I’m old enough to remember when network television didn’t cut important scenes from shows in order to show me commercials.

If these businesses are getting so much efficiency from laying off their employees, why do they need increasingly more advertising?

I doubt there are enough of us who block (when it is even possible) to seriously affect revenue.

Also, if they can break their contract with me to pay for a service with no commercials and force me to watch them anyway, I have no compunctions with denying them the extra profit.

Unfortunately, they’ve been so successful, we won’t be able to get our kids to read this report.

This gave me a sudden flashback to the days when I had a program on VAX VMS that would spit out ASCII art to a chat console from a collection of dozens.

This was also huge on the old WWW III and other BBS Systems over various networks like FIDO. What a time.

I’d love to hear the logistics of making that work well in the current world.

TIL Sortition. Thanks. Your since you don’t believe in democracy, what form of governance do you feel is best?

Oh, you were serious! Well, I think what they need is Democracy first, then unions. Communism theoretically eliminates the need for unions, but the reality is that it’s just a dictatorship. Unions in China would likely either be co-opted by the Communist party through subterfuge, or through “reeducating” the misguided leadership and defining the unions - thus landing them right where they are, with a new bureaucracy.

Unions represent the spirit of the checks and balances envisioned in the U.S. Constitution. It is only by being of near equal power to the company that employees can negotiate for fair compensation and treatment. Without that, they’re just resources. It’s an effort to use human nature to gain good outcomes.

Oh, I forgot to address the Dr. Strangelove reference. Did you know that was parody and sharp criticism of not just The United States, but of the power structures of the whole (first) world at the time? If that kind of criticism were made in the U.S.S.R. or China, Cuba, etc., of their leadership, the film would be banned and everyone involved would be imprisoned or disappeared. We’re allowed to criticize stupidity in leadership over here (for the moment). We believe it is a useful tool to try to make things better, or at least a bit more sane.

Hey, how come you didn’t get the snide arrogant insults for saying the same thing I did? I’m jealous! ;-)

I was implying nothing about any other type of societal organization. However, since you mention it, I will point out that Capitalism (which is an economic, not political philosophy) can become horrific for the same reasons Communism becomes horrific - People. Communism was a response to naked, mercantilist Capitalism. Marx’s heart was in the right place, but he was describing a Utopia.

I think Democracy (in its many forms) designed with checks and balances is a viable answer to the problem. It ain’t magic, though. People still need to ensure it remains balanced. We’ve been having some trouble with that lately. It took fifty years of planning for the authoritarians to get us here. It’s a good sign it was so difficult, but now we have to work hard to fix the mess.

Yes. I simply found it somewhat ironic that someone would point out that a Communist nation would need unions given the definition of Communism. It was to me a Monty Python level of dry humor to suggest that, and I felt my response should match that dry humor.

Thank you for the assist. You are correct. I made the fatal assumption that most people discussing such things would have the context of Mao, the long march, the various purges, the decades of poverty, the suppression and outright murder of minorities under their belt and would recognize that the statement was so obviously false that it could only be taken as sarcasm. Unfortunately, I didn’t account for people having arrogance and a sense of other people being ignorant morons by default.

sigh. I know what communism is. I also know it’s never been implemented in real life and never will be due to the nature of a subset of humans inflicted with various personality traits like Narcissism, Psychopathy, and Sociopathy… not to mention simple greed and basic envy.

I find it interesting that you first assigned to me the characteristics of ignorance and arrogance, and then pegged me to a certain nationality, thus revealing your uninformed bias against an entire nation containing over 300 million people - many of whom probably fled whichever morally superior country you call home - simply for living there.

Now, as for the assertion that government control of the means of production is the antithesis of communism, I give you first a description of Karl Marx’s vision:

Karl Marx envisioned communal ownership on a large scale through the abolition of private property, particularly in the means of production, advocating for these assets to be owned collectively by society. He believed this would lead to a classless society where resources are distributed based on need rather than profit.

Now, has it ever crossed your mind how this could possibly be implemented? I mean when you literally have millions of people collectively owning everything and therefore whatever is needed must be somehow made available wherever it is needed. Where will things be stored, and who will manage it? Who will ensure nothing is stolen from the people? Who will ensure item or resource “A” is transited from somewhere to the place it is needed? Word of mouth? Telegraph? What if nobody feels like manning the telegraph or decides not to relay the message to the next person? Heck - how do they know who the next person is?

In any sufficiently large group of people, some form of “government” has to exist merely to facilitate meeting the needs of the people being governed. So, I put it to you that the U.S.S.R. was in fact “implementing communism” by being the “people’s government” and thus, by their logic, everything is “owned” by the government. They have to know where it is, how to protect it, how to ensure there is enough of it to meet needs, etc… Unfortunately “power corrupts”. Or in the case of the Red revolution, it decapitates a revolution for freedom and democracy the moment it wins power and takes its place.

Sounds like American Evangelism. I bet they coordinate.

Damn, I took a quick look and I knew those two were shady just by the names and publishers.

Didn’t you hear? China’s been one gigantic people’s union since 1949. That’s the whole point of Communism. As you can see, it’s working swimmingly well.

I did it recently because it was only way to update my Lenovo Legion BIOS. I bought an SSD on a stick, so it is a fully accelerated windows to go installed via Rufus.

The main problem with USB drive setups is the xfer speed of SDRAM, so I suggest you go for an SSD stick.

And heck, I’m on Ubuntu and have no problems. I played BGIII and Cyberpunk 2077, full graphics,no glitches. Currently back on Skyrim with a couple hundred mods using Vortex.

Any Linux distro with Protontricks should be fine.

I had the same issue for a Lenovo bios update. I finally just installed windows to go on an ssd memory stick and booted that to do the update.

Yes, I am nuanced enough to understand the security issues and respect that - on their equipment.

As for monitoring, there is a very large and prosperous market for products to do exactly that, and we are frequently told we have no right to privacy on company equipment.

The watched pot never boils. The watched employee is constantly distracted, stressed, and wondering when he will be admonished or fired for something he doesn’t even know is a problem.

I had to read up on that to know what it was about. While I’m all in on unions and collective bargaining, I’m not keen on Communism as a political approach. the original idea was a plausible answer to the woes of the struggle between groups of people, but it does not acknowledge that the problem is human behavior. Specifically, a portion of the population that will always seek dominance, regardless of the means or declared ideology. This is what happened with Communism. The assassination of the white revolution in order to insert the red revolution is class 101 in that fact. The United States’ founders understood this, which is why I’m still behind the checks and balances approach to power.

Yes, it eventually is subverted and must be re-established (sometimes forcefully) but it is as Churchill said, Democracy is the worst form of government… except for all the rest.