1,634 karma · joined February 26, 2014
Really? You mean every time we've tried to overthrow a foreign government we've been able to find locals who were willing to give us a hand if they could personally benefit from the arrangement? That's amazing! What are the odds?
The notion that we are not involved somehow is totally ludicrous. That doesn't have to mean that Tony Blinken (or Joe Biden) personally signed off on this, but we are involved. To suppose otherwise is to be naive to the point of stupidity.
No, I think the US is a much less reliable trading partner, even for aligned Western nations to say nothing of the rest of the world, and the pivot to China that virtually every nation on Earth is making, if it's not a functional tributary of the US (and even many of them, actually), speaks for itself.
Uh yeah? Because you're not arguing in good faith. As I've already said, "if you like it so much why don't you move there" is such a boring dogshit argument that even South Park made fun of it. Twenty years ago. It would be one thing if you knew anything about me or my circumstances, but since you don't, I can safely assume that you frequently apply this logic as a rebuttal to any criticism of the status quo, which is an extremely small-brained, liberal thing to do. Nice work.
At any rate, all states are authoritarian, so if there is some structural limitation inherent there, the US and China are on equal footing. The real structural limitation at issue here lies in the US where we have both a highly-centralized economy dominated by a few actors and one driven entirely by the profit motive. Not a good spot to be in unless you think rent-seeking is good for productivity. Which, hell, given your performance in this thread so far, maybe you do think that. But, it isn't. This explains the respective growth and development trajectories of both nations.
Anyway I'm done with this thread as you still haven't put anything compelling or thought provoking into any of your dozen or so posts here, and I'm not interested in reading any more of your reactionary liberal bullshit arguments, if that's what we're calling them. So feel free to put whatever witty zingers you like in your inevitable reply, with links to Adrian Zenz' Twitter account etc. I hope we don't cross paths here again.
Quite the contrary, I will stay in the US because I anticipate that our loss of power and prestige vis a vis China will result in many structural changes as we are forced (often against cultural inertia) to embrace more advanced productive relations to have any hope of keeping up. I want to be here for that, thanks.
Particles aren't?
I don't speak Chinese and I'm an American citizen. "If X is so great why don't you move to X?" is such a typical retort from reactionaries to any criticism of the status quo that it's literally a meme. I'm not surprised to find this on HN but I am surprised that you lack self-awareness to the extent that you're actually doubling down on it, here.
Second to ours.
> mobile execution vans literally seizing and executing people on the street by the tens of thousand or more
Absolute nonsense.
You seemed to be confused by the fact that China hasn't financialized their economy and turned it into a giant Ponzi scheme / wealth extraction machine. That's the point: they're trying to avoid the terminal rent-seeking behavior endemic to Western economies.
Okay: Chinese report higher satisfaction with their government and the direction their country is headed in than virtually any Western nation and much more than in the US. The Chinese economy is doing the opposite of enshittification, whereas the US is openly embracing the trend at this point with inflation / capital strikes, shrinkflation, consolidation, rent-seeking, and overall lower quality of goods and services. The home ownership rate in China is about 90%. Real wages in China are steadily rising and have been for decades - in the US they are falling and have done for decades.
America's primary means of diplomatic leverage is military domination but it can't even prevent the Houthis from a virtual blockade of the Red Sea and sea traffic through there has dropped 90%. Meanwhile China is transforming entire continents with its superior industrial capacity and soft power. They are the world leader in clean energy research and production. They got kicked out of the International Space Station so they built a better one and left an open invitation to the nations that kicked them out of the ISS, to join them on the Tiangong Space Station after they come to their senses.
China has already won. Chinese socialism, won. If there is a positive future for humanity at this point, it is in China and China alone. The West is still coming to grips with this. Posts like yours are transparently cope.
Worth noting that this is a different kind of protectionism than that sometimes practiced by developing nations to build up their local infrastructure and industry. In both cases you end up with higher domestic prices and lower quality of goods (at least at first) but at least in the case of the developing nation you do actually build up some domestic infrastructure and industry in the meantime. (Or, at least, you have the opportunity to do so.)
That's not what's happening here as there is no build-up for us to do. This is just the US government acting on behalf of US companies to shield them from competition so they can soak the domestic market for every cent without interference. There's no way any of this is going to reverse or even slow down the trend of enshittification - in fact, it's going to accelerate it.
You're deliberately overstating the issue, to the point of absurdity, to avoid legitimate criticism. Three-letter agencies do have a high level of access to this data, and in many cases that's because the companies involved just voluntarily hand it over (no need to get the courts involved). Even when the courts do get involved, these are secret courts where the decisions are classified, and in any case from what we do know they act as a rubber stamp anyway.
So, this is a matter of the US wanting access to that data in addition to, or possibly exclusive from, the CCP. Frankly, as I'm not currently under the jurisdiction of the Communist Party of China, I'd prefer they have unlimited access to that data as opposed to the US government, if I have to choose one or the other.
That said, even if you take as a given that property rights enable those other rights (certainly a contentious claim), it still seems like you're missing the point of the question. If you value the right of a person not to be murdered, more than you value the right of a person to own a factory and to pay people to work in it, you should just say so.
Are we doing that?
