That’s not true!

… he never cares about anybody who shouldn’t already be in jail for life.

Hey human doms I’m 100% okay with, it’s these things I’m worried about

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/doom/images/2/27/Meet_spider.png/revision/latest

Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa

… maybe?

With the disclaimer that I’m not at all sad that Khomeini was a casualty, Trump’s illegal war against Iran is set to provoke some real attacks in, probably, quite short order.

playing dom

I do not think we should train a bioengineered intelligence with guns to do that.

Or progress back to it … modern corporatism is a long way from the rights-respecting free trade that was originally meant by capitalism.

Ludwig von Mises of the Austrian school of economics, writing in the 1920s …

No chapter of history is steeped further in blood than the history of colonialism. Blood was shed uselessly and senselessly. Flourishing lands were laid to waste; whole peoples destroyed and exterminated. All this can in no way be extenuated or justified. The dominion of Europeans in Africa and in important parts of Asia is absolute. It stands in the sharpest contrast to all the principles of liberalism and democracy, and there can be no doubt that we must strive for its abolition. The only question is how the elimination of this intolerable condition can be accomplished in the least harmful way possible.

Sorry, I was being snarky. What I meant was that a computer running Android (or iOS) can’t really be counted as a PC, in the sense that Google (or Apple) control what you do with it.

No, but in part because many on the left demonize entire demographics (e.g. Christians) and drive them into the hands of the fear-mongering Republicans.

Just like they probably think every gun owner is bad, and every SUV / pickup owner, and every business owner, and every landlord, and pretty soon you’ve alienates all your potential allies and the Republicans win again :(

There is no such thing as an Android PC.

Sometimes. It can be done honorably and with good outcomes; Japan and Germany post-WW2 are good examples.

So how is it decided who works on what, and when?

The point I’m trying to make is that even if a system like Cybersyn could be made to work at the scale required, we’re still in the position of a dystopian “today it’s your turn to work in the salt mines, comrade” decision being made by a higher power, and imposed by law.

Perhaps I wasn’t clear - the value that money and markets add is in the allocation of labour - not the labour itself, but who works on what, when, and to what extent.

So we get an equal amount of these tokens, right? Regardless of how hard the 2 to 3 months essential work is, and regardless of how unpleasant it is?

Okay, sure - but you still have to have robust manufacturing capabilities that you can, at least, scale up at short notice (c.f. artillery shells).

My point was, really, that I see a lot of people trying to simultaneously hold the opinions that they certainly wouldn’t work for arms companies because the entire industry is evil, but also, we should make sure to arm Ukraine.

But at the point where you’re distributing arbitrary tokens to individuals to have them reveal their preferences in a Cybersyn-like system … you more or less have money and markets again? Unless I’m misunderstanding your suggestion.

You can’t support Ukraine and other victims of military aggression, without having a strong arms industry yourself.

The issue is that the production of those resources requires money.

Not just as a means of exchange - the world is far too large and complex to run on barter - but also, through the mechanism of markets, as a means of resource allocation.

Say you could go and grow 1kg of potatoes, or mine 1kg of copper ore? How do you know which to do?

In a society with money and markets, you look at the prices!

Say you have your 1kg of copper ore. Do you sell it now, or wait?

In a society with money and markets, you guess[1] what the prices will be in the future.

Without money, and markets, large industrial societies fail. That’s not to say that markets are a perfect signaling mechanism - malinvestment is a thing, and can certainly be exacerbated. But the known alternatives (and we’ve tried them) have led to poverty and misery.

[1] I know, I know, …

I think the Vatican is sad that LLMs are encroaching on their turf of “very expensively harming people and especially minors while hallucinating about things that don’t exist”.

Pretending that Trump didn’t win the election is how you fail to ensure you win the next one, and doom the rest of the world to another MAGA administration.