Longshoreman overtime is ass-backwards though. They clock crazy high OT and do shit like sleep on the clock and they get any shifts outside normal business hours counted as OT. The average pay is well over $100k iirc

They’re also super insular and basically the only way to get a job with them is to be a family member of someone who’s retiring.

I like unions but the ILA is basically a front for the mob. Their leader literally got involved in a ton of RICO charges that didn’t stick because a key witness mysteriously turned up dead in a trunk.

Also part of the reason they’re so insistent on paper records and refusing automation is so they can traffick humans, illegal goods, and steal stuff.

I’d happily pay $20-40ish for a quality textbook. I have many times before. It’s when they want to charge $300 and give almost nothing to the authors that I have a problem with. Extra scummy when they make a new edition that’s just barely different enough you can’t use it for class because the practice problems don’t match or give you one time use online codes that render it worthless for resale.

With just a web browser, teams, and visual studio open my work machine sits at 95% usage of 16gb. Half the time my compiles can’t even finish without getting axed by the oom killer. SSMS is a hog too, I often have to close half my stuff to get to work right.

Supposed to be getting an upgrade but my company is taking their sweet time.

I’ve been waiting for HDR and color management for like 5 years now and it feels like progress is dead in the water and now we’ve ended up with two custom implementations between KDE and gamescope. Heck, Kodi has supported HDR for ages when running direct to FB.

I know it’s tricky but geez, by the time they release an actual protocol extension we’ll already have half a dozen implementations that will have to be retooled to the standard, or worse yet we’ll have a standard plus a bunch of fiddly incompatible implementations.

They let us use them for all my college math classes.

They really don’t help much at all if you don’t understand the math, and if you do understand, you don’t need the calculator most of the time.

Also it’s specifically named as a reference to the gimp from pulp fiction as it originally came out around the same.

It’s fine for a hobby project but GIMP is well past that now and it’s a really bad look in a professional environment.

I prefer it over unconfigured vim on remote/new systems. If I can bring my vimrc though, vim wins.

Coke keeps running ads because that’s how they keep the brand as a cultural staple. They aren’t trying to sell more coke right now, they’re making sure that people in 50 years will still be buying it.

This can’t be overstated enough. There are huge swathes of the USA where the only stores within half an hour are dollar general or gas station convenience stores. You literally can’t eat healthy on those sources, and the nearest actual grocery store could be an hour or even more away.

Kinda hard to eat well when just getting the ingredients would take half a days time.

Hell, I’m in a city and if I didn’t have a car my only options in walking distance are a convenience store and a couple fast food places. Nearest grocery store is a 12 minute drive or a 3 hour bus ride if the bus even shows up.

I am familiar with marxist theory. The problems lie in what you just said. As Marx said, it is the natural progression of a society that has progressed through the stages of capitalism and entered post-scarcity. People who advocate for other channels of achieving communism are misguided, as post scarcity is a pretty hard requirement and a lack of that aspect opens the mechanisms of resource allocation up to exploitation. And unless you can somehow stop shitheads from being born, someone is going to be enough of one to take advantage.

Even the OG natural progression of society version of communism has issues. For one, you still have the shithead human problem. There’s always going to be people out there who want it all, and they’ll exploit whatever they can to get it. Communism, being stateless, doesn’t have particularly good mechanisms for dealing with that.

Communism is an definitely an ideology. Literally first sentence from Wikipedia: “Communism […] is a left-wing to far-left sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology…”

But yeah, it’s kinda suspicious that every nation scale attempt at communism has ended in failure or a system that is decidedly not communist, whether through internal strife or external influence.

Hint: communism doesn’t work in practice on scales the size of nations. The ideology is too fragile and susceptible to corruption and outside influence and you end up with shit like this.

Before anyone says “it’s not real communism” that is the point. It’s useless if it’s too weak against other ideologies to be properly implemented.

For about 3-4 years. I switched after sway added support for per-display VRR which xorg cannot do still (and probably will never be able to do due to core design limitations)

On AMD it’s been better than Xorg for a couple years now in my use case. No more tearing and latency issues, any games that don’t play nice have worked fine with gamescope.

With HDR support finally on the horizon it’ll be able to completely replace windows for me which I already barely use.

The only issue I regularly encounter is programs handling windowing strangely. Some programs like to switch themselves into my active workspace under certain circumstances which is mildly annoying but just requires that I press the hotkey to put them back where they belong a couple times a day.

Alright dude, now you’re just misrepresenting my views and revealing your own biases and we’re going nowhere. I don’t have time to make a comprehensive response to all that, I’m just going to go outside enjoy the freedom and prosperity that my evil liberal society has provided me. Good thing I won’t have to wait in a bread line at Costco, it’s a real time saver.

This entire discussion is about semantics, so I see no issue with getting fiddly with it. As for authoritarianism being illiberal, I don’t see how that is tautological. Authoritarianism is when the government or ruler has absolute control and has no obligation to accept input from the populace over which they rule. This violates the consent aspect of liberalism. These are commonly accepted definitions, not stuff I just made up. They’re mutually exclusive concepts and absolute versions of either cannot coexist.

