There's plenty of pieces of shit before and after PewDiePie that have contributed to the popularity(or even existence) of Linux, just because they might be morally questionable doesn't negate their potential usefulness to a good cause.

A lot of things that US courts have recently done(this included) is making making me wonder about how judicial review should work. Because what I keep seeing is that US courts will strike down shitty band aid solutions(which AA was, it was an attempt at a quick and easy solution for a very long list of social issues) without offering better alternatives. I do think that affirmative action should not have to exist, but the better choice is full scale education reform, addressing systemic racism, an understanding of how privilege affects educational outcomes, and greater availability and lower cost of the highest quality tertiary education. As it is today I am observing courts not choosing perfect over good, but rather destroying half baked solutions because they oppose the intended outcomes of those solutions.

If by "left" you mean democrats then they will not do this because it is not what their views are. They are ideologically as neoliberal as Reagan and Thatcher. This is part of why they don't do as good of a job opposing the far right as they could, because they only exist as long as their only opposition is unhinged far right politicians.

My stance on this starts with the things that a lot of people for the most part can admit are problems. Corporations with the power and wealth of small countries, concentration of money in the hands of a few, absurd costs of living, decreasing access to education, the environmental crisis, constant wars that destroy poorer countries, and in many countries poor healthcare outcomes. And this is by no means an exhaustive list.

Now why do these things happen? In my opinion the origin of these issues comes down to private ownership of vitally important organizations and infrastructure, and the resulting profit seeking regardless of the consequences. This also is how I would define capitalism, because capitalism is at its core only a way of organizing the economy.

There are then multiple answers to how we should address them. Regulating companies and reforming capitalism without addressing the root issue are a common one, and in some cases somewhat effective. However, in most cases such movements(which I would call social democratic) have a tendency to quickly walk back their achievements. For example, Tory attacks on the NHS in the UK have contributed to its reduction in quality. Or the walking back that the Mitterand administration did in France. Or the deregulation of trucking in the United States which led to substantially lower wages. This is also a western-centric argument on my part, because social democracy also relies on ruthlessly exploiting poorer countries' workers but that's a whole separate can of worms.

One could think of this backtracking as faults in the political system, which they perhaps are, but I think they are inherent to capitalism, because when you have such overwhelming power in megacorporations, they will inevitably eventually get their way as long as they exist. It's the equivalent of being surprised that you will eventually burn up if you try to stand on the sun despite your thermal shielding or other mitigations. Which isn't that absurd of a comparison because the sun's surface is only ~15 times hotter than a human if you measure from absolute zero.

The next answer is to try to, through monopoly breaking or other means, to revert capitalism to a former state of less concentrated capital. This is a fool's errand and a reactionary stance in most cases, because monopolization is inherent to capitalism, especially now that companies' fixed costs are immense, but the marginal cost of each new unit(be it a package sent through a carrier or a complex electronic device) is nearly negligible in comparison, making a monopoly the inevitable outcome.

And about at this point in my political development I found out about Marxism and it's overall proposal for an alternative to capitalism, and I found it the most compelling. The history of Marxism is also a whole separate can of worms so I won't go too far into it, but I agree with the Marxist class analysis that there are owners(most of which aren't even individuals anymore) and workers, and that workers' main political strength are their numbers. And a lot of capitalism reform proposals do actually rely on mass political organization of workers. Now what I say is, I think we can be more imaginative as to what that power can be used for. I don't think what comes next after capitalism will be perfect, but I think we can do much better.

"leftists" nowadays who defend Russia seem extremely pathetic to me. The only thing Russia has in common with leftism is a general dislike for the activities of the United States. But there are many other groups who opposed the US, such as Nazi Germany, which doesn't necessarily make them your ally. As a Russian-american I can say that a lot of media and discourse on Russia in the west has incredibly poor overall quality, but it's not a CIA psyop, it's a combination of American exceptionalism, genuine issues, and zero cultural awareness.

Millionaires are definitely still well off but just to make a point: the average value of a US house is $450k. Add to this a $250k retirement fund and you're already up to 0.7M in net worth.

