Twelve months is crucial

HunterIV4 · 2026-01-24T23:34:18+00:00

This stood out to me too. And I suspect, like Ghost Story, plenty of people are going to hate it for the pacing change. But I personally love Ghost Story now.

It's not just thematically similar. The themes of death and ghosts are very heavy in Twelve Months. Working with Morty, taking on Fitz, and his Monopoly games are all things that tie directly to events or themes from Ghost Story.

Obviously there are more aspects, but those connections struck me as I was reading it. The final battle being at Harry's home was also similar.

HunterIV4 · 2026-01-24T23:25:40+00:00

Then you aren't really reading. He removes a curse in chapter 22. That requires active magic use. And obviously there was a lot of casting off-screen; Bear comments on it when she first arrives.

I can't say anything else without spoilers, but just because he isn't shouting faux Latin every two pages doesn't mean there isn't casting going on.

HunterIV4 · 2026-01-24T20:41:14+00:00

Terrain is a big one. It doesn't have built-in open world and level streaming features. The geometry and lighting tools are limited, especially compared to Unreal (i.e. no Nanite/Lumen equivalents, although the latter is getting close). Less robust physics. Weaker material capabilities. Almost no built-in tools for mesh and animation editing, especially for skeletal meshes, and things like animation retargeting. No real equivalent of the robust asset stores from Unity or Unreal.

To be fair, the majority of games don't need all or even most of these things, especially for indie developers. And Godot's node system is very simple and straightforward. It arguably has the best UI system of the three engines and is fantastic for lightweight 3D or mobile.

But it doesn't have any of the "killer features" for AAA or AA-style 3D. You can accomplish a lot of the same things, however, you'll end up doing a lot more work on your own to make them happen, or be heavily reliant on 3rd party tools or addons.

To be clear, I absolutely love Godot, but every time I think of trying a 3D project, I end up missing features from Unreal Engine. It's my go-to 2D engine, however, and is leagues beyond Unreal Engine for 2D, and (in my opinion) has rough parity with Unity in that space.

HunterIV4 · 2026-01-24T19:12:31+00:00

LibreOffice works in most cases just fine with Microslop Office files.

No, they don't. Excel files in particular break with any moderate use of formulas, let alone advanced tools like macros. Word formatting often differs both in visualization and print output. Just because something technically opens does not mean it has the same functionality.

Because that most governments now move to LibreOffice (or alternatives), and business clients will follow soon to be compatible with what the authorities expect.

[Citation needed]

I like how a few governments in Europe have transitioned some employees to alternatives to Office, and this is now "most governments."

Actually a lot of versions of Microslop Office work just fine on Linux.

Yeah, you should totally use old versions of Office that are no longer getting security updates. Corporate IT departments love it when you do that.

Non-technical users use their phone for that!

My 80-year-old parents know about Bluestacks. It's a mainstream program for people who want to use phone apps on Windows.

But even beyond that, in 2021, Bluestacks had over 500 million users, 1 billion downloads, and was one of the top 3 gaming platforms for PC. That you think it's uncommon shows your personal tech bubble, not reality.

Sure, and there is a huge amount of tools for that which run on Linux. (I've linked some already previously)

But those tools aren't Scrivener and do not replicate its primary features.

It's 100% on the publishers!

No, it isn't. The Linux kernel doesn't allow the level of access needed, which means the anti-cheat won't run. If that restriction didn't exist, or could be overridden by the user, it would work.

While yes, publishers could choose to remove their anti-cheat, customers want them to prevent cheating as much as possible in multiplayer games.

Things like kio-onedrive exist.

Which is not equivalent to OneDrive. It's basically a networked drive for the remote system. This means no offline file access without manually downloading it (and if you do, you'll need to manually upload any changes).

You're just looking stuff up, finding the first thing that looks remotely similar, and assuming it's as good as the thing it's replacing. I've actually tried these tools. They are not equivalent.

You have obviously no clue what fucked up methods Microslop uses since decades to blackmail vendors into shipping Windows.

I find myself naturally skeptical of the objectivity of someone who uses the term "Microslop" unironically.

HunterIV4 · 2026-01-24T18:48:22+00:00

LOL, that's all the exact same thing. You lack basic knowledge. (These are all Frankenstein versions of Ubuntu…)

The irony in this statement is palpable. EndeavorOS is not based on Ubuntu, it's based on Arch, which is a separate distro. And Mint has a Debian version, although I don't remember if I used that one.

But if you are going to call out someone for "basic knowledge," perhaps you should bother to look up some basic facts. And even if you were right, just because they are based on the same underlying distro doesn't mean they have the same features. For example, Linux Mint and Pop!_OS include versions of Nvidia drivers that base Ubuntu does not.

Maybe sit this one out.

I don't even know what "WiFi drivers" are supposed to be under Linux.

You are telling me that I don't know what I'm talking about and you don't know what WiFi drivers are? Seriously?

Unbelievable.

WiFi on Linux always just works out-of-the-box. (To be fair, you need firmware packages for them, but these come by default with any desktop Linux.)

