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Stack Overflow lays off 20% of staff

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Re: Stack Overflow lays off 20% of staff

#51

Post by [deleted] »

logicchains wrote: post #29
GVIrish wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're conflating communism and authoritarianism. Nothing about Communism as a concept requires massacring people. It's just that in the 20th century those who were murderous autocrats used Communism to convince their (often poor) countrymen to give them power and they killed people in service of that power. Communist and Socialist governments were a popular vehicle for getting poor people to join an uprising in the…

>Nothing about Communism as a concept requires massacring people. It requires either jailing or massacring people who own any property and don't want to give it up, and any people who choose to exchange goods and services with each other.

[deleted]

Re: Stack Overflow lays off 20% of staff

#53

Post by DKnoll »

thekaleb wrote: post #48

> “I don’t see HackerNews or GitHub as competing against us directly for the same dollars or even the same attention,” CEO and co-founder Joel Spolsky said at the time. Does Hacker News make "dollars"?

It promotes YCombinator startups, which in turn makes them money.

Re: Stack Overflow lays off 20% of staff

#54

Post by GVIrish »

logicchains wrote: post #29
GVIrish wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're conflating communism and authoritarianism. Nothing about Communism as a concept requires massacring people. It's just that in the 20th century those who were murderous autocrats used Communism to convince their (often poor) countrymen to give them power and they killed people in service of that power. Communist and Socialist governments were a popular vehicle for getting poor people to join an uprising in the…

>Nothing about Communism as a concept requires massacring people. It requires either jailing or massacring people who own any property and don't want to give it up, and any people who choose to exchange goods and services with each other.

The difference between jailing people and massacring people is HUGE though.

I do think it's very difficult to get around the problem of people not wanting to give up private property when a society shifts into Communism. But in the future when/if automation can provide a very high standard of living with far less labor inputs, maybe it will become something viable in some form without massive heavy-handed coercion.

I think varying forms of somewhat Socialist democracies will probably win out in the next century or so, but it's very hard to predict given that some potential advances in technology could dramatically reshape economies and governments.

Re: Stack Overflow lays off 20% of staff

#56

Post by UncleMeat »

varjag wrote: post #46
dragonwriter wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Private property and personal property are distinct in socialist and communist thought.

Re: Stack Overflow lays off 20% of staff

#57

Post by varjag »

UncleMeat wrote: post #56
varjag wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Private property and personal property are distinct in socialist and communist thought.

I would still insist on a Marx quote where he draws the distinction. Not a late 20th century interpretation with benefit of hindsight.

Re: Stack Overflow lays off 20% of staff

#58

Post by 9erdelta »

I actually think GitHub is a competitor. More and more often I find myself getting answers by reviewing discussion about issues on GH. Also, places like Discord I've ended up in commmunities where I can get answers to my programming questions. It's anecdotal, but it has caused my usage of SO to drop over the last year and a half or so.

Re: Stack Overflow lays off 20% of staff

#59

Post by dragonwriter »

varjag wrote: post #57
UncleMeat wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Private property and personal property are distinct in socialist and communist thought.

I would still insist on a Marx quote where he draws the distinction. Not a late 20th century interpretation with benefit of hindsight.

The distinction between property generally and bourgeois property, and the statement that Communism aims for the elimination of the latter and not the former is in the paragraph of the Communist Manifesto immediately preceding the one your quote is drawn from.

“The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property.”

Again, “private property” in Communist theory is narrower than the usual capitalist understanding; particularly, neither consumer goods nor money insofar as it cannot be exchanged for a proprietary interest in the means of production in a society which has progressed to the socialism stage as envisioned by Communism are necessarily included in “private property”. (And, even personally held means of production that cannot be converted to bourgeois property because of controls on engaging wage labor are frequently not sought to be banned in practice—which may be contrary to Marx’s statement on private property, but is consistent with the focus on borgeois property which is explicitly it's underlying motivation.)

Re: Stack Overflow lays off 20% of staff

#60

Post by merdreubu »

zaro wrote: post #43
merdreubu wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 d…

> 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.

I live in a former communist country too, one that suffered under a North Korean inspired regime in the last decades before communism collapsed in a bloody revolution. And population was increasing at the fastest rate in Europe at the time, despite the miserable living conditions only because abortion and contraception were forbidden because the communist leadership wanted to increase the number of state slaves as fast as possible. Hundreds of thousands of children were abandoned by parents unable to care for them due to lack of food, lack of money and lack of space in the cramped apartment blocks. Countless children ended up in secretive state run orphanages that looked more like concentration camps. Here's a clip of one of those happy places

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOS3jBy3bl4

Anyway, yay population increase!

> 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.

How did capitalism produce child labor and slavery? You must be pretty historically illiterate to not know that it was capitalism that made child and slave labor obsolete through technology advancements and automation. The very concept of childhood as we understand it today is the product of capitalist societies during the industrial revolution. And it was the capitalist societies that birthed the abolitionist movement and also exported it all over the world through various means more or less peaceful. Blaming capitalism for those things is like blaming the cure for the illness it removes.

> 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.

Of course you don't like "capitalism", who the hell would like "capitalism" if it would mean what you think it means (that whole slavery and child labor bullshit).

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