591–600 of 604 posts
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They drive for Uber now
And that's thriving by what measure? No employment stability, no benefits, no health insurance, no vacations, at complete mercy of basically a single company. Yeah, thriving.
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Those optimizations increase the value of labor by greatly increasing the amount of output per unit of labor. Do you understand how much wealthier the modern worker is than the pre Industrial Revolution peasant?
Pre-industrial societies may not have had flat screen tvs, but they had time. The only thing you can't buy.
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Thank you for the thoughtful post. I hope that the current circumstances trigger a renewed interest in thinking about how we organise our society. It would be great if that could be done rationally, without taboos. I don't have high hopes though. The people in power want to stay in power, and any hint at socialistic or communistic ideas are quickly shot down. Communism as implemented by Soviet Russia was pretty bad a…
I suggest actually reading up on how past or existing Communist countries worked. The Soviet system eventually failed, yes, but not before great strides in a lot of areas. There is an incredible amount of nuance lost in how the west generally talks about these systems, some from general misunderstandings, some from Orientalism, some from downright nationalism. For example, the "soviet" system was a bottom up democrat…
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I suggest actually reading up on how past or existing Communist countries worked. The Soviet system eventually failed, yes, but not before great strides in a lot of areas. There is an incredible amount of nuance lost in how the west generally talks about these systems, some from general misunderstandings, some from Orientalism, some from downright nationalism. For example, the "soviet" system was a bottom up democrat…
>For example, people hate on Stalin a lot, but his 5-year plans were so wildly productive and successful you mean productive as in Holodomor?
You literally proved my point, One can't say "Stalin's 5-year plans were overall successful and copied by other countries" without "but holodomor". Yet you can say all you want about Churchill or Britain's policies without a smug "Bengal famine" appearing.
We're not that far from a major turning point. Currently these models don't provide an adequate enough confidence measure that prevents them from maximizing their potential. In the next few years we're going to reach a point where models will be able to tell if something is possible and avoid hallucinating, guaranteeing much better correctness. Something like that would be absolutely killer. If you add on a top-down…
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You're really passionate but you're strawmanning all over the place.
I wish I was straw-manning. It'd be great if my description was an overly pessimistic caricature of a major political party. Unfortunately, it's not. It wasn't some political cartoon of people cheering on the deaths of the poor and sick. It was real people. I could understand why someone reading my description would think "wow what a perverse view of people this misanthrope has" -- if that person had no exposure to U…
The (very clear) point of Dr. Paul's RNC speech was that regular people are better at solving problems than the government. If the government stopped taking tax money to monopolize "helping the poor" (while wasting most of that money on ever ballooning bureaucracy) then churches and other private initiatives would step in to do the job better, and at better value for the money. We wouldn't just let our sick and our poor die in the street, because unlike a faceless bureaucratic machine that inevitably comes to exists only to perpetuate itself and its own power, we are humans who care about other people.
The people at the RNC were cheering for the goodness of regular people, for the fact that Americans give more to charity than any other nation, and for the positive libertarian vision championed by Dr. Paul.
When the government gets in the way, and makes everyone poorer (by excessive taxation and bureaucracy), however, people become colder, and they can always excuse it to themselves by pointing out that the government promised to solve the problem, and they already forced us to pay them to solve it. So now it is the government's responsibility, but a bureaucracy cannot have any feelings of responsibility, because it is a machine and not a human.
This is also what happens in communist countries like China and the USSR before it.
Unfortunately, many people will probably just read deceptive statements like feoren's, and never go listen to the actual speeches. The left loves to dissuade people from actually listening to conservatives. Just see how they are shamelessly lying right now about Trump's "bloodbath", hoping to stir up actual political violence from people who they manage to trick and frighten.
The left is always trying to use 1984 style newspeak to prevent people from having an honest debate, so naturally they talk as if it was an established fact that either a government bureaucracy must continuosly rob Peter to pay Paul, or everyone starves.
This is because the left wants as big and powerful of a state apparatus as possible, because they intend to use it as an army against their political enemies. A recent example of how the left sees the role of the government is Letita James' lawfare against Donald Trump.
Ron Paul's message was that whenever the government tries to "help", it always backfires. Expecting the government to solve social problems, and allowing them to take money from regular people, leads to financial ruin for the country, and it won't even fix the very problems it claims as the reasons why we must give up our freedom and prosperity. In fact it always manages to make the problems worse.
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Buying handcrafted artisan stuff is a luxury few can afford. I come from a poor family and I was always grateful for mass produced mediocre stuff that we could actually afford.
The capitalist system keeps you poor by design. And you feed the system by purchasing the mass produced garbage. Sure, it is nice to afford stuff when poor, but we don't need to live in a society where being poor is common, or where mass produced garbage is the default option for most.
Please describe the alternative. "Mass produced garbage" is exactly how we are able to feed the world. It's not some sort of conspiracy, just scarcity.
(Welfare and UBI is still capitalist.)