Do farmers still do crop rotation? Here in the Netherlands they pump the ground full of the appropriate chemicals so they can grow the same crop in the same place every year.

As for your plan, the fact that bees are getting essential nutrients from those flowers proves a fallow field with wildflowers isn’t being fallow; it’s extracting resources from the soil which may have needed replenishment for crop rotation to work. You can sacrifice productivity for wildflowers, but at that point you’re just designating a space to be a meadow.

The solution is complicated and requires society to step away from the industrial model of agriculture entirely. Food forests are diverse and resilient permaculture, where a farmer does the labor of monitoring nutrient flows through the ecosystem so that a large population of humans can be part of that balanced ecosystem (possibly at a distance, with food being exported and feces imported). Bees are a natural part of such an ecosystem.

Cults and toxic self-help literature have existed before LLMs copied them. I don’t know if LLMs are getting people who couldn’t have been gotten by human scammers.

Scams have many different vectors and people can be vulnerable to them depending on their mood or position in life. Testing people on LLM intolerance would be more like testing them on their susceptibility to viruses.

People can be immunocompromised for various reasons, temporarily or permanently, so as a society public hygiene standards (and the material conditions to produce them) are a lot more valuable. Wash your hands after interacting, keep public spaces clean, that sort of stuff.

Are the users in this study techbros?

Besides, tech bros didn’t program this in, this is just an LLM getting stuck in the data patterns stolen from toxic self-help literature.

For decades there has been a large self-help subculture who consume massive amounts of vacuous positive affirmation produced by humans. Now those vacuous affirmations are copied by the text copying machine with the same result and it’s treated as shocking.

This is looking at global data. Most countries are a lot less wasteful than the US. It also completely disregards waste food, though it says it only makes up 5% of global caloric production.

According to the article, the US produces 14% of all agricultural calories on Earth. 28% of this is spent on non-food purposes, while 17% is spent on food but not animal feed, compared to 15% and 45% globally. This means that while the US produces twice as much calories per acre of farmland than the global average, it can actually feed fewer people per acre than average.

And yes to slavery for millions of people imprisoned because cops lied about what they did.

You don’t need a monoculture for that. Plenty of black people murdered Vietnamese civilians.

On this chart Norway would also be listed with 29 guns per person. These are owned by only 10% of the population however

Wait, so you’re saying the average Norwegian gun owner owns 290 guns? That sounds very implausible.

Waving away ownership because it’s a “social construct” is a dodge.

I am not waving it away, I am lowering its status to be within the same realm as concerns that are secondary in capitalism. Concerns that may become primary when capital is undone, as in state communism.

You’re using “class” as a catch-all. I’m using it in the stricter sense that actually lets you explain things, relation to production, control of surplus, reproduction of power. That’s what gives the concept teeth.

And all of these can continue to be monopolized by a specific societal subgroup without the use of “ownership”. Any group with authority over these matters that can have solidarity within the authoritative group will serve as a ruling class that gains from exploiting the working class.

So no, solidarity isn’t a matter of interpretation. It’s grounded in position. People can misread their interests, sure. They can be won to chauvinism or reformism. But those interpretations only stick because of material conditions, and they only last as long as those conditions hold. Real solidarity has to be built on shared relation to production and shared interest in ending exploitation. Anything else is temporary alignment at best.

The relation to production of different groups change over time. Serfdom, slavery, automation. Worldwide alignment of workers’ interests is temporary and shifting like intranational alignment, which is why it historically hasn’t happened yet.

If the singular working class as a concept had more teeth than nationality I would expect it to, well, take a bigger bite out of history. For French revolutionaries to abolish slavery in their natural solidarity with other workers rather than continuing exploitation because their interests did not in fact align with slaves in the colonies.

If every exercise of authority or unevenness in incentives is already the seed of a new ruling class, then organised transformation becomes impossible by definition. Any revolution complex enough to survive would already contain the embryo of its own betrayal and again we should just give up and kill ourselves now.

No, we should become anarchist. Unevenness is a vulnerability that we build social structures to prevent from turning into authority, and complex social structures with far less authority already exist from sociocracy to decentralized guerilla cells.

As with your narrative of state communism, these systems are imperfect and will develop places of authority and abuse, and we will learn from that and alter the systems to be less authoritative.

But where you expect administrators to make such improvements to their personal and (sub)class’ detriment, anarchy keeps the power to make these changes with the people so the changes are made in the people’s favor.

We are able to be anarchist (or state communist) even within capitalism; the countless seeds of authority we carry with us into the postrevolutionary society will be far easier to wrangle than the full-grown monstrosities of capitalism.

“Heroin chic” used to be an unironic term for female beauty standards. Nothing will be as bad for our self-image as the white supremacist capitalist monoculture of the 20th century.

