thank you, this checks out

It appears that Sakai’s answer is that land hunger was so severe that, yes, petty bourgeois individuals would be willing to endure it to have something like the standard of living they had been used to.

the sons and daughters of the middle class, with experience at agriculture and craft skills, were the ones who thought they had a practical chance in Amerika… What lured Europeans to leave their homes and cross the Atlantic was the chance to share in conquering Indian land.

Here is a quote he takes from ““Social Origins of Some Early Americans”. In SMITH, ed., 17th Century America. N.Y., 1972.”

Land hunger was rife among all classes. Wealthy clothiers, drapers, and merchants who had done well and wished to set themselves up in land were avidly watching the market, ready to pay almost any price for what was offered. Even prosperous yeomen often could not get the land they desired for their younger sons…It is commonplace to say that land was the greatest inducement the New World had to offer; but it is difficult to overestimate its psychological importance to people in whose minds land had always been identified with security, success and the good things of life.

四叶妹妹 is yotsuba&!,btw

Thanks for your viewpoint and I think I’ll do that and keep working towards my first dev co-op etc. Nice to have the flexibility to transition down the line.

Thanks for your input. Web dev seems great and I’ve considered trying to deploy some kind of useful REST API, like for computing directions from one place to another on campus, probably with FastAPI in Python. Doing something with Docker is also on my todo-list…

Behind the Urals is great. John Scott was a fellow traveller or party member in New York as I recall. Immigrated to the USSR to work in Magnitogorsk.

this board is a godsend.

I’m starting to think I should make this my whole undergrad research project. I could develop a tiny part of it for this DB course. Thanks for your response, lots of helpful stuff here and will come back to it and others’ comments…

Haven’t done any linear algebra or dug into matrices yet… do you think light study of the basics on KhanAcademy would be enough? I’ve done calc 1 and 2 and discrete math.

I read it years ago, and I should definitely dig in again and review. Big part of why I want to do everything in labour time as much as possible. However I think he suggests the use of a neural network at one point which is a little over my head for now. I am thinking simpler like the pen and paper material balance planning the Gosplan cdes used to do…

I’m asking because I wondered if dependence on colonial wealth could inform an argument that capitalism is historically contingent, that it was possible for there not to be capitalism

If you are looking for other lighter-reading communist newspapers I like the Red Clarion. https://clarion.unity-struggle-unity.org/2024-01-02-another-letter-to-the-youth-of-america/

There is no doubt that the unpaid internship is exploitative, moreso than the already discouraging/tiring path to a first job programming. But I also think you were right to accept it as a step towards launching a career. It’s something you will never have to do a second time… onward and upward

What was the situation in 1973? I don’t think we’re actually in the worst stage of automobilism right now, honestly. I think we’re still in really bad shape in North America, but the worst of it must have been some point between the time Gorz is writing and like 2010. All conjecture, not basing this on anything but impressions from some reading on the topic.

I think a modern socialist planned economy fit for our situation would come out with a very pemanent, modular, and repairable cell phone. It would resemble an Apple product in no way, making use of open source hardware and software and with an ideological commitment against planned obsolescence.

I’m considering starting a lemmygrad whitelist server with a couple mods. Maybe you guys would be interested!

we can have a few impersonators as a treat

May we live to see a revolutionary socialist restoration, but more than a restoration, a forging anew <3

When first considering learning Chinese, “Shanghainese” caught my interest, because apparently they only use two tones? Tones didn’t turn out to be so bad. That is cool it is being promoted.

Maybe we can say it’s more like saying a French person from one region speaks Languedoc and one from another speaks Provencal. Yes, there are multiple languages in France with origins there, but there’s massive institutional weight thrown behind a standard one, and the variation is, as I understand it, almost completely gone in France, and mostly being maintained or slightly declining in China?