Kevin Carson

@estelle@mstdn.social Wow o__o That's horrifying, but thank you.

Little help? I'm trying to find the article that quoted engineers at various Musk firms on their practice of designating someone to distract him with some made up problem to prevent him from interfering with their work.

@futurebird@sauropods.win Was the press laughing at some joke told about the people ICE murdered??

The federal immigration agent who shot and killed a 26-year-old Colombian man in Biddeford has been identified as David Michael Brouillette. https://www.pressherald.com/2026/07/16/ice-agent-who-shot-man-in-biddeford-identified-as-former-maine-law-enforcement-officer/

The Backlash Is So Strong That People With "Pervert Glasses" Are Afraid to Use Them in Public https://futurism.com/future-society/backlash-meta-pervert-glasses-afraid

China built a 40-story tower that banks wind power by hoisting giant concrete blocks, then dropping them when the grid needs juice. A skyscraper-sized battery with no lithium in it. https://boingboing.net/2026/07/06/post-china-built-a-40-story-tower-that-stores-wind-powe.html

Stick the Fucking Flag up Your Goddamn Ass, You Sonofabitch - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vObjfSMtB1g

Companies Are Throttling Employees’ AI Use Because It’s Too Expensive https://www.404media.co/companies-are-throttling-employees-ai-use-because-its-too-expensive/

I make a modest amount of money in royalties on a handful of books I’ve published, which are marketed online. I honestly doubt if I’d be selling any at all if I relied on a conventional proprietary model of making people pay before they could look at them. https://c4ss.org/content/45961

@Sheril@mastodon.social Most of the fiction I enjoy is near- to medium-future sci-fi involving postscarcity libertarian socialist utopias that emerge following the "Time of Troubles." I have a blog of reviews of that genre, although I've fallen behind and not yet published draft reviews of several books (among them Ministry For the Future). https://teaearlgreyhotblog.wordpress.com/

@SKleefeld@retro.pizza Ooh, I didn't even think of newspaper comics -- I could've picked Alice Otterloop from Cul de Sac

@ertchin@mstdn.social @ami_angelwings@urusai.social Well, now I know what my pick for Z will be

But... but... but... all the right-libertarian Economics Understanders(TM) at FEE, Future of Freedom, and Mises.org assured me that wages are determined by the productivity of labor.
It's almost as if the Economics they Understand is just a big fucking pile of shit.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/u-s-workers-record-low-wages-labor-share-bls

@ami_angelwings@urusai.social I'm just glad nobody picked AM.

@cstross@wandering.shop Yeah, I got stuck with chromebooks a couple of times in a row because they were cheap and once you've got one it's a lot easier to transfer to another one. But I broke the habit last time around and went back to buying refurbished laptops and having Windows wiped and Linux installed.

@ami_angelwings@urusai.social It would be a much better society if it were understood that parents were only naming babies provisionally, until they were old enough to name themselves, and it were accepted as a normal thing for people to rename themselves at various milestones in their lives. Also that kids could tentatively experiment with gender identities without needing a driver's license and mortgage to certify they were "mature enough," and it wasn't considered some kind of earth-shattering occurrence.

@dtluna@novo-atlantis.null.media Not entirely, but it's certainly one of the most important structural supports.

The trillions that US tech companies extract could be someone else's billions – all they'd have to do is offer the interoperable goods and services that disenshittify America's tech products. They could sell the tools that let anyone in the world use independent app stores, or fix their cars and tractors, and put generic ink in their printers.
https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/05/three-is-a-magic-number/

@Pierrec @ami_angelwings Noah, Lot... sure seem to be a lot of "righteous men" in the Bible who like to get drunk and lay around naked in front of their families

@artemis Hegseth also thinks things like logistics, clearly defined political objectives beyond just blowing the most stuff up, and all that otherr Sun-Tzu/Clausewitz stuff is "woke," and it's all about "warrior ethos" and hammering your fucking jar head into a brick wall while shouting "HOO-raw!" This extends more broadly to the entire administration's approach to everything. Compulsive doomer edgelords cite those articles on how much Trump's done compared to Orban or Putin in the same time period, but they miss the point. Trump's attempted to contest more areas than they did by this point in their regimes, but there's a reason they didn't *try* this much this fast: they're both much smarter than him. Instead of starting out slowly and patiently, and laying the groundwork for gradually consolidating power, Trump immediately started grabbing at everything at once like a toddler, in a way that was unsustainable and would collapse as soon as he began to encounter resistance. It's the equivalent of Hitler starting his drive toward Moscow in March 1933 and doing the Downfall bunker scene a year later. His puerile Rehoboam "my little finger shall be thicker than my father's loins" shit is the same approach Hegseth took in Iran, and it's gotten him the same result Rehoboam got.

