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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

I believe in hundreds, maybe thousands of years, after humanity has finally evolved past our current monkey mentality, future historians will look back at this time period in awe: "They had the technology to make the sum of all human knowledge available to everyone... And they blew it! Further, they had the means to feed everyone, clothe everyone, house everyone, but they just walked away in the other direction, purely to maintain existing economic power structures." The future historians are going to wonder how strong our ideology was that we sacrificed all of what we could have at the altar of our scarcity-based religion.

If Star Trek Replicators were invented today, we're so stupid we'd outlaw them.

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> If Star Trek Replicators were invented today, we're so stupid we'd outlaw them.

You're so optimistic to think the law would even be this fair. More like limit access to corporations as "the only custodians responsible enough to wield them", while still allowing the developing world to starve and further increasing their profit margins simultaneously to decreasing working wages and employment levels.

Hah some Ferengi actually did this in an episode of TNG! They showed up on a random planet with a replicator and then used their ability to produce anything as a means to subjugate the population.

I believe that was Voyager and the Ferengi were stranded in the delta quadrant after the incident with the stable-on-one-end wormhole in TNG. Imo it wasn’t the worst strategy in their situation.

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/False_Profits_(episode)

Oooh you’re so right thank you!

Fun episode title.

A script writer can make any fantasy appear to be workable.

You cannot make money off of people who are starving.

You can force starving people into unfair arrangements where the choice is between getting screwed or dying of hunger. You can use the existence of starving people as a threat to keep your work force in line. Sometimes it's not even the starving people that you're making money off of, but their minerals and land.

There are a lot of ways to profit from suffering. And sometimes it's not even about profit—it can just feel so good to have an Other to oppress.

> You can force starving people into unfair arrangements where the choice is between getting screwed or dying of hunger.

History shows us that if you want to force starving people to work for you, you also need to shoot the people who refuse. See the Soviet gulags, and the Nazi slave labor camps.

Indeed the arrangement is violent and enforced with terrible violence, and in no way is this incompatible with profits.

This is false. You can create conditions where their only real choice is to work for you. And since they’re starving, they’ll work for very low wages. You sell the product of their labor and collect the surplus value created by their work.

If they're literally at the point of starvation, maybe true - though famines often happen when people simply can't get access to food, even if they have the resources to buy it. So, bringing food to a starving area is unlikely to be bad for business.

However, the more important point is that you can surely make money off of people by becoming their only source of food/money - i.e. they would starve without you, so they accept whatever trickle of resources you deign to assign. This is extraordinarily common throughout history, coupled with a threat of violence that all states use.

> the more important point is that you can surely make money off of people by becoming their only source of food/money

If you the only source, there is a reason for that, usually because you are shooting people who try to leave.

I'll cite a counter for you. The US was the first country in the world to eliminate the specter of famine (around 1800). Free labor was the distinguishing ingredient, not slave labor. (The slaves at the time were used to primarily farm cotton and tobacco.) The average height of Americans increased dramatically throughout the 19th century. Scores of millions of Americans arrived in America as paupers and moved into the middle class.

The economic machine of America was fueled by free labor, not starving people.

Slavery created the wealth that made industrialization in the north possible, and was the basis of the economic machine that you speak of.

You've reduced slavery to a parenthetical. Where do you think the cotton and tobacco went? Where do you think the money came from? Where do you think it got spent?

https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/8/16/20806069/slavery-ec...

Here's why that's wrong. When the Confederacy seceded, the economy of the South slid into ruin. The economy of the North thrived.

The Rebel army was barefoot, because Southern industry could not even make shoes. The reason that Lee was in Gettysburg was to loot the shoe factory at nearby Harrisburg.

Where were the industries in the South? Where were the industries in South America? Why did the South secede to protect their economy from the North?

> was the basis of the economic machine that you speak of

The Civil War destroyed what there was of the Southern wealth, literally burning it to the ground.

"made the South its most prosperous region"

That's just nonsense. Take a look at contemporary photos and paintings of the North and South before 1865, and you'll see the stark difference in prosperity. Railroads latticed the North, far outstripping mileage in the South.

Do you understand the difference between starting an engine and keeping it running? I'm referring to northern wealth btw.

> Where were the industries in the South? Where were the industries in South America?

They weren't there precisely because slave labor was so profitable that they did not see the need to industrialize.

> Why did the South secede to protect their economy from the North?

The south seceded in order to protect the institution of slavery.

> Take a look at contemporary photos and paintings of the North and South before 1865

Good thing we don't measure wealth by photos and paintings, and instead we have census data. Be serious, think about why an economy based on slave labor and agriculture would not build a network of railroads even if they had the money for it.

> Good thing we don't measure wealth by photos and paintings

Do you really think that photos and paintings are all lies?

