Thanks. I guess I don't understand how a 5% increase in food prices is devastating.
I'm also not opposed to immigration either. I just don't think that we should have second-class immigrants who can be abused in conditions/etc. As long as they get paid minimum wage and have healthcare, OSHA, etc, I don't really have a problem with legal immigration. It should be based around people who are here to stay, however, and not a migrant workforce.
But, for it to work, people need to stop thinking of food as something that comes from the store, and start thinking of it as something that comes from the forest. People need to go pick their food themselves...It's not more work. It won't take more time out of your day than the way you gather food now.
Uh, right now I can buy a found of steak in shrink-wrap. How exactly is walking through a forest supposed to be easier than that? I can buy enough food for a week in 30min of shopping.
And where is this forest going to be? Are we going to just plant it in the middle of our suburban housing developments? Will my neighbor mind me spearing some antelope in his back yard? If it is going to be in some designated area, then how is accessing that going to be easier than going to the local supermarket? If the food is unpreserved, then you'd need to basically go there daily.
I don't think the solution to the current ecological problems is to return to a hunter-gatherer state.
How many mistresses and Dachas does Putin have? How many billions (and where are they kept) are stashed away by the rulers of China?
That is a sword that cuts both ways. You don't need the NSA to figure out that a lot of US politicians are dirty.
It is like assassinating foreign heads of state. It isn't like the US couldn't assassinate just about any world leader if it wanted to. The problem is that the reverse is just as true. No world leader wants to create a world in which world leaders can't sleep soundly at night.
...all domestic telephone calls will be routed through Great Britain from now on.
No need. While the NSA isn't allowed to spy on Americans, the GCHQ is allowed to do so. I'm sure the GCHQ is interested in what Brits are doing in the privacy of their homes, so the NSA just trades that data for whatever the GCHQ is collecting on Americans.
Or maybe the NSA just outright spies on Americans. You never know which ones aren't actually Americans until you listen in...
The other issue with ubiquitous surveillance is that it doesn't even need to be used in court. You discover somebody is a drug dealer or whatever. You arrange to have a cop happen to walk past the house where a deal is going down and hear something suspicious. Busted!
Basically you have to find a chain of evidence that is legal/plausible, but that is certainly possible. The US did that sort of thing in WWII all the time. Find out that a supply ship is at point XYZ from Enigma intercepts, arrange for a recon plane to overfly it, and then the next day blow it up. Generate noise that suggests you have the worlds largest recon fleet, while in reality not needing more than a handful of planes.
Sure, it makes sense to distinguish between speculation and facts.
However, I tend to think that things which forms of surveillance which are conceptually possible are generally likely to be employed by the NSA, and probably other state actors as well. Moore's law and the even faster expansion of storage density enable a lot of crazy stuff. People only generate so much communications in a day - even if you do nothing but type or speak continuously all day long you only generate so many megabytes of data. At some point it becomes possible to just record everything.
Recording everything has a certain advantage to it - you avoid having to try to figure out up-front what is worth recording in the first place. Some guy disappears with an airplane and we think he was involved in a conspiracy? Well, let's listen to every phone call he made in the last two years, go ahead and backtrack aerial footage of everywhere he went, go ahead and figure out everybody he met with and listen to all their phone calls, and so on. Heck, software can do a lot of that stuff automatically - just look at all human movements and look for anybody closer than n degrees of separation from Yemen or whatever. That all goes into a scoring system and you ID people whose calls might be worth a quick screening.
And just think that all of this is happening without AI. Imagine the day when you literally have a being more intelligent than you whose sole job is to watch everything you do all day...
I tend to agree. I wonder if this will be like the LED watches of yore where you pushed a button to display the time. I'm not convinced I'd be happy with that. I want to happen to catch my watch out of the corner of my eye and get situational awareness on time (which is why I like analog-style hands). I don't want checking the time to become a conscious action.
If it lasts a few days at least and has Qi charging I could probably live with it. Still, we're getting towards a point where I'm going to feel like Robocop stopping at the charging station at the end of the day to disassemble myself.
Show me the portion of that chart that backs-up your claim that doubling the wages of food workers would not impact food prices, and that they could absorb the cost. Or were you merely going "Look! There's rich people over there!"
You claimed that farmers were not wealthy. I merely demonstrated that some farmers are rather wealthy indeed. US "farmers" tend to wear suits to work.
Care to back up your claim that labor is a significant portion of food prices?
So, the argument is that you can eat if the previous three generations scraped enough away for you to afford food?... Cheap food is still expensive if you have no money and no job.
No, I'm assuming that even in a society technologically advanced enough that almost everything is done by machines, there will still be ways you can make yourself useful enough to someone to earn what you need to survive. If nothing else, you can always grow your own food, build your own shelter—it's not much, but with knowledge of modern science and access to cultivated seedstock you'd still have an advantage over most humans throughout history.
You can't grow food or build a shelter unless you have land to grow/build on. That is capital too.
As you've already pointed out, a commune cannot exist if people can choose to join it or not. That's the whole point of communism. If you are fairly skilled/etc then there is no incentive to join, and thus the commune fails since only those who cannot provide for themselves join.
