The crucial point is that this is Britain - which together with US is the homeland of sexual puritanism coupled with extreme deviance when it comes to violence.
I don't think the rest of the world has anything to fear from this particular twist. They're just following their voters and their culture. This is a very democratic move on which most people clearly agree. He wouldn't be pushing for it this aggressively otherwise. He has voters to please after all.
Well, except maybe other countries that inherited that particularly nasty streak of puritanism.
They were probably right for the simple reason that they're likely not producing them anymore. With that kind of stock vs slow selling speed, it would be dumb not to cease production.
Again, I'm not sure about the evidence "you saw with your own eyes", for the simple reason that I'm something of a military buff - I follow the publications in the field with significant interest. And about the only case of accusations of "low tech knock offs" in relation to fighter aircraft I can recall ever being made were back when MiG-25 was acquired by Japan but US technicians were not yet given access to it. I.e. they heard about vacuum tubes-based avionics suite from japanese but couldn't examine the whole aircraft yet, so many speculated that plane was in fact a low tech knockoff of some of the US Airforce interceptor projects (which were largely shifted to transistors at that time). It wasn't until US technicians were admitted to examine the aircraft that claims were stopped and aircraft got a significant amount of admiration from relevant specialists for extremely simple design which allowed for extremely complex operations (extreme high speed long range interception and complex data interfaces, all made on vacuum tubes as to make the aicraft lighter as it didn't have to house microclimate systems for (back then) large transistor based electronics.
As for putting opinions of people you know are extremely opinionated ahead of logical arguments without even bothering to examine logical arguments in question strongly suggests a cop-out. I have imho produced a great example where people with deep personal opinion could be queried on topic of equality in US (which is frankly one of the best in the world, and arguably the best considering the historical background of the country) and yet we currently have pearls like "it's an open season on black boys in US" from them all the time. Compare those statements to statement you likely got from your russian friends who had to be on the receiving end of that other system - you may see correlation that is a bit too obvious to ignore and draw an conclusion that perhaps they were going on a massive hyperbole because of emotional charge that particular topic holds for them.
uTorrent, was never open source. Guess what's the most popular torrent client in use by a huge margin? Also guess who the guys behind utorrent currently work for?
1. People who "lived there" tend to hate the system, and not be able to think logically about advantages and disadvantages. This goes doubly for people who immigrated, as they have been on the edge of the receiving end.
As a result, you'll get a very skewed view of what totalitarianism in USSR represented. Imagine asking people currently backing Trevor Martin about "equality in US" and taking their opinion as factual truth.
2. I would be intrigued to see the evidence you cite, considering that USA and USSR essentially countered one another on tech, as a result building dramatically different weapon systems to the point where copying one another would have been largely pointless. USA went for surface navy and aerial dominance with large strategic bombers to suppress the USSR's heavy tank based ground force. USSR countered with long range tactical maritime bombers, extremely advanced SAM systems and essentially "flying SAM" aircraft.
Again, I'm not sure what kind of drawings your saw, but if you want to see the comparable tech where USSR was (and likely still is to some degree) decades ahead of NATO, look at what they developed for their kind of warfare (supersonic bombers, extremely complex anti ship missiles, extremely long range air to air aircraft and surface to air capability, tanks, etc), and compare it to the NATO variants which were several decades behind.
If you want to see an example of extremely complex long fighter jet where USSR tech was worlds ahead of USA, take a look at MiG-31. Decades later, USA gave up on trying to make a similar aircraft after utterly failing with F-14 because their long range radar and missile tech was simply too far behind. MiG-31 was the most complex and expensive fighter in existence since its arrival in 1970s and until introduction of F-22. It pioneered several cutting edge technologies which were copied by West, such as PESA radar and ability to use one aircraft's radar to guide missiles fired by another.
Another great example is once again the F-35 project, which still struggles to implement the tech copied from MiG-29. Tech that was in use by USSR MiG bureau back in the 80s.
About the only way to argue that USSR's fighter tech was "low tech knockoff" was the propaganda that came after MiG-25 was acquired and noted to use vacuum tubes in its electronics instead of transistors. Not only were USSR's fighters extremely advanced and pioneering in many aspects of the field, they were also very much DIFFERENT causing problems similar to those currently experienced by F-35 project when attempting to copy improvements made by other side.
