Socialist governance seems to require concentrating an extraordinary amount of power in elite government decision makers; this tends to produce a new ruling class, the widespread deprivation of political rights for everyone else, and crippling poverty.

Obesity isn’t a problem in North Korea. They’ve met their BMI goals.

Pfft. No one votes for number 2.

Probably both. Divert pressure off the front. Disrupt supply lines and infrastructure (roads, bridges and railroads). I’ve also heard mention that one axis of advance is towards a nuclear plant.

I’ve seen some keyboard warriors theorize that the Ukrainians intend to capture the plant as a bargaining chip in negotiations with Russian because Russia currently holds a Ukrainian nuclear power plant. My (wild ass) guess is that if they make it to the plant, they will just destroy its ability to generate power, then retreat.

Venezuela has access to the internet for their 21st century experiment with socialism and it hasn’t turned out very well.

Emails and Web Browsing work almost instantly around the world, but solid economic data that a central planning agency needs to use to make decisions takes time to gather. This it the core of what Broton33 talks about when he mentions the “lack of perfect information”. As an example, US businesses make extensive use of the internet, yet despite this, the US Government routinely has to revise the economic data it gathers, months and sometime years after the original surveys. Gathering accurate and timely data is hard. Gathering all the information you need is impossible. If you want to learn more, then do a Google search using the terms “Economics Perfect Information”.

As to destroying the planet, yes things are getting warmer, but the free market and the profit motive is also producing technologies that will help cool the planet.

“But from the perspective of a coherent story in a coherent world, ignoring the success in terms of sales, it was cobbled together without a plan, and it shows. It wasn’t until maybe order of the phoenix that she had a plan for how the story would end, and she had to do a lot of hand waving to make it happen.”

“But she wasn’t a good writer. She was mid tier at best. So the eventual success of the series got beyond her abilities. While the last book was much better overall than the first few, it still relied on shoddy world building”

Excellent explanation. The first HP book is excellent. It really sucks you in. After book 4, the quality declines and they become slogs to get through.

This simplest explanation is that JKR isn’t a very good writer. She came up with an idea “I’ll give hard working and ambitious Hermione a time travel device so that she can take more classes in the same amount of time” without thinking deeply about the implications of allowing time travel to exist in the universe of Harry Potter.

House Elves were one of the things that made me realize that JK Rowling was something of a hack. I found it odd that Hermione was the first person in the wizarding world to ever point out that House Elves were slaves and were being treated very badly. In the thousands of years that wizards and wizard schools had existed, no one ever protested the treatment of House Elves? Not even the ‘Good Guys’? Everyone just accepted this over the centuries??

And then she does almost nothing with this potential plot point…

That is a big leap from slide 2 to slide 3. As Broton33 says, one central authority will never have perfect information across the entire market and thus will not “maximally optimize each supply/demand connection”.

Centralized planning has been tried many, many times in the past 100+ years and it has failed miserably every time. Computers and the Internet won’t make it work any better, if tried again in the 21st century, either.

I think the DEA is the only entity at the Federal level that cares about marijuana. Drug warriors are gonna drug war.

When is the last time a government agency was eliminated or had its budget cut?