This is only really useful in low expressiveness languages where there is not a huge set of language enhancements possible through libraries. Think Java exception handling for example.

In essence it works if you “best practices” are things like don’t use switch statements.

It doesn’t work if you best practices are things like use Result<T, E> from this functional result library.

Essentially LLMs don’t really work “at scale” if you need anything more complicated than what the average internet tutorial code is in your language.

Same with perf.

Also this only works 60% of all the time though if that, so the more requirements you pile on the less likely it will hit all of them properly.

Hardware can’t really have “tech debt” in the same way as software. Hardware is a physical entity, each computer is a different computer, they’re the same model, the same design, but they’re different computers. Each installation of software is a direct copy. If we’re on the same architecture and the same version, we’re running the same Firefox unless something is wrong with Mozilla.

I think hardware that’s outdated is bound to happen. As a hobbyist I have my own share of “outdated hardware”. In reality that shit still works. I can pull an old laptop and put Fedora Silverblue on it today and it will work just fine for surfing the web, writing on forums, doing a good amount of hobbyist software stuff, etc.

And there in lies the problem, that much of the lifecycle of hardware is directly tied to software support and typically very strongly to bad commercial software. We can give people reasons to not upgrade and we’ll write better software for it. Some of the best software is effectively eternal, for example I have used vim my entire professional career even when I was writing Java.

I think the biggest problems is that there’s too much hardware and proprietary hardware being made now a days, and not enough hobbyists to get it basic support. For example unless the landscape changes in 6 years I will likely have no way to revive full functionality for my M1 Apple silicon.

But that’s PC’s, the more egregious things are smaller form factor devices. Android has been the biggest disappointment for me to be honest. What was sold as a “Linux Phone” gave you none of the technical benefits of Linux. So much small form factor stuff essentially becomes ewaste. The small amount of platforms that gain hobbyist support are extremely rare and limited. This is exacerbated by tight integration between physical devices to server side software as a service platforms.

If the libre movement was not a hollowed out husk of it’s former self and the economic conditions were able to create a new set of leaders for it we would have

• GPLv4 that requires you to license as GPLv4 if you use any remote procedure call regardless of medium that executes GPLv4 code.

• GPLv4.1 that requires any device where GPLv4.1 code comes factory installed must have a fully documented and unlocked bootloader and/or user serviceable firmware flash functionality

• GPLv5 that requires you to license as GPLv5 if you have any use of GPLv5 code in the tool/supply chain of a software for examle if FoxConn is using gnutls and you use a MacBook you’re licensing as GPLv5, if you are a GPLv5 compiler, you’re licensing as GPLv5

• GPLv6 that makes legal to execute your landlord if they charge you rent and any GPLv6 code is used by them directly or indirectly

That would really fix some things regarding ewaste and frankly housing. TBH I think we’re gonna see general computing calm the fuck down in the next 10-20 years compared to the onslaught of release cycles in the late 2000’s and 2010’s. The only real possible driver is going to be if games really glom on to ray tracing bullshit beyond the AAA contractually obligated messes.

I honestly feel like a walking infohazard most days. I have started reflexively weaponizing my autism to that extent.

I was literally explaining the context of a project I’m working on to a mid-level exec and I was explaining the incentive structure of our team (with a graph that had directionality and weight) within the business. The structure was typical and showed that the strongest incentives (e.g. the things that have strongest ability to decide roadmaps, implementation and prioritization) exist surprise surprise outside the team. It’s incredibly bad because there’s like 7 strong outflows (lovely bold lines leaving a big box with our org label on it containing our teams as nodes tells a great simple story), in our structure to various stakeholders, and only middling and weak inter-team flows. I literally used the term “we have responsibility without authority” in the exec summary. You’re 100% preaching to the choir here.

I’m stealing this one, because it’s a very apt description:

Production is the process which sets in motion the productive forces, which can only happen within given relations of production.

You’re misusing terms here and I don’t really want to nitpick because I’ve also been fast and loose, but under Marxist analysis the combination of productive forces ( tools and labor) with the relations of production (relationships between individuals) create the mode of production (capitalism). They do not create production itself.

I mention this only because it aligns with my point that these concepts are more general than the actual technical work and decision making within the productive process itself, which is what I am trying to describe. It’s a level of specificity that I’ve been badly trying to explain:

1. Brumaire – The general description of a dependent recursive process through the metaphor of history
2. Mode of Production – The sociological description of how a society generally organizes around production.

