131–140 of 187 posts
Related, this is an interesting relatively modern (1993) book about socialist planning + computers + networking: "Towards a New Socialism" / Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/socialism_book/
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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…
I think your oversimplifying here. I think economic growth is strongly tied to stability but it's also strongly tied to mechanisms. Pricing as a vehicle for measuring supply and demand simply outstrips everything else we've tried. Even this article mentions how difficult it is to centrally plan supply and demand and how large the bureaucracy needs to be. Perhaps some technocratic socialism could create a computerized…
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I think this is one of those cases where the most correct answer is simply "yes". Realistically, the guards were put there to halt the transfer of people, goods, and currency: to be the physical manifestation of a hard border. Although, the motivation for this border (who it benefits, is it to keep "others" out vs "us" in) was a dynamic concept that evolved over time. However, if you integrate the motivation function…
The thing that really drove this home for me was the way the wall was built literally overnight with no warning to the public to prevent people from fleeing.
If you're interested in the topic of the east/west German border's materialization over time, I'd recommend you to Edith Sheffer's excellent book on the subject [0]. It focuses on adjacent villages in Thuringia, and how they took turns coping with, helping create, and profiting from the existence of the border.
It's a great illustration of Simpson's paradox [1]: something that looks kind of simple on the surface (of course there would be a border between NATO and Warsaw Pact), becomes more complicated when you glance at the details (the people living on either side were mostly German citizens, with ideas and ambitions and fulfilling lives).
Then, you zoom in on the details (individual people, families, towns, neighborhoods), and again you're presented with something comprehensible. For example, a mayor can get special funding from the Marshall Plan, by emphasizing the propaganda opportunity of building attractions near the border; to get this money, it's helpful to sell the idea of a fundamental difference between east and west; once the attractions are built, there is now a real difference between east and west, whereas before it was imaginary. When you zoom out, it's these little independent assertions of autonomy and appeals to authority that motivate the creation of a border. Super fascinating stuff.
[0]: https://www.amazon.com/Burned-Bridge-East-Germans-Curtain/dp...
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Should the novel be pro-soviet?
Much like the USA, lots of stuff about the USSR was bad. Lots was good. Including the political decisions the respective countries made.
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Could you please elaborate? How would one link up two existing networks with different systems and infrastructure? What I can think of is either installing a couple translating routers, which do speak TCP/IP as well as their network's internal protocol, or making them, by repurposing existing machines with software-only modifications. Is that what you had in mind as not really counting as installing something physica…
Right. The key innovation of the internet was the invention of TCP/IP for the purpose of inter-network communication. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_protocol_suite#Early_...
A comparable precursor to the internet was MINITEL in France.
The Internet predates MINITEL, at least if you consider ARPANET its birth.
Douglas Engelbart's "Mother of all Demos" still blows my mind every time I watch it. Douglas Engelbart was inspired by Vannevar Bush "Memex.
You can't come up with plan like this and not come up with 'what's in it for them' in Russia or Eastern Europe. Not even now.
This is not a phenomenon unique to Russia. What was in it for the United States to drop 108,000 tons of bombs over Cambodia? What is in it still for the US to continue having troops in Afghanistan? Powerful countries have agendas. I cannot think of any entity that names itself a "country" that does not.
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Somewhat related, Netheads vs. Bellheads https://www.wired.com/1996/10/atm-3/ I briefly worked at a place fully dominated by Bellheads early in my career. They were bemoaning IP and holding on to ATM stuff as late as 2001. I'm told that the last of their tribe (after I left) fought off VoIP as a passing fad well into the 2000s.
ATM is still actively in use in broadband networks all over the place. Its a real pain when you're on the ISP side.
It’s gone in newer DSL variants and not in DOCSIS? Or am I wrong?
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ATM is still actively in use in broadband networks all over the place. Its a real pain when you're on the ISP side.
It might very well be a pain for the admins, but for low latency applications, ATM has clear advantages to the user.
IMHO the project was doomed from the start. Top down design on a scale that massive and distributed is nightmarishly complex, and when the designer is well ahead of the state of the art like this it doesn’t stand a chance. ARPANET by contrast started from the bottom and worked up. This is crucial because it makes it easy to iterate on the design until you get it right. With a top down design mistakes get baked in and…
On a tangent, I personally feel that bottom-up design has been an almost complete failure. The US has lost its ability to articulate what it needs to do, and then execute that plan. So for example, nearly all federal services that we used to depend on are failing. The Post Office is being crippled because it's seen as a price ceiling against UPS and FedEx, not to mention that elections can't be rigged when votes are centrally counted. The IRS has been defunded by the far right and liberals who have sold out to Wall Street, because they don't want rich people or corporations to be audited, because that might reveal widespread fraud. NASA hasn't been properly funded since Challenger, and technically lost its funding when the public lost interest in moon missions. We can argue various fake news interpretations of these trends, but the truth of them is self-evident from an academic standpoint.
What's my point? That maybe we could use a little more top-down planning. I'd rather see the spirit of socialism succeed (the elimination of wealth inequality), rather than what we have now, which is survival of the fittest on steroids. A top-down internet might have had some basic security measures in place, such as HTTPS everywhere. Also some bells and whistles like the free hosting that university students enjoy.
This may all seem quaint, but the loss of confidence in central government planning in the US is another way of saying that our republic is in decline. It's the central conflict in the Republican Party, half of whose members are old enough to remember when American ingenuity was once second to none. Now we can't even temporarily nationalize, say, N95 mask manufacturing. Sad.