My opinion on that is that someone would've done what musk have money for at some point as well. All of those companies were mostly rehashed concepts that became viable due to faster computers, better materials, and better battery technology. I usually don't say this about actual inventions made by scientists and engineers, but most of the time billionaires just provide a concept and daddy's money and that really doesn't take a lot of skills that I think are worth anything.

Perhaps my opinions are different from others but I feel like these websites are forgetting that they're an optional part of people's lives. There are plenty of things I can spend my time on besides reddit and YouTube, and Netflix is forgetting that it's marginally more convenient than piracy.

See this kind of shit is why I pirate, not because I can't afford to pay $10 a month. When the $10 for a lot of content becomes $10 per month per piece of media you like, and you can't watch it on your platform of choice, and you can't watch it on a flight without paying more or not at all, this makes the $5 per month I pay for a VPN sound like a far better service.

I find the "raise taxes to pay for social programs" and "cut corporate taxes" to be somewhat contradictory. Reagan and Thatcher were textbook neoliberals if you need any examples, and they destroyed social programs and labor unions rather than supporting them.

Are they that good per view(and hence per bandwidth cost) though? Everyone I've heard who knows more than I had been saying that internet ads have always only marginally paid the bills and that purchases for microtransactions make way more money.

Because the AUR is a pretty low quality repo. Not sure if anything has changed since 2 years ago, but last I used arch, the AUR was full of broken, abandoned, and unbuildable packages. The Debian repos, fedora+rpmfusion, etc, provide a comparable number of software packages with substantially higher quality, hence no need for the AUR. Fedora actually has COPRs which suffer from the same quality issues as the AUR for similar reasons.

It's definitely going to be the far right who will throw people into camps if we get there. The most far left politicians in the US rarely if ever advocate targeting individual right wingers, but I can name a few far right politicians with substantial followings that suggested punishing people who disagree with them. I don't have a lot of love for democratic politicians in the US but they don't seem like a possible near term threat to people's safety, they just won't stand in the way of the people who are.

While there were issues with the way things were done with vaccination, you have to understand why it even got there. We had a situation where people were unreasonably made scared of vaccines which were by every metric substantially safer for the general population than the side effects. If right wingers convinced the population that they should do 150mph in a school zone and this is fine behavior because speed limits are a conspiracy and crashing into someone else doesn't actually hurt them, how would you deal with this? I don't think there are any good answers here, but the vaccines were better than not, and you need herd immunity for things to get better. And again, forcing people who can get vaccinated to get vaccinated, with overwhelming evidence that this was safer for everyone involved, is not the same as exile or imprisonment based on political beliefs.

What do you mean by this? Flatpak definitely solved the Linux distro balkanization problem for application developers without trying to destroy the benefits of having different distros. Having a distinction between system software, utilities, and advanced end user applications does solve a problem.

This might actually reverse firefox's decline in userbase at least in the business world. Any shop that already has multi-OS management could probably insta-switch to firefox, and i'm sure that MS locked-in places could too given enough of a push by IT.

But their countries are only poor because of the imperialism of rich countries for centuries. You're saying they should be grateful for rich economies helping them develop, when those rich economies are the reason they are poorer to begin with.

The thing is the American revolution wasn't about taxation itself. The taxation without representation bit was more of a minor component over how society should be organized. The question was whether the inherited aristocratic titles or ownership of land(later means of production) determined your social power. There's nothing about the ideology of the American revolution that is about the levying of taxes, it is about who gets to collect them.

With the soviets, the problems and successes are significantly more nuanced than "Stalin was bad dictator"(although that is a true statement). Which on one hand makes a lot of western criticism of the USSR questionably true, but also makes the actual issues(which there were) harder to address because they happened not because of one guy being bad.

Sunbird is somewhat suspicious to me because of the "we won't open source because it's less secure". Makes me wonder what godawful nightmare their app is if they don't want to let people look. Oh and if they're doing it as a business decision I don't want anything to do with them either as it's still vendor lock in.

Matrix is probably the closest in terms of being widespread and well supported by client and server implementations, though it's not quite the same. It's a bit finicky in practice too.