[HN Gopher] Socialist Cyborgs
___________________________________________________________________
Socialist Cyborgs
Author : tlrss
Score : 45 points
Date : 2021-09-27 10:51 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (logicmag.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (logicmag.io)
| KorematsuFredt wrote:
| I remember the socialist India where workers unions opposed any
| kind of computerization/automation. This especially hurt Indian
| banks as they continued to use costly manual calculations which
| employed army of clerks.
|
| However one of the despotic Indian PM forcibly took over all
| private banks and "nationalized" it and later the same party used
| these banks as a jobs program to employ thousands of party
| workers and others to win votes.
|
| A lot of these youngsters were bored of this manual work and
| insisted on computerization and the workers unions could not
| maintain the opposition. (In Indian government owned businesses
| people never lose their jobs. Which means even if a machine
| replaces your work, you will still get paid just to show up at
| work. While it makes sense to oppose digitization when you are
| unemployed, it makes sense to support it once you are employed. A
| bit of catch 22. This is not true for private companies as they
| can not keep people on payroll they don't need.)
| twic wrote:
| > The organization that prepared most Bulgarian children to be
| the model communists of the future was the Dimitrov Communist
| Youth Union (DKMS).
|
| Ah, that's why my Red Hat machine was always building DKMS
| modules!
| angryostrich wrote:
| It always makes me sad to see these beautiful ideas to use
| technology to bring about a better life for everyone squashed by
| ineptitude and greed of bureaucracy.
|
| _In their view, it was the Bulgarian worker rather than the
| system that was to blame--shirking responsibilities, pilfering
| the petty change, and sleeping on the job._
|
| It's amazing how similar this is to capitalist thinking. Guess it
| doesn't matter if the people are exploited by private owners or
| the state.
| yakshaving_jgt wrote:
| > The conventional narrative of Eastern European communism is one
| of technologically backward states that failed to enter the
| information age, locked behind an impenetrable Iron Curtain that
| prevented both people and ideas from circulating.
|
| Yeah. That's typical Western Russophobia for you.
| qsort wrote:
| Is any of those points wrong, though?
| yakshaving_jgt wrote:
| ...Well, yes? Of course? How else do you explain a supposedly
| "technologically backward" society beating even the Americans
| in the space race?
|
| I mean, even _this very article_ immediately refutes that
| narrative.
| nanna wrote:
| Ok, but you're talking 1950s, when this article is talking
| about the '70s and '80s.
|
| The US got so far ahead of the USSR in computing because of
| the military-industrial-academic complex that channelled
| vast public resources and knowledge into projects that had
| both military/state ends as well as commercial ones too.
| Especially after the launch of Sputnik and the subsequent
| sense that the US was trailing the USSR in a 'cybernetics
| gap', which triggered a huge amount of funding in the US
| for technical developments. This is the story of how the
| personal, graphical, interactive and internetworked
| computer was invented.
|
| In the USSR the military did its own thing without sharing
| its knowledge and inventions with the wider society,
| especially with such cutting edge inventions like
| computers. As such outside of the military (even this is
| debatable), the USSR as a whole did fall significantly
| behind the West in terms of technological progress. Who
| knows, if it hadn't it might still be around today.
|
| See Slava Gerovitch and Benjamin Peter's writings, for
| example:
|
| InterNyet:
| https://web.mit.edu/slava/homepage/articles/Gerovitch-
| InterN...
| yakshaving_jgt wrote:
| I'm not really refuting any of that, and I think your
| point is orthogonal to the one that I'm making. As far as
| I'm aware, Western sentiment with regards to
| technological capability in the USSR didn't radically
| shift in those two or three decades. In fact I believe
| popular sentiment remained fairly static all throughout
| the Cold War which encompasses the decades you named.
| flerchin wrote:
| Russian boots on the moon when?
| pid-1 wrote:
| > How else do you explain a supposedly "technologically
| backward" society beating even the Americans in the space
| race?
|
| Invest in a small elite and let the rest of the country
| starve. That's old as civilization.
| artem247 wrote:
| That's very unfair. The education was free for all, there
| was significant investment in education, 90% of schools
| in my rather ancient city were built during Soviet time,
| not before, not after. Same for university campuses and
| hospitals. That systemic investment into education along
| with state-wide industrialisation eventually paid-off.
