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cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/201230

Mine's

• PBS Space Time
• Sabine Hossenfelder
• Kurzgesagt

Mine's

• PBS Space Time
• Sabine Hossenfelder
• Kurzgesagt

President Xi Jinping pledged to redistribute wealth while turning up the heat on China’s upscale citizens and businesses. So, what keeps Chinese communism going?

CaspianReports says it is because geopolitics, development, national security, stability. BTW ofc China is not Communist. What are your informed arguments?

Summary

On paper, the U.S. government is free to legislate its path and determine its policies. In principle, there is little to prevent a resolute U.S. administration from challenging the power of the country’s dominant capital and clip the wings of its largest firms.

But it would be good to remember that the U.S. government---like most other governments---has become part and parcel of an increasingly global state of capital. This integration has undermined the de facto autonomy of governments everywhere. Whether willing or reluctant, many if not most policymakers have become pawns of a global mode of power they cannot control and that forces them to tranquilize the increasingly vulnerable population that dominant capital helps create. Government spending has inflated, but this inflation betrays weakness, not strength.

Larger-yet-weaker neoliberal governments are the alter-ego of bigger-and-meaner dominant capital. It is hard to think of any important sector or aspect of society, in the United States and elsewhere, where dominant capital does not dominate. It is true that, faced with increasing resistance, the rising power of dominant capital in the United States has slowed down significantly over the years and seems to have stalled completely in recent times (Figure 1). But the level of this power is still greater than ever, and it is yet to show any meaningful decline. Finally, and importantly, the stalling advance of U.S. dominant capital makes it extra vigilant against any serious challenge.

Prediction: if the current U.S. government delivers on its promise to curtail the might of the country’s largest corporations, it will face the wrath of the most powerful megamachine the world has ever seen.

---Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan, authors of the Capital as Power, the power theory of value

• https://ideas.repec.org/p/zbw/esprep/242968.html
• https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/242968/1/20210930-bn-dominant-capital-and-the-government-rn.pdf

In my experience, the most innovative distributions include NixOS and GNU Guix System (Nix influenced it): determinism/correctness, pure functional paradigm, declarative, atomic, departing from FHS for good, ... And they are pretty useful currently: Nix has the most packages, both are declarative so can easily reuse the configuration and apply in infrastructure as code, can rollback, can use for development (basically a way better alternative to Docker), can use in other distributions and Nix even on MacOS... Nix community being generally more practical, agile and flexible, while the GNU Guix community enforcing more correctness (building everything in their repositories from source including all transitive dependencies) and software freedom as GNU/FSF defines.

Other distributions I could include are musl based ones, Clear Linux, Fedora SIlverblue, OpenSUSE MicroOS, and projects like sel4, Theseus OS, but I don't have much experience with them to describe them fairly. So please lets discourse about innovative distributions and operating systems, those which you have experienced, which you may be excited about.

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/113521

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/113520

Some quotes

Twenty years ago, the phrase 'open source' had a definite meaning in computing which is quite different from the sense it has now...

Why is Free Software so Bad in Quality?

Most free software is poor or unusable. This is heavily disguised because protagonists like to use the isolated points fallacy to sell the idea FOSS is great.

...

...if you're lucky enough to attract such a team you need to keep them together. And for that you need capital and that is exactly where FOSS falls down. This is the main reason why so much FOSS is of poor quality.1

FOSS was Built Out of Corporation and Tax Money

Open Office was derived from Star Office which was the product of StarDivision and Sun Microsystems. It was not put together by a hacker living in his mom’s spare bedroom...

Emacs was supported financially by people working at the MIT AI Lab, which means that it was funded by Uncle Sam...

Linux is...mostly a copy of Unix, despite howls to the contrary it is deeply unoriginal, being based on ideas going back to the time of the Vietnam War. These ideas were in turn evolved within Bell Labs by its creators who were also well-paid professionals. Linus Torvalds really copied an idea whose basis had been funded by university and corporation money and without that basis there would have been no Linux.

Free Open Source is not often Innovative

...lot of FOSS is poorly written reverse-engineered copies of existing commercial software. Innovation is hard; it requires time and brains. Reverse engineering is a powerful disincentive to innovation since anybody who does spend R&D capital in innovation, can have their ideas reverse engineered.

...

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/113520

Some quotes

Twenty years ago, the phrase 'open source' had a definite meaning in computing which is quite different from the sense it has now...

Why is Free Software so Bad in Quality?

Most free software is poor or unusable. This is heavily disguised because protagonists like to use the isolated points fallacy to sell the idea FOSS is great.

...

...if you're lucky enough to attract such a team you need to keep them together. And for that you need capital and that is exactly where FOSS falls down. This is the main reason why so much FOSS is of poor quality.1

FOSS was Built Out of Corporation and Tax Money

Open Office was derived from Star Office which was the product of StarDivision and Sun Microsystems. It was not put together by a hacker living in his mom’s spare bedroom...

Emacs was supported financially by people working at the MIT AI Lab, which means that it was funded by Uncle Sam...

Linux is...mostly a copy of Unix, despite howls to the contrary it is deeply unoriginal, being based on ideas going back to the time of the Vietnam War. These ideas were in turn evolved within Bell Labs by its creators who were also well-paid professionals. Linus Torvalds really copied an idea whose basis had been funded by university and corporation money and without that basis there would have been no Linux.

Free Open Source is not often Innovative

...lot of FOSS is poorly written reverse-engineered copies of existing commercial software. Innovation is hard; it requires time and brains. Reverse engineering is a powerful disincentive to innovation since anybody who does spend R&D capital in innovation, can have their ideas reverse engineered.

...