Well, JS is just as much of a joke to me. ;)

Nooo, it’s a trap!

Sorry, haven’t seen your reply earlier.

Well and Germans calling Barcelona “Bazelona”.

Huh? You must have heard someone having no idea what they’re talking about. :D

We write it the same as in Spanish… So we have an r sound in there, but typically we don’t roll the r and instead pronounce it like the French. And we’ll pronounce Spanish “c” like a sharp S, but there’s plenty of Spanish and Latin American people doing the same. I have lived in Bogotá, I’m allowed to do this. :D

Yeah, but that’s not unique to Americans or even the English language. In German we write it the same (Parmesan) and pronounce a soft s in that place.

No, that time’s gone. The climate crisis will make sure that that sweet home you bought from your union wages won’t survive until you’re old… If you don’t die early to starvation thanks to the collapse of agriculture.

It really depends on what you actually need, how much setup the IT department can manage and how well the change is communicated and managed, I guess.

We use it (i.e. the Element client) mostly for chatting and another open source solution (BigBlueButton) for online meetings, but voice and video calls are possible directly with Element. Matrix lacks the out of the box office product integration for collaborating on presentations, spreadsheets or text files that Teams has. It can be extended via widgets though, which includes at least etherpad and afaik there are options for nextcloud (which has collabora) integration as well, so with a bit of setup, even that could be emulated.

So that would of course require some setup and maintenance and if the company used Teams before, some training and help for the users as well.

I’m trying not to dox myself, but it’s a university in Germany. :D

9-10 billion wouldn’t be a problem if our food was mostly vegan… We’d even still have space left that we could rewild.

I’m so glad we use Matrix at work. Our IT department even tells us explicitly not to use Teams if we can avoid it.

Hunter gatherers also had “socialist” lifestyles

That view may be outdated. I’m reading David Graeber’s and David Wengrow’s “The Dawn of Everything” where they review anthropological and archaeological evidence and argue that human societies were always very varied.

E.g. they show that this idea you cited came from contact with just three hunter-gatherer societies who already have had contact with western societies and at least one of them was started by a group of runaway slaves. Their egalitarianism was probably a reaction to western authoritarianism.

On the other hand they look at two indigenous societies on the north american west coast. Thos in today’s california were very individualist, valued personal wealth (when achieved through hard work and frugality) but hated slavery and had no rulers. Those more to the north were notorious slavers, had an aristocracy and a member of that aristocracy was considered superior if he organized the most wasteful parties.

A point they made at that point was that not only are hunter-gatherer societies not all the same, they might actually have developed important parts of their culture, including egalitarianism vs. authoritarianism in an attempt to be as different as possible from their neighbors they don’t like.

In the following chapter they then go on that the first cities in the middle east show no signs of hierarchy, including a patriarchy, and that patriarchy and a warrior aristocracy developed in that region as an answer to these egalitarian, rich cities widening their influence (trade networks, but also colonies). :(

Strictly speaking, a normal distribution doesn’t cap, neither at 0 nor at 200. Maybe the scores achievable by standardized tests do, of course.

Let’s make anti-shit!

No, definitely not.

The report is linked in the article. It’s an annual report of the Secretary General to the Security Council.

That’s a weak argument because everything used by normal citizens is, in practice, always used by the big corpos against the normal citizens in much greater quantity and with much more force.

Now that I think of it, it’s no argument at all because I already admitted, that under capitalism, you might not have another choice to get paid for your work. That still doesn’t make it morally good or logically sound.

Of course it’s work finding solutions to problems and you should be able to live off your work. And in capitalism, a patent sometimes is the only option to do so.

However, patents and other forms of “intellectual property” are absolutely illogical and amoral. Nobody ever made a completely new thing. Every innovation builds on so much knowledge accumulated by so many people that came before. It’s absolutely nonsensical that an advancement that’s 99 % an achievement of humanity and 1 % of a single person should belong to that single person.

Is what you describe really socialism though? Western leftists would probably call these policies social democracy. And yes, they make the life of people in that country better! Relatively high minimum wages, limits on prices (or price increases) for certain things (especially housing), mandatory paid sick leave, mandatory unemployment insurance, and so on are all things that some European countries have in some form or another. And yes, that makes most of our lives (I’m German) relatively great.

However, most of the housing, factories and land are still owned by capitalists. They still exploit their workers and tenants, the policies only soften the blows. In recent decades, the concentration of capital in a few families’ hands has also skyrocketed here, which gives them political power (sometimes openly, sometimes covertly) and led to the erosion of many of these social democratic benefits. Also, a lot of the high social security in the west in the past century was only possible thanks to exploitation of people and nature in the global south.

That’s why many leftists, at least in the west, don’t think that social democracy is enough in the long term. Many even see social democrats as stabilizing the fundamentally corrupt capitalist system by covering up that corruption. For most of us, socialism would mean that, at the very least, big corporations are owned and lead by the workers themselves. That could be cooperatives in markets (market socialism) or that could be some kind of planned economy (not only state central planning, there’s also proposals for somewhat or even totally distributed/decentralized schemes). The point here is that there are no more owners of productive forces, who don’t participate themselves in production, i.e. capitalists. The existence of a separate capitalist class with a lot of power and opposed to the workers is a common denominator for unneccessary misery in this world. Eliminating that class (that doesn’t mean eliminating the people, only expropriating them) would not magically solve all problems in the world, but it would make us freer to seek effective measures.

Maybe you should read that post before commenting. It’s anti-AnCap at its heart.

I’m neither. You’re the misinformed one here, and the people who downvoted me as well. Go to the link you provided.

• click the link to the article for Ahmed Al-Sharaa
• click the link to the article for Al-Nusra Front
• see “part of” section in the overview: Al-Qaeda

Yes, they split several years ago. Insofar I have exaggerated. Are they substantially better in terms of authorianism and religious fundamentalism? I seriously doubt it.

Correct, it’s the other big islamist group, al-Qaeda.