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Cake day: August 23rd, 2023

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  • The weird thing is I get cover art and hardware transcoding with Emby but I’ve never paid. I know it has it because 4k playback was lagging until I enabled it 🤷‍♂️ and it would be weird to imagine emby without cover art of any kind. Doesn’t every media app just scrape by title? Is this referring to something else?

    I also use the native emby app on my phone, I think my smart TV has it too, unpaid. Man, I’m really confused about their paid features lol everything I think would be needed seems to be in native Emby as well. So weird.

    Good to know though, I could see downloading for offline use being very useful for travel and stuff.



  • I feel like your interpretation of my comment is really off. I’ve never had issues with paywalls, and the reason I said the ad thing was my only gripe was because I thought I didn’t have to explicitly say it wasn’t a big deal. I haven’t had any problems that make me feel like I owe it to myself to find something better, because my Emby experience has been great.

    The point of my comment is that I’m curious what I’m missing out on, since people’s problems with Emby don’t really line up with my experience.


  • I keep hearing this, but my emby server has been running strong for a few years now without issue. My only gripe with it is the emby premiere ads that take up a lot of home screen space, but I got rid of it with custom CSS that you can put in emby settings, doesn’t even show up on the phone app anymore.

    I’ve heard Jellyfin implemented features that emby puts behind a paywall too, but I’m not sure what. Care to fill me in on what I’m missing?



  • had a famine in the 30s during the horribly botched collectivization of agriculture

    which implies that non-collectivized agriculture was doing a good job considering the significant upswing in the 20s. After the civil war, non-collectivized farms were doing a good job.

    All in all, you’re frustratingly bad at arguing anything coherent, and it’s clear you don’t actually care about proper definitions.

    This response makes me think you didn’t really read my comment very closely considering I literally explain the etymology of the word “public”. Socialism is the public ownership of the means of production, and there’s good reason to consider that state ownership given the history of the word and its use over time. I don’t think I’m incoherent, I just think you don’t understand, otherwise you’d actually address my comment instead of restating your position and implying I’m stupid for not agreeing. I honest to god do recommend taking my comment a bit more seriously and rereading it. Really try to look at what I’m telling you, and if you disagree, I’d love to see you actually point out what’s wrong with my comment.

    You’re never going to convince me I’m out of line here unless I can tell from your response you actually took in what I was saying, because honestly, you really didn’t have to read much of what I said to generate the response you made.


  • HardNut@lemmy.worldtolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldSteve Balmer quotes
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    11 months ago

    I wasn’t referring to 30s and 70s as time periods, but the actual life expectancies.

    Oh, I must have assumed you meant otherwise because the USSR never reached that high of a life expectancy. They peaked in 1970 at 68 years old, at which point it trended down again. Russians never reached a life expectancy of 70 until 2015. You should also consider how volatile that graph has been in general, it simply isn’t good for a state to have that much influence over the life expectancy of all of its people.

    That little bump in 1985-1990 correlates with the reign of Gorbachev. He implemented policy that gave more autonomy to enterprises (less state control), and allowed for foreign trade (opening the market, again less state control). This included giving way more autonomy to the collectivized farms, as well as allowing for private farms for both personal use and for sale on the market - in other words, he de-collectivized. Given that the central authority in the USSR was the state, you could also say the central authority has less control, and thus they decentralized.

    Compare this the the US life expectancy of time. It’s much less volatile for one thing, it’s a very steady incline. They also actually did reach a life expectancy of 70 by 1970, they had it by 1965 in fact.

    .

    Honestly, we totally agree on quite a bit here. We obviously both don’t advocate for Stalin himself, and we totally agree decentralization is a good thing. It’s just strange to me that in the case of the USSR you don’t see how the act of decentralization was literally being less strict on collective control and more lenient on private control - in other words, being less strict on socialist policy and being a little more lenient on private ownership.

    it’s also important to acknowledge that many parts of the USSR did work

    It’s also important to acknowledge which parts worked, it’s also important to acknowledge why they worked. When farmers were given private ownership, they had more freedom of choice in how to manage it, which is really important to have on farms for a myriad of reasons I can get into if you want. But in any case, they were better able to feed themselves as well as bring more product to market. Surplus on food and freedom of distribution means less hunger.