To the side of that:

1. Production Cycles – A technical description of a general production process
2. Tech Debt – A technical description of contradictions within specific capitalist production process

Our mode of production, capitalism, has an impact on the tools I use by their availability, their market dynamics, and cost. However it does not actually force my hand to choose one over the other, and it does not take away my agency in fighting for that choice. It merely creates an incentive for the system to override that, but remember kids “code is king” is a weapon for just these types of times if you can wield it politically. Given my position on most of the teams I’ve been on, and my autism I’m usually swinging for the fences.

Instead of fussing with these concepts, we should focus on the material forces of production and the relations of production.

These conceptualizations do not heavily factor into the technical decision making within a process. They can in certain respects, for example how representatives of capital nest themselves in the middle of the process. However there are inherent technical considerations beyond the mode of production, we should always keep the relations of production in mind when working through them.

I don’t expect engs that I manage to go out of their way unless they’re obsessives like I am because of the relations of production and the mode of production. However I do expect them to be able to work through the technical decision making and consequences on the process of production of those decisions. That’s generally within their purview.

For example: I do not expect an engineer to compensate for a delay by overworking. However I do think if they introduce a new library they have to explain why we need it, explain how it affects the stability of the system, explain how it affects how we write software, and ensure that the trade offs are not making it harder to do our jobs.

You can reify that through the relations of production, e.g. devs have a responsibility to each other not to make the work harder. However that abstracts away what “making the work harder” actually means technically speaking because that is the actual hard part and what I actually get paid for.

If relative surplus value is received through technological innovation, then technical debt (understood generally) is simply the opposite possibility: technical debt is the accumulation of inefficiencies in terms of value inputs which threaten to make the business uncompetitive. This can be because of code complexity, code size, spaghetti code… or a zillion other industry-specific reasons. But these are mere manifestations of productive inefficiency, and they matter not because of subjective “negative outputs” but because they threaten the one thing that matters to a capitalist: their production of surplus value.

This is a just so story. Capitalists themselves often cannot tell what threatens “their production of surplus value.” The zillion industry specific reasons do not have a clear calculus, and they do not have a clear calculus in other sectors in the real world either. This is the problem, capitalism, especially in software, is a speculative hindsight based understanding. I am talking about conceiving of production via foresight. The reason I explain process cycles is that it’s very easy to point out parts of the cycles that cause waste. Whether a capitalist accepts that waste or not is irrelevant, because that’s the capricious nature of of the mode of production. The capitalist themselves is a source of waste.

The job of a software architect or tech lead or any software leader is to explain these decisions and their consequences (e.g. the cycles of production) via foresight to a baby brain dullard who will then shit all over their plans anyway.

Put in this way, we don’t need “fuzzy” concepts like error or risk or negative output to understand technical debt.

I disagree with statement solely on the fact that technical debt itself is a fuzzy concept.

Beyond that process cycles represent a real way to explain the long term viability of software production which creates a relative measure for technical debt. I am not an oracle even though I wish I was, seems like a cool job. I cannot tell if the market will “reward” us for our “brilliant idea”. I can tell however that producing software in a certain way if not rectified going to lead to failure sooner rather than later under the context of the social relation.

For example if you have a capricious management or a uncertain market, there are choices that you can make in the architecture of your program that make your project more sensitive or more resilient to resourcing changes on your team. In order to figure out that path you need a framework, other than the social relation, because under the current social relation the logical conclusion is if you have a stupid boss you should just find a new one or give up until the revolution comes.

As socialists we talk a lot about the “antisocial” nature of capitalism, and this is an opportunity to fight to prevent that natural inclination. I cannot morally make that choice to say “this technical situation is management’s problem”, because I have people who’s children depend on me making and pushing through good technical choices to minimize the risk of their parents becoming unemployed (hey look a social relation reason, however as an incredibly weak incentive this one is a personal choice). It’s an inherent moral hazard of having a hand in the technical process of production.

Beyond that, absent of a market, software can still exist because it’s useful. These projects still need to be architected, these trade off still need to be adjudicated not just on their technical merits but on their viability within the social relation. It’s why large open source projects are run completely differently than commercial ones. The Cathedral may follow a capitalist like model, because of the similarity of the relation, but the Bazaar inherently cannot.