| There were wide-spread programs how for example factory
| worker can get a higher education while still being able
| to provide for his family.
|
| Invest in a small elite and let the rest starve was more
| of a motto of Russian Empire, where most of people
| couldn't read, yet there were some technological
| achievements nevertheless.
| soco wrote:
| I argue that the ways of the Russian Empire weren't that
| much different from the Soviet Union ways - both
| internally and with its vassal states.
| tristor wrote:
| "New boss... same as the old boss." as they say. This is
| true for most regime changes in history. Those in power
| change, and their motivated reasoning may change, but the
| net effects on those down the stack is pretty much the
| same.
| aaron-santos wrote:
| The propagandist wants the opponent to be strong enough to
| be a threat but ideologically weak enough to defeat. That
| should be enough for anyone to pause and think hard about
| what's really going on.
| Igelau wrote:
| I think you're mistranslating "conventional narrative" as
| "we think this is a rock-solid fact". It doesn't mean that.
| yakshaving_jgt wrote:
| I'm not sure why you think that. I certainly don't think
| "fact" has anything to do with this, as this is all about
| _narrative_.
|
| What I'm taking issue with is that this _narrative_ is
| being characterised as _conventional_ , which means in
| accordance with what is generally done or believed. I
| think this is only generally done or believed in Western
| society, which I already alluded to.
| qsort wrote:
| Dude, are you literally trolling right now? The space race
| did not end the way you think it did.
|
| And no, the article does not refute that "narrative" at
| all, if you're reading carefully. The 80s were the years of
| the microcomputing revolution in the West, by that time
| most of the computing products of the Eastern block were
| knockoffs of the western counterparts. They were
| objectively lagging behind at that point.
| teekert wrote:
| For sure, but it's also the other way around, I read RTV for
| some time (everybody should), same news, very different angle.
| The fear and contempt of the west (the NATO) is palpable. I
| imagine it is the same the other way around, but I am just used
| to it.
|
| Edit: A nice example:
|
| EU: https://www.dw.com/en/nord-stream-2-gas-pipeline-what-is-
| the...
|
| RT: https://www.rt.com/business/476844-eu-russia-us-sanctions/
| yakshaving_jgt wrote:
| Yes, I absolutely recognise that. I've spent enough time in
| both Sweden and Russia (and Poland, Ukraine, Bulgaria,
| Romania, etc, etc, etc) to recognise the same stories and
| military expeditions being told from different angles. It is
| absolutely true that each nation tells their citizens their
| own stories.
|
| The point I took issue with was in the excerpt I pulled,
| which describes the Western perspective as the "conventional"
| one, which seems a rather Americentric thing to write.
| teddyh wrote:
| This is literal whataboutism.
| markenqualitaet wrote:
| It is not, I think, if it's the _exact same relation in
| reverse.
| bufferoverflow wrote:
| You need to learn some history instead of propaganda. Both
| people and ideas were highly filtered in circulation. That's a
| fact.
| mbeex wrote:
| It depends. The general shortage implied a relatively high
| average level of knowledge.
|
| I grew up in Eastern Germany. At the time I started my
| studies, the country routinely created clones of the early
| 8086 PC. As a common user, you got a manual, describing
| things down to machine language. 'opcode hunting' (finding
| the assembly instructions from previously unknown opcodes)
| was kind of a competition among us aspiring physicists and
| mathematicians.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _You need to learn some history instead of propaganda._
|
| Just don't trust the history of your national side -- or the
| winners, in most cases.
| randomeat wrote:
| WW2, for example
| coldtea wrote:
| Especially that.
|
| What with provoking the Japanese before Pearl Harbor to
| get an excuse to join the war, the propaganda over
| decades to dismiss the importance of USSR in the fall of
| Nazi Germany, Dresden, the reasoning behind hitting
| Hiroshima and Nagashaki, the cozying up with "ex" Nazis
| in West Germany (now an ally), and tons of other dirty
| laundry...
|
| What, you expected at least this to be a clear cut "pure
| good vs pure evil" affair, the way "sanctioned" national
| histories retell it?
|
| Here's but an example:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_St._Louis#The_%22Voyage_
| of_...
