wierd_w wrote on 2026-10-02, 17:02:

The FOSS community is a self-segregated community based on a shared, conserved skillset.

Well not that segregated, if Apple, Google &C .were allowed to pile UP tons of money acting as parasites of the free work of thousands of enthusiasts.

Whatever.... my point was not that, my point is that if you want to synthetize both Communism and FOSS in a single sentence you will get

From each one according his to abilities/possibilities, to each one according to his needs

which differs from socialism where the idea is

From each one according his to abilities/possibilities, to each one according to his contribution

Which means that if FOSS was based on the same socialist idea, only github subscribers who contributed to a project were allowed to use the program in object, which is clearly not how it works.

wierd_w wrote on 2026-10-02, 17:02:

The FOSS community is a self-segregated community based on a shared, conserved skillset.

A nation does not enjoy that status.

It's actually a problem with all forms of government I think, people seem more temperamentally suited to flourish under one scheme or another, across a typical population these are minority groups, with there being around half a dozen of them or so. Also the rub is, self selection might not necessarily work. By that I mean predatory types would prefer the "softer" societies, whereas they would be less superficial and more fulfilled if directed under another type of regime.

Anyway, it tends to keep actual governments oscillating either side of some lowest common denominator, with some oscillations making extreme excursions.

The Solutor wrote on 2026-10-02, 17:22:

Well not that segregated, if Apple, Google &C .were allowed to pile UP tons of money acting as parasites of the free work of th […]
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wierd_w wrote on 2026-10-02, 17:02:

The FOSS community is a self-segregated community based on a shared, conserved skillset.

Well not that segregated, if Apple, Google &C .were allowed to pile UP tons of money acting as parasites of the free work of thousands of enthusiasts.

Whatever.... my point was not that, my point is that if you want to synthetize both Communism and FOSS in a single sentence you will get

From each one according his to abilities/possibilities, to each one according to his needs

which differs from socialism where the idea is

From each one according his to abilities/possibilities, to each one according to his contribution

Which means that if FOSS was based on the same socialist idea, only github subscribers who contributed to a project were allowed to use the program in object, which is clearly not how it works.

There is a fundamental rub, that you are tangentially raising, but not exploring.

FOSS 'works', because there is little to 0 cost of replication of work performed.

This allows skilled labor of that type to effortlessly serve millions, easily.

This is not a thing that is universally conserved, even with automation. It's a feature wholly unique to data/information.

A system for *a nation*, needs to be broadly applicable, in the general sense.

Automation reduces energy-economic costs, but they do not 'approach zero', like information does.

Trying to force the equivilence through top down pressure creates the enforcement class.

Generally, failures to accept the limitations 'of what you actually have', produces a systemic need to force a demand, which creates this class.

The creation of this class foundationally excludes 'the status of true communism.'

It is necessary to let go of such notions. Foundationally.

wierd_w wrote on 2026-10-02, 17:46:

Which means that if FOSS was based on the same socialist idea, only github subscribers who contributed to a project were allowed to use the program in object, which is clearly not how it works.

Sure, but this works also looking at the matter from another direction.

Capitalist IT companies are able to pile up money because, each license they sell cost virtually nothing.

So yes (real) communism is harder to get working properly than FOSS, just like for MS is easier to duplicate a DVD (and now not even that) than for Ford that has to build each car they sell.

Immaterial v.s. material world.

But still if Ford is able to make money, it's possible to apply the FOSS idea to the real world, hard, not impossible.

Again, there are compounding issues related to a society making demands (and thus needing enforcement to attempt to attain), vs accepting limitation based on attainability.

Humans are demonstrably not universally interchangable, and you cannot mandate the creation of certain kinds of human, no matter how useful that would be.

Any system concieved that attempts that enforcement cannot attain communism.

Full stop.

wierd_w wrote on 2026-10-02, 17:58:

Any system concieved that attempts that enforcement cannot attain communism.

Full stop.

Yes explain that to Cubans, and tell them that they are starving because Fidel Castro and communism rather than because are being strangled by the orange idiot's blockade.

False equivalence.

The USA's RealPolitik is indeed real.

It is outside the scope of this line of reasoning; even with that realpolitik removed, attempts to demand unreal things will create the enforcement class.

