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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

#321

Post by aspenmayer »

aspenmayer wrote: post #194
germandiago wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Argentina is almost socialist in taxing terms. And 21 million of people are subsidized. I do not see a capitalist system subsidizing 21 million people. That is not capitalism. Call it something else.

How many people in USA receive food stamps or Medicare due to low income while being part or full time employees?

I looked it up.[0][1] It’s a lot. About 14.7 million Americans work full time and receive Medicare or food stamps (SNAP).

> And 21 million of people are subsidized. I do not see a capitalist system subsidizing 21 million people. That is not capitalism. Call it something else.

So by your logic, USA is a socialist country? Democratic socialist? Communist? That’s… not what most Americans would say.

> The numbers could not be fully explained by part-time schedules; about 70 percent of the 21 million people receiving Medicaid or SNAP benefits work full time, in general, the GAO said.

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/11/18/food-stam...

[1] http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...

Re: Tips to grow your North Korean Startup

#322

Post by germandiago »

ThomasWinwood wrote: post #293
germandiago wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has always existed. When men collected food and survived they shared. If there is an surplus of something you do not need, what do you do with it? Eventually, I guess, they started bartering. Bartering is a primitive way of trading. That trading is possible accumulating enough, otherwise you would need it all for yourself. I do not think it is difficult to see the beginning of these patterns, they seem relatively…

> It has always existed. When men collected food and survived they shared. If there is an surplus of something you do not need, what do you do with it? Eventually, I guess, they started bartering. Bartering is a primitive way of trading. That trading is possible accumulating enough, otherwise you would need it all for yourself. This is Adam Smith's just-so story, but he was wrong - no society has ever been shown to s…

Thanks for the pointer. It is an interesting point of view indeed.

However, I think bartering has always existed for a reason, and when it did not or trading was forbidden, what you end up is with poorer or more violent societies.

This is the same reason why we specialize our labour and we do not do all things: shoes, food, blankets, bridges, roads, trains, planes, computers. Because if we had to self-supply fully, our lives would be much more miserable. From there it follows that trading is a natural choice: I can give something valuable and someone else can give me something valuable in exchange. Of course that gets mixed with debt and other stuff (I did not read your reference yet so I cannot assess how true it is in my very limited opinion) but the alternative to bartering, trading, etc. is violence. Every time.

There is an analysis from a well-known spanish philosopher that died short ago, his name is Antonio Escohotado, well-known for having written a book about the history of drugs that was translated to many languages.

He wrote a 3-volumes book that is called "Los enemigos del comercio" (The enemies of trade).

He researched the topic with unusual passion, since when he was young he used to be a communist. He wanted to explain to himself why he was so communist at some point. He spend around 15 years writing that. One of his main conclusion is that the alternative to trading is trading people (slaves) and the conquer of the other (violence). I really think it is true. He establishes some relationships between the amount of trading and the violence in societies (military vs trade societies). I think it is a nice read, but I am not sure it is translated to other languages as of now. The one for the drugs it is.

Greetings.

Re: Tips to grow your North Korean Startup

#323

Post by jonway »

germandiago wrote: post #152
jonway wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't necessarily disagree with your comment overall but there are a lot of problems with your list and your methodology. 1: Why isn't france or china on the former or currently socialist list? There are many others. 2: Consider the volatility and violent turmoil, war, genocide, atrocities from those former and present countries from the timeperiod of german unification under bismarck (somewhat arbitrarily chosen d…

1. True, France could be considered to some extent socialist. But it was never a communist system AFAIK. 2. In all countries there have been genocides, starting with Germany, one of the biggest economies. There have been genocides in lots of places a lot of times. But the mindset plays an essential role about development IMHO (this is just opinion). 3. True. I do not think a non-socialist system makes countries autom…

> 1. France could be considered to some extent socialist.

I join you in pointing out that there is not a rigidly adhered to performative standard of government classification. By that I mean for example, that while the USA is generally considered as the quintessential modern, successful democracy, it is not that, but a representative republic with deomcratic elections.

So sure, France hasn't been purely "communist" or "socialist", but the reality of the world is that there is much more going on than could be captured by a check box.

>3. It is difficult to identify those traits, but I always remember something someone important to me taught me since I was young: first fix it, complain later.

