Sociology courses have been nice and all and my last two profs in it were left-liberals who were fairly civil and nuanced about Communism as far as liberals go. but my new one, on day 1 of a course titled Inequality, described it as a "bloodbath", said Mao "killed several hundreds of millions" (to hell with Courteois and his 100 million, I think we can get to a billion) and asserted that the Russian and Chinese revolutions produced societies with greater income stratification than.... imperial core countries like US and Nordics today.

Animal Farm theory of Communism being "make everyone equal overnight", undialectical liberal worldview, numbers multiplied several times even from what was in the Black Book... This is more what I expect to hear from a high school teacher.

Marx:

Today's wage-labourer is tomorrow's independent peasant or artisan, working for himself. He vanishes from the labour market - but not into the workhouse.

Sakai:

A study of roughly 10,000 settlers who left Bristol from 1654-85 shows that less than 15% were proletarian

many English farmers and artisans couldn't face the prospect of being forced down into the position of wage-labor.

Is it the difference of time periods? I just noticed now that the time period Sakai is talking would be a pretty early period of colonization, wouldn't it? So it may be that by Marx's time of writing (late 1860s-early 70s?) it was proletarians headed to America and had been in recent historical memory?

I'm a little over half done my CS degree. I love programming, Linux, etc. I am considering getting CompTIA A+ and Linux+ this summer with pirated Udemy courses. I do coding projects too, like I am almost done my homebrew NDS game, threw together a Tkinter pomodoro app last week, and in the past I made a command line program that computes a readability score on a body of text. Finally, I am participating in 100 days of leetcode problems together with my CS club. So I've done a lot to move towards coding professionally.

The question is what kind of career should I go for to suite my goals in life. I would like to be able to own a place to live in Quebec (don't live there yet) whether it is in MTL or a rural area, not sure what I want yet. So software dev. gets a point for higher income, I think, plus it's what I've studied for, mostly. But it's important to me too that I have free time outside of work and so can participate in social movements. Would working in helpdesk allow a better or worse WLB? Would it be more likely to be unionized and thus a better place from which to participate in tech labour struggle? I'd really like to achieve fluency in French and Chinese (currently a beginner and intermediate learner respectively) eventually, and maybe the IT world would have me talk to people more. Is it easier to break into than software, like, so much easier that it would be worth changing course, or just doing IT as a stepping stone for my first co-op (internship program in Canada) or two?

Interested in others thoughts on how to proceed here.

For the meantime I think I'll start the A+ course because it can't hurt, and keep working on my DS game, cuz it's almost done.

I don't even know if I want to do either of those professions, I could see myself teaching English too, to Francophones and Chinese especially as I want to learn those languages...

Hi folks. I am a CS major taking a 3rd year course in relational databases. The example DBs we study are pretty much all either a school or a company. On the bright side we get to do a project of our own design with C++ and Oracle DB. Has to be some kind of program that makes use of a reasonably sophisticated schema.

I was thinking I could make a DB program that does economic planning, but I don't know what direction to go with it, really. Maybe the kernel of it, the usefulness could be, computing everything down to hours of human effort using the LTV. Labour time accounting. For example, we create a profile for what we want the living standard to be, like private and shared square feet per person, food choices, clothing choices, level of convenience of transport etc. Then the program could use a database containing information about the SNLT to produce different products and services to compute what professions would be needed and how much we all need to work, basically.

But like any idea this is starting out huge. So does anybody have ideas for how to make this small but extendable? Or different directions go with it, or totally different ideas that you have?

Not kidding either, it'd just have to be a very low priority and part of a broader campaign to socialize the internet.

My hunch is yes, because of how successful English agrarian capitalism was early on... but likely more slowly?

According to Marxist historians writing on the origin of capitalism, namely Ellen Meiksin Wood (Origin of Capitalism) and Ian Angus (War Against the Commons), the first capitalism was defined by a particular triad arrangement: landlord, yeoman / capitalist tenant, and wage labourer.

Does anyone know good sources to particularly examine the circumstances and lives of each? Short little descriptions of the daily life of a landlord, capitalist tenant, and wage labourer in 1400s-1800s England?

Btw, I was taught Northanger Abbey for a class last year and I think I could pick any random character to get a depiction of the life of a landlord or hanger-on, just kidding, looking for non fiction anyway.

I wish it wasn't this way, friends!

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No other country in the world is as dominated by the automobile as the USA. From the very beginnings of automobile travel in the early twentieth century, rates of automobile ownership and use in the USA have exceeded levels in other countries, and current rates of ownership and use are by far the highest in the world. Even countries with higher per capita incomes have fewer cars per capita than the USA. The automobile has not only dominated passenger transport in the USA; it has also become the most important determinant of the American lifestyle, urban form, and even the organization of the American economy. Virtually every aspect of life in the USA - work, social activities, recre- ation, education and culture - is crucially dependent on the automobile. For most Americans, every other mode of urban transport is practically irrelevant, and life without the automobile is unimaginable. Unlike other advanced industrialized countries, where car ownership only became widespread over the past two or three decades, almost all Americans living today grew up in an automobile dominated society, and most of them have never experienced anything else. The dominance of the car in the USA is especially striking in cities because its impact on urban land use patterns is highly visible and unmis- takable. It is also what most clearly distinguishes American cities from European cities. The term 'urban sprawl' first emerged in the USA to describe the extremely low density, unplanned, rather haphazard residen- tial and commercial development that increasingly surrounds every American city. Widespread suburbanization began earlier in the USA and has been more extensive and lower density than virtually anywhere else in the world. Low density urban sprawl would be impossible without the automobile. Just as the automobile encouraged suburbanization, so subur- banization has encouraged ever more automobile use, since low density development cannot be served effectively by public transport. The extremely high levels of car use in American cities have caused severe problems of congestion, air pollution, noise, loss of open space, traffic accidents and inadequate mobility for the poor, the elderly and the handicapped. Similar problems have arisen in other countries, but they generally arose earlier in the USA and have been more severe**___**#

When visiting cities in other countries, one is often struck by differences in their transportation systems. These differences are among the most visible indicators of variation in underlying social, political, and economic systems.

Take, for example, the Soviet Union and the countries of Europe and North America. Going from east to west, there is an unmistakable increase in the relative importance of the automobile and a corresponding decrease in the importance of public transport modes, such as bus, streetcar, subway, and commuter rail.

In the United States and Canada, the vast majority of urban travel is by auto. At the other end of the spectrum, in the Soviet Union public transport almost completely dominates, with extremely low levels of auto ownership and use. Europe lies along the middle of this spectrum, with Eastern European countries much closer to the level of public transport dominance in the Soviet Union, and with Western European countries somewhat closer to the level of auto dominance in the United States.

These differences in urban transportation have not arisen at random. To a significant extent, they result from decades of deliberate public policy. In the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, socialist governments have directly set the costs of auto ownership and operation extremely high through their system of regulated prices: in addition, they have sharply restricted auto production, thus keeping supply limited. At the same time they have offered extensive public transport services at extremely low fares.

By contrast, policies in the United States have strongly encouraged auto ownership and use. For many decades, large subsidies to highway construction, automobile use, and low-density suburban housing have made the automobile very appealing if not irresistible. Since the same policies have contributed to the decline of public transport, that alternative was eliminated for most Americans anyway.