How I tell my friends I'm on Lemmy

I've always been partial to this one

Honestly it's not all great, lots of it I kinda check out through, but there are some great bits that make the whole show worth it for me at least.

But yeah being in on references to it is honestly great because of how original/memorable some of the bits are, I think.

Similar situation with some of the less popular Monty Python movies or sketches, while watching I'm just like, ok this is weird, then while you're explaining it or talking to someone who knows you're just cracking up...

I felt exactly the same way about the UK version if the office - great in jokes but waay too cringe inducing for me

This is how I feel about a lot of shows in this vein, The Office, Parks and Rec, Sienfeld etc. They have really funny and quotable/refrenceable bits but actually watching whole episodes or seasons can get oddly depressing.

Yh I kind of feel it was hyped up so much for me that it was always going to be disappointing.

I tried rewatching recently but I could not go past the recorded laugh.

What if I just download the means of production?

no need, i'll simply keep the surplus value of my labor

no, but I'd pirate it.

You don't know me

Maybe just spread it around a little bit. Managers do do some work...

You wouldn't execute 700,000 landlords...

This is my one obsession. Fear of how we can't possibly all be employed, because of automation, and how the resources and power will keep concentrating in the hands of those who own the automation. I've had this argument with friends that aren't as left leaning as me, and what i'm told over and over again is that i just lack the vision. That this has been a scare since forever, and yet look at how new jobs keep popping up. "There'll be jobs you can't even imagine right now", they say. "Fearmongers like you have been around since forever". "Employment is actually going up".

In my mind though, we're like the horses when the engine was invented.

Great plain language breakdown for the uninitiated. Doesn't disregard socialism as a solution to the problems outlined, but that's a whole other discussion. Frankly at this point in history, it's largely academic IMHO.

a lot of the human populace is becoming useless.

Emphasis mine. This would be my only edit. Useless only as a consumer and worker. Still imbued with dignity and capable of generating meaning and experiencing a worthy life.

Have you seen the concrete 3d printers by chance? My dad was smart enough to get 2 a few years ago. Not only did it cut material costs by about 50% in construction, we went from running a 20 man crew to a 4 man crew when running those things.

This is where the gaps in your perspective start, concrete 3D printing is incredibly niche, and would usually take more higher paid labor to be used in places that replace concrete methods. That's not to mention the significant labor in their design and production.

That's the same with medical AI, AI in general has a massive hallucination problem, but for diagnosis especially, just as many doctors are actually needed for the core part of their job- treatment and running the tests to gather the data for the AI in the first place.

The economy functions on people exchanging the product of their labor for the product of other people's labor. The amount of useful things produced per hour of a humans labor going down is a good thing. It means we have to work less to live comfortable lives. Capitalism has been remarkably effective at that, it allows people to be as lazy as possible. Communist societies on the other hand, have had no incentive and therefore have not minimized human labor. Why invest in ways for people to work less? What benefit would the planner see in that, if they already have the people to fill those positions?

The one of the most arguments in favor of capitalism is innovation, and then people point to the several clear examples of centrally planned countries inventing something- but that forgets the equally important innovation. Innovation in production, which no centrally planned society has ever excelled at.

Your probably the only serious communist I've came across. So I'm curious how do you expect innovation to happen in a communist world. I know we live in a corrupted capitalist society. But while we have had many counties try and fail to make a thriving socialist society. We have had capitalism thrive and make everyones lives better. We've had many people call amarica today late stage capitalism, but that implies that it's inevitable that society will be corrupted by blind brand loyalty and companies will buy out compition. So why do you think we should change to communism, instead of eradicating blind brand loyalty and cracking down on wealth gained through stifling others.

I'm not a communist, but I agree. I think most people would agree communism/socialism would only work if there is abundance, which in this case will be brought by automation. This is exactly what Star Trek predicts-- if global warming doesn't get to us first.

This is a good empathetic arguement for socialism. Unfortunately many terrible people like the second solution of just killing off the unemployable in various ways. This was usually done through invading neighbors which increases ones own power and reduces your own unemployable workforce. If you don't want to kill off your own people, you may also have a minority group in your borders that can be put on trains for removal in various ways. Unfortunately the Karl Marx saw a common issue in history and proposed an empathetic way to solve it, but most people I know are assholes and prefer the second option.

Isn't that the thing, we needed capitalism now to be able to have communism in the future?

As you can see from your upvote/downvote ratio, most of the vitrol towards communism here is rightly directed at the Tankies, as theres a LOT of them spewing braindead takes that are the weirdest mix of SJW (For lack of a better term for nice sounding but low thinking social takes) and authoritarian... as if authoritarians or violent revolutionaries are ever going to care for any minorities past getting into power.

While everything you said is true, another fact is also true. We could have already automated away almost 2 billion middle and upper management jobs worldwide. They refuse to deploy that automation because that would eliminate all of the crony capitalist jobs that exist, and they, the ultra rich, could have saved themselves trillions of dollars in the last decade.

They prefer to automate the jobs that are harder to automate, so they can drive all the "poors" further into poverty. Every economic analysis in the last decade has shown that the rich refusing to embrace automation and a fair minimum basic income, have cost them at least $100,000,000,000,000 dollars in the last 45 years. Yeah that's 100 trillion dollars in growth that they just threw to the wayside, knowing it was there, just to see how many of us they can kill before we decide to kill them.

I am not reading all that shit dog

Everyone on hexbear and lemmygrad is already a communist, so they don't spend a lot of time trying to convince each other that communism is good and capitalism is bad, although they do post specific examples. It's mostly current events, venting, and shitposting. A lot of the serious discussion is either in the weekly news megathread or buried in the comments under some shitpost begging xi jinping to nuke the white house.

He probably refers to the hexbear/Lemmygrad Members. Aka the latter

Every debate i have with people on lemmy eventually ends in them resorting to 4th grade insults towards me or just straight up throwing hissy fits.
Lemmy is full of children who think anarchy is really good and has no flaws but they cannot explain how societal flaws would be fixed by it. Anarchy is just an example.

And trannies

I too love identifying with a word rather than holding my own beliefs. Then when others also identify with that word and do something bad, I say they're not a real representation of that word.

Yes, it makes sense.

Cannot say I have really noticed any more than I did when on Reddit.

Couple things here: Communism is Socialism, a form of it. Communism has never been "implemented" either, as it's specifically a post-Socialist stage. The ML states you're referring to were Socialist, and didn't reach Communism.

Secondly, the ML states were ML states, and as such were deliberately adapting new theory proposed by Lenin and distilled by Stalin.

I'm in no way a Stalinist, or a simp for the USSR, your comment is just wrong.

By your very same logical chain, Capitalism is an ideology 400 years old that failed miserably every time, as well as Socialism. It's meaningless word salad.

Can’t say I have noticed them any more prevelent here than in Reddit and such. Agreed that a balance between capitalism and communism is probably the sweet spot as has been demonstrated in countries with the highest happiness and other such ratings.

Maybe if this was Reddit, but on Lemmy there are vast numbers of Communists and Socialists, not just Social Democrats who want Capitalism with band-aids. The founder is a Communist, and decentralization is core to leftist ideologies.