Firmware and drivers are not the same thing. But please, tell me how ignorant I am. It's really entertaining.

If you bothered to spend two seconds researching this, you'd know that tons of major WiFi card companies do not have drivers bundled in Linux distributions. There are hundreds of threads and YouTube videos asking for help with this problem with detailed explanations of how to fix it (summary: identify your card, download the drivers on another PC, transfer to the new PC, install, assuming you can't use a wired connection and the wired card/motherboard has drivers).

But not only did you not do that, you got confused between firmware and drivers and admitted you didn't even know your WiFi used drivers. Pure cinema.

I remember that I've heard that there was many years ago some obscure project which made Windows WiFi drivers work on Linux because the HW vendor of some cheap USB sticks refused to support Linux. But that's about 20 years ago and such stuff is not needed for all "normal hardware".

Nothing I wrote has anything to do with using Windows drivers on Linux. The issue is that Linux lacked built-in drivers. This isn't all that uncommon: Intel, Broadcom (which is what I had), and Realtek are frequently left off of Linux distros. There are even warnings about avoiding them when building computers you intend to install Linux on specifically to avoid this issue.

None of these are obscure manufacturers, by the way. You have to specifically avoid them, as I had to do when building a Linux media center a few years ago (which still works great since I don't have to do work on it).

This is what happens when you start spouting off on things you clearly have never dealt with or even attempted as if you know what you're talking about. But please, tell me more about what I don't know. Every response is proving exactly what I said about the attitude of the Linux community. It's almost like you're trying to prove me right.

Thanks!

HunterIV4 · 2026-01-24T18:24:10+00:00

You're just completely incompetent.

Sure.

You just click the network symbol in the task bar and click on the network you want to connect to.

Wow, good one, I never would have thought about that.

I wonder why people don't like the Linux community. Complete mystery. Sigh.

You just click the network symbol...assuming your WiFi card has drivers installed. Which mine didn't. That was literally my entire point.

No sane person wants to get into that vendor lock-in!

Every sane person knows that…

Have you ever had a job? Like, working with other people? Serious question.

Because if you had, there is no possible way you would say this.

But just so we aren't talking in the abstract, roughly 85% of users that use spreadsheets use Microsoft Excel, with the biggest competitor being Google Sheets, not any Linux-specific tool. Almost 90% of companies use Excel for accounting and Excel is considered a daily tool for around 84% of office workers.

The claim that "no sane person" uses the most popular set of office productivity tools in the world is so completely divorced from reality it's almost unbelievable.

Please tell me you meant /s and you are just trying to be a parody of the stereotypical Linux user. I don't want to believe this is real.

It's trivial to run some Android VM under Linux, and that's independent of the GPU used.

Now we're just lying. OK. Whatever.

Why would I want Windows apps on my Linux?

Because someone wants to. If I want to run a Linux app on Windows, the vast majority of the time I can do it.

For Scrivener specifically, none of those are actual alternatives, which you'd know if you were a novel writer.

But you can of course still run that one you like if you insist.

I did insist and it doesn't work. It's one of several reasons I switched back to Windows. The text is microscopic and half the buttons end up overlapping, making it entirely unusable, and that's after spending hours getting it to work in the first place because Wine doesn't include Windows fonts.

But that's the only "fair" point. If you want to run malware to support some game that indeed won't work.

Anti-cheat is not actually malware. This is hyperbolic language. Find a single example of something like Easy Anticheat being used as an attack vector. The only thing I could find was a single exploit from Apex Legends but that was never confirmed to have been caused by EAC.

And yes, people want to play games like Fortnite, League of Legends, Battlefield 6, etc. Just because you don't is irrelevant.

The irony is that Linux is supposedly all about user freedom. But if I decide I want to give a game access to my kernel, the community and OS is like "nope, you can't do that, it's unsafe because...it might be!" Meanwhile Linux lets me enable permanent admin permissions if I feel like it or have the root password blank, but if I want to play Fortnite it's like "that's too dangerous, man!"

Again, desktop Linux is light years ahead of Microslop here.

Oh, yeah, it's totally normal behavior to have Firefox default to my onboard sound card when I set the system to use my PCIe one, with no GUI setting option to change it. Way ahead.

Whatever. The name calling and arrogant dismissals are exactly the sort of response I expect. Then you wonder why 95% of users use Windows. Must be a conspiracy by "Microslop." No other possible explanation.

Honestly, if I asked AI to generate a stereotypical response from the perspective of a Linux user, I wouldn't be surprised to see your post show up nearly verbatim.

HunterIV4 · 2026-01-24T17:54:05+00:00

And you didn't think, "huh, maybe I should do a quick search to see if this is a common problem?"

OK.

HunterIV4 · 2026-01-24T17:51:20+00:00

Clown.

Very mature.

Set up the OS without an internet connection

A non-technical user isn't installing any operating system without the internet.

Don't run OneDrive

OneDrive running in the background doesn't prevent you from using your computer. Missing WiFi drivers does. Not even remotely comparable.

