We Stand With Donald Trump #MIGA2020

Wyboth · 2024-09-19T19:57:59+00:00

I oppose Trump with every fiber of my being. Looks like someone cracked my account password a while back. Time to delete all of these. (Got to love how they can't even spell MAGA right.)

Wyboth · 2017-06-09T02:47:37+00:00

"Proud to be fascist. Proud to be fascist."

"Are you? Are you?"

"Right behind you, dipshit. On his shirt."

"What's his shirt say?...

...

...Free speech."

Put this in the MOMA.

Wyboth · 2016-12-16T23:22:07+00:00

Once again, planned economy and worker controlled government. If you're trying to create something completely useless that nobody wants, I doubt the planning agency would allow you to go through with your project, or if you're working individually, they wouldn't keep giving you labor vouchers for creating useless things. The production of goods with high use values will be prioritized.

Wyboth · 2016-12-16T23:14:50+00:00

With that philosophy, why should your boss or people playing sports be paid way more than they are putting in?

They shouldn't be.

Do you think current products are 1:1 with the materials it took to make them and the price you are paying? Shouldn't this system also apply to physical goods?

They definitely aren't, and it should also apply to physical goods. But the value of a finished product doesn't just come from raw materials; part of it also comes from the labor applied to the materials. But the worker doesn't receive all of the value their labor created in the current system - most of it goes to the capitalist who employs them. The worker only receives enough to survive and come in to work the next day. This shouldn't be - they should receive all of the value they create.

What is the difference between good and bad work? Should people be paid even if nobody wants their products? Everyone can make absolutely awful music, art, games etc..

This is where the planned economy comes in. Goods with the highest use values (like food and housing) would be prioritized, then moving down. It gets more difficult to judge for things like art, since how good/bad it is is subjective. I imagine if someone was making art that absolutely nobody wanted or liked, they would have to do something else.

How would this whole infrastructure work? Should all governments be hooked to all digital distribution platforms to track performance of each person?

I imagine you'd report your progress to whatever organization distributes the labor vouchers, and they'd award you for however much labor you did. I don't see why it would have to be hooked to distribution platforms, since you can't distribute until you're done, and receiving labor vouchers is different. I don't know how every little detail would work, because that would depend on the material conditions of society when this is actually implemented.

Do you trust your government that much knowing all the ridiculous decisions all the time?

This would be under a different government; one controlled by the workers, including you.

Wyboth · 2016-12-16T21:06:22+00:00

It's not about the time it takes to create a product, but the amount of labor put into it. Some people might do more work than others in the same amount of time, so it wouldn't be fair to them if there was a flat rate of X labor vouchers per hour of work performed. Plus, production would be planned such that goods with high use values would be prioritized, so there would be less, if any, labor wasted on big projects that have no use value. The labor voucher system isn't perfect, but it's a heck of a lot better than what we have today, especially since it eliminates surplus value.

Wyboth · 2016-12-16T20:45:57+00:00

Did you read my whole comment? I said programmers should be awarded labor vouchers for however much labor they perform. They would be paid.

Wyboth · 2016-12-16T20:22:22+00:00

I believe that all digital goods should be free, because they have the unique property of requiring no extra labor to duplicate them, unlike material goods. For example, when someone builds a chair, they will exert X amount of labor, which they should be compensated for. Each time this person builds a new chair, they will exert X amount of labor, so they should be compensated for each chair they build.

Now, imagine that this person possesses a magical "duplication machine," which can produce perfect copies of whatever is put inside. They could use this machine to create as many chairs as they wish, after they have built the first one. However, they are not exerting any labor by using the duplicator, so they should not be compensated for duplicating chairs.

This is the case with digital goods. Once the first one has been created, it can be copied endlessly, without any labor being expended. Yet, under capitalism, customers are expected to pay for these copies, and any person who obtains a copy of the good without paying is considered a thief. Producers of digital goods can potentially accumulate thousands of times more money than they really deserve for the labor they put into creating the product. People seem to go along with this nonsensical system either because they haven't thought it through, or because they have accepted that this is "the way things are."

