You’re being facetious. Rent is not capital harboured for the maintenance of lands or buildings. From Wiktionary:

Noun; rent (countable and uncountable, plural rents); (economics) A profit from possession of a valuable right, as a restricted license to engage in a trade or business.

I want to make this point absolutely clear: landlords in Australia have been a cohort that’s been cultivated by the capitalists as a bulwark against labour domestically. In law and in economic-systems privileges have been carved out solely for them, to the detriment of the industrial-capacity of Australia to produce tangible goods.

Australia has a housing crisis–which is not a state that is unique to Australia. Housing is a human right. Australia’s government acknowledged this and promised to act on it. It has failed in every domain–deliberately!

The right to housing is clearly supported by international law, indeed at the very foundation of the international human rights system in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This Declaration, adopted by the United Nations in 1948, establishes an internationally recognised set of standards for all persons without qualification. Article 25 of the Declaration provides, “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and his family, including … housing”.

—Chris Sidoti, Human Rights Commissioner, 4th of September, 1996.

Article 11 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, to which Australia is a party, recognises the right of all people to adequate housing and commits state parties to take appropriate steps to ensure the realisation of that right. Article 11 recognises, “… the right of everyone to an adequate standard of living for himself and his family, including adequate food, clothing and housing…” and that “States Parties will take appropriate steps to ensure the realization of this right”.

I do encourage readers to read the linked document (especially Australians). It will help shed light on why the privileged children of Western-democracies are looking back at the USSR as an ideal to work towards whilst they face worsening material conditions with the political classes unanimously declaring: it will get worse; deal with it. Users such as whoisearth@lemmy.ca are being, I think, disingenuous.

The children of Australia are aware that the adults (that are in privileged positions now, shaping Australia’s future political- and economic-landscapes) were the recipients of public-housing, cheap private-housing and free tertiary-education, whilst ending those same programs for them. This injustice is further inflamed with the deliberate inflation of asset-classes, of which housing has become an overwhelming salient sore-point in the Australian context.

Rents in Australia do not go towards the maintenance of the property. They overwhelmingly go towards the financing of new mortgages. A rental-property is a political-license to freely create private misery for your tenant as you attempt to extract unjust amounts of capital to finance a mountain of new mortgages in an attempt to join the politically protected class: landlords.

I pay $300.00 AUD a week to rent a room, with no access to laundry or cooking facilities. Meanwhile the property fails Australia’s national-standards for housing. There are no smoke-detectors in the bedrooms. A glass-panel in one of the windows has a hole in it. The bathroom’s exhaust fan does not work. Mold is a never-ending issue. These conditions are illegal, but good luck getting the landlord to meet his legal-obligations! If you live in Australia you know tenants are treated as an underclass.

Tenants are supposed to maintain the building and the land, not the rent. That’s the expectation and the reality here. It is certainly different to what I’ve read of European-tenancy expectations. I can only defend Australia by saying it’s a young, naive nation led by lazy and entitled morons.

In Australia homelessness is increasing. Asset-classes are over inflated. Rents are crippling. Wages are insufficient. The leading thought of the domestic political-class is that A.I. will increase productivity, leading to higher wages which will erode that asset inflation, leading to a nice, comfortable equilibrium. Of course this ignores the fact that the historical gains of increased productivity have gone towards profits, not wages. Somehow the future gains will be different! Everyone knows that’s a lie, which means the current cohort of leaders are promising nothing. No change. We will continue this course of destructive neoliberalism.

What the USSR accomplished was remarkable. What the Chinese have accomplished is astonishing. All under the frame-work of socialism, working towards communism. Meanwhile the Western-democratic nations seem to be in endless internal-squabbles, external-wars and domestic degradation.

I agree. Disclosure of A.I. use should be mandatory.

