Wow. The two party system has you so fucked that you imagine if the Ds disintegrate that the only replacement would be the Republicans. Read history, I beg you. The Ds will disintegrate over the next decade and they will be replaced by a better stronger party that takes their place.

Good question. If you have two parties ostensibly desiring office, and both will commit genocide, you punish the one that is ostensibly relying on you as their base until they stop the genocide. It’s a game of chicken with that party. And the Democrats lost that game. They thought “we will still get what we want even though we are genocides” and they didn’t.

So now. They will have to stop being genociders if they want to win next time. It would have been 4 years of genocide either way, but now the people have shown that if you want to win next time, you need to not be genociders.

That’s a white puritan definition of perfection, and perfection itself is a white supremacist Christian concept. You may think you’re an atheist but you have a lot of Christendom to shed.

Emotions are super potent. You will not be whole until you feel all of them and work with them on a regular basis. Eliminating anger from your life is a totalitarian strategy based on a Christian ideology that is fundamentally anti-human. Anger is amazing.

Yes, the standards you are holding for yourself are absolutely toxic and you will suffer from them long-term.

Your questions cannot be answered because they assume things about the world that are simply unreal and/or are not even logically consistent enough to be real.

For example, the most corrupt people on the planet are USA politicians. They are immune to insider trading, they have legally structured bribery, they receive bribes totalling in the billions annually, the parties literally contribute to their opponents’ campaigns, they control the entire debate system and establish a quid pro quo to require compliance from candidates in exchange for air time, they literally create and maintain prohibition laws to increase profits for private operators of their prison services…

As for dictators, the USA imprisons more of its population than any country in the world. It imprisons more people than the USSR GULAG did at its height, and they were holding Nazi soldiers. The USA prison system produces $11bn of goods and services for private companies using slave labor. Prisoners in the USA are usually charged anywhere from $100 to $350 every day they are in prison and they leave prison with that debt. That debt becomes the pretense for probation, where ex-prisoners who have served their sentences are directly surveilled and are required to work to pay their debt off. Failure to behave can result in a court summons and failure to attend that court summons for any reason can result in further jail time.

And that’s just the prison system. There are political prisoners in the USA held for years. There are secret military prisons. Children at the border of Mexico are held in solitary confinement causing permanent brain damage. White refugees are welcomed with open arms. Haitian refugees are met with cops on horseback and bullwhips. The secret military bases are on foreign soil so that the USA can break it’s own laws without oversight or consequence. The USA is spending a trillion dollars expanding and upgrading its nuclear weapons. All the while there are a million homeless people and budgets to address homeless are all given to the police to break up encampments and displace homeless people, the citizens pay the most in the world for health care and gets the worst outcomes, the political leaders take citizen money and give it directly to corporations in ways that are completely unnecessary to achieve their outcomes, and citizens who protest are beaten, kidnappped, blacklisted, monitored and surveilled, while citizens who kill protestors are protected and rewarded.

And you don’t think the USA is a corrupt dictatorship of the land owners over the masses?

Meanwhile, former President Carter has been at the forefront of election monitoring around the globe. Out of not quite 300 countries his group monitors 90+, so about a third. He has stated, the former USA president has stated, that Venezuela had the absolute best fairest most democratic elections they had seen. And Venezuela got sanctioned for dictatorship, corruption, and unfair elections.

There is no answer to your questions because your questions assume a fantasy world that does not exist. Come back to Earth, dig into what you’re observing, learn about what’s really happening.

No. Net neutrality is about ISPs, not about applications. It might violate anti-trust, but the military is a major counterweight to any attempts at disrupting Google (among others)

It can be fully end to end encrypted and still drop keyword-based metadata into the envelope. But also, I am pretty sure that the feds can access the keys if they need to. It’s e2e encrypted, but that doesn’t mean the key stays on your device.

This is why hexbear disabled downvotes, because it requires the would-be downvoter to engage

Not really though. The workers don’t control the state, the owners do. The workers can’t actually use the state to advance their interests. Every concession given to them by the owners is a) only given if the alternative is revolution and b) rolled back as soon as possible. Once the workers take over the state, taxes no longer serve that purpose but instead serve the purpose of smoothing out the money supply to avoid hoarding and accumulation.

Yes, in theory it would be great if we could tax the rich, but history shows us that we cannot, and ultimately theory has shown us the same thing.

Taxes are completely fucked. Here’s why.

ALL of the wealth of a society is produced by workers - they do the mining, the harvesting, the planting, the refining, the quality assurance, the distribution, literally ALL value is produced by the workers.

The owners got togther and formed a country. Not the workers, not “the people”, only owners formed and organized the country. They chose a private property regime because they now own all the wealth produced by workers. 100% of what workers produce under an employment regime is owned by the owners.