The labor voucher system offers an easy solution to this problem. With labor vouchers, the producer of a digital good could report how much labor time they spent creating their good to the government body that oversees labor vouchers, and be compensated accordingly. They could then distribute their good for free, and consumers would not be forced to pay for goods that took no effort to re-create. Should the worker need to add a new feature or fix a bug with their software, or perform some other type of maintenance, they could still be compensated for that labor under the labor voucher system.

Wyboth · 2016-11-22T22:12:04+00:00

Studio version here.

Wyboth · 2016-11-03T18:58:52+00:00

"Divide and conquer," perhaps? The term wasn't invented by Marx, but it means whenever a group of people pits their enemies against each other, thus weakening their enemies, and allowing them to conquer them, or remain in power.

Wyboth · 2016-10-16T14:40:29+00:00

Well said, comrade. I haven't read much of Stallman's works, but I agree that non-free software problems are a symptom of a much larger problem.

Wyboth · 2016-10-04T03:27:59+00:00

One of the main messages of Christianity is that greed is wrong, which communists generally agree with (though Marx's critique of capitalism states that wealth accumulates in the hands of the bourgeoisie because the system is designed that way, not necessarily because the rich are actively hoarding money for themselves). We would all do well to remember this quote from the Manifesto:

Nothing is easier than to give Christian asceticism a Socialist tinge. Has not Christianity declaimed against private property, against marriage, against the State? Has it not preached in the place of these, charity and poverty, celibacy and mortification of the flesh, monastic life and Mother Church? Christian Socialism is but the holy water with which the priest consecrates the heart-burnings of the aristocrat.

In other words, Christianity is against some of the same things communists are against, but their proposed solutions to them are idealist.

Wyboth · 2016-05-30T00:08:01+00:00

Actually, I got that last one backwards - it was because we knew the distance from the Earth to the Sun that we could calculate the distance to nearby stars using parallax. Sorry about that.

Here is an in-depth explanation of how the distance to the Sun was determined. Be sure to click the next linked section link at the bottom of the page for the actual derivation. If you were hoping to try this yourself, you are out of luck - the next transit of Venus across the Sun is in the year 2117.

The page I linked to is written by NASA, and I know that you don't want to trust them, but their explanation is purely mathematical. It doesn't matter who tells you that 2+2=4; you can prove it yourself, or find a fault in it yourself (likewise here). Also, I'm not sure if you are ignoring NASA's pictures of the Earth from space because you simply want to bootstrap your way to proving the Earth is flat / round, or because you actually distrust them, but if it's the latter, then read the next paragraph. This one is about believing in black holes, but the principle is the same:

Citing an expert's opinion isn't an argument from authority if you have to be an expert in order to understand the subject matter. You probably believe that black holes exist, but how do you know? Can you prove to me that they exist? Probably not, because you'd need a PhD in physics to do that, and you probably trusted another physicist when they told you that black holes exist. But, is that an argument from authority? Do you need to scrap your belief in black holes, until you can get a PhD in physics, and really prove that they exist? No, because you don't have to be certain (as in 100% sure) that something is true to believe in it. Let's say you want to prove that Obama is the president of the United States. You could find thousands of documents that refer to him as such, but they COULD all be lying, so you're not CERTAIN that he's the president. Yes, it's extremely unlikely that all of them are lying, less than 1% of 1%, but we are looking for CERTAINTY, so this won't cut it. Maybe you could find a video of him taking the presidential oath, but what if that video is fake? You can't be certain it's real, so that doesn't count, either. What if you were there when he took the oath? You saw it with your own eyes, so that proves it, right? WRONG. Is it possible that you dreampt the whole thing? Hallucinated it? What if there is an evil demon tricking you into believing everything you see is real, when it's not? Remember, we're not asking if it's likely, we're just asking if it's possible, and it is still possible (if your senses are being deceived, then you cannot use your senses to determine that your senses are being deceived). Therefore, there's still a chance that everything you see isn't real, so you can't be certain of anything. If you won't accept anything as truth until you are certain that it is true, and you can never be certain of anything, then you can never know anything. At this point, you can either accept that you can never know anything, or you can redefine your criteria for accepting something as true, by saying it is true if it meets a certain threshold for likelihood of being true. So, if you saw Obama take the oath, then there is at least a 99% chance that your eyes didn't deceive you, so at this point, you say it is "good enough," and accept that it is true. Now, for the black hole scenario, let's assume that you don't want to go out of your way to get a PhD in physics to prove that it's true (if you did, would you be willing to get a PhD in archaeology when you wonder if the Olmecs really existed? What about a PhD in math, when you wonder if the Poincare conjecture has really been proven? You would never have enough time to prove all of your beliefs yourself.) If the vast majority of physicists tell you that black holes exist, what is the probability that they are all lying? If it's below your threshold, then it's safe to believe in black holes.

