Didn’t Jim Henson die a completely preventable death, too? He had strep throat that went untreated for several days and it caused organ failures from toxic shock syndrome.

It is illegal, you’re right, but they want to destroy the legal definitions of many things so that they can write new ones. So suddenly, teaching kids about how their bodies work becomes “grooming”. Being anything other than a straight white Christian male makes you a “sex offender”. Reading anything other than the Bible to kids is “indoctrination”, and so on.

They’ve spent many years and billions of dollars studying the power of language and ideas. They have framing the issues from their perspective down to an art form. If you control what words mean, you control debate and democracy.

Tell ya what, I’ll build a time machine, go back, find this Abraham guy, teach him English, get him caught up on the last 2 millennia, and have him straighten out all this shit.

But the nation does need a robust transportation system for people and resources. Both people and things have places they need to go. What’s your solution? Unless you can build Star Trek-style matter-energy transporters, rail and road are your best options.

So, more like a sortition system, like how most Western courts select people for jury duty. Now that I think about it, it probably could work. We have wonders of technology that were once the realm of science fiction. These technologies could be leveraged positively in a communist system, I believe. AI in particular could solve things like the Numbers Problem. In a moneyless society, resources are allocated according to what is most necessary. I once watched a video where a problem was asked of the viewer. The scenario is as follows:

You are now the leader of a communist country. All markets and prices and money have been abolished. You want to build a train between City A and City B. There is a mountain between the two cities. You have two options. Option 1: Build a tunnel through the mountain, and Option 2: Build the track around the mountain.

1 will require less steel, but will take more manpower, as you will need more engineers to design and construct the tunnel.

Option 2 will require less manpower, but far more steel. That steel may be needed for other things, like appliances, medical equipment, homes and hospitals.

So, how do you prioritize resources? How do you know what your fellow citizens value more as a society?

You could do a survey, but then you run into the Numbers Problem. Your country has a lot of people. That’s a lot of survey responses. You’ll need nearly all of the available manpower in your country to sort them all. But with AI, that might not be necessary. The algorithm could collect all the responses and then output solutions to resource allocation based on those responses. To do this would require a massive surveillance network, though. People would no longer have much in the way of privacy.

Well, while Marx does call for a “winnowing of the State” after the workers seize the means, a problem we saw, in countries such as the USSR, once some of these revolutionaries got their hands on the levers of power, they found they rather liked it, and would not have let go willingly.

The Internet started as this kinda long-haired hippy fella who thought it would be great if everyone could share knowledge and have conversations with everyone else regardless of where they are geographically. Then the corpos made him cut his hair, put on a suit and tie and get a damn job! And 25 years later, he’s a yuppie corpo slave. I want my hippy back!

Maybe I’m just seeing potential where there isn’t any, but I really think if the people of the Archive could find a way to get their stuff stored in TUL, or perhaps build a Library of their own, the publishers couldn’t go after them then, because to the outside observer, all they see is a buncha dudes playing Minecraft.

There’s a Minecraft server that has books and articles stored. it’s called The Uncensored Library, (visit.uncensoredlibrary.com), and they have various articles and books that are free to view. The Uncensored Library was created by Reporters Without Borders. If I were the people of the Internet Archive, I’d be talking to the folks in the RSF about porting some of their content to this virtual library.

Yes, but speaking as a white male, alomst everyone in the 1%, at least in the USA, looks like me. Obviously I know they’re the enemy, but there’s a lot of us and it’s very easy for the 1% to convince us that marginalized groups are the problem (Blacks, trans people, immigrants;etc).

Not really. They’re still sowing division among the peasantry, and it’s still working. People want someone to blame for their troubles, and the 1% is all to happy to give you a target based on your demographics.

Same with “War on Drugs” or “War on Terror”. I would like to congratulate both Drugs and Terror for their victories. I bet if they declared a War on Housing the homeless population in the US would plummet.

Elon Musk comes out onto a stage and announces that Tesla is entering the game console market when?

We should send genetically modified cockroaches and algae. Then check back 500 years later. Surely there’s no way it can go wrong

JOHJ in the distance

Looks like we need him again.

They live in a huge gated neighborhood a few miles outside of DC, I believe. Personally I’d stage a protest at the place they all send their kids to school, The Sidwell Friends School, I believe it’s called.

Well, given what we know about most commercial plastics, which are all derived from oil/complex hydrocarbons, the consumed plastic could be broken down into condensed carbon? Or would it be carbon gases? I’m speculating based on just what I know about plastics, what they are and how they’re made.

Mexico also banned slavery before the US did. That’s why Texas split from Mexico, became its own country, then asked the US for help, which the US granted. As their way of saying thanks, Texas applied for Statehood. Then when we started thinking that maybe owning people was wrong, Texas was all “Now, wait a minute! The whole reason we started hanging out with you guys in the first place was because you said owning people was cool!”

air force veteran

Probably not an officer. Officers get a nice pension package when they retire, enough that they can afford private health insurance and not have to sit in lines at the VA for healthcare. I would absolutely loot officers pensions if I were President. And take all that money, and give it to enlisted.

They want their perceived enemies to make the first move. They might be calling for violence, but many of them are cowards and also love to play victim and win the sympathy Olympics.