> Be serious, think about why an economy based on slave labor and agriculture would not build a network of railroads even if they had the money for it.

I'm sorry, I can't take that comment seriously.

> slave labor was so profitable that they did not see the need to industrialize

Or that one. Sorry.

The South was so profitable they could not finance their military. The North did easily.

If you recall, the original contention was that "You cannot make money off of people who are starving." Clearly you can—in the short term, and enabled by violent coercion, as you've helpfully added.

My argument summed up is that slavery was a "local maximum" that A) generated an enormous amount of wealth early on, and was thus a crucial factor in developing the American economy, even if it was no longer the main driver of wealth by the time of the civil war, and B) made it unattractive for the south to risk seeking a global maximum (investing in industrialization) a strategic misstep for sure.

It's clear which strategy wins long term, I don't think that's a debate. I should have phrased my earlier comment better, sorry.

> enabled by violent coercion

The violent coercion is key, not starvation. Isn't it interesting that every example of an abuse by free markets actually turns out to be the government doing it? The anti-chinese laws, debt slavery, slavery, Jim Crow laws, etc.? It's almost as if these things won't happen with free markets!

> generated an enormous amount of wealth

I dispute that. Slavery was dying out in the US by 1800 (as evidenced by its disappearance in the northern states). The cotton gin revived it, but only for cotton, and it was dying out again by the time of the Civil War. The South though the North needed its cotton, but the North was importing it from Egypt. Egyptian cotton (not raised by slaves) was cheaper even including shipping it across the Atlantic.

> made it unattractive for the south to risk seeking a global maximum (investing in industrialization) a strategic misstep for sure.

So they sent their money north to found industries? That doesn't make any sense. Why didn't they invest locally, and get more slaves to work them, if slavery was so enormously profitable?

Slavery is terribly inefficient. First of all, your slaves hate you. They will work as little as they can get away with. They'll sabotage anything they can get away with. They'll piss in your oatmeal. They'll kill you if they can. You have to employ armed guards at all time. You have to provide cradle to grave care for them. They are expensive to buy. If your slaves don't have the right skills, selling them and buying ones with the right skills is far less efficient than just hiring a plumber. And so on.

The Nazis had all these problems with their slave labor war production. Sabotage by those workers was a constant issue.

Isn't it interesting that every example of an abuse by free markets actually turns out to be the government doing it?

Government instrumentalized to serve the interests of the wealthy elites, that is. So at the end of the day, it's the latter who are "doing" it.

In the past there was a fairly common practice to create a monopoly by outlawing people from importing food to a local economy. People may recognize the concept of mining towns, company stores, or its role in debt slavery.

The practice back in those days were to advertise inflated wages for a job in remote areas. People then traveled there, only to find out that food and living costs, all under the control of the company, were also inflated to the point where even a full working day would results in debt when subtracting food and living costs. People who tried to flee was prevented from doing so under the argument that they tried to escape acquired debt. The fines for smuggling food was also extreme, since food costs was the primary way that the companies held control over their debt slaves.

This practice was so vile that many countries created laws directly targeting it, including changes to inheritance so that debt would not follow from parent to child.

> outlawing people from importing food

I.e. the government is doing it.

No, this was companies doing it. They controlled ports, rail and roads (or what ever roads that may exist in remote areas), and controlling in-going supplies was a matter of policy and enforcement. Mining and railway companies where once very large and powerful, similar to some trading companies in the past.

In systems such as our own, where government power has been essentially captured by corporate lobbying, there is little difference between "government is doing it" and "companies are doing it."

"outlawing" means a law, and the law is done by government.

Capital is most valuable when demand exceeds supply (producer surplus).

It doesn’t matter, people are starving.

Europeans and Americans are now taxing green technology, which they said in the past they want, because it is built in another country...

Because they don't want to be dependent on another country for energy infrastructure.

Especially when another country is undercutting domestic production of others in order to impose an Orwellian ideology.

I think the truth is we just failed to invest in the manufacturing tech and now they’re beating us in the market, so we’re taxing them to make it hard for them to compete. I’d way rather we just invest and outcompete them. I don’t think they’re intentionally undercutting us they just have lower costs from decades of investment that we haven’t been doing ourselves.

They're undercutting us by virtue of labor standards and other corners that we don't cut.

Honestly I know that used to be true, but how true is that today? Laborers in the USA don’t have great standards either. What proportion of the cost reduction comes from lower labor standards and what proportion comes from the fact that they absolutely have invested more in manufacturing than we have?

I order my PCBAs from JLCPCB in China and they’re about 1/10th the cost of ordering something from the USA. But you can watch a factory tour, it’s not some horrible labor conditions it’s huge highly automated machines: https://youtu.be/jTBOSob5MLg

They just invested more than we did.

