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kunimu

46 karma · joined October 26, 2017

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kunimu··on How Apple sidestepped a 2013 crackdown on its Irish tax practices
"some people aren't so greedy as to believe that they are entitled to the fruits of other's labour."

There is a distinct and strong sense of unaware irony in this comment.

kunimu··on UN Study Warns: Growing Economic Concentration Leads to “Rentier Capitalism”
What was the predictable reason?
kunimu··on Ask HN: What are your favorite books of all time, and why?
I don't know. I'm doing an EE degree at the moment (second year) and AoE isn't that helpful from my view to understand the theoretical side. It'll tell me what an op-amp bandwidth is and the significance of 3dB but it won't tell me why it's that way, or go into why there is a decay at 20dB/decade. It's been more helpful on the practical side of building circuits rather than their analysis, but I don't know if that's the point or not.
kunimu··on AMD takes on Intel with new Ryzen processors for laptops
I can replicate this experience. Enemy Territiry with radron would give you maximum 30fps in 2014 or so, forget playing with rain or on a populated server. Now I get 90fps at 1080p comfortably.
kunimu··on Most US jobs created since 2005 are not conventional full-time work
Of course not everyone can be directly involved with the allocation of resources, however as with all scarce resources decisions need to be made from time to time on which usage would best benefit society; in this case, I'm an advocate for democratic management of such resources. I don't think that power only comes with information, the power comes when people are given extra abilities to deal with that information (such as using personal preference to dictate allocation) so I think that protections are needed.

I think the problem with central planning stretches further; the goal of the Communists is to avoid alienation from one's labour, the non-commodity of labour-power, however having labour being externally imposed (whether by the capitalist and the "market" within capitalist society, or by the central planner within Socialist society) is alienation by definition. Therefore some change in the method of planning is required. Marx wrote that there are four forms of alienation, one which I think is important here is alienation of the worker from the act of production; the Communist movement aims to reject this alienation through making the whole productive capacity of society available to all such that the worker can in almost all cases direct his own labour, all production is social therefore, as all workers contribute.

So the kind of planning in higher stage Communism is much past the idea of a government planning, rather, as Marx wrote (to what some consider a contradiction), society regulates general production. To quote,

>For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.

kunimu··on Most US jobs created since 2005 are not conventional full-time work
>Communism is anti-worker because it leads to rampant rent-seeking by political organizers responsible for coordinating the provision of collectively owned capital goods

Can you expand on what you mean by this, please? If I understand it correctly, you're saying that organisers of the means of production would draw benefit which is not distributed to the collective of people who "own" the means of production. How would they do this?

I think it is important also to note that capital requires circulation, as in M-C-M', which not only requires money but also the value-form - these two things are what the Communists desire to render useless through the collective control of means of production.

There are strong currents in Communism which are anti-bureaucracy, and insist on models which do not place the economic organisers of a lower-stage Communist society to be above others in terms of access to goods. As I understand it, within Communist society a line is drawn between end goods and goods which will be used for further production.

What is the justification for separating natural resources from other forms of capital? They require labour to extract, transport and refine so in my view they are as much capital as outputs from previous industrial processes.

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