My main concern with A.I. use is its ability to hide incompetence. If a new agent introduces code that was entirely written by illegal-software that violates copyright law–A.I.–then that should be made clear, even if competent-programmers review the new inclusion and approve of it. Otherwise people are left with the impression that this new agent is a competent programmer. A.I. use–undisclosed–creates false reputations.

The disclosure being encouraged and not mandatory is purely to protect the egos of programmers currently utilizing A.I. products.

However I do respect their decision and I maintain projects should be self governing.

It always was comrade.

The American intelligence apparatuses had been using this line of reasoning to legalize their illegal operations from the start: computers collecting data on citizens are not committing ‘surveillance’. If a human needs to assess that data then they apply for a rubber stamp from the state to allow surveillance of a human, but for the computer to collect and asses? There was never a need to seek authorization: it’s not surveillance. Computers collecting data and autonomously acting on that data–even to kill–can never be illegal. Welcome to the United State of Ammerikkka.

That’s to say: it never mattered. The verbal affluent to legitimize what they’re doing is just that. To people ignorant of computers it may have sounded reasonable back then, given it was dressed up enough, but in the day of computer-controlled economies and warfare I don’t think it can stand anymore even to a moron.

It can’t change though as changing would necessitate all the current political and economic structures to change: to voluntary put in excruciating effort to give up power. Not only are you asking those in power to debase themselves, but to also debase all those around them. It cannot happen.

What can happen and what should happen is that you should act. You are in control of you: liberate your computers. Not only is this something that is possible, but you are also empowering yourself. When you do this you inversely disempower the polities and economic controls that are superstructures built on this foundation of computer-surveillance and -manipulation.

I see something in the commentary I can’t exactly define. It’s probably bigger than a single word can encompass. Regardless of how revolutionary and forward thinking the leaders of a polity are they are still leading groups and individuals who have their own cultural beliefs, of which their positions would be inherently antithetical towards revolutionary ideas–if they were not the revolution would have occurred earlier. There’s a cultural threshold that must be passed before revolutionary activities can occur, but that threshold may be with a minority of people who can enable those activities to start. They will still be leading a majority who simply do not care intellectually. Most people do not give a thought towards the economic system they live under.

A white-class who materially benefits from a black-class’ oppression will be racist towards that class regardless of what the leading mouthpieces say, especially if that benefit has been enforced throughout many generations. “Equality feels like suppression to the privileged.” When a strong revolutionary polity enters a territory they–by definition–are fought against. It’s intellectually lazy to call this push-back the “suppression” of religion–ethnicity, sexuality or any other category–by the revolutionaries.

Revolutionaries were on the correct lines. One cannot attack the revolution’s failings on the actions of uninterested participants or more accurately: counter-revolutionary actors. The communists were more socially progressive than the capitalists. That’s a fact not up for debate. Communists are more socially progressive than capitalists.

Rents should be abolished. It’s a tax and I do wonder why taxes are still in use by national-governments today. They’re inefficient and create absolutely needless friction and dissent amongst payers. Money has long left the bounds of reality. Of a nation state to issue money, but then tack back a small fraction due to cultural-legacy, should it not be ridiculed? Likewise the ill effects of landlords has been well documented economically: their patronage is solely for the oppressive effects on you–the worker.

matlag

Actually yes. I did not know they released this. I still think my point stands: it’s a self imposed burden that is not relieved by spending loaned capital. That only has increased their burdens, because not only do they have to continuously pay for a large quantity of computer resources they have to repay debts and find a way of financing all of it sustainably.

I don’t know a lot about signal. My understanding was open-source clients existed, but the server’s software was proprietary. I’ve since read the Wikipedia page and Signal’s servers were once federated: “Signal’s server architecture was federated between December 2013 and February 2016.” That later date is when they ceased federation, claiming it held back the project.

I don’t like Signal. The people behind it are the benefactors of looters that reside in Silicon Valley. The project purports to be a non-profit, but burns capital that was accrued in and by Silicon Valley. It could not exist without surveillance-capitalism. Though that’s a critique of, perhaps, the entire software economy. Its members are too closely related to its major players though, being ex-employees.

