• 5 Posts
  • 102 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

help-circle
  • I mean, this is literally what happened, so I don’t see why the quote wouldn’t be real. In late 1956 the boat coming from Mexico carrying 82 people was supposed to land in Cuba, join other comrades with vehicles and supplies, travel up the coast and connect with even more rebels. Then they would attack and capture the military outpost, seizing guns and ammo, travel to the Sierra Maestra mountains, from where Fidel would call for a general strike and topple Batista’s government.

    None of that happened. The boat was garbage, they landed days later than planned. By that time other rebels carried out diversions that alerted the army, and Fidel’s company was ambushed as they were crossing the marsh after losing the boat and all the supplies with it. They had to split up and run, trying to get to the mountains with no food, water, or medicine (Che Guevara was seriously shot). By the time they reached their destination only a dozen of them remained. And the rest is history.


  • From a social investigation by kites in 2021, Chronicles of the struggling and dispossessed

    Our caravan managed to interview a home-owner named Marie from Lillooet, a small town an hour up the road from Lytton. Marie was a healthcare worker, and the Federal government had just offered to rent or buy out her house so that emergency crew workers could be stationed in the region to battle the proliferating fires. Cheekily, comrades asked why she decided to buy a house in a region on fire:

    Well it wasn’t always on fire! But yeah, when we put an offer on the house, we did have friends say, “Are you worried about the fire zone?” I said “No, I mean, I know there’s been forest fires, but nothing was that bad.” My understanding was that the wildfire forest service comes in and they build a guard for protection and to protect the town, right? There’ve been histories of evacuations, but it didn’t really cross my mind that a town could burn to the ground. That seemed like some spectacular event.

    Comrades asked Marie if she thought this was creating a shift in people’s perspective around the urgency of climate change:

    I think people are still dealing with things in the day to day. I know in Lillooet there’s still fires on each side: one in Lytton, one in McKay Creek. There’s like 200 fire fighters within 80km of our town. Wait… no, more than that because Ashcroft is on evacuation notice as well, and so is 100 Mile House. Like, there’s 125 fire fighters just in Mckay Creek, so there’s encampments of forest firefighters because there’s nowhere to house them. We actually had the federal government call and ask to rent out our house because there’s nowhere for them…

    And it never even crossed my mind: Where do all the people go? You evacuate 1,500 people from a town, where the fuck are they supposed to go?.. I think a lot of people still don’t know if or what they’re going back too.










  • It’s the curse of being a leftist. I walk past a coffee shop and think about how there are no third spaces left to hang out for free. Because they were systematically destroyed, in order to separate the people into individuals, and at the same time commodify their leisure at ever growing costs. How there are so many people working miserable jobs in those coffee shops, jobs that we don’t need in the first place. About the chains that have swallowed all the individual businesses that could’ve been of higher quality, had better working conditions and pay. About the bench outside with extra railings, so that the unhoused people couldn’t sleep on it. They’re forced to sleep in designated “bad hoods”, from where they will eventually be kicked out by pigs filth so that their hoods can be gentrified. And all those freshly gentrified hoods will have tons of empty condos that would never house even one of those displaced people…

    Then I smoke a joint, watch some cute animal videos, and forget about it until the next time I walk past a coffee shop.









  • I gave a number of real life use cases where it would solve real problems. There are so many more, especially “boring” ones like official documents, research, and medical records that would benefit from it tremendously. Blockchain does not equal crypto, but they complement each other really well.

    Proof of stake could make the thing not too environmentally damaging but it’s been years that major blockchains are saying they will implement it the next year

    What do you mean, Ethereum is pos.


  • I AM NOT SHILLING CRYPTO IN ANY WAY OKAY THANK YOU

    With that out of the way, those are not intrinsic qualities of either. The fundamentals on which every shitcoin and the bored ape garbage were sold to the public are still very strong. This is like saying “online shopping is horrible” in 2004 - technically not incorrect, but very shortsighted. While the proof of work protocol (mining for it to function and who mines more is the truth) is unsustainable, proof of stake (who holds more is the truth) and mixed ones are fundamentally amazing. Imagine stablecoins pegged to indexes of international currencies. BRICS coin, for example. With smart contracts (rules built into the transaction itself) and being practically legitimate international currencies it opens up so many possibilities. Transparency and easy comparisons in payments - salaries, rents, goods and services. Immutability - you can’t just whack a person and steal the deed to their house. The “chain” part of blockchain - clear history of ownership of assets, no more “I accidentally bought a stolen car/house”. And eventually the contracts can be made complex enough to cover most interpersonal transactions.

    And the same thing for nfts. Especially now, in the rapidly exploding era of unethical AI art, music, etc. Artists could easily sell/lease rights for their work, including for it to be a basis for generative models. It’s not limited to digital products - whatever you want to to confirm ownership of can be tagged with one-way encrypted signatures baked into nfts.

    So both are great technologies that can still be improved on a lot. But it’s just that the ways in which they’re used today are almost exclusively rugpull bubble dogshit.



  • YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Technically they operate with the same model of taking a profit from others’ activity.

    People use them regardless, for many different types of content, they’re primary platforms. Patreon is a secondary one, pretty much nobody would just go to Patreon and pay for a random subscription to discover someone’s content. But with the primary ones if a certain person was banned from there, subscribers would still keep using them for all the other ones.

    Anyway, I’m not really disagreeing, and it’s speculation either way. For all we know, States might straight up illegalize commie content online, moving all of it, including payments, underground.