self censoring 99% of the internet because one does not like big corporations or little guys with ads and viruses is not for 99% of Internet users.
Only to the extent that people with the position and know-how to make differences are resigned to living in an ever suckier corporatized world. Setting up a browser with a default AdBlock and NoScript install is a pretty good start --- and pretty easy for 99% of internet users to do (at least with the help of a more tech-savvy friend/relative, who they rely on to get their computer running in the first place) to get a much nicer anticorporate browsing experience. Without insisting everyone totally avoid Facebook/etc., you can certainly help your friends/family towards a less skeevy browsing experience on their end. And, on your own server side, advocate for spending a couple extra dollars a month to host your / your company's web presence without mandatory Facebook logins or advertiser tracking cookies. If enough technically savvy people take principled stands against the degeneration of the whole internet into one giant Google/Facebook-owned advertising machine, then real options for reprieve from centralized megacorporate (and NSA) control can be made accessible to even "average" internet users.
Your friends have to attempt to decrypt each message on the local board: when they find one which they can decrypt then they have successfully received your message.
You can optimize this procedure some, while still retaining anonymity, by including a few short randomly generated blocks at the end of each message you send out (encrypted with the rest of the message). A response to that message could include an unencrypted header like "RE: 9347ab87e87ff", where 9347ab87e87ff was a code in your previous message. Now, you only need to bother with downloading/decoding messages tagged with a header that you've recorded as "belonging" to one of your conversations, and can skip any tagged as responses you don't recognize. There could be a particular standard tag for "unsolicited" first-time messages to someone without a response code, which everyone would have to download and check (if they want) to see if it is for them.
Fortunately, not 99% of the internet I visit --- especially with ad/script blocking (and blocking *everything* spewing forth from Facebook's domains). For the decentralized, free internet, I've got a lot of personal autonomy to decide what and where I visit, avoiding the crappy commercialized spammy places. I also have the freedom to be classy hosting my own stuff: not cramming ads and spying down the throats of folks viewing my own corners of the web. When all content is routed through a central (for profit, run by privacy violating advertiser scumbags) service, I forfeit a huge amount of control over the communications I send and receive. Facebook may be "cleaner" than the average internet cesspool, but it's far uglier than the sectors of the internet I visit and create under my own control.
And decentralised means it would cost orders of magnitude more money to run, meaning necessarily either far more ads, or everyone being willing to run one at a huge loss.
Somehow, the whole internet has managed to operate, grow, and thrive just fine on a decentralized model. There's more than one or two companies that operate HTTP servers, or email --- yet that hasn't created an uneconomic impediment to browsing websites or sending/receiving email. Decentralized social networking would work along the same lines: common standards for negotiating/encoding the transmission of data, and everyone and their dog can run their own server (or subscribe to a server service if they're not interested in maintaining their own). There's no need for a centralized repository of everyone's social information (Facebook) any more than one needs a centralized repository for every.html webpage.
Yes, the language was intentionally constructed to provoke comparison with right-wing rhetoric. The key differentiation, however, is that I'm calling the wealthy capitalist class --- who accumulate their wealth by taking a cut of the labor of others, rather than through their own work --- the parasites. "Don't work, don't eat" is a sick ethic within a capitalist system, where a wealthy few control the majority of the means of production and can prevent others from working (on remotely fair terms). But if jobs were available to all, so no one able to productively work will be left unemployed just because they aren't profitable enough to some plutocrat, then expecting all (able) people to contribute in exchange for society's products is not so pernicious.
I guess you're simply ignorant that there are a nearly infinite variety of possibilities for socio-political organization. Guess what: not every possible system lies along a single narrow axis between some rigid ideal of capitalism or communism. People can have ideas for different systems with their own approaches to resolving societal issues. Your argument that, because I'm not describing Capitalism, I must adhere to some particular Socialist logic, is downright idiotic.
That would be the way to maximize the recovery of artifacts and have them make their way to museums. Sure, in the short term private collectors might have them, but that's not a lasting problem, especially compared to the age of most interesting artifacts.
