Socialist Cyborgs
logicmag.io
logicmag.io
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.
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.
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...
I don't know if it is a bubble or 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://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamj...
[2] Wendy Liu, Gatekeeping in the tech industry: https://dellsystem.me/posts/fragments-50
The problem is how few people take advantage of this wealth of access and knowledge.
The problem is how a profit-seeking knowledge-enclosing/commoditizing capitalist economy and education system allows the propertied class to control the supply of technical labor.
The problem is that many in the working class don't have a methodological literacy.
"The researchers note that it’s tough for lay audiences to fully understand complex topics [...] They suggest a more sustainable solution for curbing misinformation is helping the public develop a type of scientific literacy known as methodological literacy. People who understand scientific methods and research designs can better evaluate claims about science and research, they explain."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28658946
imo we won't see many positive changes until we abolish silicon valley and the western-led intellectual property regime. liberate science and technology from capitalism.
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.
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?
It is not top notch.
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.
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 "наехать"
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.
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.
>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?
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.)
Ah, that's why my Red Hat machine was always building DKMS modules!
Yeah. That's typical Western Russophobia for you.
I mean, even this very article immediately refutes that 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.
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.
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...
Invest in a small elite and let the rest of the country starve. That's old as civilization.
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.
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/
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.
For me typical fallacy would be something like
"You did A. A is bad."
"So what? You did B. B is bad."
This tries to dismiss A , while "Both did A." tells us something about A.
Just don't trust the history of your national side -- or the winners, in most cases.
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/hitlers...
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?
Essentially though, Japan had imperial ambitions across most of East and Southeast Asia, knew the US wouldn't allow them much more conquest, and miscalculated that attacking first would be the best chess move to negotiate and secure the rest of the Asian territory they wanted.
No, just the accurate ones. The state sanctioned historiography pretends it's not a thing.
>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?
Yeah, the kind US that warred in the Philipines, and toppled/established/promoted regimes all around the world for the whole 20th century (and the 21st) got so upset at Japan invading China...
The same Japan they earlier attacked as a sovereign state and forced-open to their trade and terms, just because they could... (Who invaded whom first here?)
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.
If the Warsaw Pact allowed people and ideas to circulate, they might have launched satellites and men in space before the West!
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.
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.
It is removing agency from people and assumes that the party knows better - which essentially is just another form of slavery.
Cybersocialism: Project Cybersyn & The CIA Coup in Chile: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJLA2_Ho7X0
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.
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
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.
This is a two-edged sword, because it also makes people want stuff that it can make.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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?!
> 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