The Solutor wrote on 2026-10-02, 09:21:

Here is the main flaw of your (and sadly you're anything but alone) way of thinking. […]
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ElectroSoldier wrote on 2026-10-02, 02:59:

After the cuts and on into the 80s in spite of all the problems caused by the government ownership the railways made money

Here is the main flaw of your (and sadly you're anything but alone) way of thinking.

Public services aren't there to make money, are there to provide a service to the community.

No, while its obvious that a big thing, like a national railway, a national mail service a national freshwater provider, are easy target for bribery, which should be avoided with any means, a public service running , technically, at a loss is still something that helps the society to run, to prosper, to make money, to pay taxes because that money, taxes that help the state to run (and eventually to "loss" some money with) the services it provides.

That said, a nationalized service doesn't automagically mean a service run at a loss.

I mentioned British Railways as an extreme example, but here in Italy FS/Trenitalia makes a lot of money and is already expanding in France, Spain now Germany as a competitor of their national services, which in turn will expand in other countries. Poste Italiane makes a lot of money, ENI makes a lot of money.

While the highways (perhaps something invented here) became private in 1999 at the peak of the stupid privatization trend, allowing the new owner (the Benetton family) to make huge amount of money, while keeping high prices and low maintenance, something that ultimately lead to the infamous Morandi Bridge collapse that killed 43 people in 2018.

SIP/Telecom Italia/Tim Used to be in top 5 world telephone providers, their CSELT research center ruled, and had a main role in the MPEG standards creation. Was privatized 1997 and now is the shadow of itself, albeit Telecoms are by design golden egg chickens.

I can continue for a day, but you got the idea. Public services handed by private companies aren't magic wands to solve problems, usually they are their exact opposite.

At the point in time I am talking about it wasnt about making money as profit, it was about making money to improve the services.
That is what the managers of BR wanted to do, but they were not allowed to.

The government refused to spend money on it from the public purse, they also refused to allow BR to spend on the system as they wanted to and knew it needed.

Government ownership is what killed British Railways and British Rail.

This isnt a general subject for me, this is a subject I know very well indeed. I know the period in time you are talking about when Maggie Thatcher first allowed "sectorisation" and then that lead to the breakup and "selling off" into private hands, think Transrail and LoadHaul etc, and then comes the entry of EWS... It was that one that allowed the other. You couldnt get to EWS being interested without splitting into sectors first, and you couldnt get EWS thinking about buying without Loadhaul, Transrail, REs etc.

ElectroSoldier wrote on 2026-10-02, 18:09:

This isnt a general subject for me, this is a subject I know very well indeed.

Then, aside the specific details that require long and boring discussions, just answer to a simple question.

Are the fruits of Mrs. Thatcher choices and their private companies better than DB/SNCF/FS/RENFE and alike?

Hard to say yes.

wierd_w wrote on 2026-10-02, 16:33:

The above is precisely why I approached the question of Marxism the way I did. […]
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The above is precisely why I approached the question of Marxism the way I did.

I dont think Marxist-Communism can work, "with the humans we actually have", because it leads to an enforcement class, which is fundamentally incompatible with the baseline premise.

Now, the conversation gets more complicated, due to 'pro-social programs', that is, programs concieved, designed, and implemented to address a socio-societal need (see for instance, US's Social Security program) being branded 'DREAD SOCIALISM!', mainly from people who 'already got theirs', and 'Dont wanna pay [for other people].'

You can show them the baseline statistics about how they will be better off if the majority of the system is not starving, sick, and uneducated all day long, and that they are not actually saving themselves any money or productive output by being tightwads that way; it does no good.

Conversely, there's *also* a severe problem with well-intentioned, but poorly considered, policies that truly *are* just straight up bad, that people dont want to let go of.

I favor quality pro-social program creation, well-considered regulation to enforce and sustain it, and robust enforcement to ensure compliance, coupled with stringent quality evaluation of any such proposed regulations, to avoid implementimg and enforcing bad system requirements.

It's a very tall order, on a tightrope.

I agree with you, communism will never work with the people we are today. Most of people nowadays see society as an annoyance that gets in their way rather than something you are part of and should help maintain. So I think for now it's more a matter of opening people's minds to smaller changes and trying to cleanse some of the individualistic mindset capitalism doctrine injected us for so long.
It's very hard to say what our true nature is as we always had to deal with scarcity and conflicts until now. My theory is that we are not going to be such assholes if we have all of our needs satisfied. And by needs, I mean something far more complex than simple food and shelter, there is sense of belonging, feeling respected, having freedom to be yourself without fear or judgement (keep in mind individualism is not the same as individuality). We will never be perfect for sure, but any problem that arises will be handled in much better ways.
Maybe someday people will be "marxism ready", but surely we won't be there to see it.

