communism

@communism@lemmy.ml

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do I figure out where flies are entering my house?⁩ ⁨⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  I used to have lots of flies and noticed one summer when I put tin foil in the windows to cool my house down, I stopped finding flies inside completely. Maybe because it made my house dark, they didn’t want to come in anymore? Idk, but I’ve been gloriously fly-free ever since. You’ve mentioned you have a basement—do you find fewer flies there? I suspect they might avoid dark places.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  I use HeliBoard. It’s fine, but I don’t have any special use-cases/needs; I just wanted a normal keyboard, which HeliBoard is fine at. If you have anything specific you need, I’m not sure if HB does it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is so difficult to organize a strike⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s the one I was referring to! It was (still is, I think, by skimming the website) hosted by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. I went to it a while ago and found it useful, so can recommend. It’s quite highly regarded by the trade unionists I know.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is so difficult to organize a strike⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Have you read any books or done any trainings on workplace organising? Most unions provide free training for members who want to organise. I’d leave a book rec too but the main books I’ve read on the matter are by IRL comrades and I don’t really want to dox myself on here.

  It’s about having the right strategy and knowing how to have these conversations with coworkers. Most people trying to organise a workplace come up against the same barriers. The biggest piece of advice I’d give is focus on active listening—what problems does this person have and care about in their workplace? Don’t impose your own problems/the issues you care about most onto them—what’s important to them may be different to what’s important to you. Find out what they care about, and get them thinking about what might happen if we used our collective power to do something about it. But organising strategy can’t be summed up in a Lemmy comment. I do suggest you look into doing a course/workshop/reading a book. You mentioned being in Europe; I think the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung ran online organising workshops for Europeans iirc, not sure if they still do.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why are some Linux community so toxic?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t think it’s Linux-specific. There’s a lot of dickheads in society. If you create a community around a particular topic or hobby, then most likely you’ll get people there feeling arrogant/superior about their skills in that hobby/topic/etc and wanting to gatekeep it. It happens for a lot of things.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why are there so many more mtf trans vs ftm trans people??⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s definitely a you thing of where you go on the internet. e.g. on Tumblr or ao3 the bias in the trans population is in the opposite direction.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why are there so many more mtf trans vs ftm trans people??⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s not the case… There used to be more trans women visiting gender clinics than trans men, which we got old stats from, but nowadays all the stats you can see show it pretty much 50/50.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do you keep your shit organized?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  (assuming you rent) you can use command strips to stick organisers to your walls and use vertical space. You can use some of those stationery organisers and stick it to the wall. In general see if you can use more vertical space.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do I get the damn cat to understand I can feed myself?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If they don’t think animals should be kept in captivity, they shouldn’t keep a pet. Pets are, by definition, captive animals. If I befriended a pigeon by feeding it, it wouldn’t become my pet; it only would if I captured it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do black people actually want to be called Black with capital B?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  A lot of lit from the Black liberation movement uses “Black”. I’d say that the majority of people I’ve seen capitalise Black have been Black themselves. That isn’t to say it represents a majority of Black people, but also I don’t think “what do the majority of this group think” is the best metric for determining what’s right—e.g. a significant amount of women are figureheads of the anti-abortion movement, but that doesn’t mean that they’re right or not misogynistic.

  I wasn’t sure if I should use “themself” or “themselves”

  Different people who use they/them will have different preferences. If you don’t know the person’s preference, I doubt they’d care about which you go with, and if they did, they can reach out to you after the fact and ask you to change it or to use a different option going forward in the future.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do black people actually want to be called Black with capital B?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s a political choice that some folks in the Black liberation movement choose in order to emphasise Blackness. Not all Black people do it. I don’t think anyone would tell you off for choosing to capitalise it or not. Both are quite common.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why can't I apply SPF50 sunscreen twice to get SPF100 protection?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  …How do you smear butter on your skin then?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Should I donate sperm?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  People do pick based on career (not sure about UK specifically but generally sperm recipients can see that kind of biographical info), but it’s not like nutting in a cup is difficult, and someone might want sperm and not care what career the donor has. Why not just donate in case if someone wants it?

  I’m not sure how long sperm lasts, but when I was doing egg retrieval I was told that frozen eggs can last at least 10 years, probably a lot longer but they only store them for 10 years as they have limited space. If sperm is similar then there’s a decent enough chance someone will want to use it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Possibility of translating the messages of dogs, cats, and other pets⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Most animals don’t use verbal communication. As an analogy, most humans don’t use sign language. Imagine if someone wanted to create a human translator that recorded what humans do with their hands and translate them into meaning. There would be a lot of noise there because most humans don’t talk with their hands, so most of it would be ascribing meaning that isn’t there. Sometimes the person is just itching their back, or just doing the dishes, etc, not trying to say something. Similarly, most other animals vocalise for other reasons, not because they want to make a specific sound to communicate something.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is the US so into Israel?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s their attack dog in the SWANA region. As Biden said, if Israel did not exist the US would have to create an Israel.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How did old-money people of color maintain their wealth through racist times?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You know that there are countries where the majority of people are Black (ie all of Africa…), or majority of people are Asian (ie all of Asia…), or majority of people are Hispanic (ie LatAm… not to mention that “Hispanic” is not a racial category in LatAm—there are white settlers, indigenous people, Black people, etc in LatAm too), right? You know that non-white countries also colonise and plunder, and may have colonial wealth from that (eg Japan)? You know that inequality and class exist in these countries and some families will be wealthy for the same reason that families are wealthy in majority-white countries? And you know that white supremacy is not the only racist system in the world—in a place where Hindu nationalism is the order of the day, for example, being a brown Hindu is not going to cause you disadvantages in society.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do I drink more water?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Maybe eating foods that have high water content like cucumbers, watermelons, etc? Or if you find a non-water beverage more enjoyable than water, drink that—all beverages contain water.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there a platform like github that isn't for code?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Plenty of people use git hosting to host non-code, like documentation, books written in markdown/LaTeX, etc. I personally use git to maintain a few personal wikis.