    However, this cannot be meaningfully achieved in a top-down system like Capitalism.

    Take farming as an example since it’s on topic. Capitalism is the private ownership of the means of production. In 1985-1990 USSR most privately owned farms were small scale and personally managed. What’s more top down, a guy owning a plot of land and doing what he wants with it, or being assigned to work a plot by the regional agriculture authority, who answers to the ministry of agriculture, who answered to the council of ministers, who answered to the Communist Party leadership?

    .

    Private Property Rights require a state while public property does not

    Public Property: something owned by the city, town, or state.

    I understand that the line is blurry on whether public means “of the state” or “of the people”. For example, the Romans saw the state to be in service of the people, so “public works” were state works for the people. They also saw the republic as a government of the people, so state projects were of the people either way you take it. This is exactly the same in our democracy, public spaces are managed by the state, on behalf of the people, but the democratic state is also a government of the people, so it’s effectively redundant in the modern context.

    In any case, I don’t exactly think the distinction matters. As soon as a large group of people (the public) see the need to come together and make decisions and how to manage certain things and/or how to cooperate to get something done, a government is formed. When the Romans did this, they literally didn’t have a distinctive word for it, which is why they basically just called it the “public thing”, the group that handled public decision making. The nature of the Roman “public thing” swayed in and out of meaning of for the people, by the people, in service of the people, in command of the people, and it was never exclusive to one of those things.

    Private property demonstrably does not require a state to exist, because that’s not always how property rights are handled. In this early period of Rome, the state could purchase and grant rights, but so could private citizens. If the people of Rome wanted a plot of land to themselves, the legal way to do so would be through a legitimate exchange with a private owner. Property rights are granted by whoever holds the property rights, private or public. Modern nations technically own the land they claim, which is why they grant access.

    .

    The far more important distinction are the things that which the people don’t decide need collective cooperation. That’s what we call “private”. To be privately controlled, you can’t be under the control of the collective or the control of the state, which is precisely why “private” is the antithesis of “public”. In the context of Rome, centralization would be to make it part of the “public thing”. So, if the people and senate of Rome decided to bring the whole market under the control of the people the way they did the army and roads, they would have been both centralizing control of the market and technically socialist, as the means of production would been publicly controlled. The USSR was socialist for exactly that reason.


  • HardNut@lemmy.worldtolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldSteve Balmer quotes
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    11 months ago

    I didn’t say the workers decided things, I said they had a right to, and then alluded to the diplomatic issues that creates… In fact, I heavily implied they can’t realistically make decisions when I said the group decides things on their behalf.

    Central Planned Economy: an economy where decisions on what to produce, how to produce and for whom are taken by the government in a centrally managed bureaucracy.

    In socialism, the market is controlled by the state. This fits the definition of central planning perfectly.

    In capitalism, the market is not controlled by a centralized bureaucracy.


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    11 months ago

    Okay I see what you mean. You agree attempted, but never achieved, I see that now. I’m sorry for misconstruing your argument, but I still take issue with your assertion that things got drastically better. That’s a big red flag to me and tends to be a sign that someone is having a big misunderstanding.

    .

    The Soviet Union doubled life expectancy from the mid 30s to the mid 70s

    While true, it is essentially a lie by omission to leave out other key details. For one thing, if you think about it, what kind of conditions would one have to be in initially to make doubling the life expectancy even possible?

    The Russians were in horribly dire straits. Life expectancy fell from 37 to 32 from 1930-1935. The chief cause was forced collectivization of farming by Stalin. Privately owned farms were confiscated by the state, and were horribly mismanaged which resulted in famine. Socialist policy directly caused that famine.