For encrypted communications I would like to direct readers to GNUnet. The entire internet is incompatible with the ideals of privacy and security. You can mount applications on top of it, but the underlying framework is not appropriate. GNUnet is an attempt at creating a secure, decentralized internet. It’s a worthwhile project.

A self-inflicted burden because they refuse to liberate the server side code. Besides, they can’t be burning through that reserve as they need to pay it back and how on earth are they going to do that?

Hang on… that’s not a gift. The hard work is making money from free software. You’ve indebted a foundation to the sum of $100,000,000.00 and you’re telling them:

A) pay it back

B) via commercializing free software

How the fuck do you do that? You can’t. What the fuck does a piece of software need that exorbitant amount for anyway? I guess that’s why Signal never really was libre software. There’s too much money to be made in spyware.

I wholly reject your view on software and capitalism. Libre-software has given capitalists a commons to rape and the ability to accrue capital at a rate that’s new. It’s the bedrock of surveillance-capitalism.

(I have an issue with the name: it’s really just capitalism. I am not convinced by Shoshana’s writings that it needs distinction. Because it’s about computers and software it immediately becomes opaque to laymen and accrues a type of mysticism. Commodification of a new product does not necessitate a new sub-type of capitalism, otherwise there should be distinctions between oil-capitalism, consumer-capitalism, marketed-capitalism and so-forth into an endless jumble of nonsense.

Shoshana’s writings are reactionary. They’re the concerned mumblings of a previously privileged class becoming increasingly exploited as capitalism necessitates new markets to exploit–and that new market now necessitates the surveillance of their class to generate data from which services can be sold.)

Libre-software is a very clear example of why socialist programs fail in competition with capitalist endeavors when the structures of capitalism are not dismantled. The reality is the internet and the economy now operates via libre-software. Just as the working-class is exploited for their labour the commons of libre-software is plundered. Both are undeniable.

The plundering of libre-software does not weaken the capitalist’s position. It only strengthens it and reinforces it. It’s the reason you have the Americans attempting to create a technocracy or techno-feudalism.

"I mean yeah, they absolutely did.

Communism is fantastic in theory, but in reality it doesn’t work, and it won’t ever work, because our species just doesn’t work like that.

People are, by and large, greedy, power hungry and prone to corruption, and this is why we can’t have nice things and are destroying the planet."

OryxAndCake, please enlighten me. From your perspective the need for communism must become immediate. If humans are myopic and selfish the enshrining of an economic system that rewards the most base characteristics of humanity–capitalism–must be opposed now. Safeguards–systemic regulations–must be created to guard against the worst characteristics of mankind. These characteristics are immutable. The need is undeniably apparent. These systems should be democratic, with all citizens being participants exactly to diminish the baser flaws of our nature. That is exactly what communism aspires to do!

Capitalism is contradictory in theory and barbaric in reality. Your dimwitted snark doesn’t make sense. From such a position the capitalist that adulterates their product should be shielded from any consequences. There should be no regulatory decrees or no body polities at all, because those are naive things. The capitalist that adulterates a commodity and employs men in slave-like conditions should be applauded and congratulated for embracing his better nature! Such an individual should be virulently rewarded!

No courts or magistrates! Of course this makes sense: humanity is trash! Because of this eternal truth let’s dismantle every polity that attempts to bring justice and enforce laws. Burn it all down, because why would anyone ever do anything altruistically?

Don’t you know: people are awful. This is an unchanging constant. The fact nations even have any benign or positive institutes is contradictory and is not real, because people are awful: they wouldn’t even attempt such a feat in the first place! They wouldn’t exist, yet they did and they do. Your premise is maddening because it’s not a premise at all. It’s pure infantile snark. Its only purpose is to highlight the need for regulation and the participation of those being governed.

It’s a banal quip about totalitarianism, not communism. It’s misplaced.