There are plenty of software projects out there open source and commercial that successfully resist the inherent problems within the social relation under which would lead them to sub-optimal technical choices, because the alternative is failure.

TL;DR

I fully admit this conceptualization is cope, and is irrelevant to solving the root causes of the problem of the mode of production and the social relation. However I submit that cope theory is important because I have no delusions of overthrowing the capitalist relation and I owe it to the other people who I have indirect authority over. I believe that aristocratic labor positions confer some personal responsibility and moral hazard that must be abated. Beyond that we will still need cope after the revolution. Fixes in the social relation can fix a lot but they cannot fix everything. Production has inherent negative externalities and people will always need to cope with those.

You might get a kick out of Residuality Theory

I’ll have to take a look.

One of the deeper issues, I think, is that - much like Extreme Programming or agile when practiced properly - I’m not sure Residuality Theory is truly compatible with capitalism, even though it can deliver significantly better outcomes.

Long termist views of production are generally not compatible with capitalism because market forces are inherently biased towards closing out arbitrage opportunities. The compatibility of these processes is really only during eras such as the first and second industrial revolution, because there wasn’t a luxurious abundance of the basic needs. At one point in history, there was a choice to make food and not have pants or to starve and have pants. Today that choice is irrelevant because we produce more food the world over than we can eat.

When applied to software, it creates a new problem. You’re at a startup chasing the market, and that’s great. XP and Agile will tell you that you need to eat first. However businesses never admit to their employees when this period of market capriciousness is over because labor discipline is based on capitalist capriciousness. Essentially there is no incentive for a business to take seriously professional concerns of the new economy of scale, because it’s impossible to calculate just how much money you actually stand to make. Which is why I prefer developer time unit economics, e.g. how much time are your devs spending per day on struggling with badly written code?

Just because you picked XP, why don’t more teams do XP? Well the problem is that under XP there is not as much room as desired for the representative of capital interests to redirect the process. In short the process is made so that your manager has fewer opportunities to micromanage you from reaching market.

I often argue against YAGNI because it comes from XP. in XP YAGNI works because the pain of the decision to not do something earlier is felt by those who made it by having to wait later. YAGNI under XP aligns the incentives to make how you build software compatible with the type of software you’re building and the market you’re building it for. YAGNI implies you’ll build it when you need it, but often you just don’t build it at all. There is never a good time for non-marketable work. YAGNI under typical agilefall aligns the incentives to make how you build software more compatible with time to market. YAGNI under agilefall is your manager says you don’t need it.

As you said the “agile when practiced properly”. The problem is agile is picked and practiced the way it is because it allows managers, e.g. the representatives of capital to insert themselves in the production process. This allows them to optimize for “making money”, but in reality the optimization isn’t about making the most money, it’s about respecting the ideas that the “bosses” have about how they want to make money. Which is quite literally a form of speculation internal to the production process. That’s why all the “anti WFH” people all say the same thing. They speculate on the production process and its outcomes just like they speculate on other market trends like AI.

Is it really necessary to use the term meta-productive force here? I get, that software seems immaterial, but it’s still a commodity, just like a table or some wheat or linen. Even software services are commodities that are like any services consumed while being produced. So software workers are workers and part of the productive forces, exactly like engineers or mechanics. So with tech-debt you are thinking about a problem in the realm of production, the base of society.

This is largely correct. Even things like knowledge and learning have a commodity form. I was trying to lead people away from “production” = “factory” or thing I use. Production is fully bootstrapped in that production produces itself. Labor is a commodity after all.

What Marx is describing here seems at first to be in the realm of ideology: how revolutionaries talk about themselves and style their movements. So it’s more about the superstructure than the base. So it seems to be about a totally different realm and not applicable to tech-debt at all. Though, I get that the similarity is still helpful. And there might be an actual similarity on another level, that explains it:

I get into a clearer example in this comment thread.

https://lemmy.ml/post/30849595/18912884

What is written as is is ideological, but it’s a generalization of materialism.

The law of the unity and conflict of opposites: The contradiction between short term profit interests leading to the accumulation of tech-debt and the need for software as a commodity to have actual use-value can not be resolved within capitalism.

