• 5 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: November 19th, 2023

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  • In fairness, a lot of socialist theory has a distinction between a “state” and a “government”. The former is the repressive apparatus (police, army and ideological state aparatuses) and the latter consists of the civilian administration which deals with centralised organisation of labor/economy. This is why marx could describe a “stateless society” as developed-communism.


  • America (like most “liberal democracies”) doesn’t have a democratic process to begin with, so your point is moot. Your reps control your entire country and can do basically whatever the fuck they want for 4 years (in the house/presidency), 6 years (in the senate) or life (for SCOTUS).

    In theory, the power of recall or impeachment exists, but you’ve seen yourself how trying to impeach even someone as corrupt as Trump goes.

    Even in cases where there is a semblance of direct democracy (such as state wide propositions), the capitalists own the entire media aparatus (on top of basically every other part of society and nature).








  • From a basic labor theory of value perspective, bitcoin requires labor to produce because mining it requires massive amounts of compute power. This computer power is supplied using GPUs and electricity, both of which require labor to produce.

    If you use this calculator, and enter the values 67 TH/s (tera hashes per second, the rate at which you are mining), 2680 watts for electricity consumption rate, and 5 cents per kilo watt hour as prices, you will see

    4.25 USD revenue per day 3.22 USD cost per day Profit rate = 32.0%

    To make the values of the the hash rate and energy consumption rate realistic, I consulted the specs of the machine antminer S17, which is aparantly a machine used in the bitcoin mining world (I ain’t into crypto mining). The cost of electricty comes from Kazakhstan, which has cheap electricty and substantial mining operations.

    So basically, at the current price of bitcoin can support a gross profit rate of 32% for the people who produce bitcoin, assuming you keep all the profit (no taxes, interest, rent), have no employees or maintainable costs. This is the price currently settled at based on the technological conditions and level of competition.

    It is nothing too crazy of a price, and the rapid growth of price in bitcoin is due to how the currency was designed. Basically, once a certain number of bitcoin have been mined, the bitcoin generation rate per mined block halves. This forces an exponential rise in the difficulty of mining bitcoin, and therefore an exponential rise in its price.

    Most probably, if bitcoin was designed to have a constant difficulty of producing, its price wouldn’t have increased at all.




  • Sodium_nitride@lemmygrad.mltoScience Memes@mander.xyz>:(
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    7 months ago

    That didn’t feel like science so much as politics and I get why some would be against that.

    Respectfully, this is a weak sauce excuse, and a completely unscientific attitude. Scientists do not establish arbitrary barriers between different fields.

    These kinds of statements 99% of the time come from people who don’t even do science, and whose understanding of science consists of “take down data points, analyse data points, be neutral” (paraphrasing your comment).

    In reality, scientific names are usually given to honor specific people. The idea that the community just gives names to people who discovered things is simply ignorant of history. There are literally cases of people purchasing name recognition. There are also cases of people being honored by having their name on a phenomena they didn’t even discover, or a unit they did not create (typical for units, which are standardised by committees and not named after people in the standardisation committee)


  • Sodium_nitride@lemmygrad.mltoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlWhat hills are you dying on?
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    9 months ago
    1. Rainy, damp, cloudy, windy weather is peak weather and beats a “nice sunny day” 80% of the time.

    2. Ice cream is winter food and not summer food because of how fatty it is. Popsicles are summer food and not so appealing in the winter.

    3. All countries should be making a 100% effort towards eliminating all meat (except that produced by subsistence farmers and the like) in their diets for the sake of the climate. Poverty is not an excuse because vegetarian diets use many many times less resources (which is why wealthy countries eat much more meat).

    4. Large wealthy countries should provide free vitamin supplements worldwide to reduce diseases.


  • Oscar Jenkins, 33, was convicted in a Russian-controlled court in occupied eastern Ukraine on Friday of fighting in an armed conflict as a mercenary.

    Mr Jenkins, a teacher from Melbourne, was captured last December in the Luhansk region.

    Prosecutors said he arrived in Ukraine in February 2024, alleging he was paid between 600,000 and 800,000 rubles (£5,504 and £7,339) a month to take part in military operations against Russian troops.

    The article seems to claim that this guy is a mercenary, but someone in the comments is claiming that this guy is not a mercenary because he is a member of the UAF’s foreign legion. I don’t know if there is any additional context here that I am missing.




  • why would the US care about gaza

    Petrodollars, settler colonialism and imperial control. Israel and the Gulf monarchies are the linchpin of the petrodollar, aka the American government’s ability to run a massive trade deficit over decades with minimal inflation, something no other country can do. This gives the American government unlimited spending power (for its military).

    There is also the geopolitical aspect of dividing the middle east, figuratively and literally, as well as having a forward base there to put pressure on Europe, Russia and China.

    Finally, a huge number of “israelis” are really just American settlers. From the standpoint of the American bourgeoise, having a settler colony with a racialised underclass is very profitable, as this underclass (the Palestinians) are easily exploited workers. Furthermore, the American firms can test weapons on Gaza and their partnership with companies in the occupation yield them economic benefits.