. The Red Cross and UN have both decried this maneuver by the US as a political stunt. And Venezuela is in fact currently accepting aid, just not from countries which have a record of both using aid as a Trojan horse for contraband and invading countries after dubiously declaring their governments to be illegitimate.
But why should I expect any of this information to be in a Slashdot summary.
Have you ever heard of the NSA
I use DDG as my default search engine everywhere, as for the last year I have been taking steps to de-Google my digital life as much as I can. That said, I can vouch that I end up falling back to the `g!` modifier to get Google results far more often than I would like. DDG is great, and I encourage everyone to use the best alternatives to Google's products available, but DDG search results definitely have room for improvement.
Came here to say this. As a typical US citizen, if some government is going to have access to my data, why wouldn't I prefer one that doesn't have jurisdiction where I live? On the other hand, a US company would obviously prefer the US government have their data, because the US government is generally interested in maintaining and extending the influence of US enterprise abroad; which isn't to say that the state wouldn't misuse the data (perhaps sharing it with domestic competitors in backroom deals?), but you'd be far less likely to suddenly have foreign competitors suddenly pop up with your trade secrets fully developed.
Too busy pursuing their mission outside the mission itself and the bounds of constitutional practice.
That said, I have trouble believing this, or really any offer of information to the public from government agencies. Sounds like a honeypot, or a false reveal of vulnerability. Who trusts any of them at face value?
All these Slashdot commenters jumping in front of this story like it's a bullet, just giddy to defend the international megacorp. I'm sure Bezos is very grateful for the free service.
They got me.
Surely you're just as indignant about the existence of KeyWiki, where my name is on a list and where some of my friends have full pages dedicated to profiling them.
*someone who has never heard of KeyWiki, where my name can be found on a list and where I have friends with full pages dedicated to profiling them and their political activities*
This right here. And it's the younger generation changing this. For example, a friend of mine works on designing playgrounds that allow for riskier play, supported by research showing that kids need that kind of play to develop confidence. It's the older generation that put rubber bumpers on every acute angle; the younger generation is taking the bumpers off (among a thousand other things they're doing to clean up the various messes left by the olds).
Yeah this is wrong. I make close to a quarter million a year and I got up at exactly noon today. I tend to work later hours and I've secured a position in which not only does this not negatively impact my work, it has a positive effect because I'm able to work at my peak productivity hours. There exist reams of research which directly contradict your flippant and proto-fascist view of the clock. But don't let that stop you.
What do you mean I can't turn it off? Sure I can.
DuckDuckGo became my default browser on mobile. Before long, I switched to it on desktop as well, ditching Chrome for Firefox in the same step. And my primary email is now at ProtonMail. The Gmail account I've had since the year Gmail was announced is slowly withering away, getting fewer and fewer emails that actually matter. Before long I'll completely switch over and "delete" the Gmail account's contents (which I know they'll keep archived, as well as the data about me they've harvested from it over the years; I'll just consider it their last middle finger to me as I leave their services forever, and a lasting reminder of why I left).
I know it's a drop in the bucket, but honestly it feels pretty good personally, and well worth the very minor pain of switching over.
I'm a communist who listens to everything from classical to mathcore, including a majority of what you listed. I'm sorry your 15 yo's taste is awful, but if I'm honest most of what I listened to at 15 doesn't hold up either.
I grew up in a trailer park with a single mom who worked as many overtime hours as she could to make ends meet. But nice try. And regardless of how one develops empathy for the poor, your reaction is to question the source of said empathy? As though that has shit to do with anything. Are you high?
It's easy to say that if you happen to live in an area that will see benefits. As with all natural disasters and externalities of industry, the poor will take the brunt of the suffering, both for geographical reasons and for the fact that the poor have less access to physical mobility.