Dimmer06

I work retail but I'm mostly in back of house and don't interact with customers very often. Retail workers are so bizarre to me. They get paid and treated like shit but sometimes they care so deeply about their job even though there's zero reason to do so. So many of my coworkers will, in the same setting, say they just come in for a paycheck and also complain about the unprofitable mismanagement of a department (oftentimes not even their own department!). I have one coworker who was complaining about being disciplined for not taking his mandated lunch break even though there's absolutely no pressure to skip it. Another one freaked out about the box a product arrived in being possibly incorrectly labeled (it actually was labeled correctly). If I tell any of these people we should organize a union for better pay and benefits they look at me like I have a second head but then they act like this and I'm like "you're all desperate for communism and you don't even know it".

I don't have too many complaints otherwise. It's a little boring this time of year but I'd rather that then super busy.

I don't think it's out of line with the ideas of Marx or Engels. Kautsky wrote it in 1892 after spending like a decade learning from Engels so it's well before he began drifting away from Marxism and it's about the Erfurt program which Lenin admired. It's not a ground breaking work of theory that will enlighten even a half decently read Marxist but like I said it describes a society much closer to our own than the Manifesto does which would probably be useful to anyone looking for entry level texts.

If it kept up with its peak it probably would be more than $30/hour by 2030 but it does make.a good slogan.

I'm reading The Class Struggle by Kautsky and it's like an updated Communist Manifesto. It's still 130 years old but it feels so much more contemporary than the Manifesto. I think it might be better suited for entry level Marxist literature.

Imo the best thing you could try to do is organize a union or something along those lines. Maybe your local orgs know a place that needs a salt. Most of the political parties in this country don't have any idea what they're doing because they aren't actually rooted in the working class. They have no organized base of workers to lead in struggle against the system which means the parties don't actually learn anything. This leads to meaningless debates and continually rereading and misinterpreting theory.

Also forget everything you know about unions and read about "direct join unions" or "solidarity unions" because that's the only way you'll ever organize a union that will further the cause of socialism and it might be the only type of union there is in the coming years.

In an old eco-monkeywrenching pamphlet I read it said they used to leave notes saying they spiked trees even though they had not actually done it. The fact that they could have done it was enough to stall cutting and make the loggers look for spikes.

I'd think if the characters in your story could sabotage a few things on the site they could use that strategy as a multiplier which might also help to avoid people getting hurt.

I work in a another nationwide chain that is rolling these out. They are wirelessly connected to a database so prices can be set automatically and update within minutes. I don't think they want to do individual pricing though and if they did they'd just do it at the register. While electronic tags would make store by store pricing easier, that has already been happening to some extent and it's becoming less common as the industry consolidates.

What these are really for is to cut costs. The store I work at probably used to spend 15+ labor hours a week hanging tags on top of a full time employee just to audit them. The other store I used to work at had two full time employees doing it. There's a special printer, app, tons of different little plastic hangers, and paper to print and hang paper tags. These new electronic tags are shipped in a box as they're needed, are reusable, and are automatically updated.

I've been thinking about this recently. In Battlefield 4 there was a DLC that introduced the "UCAV", a small airplane like drone that exploded on impact. People quickly figured out that a full squad with an ammo replenishment box could deploy so many UCAVs that they could dominate any part of the map that didn't have extremely hard cover. Running into a squad like this basically made the game unplayable because there was no way to counter them.

It's funny to see that's more or less Iran's strategy a decade later.

Truly the most moral army in the world.

Gas cars are fucking stupid. "Oh let's put an internal combustion engine, battery, exhaust, and gas tank in every single vehicle so that cars are stupidly complex, gasoline dependent, and unnecessarily large, heavy, and noxious. They'll be so much better than a motor and a battery that can be recharged at any source of electricity."

"I don't like the possibility of a self charging car. I want to burn gooified dinosaurs in my engine."

By the time he was doing or writing anything meaningful Mao had nothing to do with anarchism. Maoism (which was created because certain people copied Mao's ideas to their own national context even though Mao pretty explicitly said not to do that) just looks like anarchism because they are both the post-hoc philosophical justifications for the natural activity of the radical lumpenproletariat.

Average DSA maoist