Edit: wait, you might be right. As I understand, net neutrality is for the last mile ISPs, not the L1/L2 providers. So uh… what I explained below isn’t relevant. Eh, I’ll leave it in case people wanna learn stuff.

It was a bad explanation, assuming you had knowledge of network infrastructure things, but it does make sense. I’ll explain things if you’re interested.

Net neutrality is the idea that ISPs must treat all content providers equally. Your phone is not a content provider (most likely. You could run a web server on your phone, but… no). YouTube, Netflix, Facebook, TikTok, and your weird uncle’s WordPress site are content providers. Without net neutrality, ISPs can say, “Hey YouTube, people request a ton of traffic from you on our network. Pay up or we’ll slow down people’s connections to you.” The “neutrality” part means that ISPs must be neutral towards content providers, not discriminating against them for being high demand by consumers.

For the L1 and L2 part, that’s the networking infrastructure. The connection to your home is just tiny cables. I don’t recall how many layers there are, but it’s just “last mile” infrastructure. The network infrastructure between regions of the country or across the ocean are giant, giant cables managed by internet service providers you’ve never heard of. They’re the kind of providers that connect AT&T to Comcast. These are considered L1 or L2 providers. The data centers of giant companies, like Google for YouTube’s case, often pay these L1 or L2 providers to plug directly into their data centers. Why? Those providers are using the biggest, fastest cables to ferry bits and bytes across the planet. You might be pulling gigs from YouTube, but YouTube is putting out… shit, I don’t even know. Is there a terabyte connection? Maybe even petabyte? That sounds crazy. I dunno, I failed Google’s interview question where they asked me to estimate how much storage does Google Drive use globally. Anyway, I hope that gives you an idea of what L1 and L2 providers are.

I’m not a network infrastructure guy, though. If someone who actually knows what they’re talking about has corrections, I’d love to learn where I’m wrong

This community is on lemmy.ml, which explicitly leans hard left. Maybe a memes community on another instance would be less like this

Saved

Thank you for taking the education angle. I’d like to add another perspective for folks’ benefit. I’m not 100% sure it’s correct, so please correct me if I’m wrong.

Your labor has some value. Ideally, you should be paid a corresponding amount of wealth to the amount of value you generate through your labor. So you do $20 worth of work and get $20 worth of money. This is the ideal.

But how much labor is worth $20? Capitalism takes advantage of this ambiguity. The capitalist, e.g. a business owner or investor or similarly positioned person, pays you $19 for that $20 labor and pockets the remaining amount as profit. Sure, the capitalist likely provides some amount of leadership and direction, which is labor with value, but their compensation vastly exceeds the value they generate. This is why you see CEOs getting >300x the pay of their employees. The labor of these CEOs is not worth that much. One person’s labor literally cannot be worth that of 300 people. (Engineers may pipe in on that point, but please realize you’re in the same boat.)

If you see capitalism from this perspective, it makes sense why you would be angry. You’re literally getting short-changed for your effort. Not cool

So what’s the alternative? Well, there’s a bunch. Personally, I like the idea of employee-owned companies. This way, you get the advantage of pooling people’s resources, and any profit can be invested back into the company to generate more wealth for its employees or be held onto in case of a downturn. Both are better than a CEO’s pocket.

One issue is capital investment. Starting a company is expensive, and many companies take a long time to become profitable. If every company had to bootstrap, we’d see much fewer successes and much slower progress. I’m not exactly sure how to solve this, yet. Would love to hear folks’ ideas

Unfortunately, the definitions change based on context.

When we’re talking about political and broad economic systems, private means non-government organizations. Public means government.

When we’re talking about a company’s status, public means its equity is traded on a public stock exchange. Private is everything else. So a ma and pop shop is a private company and a private organization. Microsoft is a public company but a private organization.