The Solutor wrote on 2026-10-02, 18:22:

Then, aside the specific details that require long and boring discussions, just answer to a simple question. […]
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ElectroSoldier wrote on 2026-10-02, 18:09:

This isnt a general subject for me, this is a subject I know very well indeed.

Then, aside the specific details that require long and boring discussions, just answer to a simple question.

Are the fruits of Mrs. Thatcher choices and their private companies better than DB/SNCF/FS/RENFE and alike?

Hard to say yes.

NO!
That no is really easy to say and British Rail is a really good example of why railways should not be nationalised!

Not that nationalisation of such a thing, public transport, is a bad idea, its the way the government did it from the very first inception back in the 1940s with "The Grouping".
This is when LMS, LNER, SR and GWR were created as a result of the 1947 Railways act. That act had a loop hole which means the CLC survived the creation of "The Big Four", but their Stock was managed by one of them and the infrastructure by the other (LNER, LMS). (Locos, rolling stock)

Then i 1948 British Railways was created by merging all of those into one monolithic structure.
And thats what killed it dead!
It was managed by a group of well meaning people that fundimentally misunderstood how the railways worked.
I mean as a system not mechanically or electrically. How branch lines fed main lines etc.
then in '65 British Rail was made, together with the branding and familiar logo and it was good for a while not because of nationalisation but because at that time the people who worked the shifts made it work, they were competent. But once they started leaving the cracks started to show and it became a public talking point.

Nationalisation was a disaster for UKs railways.

"Rail fans" dont want to go back to nationalisation because it was good, they want to go back because what we have now is a disaster.

The Solutor wrote on 2026-10-02, 16:02:

Yeah and HDDs prices had yet to recover from the infamous Thailand flood happened in 2011 or so.

I paid, for two refurb units, in 2016 or so more than I paid them in 2009/2010, brand new.

There was/is also the Chia mining using storage space. People were building massive storage arrays to farm Chia the same way people were building GPU farms to mine Bitcoin, etc.

y2k se wrote on 2026-10-03, 02:54:

The Solutor wrote on 2026-10-02, 16:02:

Yeah and HDDs prices had yet to recover from the infamous Thailand flood happened in 2011 or so.

I paid, for two refurb units, in 2016 or so more than I paid them in 2009/2010, brand new.

There was/is also the Chia mining using storage space. People were building massive storage arrays to farm Chia the same way people were building GPU farms to mine Bitcoin, etc.

That didn't last. In half a year prices were back to normal.

gaffa2002 wrote on 2026-10-02, 18:22:

I agree with you, communism will never work with the people we are today. Most of people nowadays see society as an annoyance th […]
Show full quote

wierd_w wrote on 2026-10-02, 16:33:

The above is precisely why I approached the question of Marxism the way I did. […]
Show full quote

The above is precisely why I approached the question of Marxism the way I did.

I dont think Marxist-Communism can work, "with the humans we actually have", because it leads to an enforcement class, which is fundamentally incompatible with the baseline premise.

Now, the conversation gets more complicated, due to 'pro-social programs', that is, programs concieved, designed, and implemented to address a socio-societal need (see for instance, US's Social Security program) being branded 'DREAD SOCIALISM!', mainly from people who 'already got theirs', and 'Dont wanna pay [for other people].'

You can show them the baseline statistics about how they will be better off if the majority of the system is not starving, sick, and uneducated all day long, and that they are not actually saving themselves any money or productive output by being tightwads that way; it does no good.

Conversely, there's *also* a severe problem with well-intentioned, but poorly considered, policies that truly *are* just straight up bad, that people dont want to let go of.

I favor quality pro-social program creation, well-considered regulation to enforce and sustain it, and robust enforcement to ensure compliance, coupled with stringent quality evaluation of any such proposed regulations, to avoid implementimg and enforcing bad system requirements.

It's a very tall order, on a tightrope.

