Aceticon

I'm actually shocked as hell that the EU company which is probably one of the biggest targets for state-sponsored industrial espionage had anything at all hosted outside the EU (or, in fact, in any cloud system other than an in-house one).

Personally I had lost all hope on those fuckers as soon as I saw how they went after Corbyn.

Then again I was just an EU immigrant in the UK and left after the Leave Referendum because that was the last drop for me and I lost all hope for the UK as a country (I kept following UK subjects for a while, hence actually caring about the whole Corbyn thing, but that slowly tailed of after a few years)

In the years since periodically some news or other comes out of the UK that just confirms my decision to leave Britain as one of the best in my life.

PS: Also, full disclosure, I was a Greenparty member back in Britain, so I was always significantly left of New Labour and didn't have a good opinion of them. Mind you, they still exceeded my expectations ... on the downside.

The politicians who wrestled back control of the Labour party through a campaign of smears with the help of Israeli-linked Jewish groups and who, immediately after that started at purge of any with dissenting opinions from that party, had more than demonstrated their love for Machiavelism, even before rising to Government purely on the back of the First Past The Post system and Reform splitting the far-right vote thus costing the Tories lots of seats.

Also, as others pointed out, this faction of Labour has long had an autoritarian streak, both in terms of the insane civil surveillance infrastructure they built last time they were in Government (as exposed by the Snowden Revelations) and their relentless weakening of privacy and even pretty basic legal rights.

This is really not surprising: the goose stepping into Fascism in the UK has started a while ago, it's just that it's a posh kind of Fascism wrapped in layers of deceit and disguised as "Rule Of Law", unlike in places like for example Hungary were it was closer to the more traditional "strong-man with an iron-fist" Fascist image.

Judging by what has come out regarding UK personalities and the Epstein files, they're looking for whistleblowers who would denounce the pedos they have amongst their elites.

Curve is a UK company.

Having worked in the Financial Industry in London, I wouldn't trust any UK financial solution provider (including payment processors) any more than a US one since Financial Regulation in both is a joke, both governments are in thrall to Finance and both governments are, for supposed Democracies, insanely high on civil society surveillance having things like secret information courts that can just issue secret bulk surveillance orders.

The UK might be in the European Continent, but for somebody based on the EU they provide no more rights than the US.

If one is based in the EU, it's overall safer to stick to EU based companies where one actually has some right and companies doing fishy things towards EU citizens run real risks of being heavily punished for it.

Same here.

Whilst I don't necessarily think Steam are doing it because of being good guys (I just think it makes good business sense for them to move gamers away from Windows), that doesn't mater for the outcomes for gamers, what maters is that what they're doing helps us all out to escape the ever tightening clutches of Microsoft which nowadays is basically an Evil Tech Corp.

Religious gamers should be praying really hard to their Deity/Pantheon for Gabe not to have a traffic accident and exercise a lot and eat healthy food so as not to have a heart attack, because after he dies many if not most of the games you "licensed" from Steam via a button in their app which says "Buy" might simply disappear from your account with some shitty excuse and you'll have no effective recourse unless you have a couple of millions of dollars to sue them for it in whatever court their EULA says you have to sue them on.

I think that more in general, from the change in the image of Elon Musk over the last 5 to 10 years the younger generations of Techies should've learned the vast chasm that is possible between perception and reality when it comes to those people who manage/own the companies making the Technology we love.

Maybe Gabe is a good guy, maybe he's neither good nor bad, maybe he's a bad guy - if you don't know the guy personally and well as a person, all you have to go by is the tightly managed public image you see, and as Musk so painfully demonstrated not that long ago, you can wrap an Nazi in a "nice techie pushing the world forward" managed public image which for decades the overwhelming majority of Techies (especially young ones) believes is real.

So, yeah, going back to your original post, its safer "not to worship companies" or the people who lead them.