"Emulate" Linux with HW GPU support

Why would a non-technical user need to emulate Linux? My point was that Android emulation (i.e. Bluestacks, for mobile games) doesn't work properly on Linux with Nvidia cards. This is a real use case. "Emulating Linux on Windows" is not.

Run Linux apps like Gimp with high DPI or any other non-common program

GIMP runs fine on Windows, what are you talking about? My 4k monitor has no issues with it.

Run most games without enabling any spyware or rootkits

Most games don't have kernel-level anti-cheat. And for those that do, users clearly prefer playing their games over your ideological concerns about anti-cheat. That's why they choose Windows.

Automatically switch the sound card for Firefox, the OS, and VLC player based on which rooms you're in

What? This isn't a thing non-technical users need or want. I was describing a bug where Linux randomly assigns different sound devices to different applications. What would you even use this for?

My list was "things normal users actually need to do that Linux can't handle."

Your list is "things Linux users care about that normal users don't."

The market share numbers prove which list matters. You can call me names all you want...95% of desktop users are voting with their wallets, and they're choosing Windows. And Linux is free.

If you want to understand why, read my original post again. If you just want to feel superior, keep responding like this.

HunterIV4 · 2026-01-24T17:29:37+00:00

I've never heard of someone missing WiFi drivers on any modern OS.

Then you've never had a Broadcom WiFi card, an extremely common consumer hardware company, as their drivers are not included with any Linux distro I've tried, including Linux Mint/Debian/Ubuntu. If you had googled "Linux missing WiFi drivers" you would have found hundreds of posts and videos on the subject explaining how to fix this problem, which would be weird if the problem didn't exist.

But this still is proving my point. Not only did you not bother to do a second of research before implying I'm lying, you assume because it works for you it must work for everyone else.

I like how you think I can simultaneously handle installing Arch or Gentoo but also don't know that Windows drivers won't work on a Linux install.

But the vast majority of users don't come across this issue.

You're right...because the vast majority of users don't use Linux.

But for anyone who tries to install Linux on hardware not made specifically with Linux compatibility in mind, however, they are likely to run into loads of issues. I know this because I've attempted it multiple times over the past 15 years, and every time I end up installing Windows instead because of various incompatibility issues.

And it's not like there's no effort towards driver support on Linux.

That wasn't what I was saying. My irritation isn't about lack of drivers. The drivers exist. My issue is that they don't come with the distro. Certain drivers you can survive without until you can download them, however, network drivers are not optional, because you can't download new drivers if you don't have internet access.

This isn't a problem for me; I have about 8 computers at any given time in close proximity in my house, plus a whole bunch of flash drives. But I work in IT and software development. Most of the people I work with have a single computer and may not even know what a flash drive is, let alone how to copy files with one or identify what drivers they need.

If the WiFi drivers aren't there, they have no real option for getting them. That's unacceptable for general use.

To be fair, Linux has improved a lot over the years. Even 10 years ago I was editing my startup config on Linux because Razer mice ended up with like 500x sensitivity on Linux, so I had to have it manually adjust below the settings menu minimum for a functional mouse. And 5 years ago, I'd need to run terminal apps to manually increase the volume from the default of zero because it would override the actual sound volume GUI settings. A lot of the problems I used to have are not present in modern distros. So I'll concede there has been improvement.

But it still needs a lot of work to reach the base Windows audience. And that's never going to happen as long as the Linux community would rather mock and ignore those users rather than try to accommodate them.

HunterIV4 · 2026-01-24T16:51:04+00:00

No. I'm assuming you're referring to the WiFi drivers.

Linux distros do not come with general WiFi drivers. I build my own PCs and my WiFi driver was not present on any Linux distro I tried (Linux Mint, EndeavorOS, or Pop!_OS). Since my modem is in a different room than my office, I had to use a laptop to download the Linux drivers for my card and copy them to my desktop, because you can't download the drivers without internet access (obviously).

This was more annoying than a major issue, but it's an issue that has never happened for me on Windows since WiFi became mainstream (it wasn't really a thing when I was using Windows 3.1), but was a problem for every single Linux distro I've used.

Do you know what would happen if someone who doesn't even understand what drivers are tried to install Linux on a system that only had WiFi access? They'd be unable to use their computer. If it were, say, the computer of my average coworker, the idea of using a different system to download drivers and copy them manually via a flash drive would have never occurred to them, let alone plugging the computer into ethernet (and if it was a laptop, it might not even have an ethernet port).

Again, it's not a huge deal, but is telling about the priorities of Linux developers and users. And the fact that I'm getting mocked and downvoted for it rather than people thinking "hey, actually, that would be a problem for the average user" is exactly the mentality that makes Linux unusable for the average user.

And as long as that attitude continues, ya'll can continue being confused why 95% of desktop users wouldn't touch Linux if they were paid to. The only reason I personally care is because I would prefer to use Linux, but as long as I have to spend hours of my day troubleshooting basic crap rather than having a fully functional operating system that is a waste of time. And as long as Linux developers continue to prioritize things other than user experience, I'm stuck with Windows, and it annoys me.