Social media has been a godsend, helping people build communities around other standards of beauty or even resisting central beauty standards altogether. The diversity of aesthetics, the social support for people who don’t fit the cookie-cutter mould, the sharing of nutritional delicious meals without advertisers leaning on the editor.

Personally, people on social media advised me to cut shampoo when doctors told me to use more and more intense shampoo, so now I have healthier hair while spending less on product. Social media helped me recognize I was trans and showed me realistic transition timelines when regular media treated it as a vomitous joke and my psychiatrist said it was just the autistic tendency to question everything.

Without social media I would probably have killed myself, unable to make myself conform to how my those around me said I should look and act.

There are plenty of infohazards on social media, but Lemmy is also a social medium, as are reddit and youtube where I got most of that productive information over the years. I am glad social media exist, I’m glad we and others like us able to talk like this, and I hope we always will be able to. Though yeah, hopefully not through capitalism.

The dissolved oxygen has to leave the beer somehow to get the yeast to produce alcohol. You could use some energy-intensive process to remove the oxygen, but otherwise it naturally gets turned into the CO2 beer drinkers expect. And I doubt that energy-intensive process would be worth it in the end.

Though maybe the naturally present oxygen isn’t enough to make it as carbonated as consumers expect, and more air or CO2 is pumped in to make it more carbonated. In that case using captured CO2 instead of letting the yeast turn some more of the wheat into CO2 would make a difference.

Ownership is a social construct like any other. Limiting your intepretation of class to ones defined by ownership makes the analysis pointlessly inapplicable when looking at societies where ownership plays less of a role. Feudal society didn’t just have lords and serfs, it also had peasants and free cities and church land that don’t fit the “feudalism is defined by owning the land and the serfs on it” schema. Theocracy, bureaucracy, caste systems, white supremacy, patriarchy, and anarchy all benefit from a class-based lens.

Marx focused on ownership as the primary class divide because that’s how capitalism works (especially in the 19th century before social liberalism muddied the waters through pension funds, unemployment benefits, small business loans, etc.), but any conflict of interests between groups of people seeking to achieve economic prosperity will do. For example, migrant workers are actively imported under liberalism to divide the working class, which was so succesful not just because of racism but because of genuinely different economic incentives between those with citizenship privileges and those who are floundering in a hostile legal system but for who what little they get is more than they could have gotten back in the imperial periphery. In essence, citizenship becomes the division between two distinct working classes.

And here we see how solidarity is a matter of interpretation. Right-wing citizen workers attempt solidarity with capitalists by invoking their shared citizenship while left-wing citizen workers attempt solidarity with the migrants by invoking their shared worker status. These are different strategies that are both within range of what the material conditions make plausible. One hopes to reinforce imperial oppression, creating the material conditions that can be leveraged into greater citizenship privileges as traitors to the international working class; the other hopes to leverage the power of a united labor front grants either to demand more privileges at the negotiating table (socialist reformers) or to have a revolution whose reorganisation leaves them better off than before.

I wish I could say for certain that being traitors to the international working class is a foolishly bad bet. But it worked okay for western workers in the past century. I truly can’t say if a median income middle aged white male American would expect less prosperity under Trump than in the conflicting mess that would be an American leftist revolution.

Those in power have similar choices between mutually contradictory strategies, reshaping material conditions in different uncertain ways. In 2015-2024, the USAmerican capital class was divided between going full hog dictatorial fascism and trying to reform through the slow decline of their empire. Neither is objectively better for the US capital class; they both have different risk profiles, and fascism is a big enough swing that it can’t be hedged against very well. If the US collapses, billionaires may well end up being hunted down and killed, which is worse for them than becoming multi-millionaires in a world where China is the dominant nation.

So you made a straw man of what I was saying. There are degrees of freedom in how material relations are shaped which can be chosen between by a revolutionary movement.

Administrators, officials, organisers, these are roles within a system. In a system where production isn’t privately owned as capital, people in those roles don’t become a separate class just because they have authority.

Feudalism did not primarily maintain its classes through ownership either. Like a feudal lord, an administrator primarily maintains their position by social maneuvers towards their near-peers. Justifying bad metrics as unavoidable while claiming responsibility for windfalls, shaping their domain to play better within these social dynamics, and sabotaging rivals who don’t fit in their narrative.

Unlike feudal lords, administrators don’t own a personal demesne, but for the most powerful feudal lords that demesne was miniscule compared to their power base that came from vassalage. A feudal lord conquering a rival kingdom would distribute it to loyal vassals like an administrator cannibalizing a rival ministry would distribute it to loyal managers.

In this game, administrators want to increase authority over their domain of responsibility to better weaponize it. Modes of production are turned towards political usefulness for the administrator rather than towards the benefit of workers, alienating workers in the process.

Simply put, authority becomes a form of control over the means of production which shapes an administrator’s class incentives differently from workers. It isn’t ownership but it doesn’t need to be.

And yes, administrator roles do tend to be leveraged into nepotistic inheritance of authority, with family being appointed to higher roles in exchange for favors.