I agree with you, communism will never work with the people we are today. Most of people nowadays see society as an annoyance that gets in their way rather than something you are part of and should help maintain. So I think for now it's more a matter of opening people's minds to smaller changes and trying to cleanse some of the individualistic mindset capitalism doctrine injected us for so long.
It's very hard to say what our true nature is as we always had to deal with scarcity and conflicts until now. My theory is that we are not going to be such assholes if we have all of our needs satisfied. And by needs, I mean something far more complex than simple food and shelter, there is sense of belonging, feeling respected, having freedom to be yourself without fear or judgement (keep in mind individualism is not the same as individuality). We will never be perfect for sure, but any problem that arises will be handled in much better ways.
Maybe someday people will be "marxism ready", but surely we won't be there to see it.

I would cut that first sentence down to it will never work.

Any system that calls for people to be murdered en mass to take their money clearly has something wrong with it.
Then there is the other flaw in Marx ideas in the the reason why you need to kill them en mass is because they stole the "excess labour".
That's clearly wrong and I'll illustrate why.
Take a simple trade such as a painter/decorator, his actions of painting a wall have a value but they will not make money painting the walls at home, it's only valuable at a certain time and place, a customers house for instance, at all other times it's of limited value to none at all.
So the provision of an arena in which the activity has a value has a value in its own right and makes money. That's another thing Marx over looked.
When you read the books and trace then into reality, for instance some people are more competent than others and provide more value than others while performing the same work task was also over looked.
When you factor in human nature of wanting to be recognised for that larger contribution then the idea looks more and more unworkable in practical terms.

The fact that it's been tried multiple times over history and across multiple vastly different cultures and found nothing but failure and the deaths of so many millions of people we have no way of counting then anymore...
Once a political idea get to 10 million dead people then you kinda have to question if it's a good one, once that death toll reaches 100 million then you should know it's an outright failure.

Enslaving a population that would number in the tens of millions because you think you know what's best for them isn't going to end well.

ElectroSoldier wrote on 2026-10-03, 07:17:

Any system that calls for people to be murdered en mass to take their money clearly has something wrong with it.

So if some Americans kill thousands of British, to get independence, they are the paladins of freedom.

If poor Russians kills some of the Romanov family and other rich who became rich at their expense, are mass murderer, right?

Sometimes I'm stunned when I see how much the American propaganda can brainwash people (sadly not just in America)

The Solutor wrote on 2026-10-03, 07:31:

So if some Americans kill thousands of British, to get independence, they are the paladins of freedom. […]
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ElectroSoldier wrote on 2026-10-03, 07:17:

Any system that calls for people to be murdered en mass to take their money clearly has something wrong with it.

So if some Americans kill thousands of British, to get independence, they are the paladins of freedom.

If poor Russians kills some of the Romanov family and other rich who became rich at their expense, are mass murderer, right?

Sometimes I'm stunned when I see how much the American propaganda can brainwash people (sadly not just in America)

There is no parallel there in the reason why they did it.
Would you also ask if it was worth defending Europe from the marauding Germans during WWII?

If you read the book Marx wrote then he makes it clear that the reason is to take back what he believes has been stolen but there is to much evidence it wasn't stolen at all it was earnt.

There is a fundamental misunderstanding of what it is a capitalist provides.

I see that whatever has hit the whole world has finally reached vogons too.

ElectroSoldier wrote on 2026-10-03, 13:29:

There is no parallel there in the reason why they did it.

Only if you are so square headed to not see it

Would you also ask if it was worth defending Europe from the marauding Germans during WWII?

For sure for the US, it was, they entered as a medium power, they ended as a superpower, with a giant aircraft industry, the atomic bomb, all the research seized to Germans, engeneers included, they blocked their main concern (the "evil communist") before they arrived to the west cost of the of the Portucgal

Or you think US entered in the WW2 to defend us poor Europeans, and the freedom around the world?

Seriously you think this? 😮

konc wrote on 2026-10-03, 13:39:

I see that whatever has hit the whole world has finally reached vogons too.

Well we did try to get this back on topic but it seems that the political/economic discussion is more important to some members.

Trashbytes wrote on 2026-10-03, 13:50:

konc wrote on 2026-10-03, 13:39:

I see that whatever has hit the whole world has finally reached vogons too.

Well we did try to get this back on topic but it seems that the political/economic discussion is more important to some members.

Yeah those crazy people that think that a world war is something more important than a ram stick 😁