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2017/06/american-nazis-
| in-...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/04/hitl
| ers...
| reducesuffering wrote:
| > provoking the Japanese before Pearl Harbor to get an
| excuse to join the war
|
| Not sure really any significant group of historians push
| this. Japan invading China is basically universally
| condemned, they signed the Tripartite pact with Nazi
| Germany, and you think it's the US' fault they decided to
| stop airplanes and oil to that regime?
| randomeat wrote:
| Minor in comparison to the larger propaganda over that
| war
| VictorPath wrote:
| It's great that Bulgaria was so technologically forward in
| 1945!
|
| If the Warsaw Pact allowed people and ideas to circulate, they
| might have launched satellites and men in space before the
| West!
| _hao wrote:
| I'm from Bulgaria and the article is pretty good for the most
| part. I'm from the so called "children of democracy" generation
| which is basically the first generation(s) after the communist
| regime fell in '89 (I was born in 1993).
|
| One thing I have to say is that IT in Bulgaria succeeds right now
| not because of the government or some historical acumen, but
| despite of it. I think there might be some inertia from back
| then, but that's gone if we look things as of today. Taxes are
| low (relatively) to other EU countries, while the quality of work
| being done is very high. With that said Bulgaria is still mainly
| an outsourcing destination. There are some innovative homegrown
| companies like Chaos Group (creators of V-Ray) and others, but
| relatively to the size of the market they are few and far
| between.
|
| I'm based in London now, but on my recent trip back a month ago I
| met with some ex-colleagues and we talked about how there's
| potentially a salary bubble forming. There are positions for new
| grads without any experience starting from 5000 BGN (2500 EUR)
| which is absolutely insane. Given that the average gross salary
| for Sofia (the capital and most well paid/expensive city in
| Bulgaria) is 1976 BGN[1] that's not normal. Another case was for
| a German company so desperate to find people that they paid a
| friend of mine net 6000 EUR a month as a front-end. That's even
| crazier. Companies like VMware that created big campuses pay
| around 7000-9000 BGN a month for devs (not seniors/team leads).
| You can live like a king with those kinds of salaries in
| Bulgaria, but you'll be surrounded by shitty infrastructure, non-
| existing government and all other types of shit that people like
| me that have left don't want to deal with.
|
| [1] https://www.nsi.bg/en/content/3930/statistical-regions-
| distr...
| kongin wrote:
| >Another case was for a German company so desperate to find
| people that they paid a friend of mine net 6000 EUR a month as
| a front-end. That's even crazier.
|
| Wait how much? At flat 10% tax that's competitive with non-CA
| salaries in the US. Throw in that healthcare is top notch and a
| 20th of the price and some CA positions start looking worse.
|
| Do you have more information on this?
| vt85 wrote:
| Salaries here for senior developers are approaching such
| figures, he is right. You need to ping any HR agency in
| Bulgaria (e.g. Minds) and they will be happy to find you a
| position. I am currently unavailable to find better job in EU
| in financial terms, because of this. And that's excluding
| rents that are ridiculously low, as well as everything else.
| Many foreigners came here in last 10 years, even from places
| like Switzerland, France or Germany. We are yet to see if the
| new government will manage to screw this achievement.
| yakshaving_jgt wrote:
| I broke my wrist in Bulgaria earlier this year and spent a
| night in a hospital in Varna.
|
| It is _not_ top notch.
| baybal2 wrote:
| > You can live like a king with those kinds of salaries in
| Bulgaria, but you'll be surrounded by shitty infrastructure,
| non-existing government and all other types of shit that people
| like me that have left don't want to deal with.
|
| No roads? Why not to build one?
|
| Road building was synonymic with mafia from even before the
| USSR collapse in Russia.
|
| So, my father, back in mid-late nineties simply imported
| equipment from China, hired labourers, built the road for our
| village for 1/8th of what the mafia asked, and then sold the
| equipment on the open market.
|
| Money is power. Don't be ashamed to use it for the right cause.
| pdabbadabba wrote:
| I hate to say it but, if this is really what happened, it is
| only because the local mafia was ineffective. Normally,
| mafias have a lot of well known and often unpleasant ways of
| keeping rivals off their turf.