This is about the worst case for actual archaeological research. What collectors want --- a pretty looking specimen to display on the shelf --- is often the least interesting/important part for researchers. Most of the useful information from archeological digs comes from meticulous recording and analysis of all the "rubbish" at the dig site --- all the stuff that looters tear through and discard to find the shiny baubles. Little fragments of rotted wood can be just as important (or more so) than the occasional solid gold jewelery for learning about history. By the time an artifact has passed through private collector's hands, it (and the site from which it was looted) has usually been rendered nearly worthless as an object of academic historical study.
Who is going to work when they get paid the same no matter what?
Where was that in my description above? I was proposing that everyone's work would involve a balanced mix between "undesirable" jobs and more interesting, self-fulfilling work --- not the same as doing no work. You do no work, you get no share in products of society produced by those working in "balanced job complexes".
I want a private island.
Bully for you. But the rest of society has decided they aren't going to work their asses off in miserable jobs so you can collect all the fruits of their labor and live high on the hog off their work. So, sorry, you don't get a private island. And, if you're such a self-entitled lazy parasite that you refuse to work on the same terms as everyone else (including a little toilet cleaning), I hope being homeless and starving is your second choice preference after that private island.
At work, they are paid by the company for X amount of their time. Should that paid time be for doing their jobs, or for cleaning toilets?
If you measure "efficiency" from a corporate-centric perspective, as in "what maximizes returns to the rich ruling class," then yes, it may well be most efficient to create a horrendously stratified and unequal society that turns the majority of workers into interchangeable labor drones. However, considering efficiency from the perspective of a whole society, which means taking into account everyone's quality of life, it's OK to decrease "unit productivity per time" in exchange for giving a lot more people opportunity/ability to live richer lives, rather than a tiny lucky few.
If you don't think that moving millions of intellectuals from the cities to the countryside during the Great Leap Forward was a primary factory in its failure, then we are simply going to have to disagree on that one.
This was certainly a factor, but consider why it was a factor. The problem wasn't "intellectuals" being made to contribute to work, but more that city-slicker "intellectuals" were put in charge of the complex and highly knowledge/skill-dependent tasks of food production. Rather than learning to be farmers alongside rural peasants who, while not world-class in food production, at least had a history of doing generally well enough to feed the country, brand new techno-fetishist disruptive changes were imposed on agricultural production techniques by centralized technocrats, with no actual experience and isolated from on-the-ground issues of agricultural production. Dumping a bunch of idealistic party faithfuls and an expensive imported tractor-combine (with no fuel or replacement parts) on a rural village and expecting productivity to explode turns out not to not always work so well as envisioned.
The failures of the Great Leap Forward are not an indication that involving more people in more diverse areas of social production is itself a bad idea. The problem is having "smart" people coming in with a chip on their shoulder thinking they can do everything better than those boorish rural manual laborers; assuming that knowledge and skill can/will flow from some centralized technocratic elite. A less top-down centralized approach, in which city intellectuals first developed hands-on experience working under the tutelage of already-productive farmers, instead of pulling out the fancy Lysenkoist pseudoscientific theories from day one, might have turned out a lot better.
1. Forcing engineers and scientists to clean toilets is a horrible waste of resources.
Having grown up in a family of scientists/engineers, and frequently in the company of many other scientists/engineers: guess who cleans the toilets at home? Most scientists/engineers aren't ludicrously rich, and don't have home servants. At least at home, they scrub their own toilets, do their own laundry, wash their own dishes, etc. --- and yet the progress of technology doesn't grind to a screeching halt.
It has also been tried, learn some recent history, read up on the "Great Leap Forward" in China
I have read some history: plenty to know that simplifying the causes of failure in the "Great Leap Forward" to "Scientists made to work in crop fields" is grossly inaccurate.
2. What happens when those people simply don't want to clean the toilets and simply say "no" when you ask them to?
They get to have incredibly nasty toilets. And why should the people with clean and well-maintained toilets (because they all chip in to getting work done that needs be done) let those work-shirkers share theirs?
