I originally wanted to do what you’ve done, but eventually fell on the idea that the country is essentially beyond saving. Should this hold true, the best option then is to join a grassroots movement and begin building an alternative economy from the ground up as a ready replacement for the collapse of the current system. Join a socialist organization, work for a land trust, start building cooperatives and alternative food systems, etc.

I worked part time through college. Summers I had two part time jobs, and a couple summers three that worked with my schedule. Started school with about 10k in savings and finished about 12k in debt.

Edit: I’m also super frugal. Found cheap food, cheap/free furnishings/clothes, cheap housing, pirated textbooks, and rode a bicycle and took the bus to get around.

Wish I could have afforded the time for some unpayed opportunities. Really struggling to find a decent job at the moment. (Studied math at a top university with fairly significant cs experience and decent gpa).

Wouldn’t not recommend college, but man not feeling too good about it at the moment in terms of job opportunities (certainly wouldn’t trade the experience and what I’ve learned for anything though)

Living and working in cooperatives has given me hope. Member/worker owned and democratically controlled. They’re places that I found I would consistently get more out of than I put in; you share a meal or help someone out and dozens would want to return the favor. These experiences and this video has changed how I see and interact with the world. All that’s left is to help spread cooperativity.

They’re like parallel processes. Rice takes about 20 min. Start that first and you can have the stir Fry done before the rice finishes with plenty of time to clean up. A sandwich leaves just a knife and cutting board. Just rinse that off. And if I was making pizza I’d make the dough the night before and the rest is simple, clean up when the pizzas in the oven.

Personally love leftovers. Make extra rice, use the leftovers in a burrito or something. Make extra pizza dough and put some in the freezer, etc

There’s also a stoned ape theory about the cognitive evolution of human consciousness through consumption of psilocybin mushrooms.

https://bigthink.com/neuropsych/stoned-ape-return/

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I personally think meaning is simply about cooperation. Pop-sci video explaining basically what I mean better than I probably could.

The dude makes some pretty legit videos. He has a PhD in physics education research. Using YouTube is just a sign of the time we live in. Imagine if your professor quit their job to become a YouTuber because they thought it’d be a more effective medium for education than a whiteboard.

Mathematics is, in a sense, about abstraction and generalization, and the video covers an ideal, or set of axioms, you’d want from a voting system. This perfect system was proven to be impossible and the researcher was granted the Nobel prize in economics. In short, there can be no perfect voting system, and we must accept a compromise (much like an engineer). You can also say mathematics is about proofs, and, no matter how unintuitive something might seem, it leaves no room for doubt. It doesn’t hardly matter if the source comes from a YouTube video.

Edit: I don’t agree with the context the video was posted, but I was bothered by this response to it.

Open source software is like communism. Held in commons, free to use, contribute to, and benefit from.

You hiring by chance?

I personally try to avoid absolutes. I would have probably said, “a more ethical kind of company…”, but totally agree. Also really wish more people understood and supported co-ops.

I don’t love how it played out either but it was the delegates we voted for that elected kamala as our nominee. It was our representative democracy at play in a less than ideal situation when biden dropped out at an awkward time. And kind of the point of a vice president.

Its this or the guy that said he’d be dictator on day one and that no one would ever have to vote again if he is elected. You decide what you want to vote for.

I mean its the goal… to avoid violent revolution. If it does need to turn to that though, then what will be there to replace capitalism?

Its literally an alternative where workers own the means of production. How is that not outside the system? They already exist in pockets around the world.

Right I see. Co-ops are a threat to a capitalist that wants to exploit their workers, and if co-ops got big enough to strain the system I imagine there would be some push back from someone with money.

But co-ops can exist outside the system so it shouldn’t matter, and theyd have the power in numbers. Cooperation among cooperatives is one of the defining principles of a cooperative. So if a housing co-op gets their food from a food co-op who gets their food from a farmers co-op and they all get there energy from an energy co-op, what is a capitalist to do? Its like a free market and if the capitalist fails, that’s just competition.

All that would need to be done is for there to be more co-ops and more people that understand and want them to exist.

I mean if we want to overthrow the system violently, or reject it with violence, we can but I see an alternative here if somehow people can unite on an idea. I don’t know how to do that though.

Love a good ferromagnetic metal but how about that electric conductivity of copper

I had an ex help organize an event to great success, ultimately accomplishing more than they were asking for from the powers at be. Organizers in the area tried to shut it down, or take over, however because it wasn’t how protests are typically done.

I don’t know enough about Lenin, but do we need violent revolution to advocate for cooperatives and elect officials that will help support them? With the right state sponsored incentives, cooperatives can be a great stepping stone for a peaceful transition of power giving workers ownership to the means of production. I struggle to understand how someone can argue against this idea. Maybe I need to learn more history, or maybe we need to be collectively more optimistic and united. I don’t know how to accomplish this aside from trying to feebly spread the idea here and in my own life. I’m involved and trying to be more involved in the small cooperative movement.

Just what ive decided might be the best, or quickest, path to achievement. Wishful thinking, idealist, idea worth spreading. I see cooperatives as a form of peaceful revolution, but how best to achieve a cooperative economy when so few are aware of what it means? One way, I suppose, is for elected officials to advocate for it. Its hard but not impossible to imagine. I suppose there are multiple steps in between that would make that more tangible, and one of those is awareness. There’s already a lot of us in support of socialist ideas where one of the biggest criticisms is for a planned economy, so why not advocate for a stateless form of socialism that expands, rather than possibly, or arguably, restricts, individual and collective freedoms?

Was Lenin aware of cooperatives when he wrote the state and revolution? Its not a theoretical idea. Its already a proven and successful form of enterprise. Why do some of our representatives advocate for workers unions when their existence goes against capitalist exploitation of workers? Seems totally possible to advocate for worker cooperatives in a similar vein.

I’d like to point out the viability of cooperatives to accomplish this. A co-op is defined by the seven Rochdale Principles. Among those is open and voluntary membership, democratic member control, cooperation among cooperatives, and concern for community.

Its a stateless form of socialism that gives workers ownership to the means of production and doesnt have to necessarily negate private ownership. They can simply be incentivized by the state similar to how tax breaks and subsidies currently work or by providing workers the framework for which to purchase a company in the case of failure (like after the 2008 financial crash - when competition, greed, and capitalism failed).

https://degooglisons-internet.org/en/

Thought this looked cool. Haven’t had the need to use it much since discovering this. Offers a lot of googles functionality that I used to use like collaborative documents, spreadsheets, calendars, and more.

One of the ideals of being a cooperative is “cooperation among cooperatives” as dictated by the Rochdale Principles. So by definition worker co-ops shouldn’t be competing with each other. Instead consolidation of corporations to force a sort of cooperation to increase profit we’ll ideally have worker cooperatives working with producer co-ops for example.

Not entirely sure the implications of supply and demand market forces but I imagine its a step up from our current system. We’ll have democratically controlled work places where workers dictact the direction of supply and not necessarily for the sole purpose of increasing profits. In any case what I think we need is a new systematic way of measuring the growth of an economy in conjunction with worker co-ops.