I’ve had an antagonistic relationship with a vendor like this, it’s awful. In my case the vendor was supposed to be a fast moving tech startup - the only thing that moved fast there was the revolving door of engineering talent coming and going.

Even worse, my boss had been convinced by their founder that he had all this pull with the company, and since the company was super cool, that made him super cool, and I dunno if you’ve ever tried to criticize something that has made a middle aged nerd feel cool for the first time in his life, but let’s just say it was not a fruitful endeavor.

The number of things I effectively fixed for them via email, the abominations I had to construct to work around the things they refused or failed to fix…bad times.

As a lefty gun owner, couldn’t agree more. Peace as a choice is only available to the folks who know how to do otherwise, and frankly even simple know-how isn’t enough. Pacifism is no virtue, peace is no natural state.

I hope this comes across as a genuine question, despite the thread itself getting a little jacked up. Like many of us, I’d like to find better systems of governance / better solutions to the problem of needed / beneficial coordination.

How does a communist society as you’ve described defend itself against opportunistic, hierarchical forces that would subsume and control it? What is the (de-coordinated? If you’ll accept my term?) answer to such a problem, pragmatically?

Agreed. It’s the shitpost com, so fair game I guess, but all of us humans do this thing where the more we see or hear something the more we soften toward it subconsciously. It’s almost the basis of advertising. That’s good in general, but not in this case, fuck this dude forever. I don’t want my subconscious tryna tell me otherwise just cuz people enjoy the lols, but hey, that’s me.

I hope you’ll update us if you chase this down. I like 404 Media and I want to keep liking them, but only if the reporting is good. Hopefully it’s a typical tech journalism mistranslation where they use Tesseract OCR to scrape PDFs and the author just misunderstood, or something like that.

Edit: after looking, I don’t have any issues. Looks like just a raw list from whatever source, I don’t need 404 Media to try to “curate” that or remove elements that seem irrelevant, they can leave that to us.

Lol I forgot about that! Yeah fuck em both of course, but I feel like most folks would put their money on the ex-KGB agent who seized and kept control of freakin’ Russia over nepo-baby “gamer”, “engineer” Musk. What a goofy threat. And I say that as a middling gamer and engineer myself lol