Regardless of what Marx wrote, the development of Marxist ideology under the Soviet government strongly and officially diverged on this point. A key tenet advanced by Stalin was Socialism in One Country: that, rather than seeking global domination and revolution, the USSR should work towards making itself into a model Socialist paradise; once its own working class enjoyed a utopian life ahead of the rest of the world, then workers in all other countries would rise up to gain the same paradise for themselves. Of course, the USSR ran into a few problems before completing its internal transition to the happiest, wealthiest, most productive place in the world... but, in the meantime, the official state doctrine was not the "original" Marxist stance of necessary global revolution, despite endless fearmongering propaganda in the West that the Ruskies were just itching to swarm over the border and eat your babies.
The only way this idea works is if you abandon all physical reality, and move everyone into The Matrix
Or, you share the nice places. Once in a while, you get to rotate through some beautiful prime vacation spot. The rest of the time, you live in your comfortable but mundanely situated ordinary dwelling. In the process, people work on finding ways to make the "normal" habitat areas more luxuriously comfortable and appealing: you might not get a private island rainforest, but you'll always be an easy stroll away from some beautiful parks and garden groves, isolated from the noise and stench of 20th-century traffic. With a little earthmoving machinery, even Boring Flatsville can get some interesting topography and nice places to watch a sunset.
In our apartment building in the late 1970's there was only one telephone. You had to ask the people living in the apartment to use it
Laying this entirely at the feet of Communism, however, would be rather silly. Consider that Russia, prior to the 1917 revolution, was far behind America's concurrent state of development: consider the Historical GDP per capita. Russia in the early 1900's was where America was in the 1820s, development-wise. Not having phones for everyone by 1970 is no surprise for a country starting well over fifty years behind the leading edge of the development curve before communism took over. That Russia could even consider reaching standard-of-living parity with the US (and could actually beat America in the space race) is an absolute marvel for a country that, half a century earlier, was rural serfs and Czars. The USSR actually provided a rather solid and rapid level of technological and standard-of-living development, though at a brutal human cost (with similarities to the horrors of early industrial revolution development in the West).
And alternate non-capitalist social organizations could greatly speed up the application of machines to improve human lives (rather than just the profit margins of a wealthy few). For example, in a society that shares all "undesirable" tasks more equally, so even the most brilliant engineers and scientists have to muck out toilets, there's likely to be a lot more productive effort put into making better self-cleaning/non-stinky toilets than a society where such a task can be fobbed off on poor minority women earning minimum wage. And, once the robots are introduced, the benefits accrue to everyone in society (not just the wealthy class, while some poor worker ends up in even more misery unemployed and homeless).
Very small companies often approach rather "communist" ideals: everyone really is "in it together," with equal input and common goals (not based on "maximize shareholder profit at all costs") and no 400:1 pay disparities between management and labor. Interestingly, such "small business" ideals are often held up by staunch defenders of capitalism (while arguing on behalf of megacorporations that function nothing like the mom-and-pop shop or garage startup) --- the only way to make capitalism look good is to cherry-pick the most communist parts (while ignoring the conditions under which the majority work).
Back to communism and money: the main problem here is how do you decide who does what job, and how do you get people to actually do jobs? Everyone wants the good jobs, and no one wants the shit jobs. Who actually wants to haul garbage for a living? Or clean toilets? Lots and lots of people would prefer not to work at all if they don't have to. How do you motivate people to do jobs that society needs done, but which everyone would prefer someone else do?
This is a problem that faces all economic systems, and has yet to be perfectly dealt with in any large-scale society. Note, however, that capitalism has one of the worst track records for resolving this: the shittiest jobs are often also the lowest paid, and who gets to do them is "decided" by race, gender, and economic status (in a self-reinforcing cycle of poor people being stuck with shitty jobs that leave them poor). Countries adopting a more social-democratic approach alleviate some of these problems by assuring that even those in shitty jobs can receive a more humane overall standard of living --- access to good healthcare; livable wages; enforcement of workplace health and safety regulation; similar educational opportunities for their children; etc.
Making the "worst" jobs pay the most (until they are seen as "equally good" to any other career path) is one method of approach; another is to try and spread "undesirable" jobs between everyone (e.g. all company employees from top to bottom will take a toilet scrubbing duty rotation for 15 minutes a week). Various proposed alternatives to capitalism all have their own pitfalls and details to work out, but many (at least employed to limited extents) have a significantly better track record than capitalism for creating humane and just societies (that don't drop massive burdens of suffering on an economically disenfranchised lower class).
but anything more substantial is illegal, and in areas (like mine) with smog checks prior to registration will get found.