The law of the passage of quantitative changes into qualitative changes: Accumulation of quantitative changes (tech-debt) pass into sudden qualitative changes (software becomes unmaintainable and is dropped).

The law of the negation of the negation: The negation of proper methods and maintenance sooner or later negates the use of the software and thus this way of managing it.

Yeah I’m not so great at Engels vocab but I cover each of these in some examples.

• Not maintaining saw blades on a saw mill
• Running out of trees
• TDD as a maladaption that creates tech debt

Well of course Marx wasn’t talking directly about tech debt Marx didn’t consider the computer. ;-)

To expand on it, any process or productive force has inputs, as well as positive and negative outputs. Inputs are things that are needed to complete the cycle like “labor”, “material”, “knowledge”, etc. Positive outputs are things like “knowledge”, “goods”, etc. Negative outputs are things like “pollution”, “waste” (distinct from pollution because some waste is effervescent like wasted labor), etc.

To simplify this we should actually get rid of “inputs”. Inputs are an implementation detail (mainly for amortization and property interests) that can be represented as negative outputs.

These processes work in cycles, where each previous cycle affects the next cycle. For example I make lumber, I own 5 acres, each year I process an acre of logs (input) and ship 500 board feet(output), after 5 years I have cleared the forest and have no way to produce. Each year the available resources that can act as my inputs dwindles, which is a systemically speaking actually a negative output. So we can reframe this process as each yeah I ship 500 board feet (output) and I cut down an acre (negative output).

When a cycle begins or ends is not really relevant. These process in reality are continuous. Cycles are merely a form of abstract structure around a long running process that has repetition. A cycle could be a day or a year. It could be until the next time someone jumps into the Kiln of the First Flame. What really matters regarding cycles is the cause between point in time decisions and their effects on the process later on.

Each cycle can adapt to new conditions, in an optimal/hindsight/longitudinal sense adaptations are changes to the process as a result of a cycle that increase the total amount of possible cycles (leading to longer lived processes), maladaptions are changes that decrease the total amount of possible cycles. For my lumber mill, an adaption (given more acreage) would be planting trees with a 30 year outlook. If I had 31 acres, each year I plant an acre and log an acre, that removes a negative output. A maladaption would be extracting money that would be spent on sharpening saw blades, leading to premature failure of the mill’s mechanical systems.

The overall way we can gauge the health of a process is through relative risk. Risk is a balance of positive outputs, negative outputs, adaptions and maladations. This is a fairly fuzzy, complex and contextual measure. For example if I’m not sharpening my saw blades that increases risk, however how much depends relatively on what the effects are on future cycles, however this risk may likely be a lower risk than the risk of my negative output which has a 5 year horizon.

These cycles can adapt to output immaterial things like software, social knowledge, individual knowledge, etc.

Error in this case is metaphorical, error fuzzily represents maladaptations and negative outputs.

Tech debt is a complex inner process that stems from the production of goals, e.g. what, how and by when to build something. Those goals have implicit effects on the maladaptions and creation of negative outputs during the outer process of actually building the software.

The tech debt case essentially says building a software has the following outputs:

• deployments
• features

However it has the following negative outputs:

• labor cost
• size of code
• complexity of code

Tech debt is prioritizing a specific feature output over it’s long term negative costs such as increased code size, increased code complexity and increased labor cost to produce more features and lower future labor costs.

I do not think your excerpt from 18th Brumaire is talking about technical debt, or accumulated error. Marx here refers only to “epochs of revolutionary crisis”. He is not making any claim of historical continuity in general, only in transitional periods. As well, the extent to which the past “weighs itself” on the present is through forms of expression, not necessarily in substance.

I’d disagree with this mainly because we’re getting caught up on the metaphor when its spelled out plainly:

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”

This is equivalent to the production cycle of the next set of history is dependent on the outputs, negative outputs, adaptions, and adaptations of the previous one.