It goes further than that. The commune has to do more than just force you to nominally join; it has to force you to contribute. Without, needless to say, offering positive incentives conditioned on your contribution, since that would go against the whole point of a commune. The commune essentially has to consider each individual's skills and labor property of the commune rather than the individual, with failure to contribute according to one's ability punishable as a form of theft from the commune.
Agreed, though I don't think that a communist society must treat everybody COMPLETELY equally. You can have incentives to produce and still have what amounts to a communist society. Obviously there is a continuum between "pure" communism, EU-style socialism, and US-style socialism.
As I see it, a system where each individual is a slave to the group is no better than one with distinct slaves and masters.
Depends on who runs the group.
Communism can really only exist if it is imposed at a societal level. That's why communist societies tend to be associated with atrocities - it takes a very authoritarian government to sustain communism for any period of time.
I'm glad to see that we're in agreement, then. I thought you were advocating a communist society.
Who says I'm not?
That is unfortunately the crux of the problem. I think a US-style capitalist society is eventually going to progress to the point where everybody is slaves to a handful of super-wealthy, assuming that more than a handful of people are even allowed to live. On the other hand, communism requires totalitarianism, and totalitarian governments tend to turn into human meat grinders eventually (they're basically as good as the folks in charge - history tells us that dictators can sometimes be relatively benevolent but sooner or later you end up with a Stalin/Hitler/etc - rule by committee probably would help to moderate some of the negative extremes, but also the positive extremes as well and tends to result in lots of corruption).
So, I think the next 100 years are likely to be a big mess any which way...
Why would anybody who is productive agree to share part of their income with the rest of the co-op? They have no incentive to return the favor should the tables turn.
It wouldn't be up to them. The organization's charter would dictate its purpose as providing a basic income to as many people as it can afford, starting with those most in need, after targeting a particular rate of growth. A bit like a trust, really. The idea would be that you start with a some donated seed money, say $10M. That gets invested at a real return of, say, 7%. You want to target 6% growth, so that leaves 1% of $10M ($100k), which you split
Good points - I agree that uniform import tariffs that simply equal the taxation on domestic production shouldn't be considered protectionist in nature.
I'm not convinced that defaulting on loans makes your country stronger economically.
Sure, it will hurt the banks who loaned out the money. However, they can't really just raise interest rates, because those are set by the market (if they unilaterally raise rates, nobody will borrow money from them as other banks unhurt by the default won't raise their rates). The rates would probably go up, but less directly - those banks would have less money to lend out, and thus the supply of loans is lowered and everybody pays a bit more.
As long as the sanctions are in place, nobody will be lending to Russian corporations. Even after the sanctions are lifted, Russian corporations will probably have to pay higher rates, even if they are new corporations that never defaulted. The problem is that Russia is now regarded as the kind of country that might provoke a major diplomatic standoff with half the world. Sure, that isn't some corporation's fault, but anybody lending money to them has to consider that Putin will invade some other country in three years and trigger more sanctions and more defaults.
Bankers like stability. There is only one way to be considered stable - you have to go half a century or so without ticking off every other country on the planet. Russia won't be considered stable until there is a major regime change and it lasts for a decade or so.
Sure, people NEED to become owners of capital. However, if you walk up to the average poor person how does it help to explain to them that if they merely owned $500k worth of stock they could easily afford to live just above the poverty line on their capital gains and dividends?
For a start, if they understood that then they could start working toward it. Naturally, if they really have no capacity for earning money beyond the minimum needed to survive then they'll need help of some sort. Apart from that (rare) case, there is always some opportunity to set some savings aside. Over time, perhaps several generations, those savings add up. Also, the flip side of the technology-driven obsolescence of labor is dramatically lower prices. After all, the whole point of using machines is that they're cheaper than humans for the same tasks. That means you don't have to earn as much to support yourself.
So, the argument is that you can eat if the previous three generations scraped enough away for you to afford food?
Sure, food is cheap, but why would somebody who owns a farm bother to give you food if you have nothing at all to offer for it? He doesn't need your labor. Cheap food is still expensive if you have no money and no job.
Communism is simply a system of government where everybody becomes an owner of capital by the virtue of being born.
It's not quite that simple. Capital doesn't just magically appear for each new person, you know. It's a scarce resource, like anything else. If everyone is entitled to sufficient capital to sustain them simply by virtue of being born, then you have to somehow limit births to what you can accommodate out of surplus capital. People tend not to appreciate that sort of interference in their personal lives, which means some of them will want to leave. If they are prevented from leaving then you have an authoritarian dystopia. However, if you let them leave then your system is no longer universal; those who are born outside become second-class citizens from the commune's perspective. If those who leave happen to prosper more than the commune (which is historically likely) then more will leave and the commune will fade away. If not, you still have the problem that there are more people than your commune can support, so you can't just invite the extras back into the fold.
Agree on all points. A communistic society probably cannot allow free reproduction or emigration and remain functional for all the reasons you cite.
A capitalist society will respect the rights of the communists living in it to join together for their own common good; the problem is more the reverse, as the communists, eschewing property rights among themselves, often fail to respect the property rights of those who choose not to join the commune.