The thing that has struck me the most is the complete lack of opposition. Not of the incessant quibbles online, but real opposition in the streets by everyday people.

Users are never given an option in capitalist-American-spyware & -malware–suspicious ‘software’. You either accept unfair terms or… no. There is no option to decline. There’s always just an “ok” button. The fact that governments (the supreme body that is supposed to… well, um… govern) have just left this space, completely vacant… is very fucking odd. There are no governing bodies for software or for consumers of software. It’s a pure capitalist hellscape of no-choice. One giant monopoly that offers you not convenience, because there’s no choice. How can something be convenient when there’s no choices? I bring up convenience because it’s the term most brought up by users in their complicit use of totalitarian software. It’s the same as being dictated to by a communist-thug and mentally deluding yourself that you comply out of an overwhelming sense of it being convenient. You don’t get a choice.

The jab at communism isn’t out of place, because the cold war rhetoric stays in living memory and were we not told the communist states–even those too shy to admit it, but just brave enough to self-subscribe as socialist–were we not told they had the secret police? They had no consumer choices–only one brand of toothpaste; only one brand of shoe; only one brand of car: all brandishing the state’s logo. Yet look around you and it’s a global duopoly of America’s Apple & Google. You don’t get a choice. You have to comply, as any freedom loving capitalist would. You will accept American-spyware. The American-spyware-corps will look after you. You just need to comply, because it’s convenient. You don’t have a choice.

Yes, use libre mobile-computers, but the need for public governance of technology is now. Countries need to have software sovereignty. It’s embarrassing for a non-American state to publish their ‘apps’ only via American spyware companies. It’s ludicrous. To give them an exclusive contract in distribution and to pay Apple or Google to supply, whilst they turn around and tighten the hatch: making it harder for users to install packages that do not originate from their monopolistic ‘market places’. It’s a joke.

If you’re a developer do not publish on American spyware platforms. Do not do it. Do not compromise. Fight these duopolies.

I urge users to become participants and contributors. As Kongar has written, we have access to sophisticated hardware, but we’re not deploying it. If mobile-computer operators contributed to a mesh-network we’d be in a position to discard subscriptions for telecommunications access. Before this can happen the expectations of users needs to shift from contributing capital (paying for a mobile plan for instance) to contributing resources: running voluntary software on their machines.

The requirements needed to participate in mesh-networks are not just technical knowledge. If a user deployed a program like Briar they’d notice something rather swiftly: participating in mesh-networks demands more resources than not participating. The most obvious effect of this is that the mobile-computer’s battery will drain faster. Carrying a spare battery seems to be common already and that’s without participating in a voluntary mesh-network. The users’ expectations would need to shift before they could adopt such software.

I’ll refrain from commentary on Apple’s iOS (though I expect it to be similar), but Google’s Android is hostile towards user-software that needs to run constantly in the background. It will terminate those programs, even if the user has granted it ‘permission’ to run in the background.

Desktop and laptops provide a much more fertile environment in comparison. It is the norm to have long running user-programs. Even commercial operating-systems do not find anything amiss because it is the norm here. For the user in such an environment I do not see any possible objection to running such programs other than an increase in data usage, but even then these programs often allow for deployments that have a fixed quota.

Why then do we not see mass adoption of software like i2p, hyphanet, GNUnet and so forth? I exclude tor because it reinforces the status quo that must be changed. It allows its users to exit the tor-network and access the web. It’s a good technical precaution against network surveillance, but the majority of that network’s userbase want to exit the network. To contribute to the tor-network is to run an exit-node and that is not financially feasible for the vast majority of internet users. It is not democratic, but exclusionary and elitist. User-contributed nodes that run on the hardware they have, with the data connections they have, will see their nodes deprioritized in routing if not outright dropped. The other projects I’ve listed do prioritize peer-to-peer communication whilst tor’s network has just become a way to access the web anonymously. I2p is technically superior to tor’s for in-network communication; it supports tcp and udp. You can torrent within i2p’s network. You can not torrent in tor’s: you lose udp.

