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Tips to grow your North Korean Startup

mrsteinberg.com

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Re: Tips to grow your North Korean Startup

#131

Post by beaconstudios »

fallingknife wrote: post #127
beaconstudios wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, it requires a community that shares things - like tribes or... Communes. I don't engage in negotiations with my wife or my friends, we cooperate. Maybe I could cooperate with other workers and form some kind of... Cooperative. There's a reason "socialism" starts with "social".

Well most people are not your wife, friend, or neighbor, and since you don't give a single fuck about the kid who made your phone, the system falls apart at scale.

joke's on you, I actually would rather my phone wasn't made by child labour. Also a communal system would scale with delegations and councils, not "everybody has to know each other". That's just the local basis.

Re: Tips to grow your North Korean Startup

#132

Post by germandiago »

vmception wrote: post #94
germandiago wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have lived in Vietnam for almost a decade. North Korea seems to be the equivalent of Vietnam before it started to open its economy in the 90s. I can tell you, that is a hell, but what really makes me more angry about all this is how a leading class spoils people mercilessly and treat them as animals with no dignity. I am talking about North Korea for what I see in articles lately. But in Cuba there are similar patt…

I think Vietnam is interesting since it is the same single party Communist country that we lost to, graduated to state capital system like they all do, has authoritative control over all facets of life and especially dissidents, but doesnt trigger anyone in my circles, doesnt appear in my news negatively, and is seen as a travel destination. Kinda funny is that it really just means they are irrelevant as a competitor…

Vietnam has in many aspects economy market, but yes, it is a single party country and we all know what that can mean.

However, it has been developing steadily. I am not american, btw. (I say so bc you say "we lost to").

Re: Tips to grow your North Korean Startup

#133

Post by PeterisP »

beaconstudios wrote: post #84
fallingknife wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not unfortunate, it's built in. "Communal ownership" requires that you can't freely buy and sell things. A government powerful enough to enforce that is necessarily totalitarian.

Or, it requires a community that shares things - like tribes or... Communes. I don't engage in negotiations with my wife or my friends, we cooperate. Maybe I could cooperate with other workers and form some kind of... Cooperative. There's a reason "socialism" starts with "social".

Human behavior that works well on the scale of groups where everyone knows each other (like households, certain types of tribes, extended family "clan" structures, cooperatives or communes; perhaps kibbutzim in 1950s/60s are a relevant example), probably limited by Dumbar's number, does not scale in an equivalent way to large groups where almost noone knows each other. We homo sapiens simply don't treat strangers in the same way as our community, so a "community" of thousands or millions is a very different kind of "community" than one of a hundred people, so it's a bit misleading to use the same word for them.

That seems to be the major problem with communism - it works on a small scale communities but for anything larger you get the relationships and conflicts of interest between the many actual (small-scale) communities and/or between communities and de-facto outsiders, and there this fundamental basis stops working well; the effectiveness of trust-based relationships are different for different sizes of communities and persistence of identity/reputation/etc.

This also has a theoretical basis in decision theory, e.g. even simplified models like the iterated prisoner's dilemma clearly have different optimal cooperate/defect strategies depending on whether you're dealing with someone with whom you expect many more interactions (i.e. someone you know from your mini-community) or someone who's either anonymous with no persistent reputation, or known to be of a transitory nature.

Re: Tips to grow your North Korean Startup

#134

Post by germandiago »

lordnacho wrote: post #96
mrtksn wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about DPRK but I have been to Cuba for a 2 weeks vacation, so I had time to go out of the default tourists spots. What I've seen is this: Those who have access to tourists or to the government are rich. Corruption is rampant as I've seen people bribing police right at the airport to have their things sorted out. The mainstream corruption in society revolves around casa particulars and taxis. Essentially,…

When I was there, some Cubans offered us a lobster meal. Some fisherman had brought them in, and of course they knew the tourists could pay for it. So since this seemed to be illegal, they arranged for us to drive to their house, and then immediately boarded up the garage so our car wasn't visible from the street. Inside we got the lobsters as promised, maybe the only good food we had apart from the resorts. It came…

And what you are describing is part of the misery they are condemned to by the regime. They cannot trade normally, everything is treated as trafficking and the hihger layer has privileges, control and are corrupted and live from spoiling the rest.

You want to do something by yourself? Brive me, because it is illegal or you will have trouble. And anyway, if I want, you can have trouble any day, because you did something illegal. Also, the brived people are also in trouble, because receiving a brive is illegal also. Now you have a system where anyone, at any time can be arbitrarily accused of criminal actions. Criminal actions that the government allows to happen depending on their interests.

They do not allow the right to have dignity for the people there. It is really sad. The only truth is that the system imposed there works because of corruption, literally. It is the way it works: I do not let you eat bread, but you need bread. So I give you whatever I want, if there is scarcity you can do nothing, except illegal things to survive, such as trading.