As you've already pointed out, a commune cannot exist if people can choose to join it or not. That's the whole point of communism. If you are fairly skilled/etc then there is no incentive to join, and thus the commune fails since only those who cannot provide for themselves join.
You're quite welcome to start up a commune along the lines of your ideal system of government, provided you accept its boundaries and don't force anyone to join (or stay).
Thanks for your offer - you are clearly a generous man!:)
A co-op which guaranteed a basic income to its members out of capital gains and/or dividends on shared investments would be an interesting and practical experiment. I think it would be necessary to limit the induction of new members, however. If the system works it could be gradually expanded over time.
It would never work. Why would anybody who is productive agree to share part of their income with the rest of the co-op? They have no incentive to return the favor should the tables turn.
Communism can really only exist if it is imposed at a societal level. That's why communist societies tend to be associated with atrocities - it takes a very authoritarian government to sustain communism for any period of time.
Fighter's have radar jamming and other "stealth" technology making them very hard to track.
US air defenses are designed to defeat Soviet bombers. They don't use "stealth" technology. The US may very well have radar capable of tracking stealthy targets, but if so it is unlikely to make the press. Not sure how this is relevant though.
The question was whether an airliner could fly under radar coverage. Generally speaking, it probably can't.
And if you really think someone cannot fly a plane into or out of US airspace without a dozen systems watching them, you are a paranoid freak. This sort of crap happens all the time -- smugglers and drug runners do it often enough. ('tho no one is doing it with a 777:-))
I doubt much drug smuggling uses aircraft - at least not ones who aren't on flight plans. Sure, somebody might smuggle something past customs in their airplane that is otherwise operating legally (secret compartments and such). Aircraft simply flying over the border are easy to follow all the way to their destination.
Well, part of me wonders if they're not "vision" parts of the brain so much as "visualization" parts of the brain.
I know somebody who had a stroke and has a bunch of fairly specific impairments. The interesting thing is that the relationship between these impairments aren't ones you'd normally think of, but they make sense. For example, certain types of language deficiencies tend to also cause issues with short-term memory capacity. Aspects of processing language probably involve short-term memory, and one of the ways that you keep things in your short-term memory is to recite them to yourself in your head. So, a problem that makes it hard to communicate with others actually makes it hard to consciously think about things (in the sense of talking to yourself, or your deity).
Read up on the wikipedia entry on the cerebellum some time. For a long time it was thought of as the motor/balance part of the brain. It seems more that it is the part of the brain that actually operates like all those classical neural networks do - supervised learning. It makes sense that balance is something that would benefit from this type of approach (sensors are inputs, muscle movements are outputs, train for signals that tend to result in stability). People with damage to this area can move, but lose balance/coordination. That makes sense - the voluntary control is there, but that unconscious network-based auto-correction isn't there. It is used in other functions as well.
Part of me thinks that the brain is really just a collection of neural tissues where each region develops a particular structure, and then the connections between them are used to link areas such that particular tasks can be performed. Take a region that generates conscious movement, route it through the cerebellum, and the output is auto-stabilized conscious movement. During embryonic development some kind of fractal-like algorithm results in various parts of the brain having certain neural arrangements, and then the big picture of the brain is just linking them together. It is a bit like the "unix way" for grey matter - a little tar, a little awk, a few pipes, and you get something neat.
If you put tariffs in place on incoming goods where you aren't as competitive then odds are your exports will experience tariffs as well. You end up robbing Peter to pay Paul so to speak and costing yourself a lot in red tape and lost wages along the way.
So, you sell to the domestic market.
It also makes goods more expensive for consumers, makes it harder for domestic companies to compete, slows hiring and slows economic growth.
How does having the cheapest products on the store shelves make it harder for domestic companies to compete? What makes it hard for domestic companies to compete is having to actually capture or avoid waste instead of dumping it in the local creek.
Furthermore applying tariffs based on social values is a dangerous game of cultural hypocrisy. In the US we have millions of people without health insurance and we're one of the two biggest polluters in the world. Are we really in a position to tell others that they should be like us when we don't have our own shit together?
So, let's get our shit together then. We'll never do it if we let companies just move all the jobs offshore anytime we raise taxes to pay for all that health insurance.
I also said that we should apply tariffs to countries that did not have a similar level of worker protections/etc. If the US wants to be free-market with insurance then we shouldn't expect other countries to behave differently. Of course, the Europeans will certainly tariff our products, and rightly so. Just gives us more incentive to get our acts together.
A lot of the advantage places like China have is due to the lack of pollution controls and other regulations. But the only thing that really is going to fix that is if they Chinese decide it is important to clean up their own mess.
We get to deal with their pollution as well, granted it isn't quite as bad over here.
The problem is that we won't be able to afford clean air for long if we kill off every company that actually does the right thing. Companies that respect the environment are ALWAYS going to be at a competitive disadvantage compared to those who do not. Ditto for companies that pay employees a living wage, or maintain safe workplaces. We don't have to live like we're in the dawn of the industrial revolution - we just need to create the regulatory environment we want to live in, and then apply tariffs to countries that don't do the same. The goal isn't to punish them - simply to equalize the playing field.
