What is it that you call capitalism is the question.

Market capitalism is a practical approach to solving a intractable optimization problem - allocating finite resources in the best way to get optimal results (whatever it may be, such as maximizing production of certain goods while minimizing waste and loss and minimizing “unfairness”, however it is defined).

The alternative to capitalism is planned economy. It could not work 100 years ago because technology was not even close to the advancement level to be able to optimize a whole economy, i.e. solve a highly complex set of equations with billions of variables.

Maybe today it would work out, technology-wise, but it is not clear in detail how a society completely without markets could work. Certainly not everything is feasible to be decided by some election or by decision of some committee. It would lead to what was seen in the soviet union - bad planning based on incomplete and unreliable data.

Markets solve this problem and the whole thing works.

The question is who controls the markets.

In capitalism = neoliberal dystopia actually the capitalists themselves all instead of competing try to transcend beyond competition by either becoming a monopolist or becoming the market itself (“platform”). The fascist US oligarchs are working towards this.

On the other hand, China has state capitalism - the government has a strong upper hand, but use capitalistic market mechanics (with the needed biases to ensure the market is working towards the goals of the state, not some wealthy class).

Now you can explain to me how I maybe use the terms all incorrectly, but what I’m saying is: what China is doing is working, what the Soviets tried to do did not.

If China was not authoritarian, but had elections, it would be democratic and capitalistic, so what wie also call social democracy. In contrast to socialism, which is supposed to be democratic and anti-capitalistic, i.e. planned economy, which never worked and probably still would not.

The problem is not capitalism as a mechanism of economy, it’s the distribution of power. Corruption and decay and abuse is possible in every coceivable economic system. The question is, who is the system working for.

Ideally the state works for the people, in the sense of a collective of respected individuals, and the economy works for the state. If that is given, details such as the exact structure and processes for decision making and resource allocation are irrelevant, as long as they are sustainable and ethical.

Social democracy as a concept would work if those doing it would have a spine and not be traitors of the working class.

But whatever is sold as social democracy these days (or actually the last 20 years at least), I absolutely agree is a scam.

At least in Germany, there is no left party that is both realistic (not trying to be pacifist when facing bullies, or promising unrealistic things making sure they will never get more than 15%) and also truly acting in the interest of the people, sadly. SPD is the German version of what you said, slightly softer neolibs in sheep’s clothing.

If there was such a demihuman bike god, I would ride my bicycle more often. I just don’t want to have to maintain it and waste time of my life again because some dumbass broke a beer bottle on the street.

I would never want to work at a place where I have to talk like this unironically. It’s ridiculous.

If you are competent, you show it directly. No need to hide behind bullshit buzzwords.

Well, at least that’s my reverse filter for companies.

My current team leader interviewed me in a band shirt and we deep dived into realistic brainstorming for how I would approach real problems and we instantly vibed.

I immediately knew that’s a good place.

That is just needlessly mean. Done that once to some rando, even worse. I dumped a rant on them. They deleted the post and their account. I felt bad. Don’t be like me.

we do cross platform stuff and I’m 99% of the time working on Linux, now I have to do some .NET core C# coding, was frustrated first with the language support on Linux - until I tried Rider. If I’ll have to do more C# going forward I’ll consider asking my employer to buy me a Rider license. The alternative would probably be me booting to Windows for that project (which I absolutely hate doing and only rarely have to)

I did that for 3 years. Funny how it seems to be a universal experience. Confirms to me how it’s pretty much the same, regardless of project, funding or scientific area.

For me it was a bit heartbreaking to see, because I loved the idea of writing software for research. But the reality was that academia simply does not have the right structures to support serious and sustainable software development and until that changes, it feels more like a thankless “bullshit job”.

You simply can’t run software development in such a opportunistic and chaotic way like scientists do their research and write papers.

Nice! That also needs some reasonably good management to see your skills and talents.

Can totally see why you might not like roles “above”. There’s always some point where you stop solving the kind of problems you find interesting and have more bullshit to fight than it would be worth.

