I stayed with a succession of farmers while cycling across South Africa (with all the land fenced off, your only choice at the end of the day is finding a driveway and following it up to the farmhouse in order to ask for lodging), and what really impressed me was how much reading every one of these farmers was doing. Soil science and so forth is apparently a continually evolving field, and a modern farmer has no choice but to keep up with it. It really challenged my citybred prejudice of farmers as somehow uneducated.
It's big big business here even if the farms are still "family farms" .. the land parcels are larger with both owned and leased, there are houses on farm(s) to maintain, houses and shops in nearby rural town, semi industrial town lots for staging goods, silo's (six storey and higher buildings), rail heads, small fleets of giant machines, several millions in assets to manage, local, state, and federal politics to navigate.
The science side is Ag and soil, lots of GIS IT, asset tag systems for records (individual animals and seed plots, etc), robots, laser scanning for wool fibre, ... (long list).
These are not enterprises that can managed by idiots.
This reminds me of the wide range of reactions sparked by Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror, his most avant-garde film. On one hand, you can put that film on before a gathering of fairly open-minded cinephile friends, and even they might reject it as artsy-fartsy or unintelligible. On the other hand, a number of ordinary proletariat people in the USSR wrote to Tarkovsky to say how his film touched them deeply and felt directly relatable to their own lives.
I had the same experience with the movie. Even though I knew up front about Isao Takahata’s passing, I struggled to make all the imagery fit into my expectations of a “coherent” story. At one point I just had to let go of my search of any overarching analogy, and just enjoyed the fireworks.
I’m sorry to interrupt your flight of fancy there, but the word "proletariat" came from me and not the people writing letters to Tarkovsky (as someone from Eastern Europe of a certain generation, I’m as likely to reach for that word to describe people in highly menial jobs as, say, “working class”, but then again nearly everyone in the USSR was working class).
I would suggest watching the film before furthering speculating about it. That newsreel footage and the nonlinear way it is presented is far more likely to challenge viewers than arouse any patriotic or otherwise enthusiastic sentiments.
For most of its history, nearly everyone in the USSR was a farmer, so not proletariat and not communist.
> I would suggest watching the film
The first few paragraphs on how the movie is about a person remembering important episodes of his life got me curious and gave me Butterfly Effect vibes (good), but reading further down I started getting Mulholland Drives vibes (not good).
"For most of its history, nearly everyone in the USSR was a farmer, so not proletariat." They certainly were in the context we are speaking of here. Official Soviet terminology, apparently starting at least from Lenin but I haven’t checked this thoroughly, divided the proletariat into rural proletarians (in Russian селские пролетарии) and urban proletarians (городские пролетарии). In any event, in colloquial contexts the word serves handily to refer to a life of rather menial trudging wherever it’s lived.
Of course Lenin had an interest in selling the idea that everyone is actually proletariat. In reality by Marx's definition, proletariat are those who don't own the means of production (and are therefore stuck in earning by selling their labour), whereas farmers at least until the NEP died, mostly owned their own farms which means they did own the means of their production, which is also why farmers, or virtually everyone in the USSR outside the cities hated the communists.
Your comment is incredibly uninformed (and the third such in a row). Whole rural areas of European Russia went over to the Bolsheviks, and this has been thoroughly documented in countless diaries, letters, memoirs, and literature – it’s something that anyone familiar with, say, Volga–Kama areal studies is well aware of (just as one is well aware that, alas, many of the same rural people ecstatic at new opportunities in the wake of 1917, were shot under Stalin in 1933–1937). In spite of serfdom having been abolished under Alexander II, or having never been enforced at all in some areas, smallholders regularly found themselves falling into debt to powerful rural magnates, and exploited through those magnates’ “company stores”. The Bolsheviks’ depiction of a “rural proletariat” oppressed by a “rural bourgeoisie”, however unorthodox it might have been compared to Marx, proved easy for rural people to sympathize with.
> nearly everyone in the USSR was a farmer, so not proletariat and not communist
This statement has a number of flaws.