If China doesn't want to buy our toys, then sell them to the Europeans. If they're smart they'll do the same thing. Anybody who doesn't want to be in a race for the bottom should adopt this strategy - there are plenty of countries to trade with who have progressive values.
Yup. The old addage is that once one flies, they all fly.
The problem is the question of what your opponent will do after you just nuked him. You nuked a naval group, so he nukes two of yours and a remote sea outpost. So you nuke a few of his mainland military bases distant from cities. So he nukes a few of yours close to cities. How do you just turn a blind eye to a nuclear attack?
Since continuous escalation seems likely at all points, once one missile is launched it is likely that every one of your cities will lie in ruins, eventually. So, if you're going to fire nuclear missiles, you should at least try to wipe the enemy out on the first pass to hopefully reduce the impact of his retaliation. It is still a suicidal move, which is why we've never had a nuclear war.
Sure, there is a chance that a tactical nuclear attack at sea might be met with a reprisal at sea and everybody will leave it at that. However, it doesn't seem terribly likely. The retaliating country will only stop at tit-for-tat if they feel they came out even or ahead in the exchange, and it is unlikely that the first party to strike would do so if that were a likely outcome.
China wont join Russia because if it sells it's US dollars then it just means it's tanked the main country in the world it's dependent on for exports meaning it'll kill it's own economy.
Yup - they're not buying all those dollars just to be nice. It is in their financial interest to maintain the current relative currency values. If Russia sells, China will buy, and the Chinese economy can outlast the Russian's on that front trivially. China isn't likely to think too fondly of the experience, though, and in a conventional war they're a far bigger threat to Russia than the US is.
China is opposed to Russia about the intervention, but they will not act on their opposition.
Well, if by some miracle Russia actually does something to the value of treasury bills China won't be too happy with that either, considering that for every dollar Russia loses they lose 10. Oh, and a falling US dollar would require them to buy a BOATLOAD of treasuries to prop it up relative to their own currency or they'll see their entire economy crash as their exports dry up.
Before you know it you might see Chechnya receiving a delivery of shiny new main battle tanks...
Russia now holds the economic trump cards. The EU is basically dependent on them, so any kind of "economic sanctions" are probably going to hurt the EU more than they could possibly hurt Russia.
Well, seems quite possible that Ukraine will move in the direction of joining the EU/NATO. Certainly every other country on Russia's border is going to strongly consider it. Russia may very well end up with Crimea, but completely isolated regionally, which was not their goal here.
The fuel trade with the EU makes up a much bigger portion of Russia's economy than the EU's. However, there certainly is a lesson here - it is foolish to be dependent on any particular country/region for a large share of your energy needs. All those in the US pressuring the EU to impose sanctions ought to be thinking about their dependence on the Middle East and think about the position they would be in if they ever need to impose sanctions over there. Indeed, if it weren't for the Straight of Hormuz I doubt Iran would be tolerated the way it is.
They don't have to sell their dollars, they just have to stop buying them, stop using them for trade.
What else are they going to use for trade? The mighty Ruble? I doubt they're stocking up on Dollars because they're sentimental about Ben Franklin. And who is going to trade with them anyway once all the sanctions are in place?
Sure, Russia can make waves, but only at their own expense.
Russia has less to lose and would be better positioned once the crisis was over.
You mean, once they pay back all those loans with penalties and interest, or were you envisioning a world in which Russia doesn't import anything and has zero outside investment? Refusing to pay your bills doesn't exactly endear you to those you would like to call business partners.
Yup, it is like trying to boycott Ford by threatening to sell your car. Sure, if EVERYBODY sold their Fords it would hit their financials for a few weeks, but it isn't like Ford didn't already get paid for all those cars the first time around.
I doubt that outright communism will ever make sense, but I suspect that as technology advances the ideal economic model will probably be a lot closer to it than the capitalism of the past. What choice is there once technology advances to the point where there is no need to employ humans at all?
Capitalism isn't about labor, it's about capital—of which the capacity for labor is but one example. The advanced technology you speak of is another form of capital. If anything, the emergence of more advanced forms of capital requires a more capitalistic form of economy. More people will need to become capitalists, owning and managing the machines which do the work, rather than trying to market their own labor.
The problem with this logic is what happens if people DON'T end up owning capital. People who don't own capital and who aren't employable will simply starve to death in a society that rejects socialism and effectively prevents crime.
Sure, people NEED to become owners of capital. However, if you walk up to the average poor person how does it help to explain to them that if they merely owned $500k worth of stock they could easily afford to live just above the poverty line on their capital gains and dividends?
Communism is simply a system of government where everybody becomes an owner of capital by the virtue of being born.
The price of oranges probably wouldn't change much at all - if they could get a penny more for them they already would be doing so. The guys who own the farm would just make less money.
If you live where labor costs are not a significant portion of food costs and farmers are wealthy, then you do not live on planet Earth.
Socialism of any kind can really only work at the national level. Employers can't easily flee countries
It also only works on the national level because people can't easily flee the terror of these socialist paradises.
No argument there. You can't have socialized medicine if all the healthy people aren't obligated to pay into the system for a service they most likely will never need. Call it terror if you want to.