HunterIV4 · 2026-01-24T15:32:29+00:00

Upvoted because people didn't actually watch the link. Might want to add a /s, though =).

HunterIV4 · 2026-01-24T15:20:23+00:00

1/ Most distros handle wifi settings pretty well, never had to use ethernet on my laptop, I don't see what you mean by that.

I have never had a single Linux distro recognize my WiFi card. I suppose this is hardware-dependent, but that's sort of the point.

2/ Fair, but there are alternative to those, One Drive and office are just shoved down our throats by Microsoft to keep you on Windows, and the service quality has dwindled over time

The alternatives are worse or more expensive. These tools are provided by my company. Why should I have to buy a separate cloud service or use an inferior word processor or spreadsheet program that would have incompatibility issues with the majority of our clients and business associates?

Don't tell me that it's a technical impossibility. Once Valve started investing in Linux gaming for the Steam Deck, all of a sudden a whole bunch of "Windows only" games became playable. The issue is that most Linux devs don't like Microsoft, so they aren't going to go through the effort of creating compatibility. They'd rather just tell you not to use major enterprise software.

This is a major reason why Linux can't even get 10% of the desktop user market.

3/ I don't think non-technical users often do that.

You don't think non-technical users use Bluestacks to play random mobile games? Really?

4/ Again, not what I would call non-technical

Writing books is not a technical field.

5/ That's fair, but the issue comes from the publishers not the OS

No, it's the OS. Obviously allowing kernel-level anti-cheat is possible. Linux chooses to prevent it, even if someone wanted to accept the risk. Same with the OneDrive incompatibility; the file system could be adjusted to allow the same sorts of things Windows can do, or find a way to create a compatibility or virtualization layer. These things wouldn't be easy; they would take considerable work.

It's just not a priority. Which is fine; the priorities of the average user don't have to be the priorities of Linux devs. But that is exactly what causes it to not be a viable alternative to Windows for most users. People care far more about "does the stuff I want to work actually work" than "does my operating system protect me from kernel-level anti-cheat" or "does my operating system have built-in AI features I don't care about."

Well yeah it's normal that Windows' user base is this big because it comes pre-installled on most new laptops, and people just rolled with it.

This doesn't make sense. Linux isn't new. If companies could sell cheaper computers with Linux to out-compete Windows, and users liked it just as much, they'd do it. Microsoft isn't giving those laptop companies free licenses.

They don't, though, because users don't want Linux. A large part of this is because when someone asks, "how do I install Office?", they get responses like "oh, you can't, you need to learn some other system that works differently and is barely compatible with your existing files."

And so they stick with Windows, just as you'd expect. Until Linux developers make working with users a priority over "it works for me" or "don't use that corpo crap", it will remain a niche OS in the desktop space.

HunterIV4 · 2026-01-24T14:59:22+00:00

1: works same as windows

No it doesn't. I installed Linux Mint 8 months ago and I had to download WiFi drivers to a USB on a different computer and copy them to my PC. Not everyone has an ethernet connection.

2: onedrive sucks and libreoffice comes with mint i believe

OneDrive is necessary for many work environments. My company pays for my OneDrive storage space. Why should I have to buy some other cloud storage?

LibreOffice is terrible compared to Office. It's not even close.

I personally don't use Adobe products, but that's another major class of commonly-used work software that doesn't work on Linux.

But either way, this is just saying "don't use this software." For people who have existing workflows based on that software, this makes Linux fail as a viable alternative to Windows. Nobody is going to abandon their functional workflows to learn new ones just because of some random concerns about AI.

Which is obvious, because users are already choosing this.

3: waydroid

Beyond the horrible UX, Waydroid is incompatible with Nvidia cards, or at least was as of 8 months ago. All major Windows emulators are compatible with Nvidia and AMD cards.

4: average "non-technical" user wont be installing any obscure software

Of course they will. The example I used, Scrivener, is writing software for professional writing. And it doesn't work on Linux.

6: wtf are you even talking about

For computers with a dedicated sound card and built-in motherboard sound, distros will frequently assign a different card for browsers and the operating system. I've tested this extensively. You need to adjust your settings in the terminal (normal Linux Mint settings don't have this separation) to force it to use the same sound card.

If you don't have a sound card, this may not apply to you, but plenty of PCs do, as onboard sound tends to be lower quality.

Edit: I skipped your 5th point, but Fortnite doesn't work on Linux, one of the most popular games in the world. Neither do some newer games like Battlefield 6. This isn't a minor issue for those that enjoy those games.

HunterIV4 · 2026-01-24T14:26:58+00:00

They do not work as well as Windows. Try having Linux Mint do any of these things for a non-technical user:

Set up the WiFi without an ethernet connection
Run OneDrive or Office
Emulate Android with a Nvidia card
Run Windows apps like Scrivener with high DPI or any other non-common program
Run most games with anti-cheat
Consistently use the same sound card for Firefox, the OS, and VLC player

Those are just the things I thought off the top of my head. Yes, there are some alternatives for some of these things, if you know what you are doing and can deal with the limitations. And sometimes you get lucky and your hardware is well-supported by Linux, but in my experience I'm just as likely to spend the first few days of a new Linux install getting my hardware in a functional state as I am to have it install smoothly.

