Ah, I forgot we were talking about vintage furniture. Bad paint sucks but people have got to get over this obsession with looking at wood. Color is fun and not every piece of wood is imbued with sacred beauty.

I need a link. I must see this natural great looking wood for myself, though I know it to be pine and spruce from a pallet

Argh I’ve got a 2017 with the dumb battery that also needs the proprietary SSD replaced. I was going to replace them but it’s so time consuming so I bought new, and now I feel bad and it’s just sitting in the corner un-fixed.

Some guy is writing the names “Esau” “Amalek”, “Isaac” etc in sharpie all over the neighborhood; I’m sure this is about Palestine but I can’t put together if they’re trying to say “we must destroy the children of Amalek” or “this is a religious war that cannot be explained or solved by political processes” or “Israel is fighting a war on the premise of Jewish supremacy as shown by all this biblical nonsense”.

I wasn’t really curious about the explanation until they wrote “Esau” on my door. I don’t know if they chose my door because I have a Palestine sign in the window or because my door has a gloss enamel surface that’s very attractive as a sharpie substrate (it was very easy to clean off at least). Am I being threatened?

Lots of laundromats do have employees; there has to be an attendant and if the owner wants to have business hours longer than they’re willing by to work they’ll have to hire someone.

I think any business with an owner and no employees can probably be classified as somewhere between a skilled laborer and a landlord, depending on how much capital is involved in their business. A web developer might only own $1000 worth of computer equipment and their main contribution is their knowledge. A laundromat owner owns many thousand dollars worth of laundry equipment and a space to keep it in, and only provides a small contribution of their own skills.

You want the merchant marine, longshore and fishing kind of maritime museum, not the cool battleship bro maritime museum. I know a few comrades at such museums in the US and Canada, and have seen old crusty guys with commie vibes at many more. There also are chuds and reactionary hippies for whom tall ships and such are just RETVRN cosplay.

I’ll second the volunteering idea. It’s easier to make friends with folks you see often, such as at work or school. That frequent contact really helps get you over the hump. Volunteer somewhere aligned with your interests, and go to every event you can.

• food not bombs
• bike coop
• museum if you dig old nerds (especially labor, industrial, and maritime museums, often full of commies)

This is great stuff (by which I of course mean it is terrible).

This is good shit. Also connecting that to the english peasant rebellion (can’t remember which one) where they went to London and burnt all the records, so nobody knew who owed whom.

No you’re right, I have the intellectual understanding to combat this, I just haven’t finished the work.

I’m super excited about the analysis of soviet vs. american contracts, I will look for a lay-accessible source on this.

that the wretchedness of the worker is in inverse proportion to the power and magnitude of his production

ugh I should read more Marx; this statement makes such sense intuitively and is counter to free market doctrine - capitalists say that the bargaining power of a worker is proportional to their scarcity. That idea of course has some merit, but that power is bounded by the worker’s need for survival, which are relatively constant across people (everyone needs so many calories, etc), vs the productive capacity of a worker is hugely variable, from an expert CNC operator to someone hand-knitting sweaters. So productive workers effectively have less bargaining power because they are worth so much to the employer, but if the market allows, can always be underpaid down to starvation wages.

Thanks, that’s certainly a step towards chopping the head off this worm.

TBH my sticking points are all vibes based. Listening to Chokepoint capitalism, I learned that the creators of Spiderman sold their work for about $150 and didn’t see another cent until the first movie was in production, and then through a public shaming campaign, got some $$. My reflex opinion was “Well of course they didn’t see another cent, that’s only right because they sold their work. The potential value of that work was unknown, and they made a bad forecast and it bit them in the ass. Sorry chumps.” My next thought was that they probably didn’t have much choice in the matter, and needed to take what they could get to feed their families. I want to eliminate that first thought. Talking about it here is helping, I think.

Absolutely. I think this is the core of what I need to take from ‘here’s a thing I understand intellectually’ to ‘this is how I feel about the world on a gut level’