On the other hand you could compare things that US weighted as important and see that they were decades ahead of USSR in those (decades ahead in air to ground attack capability, surface fleet and naval aviation, military logistics).
Essentially it is easy to draw comparison of "side x was decades behind side y" using one aspect that side x didn't view as their forte and part of their doctrine. This particular road goes both ways.
And this is why I tend to keep answering these threads. The common misunderstanding among the Western audience, drilled into them by decades of indoctrination is that "our financial system is better at everything".
It is not, no by a long shot. When it comes to long term projects, our system requires massive government intervention to function. Consider all the large infrastructure projects in US. All of them are government-funded, in one way or another. Free market requires immediate response, rather than long term viability. Long term viability without immediate response is judged as a failure by free market. This is the real and tangible weakness of free market economy.
Totalitarian systems on the other hand excel at long term projects. Your rather strange claim of "correlation, not causation" about the issues stated above shows your lack of even basic understanding of relevant historical facts. Well documented example: during Holodomor USSR was selling approximately five million tons of grain every year to foreign countries. Essentially all of the money gained from these exports were used in two ways: 1. Purchase of raw materials needed for industrialization of the entire country. Specifically steel, copper, various other raw elements needed to electrify and connect the world's largest country. Essentially all of these raw materials were used to build electric and telephone lines, railroads, roads and so on. Massive amount of political convicts was doing the actual work, which was brutal and lethal. And also necessary to uplift the country. 2. Purchase of technology and technological know-how. Vast majority of locomotives on the newly build USSR railroads for example, where of German origin. Many of technological designs were purchased for build of their own versions, and massive factories were erected across the nation in the process of industrialization.
Would this kind of operation be possible in a free market economy? Of course not. Free market would not have allowed for massive losses incurred in the construction process. This kind of build up required a totalitarian system, because that kind of buildup is what totalitarian system EXCELS at. It enables exhaustive, rather then efficient use of resources, which is often necessary to build up entire country from complete destruction. The usage is not efficient because much of resources used in this process is destroyed or damaged beyond repair. This ranges from people themselves (tens of millions dead reasons ranging from hunger to dying from exhaustion working on roads) to locations damaged beyond repair for a long time as a byproduct of industrialization.
It is important to realize that our system is weaker in terms of economic viability in certain aspects to totalitarianism, and understand that we need to compensate for these flaws, typically through mix of regulation and incentives. This has been largely understood by planners in the post WW2 and Cold War West, which erected strong government-backed projects to build excellent infrastructure at a staggering loss, but protected from destructive short term viability judgment of free market by government's backing.
Free market on the other hand excels at utilizing the already built infrastructure to its fullest potential by removing inefficiencies. This is why our system was so much more efficient than that of USSR - they had a very strong build-up, but totalitarian system does not allow for easy optimizations to the already initiated process. Free market system on the other hand excels at this. In the end, they themselves realized it in the 1970s and 1980s and tried to correct it by introducing some reforms to enable something remotely resembling a free competition between large governmental corporations. However the lack of necessary entrepreneur culture in the nation combined with the requirement for maintaining strong totalitarian control over everyone essentially doomed these attempts to failure.
On the last note, you seem to think that Soviet technology was someho
On the other hand I would not want to work with holier-then-thou self righteous assholes such as yourself. But you already know this, and that's why you're posting as AC.
I'm intrigued how you can make those claims. It's a historical fact that USSR has:
1. Raised the extremely poor, utterly huge country out of rural economy and devastating improvershment caused by WW1 and civil war and pushed it into an industrial giant in record time (post Russian civil war, pre WW2, massive human sacrifices and incredible rise to prosperity of the nation). 2. Raised the country utterly devastated by WW2 occupation into an industrial and scientific giant for the second time, again in record time, to the point where it beat US in the race to space among other things. This in spite of US having no need to do territorial post-war recovery work and no destroyed infrastructure.
Fact is, USSR style totalitarianism certainly did work, and it did work WELL. Something that is very disturbing to any person with any kind of belief in humanity and basic freedoms so many of us get to enjoy today in part thanks to the collapse of USSR. And arguably, if they had an economic base on par with that of NATO and no massive economic shocks of Afghanistan and Chernobyl, they would have stood a very good chance of winning the cold war.
