From my understanding, the application of the word “gulag” to a prison is to indicate there is strenuous forced labor in harsh conditions in a distant location free from public scrutiny. The implication is that people die from being overworked or due to exposure and the government is able to cover up these deaths because of the remoteness of these facilities. Likely, this implication is meant to harken back to the labor camps of Nazi Germany.

This is irrespective of whether or not Soviet labor camps should be characterized this way or whether US prisons are inherently more humane. If anything, I highly advocate for referring to US prisons by a more pejorative name to indicate their cruel nature. I would use the term “gulag”, but I think what makes US prisons cruel is different from a labor camp and deserves a different name.

They push it because it’s an easy win. Corporations will subvert any cause that doesn’t have directly to do with overthrowing capitalism. They do the same thing with environmentalism and diversity initiatives. That doesn’t mean that those things are inherently bad or part of some sort of secret plot.

Boost is still working for me. Not sure why.

My local timeline is literally the whole reason I joined this particular instance. There isn’t enough traffic in the niche subs, so I find a popular instance with posts that tend towards my interests, instead.

PHP gave my father cancer. Also, it’s structure infuriates me so I’ve never forgiven it

Codeacademy.com

It’s free for individuals and teaches all the popular languages (Python, Java, C++, etc.). Figure out what language will be most useful to the kinds of programs you wanna build (website, game, etc.) and start with the beginner courses. Once you get the hang of it, you can look up how to run a local development environment on your computer for the language of your choice so you can start building applications for real.

Best of luck!

It’s funny because I just recently created a tiny web app that I run off my own computer which allows me to aggregate the feeds of any subreddit I want along with posts from Lemmy and other Reddit-like forums. Because of this, this change won’t really affect me. While I do occasionally use a third party Reddit app to surf Reddit, I mostly just use my web app and it doesn’t use any Reddit APIs but just scrapes the website directly. Only thing is I’ve heard that they might be getting rid of old Reddit. I currently scrape from old Reddit rather than the new one because the old one has easier HTML objects to identify. Still, it shouldn’t be too hard start scraping the new UI, if I have to.

The only principle is that the economy should be publicly owned and work in the interests of the majority.

I think it’s reasonable to argue that the almost every democratic party has this principle. Even those that argue for unfettered capitalism can see that as working in the interest of the majority and the only way the economy can be truly “publicly owned”. You can argue that they are wrong but that doesn’t mean they don’t believe they are following those principles just as faithfully.

If the single party’s ideology is so broad that it basically encompasses “don’t be evil” then I’m not sure I even understand the distinction between having one party and having a “partiless” state (which would effectively make factions within the party defacto parties in and of themselves).

The main difference in a multiparty system is that people still haven’t figured out what the right way to run the economy is, and each time a different party gets elected they pull things in a different direction

If the party dictates “the right way to run the economy” as you say, then doesn’t that blunt people’s ability to reform the direction of their leader’s policies because of the framework enforced by the party?

I’m not arguing that Western democracy provides superior remedies to public disatisfaction or that socialism is not the correct path for prosperity but, if the argument is about allowing people to meaningfully oppose the policies of their elected representatives, then, in a one party system, changing those policies also requires reforming the ideology of the party, which is an additional barrier. Multi-party systems are by no means perfect but at least they provide some alternative path where an outside party can be formed with radically different ideas that can challenge the larger parties and try to pick off support.

And, yes, there is always the threat of smaller parties being squashed using political/financial power, but that, to me, seems like more a product of corruption than an inherent aspect of a democratic system. Not to mention, the same could be done to factions within a party trying to facilitate similar reforms, no?