He/Him. Marxist-Leninist, Butcher, DnD 3.5e enthusiast and member of UCFW local 880. I administrate a DnD 3.5e West Marches server for Socialists called the Axe and Sickle. https://discord.gg/R5dPsZU

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: March 24th, 2022

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  • I work in a grocery store meat department, and part of my job is breaking down the newly-delivered pallets in the morning.

    Ground beef was on sale and the warehouse had allocated (i.e., sent us extra on top of what we ordered) way too much. Each box has a production date and a use by date, but the text is very small, so I am supposed to write the day of expiration (excluding the month, since ground beef gets only 20 days on the shelf anyways; so a box that expires July 5th would get “5”) in larger size and circle it.

    I was very sleep deprived and on some of the boxes accidentally wrote the day of the production date (last month) instead of the expiration date, making it seem like they had 10 extra days. So the butchers ground other boxes before those ones, and the mistake was only discovered two days after the last two remaining (roughly 80-lb.) boxes had expired.


    A funny mistake that’s not mine is when a new hire, on his second day, was told to run our cart of fresh pickles. When he pushed it over the threshold from the backroom to the sales floor, the too-large, precariously-stacked cart completely collapsed, causing dozens of jars of pickles to smash (and to be clear, I did tell him how to push carts backwards over the threshold so that exact thing doesn’t happen - he just didn’t do it).

    And to top it off, he wasn’t wearing his slip-proof shoes (even though he had been told to multiple times), so when he was carrying a box of sauerkraut to the department to be written off, he slipped in the pickle juice on the floor and dumped sauerkraut all over himself.


  • They’re allowed to complain, but that doesn’t make them correct. I don’t believe it to be wrong, because to a large extent people have a right to know public figures - they lack a right to privacy and must fight for every bit they want.

    If I, say, found a coworker’s cringy Reddit account and shared it with other coworkers in a mean-spirited way, that would be rude and a transgression of privacy. If I found out that my state Senator, or my favorite YouTuber, had a private Reddit account and shared it, that would be okay (or even good, an act of transparency).

    And there are of course levels to everything. Take the YouTuber example. We would obviously consider it more appropriate to share if the Reddit account showed they were bigoted or fraudulent somehow; or if it was boring and not notable. Less so if it contained highly vulnerable, personal stories, or (and pardon me if this is a bush you were beating around in your post) nude photos or videos.







  • The channel Technology Connections had a great video on dishwashers. It depends on how you run your washer. Powder detergent in both the pre-wash and main wash compartments is the recommended option. If you skip the pre-wash (such as by using an “Eco” or Energy/Water-saving setting), then it makes no difference between putting the detergent in the compartments vs. the bottom of the dishwasher as long as your compartment is working correctly. If it isn’t, then indeed putting it on the bottom of the dishwasher is better.



  • I think it’s just a growing pain of the contradictions of Federation resolving themselves, mostly in the political sphere.

    You have left-wing instances (lemmygrad.ml), center-right instances (lemmy.world), and right-wing instances (sh.itjust.works). Even if different instances defederate with each other, there will always be overlap instances (lemmy.ml being the biggest, but also lemm.ee, startrek.website, mander.xyz, programming.dev, etc.). And while individual users can block specific instances, this doesn’t prevent them from seeing and responding to their posts. Communists and Liberals and Libertarians, who each believe the others are literally as bad as the Nazis (and I’m not making a value judgement here - maybe some of them are right), are forced to interact with each other on occasionally political topics.

    The hard right, unlike in Reddit, isn’t really a figure here - and moderators on Lemmy don’t know how to handle political disagreements where both sides are within the sphere of acceptable discourse.




  • The other comments here do not mention the most important part: the fiscal recession cycles caused by publicly traded, unregulated markets. In other words, the predictable 8-year pattern of booms and busts - the creation of a speculative bubble of growth followed by that bubble popping - that defines modern Capitalist economies.

    No recession or depression in recent memory has truly been caused by a mismatch of supply and demand. Instead, they are caused by our complex financial investment apparatus; they have nothing to do with the “producing and buying things” side of Capitalism and everything to do with the “Moving money around” side of it. A thing - real estate, tech startups, comic books, whatever - begins to grow in value not because it is actually worth more but because people are speculating on its future value.

    This is why Uber keeps growing in valuation despite never making a profit: the people buying Uber stock are not betting on Uber making a profit, but that other people will buy Uber stock in the future, further increasing the price of the shares. This is a bubble that will eventually burst, when they run out of potential investors to keep propping up the share price - but you maximize return on investment if you jump ship at the very last moment.

    The '08 housing crisis is a great example. It followed an almost identical speculative bubble, except with mortgage-backed securities.

    While these things will happen to some extent in Socialist countries with market economies, there are two reasons why they hit Capitalist countries extremely hard.

    The first is that modern Capitalism has made every person into their own little Capitalist. Retirement funds are tied to the stock market, rent and housing prices aren’t fixed. Ephemeral financial-sector bullshit affects ordinary people when it has no reason to.

    The second is that strong regulation can prevent the worst effects on ordinary people. Socialist governments can fix prices and forgive debts in order to minimize the effects of a fiscal downturn.


  • Others have answered your question, but I think you’re coming at the problem from the wrong angle.

    I used to think about politics and economics how you are now: that there are different systems, and different people disagree on which is the best system, either because of their internal values (liberty, security, equality, prosperity, etc.) or because they believe that one system inherently performs better than another (efficiency, robustness, fairness, etc.).

    Becoming a Marxist is realizing that while we, the working people, are sitting around bickering over whether command or market economies are more efficient, whether parliamentary or Presidential systems are better, whether our voting system should be Ranked Choice or Proportional or FPTP, the wealthy - the owning classes, the Capitalists, the ruling class - are stealing from us, are extracting our labor.

    Politics is not about different people having different ideas about how to best organize society. Politics is about different groups acting in their material interests. The rich support policies which give them more power in society, while the poor, by all rights, should be doing the same.

    I support a system where working people hold all power in society. I don’t care how that society is organized aside from that - I have some ideas, but there are smarter people than me for organizing logistics. Power and material interests are the only things that matter; and no system is incorruptible. Society needs to be lead by explicitly and wholly ideological organizations who will resist any attempt to undermine the power and supremacy of the working class, even if it is “legal” or “fair”, and they are justified in using whatever means necessary to do so.


  • They’re not talking about swearing. Call someone a fucking shit-eating worm is fine. But on the other hand are words used to insult marginalized groups (women, homosexuals, the mentally disabled, etc.). B/*itch, wh/*ore, c/*nt; c/*cksucker, f/*g; r/*tard, a/*tist, etc.

    These are the words being blocked. Not swears, slurs. You can say fuck, shit, damn, and hell all you want.

    For what it’s worth, I tend to fall on the side of a little bit being fine. I don’t use those words (except the slurs against w/*men), but if there’s one thing I fucking hate, it’s Scolds. If Felix Biederman wants to call people r/*tards and c/*cksuckers, I think he should be allowed to, and I’m not going to try to cancel him for it.



  • I am not going to go into whether it’s right or not, but using the term “B*tching” may not be a slur, but it is still considered misogynistic in many cases, because it is comparing a negative action (complaining) with a misogynistic stereotype (the B*tch).

    R*tard is a slur, but if you called something r*tarded, that would still be ableist and be rightfully removed. Many people believe that the same logic should apply to misogynistic slurs.

    Whether you agree or not is up to you, but the developers’ logic for the filter being in the state it is is sound.