Do we need traffic lights or rules of the road?

Empirical Evidence once more points to the naturalness of Anarchy.

In a new installment of Things About “Human Nature” That Are Counter-Intuitive, we now see that far from avoiding chaos, accidents, delays, and congestion, traffic lights and other handed-down-from-above rules are actually facilitating them. This video in two parts gives you the rundown Read more “Do we need traffic lights or rules of the road?”

Must-see documentary: We Feed the World

How globalization is ruining the food industry, causing starvation and destroying the environment. All for profit, while causing more and more people to starve.

Just finished watching this sombering documentary. I’m now oscillating between anger and mild depression. I also want to slap the CEO of Nestlè silly. I can’t recommend it enough. Just find it and watch it.

[youtube]ssP_Bjh6kK0[/youtube]

Can’t say more right now really. Too upset, especially since I keep bumping into apologists of this rotten system.

The Take

The Take is a documentary following the struggle of the workers of a closed factory to take it over and turn into a cooperative.

Reddit recently brought to my attention this little but very uplifting video

[youtube]LPUjR5AReBU[/youtube]

In the comments spgreenlaw mentioned that this was part of a move called The Take. Well, I’ve just watched it and it was brilliant.

The movie is basically about the struggle of the workers of an abandoned factory to take it under worker’s control. It is a real life example of the difficulties that syndicates and cooperatives face when trying to get what most of us would consider as only fair.

If you wish to see what worker’s self-management means and how capitalists will put private property rights over human lives, perhaps you should see it as well.

I just realized I need to read Marx's Capital

We are always told that Marx’s economic analysis is obsolete and not worthy of consideration but in truth, it is as current as ever. just very very ignored.

I have already realized how important it is to be able to undestand Capitalism before you can argue for the need for socialism. That is because one needs to be able to show that Capitalism is flawed, breeding exploitation and inequality and against that Economists Engineers Capitalism proponents will be more than glad to argue.

One of the most classic and basic arguments I hear to this regard is that the Labour Theory of Value is obsolete and irrelevant. That Marx got it all wrong and that Neoclassical economics and especially the Austrian school have shown that it’s all about the Subjective Value. I have already made a small attempt to prove that the LTV still plays a role (imho the most important) and that have actually a dualist system with both Subjective and Objective values.

I was truly under the impression that Marx has somehow missed the subjective value of the equation and thus his argument seemed easy to refute and dismiss. That was, and I’m ashamed to admit, due to neoliberal propaganda. We’ve had it shoved into our heads by modern economists that Marx has already been proven wrong and he didn’t even get the basics right and the like.

It’s all bullshit. Marx understood very well the existence of the Subjective Value and that too was a very crucial part of his explanation of Value. I only realized this by watching an introduction to The Capital by prof. David Harvey who has been teaching the first volume of it for 40 years(!). Just from introductory session I understood that Neoclassical economics did not disprove Karl Marx, they simply ignored him.

This course is also the incentive I need to actually get down and read The Capital for myself and I believe that with the help of these lectures, I will be able to understand and digest the content much better.

I also suggest that many of you take the time to at least watch the introductory session. It clocks at around 2 hours but I believe it’s worth it at least to hear about it outside from the usual derogatory and propagandistic descriptions. Capitalism is the system that is affecting our lives day in, and day out and yet, so very few of us actually bother to understand how it works. The Capital is not a propaganda piece, it’s a attempt to find the rules that govern our current socioeconomic system, you can read it and make up your own mind on if a socialist alternative is required or not.

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What would socialism look like?

A very interesting video about a company using distinctly socialistic methods to improve worker production and morale.

Many people have a vision of Soviet Russia when thinking of Socialism. if not that, probably then propagandistic visions of Cuba or somesuch. But what would Socialism probavly look like? Well, I just found out something close enough to give you an idea

[youtube]gG3HPX0D2mU[/youtube]

UPDATE: I don’t know what’s wrong with the embedding here. If you can’t see it, try the direct link. It worked for me.

If you thinking right now. “Who wouldn’t want to work there”, I say: Exactly!

All that is left to do to take this to the socialist level is to make sure that all the workers of this company get an equal share of the profits (instead of a simple wage) and that they have a democratic say in the company’s path.Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Improving snippits to handle the clipboard

So I’ve spend a little time from my life to get snippits to work. Initially I discovered this little gem through a lifehacker article (which also alerted me to texter for windows) but unfortunately I couldn’t get it to work with the guide included there or on the snippits readme. It just would not load on login.

Fortunately for me, a quick search revealed a guide in the ubuntu fora in which my question was answered. I needed to modify my path variable to include the location of the script. For some reason however this did not work whatever I did. This was even more annoying since my “exit” function of Ubuntu currently locks up my X-Session and the only thing I can do once I press it is to Ctrl-Backspace and restart it. Anyway, I tried various things (even the all classic windows trick, reboot) but nothing seemed to make my path export be accepted. Eventually, I was told that I should try to put it in my ~/.bash_profile file, and fortunately that worked.

Then I set to the task of making useful macros. Inserting a text string is pretty straightforward, you just have to create a file in your ~/.snippits directory which has a name equal to the text you want replaced, so for example you create a simple text file called “fyi” in there (no .txt extension) and inside you write “for your information“. Then if you write in any copy enabled program “fyi” and press your shortcut key, this will be transformed into the “for your information” text. Simple

Unfortunately, I discovered that because snippits eats your current clipboard, I could not use it to wrap links I copied from the address bar in my clipboard in bbcode or html. After asking around the forum however, I did manage to convince the thread author (by challenging him no less) to find out a way to do it. Specifically he used the xclip program to copy the current clipboard into a secondary clipboard and paste from there.

All you need to do to manage that is to install xclip sudo apt-get install xclip and then replace your normal “do” text file with a this:

<%`xclip -o -selection clipboard | xclip -i -selection secondary`%>{shift}{control}{left}{shift}c{control}{paste}

Then on the action you want to paste from the clipboard, you need to use this part:

<%= `xclip -o -selection secondary` %>

at the point that you want the clipboard pasted.

Here’s a little screencast I made as well. It might be a bit blurry but I’ll try to make a better version soon

[youtube]3hThXfzyKvE[/youtube]