Yeah, my parents work for a public utility. The level of waste, inefficiency and corruption there is comical. It may still be fine for core infrastructure like utilities to be that inefficient in order to be reliable, but certainly not for normal industries.
Or maybe my country is particularly bad at running them.
It means that the planner says, we need to have the designs and ability to mass produce low cost, high performance RISC-V cores for PCB integration by 2025.
But this is the hard part. Who is qualified to say that RISC-V is the way to go instead of x86? An elected politician? Experts? If experts, how do you select them? Who checks they really are experts? Who holds them accountable?
If there’s someone who wants to start working on a design with a new team, there’s going to be capital available for a startup.
Who and how decides if a startup is worthy of funding? How do you prevent ideas being rejected for personal reasons, e.g. religious objection? How do you prevent fraudulent startups?
If they need more capital they get it.
Who and how decides when it is no longer worth it? How do you avoid fraud, wastefulness, etc.?
Economic growth is just easy to check data.
That’s debatable but ok.
Generally markets and competition do well in figuring out how to do something we don’t know how to do well and cheap. Once we figure that out for some product or category, profits fall competitors fail and consolidation sets in, cost of production falls further due to decreasing duplication and increased scale.
Absolutely yes.
A sector that hasn’t been relaxed for example is banking and for a good reason.
Yes, very good reason.
But beyond relaxing control, the other very important thing that was relaxed was foreign direct investment.
So the other big part of capitalism.
On Walmart, I think what you’re looking at is the feedback mechanism of shop/factory data going up the stack.
I think this comes back to what you said before. If we are talking about established items, that you already have suppliers for, then you can centralize it.
But good luck getting beer from a small local brewery stocked. The more centralized, the less flexible and innovative.
Imo if you centralize on a scale of an entire national economy, you would have very hard time dealing with anything that’s not a well established supply line already.
isn’t Walmart the poster example of decentralized planning? It does the “planning” at the level of store selling final goods, where there is best access to data, such as shopping habits and trends. That’s the point of decentralized planning, not having unreliable ad-hoc supply chains.
First of all, it is hilarious that as part of criticizing capitalism, you use economic growth as a metric instead of let’s say availability of goods in stores. Yes, if your economy revolves around state directed things like building weapons, infrastructure and growing industry, it gets easier to manage than unpredictable consumer demands.
China started it’s explosive growth when they relaxed their central control. I am not advocating some absolute libertarian market freedom either. Yes, state exerting control, ideally with consumer interests in mind, can be a good thing to avoid the pitfalls of “pure” capitalism. But there are also risks to that, see China overbuilding high speed rail and housing.
And finally, isn’t Walmart the poster example of decentralized planning? It does the “planning” at the level of store selling final goods, where there is best access to data, such as shopping habits and trends. That’s the point of decentralized planning, not having unreliable ad-hoc supply chains.
PS: To be clear, you also have many good points. I addressed only the ones I disagreed with.
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In contrast, a socialist economy allocates resources and labour according to society’s needs, which are determined by some mix of economic planning and limited market dynamics.
The only problem being, that while nice in theory, socialist economies never actually did that in practice. Since humanity has never figured out, how to actually do economic planning in some centralized or semi-centralized way without being very inefficient and corrupt. I used to think AI could do that one day, but I guess that was too optimistic…
It’s easy to see capitalism is terrible. It’s hard to see a better system, that could replace it.
If you think having a force reset trigger is the same as having a full auto rifle, maybe you shouldn’t comment on gun legislation.
GTA Joe Biden when? 🤣
You’re defending him—intentionally or not—because you’re giving legitimacy to the idea that, somehow, the party that kicked him out is in the wrong.
Yeah, I am tired of this shit. My entire comment repeatedly spells out that criticizing one party does not mean supporting the other. Both FDO and Vaxry can be in the wrong. If you can’t even comprehend that, there is nothing else to talk about.
First off, I don’t know anything about Vaxry or the Hyperland community, so I am definitely not defending him or implying it is not bad or anything of the sorts. I am saying the public reasoning for the ban is manufactured BS, and I am pretty sure that is because it is hard to call yourself “free” anything if you want to police peoples behavior unrelated to your project.
If you think projects should do such policing, that’s fine. It even makes sense, if you ignore the potential for misuse. But they certainly shouldn’t advertise themselves as free. It’s the hypocrisy of trying to do both by manufacturing an excuse I am calling out.
As for the rest of what you write, I feel it all comes to the same unhinged idea that because someone is a bad person, everything they touch, create or any person engaging with them is also bad.
