I think that’s a very strong argument and a great metaphor, but you forget relativity.

All reference frames are valid - you could say the Earth and the people are moving and the train is stationary, you could say the train is moving and the earth and people are stationary, or you could say they each have a vector moving around the sun or anything else

But when you travel through a portal, the only valid reference frames are you and the entry portal. Your momentum relative to the Earth doesn’t matter - why would it? You can open a portal to the moon and jump through, and we see momentum is preserved. The Earth isn’t a special reference frame, it’s just the most noticeable one.

So let’s pick the reference frame of someone on the track. Let’s look through the portal and say there’s a sign on the other side - as it approaches, you’d see a sign approaching you through the portal. Relative to you, through the portal the sign is moving at 30mph. The portal passes over you - you haven’t moved, but you enter a new reference frame, a frame in which the Earth and everything on it is moving at 30mph

Have you ever had coca tea? It’s amazing - way better than caffeine. It’s more gentle, but stronger - like it gives you more energy, but you don’t get a hard crash, it’s less likely to make it hard to sleep, plus it has all sorts of health benefits - being able to adjust to high altitude for one

Cocaine probably shouldn’t be sold at the drug stores, but it would be amazing if we treated it like caffeine - you need a license to buy it, but you can get the leaves or products made for it

Plus we could make a path to legitimize cartels and stop getting people killed over the the war on drugs, which would be nice

Not a feat of engineering, a feat of marketing

Which is really strange to me, I mean we’ve got early adopters and lots of technical people. It seems like science should be big here

I think it’s a combination of less presence/engagement in niche content, sorting methods not quite being there, and not enough discovery without going out of band to find things

One thing I really miss is the science groups, askscience always had great debate that I haven’t yet found here

Because immunity varies by disease.

Chicken pox? Pretty much one and done. COVID? Falls off rapidly after 3 months, whether you catch it or get the vaccine

Plus, every mutation is a dice roll on how much existing immunity will apply. It could be exactly the same as the last strain, or the old immunity might not help at all

After tech Jesus posted that, a former employee came out about all sorts of stuff about the work environment were pretty horrible

Huh… I’m a huge proponent of brushing your tongue (it doesn’t take much, just a brush with a scraper on the back makes a big difference). I’ve never really tried washcloths, but now I’m going to give them a shot

On the flip side, my skin is weird. I get hives for literally no reason, I tried one of those plastic poofs and it makes me itch like crazy.

🤞

IDK if you can convince it to run on Linux, but I’ve been pretty happy with paint.net lately

It’s basically a newer project like gimp. It’s got the core abilities and appearance of Photoshop. Feature wise, it’s less than gimp or Photoshop, but what it has works decently well

Most importantly for me, the UX is much better than gimp… Not as good as Photoshop, but I find stuff is usually where I’d expect it to be

Obviously it’s built on .net, so theoretically it could run native on Linux… Not sure if anyone has done the work to make that actually happen

Oh for sure with valve - they’re still a company and they’re certainly capitalist, which basically means they’ll get more cold and ruthless, and it means they’re making money for someone else through their labors

That’s still anarchist though - no ruler, not no rules. They don’t get told what to work on or how - the threat of getting let go (with a reasonable chunk of severance) doesn’t make it not anarchist. Neither does the fact they don’t get to keep their profits

You can mix and match systems - you can have pure anarcho-capitalism or anarcho-communism, although by operating in a predetermined framework it’s not really pure anarchism

The ranking system doesn’t take much away though, team roles are aren’t assigned, they’re ad-hoc. And with software we don’t have the same hierarchy within a team unless there’s a massive gap in skills/experience. You can’t code what you don’t understand after all - leadership is more about communication. You might have an architect designing the big picture and a team lead coordinating, but even in strict chains of command, programmers usually write tasks as a group then choose their task from what needs doing and what they feel confident in

But anyways, it might’ve been transformed to be more corporate over the years (I dug into all this a decade ago), but it was certainly designed to be anarchistic - that doesn’t mean good, not exploitative, in any way fair or equal… Just that the group functions through the individuals autonomously working towards the groups goals

I can’t edit in the app I’m testing out, but I’ll add a qualifier after hearing the pejorative connotations (I literally first heard the word last week and am looking for context)

I’d love to hear the take on the definition of the term tankies by someone who believes others would push the term on them

Fair enough, a pejorative term for what exactly though? The most nuanced answer I’ve gotten is from a proponent of communism who pointed at the authoritarian bent to it… Which seems super weird to me.

The way I see it, a bureaucracy has more leeway in allocating goods the higher up you go, which is very literal administrative capitol - it’s totally in conflict with the core concept of Marx, which is a person getting the fruits of their own labor, and no one getting to milk others (which is really the only way to get much inequality)

I’m a lot more critical of lennonists. While on the surface it imitates capitalism’s ability to optimize production (and with a more aligned goal, minimizing scarcity instead of maximizing the supply-demand equation), it also reintroduces the alignment problem. As you scale up, individual action and ideological beliefs become blips in the data, and the super organism created through humans arranged in the structure.

Individuals have a perverse incentive to maximize their own authority, the number of people under them, and the scale of their operations - by doing that they appear more meritocratous and are more likely to move up the hierarchy. Eventually someone gets the idea to fudge the numbers, and since the metrics are too complex to spot this in a spreadsheet, the most widely selected for skill to move up the ladder is to distort (or spin) the numbers so an individual appears to be serving a greater need than what actually exists.

Lennon’s theory is great, the more centralized the distribution, the greater the potential for optimization - but it ignores the emergent properties that appear when humans form an entity too complex for individual humans to grasp the full picture. You can reign in the worst excesses through watchdogs and harsh punishments, but ultimately that just becomes another layer for power to concentrate. You can keep layering and slow down the rot, but it’s a fundamental alignment problem - either you purposely concentrate the power in a person or group and regress to autocracy, or you constantly keep adding layers of checks and balances (which eats away at the efficiency gains)

So I see a fundamental contradiction here, which is why I can get behind techno-communism with intelligent agents running the show, or I can get behind decentralizing the system and creating something more anarchistic (or ideally, both), but Lennon always seemed to me to be a smart architect given a problem with a scale and an urgency beyond his abilities

Or am I missing something fundamental?

There’s a lot - it’s the default organization structure for humans.

Friend groups are more often than not anarchist. Valve (the makers of steam) is designed as an anarchist company where workers freely start and join projects (they’re not the only ones with a similar structure, but their employee handbook is an interesting read). The fediverse is generally anarchist

There’s very few pure ideological systems out there - certainly there’s never been a pure capitalist or pure dictatorship. There have been pure anarchist communities out there, because it’s not rule by consent or through will of the people, all it takes is people coexisting with an aversion to hierarchy

So I’ve heard tankies defined as “someone who specifically supports the centralized, authorization flavor of communism practiced by the USSR”. They also often mention worship of Stalin and Mao, and a revisionist version of history supporting such a stance

This seems odd to me, especially since a group of tankies flocked early to a decentralized platform geared for long-form discussions

Personally, I believe capitalism is an ideological virus. You can trace a clear path from the Roman empire to the modern day, where a hyper-specialized society eradicated every other system of resource husbandry by sloppily harvesting as quick as possible and using that advantage to gangpress everyone else into service under them (and destroying anything that would even slightly slow down the process )

I don’t think communism is the answer, because I don’t think it’s a path we can walk without first curing the disease, but the guiding concepts resonate with me.

So in that light, I’d like to ask in good faith:

Self-identified tankies - how do you define a tankie?