Like my team lead wisely said, “never become a team lead”, and I’m absolutely not interested, seeing all the crap he has to out up with, manage and firefight (I’m happy he does it while I can stay pretty relaxed and keep doing all the fun stuff).

That sounds pretty cool, I could imagine myself doing that.

How did you get into such a role? Is it some kind of consultancy?

My last job was: PowerPoint presentation and poster designer, educator, communicator and mind reader.

Tried to be software developer in science, turns out that I had to spend much more time promoting whatever little coding I do to interested parties, and creating software based on guesses what they could need and what the right thing probably should be.

It was a mess, for many reasons.

Now I’m an actual software architect and engineer.

As a metaphor, somewhere between apprentice dark magician (when sprinkling in some fancy things not many others would be able to do), gardener (need to clean up a lot of weeds, tidy up and revitalize the decomposing codebase, trim some rotten code branches) and strategist (when conceptually working on the mid and long-term planning and high level goals).

For me it was more like:

Ages 11-16: unaware sad cringe

Ages 17-24: learning to hide it

Ages 25-27: reaching achievement mountain, followed by

Age 28: quarter life crisis valley and the realization

Ages 29-now: unlearning to hide it and actually feeling good

Life is a beautiful journey. Just need to look with the right eyes.

Congratulations, you made it big on Mastodon! Teach me your ways.

This is the way.

That sucks, but you can put some isolation tape on LEDs.

But I wish something horrible to those who thought it’s a great idea to make every goddamn electronic device make beeping noises.

My water boiler, fan, washing machine. In my childhood I don’t remember everything beeping at every interaction. It makes me furious and you often cannot fully disable it.

Once I tried to solder the beeper out but my soldering iron was probably not suitable so I failed :(

Fair enough. I’m sure NixOS is a great tool, like Haskell is a great programming language (in fact my previously favorite language with a special place in my heart that taught me most about properly structuring and thinking about code).

I just wanted to put it into perspective, because not everybody wants to go into THAT deep end. But anyway, it’s all good.

On a side note, your first sentence is something that I have never seen being said ever by anyone on Reddit. Yeah respectfully agreeing to disagree is also a perfectly fine option.

How is that useful to OP who asked for something “without terminals”? Unless that was a joke.

Because I’ve been using Arch Linux for 15 years and live in the terminal, but even though I like the idea of NixOS, it’s not only scary because it is alien and I have neither motivation nor enough free time to learn a parallel world and gain non-transferable skills for a niche solution. And that with being interested in what NixOS is doing.

I would say it is horrible advice to a novice, unless you want to scare people away from learning terminals and configs and managing an operating system without GUI tools.

Yep, we have this one short and precious life. Should not waste it thinking too much about the eternity of un-being that comes after and rather make the most of the time we have here.

I put them on humus-rich soil

(I’ll show myself out)

By authority of the central bank and the state? Checks out.

My maybe unpopular opinion is that it sucks that my meds, which are like my “glasses” correcting focus, motivation and emotional self-regulation, which are much safer than any antidepressants and at high dosage have about the same side effects as too much coffee, are being framed as dangerous stimulants and abused by idiots who snort them in their noses, and have to be so heavily regulated.

I got late diagnosed and since I got my meds I overcame my overthinking and anxiety issues, have no more of what I thought to be depressive episodes (caused by severe under stimulation and the burn-out of chronically forcing myself to do stuff against the strong child tantrum-like inner resistance with raw will power as you ADHD “expert” and all of my family suggested all of my life), and finally can feel and function like an adult and at the same time am much more zen and balanced.

Yes, having some symptoms does not qualify. Just as being sad sometimes does not qualify for depression. But every mental disorder is a matter of severity. You cannot feel how things feel to others. If a diagnosis and meds help a person, why would you not want them to get that help? It’s like saying that people who are short-sighted should just try harder and train their eyes and do not need glasses.