Well, we have Iran as just one example of those kind of outcomes. That course is only tolerable from one end of the bayonet. If you stab enough people if might fix every problem we have, but there will be nobody to complain later.

I guess it really is as you say: intervention just causes more intervention...

Re: Tips to grow your North Korean Startup

#324

Post by int_19h »

beaconstudios wrote: post #281
int_19h wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can only happen if unlimited concentration of capital is possible in the first place. In property right systems based on use (i.e. where society refuses to protect other property claims), this is not the case.

I understand that, but I believe that a market based system allows a capitalist system to be bootstrapped from within anarchy. If I'm able to trade for profit within the market, say in a voucher system, I can use those vouchers to purchase security from other less ideological people and bootstrap the coercive relationship between profit and violence. Maybe free market anarchists have an answer to this, but I'd hope t…

Note that freed-market anarchism is just one end of the more broader free-market left libertarian spectrum, which does not intrinsically preclude governments and law enforcement.

With that in mind, consider what would happen today if you were to claim some random empty house as your own, posted a sign to that effect outside, and started to shoot any "trespassers". That would be murder - and the law would come down on you. Same thing would happen in this hypothetical society if someone tried to do what you describe.

(The issue of how a fully anarchist society would deal with murder in the first place is a separate and complicated one. I can't really speak for them; my own take is that anarchism is a kind of political asymptote - an unachievable utopia that the realistically-possible ideal society would trend towards as its cultural underpinnings evolve to make it more viable. In this day and age, something like Bookchin's libertarian municipalism appears to be empirically viable.)

Re: Tips to grow your North Korean Startup

#325

Post by dang »

malermeister wrote: post #168
germandiago wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Argentina is almost socialist in taxing terms. And 21 million of people are subsidized. I do not see a capitalist system subsidizing 21 million people. That is not capitalism. Call it something else.

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It looks like your account has been using HN primarily for ideological battle. That's a line at which we start banning accounts, regardless of what their favored ideology actually is, because this way of using HN is destructive of what the site is supposed to be for (intellectual curiosity). I don't want to ban you, so if you'd please use the site as intended, that would be good.

More explanation here in case it's helpful:

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Re: Tips to grow your North Korean Startup

#326

Post by int_19h »

germandiago wrote: post #292
int_19h wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that pre-revolution Cuba was not exactly democratic either, and had insane concentration of wealth, it's arguable whether that stolen property can be considered legitimately owned in the first place. A government of robbers announcing that what they robbed is legitimately owned doesn't make it so. (The same, of course, applies to the post-revolution government - I'm not trying to claim that it's somehow better.…

Cuba in the 50s was the 3nd wealthies country in Hispanic America. I think it was after Argentina, not sure if Venezuela. Now it is in the poor side of things, and Hispanic America is not too wealthy...

A country can be wealthy as a whole while still having a large part of the population leaving in squalor if wealth inequality is great enough.

Re: Tips to grow your North Korean Startup

#327

Post by germandiago »

dang wrote: post #306
germandiago wrote: post #22

This is the sad truth of places like Cuba or North Korea. Everything is forbidden to the point that eating is difficult. So people get corrupted and the guards, etc. just want their part. None of those things should be illegal. It is really annoying to see how a leader class kills people of hunger and make everything illegal so that now everyone is a criminal for trying to survive.

You started a really awful ideological flamewar here and perpetuated it downthread. That's seriously not cool and seriously not what this site is for. We'd appreciate it if you'd please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and not do this again. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29827641 .

Sorry for that. I thought it was not in violation of any rule.

I will avoid the political comments, though I tried to keep the discussion reasonable at all times.

It was not my intention to start any flamewar, less ideological. You can see in my comments rebuttals or exchange of opinions.

Re: Tips to grow your North Korean Startup

#328

Post by germandiago »

int_19h wrote: post #326
germandiago wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cuba in the 50s was the 3nd wealthies country in Hispanic America. I think it was after Argentina, not sure if Venezuela. Now it is in the poor side of things, and Hispanic America is not too wealthy...

A country can be wealthy as a whole while still having a large part of the population leaving in squalor if wealth inequality is great enough.

Or they can have most of the population in really deplorable conditions, which is what happened after the revolution.
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