Happened to a friend of mine when I was a kid. It didn't kill him, but it easily could have.

Growing up in Kansas, where public transit is a joke where it exists at all, owning a car is indeed a necessary dependency to nearly all independent activity, economic or otherwise. At the same time, our traffic court is notoriously difficult to work through. I've had to navigate it as well as many of my friends. If you have money, you're pretty much good. But can't afford that ticket within the allotted time? You're slapped with a suspended license in a world where getting to your means of wages to pay the ticket basically requires a license. Think debtor's prison, but with extra steps.

Removing the suspension is almost never straightforward, even when every step is followed to the T following the initial suspension. More than one friend has had to drive hours on a suspended license to the state capital to hand-deliver paperwork necessary to clear their license, because the county courthouse failed repeatedly to fax it. Such clerical errors many times in the same context starts to feel deliberate. Getting caught on such a drive can result in further suspension, jail, and/or outright revocation of the license, all depending on how the traffic cop and/or judge happen to feel that day.

In short, we need to either develop real alternatives to autos (e.g. good public transit), or make it a right to drive rather than a privilege. The latter has obvious drawbacks. The former has benefits that go beyond issues of economic, social, and civil suppression.

Provided the environment has been altered for the benefit of the car, and that all you want to see lies by the side of a car-accessible thoroughfare, sure.

You seem to understand that one side or the other must give, so this comes off as a rather coy way of showing which side you're on without saying it explicitly.

It can tell from the pixels, and from having seen quite a few shops in its time.

I can corroborate. A friend of mine worked at a company with this "benefit", but when he tried to actually reasonably use it twice in three months, his job was threatened in vague yet certain language.

The effort you've put into these rambling responses is definitely indicative of someone with a stable personality who values his time. The barely veiled homophobia is really the cherry on top. Really, I wish you the best, and I hope you find healthier ways to cope, certainly before you end up hurting yourself or someone else.

I'm recently married after five years together. We're respected in our community and our sex life wants for nothing. If I were the one projecting, you'd come out looking better. I've seen people with going down the path you're on and 100% of the time it's a desperate attempt to blame their own disappointing romantic life on the evil feminists.

Here's some advice: listen to whichever online forums you're on when they tell you to take care of your health, have fun, and don't be a pushover, but reject their broader reactionary social theories. You're in the midst of a political reeducation pipeline which uses advice to address your past pain of rejection as a hook to further convert you into a political ideologue. Like I said, I've seen it before.

Sorry to hear about your lackluster love life, but is Slashdot really the appropriate forum for telling on yourself this? Kind of embarrassing.

It is a sad testament to this site's decline that the equivalent of the "If you don't love it leave it!!!!" argument, popular among dying, internet-connected uncles for years, gets a score of 5, Insightful. Congratulations on having the same "unique" insight as every other pre-dementia coot repeating the same nationalistic one-liners while trying to remember to breathe. Now that deserves a participation award!

"Creating big-brother tech companies" is not exactly something the US market had to "copy" from China. It's wild how almost every reference to China's own pervasive surveillance state nowadays is made as though we didn't, just a few years ago, have proof of the US's *global* surveillance apparatus, as though somehow this shit was invented solely by the Chinese, something the Land of the Free must guard diligently against because we don't do that here. The NSA literally has their own wiretap rooms in corporate data centers here, and this isn't even touching on the inescapable commercial surveillance and data sharing that our tech industry has been developing since long before most Americans had ever heard of Huawei. Quite the discursive coup for US intelligence, IMO.

Exactly. In the case of Zanon, the former owner claimed, "the government will give me back the factory." He wasn't wrong, the government did attempt to take the factory back from the workers, sending police with semi-automatics. The factory workers had to organize against this; they kept 24-hour shifts to ensure nobody came and changed the locks, and when the police came, they armed themselves with slingshots and fought them back by firing marbles at them. Guns versus slingshots, but it did work, and after protracted litigation, with the support of the larger community, the co-op gained legal recognition as the legitimate owning entity.

More broadly, co-ops are incredibly difficult to start from the ground up. Most businesses start with a bank loan, and banks tend not to loan to co-ops because they tend to be less focused on profit maximization, which a bank wants to see so that they are more assured the loan will be paid back with interest. There's also what I mentioned above, the inherent risk in trying something with less historic precedent to base it on. There are many different ways of organizing a co-op, no single "optimal" approach has been found, and lots of the concerns are contingent upon the particular industry, the geographic market, and any number of other variables. All that said, despite the unique challenges, there are many examples of successful co-ops, big and small, in industries as wide ranging as cafes to boat building.

I will refer you to this fragment which argues against the notion that stock ownership is equivalent to democratic ownership of the means of production:

http://www.carlbeijer.com/2017...

For an example of worker ownership which has saved factories that would have otherwise been shut down (not for being unprofitable, but for not being profitable *enough*), look into Argentina's "recovered factory" movement, specifically FaSinPat ("Factory Without Bosses", formerly Zanon). In the latter case, the factory and the jobs were about to disappear, but the workers refused to stop coming to work; the factory is now more productive than ever, its worker-owners are better compensated, and enough surplus product is produced to be given freely to local community development projects.

There are many ways to run a co-op. As with any innovation, there is more risk when you have few templates from history to work from. But even a worker-owned enterprise must contend with the ordinary concerns of business cycles. It's not as though a worker-owned enterprise spends every dime of surplus on paychecks and other benefits. Surplus can be reserved to keep everyone fed during hard times. The thing is, workers have a say in what is done with the surplus. To contrast, the typical way a private (or publicly-traded but with decision-making power effectively concentrated in the hands of a CEO or board) enterprise handles recessions is to lay off huge numbers of workers. So yes, there are certainly trade-offs between the arrangements.

I've been reading Slashdot since the early aughts and it's been pretty disheartening to witness the quality of the comments section degrade as it has. Any time there's an article about climate change or a handful of other topics it becomes an absolute cesspool.

A friend of mine lost the recordings from his high school band, which was just two poor kids from rural Kansas in the early aughts working with whatever equipment they could dredge up. That equipment didn't include spare hard drives, which weren't as cheap then as they are now. Even if they had backups, it's likely that the paths their lives took since then, which included moving cross country in search of a job, and living in and out of a car, would have resulted in the drives being lost or damaged at some point anyway.

For what it's worth, the music was quite good for a high school act, and in fact I became aware that something was probably wrong at MySpace months before this story was reported because I had gone to their page on a fairly regular basis to listen to them, and one day the player just didn't work. I let my friend know, and he went searching for any copies he might find, but no luck.

Obviously it's best to keep your own backups, and these days I'm moving as much off cloud services as I can, time allowing. But shit happens, and there's a difference between using the event to teach an object lesson and some of the callousness I've seen toward the people who actually lost something here. On the balance, I'd say it's not unreasonable to ask that a company which formed a business model (and, for a good while, made money) on the basis of distributing content produced by artists willing to upload their work for exposure should be expected to do the minimum so many other companies of all sizes manage to do, that being to have a backup. And if, as I kind of suspect, this was just a dying company's way of dumping costs ("oops looks like we lost everything"), it would have been decent to at least do what Geocities did and give enough warning for interested parties (including Archive.org) to retrieve what they wanted.

Anyways, I'm gonna check out this archive and see if Lady Does A Horse's songs are in there.