A few thoughts: we're not that poor, a lot of the current distribution of wealth and government spending aims are the result of neoliberal ideology first and foremost.

That said our nominal GDP growth has been harmed by neoliberal policies which have shifted the UK away from producing very much and towards playing many silly games with money. We measure how much we move abstract representations of currency around (which usually represents some probabilistic measure of value of money, which in itself is really just numbers with no intrinsic value) and go "hey, great job, we've really grown the economy!"

We saw the financial crisis in 2008 and apparently thought to ourselves "let's have some more of that".

So we're in a situation where our overseers are seeing our GDP failing to grow as it should, panicking, and implementing more of the same policies that cause that situation in the first place. The UK isn't poor yet but it will be soon. The young and the poor are the ones who are feeling the bleeding edge of this trend but it's filtering through to the middle class now as well.

Yeah it's sort of shitty but by the looks of it she was talking directly to them

To understand this you need to understand the theory. Marx outlined that socialism and communism each had to be transitioned to after reaching a given level of social/economic development. In particular there is the notion of "withering away of the state" which would happen after a global revolution, which is the aim of this classless/moniless society they outlined.

The communist manifesto is a short read!

In fact the USSR implemented explicit market policies, a sort of contained capitalism, which was designed to facilitate reaching the necessary preconditions for socialism and communism. Essentially all of the "communist" states we've seen so far have been some play on the notion of just "socialism in one country" in the Marxist-Leninist version of communist parties, who have/had the goal of eventually reaching communism.

What's probably most interesting is that the idea behind the USSR wasn't initially to have the state direct everything from the top, but in fact to facilitate worker councils (soviets) to direct their workplaces.

But you have to remember this all happened in the context of a state which had recently undergone a revolution, was rife with counterrevolutonary action (see revolutionary France and civil war Britain to see how this played out during the birth of liberalism) and was then plunged into WW2 where most states involved were acting fairly dictatorially for the duration of it. Followed shortly by the US making it an explicit goal to prevent world communism through e.g. CIA intervention because they feared "domino theory"

It's more like, a blog is a personal thing. Using some off the shelf solutions removes that sense of personality to me I guess. It kind of makes the act of publishing the post feel like I've cheated somehow, when, all I'm really doing is putting text on the internet and I'm perfectly capable of doing that myself from a technical POV.

I get this with game dev as well, I'm much happier with games where I feel like I've worked with lower level tooling than a pre made engine. Sort of a personal not made here syndrome thing I suppose.

I bought a collection of Dreamcast bits, Sonic Adventure and Powerstone (yes I know they're easy to pirate, but the ✨vibes✨) a while back on a whim without owning the console and now I've got a whole setup with a CRT. Living the retro dream(cast).

All well and good until you turn up to see Farage posing with a pint.

"hey guys I was just chatting with the wives and they all think waging war is for guys with small dick energy"

I think it's fair to say Musk already screws them to the maximum extent possible, so the degree to which they are screwed is probably not responsive to changes in insurance premiums and we can expect that to more or less come straight out of Musk's pocket.

Thanks, genocide wing of the labour party.

Down rating employees purely because they took medical leave is a fully scummy thing to do.

Then again I guess enabling genocide, conducting psychological research on unwitting users and calling his early adopters dumb fucks might have been early warning signs.

Not a hamster but when I had gerbils, one had eaten half of the other. Not long afterwards the cannibal developed a severe middle ear infection which killed her even during treatment.

Oh great, let's just give Farage and co. a big old back door to spy on us when he inevitably stumbles into power. Can't see that being abused in any way.