profalseidol

It depends on the workers themselves. The salary policy is democratically decided. For example, a very well known large scale worker-coop umbrella Mondragon does this:

At Mondragon, there are agreed-upon wage ratios between executive work and field or factory work which earns a minimum wage. These ratios range from 3:1 to 9:1 in different cooperatives and average 5:1. That is, the general manager of an average Mondragon cooperative earns no more than 5 times as much as the theoretical minimum wage paid in their cooperative. For most workers, this ratio is smaller because there are few Mondragon worker-owners that earn minimum wages, because most jobs are somewhat specialized and are classified at higher wage levels. The wage ratio of a cooperative is decided periodically by its worker-owners through a democratic vote.

Compared to similar jobs at local industries, Mondragon managers' wages are considerably lower (as some companies pay their best paid managers hundreds of times more than the lowest-paid employee of the company) and equivalent for middle management, technical and professional levels. Lower wage levels are on average 13% higher than similar jobs at local businesses. Spain's progressive tax rate further reduces any disparity in pay.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation#Wage_reg...

Share the means of production! We need less centralized planning in companies. And the only truly way to achieve that is to share the ownership. Partners not the Master-Slave trickery that we call Employment.

Social systems is created by Humans consciously. Complex biological systems are by evidence we have, created by evolutionary process and in fact, not intelligent.

Company policy doesn't want you to disclose your salary. I think this is an explicit thought out design. Companies doesn't want worker union, history tells us why.

Church policy to stop people from learning how to read. Church want you to keep believing in God and doctrines and has mutual benefit with the monarch via believe in Divine right.

The people will work towards less control. Just as in computers, centralized power is simply not scalable. We will eventually move towards something like worker-owned cooperatives.

Yep. Laws don't matter. Even in going to war, the US went ahead without approval of Congress. Or backing out of Nuclear treaties and building "missle shields" in Romania.

What matter's is who is controlling production and how is this control is enforced.

In a decades old java code base where so many has touched the code. It can look like this:

                            }

                        }

                    }

                }

            }

        }
    }
}

Best feature of it is that it is fast to load.

Also, being able to listen to WW2 Nazi Propaganda (and a fun commentary about it):

http://radio.garden/history/warsaw/ghost-voices/

Time to find that radio signal from Vega.

> plethora of social programs to provide your basic necessities and then you can spend your days writing your 2D game engine in Java. ... But you won't do that. And we both know why.

And that is because these basic necessities is not enough. To be human is to have family and travel (in economy not in business class).

> OK. So this is where hysterics start against the best socio-political system we have developed. And you do agree with that, right? That the modern iteration of capitalism (i.e. a market-economy with democratic government oversight and social safety net) is the best system we have ever tried?

Doesn't mean it is good enough. And you do agree with that, right? Feudalism, Caste System, Slavery, Central Planning, Capitalism, Church control. One replacing the other. And with less centralized power, we get a better system.

> and you've been put out of business by automobiles, it doesn't matter whether you're employed by a Capitalist corp or a co-op - it is still hard.

Well during 2008 recession. One of the big products of Mondragon was creating Washing Machines. Then demand suddenly fell, and they had to lay-off man-power like many other Capitalist corps. However because their policies was made democratically, they have handled it better than traditional Capitalist corps.

Any excess worker of the Washing Machine Cooperative (remember Mondragon is a group of many Co-ops) is offered two options:

1) Keep their membership in Mondragon. Company will re-skill you and get you to work in another coop. Any additional commute time will be compensated by the company.

2) Retire early. You get your retirement benefits. And parting compensation.

Mondragon, since they are not servant to investors can afford to do this. The profits are used for the workers, not for the 1% capitalists. Oh and by the way, compensation for managers and CEOs are only several times the lowest salary. Unlike your capitalist corps where CEOs get a bajillion times more than the avg salary. The key is in the details.

Don't we have foldable monitors and keyboard yet?

Kindle will probably take it away from you anyway.

Maybe we should have some good metric showing how small the sample size is compared to the whole. And maybe make it a rule to add 'Approximation' in the title if it uses that.

UBI to me, should be understood as like receiving dividends like how rich people does today. They simply go to their mailbox and voila, money. I can now work on my GPL'ed 2D game in Java. Or work on free software projects for human sustainability.

The problem however will still remain. The Capitalism system encourages businesses to work for profit mindlessly, and so we have invoked Oracle from the depths of hell. And a demagogue who can possibly tweet us into nuclear annihilation.

Prices will keep increasing and economist will confuse us by calling it 'inflation' and put a bunch of fantasy-based math to delude themselves. The money I got from the mailbox won't be enough to afford me a much need vacation to unwind. And so I will have to gamble my meager UBI money into buying shares, insurance, retirement etc.. Then the corporations will keep exploiting the countries you mentioned, sending firearms to fanatics while extracting resources like oil.

The answer? There is no guaranteed answer I believe. There are simply just too many moving global variables. With that said, I found the idea of worker-owned-cooperatives to be one good path to improvement. The idea is for employees to own the corporation and vote upon what to do with the profits. Ofc, this will require maturity of the employees just like how Agile requires that the team members to be seasoned in building software. The Mondragon umbrella of cooperatives is a good case study of this working in scale. Not perfect but still a success. The worker-owners used the profit to build a school, compensate for the effects of recession etc. Prof. Richard Wolff whom ironically is an Economist himself has been working hard to push this idea.

Well you already said it yourself. It is but a secondary goal. Those that do things worthwhile do it because it is worthwhile, however they understand that we live in a capitalist world where you don't eat if you don't profit.

Only the investors (or gamblers) are in it for money.

> This is literally the startup culture that resulted in the biggest corporations on the planet.