I do not see a point in expanding the concept of productive forces into a new concept of meta-productive forces. Feels like it blurs conceptual lines, at worst maybe confusing the Hegelian dialectic with the Marxian dialectic (production of concepts vs production of material world)

Historical materialism is already a “meta-productive” force (meta-productive is my flair to get people out of the production = factory mindset. You’re right that productive forces already describe what I’m saying, because labor is a commodity thus production is a commodity. It’s fully bootstrapped.) through the concept of the base and superstructure. Cyclical changes to the base are based on the previous cycle of material production (what we have), as well as the previous cycle of immaterial production in the superstructure what we want to do with it). Cyclical changes in the superstructure have a mirror of these forces. In essence the whole idea is:

• that we want is based on what we have and don’t have and what we want/feel
• what we actually produce is based on what we have and don’t have and what we prioritize (want/feel)

These 2 paragraph is are a more general, humanistic and literary version of historical materialism which is more specific.

I understand technical debt not as some ideal accumulation of error, but as a result of the dependence of material productive power with the state of technology at a given moment. I can write more about this later; my transit stop is coming up.

The problem here is that you’re describing a specific kind of tech debt. I agree that that there is a specific kind of tech debt that exists based on the general availability of tools.

However the kind of tech debt that typically accumulates in companies is due to adaptions/maladaptions and projected outputs. To offer an analogy, concrete was invented before the invention of the backhoe. That creates a specific kind of tech debt. However regardless of that a company decided to build a house without a foundation because it would be too expensive (negative output) to dig up and move all that earth, and it would prevent the house from being sold before a specific date (avoiding negative outputs). Someone commented above some helpful Engels vocab that hits on this.

In your example there’s also a sub-case based in lack of knowledge. For example choosing test driven development can be an adaption or a maladaption depending on how you actually write the software and the tests. For example if your code is well tested using individual tests and individual fixtures.

Over the long run that can be a maladaption because that increases the cost to maintain the software. Fixing a specific bug or implementing a specific feature can affect the whole code base and affect all the tests. This is a maladaption because it locks up your process, preventing you from delivering certain features, certain fixes, or improving the process itself. This comes from a lack of knowledge that can be represented as its own negative output or as increased cost/code size/complexity.

In order to make this an adaption rather than suffer the maladaptive effects the team would also need to adopt practices like factories, shared behaviors, behavior driven development, and discriminating tests based on value. This would allow you to have a highly tested code base, where the test architecture itself allows for sweeping changes. For example lets say we are testing an API that has a set of controllers, each controller gets a context for the API call. We want to change the structure of that context. If we are using fixtures we need to make that change (which can be complex) in hundreds of files. If we are using factories we need to make that change in the factory file, and only the tests that explicitly supply the changed properties of that context.

So there are ordered effects inside of these processes based on the processes themselves.

I’ve just never played DS2, no real reason for it. I haven’t even bought it. I’m kinda over souls-bourne games TBH. I started with 3 and then went to 1 then went to Sekiro and Elden Ring. I have something like 3k hours in total. Elden Ring has burned me out both gameplay but esp. lore wise. Shadow just wrecked the whole thing with bad / lazy writing and more catering to typical narrative demands. Not interested in Nightreign. I honestly prefer DS1, I like the “rock paper scissors” of it. The fluidity of DS3 but esp Sekiro and Elden Ring fuck with my computer use anxiety. The DS1 positioning “jank” is very easy to read, DS3 is worse, Elden Ring is even worse than that.

DS1 is incredibly easy to come back to esp. for my brain because there’s “rules” that are expressed in visual form and confirmation. The smoothness of the other games starts to break that and I end up getting frustrated.

I thought, “How the fuck does anything actually get done, this is simply insane. How many people does it actually take to write this software…”. Naturally, something wasn’t compiling correctly (thanks windows) and I shelved the thought for now.

I weep that the tooling space is so bad out there that we’re not treating packages as first class objects and working over packages is a crime against technology. NX is approaching this capability, but they’re still not really at the point of a solid general maintainable pattern and approach. It should not be this hard in 2025 to manage 25 domains as individual packages, use semantic versioning, commit lint, and automatically bump things. It should not be this hard in 2025 to apply the same tool configuration change to all of them. It should not be this hard in 2025 to ensure they’re all uniform based on their “types”.

It makes me think of all the MRI machines still being controlled by network isolated Windows XP installs.

I used to work in a tangential space. It has only gotten worse. Windows hasn’t been supplanted. These companies have simply created more complexity and fragmentation in their own pipelines when they’ve upgraded to the embedded/kiosk versions of newer Windows OSes.