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Thanks. I guess I don't understand how a 5% increase in food prices is devastating.
I'm also not opposed to immigration either. I just don't think that we should have second-class immigrants who can be abused in conditions/etc. As long as they get paid minimum wage and have healthcare, OSHA, etc, I don't really have a problem with legal immigration. It should be based around people who are here to stay, however, and not a migrant workforce.
But, for it to work, people need to stop thinking of food as something that comes from the store, and start thinking of it as something that comes from the forest. People need to go pick their food themselves...It's not more work. It won't take more time out of your day than the way you gather food now.
Uh, right now I can buy a found of steak in shrink-wrap. How exactly is walking through a forest supposed to be easier than that? I can buy enough food for a week in 30min of shopping.
And where is this forest going to be? Are we going to just plant it in the middle of our suburban housing developments? Will my neighbor mind me spearing some antelope in his back yard? If it is going to be in some designated area, then how is accessing that going to be easier than going to the local supermarket? If the food is unpreserved, then you'd need to basically go there daily.
I don't think the solution to the current ecological problems is to return to a hunter-gatherer state.
How many mistresses and Dachas does Putin have? How many billions (and where are they kept) are stashed away by the rulers of China?
That is a sword that cuts both ways. You don't need the NSA to figure out that a lot of US politicians are dirty.
It is like assassinating foreign heads of state. It isn't like the US couldn't assassinate just about any world leader if it wanted to. The problem is that the reverse is just as true. No world leader wants to create a world in which world leaders can't sleep soundly at night.
...all domestic telephone calls will be routed through Great Britain from now on.
No need. While the NSA isn't allowed to spy on Americans, the GCHQ is allowed to do so. I'm sure the GCHQ is interested in what Brits are doing in the privacy of their homes, so the NSA just trades that data for whatever the GCHQ is collecting on Americans.
Or maybe the NSA just outright spies on Americans. You never know which ones aren't actually Americans until you listen in...
The other issue with ubiquitous surveillance is that it doesn't even need to be used in court. You discover somebody is a drug dealer or whatever. You arrange to have a cop happen to walk past the house where a deal is going down and hear something suspicious. Busted!
Basically you have to find a chain of evidence that is legal/plausible, but that is certainly possible. The US did that sort of thing in WWII all the time. Find out that a supply ship is at point XYZ from Enigma intercepts, arrange for a recon plane to overfly it, and then the next day blow it up. Generate noise that suggests you have the worlds largest recon fleet, while in reality not needing more than a handful of planes.
Sure, it makes sense to distinguish between speculation and facts.
However, I tend to think that things which forms of surveillance which are conceptually possible are generally likely to be employed by the NSA, and probably other state actors as well. Moore's law and the even faster expansion of storage density enable a lot of crazy stuff. People only generate so much communications in a day - even if you do nothing but type or speak continuously all day long you only generate so many megabytes of data. At some point it becomes possible to just record everything.
Recording everything has a certain advantage to it - you avoid having to try to figure out up-front what is worth recording in the first place. Some guy disappears with an airplane and we think he was involved in a conspiracy? Well, let's listen to every phone call he made in the last two years, go ahead and backtrack aerial footage of everywhere he went, go ahead and figure out everybody he met with and listen to all their phone calls, and so on. Heck, software can do a lot of that stuff automatically - just look at all human movements and look for anybody closer than n degrees of separation from Yemen or whatever. That all goes into a scoring system and you ID people whose calls might be worth a quick screening.
And just think that all of this is happening without AI. Imagine the day when you literally have a being more intelligent than you whose sole job is to watch everything you do all day...
I tend to agree. I wonder if this will be like the LED watches of yore where you pushed a button to display the time. I'm not convinced I'd be happy with that. I want to happen to catch my watch out of the corner of my eye and get situational awareness on time (which is why I like analog-style hands). I don't want checking the time to become a conscious action.
If it lasts a few days at least and has Qi charging I could probably live with it. Still, we're getting towards a point where I'm going to feel like Robocop stopping at the charging station at the end of the day to disassemble myself.
Show me the portion of that chart that backs-up your claim that doubling the wages of food workers would not impact food prices, and that they could absorb the cost. Or were you merely going "Look! There's rich people over there!"
You claimed that farmers were not wealthy. I merely demonstrated that some farmers are rather wealthy indeed. US "farmers" tend to wear suits to work.
Care to back up your claim that labor is a significant portion of food prices?
So, the argument is that you can eat if the previous three generations scraped enough away for you to afford food? ... Cheap food is still expensive if you have no money and no job.
No, I'm assuming that even in a society technologically advanced enough that almost everything is done by machines, there will still be ways you can make yourself useful enough to someone to earn what you need to survive. If nothing else, you can always grow your own food, build your own shelter—it's not much, but with knowledge of modern science and access to cultivated seedstock you'd still have an advantage over most humans throughout history.
You can't grow food or build a shelter unless you have land to grow/build on. That is capital too.
As you've already pointed out, a commune cannot exist if people can choose to join it or not. That's the whole point of communism. If you are fairly skilled/etc then there is no incentive to join, and thus the commune fails since only those who cannot provide for themselves join.
