Don’t get me wrong, I’m trying to figure out how exaclty to deploy gift economy - I’ve gave away some bread and booze to neighbours, some returned with similar gifts, but I’m just looking for a path to bigger network. And competing money-free with exactly same stuff going on - thrift stores where people just rent shelves for pennies to sell their junk for pennies, in a sort of sick but rewarding game - sounds disruptive not in a good sense, but in a bad one. Maybe if I could just somehow put emphasis on information exchange instead of stupid petty cash exchange, and probably also cook something in place…

Interesting. Now that I envision something like this, I totally see one of the retired enterprising guys just grabbing bunch of stuff to sell in one of our many thrift stores just nearby (if anything, just to mess with younger and poorer people, what else to do for a boomer when they’ve got theirs?), and general thrift store population maybe getting upset for free store stealing their business. It’s not even big capitalists, they don’t care about our backwater - that’s why we have so many people-to-people non-free junk stores.

I mean, this could spark some kind of direct action, but probably just beating up old farts is not really fun community building activity.

That is true - by capitalist rules, if someone reduces someone else’s risks, they should also reduce their shares/profits. But then there are indirect dividends, so the system is kind of capitalist-sound.

As you might’ve noticed from my recent activity here, I’m also working on applied political science from unpopular freedom-humanitarian point of view side.

And indeed, there is little worse - from both capitalist and freedom points of view - than corporate wellfare, it kills both economy and people. But it’s existence is indeed in local energy minimum, so it’s here to stay with us at least until the next big upheaval. (Ironically, if Russia wins, then moves on and barbarians plunge the world into dark ages, that would be an upheaval; hopefully, we’d find better options?)

And the issues you describe are inevitable in current state of capitalism. They seem to be inevitable in any kind of capitalism. And according to my recent findings (I’m sure there were others who came to similar conclusions, so I’ll be digging the literature now), it is all inevitable with current laws of universe.

Which we, humans, are quite capable of bending. So the rebellion is bigger then class war or opposition to power, it’s rebellion against the world. We are doomed to win, whether for good or for bad.

All that said, I’ve joined these guys recently https://patio.coop/ - you might find some team that’s aligned with you.

Things are not exactly hot there, but it’s the best lead I have right now. And sure upon joining, I immediately typed “anarch” in search window in their team chat and yeah, there is one political channel with very clearly defined topic.

After running mine for a long time I find the concept too formal of an organization - the best approach IMO would be to hold really tiny 1-5 person teams as cooperatives and share franchise/brand/reputation/network effects. Binding people to one group, pretty much exclusively, limits possibilities a lot - and redistributes responsibilities in a way that might be harmful and demotivating for less active members.

Ideally, every wizard should have a tower and a village, then they join their strengths as needed, submitting to none.

Well, there is one important difference when it comes from manual labor to IT: the latter scales a lot. One person writes a silly piece of code, millions of copies get sold effortlessly, and that’s no limit. So much, that capitalists have no idea how to structure payroll - giving a dev fair share would make them rich enough to stop working immediately - so things like “competitive salary (with respect to your location)” are a thing - just paying enough so that you can’t be lured away by competitors.

But it’s not the perspective I want to highlight. What’s more important, is that value production in IT is so much distorted to benefit the capitalist instead of worker, that no matter how many unions you get in, how much you rob the system, you are collaborating with the bad guys at a scale that’s just on different level. Yes, the payment is often empowering enough to do good things with extra cash, but that’s the situation where taking care of ethics is more important than with “regular” jobs.

Same stuff could be said about finance and military tech, I guess. They scale madly too, just in different ways. So silly of me to get involved in all of these simultaneously.

I tried switching jobs to manual labor in the last month, but once people see my work history, they just freak out. I’d like to operate a mill or fix ignition electronics, but alas, they think I’ll be bored. People do not understand. Mentally relax on a job to have fun later - what a dream.

It’s not Estonia, it’s the world. I’ve been running one of these in Finland for 5 years (yeah, with our burn rate), but things just degrade - can’t land any jobs now, it seems EU is funneling cash into the wars and all the capitalist thieves benefiting from it (I tried getting into supply chain, after all, there seem to be clear good guys and bad guys - but good guys are behind thieving government wall, so they just can’t pay), and US is just jerking off to their king. Trade is dead and something is about to happen, but my cooperative degraded into 2 people now, and maybe some who would return if I can feed everyone when something happens.