| codeisawesome wrote:
| I think one would run into trouble with the local hard-power
| gatekeepers in most places with this approach. I believe
| South Africa had a problem where activists tried to improve
| water supply infra but got blocked by the local government
| (which was and is doing a terrible job).
| baybal2 wrote:
| Why not then just buy off these local bureaucrats to make
| them f... off and let you do their job?
|
| Second, if it comes to "hard-power gatekeepers,"
| $1000-$2000 a months buys you employment of a local
| toughboy ready to receive punches, and deliver punches for
| you.
|
| A successful IT business can probably really throw its
| weight around when it comes to somebody trying to
| "naekhat'"
| heavenlyblue wrote:
| Well or you could just migrate to a country where you
| don't need to naekhat'
| pdabbadabba wrote:
| > Second, if it comes to "hard-power gatekeepers,"
| $1000-$2000 a months buys you employment of a local
| toughboy ready to receive punches, and deliver punches
| for you.
|
| Sure, but at this point isn't your advice just "why not
| bribe government officials and go to war with the mafia"?
| Sure, someone could do that. But...maybe we can imagine
| reasons why they would be reluctant to do so?
|
| One notable failure mode of this strategy would be: mafia
| guy shows up at your house and hits you with a hammer
| until you're no longer able to/interested in continuing
| to pursue this strategy.
| vt85 wrote:
| Yes and no. While I bear zero warm feelings for the previous
| regime, it is true that in 90s we had critical mass of
| programmers to start off SOftware development industry, which
| in turn accelerated and shaped out as what we see now. It's not
| only the salaries, though, many people earn here more than they
| could in EU and even US. It's the expertise. And forget about
| the idea of "bubbles ", that's what people in Bulgaria call
| when they feel envy of someone. IT is very competitive industry
| and no one would pay more than what it's deserved.
| merpnderp wrote:
| New graduates in computer science start out at about 2x the
| median household income in my small US state.
|
| I don't know if it is a bubble or the world economy is changing
| faster than people can be educated.
| beckman466 wrote:
| > the world economy is changing faster than people can be
| educated
|
| how can people learn if large parts of humanity's scientific
| and technological feedback/learning loops are commoditized
| and made artificially scarce by our economic system?
| especially now that we have digital technology available that
| could make the storing and transmitting of informational
| artifacts super cheap.
|
| so i think neither of the two reasons you stated, but because
| we are living in a black box society. we are being forcefully
| disinherited by the propertied class.
|
| knowledge laborers who get 2x median income have just been
| less victim to capitalist gatekeeping, since a few are needed
| to generate more intellectual property for the propertied
| class. [2]
|
| [1] Aaron Swartz, Guerilla Open Access Manifesto: https://arc
| hive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamj...
|
| [2] Wendy Liu, Gatekeeping in the tech industry:
| https://dellsystem.me/posts/fragments-50
| kongin wrote:
| scihub, libgen, you now have the keys to the kingdom.
|
| Hilariously enough in my current gig I have access to
| pretty much all the journals out there, yet scihub is still
| easier to use and libgen has more books. The only place I
| think that has libgen beat is the British Library and
| that's only because they haven't digitised most of their
| old books yet.
| merpnderp wrote:
| There is no scarcity at all in access to scientific
| knowledge, technology, investing in the market, or access
| to guidance on how to get ahead in life. And the only
| capitalist gatekeeping is some few formalized online
| schools ask for a pittance in tuition in order to receive
| credentials. But no one can say there's a scarcity in
| access to knowledge when MIT offers most of their catalog
| online for free.
|
| The problem is how few people take advantage of this wealth
| of access and knowledge.
| Grumbledour wrote:
| This narrative reminds me of the similar program in the UK to
| teach a whole generation computer literacy which I think the
| country still benefits from. It is somewhat comforting to see
| what long lasting consequences such programs can have if you
| really put in the effort, if only for a few years.
|
| Maybe this also hits a bit close to home when my own government
| constantly declares how they want to make us the next center of
| [insert current buzzowrd] and of course always fails because it's
| just an excuse to pump a few billion into the private sector. But
| looking at these kind of stories, hope is not lost and I wish to
| see these kind of experiments again soon.
