gayhitler420

Are you though?

Do you own the means of production and employ people to operate it, paying them a fraction of the value their labor produces?

Are you able to live comfortably without working for the foreseeable future? Do you exert outsized control over municipal, regional and state government far beyond your “vote” if you live in a place that claims to be a democracy? Does that control come from your power over the means of production that you control?

Supporting a society controlled by the people described above does not make you a capitalist, being one of the people described above does.

Pynchon wrote it better.

What I’m trying to push back on is your assertion that everyone can do it.

Security auditing is an extremely complex and specialized field within the already complex and specialized field of software development. Everyone cannot do it.

Even if it were as straightforward as you imply, just the prevalence of major security flaws in thousands of open source packages implies that everyone doesnt do it.

If I were to leave piles of aggregate and cement, barrels of water, hand tools and materials for forms, a grader and a compactor out and tell the neighborhood “now you can all pave your driveways” I’d be looked at like a crazy person because presented with the materials, tools and equipment to perform a job most people still lack the training and experience to perform it.

Idk what the person you’re arguing with is trying to say, but as a prolific user of open source software, there are thousands of serious vulnerabilities discovered every time some auditing company passes its eye over github.

Malicious commits are a whole nother thing and with the new spaghetti code nightmare that is python nowadays it’s extremely hard to figure out which commits are malicious.

Open source software is not more secure by default and the possibility of audit by anyone does not mean that it’s actually getting done. The idea that anyone who can write software can audit software is also absurd. Security auditing is a specialized subset of programming that requires significant training, skill and experience.

I wrote a long-ish comment in another thread explaining why lots of people don’t like systemd.

Stuff like this is why people do like systemd.

The massive, un unixy and complex tools allow for very powerful and somewhat knowledge agnostic approaches to all sorts of problems.

One of the nicest things about systemds toolset is that it allows a person who relies on finding the problem and googling it to resolve thing much faster than their alternative, learn what’s going on and figure it out.

I don’t mean that as a pejorative, plenty of computer work is maintenance as opposed to engineering and there’s nothing wrong with that.

I think you’re gonna find out very soon because four battery plants are in the works for trucks.

i'm skeptical about electric trucks.

they're gonna be a hit with the people who've been buying them instead of sedans lately, but the fleet and rural markets are gonna be less inclined to use em and needing a big battery service periodically is gonna change the long term value proposition of a full size truck for a lot of people.

They’re planning on building four, and they paused construction recently as a power play in negotiations when the uaw said battery workers should get the same pay as the machinists.

I saw that those plants will be making batteries for the new f150, not the much smaller evs that everyone else drives.

Battery manufacture is part of its own can of worms though, and one that doesn’t make evs look great either.

I wanna also say that I’m not against spinning down the ice auto industry, but no one who’s suggesting doing that or making fun of people who recognize that it’s the consequence of things that are already happening has a real plan for it.

Come on, is the best insult you got that I sound like it’s my job to defend workers?

Really and truly, where will the labor cost savings go? There’s going to be one, so who gets it? How will that be enforced?

What’s gonna be done for the people whose labor isn’t needed anymore? Bear in mind we’re not just talking about the protagonists of the now forty year old song “Allentown”, but entire industries that support ice car production like die making and machining. Surely we have some idea of what happens here aside from “theyre fucked, some people’s blood and bonemeal grease the rails of progress”.

You can’t just handwave away the real effects of changes in productivity in the name of abstractly defined technological progress.

If you can’t seriously engage with the effects of a transition to producing electric cars then it’s no wonder American conservatives are making so much hay over it.

No really, the parts/labor breakdown of an ev skews farther to parts than an ice car. Who gets that money in their pocket in exchange for all the jobs?

What happens to the families and communities that depend on the jobs that are going away?

Have we learned anything from the failed reskilling of Appalachian coal country?

I’m gonna go backwards here:

We don’t see lots of high drag coefficient evs that look like mustangs because all the features of the mustang that make it look boxy and aggressive are there to accommodate the reality of making air go places it’s needed, across the radiator and into the engine.

We don’t see ev jeeps because jeeps are (or used to be) relatively lightweight, high torque vehicles whose design choices favor ground clearance over aerodynamics. Evs are relatively heavyweight and benefit most from low ground clearance and good aerodynamics.

When automakers try to put those designs in an ev buyers react negatively to them, to the point that they have to have ersatz engine noise to be accepted.

Indeed the wrangler and mustang are so disconnected from normal buying trends that they kept stick shift long after the industry wide move to automatics!

Those are popular models, but they’re extreme outliers in terms of design.

Let me address the top part of your reply with a question: if evs are so great and such a slam dunk why has Toyota, famous for not making the wrong choices, stuck with hybrids up until very recently?

Goose chasing meme: more money in whose pocket, motherfucker?

Seriously. We’re talking about shitcanning a third of the us auto jobs. Who’s gonna get the money from that nightmare?

How can we expect those communities to take it lying down when they saw what happened and continues to happen to coal country?

This isn’t fake made up handwavey bullshit. These are the real effects of domestic ev production and we can’t just say “anyone who opposed evs is a conservative piece of garbage or a head-in-ass neoliberal economist.”