During the move to Vista / 7, windows virutalized sound and never made direct bindings. I was working on real time software at the time that created experimental and medical tools for EEGs. The jitter and latency was insane when trying to match up the EEG data to the point in time of the experiment in real time. That software works on linux now but unfortunately there’s a hardware gap. A solution on windows is enforcing the use of Realtek cards whose drivers have direct bindings, this has the problem that it’s a non-standard per-vendor interface which creates lock-in, bugs and dependency.

Imagine tomorrow ALSA and JACK go away and there’s only PulseAudio/Pipewire, nobody would stand for that shit in the Linux community.

pioglitazone

I would equivocate this with RC’s, steroids, plastic surgery, etc. It’s a fuzzy line but there’s generally a line based on health and safety that this kinda stuff crosses. There’s a real danger regardless of your gender in body hacking communities, nobody knows this better than the thousands of straight men who are killing themselves slowly by their 50’s because they treat their dysphoria by cyclically exacerbating it. In those communities, like in many body hacking communities, these plain table stakes are something newcomers do not typically understand.

And because the body type and image are in and of themselves typically a media product in our culture, nobody actually understands the work / maintenance needed until they’ve done something they cannot undo.

This was going to be the end state of AI trends as a solution to the loneliness epidemic esp. with the sexual services side of things.

There are 2 real choices:

1. Children have AI “partners” whose characterization is inherently pedophillic
2. Children have AI “partners” that are age appropriate making the technology inherently pedophillic.

It’s unrealistic to believe that this technology can be made “safe” or that this technology can be eradicated. If we eradicated it 2-3 years ago it would have worked, now the ship has sailed. Generative image models and some video models are in reach for personal consumers. While most models still require specialized enterprise level tech to use it as “service”, what we’re really talking about is the dialup porn experience vs broadband.

Photoshopping their peers was already happening long before this. Liberal law has never been able to square this circle because it’s not possible to make a sensible system in a deonotological way. A deontological mindset will always resist conseqeuentialist approaches. Look at family court for example. There’s millions of men and women out there that do not understand that the minor legal protections we have for children should supersede their individual rights.

Nobody that’s serious in the DIY HRT space is pushing a product nor are they pushing using research chemcials to the degree that this crypto based company backed by forum posters is.

Lol the suggested hardware for usable performance is ~$50k MSRP for the GPUs alone and that’s an SXM5 socket so all proprietary extremely expensive and specific hardware.

My PC currently has a 7900 XTX which gives me about 156 GB combined VRAM, but it literally generates 1-3 words per second even at this level. DDR5 wouldn’t really help, because it’s a memory bandwidth issue.

TBH for most reasonable use cases 8 bit parameter size quantizations that can run on a laptop will give you more or less what you want.

What’s funny is that the only time this was attempted was by the USSR and Chile in the 70s when they were trying to computerize this information for purposes of economic decision making. Nobody else has done any publically available cybernetics work.

Neo-liberalism was supposed to pause all of these conflicts, but because America is no longer a leader in the world, because it sucks

Lmao. You realize that this idea in the modern era is based on one gigantic moron who’s only job it is to be a stenographer for power had this big brain moment where he wrote down “No two countries with McDonald’s have ever gone to war”.

Then he changed it to any country that has a company that sells stuff to Dell won’t go to war with each other.

The capitalist peace theory has never been true.

From my perspective making software, it’s improved. Prior to 2016, I had to be the one pushing WCAG standards. After 2016 it’s been explicit customer facing criteria managed by product managers.

Okay let me try again:

My intention was to contrast degrees of deprivation, not degrees of luxury.

Regardless of what you call it, ranking people in mutual aid is going to result in worse outcomes for people who need mutual aid.

Guess what? People are going to disengage from the comm, Hexbear cannot solve homelessness, there are plenty of people here who are simply upset about having to see poverty in a digital space. And guess what? It’s gonna get worse! It’s going to reflect the fact that this is a space that is a durable source of survival resources and the fact that more and more people need those resources to survive as the economy gets worse. These are facts of life and a comm is not going to change them. Visible poverty is a natural collective punishment for living in an unjust society.

What’s important is that people who need help do not disengage from the comm because of witch hunts and moralizing. Attempting to drive engagement of donators by catering to them is going to create worse outcomes for people who need money and for people who donate money.