The rest of you commenters are assholes for talking to HardNut like this. They clearly don’t know these definitions, and rather than educate, you criticize to inflate your own egos and display some bogus superiority. Instead, explain the terms so constructive conversation can happen. Cue the “well it’s not my responsibility” crowd. If you want to promote your own ideas, education is a better method than mockery when it comes to those who aren’t clearly and steadfastly directly opposed to you. And even for those directly opposed to you, the display of educating wins third parties to your cause.

Good on you, HardNut for trying to Google things and figure them out on your own. The context between these two areas is tricky, and your understanding makes sense without the additional context. Sadly, we’re terrible at naming things.

You incentivize the same way unions are growing now. Just show people the benefits and constantly shout it from the highest mountain tops.

So bb, tell me more about those sweet, sweet employee-owned companies for other readers’ benefit.

Tell me more about how employee owned companies are better at long term planning. Tell me more about how they’re concerned about balancing profit for survival’s sake with societal good. Tell me more about how they participate in the benefits of the free market via competition while not becoming all-consuming, profit-driven monsters. Tell me more about how they avoid stakeholder-chosen, sociopathic leadership in favor of leaders wanting the best for the company’s mission and its employees. Tell me more about the coffee shop branch that was shut down by its company and reopened as an employee-owned cafe. Tell me more about AAA. Tell me sweet nothings, bb

(And yes, I’m explicitly not talking about communism because it’s an emotionally charged concept, and i want to focus on things maybe people don’t know so much about)

Not 100% sure why, but i love this. Thank you

I understand the bitterness, but whoever said the commenter wanted to do what capitalists demand? They just wanted to avoid bloodshed.

There are always options like general strikes, massive voting movements, etc. It’s just a matter of figuring out what will work and how to do it.

If you’re arguing that capitalists will respond with violence, that’s fair, but then the blame is on them, not the workers

Like everything these days, it depends. I live in Seoul, where the density is arguably too high. If you get on the line 2 train, which encircles Gangnam and the business and tourist districts, you’re gonna be a sardine. If you hop on line 3 far enough east, it’s totally chill during rush hour in August. Literally. Air conditioning. Wifi and cell signal. It’s luxurious compared to LA.

I think it’s just a matter of city planning. In Seoul’s case, I think they didn’t properly account for population growth and how much the inner-circle areas would boom. Outside of line 2 and some key transfer stations, public transit here absolutely is relaxing. I brag to my friends in the states about it all the time

Chicken and egg problem. Crime highly correlates with poverty. People perceive transit as being a poor people thing because it’s cheap. Only poor people take transit. You get the gist.

Also, the incidence rate is probably lower than people’s perception. I lived in San Francisco for about 3 years and only experienced one incident while taking transit everyday. Of course, transit doesn’t have the problem mentioned above, so maybe it’s not the best example.

I tried taking transit a couple of times in LA and in my hometown in a suburb in Florida. Transit is underutilized in these places (read as, people see it as a poor person thing). It was surprisingly… uninteresting. It was just getting from A-to-B. People mostly just sat on their phones or stared out the window or chatted. Was quite nice.

So maybe grab a friend or two for safety, since you’re concerned about that, and give it a shot. I think you’ll be surprised.

But if you’re in LA or New York, the trains are super dirty. So uh, i recommend not one of those. No idea where you’re located

(Edit: I’m assuming you’re in the US because that kind of opinion is quite common there.)

I live in Seoul, which has superb public transit. It can work if designed well.

Busses have their own lanes to ensure traffic minimally affects them. Bus-train transfers are well managed. High density means that mass transit ends up being faster due to traffic concerns. Speed limits are quite low, which also makes vehicle accidents less lethal.

As for prohibitively expensive, that’s only if you don’t sufficiently tax your corporations ;)

So basically, vote for local and national government that will create an environment where public transit works

(Edit: what I’m about to say is a good bit wrong, but I’m not going to try and hide my mistakes. This article has a more complete history: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/why-israel-and-palestine-conflict-war-history-b2426050.html)

I don’t support the violence at all, but this isn’t a (direct) result of imperialism.