As I wrote elsewhere, their support for Windows-Linux adapter technologies and even their games machines with Linux, are things which make total business sense as part of a strategy to try and move gamers away from Windows to manage the risk that Microsoft might use their control of Windows and ability to remotely update pretty much all consumer Window machines, to squeeze Steam as a games store for Windows games, for example via enforcing a requirement for Microsoft-signed applications and even a for usage of a Microsoft-store (no doubt justified as a consumer protection measure) like Apple does with iOS.

Steam isn't doing this because they're "nice guys", they're doing this because they're managed by competent managers with an outlook which is much longer term than the typical "next quarter" of publicly traded company and if you're looking at a 5 or 10 years period Microsoft doing this kind of thing is a real risk.

This doesn't mean that they're bad guys, it just means that from their support for gaming in Linux alone we cannot deduce that they're good guys since being managed by competent people who are trying to manage the risk of Microsoft turning Windows into what iOS is for Apple is an equally good explanation (probably an even better explanation, since "good guy" actions in business is a rare exception) for their support for Linux.

I would go further and say that all that they've done are """merely""" sound elements in a strategy to avoid that in the era of always-online remote updateable software, Microsoft successfully uses their position as the provider (and, more importantly, controller of some of what runs in pretty much all consumer instances) of Windows to squeeze out Steam as a games store.

Microsoft slowly transforming for Windows applications into the equivalent of Apple for iOS applications (and their move towards signed applications could be part of that) would be a nightmare scenario for Steam and it's a realistic possibility, especially if you notice that Microsoft is moving towards "everything must be cryptographically signed by Microsoft" to run in Windows.

So it totally makes strategical sense for Steam to invest into getting as many gamers as possible away from the Windows ecosystem, and one path is to get more games to as easily as possible run in the already existing and established alternative to Windows - Linux - the easiest way being to invest in an ever improved Windows-Linux adaptor layer (i.e. Wine/Proton) backed by a Steam store in Linux which just seamlessly uses that layer when needed, whilst another path is to sell their own game machines which do not run Windows and there again using Linux makes sense as the OS, both because it already exists and is mature and because using it on their machines has synergies with their investment in the "make games targeting Windows seamlessly run on Linux without needing changes".

This isn't Valve and Steam being nice guys doing nice things because they love their customers who use Linux, it's just good long term business planning and management of maybe their greatest external risk - Microsoft.

I mean, "Yay for choosing Linux!" and "Respect for their business sense", but lets not deceive ourselves into thinking they're good guys because of doing what just makes sense strategically to manage Microsoft as a risk.

in a marxist framework, the revolutionary period is something that cannot be extended or terminated at will, it is produced by material conditions, and the duration is not decided by any leaders, but rather by whether or not class antagonism persists.

societies develop through contradictions between productive forces and relations of production and when they become unsustainable, things intensify until the ruling class is overturned. marx would argue that such a state cannot legitimize itself forever by rhetoric alone, because political superstructures ultimately depend on material relations, and if the proletariat no longer exists as a class, the state loses its function and withers away, if the state persists, that indicates unresolved class structures, not a valid permanent transition, essentially eternal revolution is impossible under the correct material conditions

That logic defines the Revolution by its outcome rather than by how it's conducted, so it's one big No True Scotsman Falacy were the One True Socialist revolution is the one which yields a state were all class structures are resolved and there is no state, and you only know that's the case when you get that outcome: per that theory is perfectly possible to have a Revolution were the "rulling class is overturned" following a period of "contradictions between productive forces and relations of production" "becoming unsustainable" resulting in there being "no state" and yet there still being at least in part "unresolved class structures" and a "proletariat as a class".

In fact both the Soviet Union and "Communist" China both quickly showed that their "Revolution Of The Proletariat" wasn't really The One Socialist Revolution as after the initial period of "no state" during the initial stage a "state" once again arose (which is, for example, what managed how food was grown and distributed) and there were clearly people who worked and got some benefit alongside other people who "led" and even got greater benefits (i.e. there was a "working class" and a "ruling class") thus showing that the "no state" phase of the Revolution was reached with"unresolved class structures" hence was not the true Socialist Revolution.