    Life expectancy started going up again in 1935 after they relaxed grain procurement quotas, decentralized, and opened up private plots. This is the scaling back of socialist policy, and the implementation of capitalist policy. Capitalism policy is to thank for stopping the famine.

    had constant GDP growth until it liberalized and collapsed

    The US has had exponential growth, rather than linear, along with many of its allies. Russia also supplies a large percentage of the world’s oil, you’d have to make fucking up an art to make your GDP go down with a supply like that.

    guaranteed free Healthcare and education,

    Both were an improvement considering I don’t think much was their for either before, so I’ll give ya that.

    and had mass housing initiatives

    These came in response to a housing crisis caused by inadequate supply of houses when the USSR nationalized it under the Central Board of Architecture. The housing initiatives did help, but the housing problem was never solved, and it was a problem created by them.

    It had far lower wealth inequality than before or after its existence

    Because he killed the rich people, and no one had anything. Equality is not an intrinsically good quality, especially when it means everybody is equally impoverished.

    .

    I guess this is why I find the observation that communism has never existed pretty naive. Socialism, in its most honest representation, is really the state ownership of the means of production. The way Stalin held ownership in common, was to collectivize it under the state that all citizens are part of. If we are trying to achieve a stateless society, then holding ownership in common is an antithetical goal. Every step the USSR took away from common ownership was a step towards private ownership, and therefor a step towards capitalism.


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    11 months ago

    Socialism means workers collectively own the means of production, and it isn’t synonymous with central planning.

    This can only be true if you stop thinking at the end of the sentence, without reading into any of the implications, or any circumstantial cause and effect.

    If the workers collectively own everything, then that means that every worker has just as much right as anyone else to make decisions on how the process plays out. This means that the group has to come up with a way to make decisions. Since the group has to make a decision, and everybody has a right to make decisions, the group is effectively making decisions on behalf of those in the group.

    If the workers collectively own everything, then that means they have to work together and organize to get things done. This means that the group has to come up with a way to organize. This means that the group will be deciding on behalf of those in the group what work is done by who.

    If the workers collectively own everything, that means the workers have to decide what rules or laws to follow, and how to enforce them. So now the group has to decide by what convention it’ll hold its members accountable. If it wants to hold members accountable, it implicitly has the power to do so.

    A group with decision making power that enforces law among its members is a central authority.

    A central authority with power over the market and all decision making is central planning.

    Your description of capitalism legitimately sounds like mental gymnastics. You can call anything centralized if you reduce the context to only itself. That is dishonest, the context here is the market. If a market is centrally planned, then all aspects of the market need to be centrally planned by the same unit. That’s what central planning means. A disunited group of private entities all planning things for themselves is absolutely not an example of central planning.



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    11 months ago

    Sure, and capitalism has never existed either, only specific forms of libertarian-constitutionalism 🤷‍♂️

    Now, if you can see how silly what I just typed is, you should be able to see how silly it is to claim communism has never been tried. You say yourself that Marxist-Leninism is a communist ideology, so if it’s being attempted, then it’s valid to say a form of communism is being attempted.

    Do you consider drastically improving upon previous conditions to be a miserable failure?

    All of the citation needed. Don’t make the mistake of including the goals of outcome as part of the definition, that’s just cheating. Op obviously rejects the idea that it makes things better, you can’t just assume it a priori.



  • The very nature of capitalism facilitates concentrations of power

    No. Capitalism is one thing and one thing only: the private ownership of the means of production. The very nature of private ownership, means private citizens have the freedom to own what’s theirs, and trade it with whoever. The nature of capitalism, meaning its logical end state, is a free market in the truest sense. This is the opposite of concentrating power, because the means of power are completely disunited. In less favorable terms, the logical end state of capitalism is anarchy or chaos

    Socialism is the common/public/collective ownership of the means of production. Holding the means of power in a collective is another way of saying it’s being concentrated. The logical end of socialism is the concentration of everything.

