• 5 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: November 19th, 2023

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  • If removing literal serfdom is not liberation then what the hell is “liberation”?

    When all the exploiter monks gather their serfs together and ask them politely “do y’all want to be integrated with the PRC?”, and then they do a vote and if 90% of the population votes yes, then they set up enclaves to test PRC rule but like, it’s a free market of states where you can choose to get services from either the PRC or the feudal monks and basically over time the people will provide more money to the superior product and drive the feudal monks out of the government business?











  • From a basic labor theory of value perspective, bitcoin requires labor to produce because mining it requires massive amounts of compute power. This computer power is supplied using GPUs and electricity, both of which require labor to produce.

    If you use this calculator, and enter the values 67 TH/s (tera hashes per second, the rate at which you are mining), 2680 watts for electricity consumption rate, and 5 cents per kilo watt hour as prices, you will see

    4.25 USD revenue per day 3.22 USD cost per day Profit rate = 32.0%

    To make the values of the the hash rate and energy consumption rate realistic, I consulted the specs of the machine antminer S17, which is aparantly a machine used in the bitcoin mining world (I ain’t into crypto mining). The cost of electricty comes from Kazakhstan, which has cheap electricty and substantial mining operations.

    So basically, at the current price of bitcoin can support a gross profit rate of 32% for the people who produce bitcoin, assuming you keep all the profit (no taxes, interest, rent), have no employees or maintainable costs. This is the price currently settled at based on the technological conditions and level of competition.

    It is nothing too crazy of a price, and the rapid growth of price in bitcoin is due to how the currency was designed. Basically, once a certain number of bitcoin have been mined, the bitcoin generation rate per mined block halves. This forces an exponential rise in the difficulty of mining bitcoin, and therefore an exponential rise in its price.

    Most probably, if bitcoin was designed to have a constant difficulty of producing, its price wouldn’t have increased at all.



    1. Rainy, damp, cloudy, windy weather is peak weather and beats a “nice sunny day” 80% of the time.

    2. Ice cream is winter food and not summer food because of how fatty it is. Popsicles are summer food and not so appealing in the winter.

    3. All countries should be making a 100% effort towards eliminating all meat (except that produced by subsistence farmers and the like) in their diets for the sake of the climate. Poverty is not an excuse because vegetarian diets use many many times less resources (which is why wealthy countries eat much more meat).

    4. Large wealthy countries should provide free vitamin supplements worldwide to reduce diseases.






  • The overarching goal of communism is for laborers to own the means of production instead of an owning/capitalist class.

    No, the overarching goal of communism is to create a stateless, classless and moneyless society.

    Employee owned businesses are the realization of communism within a capitalist society.

    No. At best, you could say that coops are a proto-socialist element within a capitalist society. Firstly, I am using the term “socialist” as separate from “communist” here, and secondly, a proto-socialist element is a very different thing from an enclave of socialism within a capitalist world.

    The simple problem is that capital is capital. A capital is a self-reproducing social relation that competes with other capitals in a sort of evolution by natural/sexual/artificial selection on the markets. The problem is capital itself, and the solution is to destroy capital. Creating a new type of capital that is less destructive, or one that operates under less destructive modes is fine for countries where development has not reached to the point that they can directly gun towards communism. However, for advanced, and especially late-stage capitalist economies, the task is not to pursue further development of market forces, because market forces have already matured. The task is to eliminate market forces (although this may take time).

    Coops may give a more equal distribution of wealth amongst the workers, but the aim of the communists is to abolish wealth, because the very meaning of wealth is that a private individual gets to command the labor of others. That is the fundamental social relation that money embodies and facilitates. The only way to remove the power to exploit other people’s labor is to remove the ability to command labor. But if you cannot command labor, then money becomes worthless and your ownership of the coop doesn’t mean anything.

    Are organizations focusing on this and I just don’t know about it?

    Yes. A quick google search shows examples such as the international labor organisation

    If not, what obstacles are there that would hinder this approach to increasing the share labor collective ownership?

    Part of the fundamental problem is just that the bourgeois class is not stupid. They want exploitable workers and profits. If you deprive them of that, prepare to face their wrath as they abandon all pretenses of human rights or fairness or the sanctity of markets.


  • Oscar Jenkins, 33, was convicted in a Russian-controlled court in occupied eastern Ukraine on Friday of fighting in an armed conflict as a mercenary.

    Mr Jenkins, a teacher from Melbourne, was captured last December in the Luhansk region.

    Prosecutors said he arrived in Ukraine in February 2024, alleging he was paid between 600,000 and 800,000 rubles (£5,504 and £7,339) a month to take part in military operations against Russian troops.

    The article seems to claim that this guy is a mercenary, but someone in the comments is claiming that this guy is not a mercenary because he is a member of the UAF’s foreign legion. I don’t know if there is any additional context here that I am missing.