Frankly, we got very lucky they did not have those. And that is one of the reasons why, in my humble opinion, work on things like human rights in totalitarian countries must be actively supported even in face of their opposition. Because these parts of our values are important for humanity as a whole, and if possible should be pushed even at detriment to economic advancement.
Hilariously, I smell envy that even poster himself likely doesn't realize to be his/her motivator in this one. Fact is, he managed to get himself into the position where he doesn't have to care about office politics, political correctness or any other similar things that most of us have to deal with, regardless of our actual desire to do so. Most of us can only dream of ever reaching such a point in our lives.
And he has an excellent point - much of the office backstabbing does come from buildup of being unable to call someone who is an asshole or a bitch just that to the face to reduce the pressure. So instead you get typical office crap that every one of us who works in the office has likely had to put up with where people hold grudges unable to act on them until they can do something REALLY nasty. As in something that would actually impact life and work performance, instead of just calling someone a bad word and moving on.
If I were ever given a choice, I'd sure rather go for nasty expletives. But I wasn't. Linux on the other hand gets a choice, and he made it.
Technically most of the Europe has not so much "free speech" as "privileged speech". I.e. most of the speech cannot be banned unless it meets very certain criteria (nazi propaganda for example). In some countries it works quite well. In some, not so much.
But arguing that it's a "joke", you may wish to compare UK right to free speech to one in USSR or DPRK for example. It most certainly is NOT a joke.
There was a form of communism that was not totalitarian back in stone age when it was a necessity for survival.
In large numbers of today, it's likely impossible to implement even with the full agreement of populace (which is unlikely to be ever acquired in the first place and mandatory for such implementation) simply due to greed. In larger numbers, greed easily escapes the only thing that can control it - direct peer pressure.
On the other hand I'm somewhat confused as to how US isn't capitalist right now. It used to be using a mix of capitalism for top end and socialism for bottom end of populace, which is currently the best-performing system we have tried, as it allows both risk and social mobility for low end as well as provides incentives for high end to not "sit on the money and collect profits".
Unfortunately as long as there are more capitalist regions that offer less socialism for low end, that system will suffer economic drain, as happened with entire West and globalization. This is essentially the same as with North-South pre-civil war cituation, slave labor (or near slave labor) is simply too profitable for high end people to pass on. Essentially you could argue that where perfect communism is simply impossible to implement, perfect capitalism may be possible to implement as long as it's held in check by extremely tight regulation and is backed by social mobility-enabling socialism on low end (Nordic model) but it is self-destructive by its nature when even one of these checks fails (current situation in US).
Indeed. Perfect forms of government never existed. However adaptation of these did. Difference being that US does in fact adapt a form of capitalism, whereas USSR did not adapt any form of communism. Instead it adapted a form of totalitarianism that it chose to call "communism" to gain acceptance from the masses.
If you ever really want to find what I'm talking about, find a translated version of "Industrial communism" if there is one. It's a damnably think book that anyone getting higher education in USSR essentially required to know by heart and not getting high marks on exams on that book killed your career chances. It is a wonderful thesis on stalinism, which explains that oppression of people of the nation by party is not actually oppression but "meaningful and necessary guidance".
It's essentially how communist party of USSR indoctrinated those who were gifted enough to potentially join its ranks. Compare to: current DPRK. Note how that particular country calls itself "democratic". Should we assume that DPRK is in fact a model of democracy?
Again, snake oil talk. "Feeling of disconnect" requires MEANINGFUL latency. As in one that your nervous system would actually be able to detect. Even eyes, located on the single fastest and lowest latency data bus of the entire nervous system could not track those speeds.
Essentially, you're again talking about placebo effect. "You'll understand it once you expect it". That is the textbook definition of placebo. The fact that you chose to link the video in question reinforces the point, as it talk about capacitive touch screens, reinforces the point. Capacitive touch screens are INACCURATE BY DESIGN. As a result you get in-built latency because they have to approximate your actual input. Again: this is BY DESIGN. Making capacitive touch with high polling rate and high detection accuracy is extremely difficult and costly. That is why most applications that require low latency input and accurate input use mouse input or similar, or when touchscreen is required, they use a resistive film instead.
Do note that modern optical mice and keyboards do not suffer from such problems because they are - surprise - not capacitive touch based.
Most interesting claim with zero arguments backing it. Would you care to back it up? After all, we have several organizations making studies about corruption, such as Transparency International, and they tend to conduct wide studies on the subject.