David Graeber Library
https://library.davidgraeber.org/

Stand with Kali Akuno: Help a Movement Builder Heal | Chuffed | Non-profit charity and social enterprise fundraising

https://chuffed.org/project/177124-stand-with-kali-akuno-help-a-movement-builder-heal?utm_id=97758_v0_s00_e0_tv0

@ami_angelwings But what a way to die

@ami_angelwings I guess you're probably already aware of this surgeon in Chicago, who has experience with the procedure? https://doctors.rush.edu/details/19529

The argument that capitalists are needed to provide workers with means of production, and profit is their reward for doing so, is nonsense.

All capitalists have are paper or digital claims on the right to allocate means of production or material resources. All of the actual material resources -- means of production and raw materials -- are entirely the product of labor acting on free gifts of nature.

The entire point at issue is the legitimacy of the process by which capitalists happen to be in possession of those paper or digital claims, and how workers come to be dependent on those claims. Why, instead of groups of workers simply acting on the free gifts of nature, advancing streams of material resources to one another, and using a simple unit of account to track the balance of these advances of material resources and who owes what to whom, do they have to go to someone who is in possession of stockpiles of these imaginary paper claims?

Why are capitalists able to interpose themselves between groups of workers, and create the illusion that they are "providing" something when they are in fact simply controlling a toll gate?

The problem is the myth that money is a "thing," some sort of commodity with an independent existence and value of its own, when in fact it is simply a unit of measurement like an inch or a pound. We have a money and credit system based on the myth that a certain class of people must accumulate a pile of paper claims and then "lend" credit "against" them -- a "service" for which they are entitled to payment.

It's as nonsensical as the idea that, in order to cut lumber and build something, a carpenter must first find someone in possession of a pile of inches who can provide them. Imagine all the wasted resources, all the impeded production, if such a bizarre state of affairs actually existed. Imagine how much housing would go unbuilt, how much food would go uneaten, if before the carpenter could saw lumber or the butcher could weigh a cut of meat they had to go to the owner of a supply of inches or pounds and pay tribute for using them. There would be an entire class of people whose incomes came from such tribute for not impeding production. Great amounts of use-value would go unproduced despite the producers having the labor and materials required for production, for want of enough money to pay for the inches and pounds. The owners of inches and pounds would use their revenue to pay for still more inches and pounds, continuing to concentrate the ownership of them, so that they could charge higher and higher prices. There would be great accumulations of inches and pounds, far more than could be used, and equally great amounts of labor and material resources going idle, because producers could not afford the inches and pounds needed to put their labor and materials to use.

This is the world we live in.

@RickiTarr@beige.party Damn, sounds like they're getting a real soaking.

With Ring, American Consumers Built a Surveillance Dragnet

https://www.404media.co/with-ring-american-consumers-built-a-surveillance-dragnet/

"We don’t need to rely on elected politicians to prove their sincerity and take action. Just as workers can withhold labor and halt production, tenants and homeowners have collective financial power too: our monthly rents and mortgages trickle up to the 1 percent and keep the economy running."

https://jacobin.com/2026/02/tenants-housing-rights-debt-rent/

Looks like Indiana's got one of those government hotlines for snitching on woke teachers.
Sure hope nobody sabotages it and renders it unusable with a bunch of fake reports.
https://www.in.gov/attorneygeneral/education-liberty/

@annaecook@mstdn.social Seriously. There are people who already understand that systems can churn out defects because of the way they're structured, regardless of anyone's individual intent to "do good work" and "avoid error," but they can't see how the same thing works when social systems produce racist results even when everyone's schooled to "not see color."

"Nearly half of employees worldwide (46%) would not recommend their company nor their profession to their children or any young person they care about, and 38% of employees globally said, 'I wouldn’t wish my job on my worst enemy.' "
I constantly wished my last wage gig on my worst enemy -- worst enemies being the bastards in the C-suite at said job.

https://buff.ly/3HJq52B

I've published several books and a lot of smaller research papers thanks to my generous supporters on Patreon. My income is getting pretty close to the edge (I've started replacing cat litter with dirt and wood chips to pay down debt faster and free up money for necessities), so if you're interested in my work and willing and able to support it, now would be a good time to start. https://www.patreon.com/KevinCarson

I'm primarily dependent on Patreon, supplemented by relatively small book royalties and Amazon Mechanical Turk income, because I live in the middle of nowhere need to work primarily from home for a number of reasons.

My current long-term book project is described here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/state-and-after-62488512 (Updates here https://www.patreon.com/posts/update-on-65263800 and here https://www.patreon.com/posts/update-on-70841916). I've also got a series of research studies for C4SS.org in the works (past studies at https://c4ss.org/content/category/studies). You can find my books at kevinacarson.org and most of my other writing at https://independent.academia.edu/KevinCarson