| shellac wrote:
| > This narrative reminds me of the similar program in the UK to
| teach a whole generation computer literacy
|
| Probably the "BBC Computer Literacy Project"
| https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=BBC_Computer_Lite...
| (apologies, there's no specific wikipedia page) which produced
| both a home computer - the BBC Micro - and a series of TV
| programmes starting with The Computer Programme.
| Grumbledour wrote:
| Yes, thank you. Not being from the UK and having heard about
| it mainly from youtube I could not remember the name.
| the-dude wrote:
| To provide further context: one could say ARM spun out of
| it.
| Guthur wrote:
| The major Achilles heel of communism is its central planning. It
| was, and likely still is, intractable to model the nuances and
| therefore inherent flexibility of a price based market system.
|
| The Soviet Union would seesaw back and forth from plenty in one
| particular item to absolute scarcity. There was very little room
| for micro adjustments as so much was centralised.
|
| The efforts that were undertaken to replace the price signal were
| also truly monumental, armies of bureaucrats collecting
| information on every detail of consumption and then trying
| project needs across an entire society. It's a herculean task
| even by today's standards of information processing.
| sega_sai wrote:
| I am wondering to what extent the central planning is much more
| tractable now with the amount of data and computerization. It
| is not like free market is perfect in adjusting either (i.e.
| situation with timber or computer chips or containers in covid
| times). I'm not convinced that central planning is the best way
| to organize the state, but I'm wondering whether the
| intractability argument against is still valid or not.
| thriftwy wrote:
| It's going to be highly non-trivial when most of your supply
| chain (any item maker in the world) is not on the same plan,
| but instead offers wares at market rate.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| The value computation problem that socialist economists
| attempted remains intractable. Dogma has them clinging to
| assumptions are fundamentally wrong like such as the very
| idea of a universal fixed value, or their notion of
| exploitation.
| nextstep wrote:
| There was a semi-successful attempt at this in the 70s in
| Chile, but it was stopped by the CIA:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn
| elliekelly wrote:
| What an interesting article, thanks for sharing. The photo
| looks like it could have been taken on the set of Star
| Trek.
| beckman466 wrote:
| There is a great documentary that came out just a few weeks
| ago.
|
| _Cybersocialism: Project Cybersyn & The CIA Coup in
| Chile_: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJLA2_Ho7X0
| qsort wrote:
| Assuming GP is talking about Von-Mises style criticism of
| command economies, it's not computational tractability, it's
| information tractability.
|
| The problem isn't that you don't know whether action A
| results in N units of X, it's that you don't know if the
| aggregate preferences are such that it's optimal to produce N
| units of X or M units of Y.
| refurb wrote:
| Let's say with data central planning is more tractable. What
| is the benefit? To make more items people _should_ want? I
| mean capitalism does a pretty good job making things people
| _do want_.
|
| And capitalism is highly distributed decision making. As we
| all know, top down decision making pretty much sucks no
| matter how much information they might have.
| phreeza wrote:
| > capitalism does a pretty good job making things people do
| want
|
| This is a two-edged sword, because it also makes people
| want stuff that it can make.
| refurb wrote:
| Have a good example? I mean, the demand for relatively
| vacuous consumer goods was pretty strong in communist
| countries as well.
| beckman466 wrote:
| > I am wondering to what extent the central planning is much
| more tractable now with the amount of data and
| computerization. It is not like free market is perfect in
| adjusting either (i.e. situation with timber or computer
| chips or containers in covid times). I'm not convinced that
| central planning is the best way to organize the state, but
| I'm wondering whether the intractability argument against is
| still valid or not.
|
| I am personally very grateful to have come across the work of
| Lynn Foster and Bob Haugen (and a few other parties, e.g.
| Sensorica). They are working on exactly this problem. Their
| project is called http://valueflo.ws (their software org is:
| http://mikorizal.org). One of the projects I'm most excited
| about is the Valueflo.ws vocabulary on the Holochain
| distributed app framework: https://github.com/holo-rea. It
| can basically replace today's centralized Enterprise Resource
| Planning model with an ecology of fully distributed economic
| resource protocols.