Or is your claim based simply on the fact that you believe in capitalism, and therefore like all religions, anything that tries to deny it is simply heresy and therefore can be bashed in the best traditions of "intelligent design style bashing of evolution" as you just did?
You conveniently choose to ignore that back then top rich didn't own but a tiny fraction of the total privately owned property and industry in relation to total. Taxes are indeed relative to many things. One of them for example is what are you paying tax for. If your income is far greater in relation to rest of population than before, as currently is for top earners, you will obviously pay a bigger portion of tax.
There's just one problem: speed of input beyond certain minimum has little to no impact on actual gameplay. The little impact it has is likely in the fraction of percent compared to things like, for example, play skill, quality of environment in which player is playing, comfort of player's sitting position and other factors.
Squeezing extra milliseconds out of your keyboard is snake oil because just like snake oil, it focuses tiny fraction of things that impact performance and only offers a tiny improvement at best and only at that narrow subset. As a result, it is wholly irrelevant to actual performance beyond placebo effect.
You can find this in professional sports in droves. Creation of placebo effect is very easy to profit off.
What you call "communism" was "totalitarianism" that called itself communism.
About the only times when humanity actually had communism as far as historians know it, was back in the stone age when small tribes were effectively forced to share everything because tribe could only survive as a whole. USSR's communism for example severely lacked in the whole "communistic" features, as it had the party that was awash in riches, while people were dirt poor. In this regard, it wasn't very different from capitalism in most 3rd world countries, with exception of it having some social net (i.e. guaranteed jobs for everyone, but these jobs paid for bare necessities in life and that's it).
Capitalism just as the name suggests is "power of the capital". Fascism is a subset of capitalism, where financially powerful megacorporations are in power, rather then capital itself.
Slashdot Mirror
The crucial point is that this is Britain - which together with US is the homeland of sexual puritanism coupled with extreme deviance when it comes to violence.
I don't think the rest of the world has anything to fear from this particular twist. They're just following their voters and their culture. This is a very democratic move on which most people clearly agree. He wouldn't be pushing for it this aggressively otherwise. He has voters to please after all.
Well, except maybe other countries that inherited that particularly nasty streak of puritanism.
While we don't know that, the story doesn't talk about surface PRO, which suggests that these are selling.
They were probably right for the simple reason that they're likely not producing them anymore. With that kind of stock vs slow selling speed, it would be dumb not to cease production.
Again, I'm not sure about the evidence "you saw with your own eyes", for the simple reason that I'm something of a military buff - I follow the publications in the field with significant interest. And about the only case of accusations of "low tech knock offs" in relation to fighter aircraft I can recall ever being made were back when MiG-25 was acquired by Japan but US technicians were not yet given access to it. I.e. they heard about vacuum tubes-based avionics suite from japanese but couldn't examine the whole aircraft yet, so many speculated that plane was in fact a low tech knockoff of some of the US Airforce interceptor projects (which were largely shifted to transistors at that time). It wasn't until US technicians were admitted to examine the aircraft that claims were stopped and aircraft got a significant amount of admiration from relevant specialists for extremely simple design which allowed for extremely complex operations (extreme high speed long range interception and complex data interfaces, all made on vacuum tubes as to make the aicraft lighter as it didn't have to house microclimate systems for (back then) large transistor based electronics.
As for putting opinions of people you know are extremely opinionated ahead of logical arguments without even bothering to examine logical arguments in question strongly suggests a cop-out. I have imho produced a great example where people with deep personal opinion could be queried on topic of equality in US (which is frankly one of the best in the world, and arguably the best considering the historical background of the country) and yet we currently have pearls like "it's an open season on black boys in US" from them all the time.
Compare those statements to statement you likely got from your russian friends who had to be on the receiving end of that other system - you may see correlation that is a bit too obvious to ignore and draw an conclusion that perhaps they were going on a massive hyperbole because of emotional charge that particular topic holds for them.
uTorrent, was never open source. Guess what's the most popular torrent client in use by a huge margin? Also guess who the guys behind utorrent currently work for?
I'll address both points:
1. People who "lived there" tend to hate the system, and not be able to think logically about advantages and disadvantages. This goes doubly for people who immigrated, as they have been on the edge of the receiving end.