> nearly everyone in the USSR was a farmer
True during the early years, but after WW2 changed rapidly (in line with the West). [1] shows rural population percentage dropped from 67% in 1939 to 56% in 1956, and it rapidly decreased after that. [2] is female specific but by 1975 under 1/3 were working in agriculture.
In addition, everyone other than the actual owner of the land was considered "The Agricultural Proletariat". Engels wrote [3] about this in 1845 well before the establishment of the Soviet Union.
> so not proletariat
As seen above, this doesn't follow especially after the establishment of collective farming where everyone were considered workers.
> As seen above, this doesn't follow especially after the establishment of collective farming where everyone were considered workers.
Correct! Farmers owned the landed, the communists came and stole it from them - sorry "collectivized" it - and so made it worse for the farmers turned proletariat. So you understand that farmers hated communists.
Exactly. Those churning out such posts on LinkedIn, would very much prefer if other people did not even carefully read the actual content, but rather simply assumed “Wow, this person is capable of generating a wall of text day in and day out, he/she must be a subject-matter expert and have great English skills”.
I wonder if that means that lower sex drive does not necessarily mean lower testosterone?
This is not a purely theoretical question. I spend half the year traveling the world in ways that let me talk a lot with local people, and I am astounded by the number of young men in developing countries who venerate Andrew Tate and are frantic about physical access to women. As a somewhat older man, I can’t share their desperation and I wish I could communicate to them “Just wank it and then get back to doing something productive with your time”, yet I fear being accused of being a “low-T man”, which in that social-media world is an object of contempt.
Lack of access to sex (aka women aren't interested) tends to be an identity level failure to men, not just a temporarily feeling of horniness that goes away after a wank. Else the problem would be solved half a dozen times a day for these young men.
Though, like the PUA forums of the early 2000s, I don't think Andrew Tate is going to be much help. But that's a separate issue.
> and I am astounded by the number of young men in developing countries who venerate Andrew Tate and are frantic about physical access to women. As a somewhat older man,
Kind of curious which countries? I noticed this some countries where women rights seem restricted or theyre lower class, and religious. Indonesia and Morocco.
Certainly the ire of Andrew Tate fans should be thoroughly ignored. You can have whatever sex drive you want, and their contempt is childish and misguided. If you did want to try experiencing a higher sex drive, try edging daily for a week without getting off and see how you feel on day 7.
I don't think that's the solution.
Sex desire is effectively a human need as much as hunger. You can wank it off once or twice, but for some people they might have this need 3+ times per day, every day. That's not sustainable for them too.
I don't know what the solution is, but saying "wank it off" seems an unsatisfying response
I’ve never had any sex drive my entire life and my T levels test normally. So I would say one doesn’t necessarily imply the other. Pretty sure it’s more complicated.
"If A (higher T) then not B (higher sex drive)" does not imply "If B then not A".
But agree, these men have built a culture where they believe that's true. I think that they'd be better served by not obsessing so hard. Sex will happen, and it's easiest to get when you are chill, safe, approachable.
And yet, these dudes feel the need to do toxic shit to themselves and others. It's a tragedy.
Taping your camera doesn't necessarily look like anything. I have a small piece of electrical tape over my webcam, and it blends in so perfectly with the background that other people probably wouldn't see it unless they were specifically looking for it.
(I personally just leave the tape there all the time, because if I need to videoconference, I’d rather connect my mirrorless camera with a much better lens and sexy bokeh.)
I don't think you realize how powerful OpenWRT is. It's a whole Linux environment where you can write your own shell scripts and schedule jobs, etc. If you have created a set of your own personal customizations over the years, then it is nice that you can bring them over onto any subsequent OpenWRT-capable router you buy.
I did some FOSS hacking as a teenager a quarter-century ago, so learned Emacs, but then ultimately chose a career unrelated to software development. I still use Emacs for anything and everything text-related: email (Gnus), RSS feeds (elfeed), org-mode where I write up both personal TODOs and serious academic research. The keyboard-driven interface is powerful and now muscle-memory. The in-built Lisp environment makes everything nicely extensible, but Emacs as an IDE, as something people have used to create general software projects, is something I rarely think about.