However, these are typically not requirements imposed as terms of your car loan. Restrictions against making your car into a smog machine are more analogous to restrictions that you can't modify your computer to churn out spam or DOS attacks: emissions requirements are set by the larger community to regulate harms that impact that larger community. However, your computer software EULAs may prohibit you from using/modifying your devices in the privacy of your own home for activities with no impact on the general public, according to regulations set at the whim of a megacorporation rather than through any even nominally democratic process.
Fortunately, compared to typical film with reciprocity failure effects, I can properly expose a dark scene using a much shorter shutter time on digital than film with nominally identical ISO rating (but actually responding with far lower ISO sensitivity in low light). Many low-light situations that require a 10 minute film exposure can be done with a 1 minute digital exposure. Not saying that there aren't some niche applications where film still excels digital (e.g. large format captures, or wherever the particular aesthetic of a film emulsion is artistically desired), but the range of "technically superior" applications for film has shrunk immensely (and is still shrinking). And, now that heat dissipation / efficiency is being taken as a serious design consideration for video work, newer digital sensors are being made to work acceptably even for "continuous use" applications.
At least when you are paying for a car (that you bought with a loan), you are generally free to mess with it however you wish. Want to repaint it, or rip out the back seats for more trunk space, or fiddle with the engine? Go right ahead. Same with your house: the bank doesn't get a say in what home modifications you make. You're responsible for paying off the loan, but not for using your (not-fully-paid-for) property according to the mandates of bank management. Not so with software you "own" under a restrictive license or "cloud-based" system.
Negative film has much superior exposure latitude to digital. There wasn't a need for HDR techniques with negative film - you could capture the dynamic range on the film.
That used to be true, but not so much anymore. With actual >12 stop dynamic range now available at the push of a button from better digital sensors, film is hard-pressed to keep up. Yes, with careful specialized home development of particular black-and-white films for extremely low contrast response, you might still be able to eke out a little more --- but not in color. And no, if you examine most negatives, they aren't capturing a >10 stop dynamic range: the dark areas are unexposed film base (will print to undifferentiated black), and the brightest areas are at maximum density with no detail --- only the soft rolloff of the transition to maximum density gives an appearance of greater dynamic range, by not creating the harsh obvious clipping artifacts sometimes produced by digital systems.
Many people I know who do not have kids of their own are nonetheless highly generous in helping the next generation. They act as teachers, mentors, caretakers, role models for many children. Selfish is using not having your own kids as an excuse for not paying to support schools, activities, and healthy environments for other people's kids. As an aspiring future member of the elderly generation, I'd much rather be cared for by fewer young'uns who received a better upbringing (more personal attention and access to resources for growth), than by more young'uns who've spent their whole miserable life squabbling with each other for scarce resources.
Do you believe a committee should tell you how much you should be paid, and how hard you should work and what job you should do? If you say no to each of those, you're a capitalist.
Funny, I'm anti-capitalist specifically because I don't like committees of rich folks deciding exactly those things for everyone who has to sell their labor to live. Under capitalism, you only have much meaningful freedom to determine your conditions of labor to the extent that you are already wealthy --- for everyone else, the choice is "work on the terms dictated by richer folks, or die impoverished and homeless." Many alternatives proposed for capitalism are developed and motivated specifically to break the monopoly of a tiny wealthy class controlling the "ownership of the means of production."
"Your Honor, I'm not the guy who committed that murder, he died that night. And if you lock me up, you'll be unjustly punishing an endless series of people who achieve consciousness in this body each day."
Judge: "Why should that bother me? For today, I reject your metaphysical stance. By tomorrow, I'll be dead, and the new occupant of my body carries no guilt for injustices perpetrated by his predecessor."
What does the general lack of understanding-the-other have to do specifically with women? The grandparent poster claimed to understand the women in his life as well as their "male analogues," not to have any superhuman telepathic ability. Yes, understanding other people is hard --- but not on account of their particular genitalia.
Slashdot Mirror
self censoring 99% of the internet because one does not like big corporations or little guys with ads and viruses is not for 99% of Internet users.