|
| Lynn did a fantastic presentation; which includes a good
| intro to their accounting model (Bill McCarthy's Resource
| Event Agent (REA)):
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vymAHXGSM14
|
| There is also a great story (using the example of making a
| pie) in pdf format on the Valueflo.ws website:
| http://mikorizal.org/ValueFlows-Story.pdf
|
| NY Textile Lab is a project that is working to integrate
| Valueflows: https://www.newyorktextilelab.com/holochain-app-
| development
| thriftwy wrote:
| In the case of late Soviet Union, one should not discount their
| inept economics: they've seriously tried to stop inflation at
| 0% and never increase prices despite growing incomes.
|
| It has eventually lead to more and more goods' production stop
| being profitable and require subsidies. Which are then bound to
| have quotes.
|
| It's not an easy task of planning anything where your populace
| wants both cars and shoes, but you have budget for only one
| item and have to choose.
|
| Bloated defence budgets and large foreign-help funds did not
| help, sure.
| djbebs wrote:
| There is nothing wrong with 0% inflation.
| gostsamo wrote:
| Do not forget corruption. The inflexible hierarchies of
| totalitarian regimes create networks of personal loyalties and
| secret infighting that use institutions and public resources
| into either weapons or sources of self-enrichment without the
| Transperancy and accountability of NGO-s and independent
| courts.
| beckman466 wrote:
| > The inflexible hierarchies of totalitarian regimes create
| networks of personal loyalties and secret infighting that use
| institutions and public resources into either weapons or
| sources of self-enrichment
|
| Wow that sounds a lot like the global system we have today.
| Especially when you look at the unequal ecological 'exchange'
| (read: plunder) going on between the global north and the
| global south:
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-
| professionals...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unequal_exchange
|
| _Dead Donkeys Fear No Hyenas_ is fantastic documentary on
| this issue, it beautifully lays out the struggles of the
| Ethiopian working class who are trying to hold onto their
| land which is increasingly being (literally) given away to
| global north capitalists:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isiYYVmvn2U
| noiwillnot wrote:
| > that use institutions and public resources into either
| weapons or sources of self-enrichment
|
| I think this is not a good example. Look at the situation
| right now with the military-industrial complex in the USA, or
| the lobbying problem. The independent courts and NGOs are
| muted or are not very effective.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| I think it is a good example. Corruption and acquisition of
| power into the hands of a few is the result of pretty much
| any system. One can still acknowledge, however, that some
| approaches lead to this result much faster.
| noiwillnot wrote:
| > One can still acknowledge, however, that some
| approaches lead to this result much faster.
|
| Agree, but there is plenty of nuance on it. A vocal
| proportion of HN likes to throw around some blanket
| statements about state institutions, tax, and societal
| issues... that are questionable at best.
| varispeed wrote:
| The problem is that many corporations were allowed to amass
| unimaginable wealth through loopholes and corruption and
| they can now use that money to keep themselves above the
| law and also teasing subsequent administrations with
| censorship of opposing views. This situation is going to be
| impossible to resolve, as people will be manipulated to not
| vote for an option that will dissolve these corporations or
| significantly curb their influence (and make them pay back
| taxes).
| refurb wrote:
| The fact the US has problems with corruption and lobbying
| isn't proof that authoritarian central planning isn't
| worse.
|
| The example I always like was Vietel, the national telecom
| company in Vietnam. It's a business _owned by the People's
| Army of Vietnam_.
|
| Wrap your head around that. The military has its own side
| business running the nations telecommunications
| infrastructure.
| noiwillnot wrote:
| > isn't proof that authoritarian central planning isn't
| worse
|
| All advanced economies in the world today are mixed
| economies. One can point USA or China as two success
| stories (in their own way) and argue for years about what
| is best.
|
| > It's a business owned by the People's Army of Vietnam.
|
| I do not know anything about Vietel and how they will
| operate. Would the population be served better if it was
| privatized? Because I can point plenty of failures of the
| so called "free market capitalism" that is so perfect
| that never exists if it fails, as proponents of communism
| do with "communist" countries.
|
| Would Swiss be better serviced with private trains like
| in the UK? Would the UK citizens would be better serviced
| with private healthcare like in the US?
| refurb wrote:
| Well, my comment was less about Vietel being private,
| since it's neither, it's owned by well connected people
| in the government. My comment was more about the
| opportunity for corruption. At least if a company I
| private there is (or can be) a separation in decision
| making which reduces the risk of people lining their own
| pockets with someone else's money.