We have no way of enforcing anything. It’s very easy to scam people who think they’re getting exactly what they want. That’s why it’s called a confidence trick.

All you’re doing is giving people reasons to lie and inviting the community to air out all their vile thoughts about those who suffer poverty.

You should read thru this whole thread and see that there are comrades who, based on how everyone’s shitty little thoughts have played out, do not feel comfortable even asking for help anymore. That is the harm here.

My intention was to contrast degrees of deprivation, not degrees of luxury.

This is not your job or your right or your business. You do not have enough information. You do not have a way to get that information. This all goes to the same place.

The sister comment to this is twisting itself into pretzels to defend creating a system of ranking worthiness, using terms like

misjudgements by one of the people

probably cheaper calories per dollar

giving someone 20 dollars to sustain themselves for 5 meals rather than 1, I’m going to pick the person who makes it last 5. That’s not a morally objectionable thing to do.

At what point are we going to start making tiered preference lists for what homeless should buy for them to be worthy of our aid?. Are we going to prefer cat food instead of Chef Boyardee because we feel that people aren’t proving themselves thrifty enough? Are we gonna optimize their calorie intake? Are we gonna question if they really need 2500 calories today? After all they’re just laying around in their tents. This is exactly where these arguments end up. It’s all gross value judgements, that further and further beg the question to prevent people from obtaining what should be human fucking rights. Enforcing barracks communism on people when you don’t even sleep in the fucking barracks is a recreation of the capitalist social relation in a red color.

There’s a 10 reply deep thread in this post gossiping and arguing about financials people are not privy to. Moralizing costs they have no proof of. Arguing back and forth over literally nothing with no proof. Going back and forth about some years long board drama. Showing their whole fucking ass. The subject of this is the post history of single homeless user that is part of this community, and people don’t think she’s good enough because she suffers with the typical problems of homelessness. This is absolutely gross, and this is the kind of behavior that results when you allow people to make it their business to evaluate how users spend mutual aid money.

It is completely antisocial behavior to investigate users of this forum in how they spend mutual aid money. It is completely antisocial behavior use conditional aid to play with their lives. These are people, not your hobby. Their lives are not for you to optimize. If you want to control things play with dolls, pirate a Paradox Game, there are plenty of ways to exercise this instinct that doesn’t affect real people.

This is the same type of behavior that bosses do to workers. This is the type of shit that Dave Ramsay says when he talks about his gross and illegal hiring practices. “Actually everything you get is from me, I’m not going to give you more, you should live how I think you deserve to live based on the money I give you otherwise why would I hire you?” This is not your house, these are not your rules. This is just the ambient cultural petite bourgeoisie authoritarian values seeping through.

You don’t have to give, but if you do, that money is not yours anymore. You don’t get to demand satisfaction. You shouldn’t demand satisfaction before even forking money over.

That’s where all this ends up. It’s simple. Attempting to deny this is silly. Nobody here is a social worker, this is not an organization, this is an online message board where people ask for help. Stop mining these interactions for value. It is gross.

Mutual aid is not control and aid is not a symbol of social and moral value. In the case of the comm, aid is to temporarily alleviate the symptoms of the social disease of poverty, asking anymore of that comm is frankly unrealistic and childish.

People who are posting stupid shit in this thread deserve this level of abrasiveness and calling out. I had to disengage last night because there’s an entire 10 replies deep thread complaining about the fact that the online message board gossip they just heard about hasn’t resulted in a homeless person getting banned from one of the only places allowing them to access survival funds. That level of hate is vile. Frankly this site would never allow that kind of dog whistle and concern troll style posting against our GSM and POC comrades and we shouldn’t tolerate it against homeless ones.

Pretending that some kind of rules lawyering and virtue signaling on an online anonymous message board is going to “more efficiently” solve mutual aid problems is equally as stupid as thinking that we’re going to start the next communist revolution or “get Bernie elected”. Grow the fuck up.

We’re ships passing in the night. Some of those ships need money. Other ships want to help. Leave it alone. It’s not the community’s business to get into this drama. It’s the business of the users involved and the mods/admins on how they want to run mutual aid. Making this the communities business is going to be a good way to fuck up a unique and unabashedly good part of the fediverse permanently over some petty Hasan vs Ethan style bullshit. These aren’t podcasters mining drama for clicks, they’re real people.