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Stack Overflow lays off 20% of staff

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Re: Stack Overflow lays off 20% of staff

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If they can afford it. Capitalism is actually the system of stealing value from your labour in order to make a profit. And yet, freelancers or one-employee businesses are also engaging in capitalism. Are those the ones being stolen from or the ones stealing? Socialist ideas are so confusing that I can no longer tell. > I guess that explains why two of the world superpowers in recent times are/were communist (USSR,…

> > Capitalism is actually the system of stealing value from your labour in order to make a profit. > And yet, freelancers or one-employee businesses are also engaging in capitalism. Those are essentially two different words that happen to be spelled and pronounced the same. The first is a politico-economic system, the second is the act of of entrepreneurship independent of what politico-economic context it occurs in…

> the second is the act of of entrepreneurship independent of what politico-economic context it occurs in.

Given that it can't occur under socialism or communism, I don't think it is independent of the socio-economic system.

But, that aside, you have a point. However, that aside, I see no reason to believe the other person wasn't talking about both.

Re: Stack Overflow lays off 20% of staff

#42
post #8
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how you'd equate communism and nazism. But whether they are the same or not how did you come with 100 million deaths for which the communism is responsible? It sounds plain ridiculous.

Here's 55m to get you started https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward You can research the rest yourself... won't take long

Or maybe 18 million to get me started according to the the same article.

Which one? Let's take something in between. 37 million. Now I have to find 63 million instead of 45. But that's only part of the problem. The other part is how exactly do you know all of these deaths are result of communism directly. Because you see, no matter communism or capitalism people are generally violent creatures. They like killing other people so maybe if the capitalism prevailed after the WW2 maybe there would have been 46 million deaths.

There is correlation between communism and increased number of deaths in a state. There is also correlation between capitalism and increased number of deaths in foreign states (especially if population is brown). But as we all know correlation is not causality.

Re: Stack Overflow lays off 20% of staff

#43
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how you'd equate communism and nazism. But whether they are the same or not how did you come with 100 million deaths for which the communism is responsible? It sounds plain ridiculous.

>I don't see how you'd equate communism and nazism. They are both abject totalitarian ideologies that produced obscene levels of human suffering. >how did you come with 100 million deaths for which the communism is responsible Just add the deaths caused by communist policies (mass-executions, purges, labor camps, collectivization, famine etc).

As a person living in a former communist country I find it quite amusing that after the communism was replaced by capitalism population increase went from a steady increase to steady decrease.

But you know while we talk about how many people has communism killed, we never talk how much child labour and slavery has capitalism produced.. Anyway you get the point.

And by the way it's not that I care about communism. I don't. Never liked it although during these years I was a kid so I didn't have adult Experience. But I don't like capitalism any better.

Re: Stack Overflow lays off 20% of staff

#44
post #42
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's 55m to get you started https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward You can research the rest yourself... won't take long

Or maybe 18 million to get me started according to the the same article. Which one? Let's take something in between. 37 million. Now I have to find 63 million instead of 45. But that's only part of the problem. The other part is how exactly do you know all of these deaths are result of communism directly. Because you see, no matter communism or capitalism people are generally violent creatures. They like killing othe…

The other part is how exactly do you know all of these deaths are result of communism directly

Because they were directly attributed to the Great Leap Forward. Same as the millions killed by the Khmer Rouge in Year Zero.

Re: Stack Overflow lays off 20% of staff

#45
post #10
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how you'd equate communism and nazism. But whether they are the same or not how did you come with 100 million deaths for which the communism is responsible? It sounds plain ridiculous.

65 million in China. Another 30 million in the Soviet Union. A number of other areas with a couple million each.

Oh :) now it's 65 million. I thought it's 55 :) I really thought the more like 25 million on Soviet Union side were during the WW2. While you can attribute some of the to communism most of them you should be the Germans fault.

Re: Stack Overflow lays off 20% of staff

#46
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That still doesn't mean you have to massacre people to evenly distribute property and wealth. The point of Communism isn't to evenly distribute property and wealth. It's to eliminate property ownership completely, and prevent further accumulation of wealth by individuals. The commune part of Communism. > I just don't think mass killings is a key component of Communism as a system. It's not an end goal, but an unavo…

> The point of Communism isn't to evenly distribute property and wealth. It's to eliminate property ownership completely No, just non-public ownership of the means of production (at least in Marxism and those forms of Communism whose approach on this point follows Marxism, which is not all of Communism); this is a frequent point of confusion in criticism of Communism because Communist literature and theory uses a dif…

I need some really substantial Marx citation on that, because in the Communist Manifesto, chapter II, he says:

> In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.

Marxist view of property is that as a manifestation of capital, which can be converted between freely. If you allow private property, you allow its inevitable emergent concentration (e.g. via bourgeois family), and hence amassing of capital and means to exploit other people.

Re: Stack Overflow lays off 20% of staff

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > Capitalism is actually the system of stealing value from your labour in order to make a profit. > And yet, freelancers or one-employee businesses are also engaging in capitalism. Those are essentially two different words that happen to be spelled and pronounced the same. The first is a politico-economic system, the second is the act of of entrepreneurship independent of what politico-economic context it occurs in…

> the second is the act of of entrepreneurship independent of what politico-economic context it occurs in. Given that it can't occur under socialism or communism, I don't think it is independent of the socio-economic system. But, that aside, you have a point. However, that aside, I see no reason to believe the other person wasn't talking about both.

> Given that it can't occur under socialism or communism

While the domain may be limited, it has been permitted in some degree in most real-world implementations of socialism or communism (and it was also widely practiced in pre-capitalist systems, like feudalism.)

There's a relationship between the two terms (capitalism-the-economic-system was named “capitalism” by it's critics because it organizes the structure of society around the interests of those who have been most successful in in capitalism in the sense of private endeavors to acquire capital, after all.)

Re: Stack Overflow lays off 20% of staff

#50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If they can afford it. Capitalism is actually the system of stealing value from your labour in order to make a profit. And yet, freelancers or one-employee businesses are also engaging in capitalism. Are those the ones being stolen from or the ones stealing? Socialist ideas are so confusing that I can no longer tell. > I guess that explains why two of the world superpowers in recent times are/were communist (USSR,…

> > Capitalism is actually the system of stealing value from your labour in order to make a profit. > And yet, freelancers or one-employee businesses are also engaging in capitalism. Those are essentially two different words that happen to be spelled and pronounced the same. The first is a politico-economic system, the second is the act of of entrepreneurship independent of what politico-economic context it occurs in…

> the second is the act of of entrepreneurship independent of what politico-economic context it occurs in

On the contrary, entrepreneurship is very much dependent on the context it occurs in.

In a socialist/communist context, my small sewing machine for customized garments is a "means of production" that is subject to seizure by the "The People". In a capitalist context, I am actively encouraged (subject to market conditions) to expand and build up my own small factory/business to meet demand.

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