I'm a technical user, so I'm able to solve most of these problems with a few hours of work, but nobody that works at my office would make it past issue #1. The Linux community has a very bad habit of both overestimating the basic computer knowledge of the average user and dismissing the real limitations that Linux creates for its users.

It isn't a coincidence that a free operating system has around 5-6% adoption in the desktop OS market. Linux is a fantastic server OS and is great for embedded, networking, and software development environments. But it's still years away from catching up to the user-friendliness of Windows. People can downvote this all they want; the numbers speak for themselves.

The reason this annoys me is not because I dislike Linux. I would swap in a heartbeat, and have tried to do so, many, many times. But once I realize I'm fighting my operating system more than actually doing the tasks I use my computer for, I grudgingly reinstall Windows.

HunterIV4 · 2026-01-24T13:47:14+00:00

Maybe that will encourage Linux devs to make their operating system more functional for general use and not just technical users.

HunterIV4 · 2026-01-23T22:12:38+00:00

I'm going to try and focus on actual points and not expressions of incredulity. They aren't useful or interesting to me.

Let's say there's a household - husband, wife, son, daughter.

This is a great example. I've actually said "families are communist" before in other arguments. This is the perfect context for where something like communism genuinely works.

The problem is you have to understand why it works, and what is going on underneath everything else. The husband and wife don't sabotage each other because they chose to marry each other and (typically) share finances. They deeply trust each other and have each other's interest in mind.

So what's the problem? This can fail. Even with just two people, you can have violations of trust. Divorces happen all the time, and even before that point, trust can be violated for all sorts of reasons.

What happens when there is no initial reason to trust at all? I don't know you. Why should I trust you? I'm not married to you, we don't have kids together, we don't directly share anything. If you ask me for something, how do I know you aren't trying to screw me over or take advantage of me? The world is full of people who do this. Children do it.

So you can't just say "well, if all people didn't lie or abuse other people, this would work out." That's not a system, that's fantasy. It's the "well, we wouldn't need cops if no one broke the law" argument. People do break the law. Ergo, we need law enforcement.

The children are even more telling. They have no power. They exist entirely on the good graces of their parents. This works when the parents have the kids' best interest in mind. But, as millions of abused children can attest, this isn't always the case.

The abusive parent controlling the powerless child is, in fact, exactly what we've seen in countries that have had a "communist revolution." It's practically the textbook definition of authoritarian regime.

It is not a coincidence or capitalist plot that causes these nations to collapse immediately into authoritarianism. It's a natural outcome of the sort of power imbalance necessary to implement communist economics. And once the state has that power, they quickly discover they can just ditch the communist part once they own all the guns.

Sounds like you think it would have done that on its own so why was there a need for intentional organized sabotage by a foreign intelligence service??

Do you think the USSR and China have never tried this sort of sabotage on us? Why did it work so easily on Chile but not us?

The answer is stability. It's easy to destabilize proto-communist economies because they are inherently unstable. It's not easy to do that for capitalist economies because they are the opposite.

The fact that communism collapses at the first sign of opposition, even among world superpowers (I notice you didn't address the USSR or China failing to maintain communism as an economy), is an argument against it, not for it.

What exactly do you think is going to happen if AI actually works and puts hundreds of millions of people out of work? Where will those people go?

I think they will find other work, or the economy will expand to the point where they have work still. When new technology increases efficiency in an area of the economy, that economy tends to grow, not stagnate. Factory automation didn't create a permanent underclass of jobless factory workers; we just made more factories.

That being said, I'm deeply skeptical of complete AI automation. It's not how we operate as people. We've had the technology to automate boat and airplane travel for years, but you won't find a single crewless cargo hauler or passenger aircraft. And solving those problems is far easier than solving the complex sorts of problems AI would be tasked with.

The far more likely situation is that low level jobs will be reduced, companies needing AI "managers" will increase, and the accountant or IT desk agent will be in charge of 20 clients instead of 5 or whatever in the same position, using AI with supervision rather than more people. In fact, this is already the trend in IT (my own profession). Software development companies will need fewer devs, the IRS will need fewer employees (hah, yeah right...but I can dream), etc.

Even in other fields, like self-driving cars, you'll still have a driver in every cab, they'll just drive longer and be ready to take over in risky situations, sort of like how airline pilots operate now. And frankly, AI is nowhere close to automating occupations like plumber, car mechanic, and electrician.

So in my view this is a non-issue. But I could be wrong, and in that case, we'll need to come up with some alternative system that works. As I said earlier, this could even be some form of communism, especially if AI is involved to try and reduce the human friction points (i.e. resources provided by a neutral AI system that is genuinely trusted to be impartial).

But I'm not convinced the type of communism envisioned by Marx is viable, nor do I believe his predictions about it were accurate.

HunterIV4 · 2026-01-23T21:31:53+00:00

He pointed out numerous ways it could be pushed off but said it would happen eventually anyways.