  Different git forges will have different rules about what content they allow. GitHub definitely allows non-code. I’ve seen Codeberg repos be used for non-code too. Codeberg’s only requirement is that you only host free (as in freedom) content, so I suppose for non-code that means using an appropriate CC licence for example. I can’t imagine any of the popular git hosting sites taking issue with someone hosting their book, unless you’re hosting, like, the whole of Wikipedia or something.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do I actually find a job that isn't retail?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Statistically it’s rare for an adult to be 120cm tall, therefore there exist no adults who are 120cm tall. Statistically it’s rare for someone to be in government, therefore there are no politicians in the world. Statistically it’s rare to be an astronaut, therefore astronauts don’t exist.

  And all the examples I mentioned are far more rare than simply self-taught people working in the field they taught themselves. Majority of the friends I have in programming jobs are self-taught with no formal education beyond high school (if that). It’s of course highly dependent on field, and the market is saturated enough with CS graduates now that getting a programming job without a degree is going to be pretty hard, but my point is that it depends on the labour market. Some labour markets don’t care about a piece of paper declaring you went to school. There’s other ways to fill your CV and prove you have a skill.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How should a news article website financially sustain itself?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Donations.

  I don’t find subscriptions too offensive, however any kind of restriction of the flow of information (e.g. by paywalling it) implies its enforcement. What are you going to do about people bypassing the paywall? Even if you only responded by patching whatever allowed them to bypass the paywall, you’re either going to have to let up eventually, or get into a protracted cat-and-mouse game with paywall bypassers. And you don’t want to end up on the side of the people who want to gatekeep information.

  So that leaves us with the possibility of having a subscription that’s not stringently enforced—in which case it is just a recurring donation anyway.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨When is the last time you had actual conversations with friends?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Over the weekend.

  I don’t see small talk or whatever as a sign of a lack of interest in someone. Sometimes there’s nothing that deep going on to talk about.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do some people (i.e. white conservatives) think all Spanish speakers (especially native Spanish speakers) are Mexican?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Where did I say or imply that Mexico and Spain were the only countries?

  Spain has a distinct accent if you are a Spanish speaker. If you don’t speak Spanish, it’s likely you wouldn’t know the difference between different Spanish language accents.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do some people (i.e. white conservatives) think all Spanish speakers (especially native Spanish speakers) are Mexican?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You’re in the US. Mexico is next door and speaks Spanish. A much higher proportion of Spanish speakers in the US are from Mexico than from Spain, which is across the ocean. If you were in France and identified as a Spanish speaker, much more people would think you were from Spain.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's the deal with people liking old devices?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s a lot of hardware enshittification, eg removing a lot of commonly used ports from laptops. Also I don’t like the form factor of all these Macbook rip-offs.

  I haven’t noticed similar issues with desktop computing, but for laptops, I do prefer older laptops.

  Also, so many older devices go to e-waste when they’re perfectly usable. I like to salvage devices when other people don’t want them anymore.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there still anyway to bypass Youtube "Sign in to confirm your age" bullshit in 2026?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Nothing, just using the latest FreeTube. Are you up to date? They’ve pushed out a few releases recently to get around new YouTube trickery. Your VPN server might also be blocked; I’ve had luck with Mullvad’s Swedish servers lately.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there still anyway to bypass Youtube "Sign in to confirm your age" bullshit in 2026?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  No, afaik every alternative frontend that still works with age-restricted videos works by letting you sign in with a Google account (which defeats the point). I’ve tried a few.

  I just make an account for just the age-restricted videos. FreeTube still works for me for non-age restricted videos (if it doesn’t for you, try changing VPN countries a few times—also you need to restart FreeTube every time you change VPN servers, otherwise it doesn’t work from the new server, idk why).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Aside from possible allergy concerns, what's stopping people from grinding all the food waste into a mixed paste?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Aside from the fact that hunger is not caused by lack of food but by a capitalist distribution of means of subsistence, that also sounds profoundly unsafe. So you want to grind raw meat, raw eggs, with berries, leeks, idk what else, and hope for the best? Some of the food might have been on the verge of expiration. If some of the food was bad now all of it is bad because you mixed it all up. Different ingredients need different cooking methods, temperatures, times, etc. Some of your paste will be cooked to inedibility whilst some of it won’t be at a food-safe temperature yet. Even if it didn’t cost anything to implement this, no one had any dietary requirements, etc, this food would just be unsafe to eat.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is Windows still bloated⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Worth considering that there’s less of a need for backwards-compatibility with Linux binaries because most Linux software is open-source, so they can be recompiled or updated for modern Linux by the end user if the maintainer is gone. A lot of legacy Windows software is still in use and the source is unavailable, so Windows has to support it for the businesses that use the legacy software. In other words, it’s a cultural difference too. Linux seems pretty good at supporting things users actually use, like old hardware.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is Windows still bloated⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  They have a near-monopoly on the desktop market. The average consumer doesn’t care about bloat, and will keep using Windows stubbornly no matter what. Why bother writing good software if people will buy it anyway?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Theoretically speaking, if one wanted to sail the seas while being not very tech savvy – is using a VPN (Mullvad) enough? I would never, of course… but theoretically?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You don’t need to be so euphemistic. If you’re just downloading, piracy is not really investigated rigorously anywhere. Just using a VPN is sufficient. You can talk openly about it too.