So maybe their labor conditions are still worse than ours, by some amount, but it’s more than just saving on labor that got their prices low.

It can be multiple things at once. They did indeed invest a lot more into manufacturing but they are also definitely using slave labor to cut on costs (see https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/02/01/china-carmakers-implicat...). Who knows as well to which extent the government funds these companies and keeps them afloat.

> But you can watch a factory tour, it’s not some horrible labor conditions it’s huge highly automated machines: https://youtu.be/jTBOSob5MLg

Rhetorical question but do you really believe they would be allowed to publish anything showing a human rights violation on youtube?

To get this footage he probably had to agree that all footage has to be reviewed by the company. There is no way they green light anything that makes them look bad. I would not be shocked if a party official had to be there to make sure he only shows the great side of everything.

I’m not sharing the video as some foolish “proof” of the absence of labor violations. I’m sharing it as positive proof of the many very large highly automated high throughput machines they have! It’s clear they have invested a lot in machinery to produce their goods.

Did the Chinese government help invest in that production capacity? I don’t know probably, but I think the US should be doing that too so my point that we failed to invest still stands.

The point is, it’s not some evil communist plot to undercut us. They just actually invested in manufacturing and that’s what I’m trying to show with the video. Seriously click through it. There’s a lot of large high throughput automated machines there! There is no equivalent to that facility in the USA that I have ever heard of. Probably big companies like Intel have some impressive machinery but this is a job shop where anyone with $5 can place an order for PCBs. And I seriously doubt this is some North Korean style propaganda show where a bunch of slave labor is hidden behind a door. This factory is a state of the art PCB fabrication facility that gets cheap prices due to investment in capacity. They’re not cheating. They just actually invested and we’ve failed to catch up.

Somehow in the West it is now an ideological crime to point out the obvious: that China has high tech industries, new technology, and scientific development. These are all things that they didn't expect could appear in a country like China, so they want the evidence to be excluded from the internet and labeled as fake news or propaganda.

The USA cuts corners on labor standards for more than a century, but Europeans are Ok with that. The same logic applies, Europeans get a lot of their products and services from a country that has little to no safety nets for their workers, so by buying from USA, Europeans are funding their own demise.

The EU sould also strive for more independence from US corporations, yes, especially the silicon valley ones. Having entire governments depend on Microsoft is a problem.

The USA absolutely fucked manufacturing into the sun, but that doesn’t come back overnight, and China cheats in ways that we can’t. You have a comment below that seems to indicate you have no clue how bad they have it vs US blue collar workers. You might want to do some reading on that before pontificating on this subject.

I get what you're saying. But at the same time, the whole Boeing debacle makes me wonder how many other skeletons we're hiding.

Either way, this is the consequences of letting corporations lobby to stifle innovation. They wanted short term money and we're all paying the price.

There is no problem with the investments size, China had way less investments. The problem is in the amount of work and production regulations, which in some cases just doesn't exist in China.

In that case, Great job divesting in domestic labor in lieu of offshoring. Mission accomplished

Chinese cars? really?

They are at best a hazard.

The Chinese government dumped tons of money into every one of those cars, they are being sold at a loss. Not because it's good for any one, rather because china fucked up.

Every single one of those cars is a state funded fire hazard about to go on the road.

EDITL: cause looking up data is hard apparently:

western data:

https://www.edmunds.com/electric-car/articles/electric-car-f...

The data we see from china: https://news.metal.com/newscontent/101781161/there-are-about...

The anti china reporting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMKpCiDomgM

Do note, that were talking about a nation that will happily NOT report on stats like youth employment when its bad, so take what you read with more than a few grains of salt.

do you have any evidence that they're more prone to fire than any other EVs?

https://news.metal.com/newscontent/102243830/tragedy-of-elec...

The Chinese government cant even keep it under wraps with how bad it is. If you pay attention to Chinese news there's a few of them every week. And thats the ones we hear about, mostly because the were spontaneous, or in buildings/gargages, or people die.

Go look it's hard to fuckin miss.

If it was only a safety issue the governments in the US and EU would only need the existing legal infrastructure for car safety to regulate Chinese electric vehicles.

The US tariffs are not even officially claimed to have anything to do with safety, but everything to do with industrial competition.

I will take it on faith that you’ve seen loads of examples but I’d be particularly interested in statistics about the number of fires per vehicle produced compared to the same for vehicles from other companies. Obviously one article saying that an EV caught fire isn’t compelling as we have that here too. The problem was so bad with the Chevy Bolt EV that some of them caught fire while just sitting in people’s driveways and the entire fleet had to be recalled.

Without statistics I’m totally unmoved by even a long list of Chinese examples as the same can be produced here too. And Teslas have killed plenty of people due to faulty self driving software!