Re: Tips to grow your North Korean Startup

#135

Post by beaconstudios »

PeterisP wrote: post #133
beaconstudios wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, it requires a community that shares things - like tribes or... Communes. I don't engage in negotiations with my wife or my friends, we cooperate. Maybe I could cooperate with other workers and form some kind of... Cooperative. There's a reason "socialism" starts with "social".

Human behavior that works well on the scale of groups where everyone knows each other (like households, certain types of tribes, extended family "clan" structures, cooperatives or communes; perhaps kibbutzim in 1950s/60s are a relevant example), probably limited by Dumbar's number, does not scale in an equivalent way to large groups where almost noone knows each other. We homo sapiens simply don't treat strangers in…

nobody is trying to scale the communal model with more communalism though - it scales with delegates and democracy and whatnot. My town sends a delegate to your town's delegate to discuss where we can mutually support each other. Maybe our elected delegates form regional councils for more regular or coordinated cooperation. It's all good stuff and is basically how democracy /should/ work. In reality, your local rep doesn't mean anything because all the power is top-down.

Re: Tips to grow your North Korean Startup

#136

Post by Aunche »

reaperducer wrote: post #62
908B64B197 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the reason it's harder to work in a resort or operate a taxi in Cuba than it is to become a "doctor". The former has access to foreign currency with a real value. The later can hope to maybe get an exit visa (the government will loan it's "doctors" to foreign regimes in exchange for real currencies).

I'm curious why you put the word doctor in quotation marks, as if to imply they are substandard. It was always my understanding that while Cuba lacks a lot of things that many other countries take for granted, that the quality of its doctors was outstanding. I even remember seeing this mentioned in the newspaper at the beginning of the pandemic. Is this not true, or no longer true? Have I been under a false impressio…

I visited Cuba with a doctor and we took a couple of drunk tourists to the hospital. I also met another doctor who went to a medical conference there. Overall, their conclusion was that Cuban doctors are legit, but their medical system is very primitive.

Re: Tips to grow your North Korean Startup

#137

Post by germandiago »

perl4ever wrote: post #126
pc86 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious question, not trying to start a debate. How does abject poverty in an openly communist country make you think about the "deep impact of consumerism?"

I wrote a comment and then thought "I should really look up where the term consumerism comes from". Because I didn't know and maybe I should. I spent half my life unaware of the origin of "capitalism". In the early 20th century, "consumerism" was supposedly used to mean something like "consumer protection". But in the mid 20th century, it was apparently adopted as a preferred term to "capitalism" in order to contrast…

BTW, some misconception here that I see so often: capitalism is not consuming a lot or too wildly. In fact, capitalism is not possible without saving, literally.

In order to raise our lives level there were previous savings that were reinvested in process improvement, which eventually kept raising our life standards. Capitalism is exactly about that: same product at better price or higher quality products.

We humans always try (yes, left wing people also!) to buy at the lowest price and sell at the highest price (in general terms). That is why competition is good, because it does not let business abuse a monopolistic position and the prices drop.

People try to associate excessive consumption to capitalism. I do not think it is a trait of capitalism per se.

Re: Tips to grow your North Korean Startup

#139

Post by germandiago »

the-smug-one wrote: post #104
hunterb123 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

Cuba is equivalent to NK? Doesn't Cuba mostly incarcerate journalists, while in NK people are publicly executed for importing Squid Game?

Yes, choose between jail or death trying to make the former a good thing if you will. None should be allowed.

Re: Tips to grow your North Korean Startup

#140

Post by germandiago »

malermeister wrote: post #117
hunterb123 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

Cuba gives free healthcare to its people and runs the largest medical school in the world [1] for free, with the explicit purpose of training foreign doctors so they can help their underprivileged communities. Meanwhile, in the US, the richest country in the world, people are dying because they can't afford life-saving insulin. [2] Life expectancy is higher in Cuba than the US! [3] It's not all black and white. Every…

> Cuba gives free healthcare to its people

I think you do not have basic notions of economy. How can something be free? If it is free, it is because someone is doing the work (the doctors). If the doctors do not get paid a market price they are being exploited (forced to work for less). So that is where it is paid. You get it for free, yes, at the expense of those people that could have a better life and in the name of the good for everyone else they are converted into a simple tool for the propaganda of their leaders.

I wonder if that is ethical. I mean: forcing others to do a work that you consider good for the rest without giving them a chance for alternatives. Are those people worse than the people that deserve that health care? Should they be a means to a goal? There are two kinds of humans? The ones that are a means (doctors, rich people, etc.) and the ones that get benefits from them (the users or receivers of those things). No, I say no. Noone should be the means of anyone else. If we want something we ask for permission or cooperate. The rest is just propaganda.

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