If material conditions are all that shapes ideas, why are you speaking ideas at me? Either you are incorrect or you are wasting your time, and I don’t think you’re wasting your time.

In a world where ideas don’t matter, either of us working against our class interests through ignorance is incoherent. If we can be deceived to act against our class interests to change material conditions to serve the rich, then ideas can change material conditions.

People can interpret their interests different ways. People can ally themselves with specific groups but not others. People can have different levels of risk aversion. People can be affected by propaganda and charisma. Ideas skew praxis skews the development of material conditions.

Neglect this at your own peril. Use it to make fairy tales come true.

To conflate proletarian dictatorship with bourgeois state power is to erase the question of class content.

What class attributes do the authorities in the vanguard have in common with the proletariat?

“Third world nation” is a USA-invented term, meaning countries that are aligned with neither the USA nor Soviet Russia. So formally, the USA can never be a third world nation by definition.

Informally, US political culture has used “third world nation” as a pejorative, associating it with primitive society, bad economic policy, hostile non-representative forms of government, etc., to make the violent imperialist oppression of those nations more palpable.

So in a sense the US has always treated some of its population as “third world”, primarily black people and latino people. Recently the “third world treatment” has simply gone from treating these people like Mexicans to treating them like Argentinians during Operation Condor.

Though if you’re asking about when the US will treat white people like it treats people in third world countries, that’s probably going to start happening around the midterms. The Trump administration has committed too many blatant crimes to let themselves get voted out of office, so they will interfere with the election and use violence to try to get people to submit to it.

Though you’re thinking of the third world as the stereotype from US education, that’s not really how US fascism would go. By late 2027 it would probably be more like the US stereotype of Soviet Russia. Assuming any revolutionary action is unsuccesful.

This is NoStupidQuestions. Please block this community if that’s the attitude you’re going to have.

Why? Because the term isn’t neutral.

That’s what I said; the center defines the standard. The US is authoritarian by social-democratic standards.

They emerge and transform through shifts in the mode of production and the intensification of class struggle.

“Class struggle” is not a one-dimensional variable, and the mode of production is to a significant extent a choice made by those within the system. A revolution has degrees of freedom for who is in its circle of solidarity.

Anarchist models that treat authority as a contaminant to be minimized misunderstand the state as a neutral tool rather than an instrument of class power.

State communists mistake the state/vanguard as a neutral outsider rather than a material entity. Authority left to fester will shape the material conditions to enshrine the authority at the cost of those without authority.

The trick is to have a system where if people choose to engage in authoritarianism they lose power. A liberal democracy can arrest a head of state who engages in illegal actions more easily than a feudal monarchy does.

This is because of their respective structures, with indictment being a legal structure with physical preparation done to facilitate it on the one hand, and being treason in the other.

So naturally the more a system facilitates the overthrow of authorities, the less authoritarian it gets. You’re right that politics is a constant work in progress, so a good political system incorporates that progress as smoothly as possible.

No system can withstand a sufficiently powerful foreign intervention, but a system where the overthrowing of authority is as mundane as throwing out the trash, where people’s best method of accumulating wealth and power is by betting on something other than authority, can split your false dichotomy.

Systems that attempt this are called anarchy.

That said, you are missing one key element from the meme. People aren’t voting for authoritarianism because they are unhappy but because they have reaped the fruits of authoritarianism/imperialism on a global scale and they want the system to find new people to exploit.

If a region in the western world became anarchic with no economic changes, it would rightfully be overthrown by people from the global south who their economic system oppresses. Liberal democracy prevents this through citizenship and the authority of those with voting rights over those without.

So anarchy would qualify in spirit if not in letter, but it would require a reckoning with everyone whose oppression we benefit from.

Authoritarian is a meaningless pejorative. All states/countries/political groups etc. must be authoritarian by necessity in class society

Historicially, classes have been created or destroyed in order to create more or less centralized authority-driven decision making, and societies with less centralized authority have called ones with more centralized authority “authoritarian”.

Feudalism, dictatorship and even economic subjugation are called authoritarian by less authoritarian states.

In practice, the criterion for “authoritarianism” is however far back on that scale makes your current political center have anxiety about their ability to keep their current privileges from the authority.

But in theory you can see that the social organisation with the least authority possible would be an anarchist one, designed to dissolve class hierarchy when possible (e.g. abolition of private property) and apply anti-authoritarian safeguards if not (e.g. teach children how to take class action against adults, and make it easy for them to do so).

While such a society will still accumulate authority, it is designed to process it like any other waste product.

This means “authoritarian” is as meaningful as “filthy”. We can never be fully clean, but someone who chooses not to bathe to the standards of their time can be called filthy, and those standards can improve over time.

The Democrats were in charge for half that time, so surely they must have done half the work during that time, right?

Imagine believing campaign promises.

or device pin

It doesn’t sound like you would have to.