In my eyes the major issue of the current ‘web’ is the rent-seeking economy that upholds it. Technically we all have the tools to self-host a blog, e-mail, lemmy instance or whatever it is you want to share. We have a glut of cpu-capacity, storage and bandwidth. The hindrance isn’t in the property we own, but in the capital expenditure demanded from a perpetual rent-seeking economy that’s evolved around the ‘web’. Users are behind cgnats and need to rent whitelisted servers. Users aren’t allocated a static ipv4 address and need to rent one. Users then need to rent domain names and before Let’s Encrypt they had to pay for a SSL certificate that had an expiration date–a perpetual expense. Completely arbitrary, artificial scarcity to create an economic system of rents. It’s all absurd.

Software like lemmy isn’t revolutionary either. It’s retroactive. It wants to shift conditions back to when web-masters had privileges. Privileges that were taken away by the new-style of business that superseded them. If you want to run lemmy you need to pay your dues to the domain registrars and whitelisted server admins. The revolutionary act is to run i2p or gnunet and do whatever the fuck you want, but once you realize Alice and Bob can communicate with one another without paying tolls to DNS registrars or whitelisted server-admins nor subjugate themselves to that third-line–the forum administrators–lemmy becomes superfluous.

Users shift responsibility to the server-admins that run the lemmy instances they interact with. In exchange they give them all their content. That content has value. Lemmy is still a value extraction mechanism because everything on the ‘web’ has devolved into economic rent-seeking. To exist on the web is to participate in that system. It is the ‘web’ that needs to be ditched. Of the alternatives GNUnet is the design that makes the most sense, though it is still juvenile.

Personal experience with the Christian-cult: mentally-ill individuals who refuse medical help corralled by narcissistic abusers. Being mentally-ill they make disastrous life-decisions creating hell-on-earth for their progeny. You people are clowns. My disdain for you can not be overstated. Your pastas are narcissists. Stop re-reading the same book that’s been repeatedly translated through the eons into different languages–with more edits than any Wikipedia article–hoping you’ll find an esoteric cure to soothe your self-loathing. You won’t. Leave your cult. Find medical help.

From the outside it appears these people are walking contradictions: they’re the most hateful people you’ll meet, yet they preach goodness to all men. Once religion was decoupled from the state it became a voluntary institution. The cults of Christianity attract self-loathing individuals who feel they need an external structure to keep them in line. That’s why you find so many pedophiles in these cults. They’re mentally ill.

Cults should be taxed. Doomsday-cults with a sole focus on expansion (like the cults of Christianity) should be disbanded by force. Healthcare is a human right. States should be providing appropriate care for the mentally-ill. Education is a human right too and cults are a road-block in the state’s pursuit of a universal education.

A daily reminder for Australian comrades: Sanitarium is the for profit arm of a doomsday-cult. Do not fund them through the purchase of their products. Do not buy Weet-Bix™, Up & Go™, etc… Advocate for cults to be taxed.

Cults have flourished here. They’re dangerous and degenerative to society. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/feb/13/the-family-great-white-brotherhood-australia-melbourne-cult-anne-hamilton-byrne

From their flock are selected the most deranged for political office. From their financing we get absolute mongrels in politics, like the insipid Scott Morrison: holder of every privilege, but never accountable. Shirking every responsibility placed on him. He would not hold a hose if you were on fire. He’d watch you burn; he’d do everything to not do anything whilst sending thoughts and prayers; he’d then go on a holiday and bill the tax-payer for it and removed that people didn’t want to shake his hand.

It’s time to put a stop to all these demented cults. Never entertain them. The Catholic cult drains our coffers. Tell them to fuck off.

I’ve been incredibly morose recently. I wonder if national-governments have reached a point where they just don’t care. Openly commit genocide; let the bombs drop. Climate change is around the corner; we don’t care; we’ll increasingly use indiscriminate violence to guarantee our continuation of a thing. Their economy? Of producing rubbish?