As a result, you'll get a very skewed view of what totalitarianism in USSR represented. Imagine asking people currently backing Trevor Martin about "equality in US" and taking their opinion as factual truth.
2. I would be intrigued to see the evidence you cite, considering that USA and USSR essentially countered one another on tech, as a result building dramatically different weapon systems to the point where copying one another would have been largely pointless. USA went for surface navy and aerial dominance with large strategic bombers to suppress the USSR's heavy tank based ground force. USSR countered with long range tactical maritime bombers, extremely advanced SAM systems and essentially "flying SAM" aircraft.
Again, I'm not sure what kind of drawings your saw, but if you want to see the comparable tech where USSR was (and likely still is to some degree) decades ahead of NATO, look at what they developed for their kind of warfare (supersonic bombers, extremely complex anti ship missiles, extremely long range air to air aircraft and surface to air capability, tanks, etc), and compare it to the NATO variants which were several decades behind.
If you want to see an example of extremely complex long fighter jet where USSR tech was worlds ahead of USA, take a look at MiG-31. Decades later, USA gave up on trying to make a similar aircraft after utterly failing with F-14 because their long range radar and missile tech was simply too far behind. MiG-31 was the most complex and expensive fighter in existence since its arrival in 1970s and until introduction of F-22. It pioneered several cutting edge technologies which were copied by West, such as PESA radar and ability to use one aircraft's radar to guide missiles fired by another.
Another great example is once again the F-35 project, which still struggles to implement the tech copied from MiG-29. Tech that was in use by USSR MiG bureau back in the 80s.
About the only way to argue that USSR's fighter tech was "low tech knockoff" was the propaganda that came after MiG-25 was acquired and noted to use vacuum tubes in its electronics instead of transistors. Not only were USSR's fighters extremely advanced and pioneering in many aspects of the field, they were also very much DIFFERENT causing problems similar to those currently experienced by F-35 project when attempting to copy improvements made by other side.
On the other hand you could compare things that US weighted as important and see that they were decades ahead of USSR in those (decades ahead in air to ground attack capability, surface fleet and naval aviation, military logistics).
Essentially it is easy to draw comparison of "side x was decades behind side y" using one aspect that side x didn't view as their forte and part of their doctrine. This particular road goes both ways.
You're forgetting the biggest pearl in your crown:
"Democratic people's republic of Korea". The shining jewel of democracy.
And this is why I tend to keep answering these threads. The common misunderstanding among the Western audience, drilled into them by decades of indoctrination is that "our financial system is better at everything".
It is not, no by a long shot. When it comes to long term projects, our system requires massive government intervention to function. Consider all the large infrastructure projects in US. All of them are government-funded, in one way or another. Free market requires immediate response, rather than long term viability. Long term viability without immediate response is judged as a failure by free market. This is the real and tangible weakness of free market economy.
Totalitarian systems on the other hand excel at long term projects. Your rather strange claim of "correlation, not causation" about the issues stated above shows your lack of even basic understanding of relevant historical facts. Well documented example: during Holodomor USSR was selling approximately five million tons of grain every year to foreign countries. Essentially all of the money gained from these exports were used in two ways:
1. Purchase of raw materials needed for industrialization of the entire country. Specifically steel, copper, various other raw elements needed to electrify and connect the world's largest country. Essentially all of these raw materials were used to build electric and telephone lines, railroads, roads and so on. Massive amount of political convicts was doing the actual work, which was brutal and lethal. And also necessary to uplift the country.
2. Purchase of technology and technological know-how. Vast majority of locomotives on the newly build USSR railroads for example, where of German origin. Many of technological designs were purchased for build of their own versions, and massive factories were erected across the nation in the process of industrialization.
Would this kind of operation be possible in a free market economy? Of course not. Free market would not have allowed for massive losses incurred in the construction process. This kind of build up required a totalitarian system, because that kind of buildup is what totalitarian system EXCELS at. It enables exhaustive, rather then efficient use of resources, which is often necessary to build up entire country from complete destruction. The usage is not efficient because much of resources used in this process is destroyed or damaged beyond repair. This ranges from people themselves (tens of millions dead reasons ranging from hunger to dying from exhaustion working on roads) to locations damaged beyond repair for a long time as a byproduct of industrialization.