Cars have gotten a lot safer over the years, so how far of a setback would this be? Are they on par with 90s cars? 80s? 50s?

https://www.euroncap.com/en/results/byd/dolphin/50011 Hmm, that's a pretty good score. Is this version different?

UHH western data:

https://www.edmunds.com/electric-car/articles/electric-car-f...

The data we see from china: https://news.metal.com/newscontent/101781161/there-are-about...

The anti china reporting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMKpCiDomgM

Edit: it's a battery fire, so lithium, a metal. It does not go out. You just let it burn till it's done being angry. The Chinese ones are doing it at random. Sometimes with people in the car.

Personally I don’t hold this view of China. I think they invested in manufacturing while we divested and now they’re simply reaping the rewards of those investments by producing superior or soon to be superior technology.

A lot of people in the west have a vested interest in discrediting Chinese manufacturing but if we put our heads in the sand and refuse to see what is really happening they’re just going to pass us by.

Note that basically every automobile producing country puts government money in to that industry so highlighting that China is doing it is on its own meaningless.

The problem is the wheels fall off in a fender bender and there's only a 50% chance the airbags will deploy when needed.

So its at least as good as Chrysler.

At least the steering wheel doesn’t fall off while you’re driving:

https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/08/tesla-under-investigation-...

Green technology is funded by our taxes in EU. 8000€ on photovoltaic panels per household. Made in China.

Tariffs do decrease competition and lead to higher prices for consumers....but...there are certain industries important for national security where a country may wish to subsidize an industry like building renewables or use a tariff against a country like China that is trying to corner the market through nationalized companies. Because those companies are a wing of their government (so to speak) a free market company can't compete and eventually all you have are Chinese companies for these critical industries and they can dictate policy to us.

> there are certain industries important for national security where a country may wish to subsidize an industry ... against a country like China that is trying to corner the market through nationalized companies

Your argument doesn't even make sense: in the first part you say yes, we need national support for this sector of the economy, while a few words later you say that China is cheating by giving support to the same sector.

> If Star Trek Replicators were invented today, we're so stupid we'd outlaw them.

Something like this already happens with housing and NIMBYism.

We’re in the middle of “The Dark Ages II” and we don’t even know it.

I’ve been thinking for a while about how historians will view our chunk of history and it ain’t too good.

There will be some bright spots, but for the most part humans have been behaving pretty terribly, at scale, since harnessing the power of electricity.

> If Star Trek Replicators were invented today, we're so stupid we'd outlaw them.

History shows the labor unions and leftists would also be against replicators. We see that today with how people are very against AI advancements that would put artists out of jobs, they would rather halt progress than lose their jobs.

Of course corporations that stand to lose out are also against it, but don't kid yourself labor movements are just as greedy and anti progress when progress would inconvenience them.

> History shows the labor unions and leftists would also be against replicators.

Only because the rich would exploit the replicators and would leave everyone else in the dust starving.

Nobody would have a problem with it, if you could survive on them.

Exactly. If AI would free you from having to work to survive there would be a lot less opposition. But it doesn't while taking away some of the better options for said work from some people.

> they had the means to feed everyone, clothe everyone, house everyone, but they just walked away in the other direction, purely to maintain existing economic power structures.

Your idea has been tried over and over. It just makes things worse, far worse.

> If Star Trek Replicators were invented today, we're so stupid we'd outlaw them.

Related, I'm surprised how fast people stopped worrying about 3D printers making guns.

The country that allowed replicators would be no.1 fairly quickly

>The country that allowed replicators would be no.1 fairly quickly

No.1 in jobless, fat and addicted peoples. You need the full Star Trek experience/mindset before you introduce unlimited everything. Also the first thing that would be produced are weapons, drugs and food....and everything sex.

Because everyone with a disposable income today is an overweight druggie bent on blasting their neighbor's head off?

The sum of human knowledge in written form is largely available on pirate sites like scihub or libgen. And the feed clothe house stuff is coming along. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/prevalence-of-undernouris...

I believe in 5 years time, digital information will be so easily transformable, that copyright holders (and patent holders) will have a very difficult time enforcing the property rights.

When a book can be readily transformed into audiobook, or even a song, a movie and anime, a sketch, a scientific diag or anything else, how you define property in that environment? Pretty impossible.

I think a useful analogy is when we lived in caves. A cave is given as is, no way to transform it, to evolve it and optimize it. As long as we found new ways to create an enclosure, then technology advancement really took off. Houses made of rocks, clay, concrete, wood started popping off everywhere.

The same way with books. A printed book is not transformed to anything else really. As long as written words can be represented in a more flexible way, then they are on to the race for technology advancement.

Replicators can produce so much mass so quickly, they pose an existential threat to public health and safety.

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