Zane Selvans @ZaneSelvans@social.coop

25 Soviet / Russian films about WWII. A different mythology. https://www.tasteofcinema.com/2015/25-great-soviet-and-russian-films-about-world-war-ii/

I'm re-reading The Making of the Atomic Bomb after 20 years. There's plenty in the story to bring me to tears, but I didn't expect the description of community amongst the scientists and their families sequestered at Los Alamos to do it. It's been a very lonely few years. I miss feeling like I'm working alongside other people in a shared world.

Should I risk upgrading to Ubuntu 22.04 this weekend? Or will it break something that keeps me from working next week?

I miss having a community bike shop.

https://whyy.org/articles/philly-neighborhood-bike-works-diy-repair-program/

I probably shouldn't have spent this much time on / be this happy about setting up a template repository with all our CI and other infrastructure stuff... but I did and I am! Hopefully it'll help other folks set stuff up. Also wtf it's 1:30am. https://github.com/catalyst-cooperative/cheshire

Shiva Baby was so much cringe, but amazing cringe.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uT1M9WfqYA

Anybody here have favorite resources for learning about GCP resource management? Especially permissions? We keep feeling the urge to give everyone access to everything all the time and that seems like it will reliably result in bad outcomes eventually.

One of the things I've loved about Twitter (in contrast to the Book of Faces) is the horizontality of it -- the ease with which you can connect across communities. But here it all feels siloed.

The number of people on Mastodon as a whole is already tiny compared to other platforms. Further hiding of the people who are here seems like it just intensifies that effect and makes the platform seem even less used than it is.

In the absence of this kind of global accessibility, it seems likely to me that larger instances will tend to grow and take over, re-centralizing, which kind of defeats the purpose.

Is there really no way to browse content and discover interesting users on other Mastodon instances without setting up additional accounts? This seems like a major drawback. This bubble is too small.

If we had a capital-intensive business where we needed to buy equipment up front, or if we needed to scale up rapidly and hire a bunch of people, we'd probably have to borrow money, and that debt would be senior to our equity.

These structural attributes that prevent any one owner from having a wildly disproportionate economic stake in the company are intentional, and probably don't work for all kinds of businesses, but for almost entirely labor-driven software & analysis, it seems like a great fit.

For now we intend to pay out member equity within 3 years of it being allocated to the members, but we'll see if that actually gives us a sufficient pool of working capital. We may also want to smooth the payouts, to avoid big year-to-year swings in our working capital.

Almost all member equity is tied back to patronage (which is based on hours worked), and the member shares are all the same price, so unless people are working very different numbers of hours, or the money resides in the co-op for a long time, it can't get too far out of wack.

If members accumulate equity at very different rates, or over very different spans of time, you could imagine low-ownership members being much less wary about borrowing from that equity to get through temporary (or not so temporary...) downturns.

One interesting consequence of worker co-op's using non-voting member equity (internal capital accounts) as working capital is that the governance and economic interests can potentially diverge. You might own a lot more, but you still just get one vote. Which could get awkward.

We have a poison pill in our articles of incorporation that require the demutualization of the cooperative to pay our any residual value on that basis, to discourage later members from absconding with co-op value created by earlier members. This feels pretty similar.