Only to the extent that people with the position and know-how to make differences are resigned to living in an ever suckier corporatized world. Setting up a browser with a default AdBlock and NoScript install is a pretty good start --- and pretty easy for 99% of internet users to do (at least with the help of a more tech-savvy friend/relative, who they rely on to get their computer running in the first place) to get a much nicer anticorporate browsing experience. Without insisting everyone totally avoid Facebook/etc., you can certainly help your friends/family towards a less skeevy browsing experience on their end. And, on your own server side, advocate for spending a couple extra dollars a month to host your / your company's web presence without mandatory Facebook logins or advertiser tracking cookies. If enough technically savvy people take principled stands against the degeneration of the whole internet into one giant Google/Facebook-owned advertising machine, then real options for reprieve from centralized megacorporate (and NSA) control can be made accessible to even "average" internet users.
Your friends have to attempt to decrypt each message on the local board: when they find one which they can decrypt then they have successfully received your message.
You can optimize this procedure some, while still retaining anonymity, by including a few short randomly generated blocks at the end of each message you send out (encrypted with the rest of the message). A response to that message could include an unencrypted header like "RE: 9347ab87e87ff", where 9347ab87e87ff was a code in your previous message. Now, you only need to bother with downloading/decoding messages tagged with a header that you've recorded as "belonging" to one of your conversations, and can skip any tagged as responses you don't recognize. There could be a particular standard tag for "unsolicited" first-time messages to someone without a response code, which everyone would have to download and check (if they want) to see if it is for them.
Fortunately, not 99% of the internet I visit --- especially with ad/script blocking (and blocking *everything* spewing forth from Facebook's domains). For the decentralized, free internet, I've got a lot of personal autonomy to decide what and where I visit, avoiding the crappy commercialized spammy places. I also have the freedom to be classy hosting my own stuff: not cramming ads and spying down the throats of folks viewing my own corners of the web. When all content is routed through a central (for profit, run by privacy violating advertiser scumbags) service, I forfeit a huge amount of control over the communications I send and receive. Facebook may be "cleaner" than the average internet cesspool, but it's far uglier than the sectors of the internet I visit and create under my own control.
And decentralised means it would cost orders of magnitude more money to run, meaning necessarily either far more ads, or everyone being willing to run one at a huge loss.
Somehow, the whole internet has managed to operate, grow, and thrive just fine on a decentralized model. There's more than one or two companies that operate HTTP servers, or email --- yet that hasn't created an uneconomic impediment to browsing websites or sending/receiving email. Decentralized social networking would work along the same lines: common standards for negotiating/encoding the transmission of data, and everyone and their dog can run their own server (or subscribe to a server service if they're not interested in maintaining their own). There's no need for a centralized repository of everyone's social information (Facebook) any more than one needs a centralized repository for every .html webpage.
Yes, the language was intentionally constructed to provoke comparison with right-wing rhetoric. The key differentiation, however, is that I'm calling the wealthy capitalist class --- who accumulate their wealth by taking a cut of the labor of others, rather than through their own work --- the parasites. "Don't work, don't eat" is a sick ethic within a capitalist system, where a wealthy few control the majority of the means of production and can prevent others from working (on remotely fair terms). But if jobs were available to all, so no one able to productively work will be left unemployed just because they aren't profitable enough to some plutocrat, then expecting all (able) people to contribute in exchange for society's products is not so pernicious.
It's part of the socialist system.
I guess you're simply ignorant that there are a nearly infinite variety of possibilities for socio-political organization. Guess what: not every possible system lies along a single narrow axis between some rigid ideal of capitalism or communism. People can have ideas for different systems with their own approaches to resolving societal issues. Your argument that, because I'm not describing Capitalism, I must adhere to some particular Socialist logic, is downright idiotic.
That would be the way to maximize the recovery of artifacts and have them make their way to museums. Sure, in the short term private collectors might have them, but that's not a lasting problem, especially compared to the age of most interesting artifacts.