All of this feeds into my original point: Socialism is not a plan to successfully reach Communism, it's more of a Manifesto which basically says that amongst many ways (possibly an infinite number of ways) which are not correct, there is a correct way to have a Revolution that results in Communism, though one has to somehow "resolve all class structures" including eliminating a "proletariat as a class", and how to do that is exactly the hard part to figure out which is left for others to do, which is such a typically way to "pass the hot potato" rather than address the devil in the details.

It's funny because I have a background in Science and one in Engineering and that stuff is like Alcubierre coming up with a Mathematical proof that one can travel faster than light and leaving the hard details (namelly how to transform a planet the size of Jupiter into energy to actually power said Alcubierre drive) to somebody else - yeah, sure, nice to know it's possible, but without the actual details of how to make it happen it's totally useless.

revolution is indeed fundamentally authoritarian in that way, do you oppose the american revolution as well? Do you oppose every revolution in history? I thought you were talking about the society post revolution, which of course is not. And is what dictatorship of the proletariat refers to.

Now we're getting somewhere.

The next part is this: what is there in Socialism to make sure that the period of Revolution is time-limited and if within that time limit the Revolution does not reach Communism, then the Revolution none the less ends?

Consider the following mental exercise:

• Imagine somebody who deep down is an evil person with selfish intent gains enough support to start a Revolution which they claim is to bring about an new system in a country which is better for everybody (a claim such leaders always make, as that's how they gather public support). They never exit the "Revolution" because that is actually the state which gives them power, whilst continuously claiming the Revolution is just the step necessary for a better future, it's just that they haven't got there yet.
• Now imagine somebody who deep down is an impeccably good person with good intent doing the same thing. They genuinelly want to end reach a better future but keep failing so are stuck in the Revolution stage because they are unwilling to let go of the dream and go back to the way things were before. Eventually the original good intention people are replaced as they die and there is no way to know for sure if those who replaced them are also well intentioned or are ill intentioned people who just sound truthfull when they claim to have good intentions.

If both cases started from a state of low freedom and during the Revolution the freedom is even lower, why would one situation be autocratic and the other not: they're both claiming to be Revolutions to reach a better system, they both never stop being in the state they call "Revolution" and in both the leadership can change and end up being people of ill-intent - they look the same, are both autocratic and both never end.

My point was never that Socialism has overtly or covertly ill intent or that it wants to create an autocratic state (I believe it's quite the contrary - it's genuinelly a political theory meant to produce the "greater good for the greater number"), my point is that de facto its a plan structured in such as way that the Revolution - which is as you admit a period of autocracy - it says is required to reach Communism never actually ends because it fails to reach Communism and has no mechanisms accept a less than perfect system than Communism after a while even if it's vastly better than the previous system) and end the Revolution. Meanwhile the power structures of the Revolution are captured by people with ill intent (who are the kind of people who seek power, especially the unrestrained power of a Revolution), which is how for example the Russian Revolution went from what it was under Lenin to the murderous psychopatic shitshow it became under Stalin.

Naive idealism in the original plan or incompetence in its execution, together with an unwillingness to let go create an ethernal state of autocracy called "the Revolution" - in other words an unending autocratic situation - just the same as ill intent claiming to be a Revolution does.

Absolutelly, all Revolutions are periods of autocracy. What makes some actual autocracies is that that stage never ends and there is no mechanism in place to de facto end it, even when the original intention was to end it but said end was conditional with reaching an objective which has never been reached in practice anywhere in the World.

If you can't exit Revolution in any what other than to reach a state which was never reached in the World, then de facto what you have is a process to create a neverending Revolution, not a process to reach a better state.