So you think having these corporations are good for us? These are simply big because it allowed gamblers to take a share in the pie. Once the actual people who truly want something worthwhile happen leaves, then we are left with Oracle or Balmer.

> Anarchism is an unworkable utopia that manifests itself as warlord-based tribal disaster akin to what is happening in Somalia and Afghanistan with warlords holding all power in a region, or El Salvador and Honduras with gangs and crime.

What do you really think Anarchism simply means chaos? It's like talking to this person then:

https://pics.me.me/i-dont-know-what-marxism-is-but-letmetell...

> What special credentials or expertise give him insight into work?

His credentials doesn't matter. What matters is what he said.

Thanks for sharing. The documentation is holy.

Nah, we'll have more interesting Github projects if we stop writing the same software over and over again.

People will do creative things.

Ambition will exist even if the useless work we do today (getting clients richer with more software).

Related - Interview of Noam Chomsky regarding Work:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcBLCBxq1k8

> Could a system be designed to be relient against this threat, at scale?

It's a problem that ethereum.org is working on. They have an mvp, but not yet ready to scale.

But one can argue that the internet has enabled some of that utopia. And the printing press from the point of view of those who weren't allowed to read. Yes the Church didn't want people to learn how to read, but humans have prevailed. Hopefully we can solve current problems before the Doomsday clock reaches midnight.

Can somebody who's worked with legacy J2EE applications get a gig? All the buzzword right now is fullstack react/angular + lots of tools to make javascript development scale. Most of my recent experience right now is stopping/starting JBoss and figuring out how to sneak in yet another feature into a 15 yr old java codebase.

Thanks. Looks like a good proper learning material for Prolog. However, I just needed to get a feel or taste of what Prolog is without spending too much time reading concepts.

Thanks for the book suggestion. Quick duckduck for it gives me this pdf:

http://www2.cs.arizona.edu/classes/cs372/spring15/Programmin...

> Today it's a big investment in time to get oneself up to speed, and so making that information more accessible and useful would lower the cost for a citizen to make an informed vote.

And this is why Capitalism is not compatible with Democracy. Especially now that we even call it as 'investment' to be informed to choose who will control our lives. And then there's the fact that it is also an investment to campaign.

However, hopefully, sooner or later, technology will eventually help give the people more information as it did in the past. Pretty sure less centralized medium of information like Twitch or YouTube will eventually replace Fox News or CNN.

The goal however is: enough to make a living

I wonder if the author of the game will still get a decent living despite the freeloaders. Seems to me, setting up some kind of in-game cosmetic shop (and make it like Fortnite[0]) will surely get loyal fans put in the support.

[0] http://www.wisecrack.co/shows/wisecrackedition/fortnite/

But looking at the website, it looks like it's gotten popular enough to support a decent living for years to come.

+1 for using LGPL.

However, seems like there's lots of features that is proprietary (or at least non-free licensed).

Don't we already have a world where machines are the ones producing our needs? There's that Discovery Channel series called "How it's Made" where you see it's practically all robots. Do you agree?

> and without it, the advances you speak of will be used to funnel more wealth to the top.

All the technologies for mass production so far has indeed funneled to the top huh? And this I believe has also slowed down advancement in technology (unless it's something that is very profitable).

> split productivity gains with labor and capital

You'll be called Socialist. Giving what the laborers deserve is Socialism. "Share the means of production!"

However, the fact that Bernie had a following is a good indicator. There's also Corbin whom is pushing for a 'right to own' policy.

There's Prolog in Java via GNU Prolog for Java:

https://www.gnu.org/software/gnuprologjava/

We can use that to run Common Lisp which can run Prolog. Lmao

Since I don't know Prolog (except for it being mentioned in some computer history subject in school), I search for a crash course and found this:

http://www.learnprolognow.org/lpnpage.php?pagetype=html&page...

Good fast tutorial for it.

Side-note: The tutorial calls the condition the 'body' and the resulting facts as 'head' took me awhile to absorb since my brain can't stop thinking of the common syntax: if(conditions){body}

Checked one of the praise review: https://www.pep-web.org/document.php?id=PAQ.053.0286A

Sounds good. My bookmark folder grows.

Pretty sure even "democratic" countries has so much difficulty with corruption. Then there is the Federal Reserve..

My true definition of democracy is direct democracy. Once you start giving power to a representative then you stop being democratic. And that includes power to survive, eat, have shelter, have vacation, have time to study and pursue creative things.

But unless we can instantly communicate like the Protoss can then no, we can't achieve 'rule by the people'. However, it's not simply a choice of Direct Democracy, 3-branch system, 1-party system. We can have system where there is way less concentrated power (again, emphasis on power including many things like education in critical thinking).

Having said that. Yes China is not a democracy. Nor any other country. It is a question of how power (again, my emphasis) is concentrated and the potential of corruption.

> Having said that, I do tend to think “slap a market on it” can often lead to perverse outcome.

Yeah. Just look at where we are today. But calling it "perverse outcome" is sugar coating it.

If it wasn't for profit being the king of all (and being the current common sense). Then we would've put more time into making software more secure.

Lol. The article is about humans not assets.

Well, o-wise one. Maybe for you. But for a non-wise pleb like me. I think this article is really great for introducing the indentifiers "short-game" and "long-game" to me. I think it's a great way to describe this concept.

Yeah. If you are born in the slums. Your chances are ultra slim. You might as well be a chicken born in Human farms.

This is why we the lucky intellectuals who have time to discuss this over hacker news have a responsibility over those who are dealt with a really bad hand.

https://chomsky.info/19670223/

- The Responsibility of Intellectuals

- Noam Chomsky

- The New York Review of Books, February 23, 1967