This is about the worst case for actual archaeological research. What collectors want --- a pretty looking specimen to display on the shelf --- is often the least interesting/important part for researchers. Most of the useful information from archeological digs comes from meticulous recording and analysis of all the "rubbish" at the dig site --- all the stuff that looters tear through and discard to find the shiny baubles. Little fragments of rotted wood can be just as important (or more so) than the occasional solid gold jewelery for learning about history. By the time an artifact has passed through private collector's hands, it (and the site from which it was looted) has usually been rendered nearly worthless as an object of academic historical study.
Who is going to work when they get paid the same no matter what?
Where was that in my description above? I was proposing that everyone's work would involve a balanced mix between "undesirable" jobs and more interesting, self-fulfilling work --- not the same as doing no work. You do no work, you get no share in products of society produced by those working in "balanced job complexes".
I want a private island.
Bully for you. But the rest of society has decided they aren't going to work their asses off in miserable jobs so you can collect all the fruits of their labor and live high on the hog off their work. So, sorry, you don't get a private island. And, if you're such a self-entitled lazy parasite that you refuse to work on the same terms as everyone else (including a little toilet cleaning), I hope being homeless and starving is your second choice preference after that private island.
At work, they are paid by the company for X amount of their time. Should that paid time be for doing their jobs, or for cleaning toilets?
If you measure "efficiency" from a corporate-centric perspective, as in "what maximizes returns to the rich ruling class," then yes, it may well be most efficient to create a horrendously stratified and unequal society that turns the majority of workers into interchangeable labor drones. However, considering efficiency from the perspective of a whole society, which means taking into account everyone's quality of life, it's OK to decrease "unit productivity per time" in exchange for giving a lot more people opportunity/ability to live richer lives, rather than a tiny lucky few.
If you don't think that moving millions of intellectuals from the cities to the countryside during the Great Leap Forward was a primary factory in its failure, then we are simply going to have to disagree on that one.
This was certainly a factor, but consider why it was a factor. The problem wasn't "intellectuals" being made to contribute to work, but more that city-slicker "intellectuals" were put in charge of the complex and highly knowledge/skill-dependent tasks of food production. Rather than learning to be farmers alongside rural peasants who, while not world-class in food production, at least had a history of doing generally well enough to feed the country, brand new techno-fetishist disruptive changes were imposed on agricultural production techniques by centralized technocrats, with no actual experience and isolated from on-the-ground issues of agricultural production. Dumping a bunch of idealistic party faithfuls and an expensive imported tractor-combine (with no fuel or replacement parts) on a rural village and expecting productivity to explode turns out not to not always work so well as envisioned.
The failures of the Great Leap Forward are not an indication that involving more people in more diverse areas of social production is itself a bad idea. The problem is having "smart" people coming in with a chip on their shoulder thinking they can do everything better than those boorish rural manual laborers; assuming that knowledge and skill can/will flow from some centralized technocratic elite. A less top-down centralized approach, in which city intellectuals first developed hands-on experience working under the tutelage of already-productive farmers, instead of pulling out the fancy Lysenkoist pseudoscientific theories from day one, might have turned out a lot better.
1. Forcing engineers and scientists to clean toilets is a horrible waste of resources.
Having grown up in a family of scientists/engineers, and frequently in the company of many other scientists/engineers: guess who cleans the toilets at home? Most scientists/engineers aren't ludicrously rich, and don't have home servants. At least at home, they scrub their own toilets, do their own laundry, wash their own dishes, etc. --- and yet the progress of technology doesn't grind to a screeching halt.
It has also been tried, learn some recent history, read up on the "Great Leap Forward" in China
I have read some history: plenty to know that simplifying the causes of failure in the "Great Leap Forward" to "Scientists made to work in crop fields" is grossly inaccurate.
2. What happens when those people simply don't want to clean the toilets and simply say "no" when you ask them to?
They get to have incredibly nasty toilets. And why should the people with clean and well-maintained toilets (because they all chip in to getting work done that needs be done) let those work-shirkers share theirs?