It goes further than that. The commune has to do more than just force you to nominally join; it has to force you to contribute. Without, needless to say, offering positive incentives conditioned on your contribution, since that would go against the whole point of a commune. The commune essentially has to consider each individual's skills and labor property of the commune rather than the individual, with failure to contribute according to one's ability punishable as a form of theft from the commune.
Agreed, though I don't think that a communist society must treat everybody COMPLETELY equally. You can have incentives to produce and still have what amounts to a communist society. Obviously there is a continuum between "pure" communism, EU-style socialism, and US-style socialism.
As I see it, a system where each individual is a slave to the group is no better than one with distinct slaves and masters.
Depends on who runs the group.
Communism can really only exist if it is imposed at a societal level. That's why communist societies tend to be associated with atrocities - it takes a very authoritarian government to sustain communism for any period of time.
I'm glad to see that we're in agreement, then. I thought you were advocating a communist society.
Who says I'm not?
That is unfortunately the crux of the problem. I think a US-style capitalist society is eventually going to progress to the point where everybody is slaves to a handful of super-wealthy, assuming that more than a handful of people are even allowed to live. On the other hand, communism requires totalitarianism, and totalitarian governments tend to turn into human meat grinders eventually (they're basically as good as the folks in charge - history tells us that dictators can sometimes be relatively benevolent but sooner or later you end up with a Stalin/Hitler/etc - rule by committee probably would help to moderate some of the negative extremes, but also the positive extremes as well and tends to result in lots of corruption).
So, I think the next 100 years are likely to be a big mess any which way...
Why would anybody who is productive agree to share part of their income with the rest of the co-op? They have no incentive to return the favor should the tables turn.
It wouldn't be up to them. The organization's charter would dictate its purpose as providing a basic income to as many people as it can afford, starting with those most in need, after targeting a particular rate of growth. A bit like a trust, really. The idea would be that you start with a some donated seed money, say $10M. That gets invested at a real return of, say, 7%. You want to target 6% growth, so that leaves 1% of $10M ($100k), which you split
Good points - I agree that uniform import tariffs that simply equal the taxation on domestic production shouldn't be considered protectionist in nature.
I'm not convinced that defaulting on loans makes your country stronger economically.
Sure, it will hurt the banks who loaned out the money. However, they can't really just raise interest rates, because those are set by the market (if they unilaterally raise rates, nobody will borrow money from them as other banks unhurt by the default won't raise their rates). The rates would probably go up, but less directly - those banks would have less money to lend out, and thus the supply of loans is lowered and everybody pays a bit more.
As long as the sanctions are in place, nobody will be lending to Russian corporations. Even after the sanctions are lifted, Russian corporations will probably have to pay higher rates, even if they are new corporations that never defaulted. The problem is that Russia is now regarded as the kind of country that might provoke a major diplomatic standoff with half the world. Sure, that isn't some corporation's fault, but anybody lending money to them has to consider that Putin will invade some other country in three years and trigger more sanctions and more defaults.
Bankers like stability. There is only one way to be considered stable - you have to go half a century or so without ticking off every other country on the planet. Russia won't be considered stable until there is a major regime change and it lasts for a decade or so.
Sure, people NEED to become owners of capital. However, if you walk up to the average poor person how does it help to explain to them that if they merely owned $500k worth of stock they could easily afford to live just above the poverty line on their capital gains and dividends?
For a start, if they understood that then they could start working toward it. Naturally, if they really have no capacity for earning money beyond the minimum needed to survive then they'll need help of some sort. Apart from that (rare) case, there is always some opportunity to set some savings aside. Over time, perhaps several generations, those savings add up. Also, the flip side of the technology-driven obsolescence of labor is dramatically lower prices. After all, the whole point of using machines is that they're cheaper than humans for the same tasks. That means you don't have to earn as much to support yourself.
So, the argument is that you can eat if the previous three generations scraped enough away for you to afford food?
Sure, food is cheap, but why would somebody who owns a farm bother to give you food if you have nothing at all to offer for it? He doesn't need your labor. Cheap food is still expensive if you have no money and no job.
Communism is simply a system of government where everybody becomes an owner of capital by the virtue of being born.
It's not quite that simple. Capital doesn't just magically appear for each new person, you know. It's a scarce resource, like anything else. If everyone is entitled to sufficient capital to sustain them simply by virtue of being born, then you have to somehow limit births to what you can accommodate out of surplus capital. People tend not to appreciate that sort of interference in their personal lives, which means some of them will want to leave. If they are prevented from leaving then you have an authoritarian dystopia. However, if you let them leave then your system is no longer universal; those who are born outside become second-class citizens from the commune's perspective. If those who leave happen to prosper more than the commune (which is historically likely) then more will leave and the commune will fade away. If not, you still have the problem that there are more people than your commune can support, so you can't just invite the extras back into the fold.
Agree on all points. A communistic society probably cannot allow free reproduction or emigration and remain functional for all the reasons you cite.
A capitalist society will respect the rights of the communists living in it to join together for their own common good; the problem is more the reverse, as the communists, eschewing property rights among themselves, often fail to respect the property rights of those who choose not to join the commune.