But the owners can’t sell anything if the workers can’t buy it. And the workers can’t work unless they can support their needs. So the owners take a portion of that value they steal and give it to the workers.

Then, the government that the owners created take money from the workers in the form of income tax, sales tax, and property tax.

Then they create NGOs and spend billions of dollars (that they stole from workers, remember) to convince workers to DONATE their salaries to the NGOs to solve social ills created by the owners.

Then the owners use the government to maintain their own wealth structures and prevent the workers from threatening them. When the owners make mistakes that would cost them fortunes, they take the money from the workers taxes.

Then they realized that even with this scheme workers were able to buy and own things. So they used their government to change the rules again. Fractional reserve banking let’s a bank hold 100 dollars in cash and create 900 in loans. The bank loans this magical money to workers and the workers collateralize it by giving the bank on lien on their house. The bank now has a more collateral that they can use to generate 9x loan values from, and the act of generating that money causes price inflation in housing, which increases the amount of money the banks can loan out. The net result is that workers pay rent to live in their own homes and that rent goes to the owners who control the government. When this scheme runs into issues, the owners use money taken from the workers (a portion of what was given to them after everything was stolen from them) to smooth out any hiccups and keep the scam rolling.

So, no, taxes don’t make things better. Only completely dismantling capitalism and running the government for workers by workers and eliminating private property and profit will ever help the 99%. Everything else is a scam and a distraction.

No one seems to be to be too worried about how much bloodlust we’re seeing from all sectors of the USA and Europe.

My god you really do believe all this capitalist bullshit. Listen, things have material and labor inputs. Those material and labor inputs could be applied elsewhere, so there are opportunity costs. But the idea that the solution is to create extraneous services that can only be afforded by people who are hoarding our medium of exchange is missing the forest for the trees. If the real problem was that we didn’t have enough paper money to pay for shit, the communists have a great answer for that and it’s called abolishing private property. End of hoarding.

Now we have all the paper money we need because no one is hoarding it. And yet, and yet, we still have labor and material inputs and those inputs could be used elsewhere.

So NOW, under communism, we get to make decisions not based on what sociopathic hoarders want but instead based on what society needs. Do we need to figure out the safety challenges for gold plated toilets on Mars, or should we maybe focus on some other aspects of space research. Because if we follow what the sociopathic hoarders want, we’re not getting efficiency, we’re getting maximal waste.

No, it doesn’t. It speaks directly to it when it mentions the things it supports about space research. It then goes on to say what it doesn’t like, which is space imperialism, space warfare, and space privatization for profits. Learn to read.

Wait until you learn about the falling rate of profit! Oh I’m so excited for you!

Something about if you die in an accident the payout could be larger than if you survived.

It’s not that. It’s that they can deny the payout if you broke the law.

It makes a lot more sense if you stop believing in the fiction of objects. There are no objects. Particles are a fiction, waves are a fiction. There is a single process, that we call the universe, and every single thing we refer to is a portion of that process from a subjective perspective. Once you give up on objects the idea that a process can be observed to produce subjective experiences that appear to violate expectations of object-oriented conceptual frameworks becomes less difficult to grasp.

Yes, it’s very slightly different energy from calling them orcs, but I guess that’s because this event didn’t kill any of your favorite Nazis.

You can’t tell the difference between supporting Russia and making fun of you morons for being so predictably thirsty? No wonder you can’t reason about the world.

ITT: libs breathing a sigh of relief that they can mock their racial enemy for something accurately for once in the last 2 years

Specialist is too thin. The specialists only know what they know and they don’t want to learn new things outside their speciality. So I had to hire a new person everytime we found a speciality gap because the specialists were like “not my job, I am an X specialist, go hire a Y specialist”. Then, they held their work tightly, no cross training, so the specialists all became their own brand of bottleneck. Different work speeds and different levels of quality meant that ego came to defend against performance complaints, and I as a manager couldn’t add more people to the problem areas because they weren’t trained in that area and the specialist could do it faster than they could train others to help.

That being said, all my full-stack team members had specialities. That’s what T-shaped means. I had frontend specialists who could work the whole stack, backend specialists who could work the whole stack. Dev tools specialists who could work the whole stack. Architects who could work the whole stack. Everyone we hired had something they were best at, and an alignment to learn the whole stack. Within a year they were able to work on all tech in the stack and anyone could bring in a new tech to solve a problem and everyone would learn it.

The idea that a single developer delivers an entire story is where your problem was situated. Stories aren’t assigned, they are owned, and they aren’t executed, they are delivered. One story can be worked on by 4 devs, all with different skills, but the story owner is the one who makes sure it gets the right people on it and is the one who makes sure the product owner sees the delivery.