It is important to realize that our system is weaker in terms of economic viability in certain aspects to totalitarianism, and understand that we need to compensate for these flaws, typically through mix of regulation and incentives. This has been largely understood by planners in the post WW2 and Cold War West, which erected strong government-backed projects to build excellent infrastructure at a staggering loss, but protected from destructive short term viability judgment of free market by government's backing.
Free market on the other hand excels at utilizing the already built infrastructure to its fullest potential by removing inefficiencies. This is why our system was so much more efficient than that of USSR - they had a very strong build-up, but totalitarian system does not allow for easy optimizations to the already initiated process. Free market system on the other hand excels at this. In the end, they themselves realized it in the 1970s and 1980s and tried to correct it by introducing some reforms to enable something remotely resembling a free competition between large governmental corporations. However the lack of necessary entrepreneur culture in the nation combined with the requirement for maintaining strong totalitarian control over everyone essentially doomed these attempts to failure.
On the last note, you seem to think that Soviet technology was someho
It seems that woman bitching about him seems to think him very much relevant?
Yes.
On the other hand I would not want to work with holier-then-thou self righteous assholes such as yourself. But you already know this, and that's why you're posting as AC.
I'm intrigued how you can make those claims. It's a historical fact that USSR has:
1. Raised the extremely poor, utterly huge country out of rural economy and devastating improvershment caused by WW1 and civil war and pushed it into an industrial giant in record time (post Russian civil war, pre WW2, massive human sacrifices and incredible rise to prosperity of the nation).
2. Raised the country utterly devastated by WW2 occupation into an industrial and scientific giant for the second time, again in record time, to the point where it beat US in the race to space among other things. This in spite of US having no need to do territorial post-war recovery work and no destroyed infrastructure.
Fact is, USSR style totalitarianism certainly did work, and it did work WELL. Something that is very disturbing to any person with any kind of belief in humanity and basic freedoms so many of us get to enjoy today in part thanks to the collapse of USSR. And arguably, if they had an economic base on par with that of NATO and no massive economic shocks of Afghanistan and Chernobyl, they would have stood a very good chance of winning the cold war.
Frankly, we got very lucky they did not have those. And that is one of the reasons why, in my humble opinion, work on things like human rights in totalitarian countries must be actively supported even in face of their opposition. Because these parts of our values are important for humanity as a whole, and if possible should be pushed even at detriment to economic advancement.
Hilariously, I smell envy that even poster himself likely doesn't realize to be his/her motivator in this one. Fact is, he managed to get himself into the position where he doesn't have to care about office politics, political correctness or any other similar things that most of us have to deal with, regardless of our actual desire to do so. Most of us can only dream of ever reaching such a point in our lives.
And he has an excellent point - much of the office backstabbing does come from buildup of being unable to call someone who is an asshole or a bitch just that to the face to reduce the pressure. So instead you get typical office crap that every one of us who works in the office has likely had to put up with where people hold grudges unable to act on them until they can do something REALLY nasty. As in something that would actually impact life and work performance, instead of just calling someone a bad word and moving on.
If I were ever given a choice, I'd sure rather go for nasty expletives. But I wasn't. Linux on the other hand gets a choice, and he made it.
Technically most of the Europe has not so much "free speech" as "privileged speech". I.e. most of the speech cannot be banned unless it meets very certain criteria (nazi propaganda for example). In some countries it works quite well. In some, not so much.
But arguing that it's a "joke", you may wish to compare UK right to free speech to one in USSR or DPRK for example. It most certainly is NOT a joke.
No, those on top have had significant practice in that discipline and a world-class athletes. Grassroots guys on the other hand do that all the time.
There was a form of communism that was not totalitarian back in stone age when it was a necessity for survival.
In large numbers of today, it's likely impossible to implement even with the full agreement of populace (which is unlikely to be ever acquired in the first place and mandatory for such implementation) simply due to greed. In larger numbers, greed easily escapes the only thing that can control it - direct peer pressure.
On the other hand I'm somewhat confused as to how US isn't capitalist right now. It used to be using a mix of capitalism for top end and socialism for bottom end of populace, which is currently the best-performing system we have tried, as it allows both risk and social mobility for low end as well as provides incentives for high end to not "sit on the money and collect profits".