    Of course, I don’t think we need to take either extreme too seriously. They both have faults, clearly, and they both devolve into something that more resembles the other with time. Capitalism adopts regulations or develop a state to concentrate their power against and enemy. Socialism reduces state power when civilians want more freedoms.

    Point is, your characterizing of Capitalism seems misinformed, and it’s incredibly silly to think a fundamental replacement of our current system is in order, as if there’s some perfect ideology we can obviously replace it with



  • What you’re describing as a “state”, is more commonly referred to as a “goverment”. (they aren’t synonyms)

    The state is the organization while the government is the particular group of people. When I said state, I was referring to the organization.

    I said that if there’s a disconnect between the definition and reality, you’d better change it

    Please think this through. This hypothetical literally explicitly assumes a word already has an acting definition. According to you, if the definition causes problems with your worldview, it should be changed. But if it has a definition, that means the generally population uses the word in that way. They didn’t uniformly make the same change to the definition that you did, and some may not see the same issue as you do, and you can’t expect every agree that what you see is an issue, because people have different perspective and opinions. Suggesting that you opinion has the authority to change the definitions of words is actually an extremely authoritarian mindset, and it’s the type of political thinking the books like 1984 warned us about.

    Words have meaning, and the meaning of words is important. To take a word to mean something the it already doesn’t, you only serve to destroy means of communication.

    you claim that they’re wrong and insult them

    I’ve been pretty honest about my thought’s on the ideology you clearly align with, but I never insulted you directly or personally.

    Or you hide your own lack of creativity

    I will, however, point out hypocrisy when I see it. Please be more civil.

    I’ve already given a few definitions very explicitly, and they have plenty of academic and historical precedence to back them up.

    I don’t think demanding 7 operating definitions will lead to good faith discussion from you, you have already explicitly stated that you operating definitions are malleable and subject to change when it suits you best. You are also highly disagreeable and have actively ignored several attempts to find agreement in our opinions (you haven’t mentioned state monopolies on violence since I clarified that we agree). Maybe we can focus on a more specific area of disagreement in our definitions?

    We know where we disagree on the definition of a state, yes? I don’t think it should include the piece about their monopoly on violence even though I agree with that assessment. Beyond that, my operating definition doesn’t seem much different than yours. I don’t there’s much that can come from going over this one over and over.

    It makes no sense to demand my definition of Socialism, you already know it! It’s literally what we’re discussing. If I provide a definition I already know you disagree with, you’ll just say “see, that’s the wrong definition!” As if we haven’t been actively discussing that.

    Would you like to focus on my definition of capitalism maybe? I’ve both implied and said outright that it refers to the private ownership of the means of production. It seems like you disagree with that too? Would you like to share why you think this isn’t true?


  • What’s the functional difference between the CEO of a Corporation and some surpreme ruler of a state?

    I was referring to private business owners, not the CEO of a corporation. Considering I think of corporations as an opt in state, I guess I would say not much difference at all. The CEO is beholden to the shareholders (like a state is to it’s people), as well as the rules and regulations of the state that legitimizes it.

    If the model/the definitions don’t fit, I change it/them.

    This actually isn’t how definitions work, wilful changing of a word to fit a specific narrative is simply dishonest and has no precedence in legitimate etymology at all. I can’t stress this enough, you are outright wrong on this is a really bad way. If you are operating on real definitions and things still don’t make sense, it tends to mean you’re missing something. You can’t perfect an ideology just from isolated thinking. What you’ve done is effectively tried to piece together an incomplete puzzle, then started trimming the pieces and adding extra shit to make them fit.


  • The boss being a state bureaucrat as opposed to a business owner is a massive distinction. Government employee’s primary obligation is to their employer: the government, not the business. This dynamic changes things, it’s not the same system.

    Suggesting that we adjust the definitions of words in order to believe your ideology is… an interesting tactic.