| blacktriangle wrote:
| Agreed, this is my go-to argument when trying to fix communist.
|
| For the sake of argument, take away human nature. Assume you
| have an all benevolent polibutro who really is looking to
| maximize the greater good. Now imagine the data collection and
| modeling necessary to make central planning work. Everything
| about communism goes against every macrotrend in modern
| thought. Distributed systems, the actor model, concensus
| protocols, microservicers, the freaking blockchain. We are
| designing all of our systems to be broken into smaller
| independent parts that can evovle and make decision on their
| own. Why the hell then are software engineers so obsessed with
| doing the exact opposite when it comes to run or economic
| system?!
| cstross wrote:
| Internally, every large corporation in a capitalist system is a
| miniature Stalinist centrally-planned economy. The key
| differences are that (a) corporations are generally several
| orders of magnitude smaller than a state (hence, easier to plan
| for _and_ amenable to real-time adjustments if the plan veers
| into the long grass), and (b) the corporation can dump
| overheads into the external state -- downsizing, for example.
| (If you try to reduce the head-count of a nation-state by 10%
| that tends to earn you a place in the history books, and not a
| good one.)
|
| If you step down to an even smaller scale factor most families
| operate on a communal basis, with married/cohabiting adults
| holding shared assets and funds, contributing their earnings
| from external employment and disbursing in accordance with need
| -- a pattern that goes back into deep antiquity.
|
| So the dysfunctional aspects of communism emerge when you scale
| it up too far -- which suggests to me that it's an information
| processing problem.
| ladyattis wrote:
| I would argue most governments at a point start looking more
| pseudo-anarchic due to how departments often compete with
| each other for resources without much in the way of a referee
| even if you factor in the secretary or under-secretary level
| positions. So the command in command economy is largely just
| giving general directives that rarely amount to much unless
| the underlying organizations know how to play well with each
| other.
| beckman466 wrote:
| > The major Achilles heel of communism is its central planning.
|
| > The efforts that were undertaken to replace the price signal
| were also truly monumental, armies of bureaucrats collecting
| information on every detail of consumption and then trying
| project needs across an entire society. It's a herculean task
| even by today's standards of information processing.
|
| No it's very much possible today. An exciting project I follow
| closely: http://valueflo.ws
| varispeed wrote:
| > The major Achilles heel of communism is its central planning.
|
| It is removing agency from people and assumes that the party
| knows better - which essentially is just another form of
| slavery.
| thescriptkiddie wrote:
| Central planning is not a necessary feature of communism, and
| it has also been employed in capitalist economies.
| kongin wrote:
| >Perhaps today's technological and political entrepreneurs, like
| their socialist predecessors, may find out that a new generation
| raised in conditions of financial crashes, pandemics, and
| political deadlock may draw different ideological conclusions to
| what the new status quo intends.
|
| What a weird take, the generation that lived after the end of
| communism saw everything get worse year after year.
|
| It's just that the majority of us left.
|
| Out of six first cousins born between 1983 and 2003 one is still
| in Bulgaria because she can make a living from the farmland that
| we were all meant to inherit and is keeping an eye on the ageing
| relatives that are still there.
|
| The rest of us aren't there and don't intend to return for the
| next 40 years.
|
| We all view socialism very favourably and our parents as idiots
| who killed the golden goose expecting golden chicken nuggets till
| the end of time.
| phreeza wrote:
| The last paragraph caught me by surprise, most eastern European
| expats I know are quite anti-socialist.
| kongin wrote:
| Of course I vote against socialism in the West, I'm here to
| make money, the less taxes the more money.
| ricksunny wrote:
| I can't tell where there might be irony here -
|
| >We all view socialism very favourably and our parents as
| idiots who killed the golden goose expecting golden chicken
| nuggets till the end of time.
|
| vs.
|
| >Of course I vote against socialism in the West, I'm here
| to make money, the less taxes the more money.
|
| Can you describe how these two statements can be
| rationalized into a cohesive position?
| jyotimalhot wrote:
| great!!
| hyfgfh wrote:
| Is it about socialism or communism?
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