There’s not much value in money that can only be used to purchase land/raw materials.

On the contrary—with automation converting raw materials to finished goods essentially for free, raw materials would be worth more than ever.

There are still (some) consumers—other capitalists.

Labor might become worthless, but money would still have value derived from ownership of capital (factories and raw materials). A tiny capitalist class would still produce and sell to each other, while the rest of humanity would be left with literally nothing to work with.

You’re not wrong—the protests in their current form aren’t going to achieve anything by themselves.

But adding some specific set of demands will accomplish even less: it will alienate supporters who don’t agree with all the demands, and it will allow Trump to claim to address the issues by cherry-picking and distorting the demands beyond recognition (see the Black Lives Matter protests a few years ago).

If we reach a critical point where mass protests can achieve some real, concrete good, it will be due to contingent circumstances that neither side was able to predict. But the contribution the current protests can make to that moment is to give everyone the confidence that the numbers are on their side, once a productive channel is found.

If a bus driver is trying to drive off a cliff, the passengers can band together to stop it even if they haven’t all agreed on a preferred destination.

You could specialize in types of crime the cops don’t usually get involved in, like corporate wage theft.

Reminds me of the Berkeley balcony collapse during a student party ten years ago.

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Entire story content:

Sen. Mitch McConnell, 83, fell to the ground in a Capitol hallway Thursday afternoon as he made his way to Senate votes. This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.

New update:

McConnell, who announced in February that he would not seek reelection, fell to the floor while two volunteers from the environmental advocacy group Sunrise Movement approached the senator and asked him a question about Immigration and Customs Enforcement actions. He did not respond to the question. The senator seemed unsteady, but got up and kept walking with the help of his detail. He then waved to the two individuals who were questioning him.

Attack by environmental terrorists confirmed.

The way Linux treats many things as part of the file system (devices, sockets, etc.) that Windows doesn’t.

Jenkins in the article: “there has to be an arrest that takes place of an agent, which requires an intermediary set by another law enforcement agency.” Seems she’s passing the buck to law enforcement.

Edit: I’m not trying to defend her, I’m just quoting her actual excuse for reference.

Bureaucracy.

First they came for the woodwinds, and I said nothing because I play in strings.

Edit: It’s a silly joke, but I do think instruments in an orchestra is a good metaphor for the importance of diversity to society.

Since a theoretical communist society would be stateless, the idea of a fully communist country is an oxymoron. Instead you have countries claiming to be transitional states that are laying the groundwork for true communism at some point in the future.

The “Fall of Rome” conflates a lot of different events, covering over a thousand years:

• The end of the Republic
• The Crisis of the Third Century
• The fall of the western empire
• The fall of Constantinople to the Fourth Crusade
• The capture of Constantinople by the Ottoman Empire

The one most usually thought of is the fall of the western empire… and while it was preceded by some stupid policy decisions, they weren’t notably more stupid than many other decisions the empire made over the previous five centuries. From an institutional perspective, it was actually a relatively boring period.

(Many of the other comments here are pointing to things that were pretty much constants for most of the empire’s existence, so if you want to blame them for the fall, you need to explain why the empire didn’t fall 500 years earlier.)

I think humans are natural storytellers who rely on the construction of narratives for most of our basic thought processes. But the natural world is inimical to narrative, so we employ narrative worlds whose functioning is adapted to the requirements of storytelling. (Even “naturalistic” storytelling relies on subtle tweaks to the laws of causality and probability, if nothing else.)

So I believe that we can’t make sense of the world without relying at least implicitly on the supernatural, but I don’t believe that it corresponds to anything external to our own cognition.

But the “laws of nature” are just provisional rules we’ve deduced through observation. When we see things that violate the rules as we’ve deduced them (and we often have), we figure out new rules—we don’t just assume there are things to which the rules don’t apply.

That’s how instant runoff voting works (assuming you’re still starting with a small list of candidates).

“Yes, Precious—we meant ‘us’!”

Bill them a consulting fee for doing their HR work for them.