I’ve been doing lots of tech jobs for crypto people, as long as they keep doing liberal things, we kind of align. But they divided between those who can barely pay anything and those who lost last shreds of ethical behavior. Either way, I’m kind of known person in those circles and that does not help.

I tried to find some activists who might be willing to commission some work (as I said, I did some military things, sure there would be socialist liberals who need hardware and have some resources to help me stay afloat and build things), but no luck so far.

So it’s some global issue. I’m trying to ground now, get in touch with local community and build something out of it, more gift economy kind of vibe and screw them money if capitalists want to just rob us all. But really I’m as lost as you are, no matter how world class professional I am at what I do. Still, we need to hold onto our connections. My contact is in user profile.

Sadly, no. I saw it at a conference. They asked me how to increase working temperature, I gave them an idea and then left the country, as it was just before Trump the first, when they’d kick me out anyway.

It was spintronic device mostly, storing spin-sorted electrons on different sides of the topology and geometry, not as impressive sounding as it actually was - a proper quantum demo of a thermodynamic principle.

Nice inspiring work, although literature analysis was not done.

I’ve seen a DARPA funded working information-based energy storage device - pretty much Maxwell’s daemon that just remembers where things are, his memory is SdT = Q of energy he can recover.

Lots of alignment problems outlined in the document are analyzed with greater depth elsewhere.

Thermodynamic analysis of self-organization is also widely developed area. And don’t make me start on electrochemistry, it’s so attractive for its seemingly easy to understand nature similar to what IT people deal with, which couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s insane incomprehensible grotesque nightmare that would make Lovecraft crap his pants. Which is why it’s so cool.

How much of material here is original and how much is plagiarism and/or independent discoveries of known stuff previously found by others? It would have been way way cooler if author bothered to add more references. Networking data has power, as is correctly stated below the article in this medium.

another suitably sized thing I wanted to build for some time is hot drinking water thermostat with zones for diffirent temperatures, like self-refilling gradient samovar column. To have fast and easy access to decent amounts of water of various temperatures in kitchen. Then you can instantly make perfect tea!

I wish I had more time for this project.

not a good idea in kitchen, gases and aerosols will harm things both ways.

does it have integrated vacuum/steam generator? Where would the exhaust go?

Looks like a place for fermentation vessel.

Finland feels a bit like this. We do pay taxes (but they are used for good things like roads, doctors, and eastern border), you could have cooperative and do whatever, and I haven’t seen cops since I went to make travel passport. Not sure I’ll need it, where would I want to go now? The government just doesn’t care it seems. Even non-citizens could be elected on municipal level, so it’s quite suitable even for larger cosmopolite self-disorganisation.

Whoa, I’m in their shoes right now!

Ok, the shoes are uncomfortable af and have holes, but mine are clean! I’ve lived with this tech company for 4 or 5 years now, and I never ever stained myself with VS bullshit. I might go bankrupt this month, I had harsh betrayals and market fluctuations beating the shit from me. I’ve got store with sales that are just too slow. I’ve delayed salaries for almost a month (except mine, I haven’t made any money for myself this year lol). I still refused to go for all those investor traps and I’m proud of that. Worst case - I’ll just go bankrupt and start over!

With investments, you’ll never get out clean, without betraying yourself. There will always be compromises. And you won’t get very much richer in the end, it’s a game where those “bad guys” will inevitably burn you unless you’ll become one of them. The rich will get richer and you’ve participated in burning the world? Not cool.

I’ve been there. I had in my hands technologies that save the world. I had nuclear waste treatment technology tested in Fukushima. I had sub-10 nm lithography in 2014 (and we showed it to Intel in hopes they’ll just hire us back then). Investors never want to save the world, they want coke and whores and to burn us all. Decision makers will keep messing things up. Only grassroots are sustainable.

(please do come to my store buy some weird stuff before it’s gone and I’m losing everything and starting another company again: https://store.zymologia.fi/)

Gosh, this post and especially all the comments singing with unison to my dream cheered me up, I’ve got to go do something good now!