The wealth of oil has been completely wasted. In a time where the resources were glutinous national-governments still failed to give their citizens basic dignity. Nothing’s improved. There’s just more shit everywhere. Plastic everywhere. Cheap electronics: gizmos, gadgets and whatnots. Buy as much rubbish as possible.

The digital world has become supreme whilst the real world rots and decays.

The insects are silent. They don’t exist anymore. What was once so abundant has disappeared–it’s been killed. Tracts of motor vehicles pointlessly speeding this way and that. Pointless ‘commutes’. Slaughter-lanes. Donk! Oh dear, you killed a bird. The insects don’t even make a sound. The car’s interior is so divorced from the outside you wouldn’t even hear the little splats or crunches anyway. It doesn’t matter. They’re all dead now. They’re never coming back. Yet the cars, trucks & planes continue endlessly. Their new targets are the larger fauna now.

They’re larger. They could cause damage to you or your vehicle, so we’ll put up signs & create environments to deter these larger creatures–not because they’re more important than the birds or insects, but because they could ever so temporarily, ever so insignificantly, hamper the endless, pointless, wasteful zipping around of all this garbage.

It’s pointless anyway. Those signs lie. I never see these larger animals anymore. They’re all dead. The signs have become story-tellers. Those animals used to be there, but not anymore. They’ve become myths–rumors. I heard so and so nearly crashed into a XXXXXXX. I’m pretty sure they’re all dead now. We can take the signs down now.

Everyone’s become a zombie, staring at their telephones. Society has given up. It’s obscene. It’s absurd.

Well Americans… you have plenty of guns in private hands… you only seem to use them though for shooting blacks, paper-targets and children…

Scuba-gear will be the fashion. Subscribe to FreshAer™ for a discount on breathing-tanks.

I think the most optimal way of doing this would be a self-made shell script that expresses your preferences. You could then run it from whatever live-environment you choose and the result would be a familiar setup. The /home directory being on a separate partition from the rest is useful for preserving large-quantities of user-data.

I’ve been impressed with the capacity of microSD cards. The idea of mounting /home to a microSD card and having a materially-portable home has been a novelty I’ve so far resisted.

I’m confused. You write as if privacy and convenience are somehow related. They’re not. They’re completely independent of one another as are rabbits and trains. You’re regurgitating corporate-propaganda: software-companies steal your resources (time, money, electricity, bandwidth, data, etc.) and retort they do so for your convenience when confronted. That’s a lie. It just so happens it’s easier to steal when your software has a monopoly and vendors actively prohibit and deter any alternative software.

You don’t get a choice of what software is on your computer when you buy it from the retailer. The fact is you’ve been conditioned and only know how to use proprietary-software that’s become a standard via lobbying and exclusive contracts between software-vendors and OEMs. That has fuck all to do with convenience.

The fact that Google and Apple have a near duopoly over software distribution on mobile-computers (i.e. I want to use my bank’s app and that’s only distributed via Google’s PlayStore™ or whatever Apple’s thing™ is called) is a national-governance issue not a mater of convenience.

Neither Google nor Apple are doing charitable works here. I’ll brush over the details to paint a picture: any financial transaction that occurs within an ‘app’ distributed by those platforms results in a demand from the distributor for a percentage of that sum. How that general thrust affects banking ‘apps’ I’m not sure and I would hope there’s caveats for essential infrastructure like banking. Probably not; regulation is nonexistent for software-companies.

I don’t bank with banks that limit their clients to an ‘app’ distributed solely by Google or Apple. That behaviour has nothing to do with convenience and everything to do with economics, politics, self-determination and self-respect. I consider it abuse to the user to run non-libre software.

Even systemd-less distros need to implement ‘fake’ systemd components. It’s like a cancer. No one’s voluntarily using sub-components of systemd without systemd. It is a monolithic thing.