Regardless of what Marx wrote, the development of Marxist ideology under the Soviet government strongly and officially diverged on this point. A key tenet advanced by Stalin was Socialism in One Country: that, rather than seeking global domination and revolution, the USSR should work towards making itself into a model Socialist paradise; once its own working class enjoyed a utopian life ahead of the rest of the world, then workers in all other countries would rise up to gain the same paradise for themselves. Of course, the USSR ran into a few problems before completing its internal transition to the happiest, wealthiest, most productive place in the world... but, in the meantime, the official state doctrine was not the "original" Marxist stance of necessary global revolution, despite endless fearmongering propaganda in the West that the Ruskies were just itching to swarm over the border and eat your babies.
The only way this idea works is if you abandon all physical reality, and move everyone into The Matrix
Or, you share the nice places. Once in a while, you get to rotate through some beautiful prime vacation spot. The rest of the time, you live in your comfortable but mundanely situated ordinary dwelling. In the process, people work on finding ways to make the "normal" habitat areas more luxuriously comfortable and appealing: you might not get a private island rainforest, but you'll always be an easy stroll away from some beautiful parks and garden groves, isolated from the noise and stench of 20th-century traffic. With a little earthmoving machinery, even Boring Flatsville can get some interesting topography and nice places to watch a sunset.
In our apartment building in the late 1970's there was only one telephone. You had to ask the people living in the apartment to use it
Laying this entirely at the feet of Communism, however, would be rather silly. Consider that Russia, prior to the 1917 revolution, was far behind America's concurrent state of development: consider the Historical GDP per capita. Russia in the early 1900's was where America was in the 1820s, development-wise. Not having phones for everyone by 1970 is no surprise for a country starting well over fifty years behind the leading edge of the development curve before communism took over. That Russia could even consider reaching standard-of-living parity with the US (and could actually beat America in the space race) is an absolute marvel for a country that, half a century earlier, was rural serfs and Czars. The USSR actually provided a rather solid and rapid level of technological and standard-of-living development, though at a brutal human cost (with similarities to the horrors of early industrial revolution development in the West).
And alternate non-capitalist social organizations could greatly speed up the application of machines to improve human lives (rather than just the profit margins of a wealthy few). For example, in a society that shares all "undesirable" tasks more equally, so even the most brilliant engineers and scientists have to muck out toilets, there's likely to be a lot more productive effort put into making better self-cleaning/non-stinky toilets than a society where such a task can be fobbed off on poor minority women earning minimum wage. And, once the robots are introduced, the benefits accrue to everyone in society (not just the wealthy class, while some poor worker ends up in even more misery unemployed and homeless).
Very small companies often approach rather "communist" ideals: everyone really is "in it together," with equal input and common goals (not based on "maximize shareholder profit at all costs") and no 400:1 pay disparities between management and labor. Interestingly, such "small business" ideals are often held up by staunch defenders of capitalism (while arguing on behalf of megacorporations that function nothing like the mom-and-pop shop or garage startup) --- the only way to make capitalism look good is to cherry-pick the most communist parts (while ignoring the conditions under which the majority work).
Back to communism and money: the main problem here is how do you decide who does what job, and how do you get people to actually do jobs? Everyone wants the good jobs, and no one wants the shit jobs. Who actually wants to haul garbage for a living? Or clean toilets? Lots and lots of people would prefer not to work at all if they don't have to. How do you motivate people to do jobs that society needs done, but which everyone would prefer someone else do?
This is a problem that faces all economic systems, and has yet to be perfectly dealt with in any large-scale society. Note, however, that capitalism has one of the worst track records for resolving this: the shittiest jobs are often also the lowest paid, and who gets to do them is "decided" by race, gender, and economic status (in a self-reinforcing cycle of poor people being stuck with shitty jobs that leave them poor). Countries adopting a more social-democratic approach alleviate some of these problems by assuring that even those in shitty jobs can receive a more humane overall standard of living --- access to good healthcare; livable wages; enforcement of workplace health and safety regulation; similar educational opportunities for their children; etc.
Making the "worst" jobs pay the most (until they are seen as "equally good" to any other career path) is one method of approach; another is to try and spread "undesirable" jobs between everyone (e.g. all company employees from top to bottom will take a toilet scrubbing duty rotation for 15 minutes a week). Various proposed alternatives to capitalism all have their own pitfalls and details to work out, but many (at least employed to limited extents) have a significantly better track record than capitalism for creating humane and just societies (that don't drop massive burdens of suffering on an economically disenfranchised lower class).
but anything more substantial is illegal, and in areas (like mine) with smog checks prior to registration will get found.