I dislike Brave, and it’s founder. Doesn’t mean everything Brave does is bad or can’t be promoted by me as good. If you choose to not do it for your personal beliefs, that is fine. But the idea that I am not allowed to praise Brave browser features or other actions because of something unrelated its founder did or said is ridiculous.
EDIT: Regarding your edit, yes. I criticize parts of DEI or stupid anti-Trump arguments. That’s the whole point. Stupid arguments are stupid even if a good person is making them and good arguments are good, even if evil person like Trump makes them. Parts of DEI can be bad, even though discrimination is also bad. The world is not black and white.
EDIT2: Here is my post on DEI if anyone wants to read it and decide for themselves whether it is reasonable criticism or not.
So it’s not just the PR, it is also him interacting with “the wrong people”. Because it is so unthinkable to post about another browser developer while developing a browser regardless of politics. Idk anything about Andreas Kling, maybe he is a bad person, but the reasoning in your comment seems unhinged to me.
PS: Maybe off topic, but FDO reasoning for banning Vaxry is also wild. FDO admits he never broke the CoC on their platforms, then the CoC enforcement sends him a threatening email demanding he moderates his community differently and when he pushes back and says he will ignore this person sending unsolicited threatening emails, that is a reason to ban him. Because somehow this unsolicited threatening email is somehow considered part of FDO. Literally manufacturing a cause…
No offense, but I seriously doubt you’ve done any of such analysis.
Well, if you don’t believe me, go do the analysis for yourself then. Unless you would rather live in a fairytale than look at your beliefs critically.
Part of the reason you know USSR sucked is because they had to do it publicly.
Yeah, why not show complete ignorance of history. Not as if USSR literally left people in Chernobyl to be irradiated in order to avoid admitting what they caused until western media exposed them. But it is capitalism that keeps things secret, that is why you know about those things from news and internet.
You wrote you’re supporting of the kind of socialism a lot of socialists would consider capitalism
No I didn’t. I wrote that until someone shows me a version of socialism that works, I will support capitalism.
So instead we should support a system where political motives are commodified and corporations sell the power to influence the political landscape…
You ever heard of the concept of lesser evil? That is what I consider capitalistic social democracy. If you find an even less evil system that does not just run on hopes and dreams, I will switch my support to that one. But right now, every system I have heard of or thought of would end up being even worse in practice.
Once you come up with an economic model that both works economically and does not hand power to elected officials or some other such group,
I literally wrote that I would support some form of socialism. That is not sarcasm. I am not talking about one example, I am talking about economic and game theory principles.
If you analyse the common forms of socialism using those, it is obvious it will always devolve into authoritarianism. The incentives between leaders and the population are too misaligned and the power is too concentrated.
Comparing all capitalism to the US is the same as comparing all socialism to the Soviet Union.
There are plenty social democracies in Europe. I advocate for spreading those and making incremental improvements to them where appropriate.
“We don’t accept ideologically motivated changes” = White supremacist language… Yeah, sounds about like what I expected…
Yeah, blame the Russians. As if the Russian revolutionaries were not fighting for the same ideals you believe in. Just by not realizing that eliminating capitalists concentrated all the power in the government and handed power to Stalin on a silver platter.
Once you come up with an economic model that both works economically and does not hand power to elected officials or some other such group, you have my support. Until then, I will keep the safe assumption that socialists have zero idea what they are talking about and would lead us to doom if we gave them the chance.
Yeah, we should just ditch email for sensitive communications.
Anyway, my point was that I lost trust in Proton back then over this and went to Tuta that has native clients. It makes no difference to my security since I don’t think I ever sent or received a single mail that was actually e2e encrypted. But Tuta’s more serious approach to e2ee made me slightly more confident in it as a company.
Now it kinda looks like it was the right choice.
doesn’t impact the security sufficiently to make a difference for the average user.
I think it is borderline. I am not advocating for PGP, I like the Signal model where you trust signal for introductions but have the ability to verify, even in retrospect. Trust but verify. Even a few advanced users verifying Signal keys forces Signal to remain honest or risk getting caught.
I think the lack of meaningful verification for proton is a significant security weakness, though average user probably has bigger things to worry about.
Big doubt on the size being the main factor, though it contributes. IMO the main factor is scarcity. An underfunded large organization will find way to operate efficiently. See NASA or some large charities.
A small startup with nearly unlimited Venture Capital will most of the time find a way to squander that money and get results that shouldn’t take tenth of the money.
The difference being that there are natural mechanism to correct waste in private companies, if it becomes significant compared to its scale. A public company often won’t have the same. E.g. which politician is going to go order layoffs? Hope he does not plan to get elected again. I think there is a good chance, if your company was public, the sw engineers would still be wasting time and resources. Perhaps on a different pointless project.
And that is before even addressing outright corruption and embezzlement.