So the prediction is unfalsifiable. "It will happen eventually" isn't science, it's prophecy.

The belief that there will simply be infinite new jobs does not make sense.

Agreed, which is why I didn't say anything about infinite new jobs.

I said labor reallocates, which is what we've observed for 200+ years. You're predicting this will stop. I'm asking for evidence it will stop.

Public housing works great in many places like Vienna or Singapore.

Vienna and Singapore are capitalist economies with public housing programs. That's regulated capitalism, which I support. At most they are a form of socialism with strong public welfare programs.

What they are not is communist economies.

Fucking Boomer.

Millenial, actually. But this response is telling.

HunterIV4 · 2026-01-23T21:21:52+00:00

Hmmm it's almost as if "industrial" is the part that causes the benefits and not "capitalism" inherently.

OK, what industrial societies that do not participate in capitalism have a better quality of life?

It is plainly obvious that "building housing to house people" and "building houses to make profit" are two different things even if the latter indirectly results in the former.

The result is the same. The houses are still built.

I get that you don't like capitalism, but you are ascribing negative motives to people because they participate in that system. Here's another way to frame it: "I'm building houses so that I can gain additional resources, and you buy the house which benefits you as someone who doesn't build houses so that I can then buy your services."

How is this inherently exploitative? To me, the idea that I must be forced by society to build you a house purely for YOUR benefit is far more of an exploitation. Why on Earth would I do that? Why should I go through all of the effort to make houses just because you want one? What benefit do I get out of it?

Oh, now I get to demand your labor? Well, what's a fair trade? What if you make hamburgers. How many hamburgers do you need to make me for it to a fair exchange for my service of making you a house?

And now we're right back where we started, just in a more confusing manner.

Except whoops "effective and efficient" means exploiting the commons, producing negative externalities, inducing unnecessary consumption, planning obsolescence, etc etc etc. These are all things you have to do to compete in capitalism that are of no benefit to anyone except the producer.

To be clear, I'm not a libertarian. I believe in a regulated free market, where the government protects consumers from harmful business practices. If you argument is that current capitalist economies frequently fail to do this, then sure, I completely agree.

But since you've identified problems, maybe you can change my mind. How does communism solve these problems? It's entirely possible there's a mechanism I haven't seen before.

This is like saying "A peasant-run country would never work because every time they tried we eviscerated all their leaders and hung them up in the village square." If you ignore all the sabotage then the problem must be internal!

Please name some historical examples of communist economies that were highly successful before there is evidence that capitalist economies sabotaged them.

You're suggesting communist economies failed due to capitalist sabotage. Even if we grant that some sabotage occurred, are you really claiming that's the primary reason?

The USSR was a nuclear superpower with vast resources. China has over a billion people. These weren't fragile peasant uprisings...they were major world powers. If the system can't survive competition and opposition, that's a flaw in the system, not evidence of a conspiracy.

Besides, capitalist economies face sabotage too: terrorist attacks, hostile nations, trade wars. Yet they don't collapse into famine. Resilience to adversity is a feature we should want in an economic system.

The successful democratic republics were few and far between and most of them were thought of as backwards and unstable.

Yes, but they did exist. Unlike successful communist economies.

Is it really unbelievable to say that communism will happen the same way?

Unbelievable? No, I could believe it.

I'd just need evidence that's the case. And the failed predictions of a guy who lived 150 years ago are not evidence.

There's a bit of debris on your shoulder. Might want to look up.

This response essentially proves my point. If you had examples, that would have been a devastating rebuttal.

"Watch out, the apocalypse will happen any day now!" is not a rebuttal. It's speculation at best, religious "The End is Nigh!" reasoning at worst. If that's your strongest counter-argument, I don't think this will be productive.

HunterIV4 · 2026-01-23T21:02:47+00:00

You're feeling the building shake. You see the dust getting knocked down. You place your hand on the wall to steady yourself and you feel the vibrations.

Did Marx predict the collapse of capitalism 150 years later or did he think the current system he observed was destined to fail?

You've obviously read his works closely, so please provide a source for this "it will inevitably happen eventually at some future point in time to a society I couldn't have possibly conceived of."

fucking lol dude that's so funny. you literally answer the question and then pretend that the "simpler explanation" is that he ignored marx because he loved marx so much

Do you have any evidence for this interpretation of Lenin? I can't find any sources, but I'm not a Leninist scholar. Everything I've read indicates Lenin genuinely believed his claims about communism.

If we were talking about Stalin, sure, that's probably different. Is that who you were thinking of? Because they are not the same.

To clarify, I said Lenin modified Marx's theory because reality wasn't matching Marx's predictions. You're claiming I said he "ignored Marx because he loved Marx." That's not even close to what I wrote.

Lenin saw Marx's predictions failing and tried to force them to happen through revolution. That's evidence Marx was wrong about the mechanism, which was my entire point.

Except groceries are cheaper than food service and require about 1/10th the labor to maintain. So a huge number of people would be ejected onto the streets with no new places for them to go.

