61–70 of 121 posts
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Yeah, real communism has never been tried. /s
Here we see the standard intellectual repertoire on Communism. - Communist Totalitarian Thinking - “Never been tried” quips as a retort to, um, no one even claiming that here
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Quite a few words in Bulgarian are similar to words in other European languages, just written in a different alphabet. I briefly dated a girl in Bulgaria years ago and was surprised at how quickly I could find my way around by reading street signs, applying knowledge of French and German, etc. The author asks why did the communists always clone things despite having engineers who could have designed their own? You do…
You're eliding the more prosaic and direct explanation for why the Soviets were forced to clone chips instead of designing systems from scratch: cost. The American semiconductor industry had a vast civilian customer base that let it recoup R&D expenses. The Soviets didn’t. Chip Wars covers this in detail with numbers.
The fact that the customers' demands have no influence on resource allocation, except to the extent that bureaucrats decide it's politically convenient to address them, is in fact precisely why life under communism is so shitty.
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All "actual communist societies", have been run by marxist-leninists or regimes supporting derivations of it, which is a couple from dozens of ideologies within the umbrella. So, sure, you can generalize about those regimes. That still does not speak to any unified "communist mind". Those regimes have collectively murdered vast numbers of proponents of other communist ideologies.
> All "actual communist societies", have been run marxist-leninists or regimes supporting derivations of it, In other words, real communism has never been tried.
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At least in Poland it was semi-common that if you had any family abroad they could send you dollars. So yeah a soviet computer was in theory cheaper but it was impossible to buy, or you could just walk into PEWEX and walk out with an actual commodore 64 bought with dollars that you "happened" to have. Of course, PEWEX stores were fully state-sanctioned enterprises, not illegal imports.
I think the point was that the illegality was that manufacturers in the west was not supposed to sell computers to the east?
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Here we see the standard intellectual repertoire on Communism. - Communist Totalitarian Thinking - “Never been tried” quips as a retort to, um, no one even claiming that here
Tell me more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47776635
This was a fascinating article, because I've seen so many results of the Eastern Bloc reverse-engineering efforts basically founder into obscurity. Many of these re-created (sometimes with minor variations, or quite novel and ingenious implementation choices) computers were made in small series, but could not compete against illegal imports, and in any case would only be briefly popular in their local university town…
This was a fascinating article, because I've seen so many results of the Eastern Bloc reverse-engineering efforts basically founder into obscurity. Many of these re-created (sometimes with minor variations, or quite novel and ingenious implementation choices) computers were made in small series, but could not compete against illegal imports, and in any case would only be briefly popular in their local university town…
Quite a few words in Bulgarian are similar to words in other European languages, just written in a different alphabet. I briefly dated a girl in Bulgaria years ago and was surprised at how quickly I could find my way around by reading street signs, applying knowledge of French and German, etc. The author asks why did the communists always clone things despite having engineers who could have designed their own? You do…
It is the difference between "safety" and "liveness" (the two kinds of correctness guarantees in computer programming). Communist societies are, at their extreme, "safety" societies: they try to guarantee that nothing bad ever happens. Capitalist/market societies are, at their extreme, "liveness" societies: they try to guarantee that something good/interesting _eventually_ happens (even if bad things have to keep happening).
A "safety" mindset is sympathetic to cloning, because it does not have to deal with much uncertainty. A "liveness" mindset is not sympathetic to cloning, because it has already been done, and profit/monopoly opportunity is minimal.
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Strawman - at no point did I make that claim. It has no relevance to my comment.
It's a variation of the same tired argument that's proffered up when communist praxis is criticised: That communist regimes they don't represent real communism unlike the all the other hippy versions.
It is irrelevant if it is "real communism" or not - it remains an objective fact that all of these regimes have derived their ideology from one very specific branch. In fact, all of them make a big fuzz over exactly that, and all of them had a history of brutally persecuting supporters of other communist ideologies.
You don't need to support any of them to recognise this. I did not make an argument about the desirability of any of them at all, very intentionally.
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Here we see the standard intellectual repertoire on Communism. - Communist Totalitarian Thinking - “Never been tried” quips as a retort to, um, no one even claiming that here
Tell me more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47776635
My emphasis. You seem intent on attacking strawmen.