Note that the centralization and socialization of production is regarded as a good thing here. You get greater economies of scale and thus greater productive capacity when this happens. This is why Marxists view capitalism as a progressive historical development - we just don't fixate on it as though it's the pinnacle of human productive relations or the "final step" or something like that.
The main problem with capitalism comes when you have a great degree of centralization and control at which point the profit motive inherent in capitalism tends to produce a ton of rent-seeking behavior which drags the economy down and makes further progress difficult or impossible. I would argue that in most industries we reached this point decades ago, or even a century ago in some cases. Tech is a notable exception, though we're reaching the point there as well.
This is the point at which reformists will say "well you just need to break up monopolies" but it's like I said: social, cultural, and government institutions tend to bend toward the economic paradigm more than the other way around. The economic base tends to influence the societal superstructure more than the other way around. This is mostly because, day-to-day, people are more focused on their material needs than they are on ideology and culture. So, our government is much more reluctant than it should be to break up monopolies, our media is dominated by capital interests (to control public opinion in favor of capital interests) and so on. Idealists will insist we're "not doing capitalism right" or something but that argument is not persuasive if the long-term result of doing capitalism "right" is that you eventually stop doing it "right" as government and culture bends toward capital interests - which seems inevitable.
And, anyway, remember that the centralization of productive capacity and control is a good thing. It is more efficient, at least until the rent-seeking behavior starts to assert itself and drags the economy down. So breaking up monopolies is kind of a regressive course of action. It would be nice if we could have highly-developed productive forces with a great degree of specialization and centralization, etc., but without the rent-seeking behavior. In order for that to happen you need to keep the accumulation of capital but get rid of the profit motive - or at least remove it as the primary driver of economic activity. Marxists identify the working class as the only class that has the correct incentives to make this happen: capitalists won't do it because they won't benefit from it personally and in fact stand to lose out personally if it happens.
And then, from there you have 150+ years of history of trying to figure out the best way to do that, usually in the face of violent reprisals from capital interests. A history filled with success and failure and lessons learned. A history I'm not going to get into here because I've already typed a massive wall of text and need to get back to work - I'll just say that IMO China has done a lot of good work in this regard but they still have a long way to go.
But all I was getting at with my comment is that we can't even be said to be ruled by capitalists, I don't think. Our government acts at the behest of capital not capitalists, and our society is shaped by that as well. All our institutions are bent toward it. It may seem like a trivial distinction but it means that people - even capitalists - who for whatever reason act against the interests of capital accumulation, will find their influence wane and eventually wink out of existence. They'll be pushed out. As such we're ruled by capital i.e. "the humans aren't in charge."
Alas, my efforts were in vain.
Capitalism is about the accumulation of capital goods into private hands and centralization and socialization of production. To my mind, that's what it does and what drives it forward - most everything else is secondary. That's not quite the same as "only for profit" but it's close. People under capitalism don't all think of it that way, but unfortunately the humans aren't in charge. The logic of capitalism, is.
I don't know if he still takes that approach. In fact, I kind of doubt he ever really did, but he certainly projected that image publicly, and most importantly to workers of those companies - whether he "really believed" it I guess is a moot point.
When you take the "businesses exist to return a profit to shareholders" approach you're always going to focus on leadership that has a track record of doing that, even if that excludes building a good product or for that matter even the long-term viability of the business. Thus, you see these CEO hires that don't seem to make sense - most of us unconsciously still think of businesses as things created to make a thing or do a specific thing, because that's a natural thing to believe.
Anyway I think you can attribute some of the success of both to this, as well as Musk's public image at least ca 2008-2018 or so.
We could even get the best of both worlds by laying the pages out on a clear surface, putting a camera on the other side, and hooking one of my eyes up to a feed of that camera. That would require some custom hardware and a little more up-front cost, though. We can look into whether that's cheaper than just buying another book.
Either method is a huge improvement on this "read two pages at a time" business, in any case.
> Somehow, humans managed to get by for thousands of years without any of this stuff.
In fact, and this is especially true for men, the correct response to this line of reasoning is basically "well, actually, no they didn't." The genetic lineages of most men over the entirety of human history, are extinct - we are descended from the comparative few who aren't. For example Ötzi the iceman (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96tzi) has no living descendants. He is typical.
Not only that, but there is no reason to think that the surviving genetic lineages are remotely optimized for individual happiness, or for that matter individual industriousness or productivity (esp in the context of modern productive relations) or whatever other metric you want to measure people by.
All of which is to say, that even accounting for the fact that basically most people who ever lived have no living descendants, we just don't value, individually or collectively, even the attributes that would have been selected for among human populations in the bronze age, neolithic, whatever. So if we want to make those things happen (i.e. if we want people to be happy and productive) we need to create the conditions for it and we need to give them significant help in doing so, as well. That "significant help" is probably going to be something like what we call "therapy" today - though, as I mentioned above, I think contemporary therapeutic practices are doing a horrible job at it. But, there is a job to do there, IMO.
I think you're right that requiring such knowledge off the top of one's head and in the context of a one-hour interview is almost always unreasonable, though.
What I'd really want to know is how well a person can do the research to arrive at performant solutions involving, as you say, obscure data structures. In an interview context though, I think you basically just have to ask them - would be nice if you could get a sense of it through doing, though.
And then what happens? Earnest question.