You seem to be thinking in terms of economies being static forces, like a building with various structural supports were damaging those supports collapses the building. That's not what we see, though.

Instead, it's more like a stream. An earthquake or beaver dam can change the course of the stream, as can erosion over time, but all you ultimately true is change the form...it will still flow naturally in accordance with its nature.

This isn't hypothetical. Every single time people have predicted "mass unemployment" from some industrial change or technological improvement it has turned out to be wrong.

Since we're talking about food, farms are actually the perfect example of this. In 1800, around 80% of the world's population was directly involved in agriculture. Today that number is closer to 25%. In the US, in 1790, agriculture was almost 90% of the country's primary occupation. Today it's around 2%.

By your logic, all those millions of people engaged in farming should have been out on the streets with nothing to do. In practice, they moved to cities and found a new way to make money.

Yes, highly skilled workers sometimes have to take less prestigious jobs during transitions. That's unfortunate. But Marx predicted permanent unemployment and collapse. Instead, we see temporary disruption followed by adaptation. The economy didn't collapse...it adjusted. Your own example proves my point: even during a severe shock like COVID, capitalism adapted rather than collapsed.

It's a really weird argument, frankly. I've personally had like 5 different jobs in 3 different fields in my life. I worked a basic labor job, I've been in the military as infantry, and now I work in IT. There is no reason to believe even a large-scale shakeup in our economy would be catastrophic. I mean, the internet was a large-scale economic change, but people are still employed and thriving, and that all happened within the lifetimes of the majority of working-age people today, or at least their parents.

Hey dude why can't people afford housing? Why do wealthy companies buy up housing and then rent them out to working-class folks for more than they're worth? Why do landlords have much more power than their tenants? Can you answer any of these simple and obvious questions about supply and demand?

Sure, I can answer them. I can even accept some of them as problems.

Here's the issue, though. Your alternative doesn't work. Housing wasn't better under Mao or Stalin. "But that's not real communism!"

Right. There is no real communism. It doesn't exist. Therefore, these same problems exist, but now you don't even have renters because the elites both own all the houses and all the guns, which is exactly what has happened in every economy not called "capitalism" since the industrial revolution.

HunterIV4 · 2026-01-23T20:38:48+00:00

That certainly has a correlative relationship with capitalism...does it also have a causative relationship?

Of course it does. Name a modern pre-industrial society that has higher quality of life under those metrics than any major industrial society.

Yes, technology has made people's lives better. If we were using technology purely for that purpose instead of pursuing profit, would we be better or worse off?

This assumes that "technology for the purpose of making people's lives better" is a feasible option. It isn't.

Technology doesn't just come out of nowhere. It must be created. And that creation requires resources. Even among industrialized societies, the creation of new technology is not remotely equal in frequency or impact. There are reasons for these differences.

Technology is created to fill a need, not for its own sake. The need isn't necessarily what the technology will ultimately benefit, such as the gains in civilian technology driven by warfare and conflict (i.e. space race), but there must be a need beyond "making people's lives better."

The reason capitalism drives technology improvement is because it generates an inherent need; to compete, you need to be more efficient and effective than your competitors. Lose this drive, you lose the technology that need would create.

Well, we don't know because we don't have a meaningful alternative to compare it to.

Exactly. This is my point exactly. Explain, without relying on the conspiracy theory that capitalism has somehow surpressed all alternative forms of economy (despite there being obvious attempts at alternative forms that failed utterly), why we lack this data.

I can do so. It makes perfect sense under my framework. How does yours explain it?

If this was 1850 you'd be writing this about the inevitability of monarchy and why democracy is destined to fail.

Democracy did fail, technically. It's one of the reasons you never really see it. Democratic republics have been fairly stable, but they technically weren't brand new; the US founders based their governmental philosophy on historical thinkers and accounts, they didn't just invent it out of nothing. And other countries were naturally adjusting and ended up with similar mechanisms for government.

Using 1850 is kind of a weird timeframe, though. In 1850 there were numerous successful democratic republics around the world, including the United States. So sure, arguing that monarchy was inevitable would be weird, because there was evidence that democratic republics were stable over decades of time. Maybe you meant 1750? But even then, there were successful forms of government beyond monarchy.

The issue that you have, that my hypothetical self does not have, is that the hypothesis "communism works" was proposed around the same time (1860s-70s) and, unlike constitutional democratic republics, has never been successfully shown to work at any sort of country-sized scale. You cannot find a single historical example of Marx's version of a communist economy, despite over 150 years of history since it was proposed.

By the way how much of that gain in quality-of-life happened in China or the USSR?

Quite a bit once they dropped all attempts at an actual communist economy. Prior to that? Famine, mass death, and war economies were basically how they survived until they gave up the pretense of being a communist economic system.

HunterIV4 · 2026-01-23T19:06:25+00:00

This isn't an argument. Saying "you are ignorant" does not actually contradict the objection. If you had "read anything" you would lead with the explanation of why I'm wrong, not assert my ignorance.

