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How A Mysterious Tech Billionaire Created Two Fortunes—And A Global Software Sweatshop
How A Mysterious Tech Billionaire Created Two Fortunes—And A Global Software Sweatshop
Two decades ago, Joe Liemandt became the youngest member of the Forbes 400 by building a software juggernaut. He’s quietly bigger than ever, with a far darker model.
In the 1990s Liemandt was the golden boy of enterprise software
Others say Crossover is running the cloud equivalent of a software sweatshop.
Disgruntled employees be damned—the pool of skilled workers in emerging countries appears to be bottomless.
·forbes.com·
How A Mysterious Tech Billionaire Created Two Fortunes—And A Global Software Sweatshop
Life Is Easier With a Fake Assistant
Life Is Easier With a Fake Assistant
TikTok is full of advice on how to get free stuff by pretending to be your own assistant. So I tried it out myself.
·thecut.com·
Life Is Easier With a Fake Assistant
Tim Heidecker: ‘I’m trying to be an antidote to the toxic side of comedy’
Tim Heidecker: ‘I’m trying to be an antidote to the toxic side of comedy’
Best known for his inventive work with Tim and Eric, the absurdist comic talks about playing it straight as a ‘legit’ singer-songwriter, and his newest creation: a ‘belligerent and terrible’ standup comedian
The music Heidecker did dabble in was heavy on the comedy: there were spoof Bob Dylan tracks and a band called the Yellow River Boys, whose album Urinal St Station featured tracks such as Slurp it Up and Hot Piss Drinker, along with a blurb that read: “THE album for those of us who believe that the human mouth smiles the most when it is being used as a makeshift urinal. Underground leaders of the pee-freak scene, your shame no longer has to be private!”
I’m trying to be an antidote to the toxic shit on the other side of comedy.
·theguardian.com·
Tim Heidecker: ‘I’m trying to be an antidote to the toxic side of comedy’
Our Moment: Disorganization as the Problem of Our Time
Our Moment: Disorganization as the Problem of Our Time
The historical problem of our time is proletarian disorganization. We have lost the class institutions and political habits of organized struggle. Building mass, militant class organization is the strategic question of our time. Addressing this historic problem will unlock a new phase of political potential.
The left, unable to plant its feet on the solid ground of class organization, oscillates between left-opportunism and right-opportunism; with right-opportunism, we see electoral substitutions for the most basic forms of struggle by and for the class; with left-opportunism, we see an impatient politics that demands wholesale social changes from thin air.
Proletarian disorganization makes movements susceptible to liberal capture.
“class” becomes increasingly abstract, and electoral politics ascends as the exclusive site of contestation. There, cross-class constituencies whose relation to the state is increasingly defined through the language of the individual emerge as the exclusive site of official politics.
Notes from a recent DSA’s NPC meeting show an ongoing membership retention problem and a growing capacity issue within the organization. People seem to be fading away from the organization. Under these conditions, success requires coming to terms with our temporary luck and setting ourselves on an intentional path.
In other words, you cannot organize an insurrection by circulating agitational media and by deploying replicable forms of tactical escalation. When class struggle reaches a fever pitch, it will take a densely organized working class to make history with any meaningful intention.
Proletarian disorganization calls for a comprehensive strategy of working within established unions to make them powerful and militant, and building new labor organization concurrently.
The tenant movement has taken on a new centrality as a site of struggle today.
The abolition movement also holds real promise for proletarian organization today.
·communistcaucus.com·
Our Moment: Disorganization as the Problem of Our Time
The Present and Future of Engineers
The Present and Future of Engineers
Subjecting engineering to Marxist analysis yields complex results.
What can be said with near certainty is that a revolution that does not have substantial participation from engineers is doomed to fail at implementing communism.
The material basis for communism is not proletarian rage or mass-scale dispossession, it is centuries of labor now embodied in the form of fixed capital: machinery, buildings, global productive infrastructure, and countless commodities.
·brooklynrail.org·
The Present and Future of Engineers
Technical Expertise and Communist Production
Technical Expertise and Communist Production
In 1976, the shop stewards at the British Lucas Aerospace Corporation published a document that would come to be known as “The Lucas Plan.” The company was planning to lay off a significant number of workers as part of a restructuring effort. Faced with the prospect of losing their livelihood, many of these workers banded together to propose an alternative: that the British government should intervene to prevent layoffs so that the workers could redeploy the productive assets of the company towards socially useful ends rather than military contracting.
·brooklynrail.org·
Technical Expertise and Communist Production
Windows NT
Windows NT
Windows NT is a proprietary graphical operating system produced by Microsoft, the first version of which was released on July 27, 1993. It is a processor-independent, multiprocessing and multi-user operating system.
·en.wikipedia.org·
Windows NT
The Instrumentalist | Zadie Smith
The Instrumentalist | Zadie Smith
During the first ten minutes of Tár, it is possible to feel that the critic Adam Gopnik is a better actor than Cate Blanchett. They sit together on a New
·nybooks.com·
The Instrumentalist | Zadie Smith
Layoff Brain
Layoff Brain
Back in the summer of 2020, I quit what was ostensibly a very good job in media to write this newsletter full-time. I didn’t do it for money. I didn’t do it because I didn’t like editors (I had excellent ones, whom I appreciated deeply). I did it because I had Layoff Brain.
·annehelen.substack.com·
Layoff Brain
How vx-underground is building a hacker's dream library
How vx-underground is building a hacker's dream library
When malware repository vx-underground launched in 2019, it hardly made a splash in the hacking world. "I had no success really," said its founder, who goes by the online moniker smelly_vx.
·therecord.media·
How vx-underground is building a hacker's dream library
Max Berger on Twitter
Max Berger on Twitter
I spent some time looking into SBF's political giving and what I found was pretty shocking. SBF was collaborating with AIPAC and Trump supporting billionaires to stop the growth of the squad and the electoral left.https://t.co/S5gra6NsRv— Max Berger (@maxberger) January 3, 2023
·twitter.com·
Max Berger on Twitter
#95: Are you a baby? A litmus test
#95: Are you a baby? A litmus test
Good morning! The other day some friends and I were reminiscing about an app idea we had years ago that would allow you to “blind cancel” on your friends. That is—flag if you were open to canceling a plan, which would only be revealed if the other person flagged it too. Basically, it was Tinder for bailing. This was our ultimate dream: an official, guilt-free conduit for that quiet hope that your friends wants to cancel, too.
·haleynahman.substack.com·
#95: Are you a baby? A litmus test