Unfortunately as long as there are more capitalist regions that offer less socialism for low end, that system will suffer economic drain, as happened with entire West and globalization. This is essentially the same as with North-South pre-civil war cituation, slave labor (or near slave labor) is simply too profitable for high end people to pass on. Essentially you could argue that where perfect communism is simply impossible to implement, perfect capitalism may be possible to implement as long as it's held in check by extremely tight regulation and is backed by social mobility-enabling socialism on low end (Nordic model) but it is self-destructive by its nature when even one of these checks fails (current situation in US).
Did you understand the post above? I guess not.
And have a phone constantly reminding the self-conscious user that it's thicker than his penis/her cup?
C'mon, that's not going to happen.
And now we have IRC. And twitter. And facebook.
And suddenly, it starts to look like we've regressed :D
Indeed. Perfect forms of government never existed. However adaptation of these did. Difference being that US does in fact adapt a form of capitalism, whereas USSR did not adapt any form of communism. Instead it adapted a form of totalitarianism that it chose to call "communism" to gain acceptance from the masses.
If you ever really want to find what I'm talking about, find a translated version of "Industrial communism" if there is one. It's a damnably think book that anyone getting higher education in USSR essentially required to know by heart and not getting high marks on exams on that book killed your career chances. It is a wonderful thesis on stalinism, which explains that oppression of people of the nation by party is not actually oppression but "meaningful and necessary guidance".
It's essentially how communist party of USSR indoctrinated those who were gifted enough to potentially join its ranks. Compare to: current DPRK. Note how that particular country calls itself "democratic". Should we assume that DPRK is in fact a model of democracy?
Again, snake oil talk. "Feeling of disconnect" requires MEANINGFUL latency. As in one that your nervous system would actually be able to detect. Even eyes, located on the single fastest and lowest latency data bus of the entire nervous system could not track those speeds.
Essentially, you're again talking about placebo effect. "You'll understand it once you expect it". That is the textbook definition of placebo. The fact that you chose to link the video in question reinforces the point, as it talk about capacitive touch screens, reinforces the point. Capacitive touch screens are INACCURATE BY DESIGN. As a result you get in-built latency because they have to approximate your actual input. Again: this is BY DESIGN. Making capacitive touch with high polling rate and high detection accuracy is extremely difficult and costly. That is why most applications that require low latency input and accurate input use mouse input or similar, or when touchscreen is required, they use a resistive film instead.
Do note that modern optical mice and keyboards do not suffer from such problems because they are - surprise - not capacitive touch based.
Most interesting claim with zero arguments backing it. Would you care to back it up? After all, we have several organizations making studies about corruption, such as Transparency International, and they tend to conduct wide studies on the subject.
Or is your claim based simply on the fact that you believe in capitalism, and therefore like all religions, anything that tries to deny it is simply heresy and therefore can be bashed in the best traditions of "intelligent design style bashing of evolution" as you just did?
You conveniently choose to ignore that back then top rich didn't own but a tiny fraction of the total privately owned property and industry in relation to total. Taxes are indeed relative to many things. One of them for example is what are you paying tax for. If your income is far greater in relation to rest of population than before, as currently is for top earners, you will obviously pay a bigger portion of tax.
There's just one problem: speed of input beyond certain minimum has little to no impact on actual gameplay. The little impact it has is likely in the fraction of percent compared to things like, for example, play skill, quality of environment in which player is playing, comfort of player's sitting position and other factors.
Squeezing extra milliseconds out of your keyboard is snake oil because just like snake oil, it focuses tiny fraction of things that impact performance and only offers a tiny improvement at best and only at that narrow subset. As a result, it is wholly irrelevant to actual performance beyond placebo effect.
You can find this in professional sports in droves. Creation of placebo effect is very easy to profit off.
What you call "communism" was "totalitarianism" that called itself communism.
About the only times when humanity actually had communism as far as historians know it, was back in the stone age when small tribes were effectively forced to share everything because tribe could only survive as a whole. USSR's communism for example severely lacked in the whole "communistic" features, as it had the party that was awash in riches, while people were dirt poor. In this regard, it wasn't very different from capitalism in most 3rd world countries, with exception of it having some social net (i.e. guaranteed jobs for everyone, but these jobs paid for bare necessities in life and that's it).
Capitalism just as the name suggests is "power of the capital". Fascism is a subset of capitalism, where financially powerful megacorporations are in power, rather then capital itself.