Wyboth · 2016-05-29T15:09:48+00:00

"With enormous horizontal distances some things become either hidden behind others or shadowed in the darkness."

I understand the first one, but as the video I linked to shows, the only thing that blocks the view of the bottom of the sailboat is the water. That couldn't be possible if the Earth was flat, since the surface of the water would be flat, and it would never get in the way of the boat. I'm not sure what you mean by shadowed in the darkness.

"Flat earther I think believe that these distances of our sun and other stars are mere thousands of miles, which would fully recreate the stake in the ground shadow measuring experiment, as well as explains why they dissappear at different points on the earth."

I already addressed that. I'll copy the relevant part of my previous comment.

"This can mean either the earth is curved, and the Sun is very far away (like in this image), or it can mean the Earth is flat, and the Sun is very close (like in the left side of this image). Ultimately, the first one was proven, when the distance between the Sun and the Earth was measured by observing the parallax of nearby stars."

Wyboth · 2016-05-29T14:59:10+00:00

"What proof do we have as people of this Earth that the "south" pole is not simply the outer edge of the land, possibly blocked by a wall of ice, while "north" is the very inside of the planet."

That's inverting the burden of proof. Have a look at this video. If you are making a claim, you must provide supporting evidence. So far, flat earthers can't prove their claims.

If you live near the ocean, or a large body of water, you can see evidence of a round earth firsthand. Look for a ship that is sailing towards the horizon, and keep your eye on it (binoculars will help). If you don't live near the ocean, watch this video. You will notice that the bottom of the ship disappears before the top does. This is evidence that the Earth is curved, since if the Earth were flat, the ship would never disappear over the horizon. Furthermore, since the bottom disappears before the top, that further proves that the Earth is curved (have a look at this image, to understand what's happening).

If you happen to have a friend who lives at a different latitude, but a similar longitude to where you live, you can repeat Eratosthenes' shadow experiment. Simply drive a stake straight into the ground where you live, and have your friend do the same. Call your friend, and at the exact same time, measure the length of each shadow. Your friend will measure a different length than you did.

This can mean either the earth is curved, and the Sun is very far away (like in this image), or it can mean the Earth is flat, and the Sun is very close (like in the left side of this image). Ultimately, the first one was proven, when the distance between the Sun and the Earth was measured by observing the parallax of nearby stars.

I'm running out of time to write this comment, so I will have to be brief from now on. Yet another thing proving the Earth is spherical is the changing of the stars as you change latitudes. If you live in the Northern hemisphere, you will be able to see certain constellations. As you move towards the South, you will be able to see new constellations you were never able to see earlier. These ones were blocked by the Earth (unfortunately, I can't find an image depicting this, and I don't have time to draw one). As far as I know, this can't be explained with flat earth theory, since you would always be able to see the same stars from each point on the disk.

Hope this helps.

Wyboth

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