This is definitely a joke. Taking something to an absurd extreme is a valid source of humor and I feel like this does a solid job of parody. Nice little references thrown in, too.
At the same time, Poe’s Law: “Without a clear indicator of the author’s intent, any parodic or sarcastic expression of extreme views can be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of those views.”
If I send you a 24TB hard drive in the mail and it takes three days to arrive, thats high bandwidth, high latency.
If I send you a 24 character morse code message over the radio it’s low latency and low bandwidth.
I think it is, at some level. The definition of socialism, especially when not contrasted with social democracy, Democratic socialism, or communism, can be very vague, but the idea that a portion of labor is shared back feels like it’s in line with the spirit.
From Miriam Webster:
“any of various egalitarian economic and political theories or movements advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods”
Taxes are just a way of taking some of the value of goods and redistributing them. Governments enforcing taxes are them getting involved with the administration of said goods.
There are a lot of options.
In fact, for most of American history, neither Zuck or Gates would give away any part of their company. They just need to pay their taxes to give back for the gains afforded them by society.
Do you think either of those folks made their companies on their own? Completely? In a vacuum? Sure, Zuckerberg did a lot of work, but the Internet was made with public funds. It runs on the national electric infrastructure. Employees get there on public roads. The protocols we use are standardized by the federal government. Their employees have public educations. The languages that they use are open source and community maintained.
It doesn’t have to be a cooperative. Even just going back to the way the US worked before Reagan when we had strong social safety nets, lots of public funding, and general social mindedness would be a step towards socialism.
I’m not opposed to some folks being wealthier than others; I’m opposed to people starving because we cannot sate the rich.
I don’t hate money as a tool. I hate systems that maximize it over humanity.
I’d have a canary token url so I could see where my photo ended up and who was looking at it. I’d redirect through to a grabify link, then to an intermediate link that looked like malware but was actually a Rickroll.
A US $1 weighs 1g according to a random website I found on the Internet. I tested and it’s close enough.
As of today 2026/06/02, a gram of gold is worth about $140 assuming it’s minted and the purity is known.
That honestly surprises me. It means that gold and bills (assuming c-bills) are within an order of magnitude of each other.
Worst case with bill denominations: half a million. Best case with bill denominations: 50 million dollars.
Worst case with gold: $140/g less 10% worst case for verification and bulk buy discounts. $120/g ballpark. $60 million. Best case with gold: ~$70 million dollars upper bound for known minted purity.
So gold has the highest potential return but also the highest overhead.
I’d probably go gold. Even if I lost 50% due to overhead, I’d be able to pay my mortgage and my brother’s student loans and for my mum to live in a nice place.
Honestly, any of them would be a life changing amount of money.
No. It’s not okay when China does it either.
EDIT:
And yet, you registered on .ml.
Thank you for pointing out the issue with, I think, the ML instance? I don’t particularly like how it was done and have some critiques, but those can wait and this can be a good teaching opportunity for both of us.
If you’ll note the age of my account you may realize that Mastodon Fed didn’t exist when it was created. In fact, when I signed up as part of the great Reddit Exodus there weren’t many other functional instances. The other alternative I tried didn’t send me an account activation email. It would seem the ML is the only one that would have me at the time.
After reading your post I found myself scratching my head thinking, “Why is this person talking about China? I didn’t even mention China?” Then I thought, wait, is the lemmy dev an advocate for genocide or something? I don’t see any articles on that and it’s an open source project. Perhaps the ML instance is mainly hosted in China? But I’m not giving them money?
Finally, I found someone mention that the ML domain was “Marxism-Lenninism” and not “machine learning”. I haven’t confirmed this so don’t take my word as gospel.
Now the question is, “do I move instances?”
That’s a longer conversation.
There’s no meeting in the middle with folks who are trying to make a white ethnostate.
I’ll debate with my friends about lots of things: is it worth adding a new tax? Is the needle exchange program appropriately measuring their numbers? Does it make more sense to build a homeless shelter next to the other one in the tenderloin to keep disadvantaged folks next to their peers or should we build it farther north so we balance people across care facilities.
These are the things we debate.
Things like, “do trans people deserve human rights?”, “are concentration camps okay?”, and, “are we cozy with state sanctioned extrajudicial murder?” are not up for debate. The answers are “yes”, “no”, and “no”, and if anyone disagrees with that fuck them. They are a waste of my time and emotional energy. They will never be convinced.
I’m triaging. My friends and family and community need my limited energy. They deserve it.
I used to ask if I could work extra and leave a little early or take a long lunch. My current employer is far more chill about it and will let me do so if there’s nothing pressing. Still had to burn a half day of sick time to bring doggo to the vet.
But like others are saying, “you don’t.” Life is a Sisyphean nightmare of falling behind on laundry, cleaning, legal obligations, etc. Live in quiet desperation and perpetual exhaustion. “Truly the best of all possible worlds.”