And yes, I do think there has never been a truly liberal society, just as there has never been a truly communist society or any other -ist or -ism based society. They are concepts we can strive for, but adhering perfectly to the academic definition of any of these concepts is not realistic. I think the USA is fundemantally illiberal in many regards, and we would do well to strive to correct those aspects.

As for the definitions of those specific aspects of liberalism, yes, of course it is those aspects defined under the framework of liberalism. It would just take thousands of words to provide the entire context and it’s not super important here. You seem to understand that these words have different definitions in different frameworks, and I’m sure anyone discussing political ideology in this level of depth is also aware of that.

When I’m talking about the extremist sides of the spectrum, far left and far right, I am referring to those who tread into territory where their ideology becomes ostensibly dangerous. The most common version of this is directly supporting things like oppressive authoritarian rulers and population cleansing, There are absolutely people on both the left and the right who would see those as acceptable means to their end of implementing their preferred ideology. Right wingers who want to ethnically cleanse populations they see as problematic or inferior are no better than the far leftists who want to guillotine whoever they decide is the bougouise. This is the crazy land I’m talking about. Not being in crazy land means trying your best to not support awful shit, making sure you are picking the least bad feasible options in your current situation, and revising your positions and who you support when evidence indicates that the bad outweighs the good.

And yes, I actually do have a lot of issues with the French and American revolutions, and I do not think Churchill was a particularly good guy. I don’t think they are the same as the Russian and Chinese revolutions. They all resulted in regimes of varying levels of “bad”, but the Chinese and Russian versions resulted in higher death tolls and much more unhealthy systems coming out the other side (in my subjective opinion).

I think to cover the rest of your points, there are degrees here and the real world doesn’t function in absolutes as I mentioned in the second paragraph. I don’t have time to respond to every comparison you mentioned, but Washington vs Lenin for example: Washington did not have secret police killing dissidents by the thousands. Lenin did. Washington did not implement policy that resulted in mass famines resulting in the deaths of millions, Lenin did. Washington did support slavery and ethnic cleansing of Native American populations, and it irritates me greatly that this gets glossed over. Lenin did not. Which one of those guys is worse depends on your subjective values, but for me, I’d say Lenin is the worse guy.

I’m tired and it’s almost 3am so hopefully all that makes sense.

Authoritarianism is by definition illiberal and anyone who is authoritarian or supports authoritarianism is not liberal no matter what they claim to be. Centrism is also a meme, anyone who claims to be a centrist is usually just a stan for authoritarians in disguise.

The core tenant of liberalism is respect for the autonomy and civil liberties of the individual and consent of the governed to the rules of the government through the machinations of democracy. Any system claiming to be liberal without subscribing to that is a farce.

The same could be said of the “far left”. They claim to be leftists, and they might have started out as such, but they have stepped out into crazy land and end up supporting things antithetical to the ideologies they claim to subscribe to.

Statelessness is the end goal of communism, yes. I have met so-called communists that think strongarm authoritarianism is the way to get there, and for some reason believe that those authoritarians would willingly give up their power once they’ve achieved a position where they could implement said stateless society. This is basically what happened in the USSR and China, and is decidedly not the path Marx himself proposed for achieving it. A stateless communist society in Marxist thought is simply the natural progression after late stage capitalist societies, which is not a step you can simply skip over.

I don’t necessarily agree with the idea, but I think it’s important to be educated on a wide variety of schools of political thought.

Nowhere did I claim such a thing. Some leftist groups want the whole stateless thing. Go even further left into crazy land though and you run into strongarm authoritarianism.

I’d call myself a liberal in the modern sense, I certainly don’t believe that large scale stateless societies are viable but there are definitely things we can learn from ideologies further to the left than what I subscribe to.

The far lefists aren’t commies though, that’s my point. They play like they are, but really they’re just authoritarian fascists. Commies are just regular leftists, and marxist schools of thought are a totally reasonable worldview to carry even if I don’t agree with some points of it.

I don’t know of any particular sources but I do have anecdotes of watching friends and family fall into these traps on both ends of the spectrum. A couple of my leftist friends have started treading dangerously close to some pretty sour viewpoints. I mostly see it as pro-accelerationism, everything I don’t like is capitalism/neoliberalism/western values, and are totally blind to the influence propaganda has on them and the weak points in their own ideologies.

On the right, I’ve watched several of my family members go down the fox news alt right rabbit hole and end up at similarly dumb viewpoints. They also want a revolution, except everything they don’t like is liberals/communism/woke etc. They are also totally blind to the influence of propaganda and the weak points in their ideologies. The media machine in the US is set up to make this pipeline far more efficient than the leftist version.

They mostly don’t like the same things, but they’re pulling in opposite directions, and each is convinced that when the revolution comes, their side is the one that will win out, when in reality, we’ll probably just end up with the same shit, different coat of paint.

Me? I think there’s concepts we can borrow from many ideologies that can help us solve specific problems and bring about incremental change until we reach true propserity. The socialists and commies get some stuff right, so do the libertarians, the anarchists, the ancaps, etc. The only thing I think will definitely not help is tearing it all down. There is no silver bullet, it’s all just problems that are met with ever improving solutions. Sometimes we take two steps forward one step back, but I don’t think anyone can deny that the world at large is better off now than when it was almost completely ruled by monarchy, bloody violence, and slavery a few hundred years back.