However, these are typically not requirements imposed as terms of your car loan. Restrictions against making your car into a smog machine are more analogous to restrictions that you can't modify your computer to churn out spam or DOS attacks: emissions requirements are set by the larger community to regulate harms that impact that larger community. However, your computer software EULAs may prohibit you from using/modifying your devices in the privacy of your own home for activities with no impact on the general public, according to regulations set at the whim of a megacorporation rather than through any even nominally democratic process.
Fortunately, compared to typical film with reciprocity failure effects, I can properly expose a dark scene using a much shorter shutter time on digital than film with nominally identical ISO rating (but actually responding with far lower ISO sensitivity in low light). Many low-light situations that require a 10 minute film exposure can be done with a 1 minute digital exposure. Not saying that there aren't some niche applications where film still excels digital (e.g. large format captures, or wherever the particular aesthetic of a film emulsion is artistically desired), but the range of "technically superior" applications for film has shrunk immensely (and is still shrinking). And, now that heat dissipation / efficiency is being taken as a serious design consideration for video work, newer digital sensors are being made to work acceptably even for "continuous use" applications.
At least when you are paying for a car (that you bought with a loan), you are generally free to mess with it however you wish. Want to repaint it, or rip out the back seats for more trunk space, or fiddle with the engine? Go right ahead. Same with your house: the bank doesn't get a say in what home modifications you make. You're responsible for paying off the loan, but not for using your (not-fully-paid-for) property according to the mandates of bank management. Not so with software you "own" under a restrictive license or "cloud-based" system.
Negative film has much superior exposure latitude to digital. There wasn't a need for HDR techniques with negative film - you could capture the dynamic range on the film.
That used to be true, but not so much anymore. With actual >12 stop dynamic range now available at the push of a button from better digital sensors, film is hard-pressed to keep up. Yes, with careful specialized home development of particular black-and-white films for extremely low contrast response, you might still be able to eke out a little more --- but not in color. And no, if you examine most negatives, they aren't capturing a >10 stop dynamic range: the dark areas are unexposed film base (will print to undifferentiated black), and the brightest areas are at maximum density with no detail --- only the soft rolloff of the transition to maximum density gives an appearance of greater dynamic range, by not creating the harsh obvious clipping artifacts sometimes produced by digital systems.
Many people I know who do not have kids of their own are nonetheless highly generous in helping the next generation. They act as teachers, mentors, caretakers, role models for many children. Selfish is using not having your own kids as an excuse for not paying to support schools, activities, and healthy environments for other people's kids. As an aspiring future member of the elderly generation, I'd much rather be cared for by fewer young'uns who received a better upbringing (more personal attention and access to resources for growth), than by more young'uns who've spent their whole miserable life squabbling with each other for scarce resources.
Do you believe a committee should tell you how much you should be paid, and how hard you should work and what job you should do? If you say no to each of those, you're a capitalist.
Funny, I'm anti-capitalist specifically because I don't like committees of rich folks deciding exactly those things for everyone who has to sell their labor to live. Under capitalism, you only have much meaningful freedom to determine your conditions of labor to the extent that you are already wealthy --- for everyone else, the choice is "work on the terms dictated by richer folks, or die impoverished and homeless." Many alternatives proposed for capitalism are developed and motivated specifically to break the monopoly of a tiny wealthy class controlling the "ownership of the means of production."
"Your Honor, I'm not the guy who committed that murder, he died that night. And if you lock me up, you'll be unjustly punishing an endless series of people who achieve consciousness in this body each day."
Judge: "Why should that bother me? For today, I reject your metaphysical stance. By tomorrow, I'll be dead, and the new occupant of my body carries no guilt for injustices perpetrated by his predecessor."
I doubt very much that you do.
What does the general lack of understanding-the-other have to do specifically with women? The grandparent poster claimed to understand the women in his life as well as their "male analogues," not to have any superhuman telepathic ability. Yes, understanding other people is hard --- but not on account of their particular genitalia.
That's the "-1, NSA employees read Slashdot too" mod.