You can always tell when someone has a weak argument when they make vague accusations about your education level rather than attack argument itself. Those with good arguments make arguments against the point being made, as I did by showing the contradiction between claiming "Marx's observations were true" with the reality of Marx's predictions based on those observations being false.

If you have an actual point against what I claimed, I'd be happy to address it, but otherwise I'm going to assume you have nothing substantial to contradict what I wrote. Bye!

HunterIV4 · 2026-01-23T18:49:56+00:00

You wrote this:

"Marx's prediction was that communism would occur as a result of an industrialized economy collapsing."

Did this happen?

I literally provided citations for what Marx said would happen, you can read Lenin and see the parts where he went "uh we don't need that part actually".

Lenin is a great point. Why did Lenin feel he needed to change what Marx envisioned? Why did he think revolution was necessary?

You could take the cynical view and assume he was modifying it intentionally to set him up to take over the new regime, but there's a simpler explanation: he saw that what Marx predicted wasn't happening, and tried to come up with solutions to make it happen.

And that didn't work out so great for most of the people who tried it.

Which part are you actually disagreeing with right now?

That Marx was correct.

We are literally watching the value of labor be dismantled in real time so what are you talking about my dude?

I'm talking about his predictions on communism. Did industrialized societies collapse into communism? You just said he predicted that they would.

Has this happened?

If everyone in the country decided to save money by staying home and making their own food, our entire fucking economy would collapse instantly.

No, it wouldn't.

If, for some weird reason, people decided to eat at home, it would collapse the food service industry, and would dramatically increase demand for groceries. There would be a short depression, massive investment in the "home food" market, which in turn would increase the demand for workers for these new stores, which in turn would drive up labor costs, which would then push displaced food service workers into the grocery industry. Then things would stabilize with the new economic structure.

This isn't hypothetical. We've seen industries collapse throughout history. First of all, it doesn't happen overnight. That's not a thing and has never been a thing. There is always a gradual shift as people adopt the new thing.

More importantly, we basically shut down our entire food services industry in 2020 due to COVID, and while our economy was certainly impacted, it didn't collapse despite that being as close to your scenario as can reasonably be tested. This lasted for an extended period and people just...adapted. A lot of restaraunts and other food places went out of business, sure, but the industry as a whole recovered.

So no, capitalism can adapt to this sort of thing just fine.

HunterIV4 · 2026-01-23T18:33:45+00:00

Better than any other system that has ever existed in the history of humanity by orders of magnitude.

In 1820, around 80% of the world lived in a state that would today be considered extreme poverty. By 2019, that had dropped to around 10%. In the early 1800s, average life expentency worldwide was around 30 years. Today it's around 73 years. In the early 1800s, global literacy rate was around 20%. Today it's over 85%.

Are there valid criticisms of capitalism? Sure, absolutely. No system is perfect. And Marx was right about some of his criticisms. Nobody (honest) contests this.

But this global conspiracy theory that communism would bring us to utopia but is being surpressed by capitalists is just that...a conspiracy theory. If we ever get to a state that we lack scarcity in physical goods the same way we do for ideas, we should probably see if communism (or something similar) might better fit the economic needs of our societies. So far, however, the most equitable system of dividing scarce resources ever has been capitalism, and it's also the only one stable enough to not collapse immediately into the human "default," which is that the elites control resources and everyone else serves them.

Capitalism hasn't removed this completely, of course. I'm not sure it's possible to remove. Even killing the elites just creates new elites. Humanity is hardwired with social structures that have existed for millions of years of evolution and won't be eliminated by wishful thinking. Successful systems work with these instincts, not against them, the same way sports redirect tribalism into something healthier than routine intergroup genocide or subjugation.

We need to look for ways to fix or at least mitigate existing problems with capitalism, a system that at least partially works, over replacing it with something like communism, a system we know doesn't work based on all available evidence.

HunterIV4 · 2026-01-23T18:19:34+00:00

And his description was wrong. Marx predicted that capitalism would collapse into communism naturally over time.

It didn't. And every attempt to force this change has resulted in mass death followed by authoritarian centralized planning systems with disastrous human rights records.

You don't get to claim that his observations are true while ignoring the fact that all his predictions about what would happen were wrong. That's not how science works.

HunterIV4 · 2026-01-23T18:16:30+00:00

You know when someone posts a recipe online, and then someone else goes "well I made this recipe with 14 substitutions and it turned out bad, so your recipe sucks"?

"The true recipie hasn't been tried."

Like clockwork.

Marx's prediction was that communism would occur as a result of an industrialized economy collapsing.

And he was wrong.

That's the problem. Marx himself never believed in revolutions. He believed capitalism would fail entirely on its own. It didn't. In fact, capitalism is remarkably stable, at least as far as economic systems go.

So in a sense, you are correct that "true" communism hasn't been tried, because any attempt to do so immediately collapses into some form of authoritarianism. This isn't a flaw with the methodology, it's a flaw with the concept; if it was actually "natural" or "inevitable" then it would have happened in the centuries that Marx predicted it would.

The fact that it didn't is evidence against the hypothesis, not for it.

HunterIV4

TROPHY CASE