I really hope these people don’t accept that it’s normal to charge for different desktop environments.

Yeah exactly. Sucks if you have a job that forces you to use Windows though, which is largely how MS has this stanglehold on PC share. Once this becomes an expensive security risk, maybe more businesses will switch to paid Linux OS’s.

Consumers are not the main driver of profit, speculative value is. Microsoft knows that Windows is guaranteed to be on the majority of PC’s, which means they can afford to implement hostile features that increase the speculative value on data collection and AI investment.

Yeah, libs have been very open about homophobia and ableism since Trump was elected and they had a crisis that warranted a suspension of the performance. Statistically, we know most men in the US are complacent with or perpetrators of sexual violence and a significant amount – even the majority in some places – fetishize youth and teen women. For Americans, it really is more reputation destroying to have done queer shit than to be a rapist pedophile (this includes “ephebophiles,” sorry).

They’re not going to get mad about racism and genocide, it isn’t even going to be on their minds because they don’t actually oppose the underlying values that facilitate those policies currently. They will make a show of anti-racism and constitution protection so long as it remains a rhetorical response exclusively.

These are evil companies, but I am curious what metric you’re using to say one is worse than the other when their objectives and methods are similar.

It actually makes more sense tbh. Being queer is far worse to fascists than being a pedophile rapist. This is especially damning when the person he sucked off is prominent in the conspiracy theories he depended on for the past decade.

Jesus god and more pre-rendered graphics.

They have to because the capitalist imperative of infinite, progressive growth forces them to constantly seek out additional speculative avenues for profit. The potential for a valuable product (stock) is more valuable than a good product and is cheaper to produce than a good product.

It is important to note that you are also a product in a surveillance capitalist state thaf commodifies every second of your day. The speculative value on more profitable avenues to source and sell your data has more speculative value than anything your patronage would generate.

My brother in Christ, check the context of the thread.

My guy, you commented on my thread. You’re the bother.

I think you’ve missed that the assuming is kinda your whole problem here.

Yes, and it would be exhausting to entirely explain how flawed and ahistorical this is. For starters, you ignore social and property relations entirely when you imagine capitalism as “wealthy hoard money, empire make money.” Wealth disparity and imperialism are certainly elements in capitalism, but do you think all these scholars are just big dumdums who didn’t think of Rome?

I instead chose to encourage you to consider how you know what you know and that maybe you don’t actually know enough. You should consider now if that level of self-accountability is a waste of time.

Could you explain where you got your information on the historical conditions of capitalism? Is this just you interpreting what you’ve seen passively, or have you gone through the effort to find historians who have spent careers answering this question?

They said “tens of thousands of years” and you thought that meant two centuries before the Russian Revolution. I think you’ve mistaken dominant narratives of history as a European discipline with what has actually happened in the past. Yes, there are very many accounts of hierarchal violence, but that isn’t descriptive of how human beings behave. Most of what we’ve built has come from cooperation (think about how dependent the internet infrastructure is on free labour and cooperation) and the greatest obstacle we’ve faced as our communities grow is the exploitation that arises from patriarchal hierarchies. Exploitation is the site of those brutalities youre referring to.

Marx also wasn’t a historian, and wasn’t very knowledgeable about societies outside of Europe at all. That isn’t something we can fault him for as though it was his responsibility, but it is something you need to take into account if you’re going to engage with this progressive history model (Hegel didn’t know about’em either).

Kathleen Duval makes an interesting argument in Native Nations that we have evidence that indigenous Americans, in particular those who lived in relation to the Cahokia (Mississippian) civilisation, intentionally altered the trajectory of their social organization in response to this same exploitation. This isn’t to say hierarchy never existed again, though certainly in a less stratified way than the European settlers that arrived a couple centuries later, but it does teach us that humans do not want to live that way, which means they do not have to.

Yes. I am pointing that out. That is the imaginary thing.

“Somehow,” looks behind us at five centuries of European settler-colonialism.

“Everyone,” looks ahead at the millions of people who defy hegemonically enforced constructions of human nature despite the overwhelming power those systems possess.

Liberal doomerism based on imaginary restrictions, how new.

Wow, they really are just gonna make you kill them eh, for like, no good reason.

It has been awfully exciting.

baba booey

That was a major motivator behind my switch. If I had to fiddle anyway, might as well use something where the fiddling has more payoff. Also don’t want to whack-a-mole AI surveillance from a company close with the fascist regime.

I’m honestly more concerned with them misrepresenting its ease of use than anything else. I ran into a lot of guides and videos that wanted to make it seem more aporoachable so as to not discourage potential users that significantly downplayed the amount of extra work it would take to use Linux. Bash is typically sidelined if they’re promoting Mint or Zorin for example. I study humanities, but I have a good amount of experience with terminals and so learning a new CLI wasn’t s big deal, but I know that’d be a deal breaker for a lot of new users who would likely feel bamboozled by the insistance that it’s “just like Windows.”