I am opposed to “maximising utility” because I am a communist. Production should serve needs, not production for the sake of production.

compulsively reinvest all their excesses and internalize all of their external cost

Ok, still exploitation.

I can see that those are your political beliefs. You are welcome to have those political beliefs. OP is asking about communists, and communists do not want this, so this is rather orthogonal to the question.

Do you think that it’s not possible to interact with each other outside of a market, outside of capitalism?

Because they are subjected to market forces. I’m not referring to the decisions an individual worker in a coop might make—an individual may well decide to give away all their money and become homeless, that doesn’t mean it’s in people’s interests to. In a market, you must compete with other businesses, otherwise you will be out-competed and not survive. The “profits” obtained by a coop are still surplus-value; all the laws of capital outlined by Marx are still at play. Marx’s critique of political economy did not really hinge upon the specific boss/employee relationship; it’s about impersonal domination of the market over people who live in a capitalist mode of production. In Capital Marx spends quite a bit of time talking about how even capitalists are subjected to and dominated by capital; the domination is impersonal, and the domination of (hu)man by (hu)man is only secondary to that impersonal domination.

The hell of capitalism is the firm itself, not the fact that the firm has a boss.

The forces of the market and of capital do not go away just because the workers own the company. In worker-owned cooperatives, the workers exploit themselves, because the business still needs to grow. They simply carry out the logic of the capitalist themselves on themselves, using their surplus value to expand the business’s capital, and paying for their own labour-power reproduction. i.e., the workers all simply become petit-bourgeois.

There are extant organisations (some political parties, some NGOs) that push for more workers’ cooperatives, and none of them are communist nor call themselves communist. If you believe in a cooperative-based economy, you are not a communist. I don’t mean that as an insult, it’s just a fact, the same as if you want, for instance, the current US economic system, you are not a communist. You can advocate for coops but you would fare much better in that political project if you didn’t try to put it under the banner of something it’s not, and something far more controversial than just “worker coops are good” anyway.

I’m subscribed to their tech, gaming, and news communities. They’re fine, I don’t care to make an account on their instance but nothing wrong with the Hexbear communities I subscribe to.

Listen to music or watch a video, if you don’t want to read?

I prefer Mullvad. I’ve found it a lot more reliable. I was a paying Proton customer but still had connectivity issues a non-negligible number of times, whereas I’ve literally never had Mullvad be the cause of connection issues in my years of using it. It’s great that they take cash and have literally only an account hash associated with your account.

I’ve also found that Mullvad customer support are responsive, helpful, and know what they’re talking about. I’ve had experiences with Proton’s customer support that were ok, but occasionally had the typical customer service hiccups along the lines of being assigned a new support agent who doesn’t read back all the conversation (understandable—I had one bug I was dealing with for months) and you have to explain again what the original issue was and what has been done since.

I think both options are perfectly fine, but I definitely prefer Mullvad, and it’s what I recommend to people if they ask me to recommend a VPN service.

The issue is that older kernel versions will lose support and stop getting security updates eventually. I don’t know if there is enough of a community around old CPUs for fixes to be backported by the community.

In the event of legal action, your side can request disclosure from the other side. It’s standard to request disclosure of evidence the other side holds that will help your case, and in this case something like a meeting in which something said is important evidence, I’m sure that both your company’s lawyers and if not then a judge will get the company to hand over the recording.

A lawyer could point you in the right direction. Not all legal action is necessarily “damages” (also, the lack of a promotion is damages—if your boss says to you “You’re my most skilled employee, but I don’t want to give you a promotion because you’re a woman”, that’s unlawful discrimination in any place that prohibits sexism. Of course in the vast majority of cases it is much harder to prove since the boss won’t actually explicitly say that, but you get the principle of the law); legal action can be to correct a wrong, in this case changing company policy to ensure that employees are not discriminated against on the basis of not using this app. You can just explain the situation over email to a law firm that deals with labour law, and if perhaps you’d be better served by a different law firm for instance, they will be able to point you in that direction.

People graduate from Bachelor’s wayy older than you. I was meant to go to uni when I was 18 then had a medical emergency, then a combo of surgeries and incarceration stopped me from going for several years after that, and I’m currently just working but may try to go to uni once I have more money. There are plenty of students who start an undergrad degree when they’re your age or older. People who start when they are 18 have various personal emergencies that mean they have to delay their education. You will be entirely fine.

No, they need consent. The state is a third party and cannot consent on your behalf

They use it for Google Maps as a pin. Nothing new, and not particularly weird either. You can just skip it and not tell them.

I think people who didn’t grow up eating tofu, or just haven’t eaten a lot of tofu, may easily believe that tofu has no flavour. Or maybe if your nose/tongue is just less sensitive. I can most easily smell it when tofu is frying in a pan, personally. Like I said, it’s really subtle, and easily overpowered.

I personally love roast veggies. The issue with eg stir fried or sautéed vegetables, for me at least, is that they don’t microwave well because for both stir fry and sautéed veggies, part of the appeal is some crunch that remains in veggies like broccoli, carrots, baby sweetcorn, etc. But microwaving them to reheat just makes them go mushy. With roast veggies, they are quite soft anyway, so as long as you are not going for a crispy exterior they will microwave well.

I guess that’s one of my big issues with vegetables, is that I feel I usually have to cook them fresh. Otherwise the texture is not nice to me if I cook a lot of veggies to reheat over the next few days.

For roast veggies: olive oil and whole cloves of garlic with the skin on. You can smash them to release more flavour, but that also makes it more likely that the garlic will burn, which is a shame because roast garlic makes for a delicious garlic-flavoured spread on toast. Add whatever seasoning you like; I go with rosemary and then whatever spices on my spice rack look good.

Tofu tastes like soy! It’s a very mild flavour but I can definitely taste and smell it in tofu and soy milk. I suppose people who are not used to eating tofu might think it has no flavour at all, but as someone who’s eaten tofu their whole life, I can definitely recognise soy as a flavour. Just a very subtle one.

Nutritional yeast is great for scrambled tofu. You can of course season scrambled tofu however you like, but for one block of tofu (quite forgiving in terms of quantities, I think this will work well for anywhere between 200g to 400g of firm or extra-firm tofu) I do:

• Generous bunch of nutritional yeast. Like a good pinch between all of your fingertips.
• 1 tsp ground cumin
• 1/4 tsp ground turmeric
• 1/4 tsp ground black pepper (you can up it to 1/2 tsp if you prefer; I used to do 1/2 tsp then I think I got oversensitive to it so halved it)
• sprinkle of salt
• Add dried parsley at the end as a garnish

Keep in mind I don’t make any attempt to make mine taste like eggs. If you want scrambled tofu as an egg substitute then you could leave out the cumin (which gives it a more curry flavour) and add stuff like garlic powder, onion powder, and black rock salt at the end (add black rock salt at the very end when it’s off the heat, otherwise it will lose its eggy flavour). But personally I prefer a more curry flavour than an eggy flavour!

Nutritional yeast also works well to top avocado toast with. I do toasted sourdough, smashed avocado mixed with lemon juice, nutritional yeast sprinkled on top, then toasted sesame seeds sprinkled on top of that.

That’s fair, but in my case ~/scripts/ acts as my prefix. I suppose that narrows down a lot what your prefix can be though, if it has to be a valid path in which your scripts live.

…People? I would say that’s too tautological, as the statement begins with “all people here are…”, and necessarily all people here are people, otherwise they’re not covered by the statement.

I’m only one of those things.