The Nordic countries have a longstanding tradition of state-run “folk high schools”. In fact, in modern economies where it is harder for unemployed middle-age people to find new work, and AI might cause unemployment in more sectors, this kind of state intervention seems like a good way to keep adults doing something enriching instead of doomscrolling or drinking all day.
The equivalent in america would be non credit personal enrichment courses at the community college. Though they specialize on a specific skill. Some are useful in daily life, others are hobbies. For a humorous example watch Parks and Rec season 2 episode 14.
Which makes me take back what I said. I wouldn’t mind if local government did it.
> It would have been much more useful if you could just mount it like a hard drive without special library management software.
When I got my first iPod in 2006, I immediately put Rockbox on it, where the iPod indeed mounted like a hard drive and files (including all my .oggs, remember those?) could be dropped right onto the device. Never used Apple’s own UI even once.
I still miss the iPod. It let you really immerse yourself in the music without all the distractions inherent in a smartphone. I occasionally considered getting a used one and installing larger storage and a new battery, but by now I think that ship has sailed.
It's easy to see African chattel slavery in the US as worse than the Barbary practices: European slaves of Barbary owners could be and often were ransomed out of slavery by their societies back home, but West Africans were rarely in a position to do that for abducted Africans in the US. Secondly, African chattel slavery in the US was bound up with rigid notions of blood purity, which can seem bizarre to us today, that severely hobbled the opportunities of former slaves and their descendents even after manumission.
>European slaves of Barbary owners could be and often were ransomed out of slavery by their societies back home, but West Africans were rarely in a position to do that for abducted Africans in the US.
Perhaps but the difference is that the West African tribes often sold the slaves to Europeans. Why would they pay a ransom to get those people back?
There were certainly racist connotations associated with slaves and ex-slaves. But it seems a stretch to say that white slaves in a non-white country fared better than black slaves in a white country.
> the West African tribes often sold the slaves to Europeans
I think that you are being disingenuous here. The African tribes that sold slaves were not necessarily the slave’s own tribe, but rather a different tribe that proved victorious in war or raiding. The slave’s own tribe, as I mentioned, would hardly have been unable to ransom its own people from the US due to lack of literacy, lack of communications, and lack of financial means. Meanwhile, postal connections between North Africa and Europe were reliable enough by the 17th and 18th centuries that slaves could message home for ransom, and this was frequently allowed as it proved highly lucrative for Barbary slaveholders.
> white slaves in a non-white country
This is a completely ahistorical way of describing the matter. In terms of race linked to skin colour, Barbary slaveholders very much considered themselves white in opposition to the black African populations to the south whom they exploited. (This survives in modern Mauritanian slaveholding.)
Moreover, Muslim slaveholding here and in the broader region was bound up with with issues of religion, not race as the modern USA understands it. In as little as a single generation post-manumission, those descendants of raided European slaves were no longer necessarily regarded as an outcaste, provided they were observant Muslims, which is why so much of the power in the Ottoman Empire famously ended up in the hands of men of Eastern European descent. At least in terms of knowing your progeny would be better off, they had privilege that African chattel slaves in the USA could only dream of.
In Muslim society, one can choose not to believe in Islam and have no problem, as long as one continues to outwardly perform the expected public rituals, recite the shahada etc. (Quiet personal atheism is much more widespread in the Muslim world than outsiders might suspect.) But if you are a black slave or a descendant thereof in a society based on blood purity, you can’t change your skin colour or descent no matter hard you try. So, while both bases for slavery and segregated society are indeed bad, it’s hard to claim that one might not be a more preferable fate for some unfortunate people than the other.
This is a bit of a non-sequitur? You couldn't just "choose to pretend to believe in Islam" and somehow escape slavery. And with castration having been a common practice, anything that was dependent on descendants was going to be different at face value. So, kudos to them for not allowing their slaves to continue their bloodline?
Look, I'm open to the idea that slavery in the US was somehow the worst slavery ever. But most arguments used to prop up the idea rely on laughably naive views on slavery elsewhere. Worse, much of it seems to stem from a naive "US bad" gullibility in taking in information.