As you've already pointed out, a commune cannot exist if people can choose to join it or not. That's the whole point of communism. If you are fairly skilled/etc then there is no incentive to join, and thus the commune fails since only those who cannot provide for themselves join.
You're quite welcome to start up a commune along the lines of your ideal system of government, provided you accept its boundaries and don't force anyone to join (or stay).
Thanks for your offer - you are clearly a generous man! :)
A co-op which guaranteed a basic income to its members out of capital gains and/or dividends on shared investments would be an interesting and practical experiment. I think it would be necessary to limit the induction of new members, however. If the system works it could be gradually expanded over time.
It would never work. Why would anybody who is productive agree to share part of their income with the rest of the co-op? They have no incentive to return the favor should the tables turn.
Communism can really only exist if it is imposed at a societal level. That's why communist societies tend to be associated with atrocities - it takes a very authoritarian government to sustain communism for any period of time.
Fighter's have radar jamming and other "stealth" technology making them very hard to track.
US air defenses are designed to defeat Soviet bombers. They don't use "stealth" technology. The US may very well have radar capable of tracking stealthy targets, but if so it is unlikely to make the press. Not sure how this is relevant though.
The question was whether an airliner could fly under radar coverage. Generally speaking, it probably can't.
And if you really think someone cannot fly a plane into or out of US airspace without a dozen systems watching them, you are a paranoid freak. This sort of crap happens all the time -- smugglers and drug runners do it often enough. ('tho no one is doing it with a 777 :-))
I doubt much drug smuggling uses aircraft - at least not ones who aren't on flight plans. Sure, somebody might smuggle something past customs in their airplane that is otherwise operating legally (secret compartments and such). Aircraft simply flying over the border are easy to follow all the way to their destination.
Well, part of me wonders if they're not "vision" parts of the brain so much as "visualization" parts of the brain.
I know somebody who had a stroke and has a bunch of fairly specific impairments. The interesting thing is that the relationship between these impairments aren't ones you'd normally think of, but they make sense. For example, certain types of language deficiencies tend to also cause issues with short-term memory capacity. Aspects of processing language probably involve short-term memory, and one of the ways that you keep things in your short-term memory is to recite them to yourself in your head. So, a problem that makes it hard to communicate with others actually makes it hard to consciously think about things (in the sense of talking to yourself, or your deity).
Read up on the wikipedia entry on the cerebellum some time. For a long time it was thought of as the motor/balance part of the brain. It seems more that it is the part of the brain that actually operates like all those classical neural networks do - supervised learning. It makes sense that balance is something that would benefit from this type of approach (sensors are inputs, muscle movements are outputs, train for signals that tend to result in stability). People with damage to this area can move, but lose balance/coordination. That makes sense - the voluntary control is there, but that unconscious network-based auto-correction isn't there. It is used in other functions as well.
Part of me thinks that the brain is really just a collection of neural tissues where each region develops a particular structure, and then the connections between them are used to link areas such that particular tasks can be performed. Take a region that generates conscious movement, route it through the cerebellum, and the output is auto-stabilized conscious movement. During embryonic development some kind of fractal-like algorithm results in various parts of the brain having certain neural arrangements, and then the big picture of the brain is just linking them together. It is a bit like the "unix way" for grey matter - a little tar, a little awk, a few pipes, and you get something neat.
If you put tariffs in place on incoming goods where you aren't as competitive then odds are your exports will experience tariffs as well. You end up robbing Peter to pay Paul so to speak and costing yourself a lot in red tape and lost wages along the way.
So, you sell to the domestic market.
It also makes goods more expensive for consumers, makes it harder for domestic companies to compete, slows hiring and slows economic growth.
How does having the cheapest products on the store shelves make it harder for domestic companies to compete? What makes it hard for domestic companies to compete is having to actually capture or avoid waste instead of dumping it in the local creek.
Furthermore applying tariffs based on social values is a dangerous game of cultural hypocrisy. In the US we have millions of people without health insurance and we're one of the two biggest polluters in the world. Are we really in a position to tell others that they should be like us when we don't have our own shit together?
So, let's get our shit together then. We'll never do it if we let companies just move all the jobs offshore anytime we raise taxes to pay for all that health insurance.
I also said that we should apply tariffs to countries that did not have a similar level of worker protections/etc. If the US wants to be free-market with insurance then we shouldn't expect other countries to behave differently. Of course, the Europeans will certainly tariff our products, and rightly so. Just gives us more incentive to get our acts together.
A lot of the advantage places like China have is due to the lack of pollution controls and other regulations. But the only thing that really is going to fix that is if they Chinese decide it is important to clean up their own mess.
We get to deal with their pollution as well, granted it isn't quite as bad over here.
The problem is that we won't be able to afford clean air for long if we kill off every company that actually does the right thing. Companies that respect the environment are ALWAYS going to be at a competitive disadvantage compared to those who do not. Ditto for companies that pay employees a living wage, or maintain safe workplaces. We don't have to live like we're in the dawn of the industrial revolution - we just need to create the regulatory environment we want to live in, and then apply tariffs to countries that don't do the same. The goal isn't to punish them - simply to equalize the playing field.