After WW2, the Allies were like, “what do we do with all these Jews? We don’t want them in our countries.” Then they thought, “why not Jerusalem?” But a bunch of Arabs were living there, but the Allies really didn’t want more Jews, so they just dumped them all in modern Israel, told the Arabs this is Jews’ land now, and recognized Israel as a state. Palestine has a right to be pissed. So this isn’t so much an imperialism problem as much as a racism problem.

But still, Hamas are evil fuckers that take shit too far. Israel definitely is not the good guy and is not helping the situation at all, but this kind of escalation just makes shit worse for everyone.

Let’s walk through an example. Please note that I absolutely do not mean anything of what I’m about to say. Imagine someone were to say the following things.

I’m going to kill you. I don’t think you have a right to exist. I’m going to torture, dismember, and end you because I personally believe this is morally right. You do not deserve life. I will come to your home. I will take you in the night. I will make you watch as your family screams in terror while I take them all away. I will do this to everyone like you. I will destroy you because I believe it is the right thing to do. I will experiment on you. You will be like cattle for my whims because I do not believe you are human like me. You are just a meat sack. I will abuse you simply for my enjoyment because you hold no value beyond the value I give you. You are worthless, and I will dispose of you.

If someone legitimately said these things to you, if they really meant it, would you want the government to just be like, “hey man, they can say whatever they want. Human rights?” This is a Nazi’s inner monologue.

In pointing out one’s deficiencies, you should help them fill in those gaps. Otherwise, you’re just being an asshole.

Explain what communism is. Comprehensive education in communism is not part of many places’ standard curriculum

Not a function of capitalism. Function of human greed. Communism doesn’t solve this. It just moves the greed from corporations and politicians to bueareacrats.

It sounds like you’re arguing more against extreme materialism, where people believe that accumulation of physical goods holds more value than human life.

Also, citing genocide due to use of US taxpayer money isn’t critiquing capitalism. It was taxpayer money, not market or investor money. That’s government corruption, which is independent from capitalism. You see this kind of corruption in both capitalist and communist systems.

I think your main argument should be the prioritization of human dignity over anything else and an extreme vigilance for corruption in institutions of all sorts.

I don’t think you read what I wrote.

I’m arguing that living conditions have improved due to technology, not economy. Our generation’s buying power is less than that of our grandparents. I’ll pull some data for this tonight after work. It’s true in several industrialized countries

So how does that relate to the original point…? The investment in and use of Chinese labor wasn’t happening during our grandparents’ generation, which is what we’re alluding to.

I haven’t tracked Chinese history very well. I don’t know when the poverty reducing occurred in relation to the markets opening up. Intuition suggests the market opening up is what reduced poverty, but I’ll see later if I can find data to corroborate that.

But I think China is subject to similar problems. Now that several areas of China are well industrialized, will the CCP ensure workers aren’t abused? Unfortunately, I anticipate it won’t. Given that the CCP doesn’t permit serious criticism, there’s no feedback loop for improvement. I’m hoping I’m wrong.

Saying Marx predicted everything is not at odds with mostly free market economies.

I think most people will say that free markets do provide economic opportunity, generally. The problem is when those free markets are completely unregulated, where those with wealth can create fascist plutocracies, which is the trend we’re seeing now. This is what Marx predicted.

We have two options: 1) reinstate proper regulations and ensure capitalists keep their hands out of government or 2) come up with a better system. To my knowledge, 2 hasn’t happened yet, and I think most people would be quite happy with 1.

All of these arguments are missing the point. They’re attempts at strawman arguments, though I don’t believe it was out of malice. Technologist progress is a function mostly of population and time. Both the US and USDR made significant technological progress, so economic system is a less important (still important though!) factor.

The argument is that the modern economic system compared to our grandparents’ generation is worse. We have less buying power. We have less publicly funded welfare to act as a safety net. Workers have less bargaining power than times past. Large corporations are taking advantage of consumers and workers at huge rates.

We could have had all of the technological progress we’ve made PLUS our grandparents’ economic situation if our parents didn’t fuck everything. That’s the argument.

Oh man, that brings back memories