I fail to see how magic advanced computer power would solve the problem of economic calculation in the socialist commonwealth. Without prices there is no efficient distribution of resources.
The same way they do so within a single sufficiently large corporation, and the same way the market utterly fails in such a situation. See https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4385-failing-to-plan-how-ay...
What makes you think central planning within a single corporation is comparable to central planning for an entire society?
I recommend reading about the theory of the firm to understand why they emerge and what makes them efficient.
Soviet bureaucracy wanted to transform itself into capitalist oligarchs by seizing and privatizing the state enterprises instead of creating an open, democratic and scientific economic planning system. Trotsky was right.
> Soviet bureaucracy wanted to transform Quite the opposite: soviet bureaucracy didn't want to transform anything, they were more concerned with maintaining the status quo for as long as they could. This is why the system turned out to be too rigid to withstand the pressures of the modern world. On the other hand, think about how much the planned economy would benefit from the wide-spread automation and access to mod…
If socialism and planned economy could ever work, massive automation, networking and computerization would be the way to do it, otherwise planning is plain impossible, especially on humongous scales USSR has to deal with. It seems to be the case that it can't work even then, the inherent deficiencies in the system are just too fundamental for the automation to fix, but it was certainly a valiant attempt and thinking to the right direction. Just not enough, because it never could be enough. Just as if you want to go to the moon, jumping is going the right general direction, just would never be enough.
USSR invented "internet" in terms of internal military network, but it had nothing in common with public packet-switching networks like in the West. Such networks were build in USSR only in late 80s - early 90s, some of them by western companies. Even PSTN was unreliable, mostly analogue, SS7 was never implemented on 99% of intercity links. Glushkov never produced any working model of his "network", they had no proto…
I think this is interesting. The value of tcp/ip was the ability to form logical networks over and across existing physical/electronic networks. That only makes sense if you have an abundance of physical networks to start with.
The same way they do so within a single sufficiently large corporation, and the same way the market utterly fails in such a situation. See https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4385-failing-to-plan-how-ay...
Private companies are interested in getting real statistics, it was not like that in USSR. Even on largest auto-factory (AvtoVAZ) programmers were creating software with intentional bugs, so they can fix it later, during pre-programmed outages and get some bonuses. No one was interested in sending real statistics to Moscow, from head of local shop to head of large factory.
To be fair to those programmers, I've seen the same thing (or similar) in the US. It wasn't intentional bugs, but intentional delays in addressing them. That is, they sandbagged. They knew the fixes but didn't apply them so that they could hit monthly/quarterly/whatever targets. Or they knew they could knock out 100 features in a week, but that one feature would take 3 months. They'd mete out those 100 easy features over the three months so that they didn't appear stalled (they weren't, but management couldn't tell the difference between a stall and a hard problem).
One of my pet theories is that economic growth is surprisingly poorly correlated to economic or social systems except for one thing: Stability. Bring stability, and people learn the mechanisms that works for their society, and overcome surprisingly large differences in type of obstacles. Be it dealing with the vagaries of the free market, or how to maneuver a Soviet-style bureaucracy. It's in fact almost depressing h…
“In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love; they had five hundred years of democracy and peace and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” - Orson Welles, The Third Man, 1949 Ancient Greece was also exceptionally politically unstable and yet produced the fou…
You now Orson Welles was a child murderer in that movie right?? I wouldn't trust his words.
What would planned economy do with hands not needed anymore? :) Even with totally unproductive economy, USSR had lots and lots of bullshit jobs just to keep people employed. What would USSR do with tons of unemployed people? Create fake jobs? Or what... let people find out what they'd like to do and let them start private initiatives?!?
No problem there: an efficient planned economy would have no trouble whatsoever also planning for bullshit jobs, efficiently. Incidentally, does not look like bullshit jobs were specific to the USSR, they are indeed everywhere .
Let me know when you find an efficent planned economy. It certainly couldn't occur under all of the communist economically illiterate assumptions of a universal fair price as an implication of their labor based value fallacy. Treating dynamic supply-demand feedback as fixed moral imperatives is a reciepe for disaster. It seems that fixed assumptions of "always right" is the surest path to insanity and travesties.
Snark tangent aside, the issue with the USSR wasn't so much the bullshit jobs as the squandering of the labor of those performing actually important jobs via lack of support. They took labor for granted as a free input and neglected efficiency, exactly like slave owners and feudal lords they accused capitalists of being.
You don't "own" a domain: you have a recurring lease on it.
True, but this is also precisely the description of land ownership on the US, as GP alludes. Call it "real property tax", or call it "domain registration fees" -- if you don't pay up, the item is taken away.
No, I think you'll find that if you read your registration agreement, that is not the case.
I spent about a decade of my life as running the management systems of a domain registrar, with all the fun of dealing with ICANN, the various gTLD and ccTLD registry operators, other registrar, and so on. One of the recurring issues that got registrants into trouble repeatedly was the fact that they didn't understand that they didn't actually own the domain and that the terms of the agreement/contract actually mattered.
It's not just a matter of not paying. You're dealing with a recurring payment for something with a private entity covered by a contract. That is a lease.
"Red Plenty" is a "historical fiction" novel that is an easy read and deals with this subject. Glushkov is the main character.
It's extremely anti-soviet, almost propagandistically so. It wouldnt be out of place as a work made at the request of Voice of America, although the author is an Englishman.
It's good that it antisoviet, isn't? Soviet Union was responsible for millions of deaths. In Soviet Union, you will be prosecuted as American spy just because you have account on HN.
Isn't this article missing the point of the internet? It talks about an ambitious (but ultimately aborted) top-down project to build thousands of interlinking mainframes. But building large networks wasn't particularly novel. It was the idea that you could build a logical layer that potentially linked any network. The key to the early internet was you didn't necessarily need to build anything physical. You could link…
Also, the key to the early internet was the concept of packet-switching.
Hard to believe this was nearly a quarter century ago. T he references are getting dated: > "How do you scare a Bellhead?" he begins. "First, show them something like RealAudio or IPhone. Then tell them that right now performance is bandwidth-limited, but that additional infrastructure is being deployed." > … > One result is undergrads who, for $29.95 a month, clog up the Internet with CU-SeeMe sessions.
The article is dated 1996. How does it have an IPhone reference?