If China doesn't want to buy our toys, then sell them to the Europeans. If they're smart they'll do the same thing. Anybody who doesn't want to be in a race for the bottom should adopt this strategy - there are plenty of countries to trade with who have progressive values.
Yup. The old addage is that once one flies, they all fly.
The problem is the question of what your opponent will do after you just nuked him. You nuked a naval group, so he nukes two of yours and a remote sea outpost. So you nuke a few of his mainland military bases distant from cities. So he nukes a few of yours close to cities. How do you just turn a blind eye to a nuclear attack?
Since continuous escalation seems likely at all points, once one missile is launched it is likely that every one of your cities will lie in ruins, eventually. So, if you're going to fire nuclear missiles, you should at least try to wipe the enemy out on the first pass to hopefully reduce the impact of his retaliation. It is still a suicidal move, which is why we've never had a nuclear war.
Sure, there is a chance that a tactical nuclear attack at sea might be met with a reprisal at sea and everybody will leave it at that. However, it doesn't seem terribly likely. The retaliating country will only stop at tit-for-tat if they feel they came out even or ahead in the exchange, and it is unlikely that the first party to strike would do so if that were a likely outcome.
China wont join Russia because if it sells it's US dollars then it just means it's tanked the main country in the world it's dependent on for exports meaning it'll kill it's own economy.
Yup - they're not buying all those dollars just to be nice. It is in their financial interest to maintain the current relative currency values. If Russia sells, China will buy, and the Chinese economy can outlast the Russian's on that front trivially. China isn't likely to think too fondly of the experience, though, and in a conventional war they're a far bigger threat to Russia than the US is.
China is opposed to Russia about the intervention, but they will not act on their opposition.
Well, if by some miracle Russia actually does something to the value of treasury bills China won't be too happy with that either, considering that for every dollar Russia loses they lose 10. Oh, and a falling US dollar would require them to buy a BOATLOAD of treasuries to prop it up relative to their own currency or they'll see their entire economy crash as their exports dry up.
Before you know it you might see Chechnya receiving a delivery of shiny new main battle tanks...
Russia now holds the economic trump cards. The EU is basically dependent on them, so any kind of "economic sanctions" are probably going to hurt the EU more than they could possibly hurt Russia.
Well, seems quite possible that Ukraine will move in the direction of joining the EU/NATO. Certainly every other country on Russia's border is going to strongly consider it. Russia may very well end up with Crimea, but completely isolated regionally, which was not their goal here.
The fuel trade with the EU makes up a much bigger portion of Russia's economy than the EU's. However, there certainly is a lesson here - it is foolish to be dependent on any particular country/region for a large share of your energy needs. All those in the US pressuring the EU to impose sanctions ought to be thinking about their dependence on the Middle East and think about the position they would be in if they ever need to impose sanctions over there. Indeed, if it weren't for the Straight of Hormuz I doubt Iran would be tolerated the way it is.
They don't have to sell their dollars, they just have to stop buying them, stop using them for trade.
What else are they going to use for trade? The mighty Ruble? I doubt they're stocking up on Dollars because they're sentimental about Ben Franklin. And who is going to trade with them anyway once all the sanctions are in place?
Sure, Russia can make waves, but only at their own expense.
Russia has less to lose and would be better positioned once the crisis was over.
You mean, once they pay back all those loans with penalties and interest, or were you envisioning a world in which Russia doesn't import anything and has zero outside investment? Refusing to pay your bills doesn't exactly endear you to those you would like to call business partners.
Yup, it is like trying to boycott Ford by threatening to sell your car. Sure, if EVERYBODY sold their Fords it would hit their financials for a few weeks, but it isn't like Ford didn't already get paid for all those cars the first time around.
I doubt that outright communism will ever make sense, but I suspect that as technology advances the ideal economic model will probably be a lot closer to it than the capitalism of the past. What choice is there once technology advances to the point where there is no need to employ humans at all?
Capitalism isn't about labor, it's about capital—of which the capacity for labor is but one example. The advanced technology you speak of is another form of capital. If anything, the emergence of more advanced forms of capital requires a more capitalistic form of economy. More people will need to become capitalists, owning and managing the machines which do the work, rather than trying to market their own labor.
The problem with this logic is what happens if people DON'T end up owning capital. People who don't own capital and who aren't employable will simply starve to death in a society that rejects socialism and effectively prevents crime.
Sure, people NEED to become owners of capital. However, if you walk up to the average poor person how does it help to explain to them that if they merely owned $500k worth of stock they could easily afford to live just above the poverty line on their capital gains and dividends?
Communism is simply a system of government where everybody becomes an owner of capital by the virtue of being born.
The price of oranges probably wouldn't change much at all - if they could get a penny more for them they already would be doing so. The guys who own the farm would just make less money.
If you live where labor costs are not a significant portion of food costs and farmers are wealthy, then you do not live on planet Earth.
They're not doing that bad.
It also only works on the national level because people can't easily flee the terror of these socialist paradises.
No argument there. You can't have socialized medicine if all the healthy people aren't obligated to pay into the system for a service they most likely will never need. Call it terror if you want to.