They flood an industry with funds and let them all compete with each other. Then they back the biggest winner. A command economy usually mandates X units of Y good. This isn’t quite that.
Its a pretty big detriment to American thinking that they take cold-war era characterizations of the Russian economy and then apply them to 2025 China.
The current Chinese worries are about having too much competition rather than too little, Google "involution" to read about it.
I am talking about the economy in the Western model, it works well if there is competition. And it usually needs the state to do moonshots, like the literal moon shot or Silicon Valley. But the American economy was the most impressive during the Roosevelt years. The war production was insane, with 75% state planned, state built and state owned factories. The private sector was dominated by oligarchy owned monopolies, which means it wasn't impressive¹. The government had no time for conservative fairy tales and needed to take initiative.
What helped was the public outrage over the insane profits the American oligarchs reaped during WOI. This enabled Roosevelt during WOII to set a maximum profit margin for the oligarchy owned factories and fined those who evaded the law. It was a shock for the conservatives to see how the bureaucracy turned America's mediocre output around with a fast, efficient and lean production monster. The monopolists had to resort to propaganda, claiming the government's success as theirs, injecting the falsehoods we now all take for granted.
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1. As an exercise, think what would be possible if all the cash piles didn't sit at big tech, but instead enabled competition. Meta isn't still more than a useless addiction factory.
any basic nodal theory will help you understand its not about how many who post, its about their reach and correlations with viewership of overall graph.
A few bad apples, spoil the whole bunch is illustrated to an extreme in any nodal graph or community.
So it's more about how much toxic content is pushed, not how much is produced. At an extreme a node can be connected to 100% of other nodes and be the only toxic node, yet also make the entire system toxic.
Uh it is specifically and exactly what it proved. It changed the entire planets awareness of needs and has since changed the direction of humanity.
Many don’t need to commute, purchase lunch food, shop downtown, buy commuter consumables etc. we do so because we have in the past. And I say this as a life long lover of the classic pre covid city life.
Now we discovered most people are content at home with some food, entertainment and a few hobbies. The rest of the consumption is a mix of boredom and ritual.
And more than half the population would be out of a job without that
Hmm... no, not really, even considering rare earth mineral mining, the total elimination of fossil fuel combustion would dramatically reduce human environmental harm.
There is zero way with current technology and economic development that we could support even half of the current worlds population without fossil fuels.
We certainly could not continue providing the current world with latest gen iphones, you are right.
Feeding and housing them though? Absolutely doable. It would require a significant change in our societies, but we know enough things about the universe to accomplish this.
If you're saying, politically, this is impossible, sure, you're probably right.
Ho man, the level of delusion here. Have you ever visited India? China? This isn’t a ‘latest gen iPhone’ (which, btw, is well out of reach of your typical Indian already).
This is a ‘the entire world economy is based on fossil fuels, and attempting to redo the entire worlds economy to use non-fossil fuels is not currently doable’. Even the best case emergency scenarios would have to use even more fossil fuels to try.
Germany and California have tried elements of it, but even despite massive investment they are still heavily dependent on fossil fuels for almost all the baseline parts of their economies (transportation, heating, industrial uses, etc).
If we all went on a wartime footing and devoted our entire economies to completely retooling the worlds economies, maybe - but realistically, it’s clear that people would rather blow each other up (which will also solve this problem a bit !) than do that.
And a big reason why is a lot of people are likely to starve to death or be pushed into poverty to attempt it.
You carefully ommitted China who is working (and will succeed as they always do unlike Germany and California…) on post-fossil world way before fossils become scarse
None of it actually addresses the points, and is quite literally propaganda when the CCP is the one who states what the internal numbers are and mean? (Which notably, is where the US is going very rapidly now too).
it specifically addresses the entire world economy is based on fossil fuels, and attempting to redo the entire worlds economy to use non-fossil fuels is not currently doable
- it is currently doable
- china is working on it
- they will succeed
- while we flip the two insane political parties in power every 4 to 8 years that each kills everything previous one did just out of spite if for no other reason
What are you reading that we're not? The PRC seems to be leading in building new green energy sources. It's not like I'm a fan of them - I live in Taiwan - but credit where it's due.
Leading is in no way actually replacing. And that isn’t even counting major economic factors like international shipping, where we are approximately 1% towards replacement.
Yes I agree with you that it would be politically probably impossible, since it would, as you imply, require dismantling capitalism.
But, it's not like we need fossil fuels to farm, and there's already enough housing for all the humans. If we engaged in expropriation, it's certainly physically possible.
It wouldn’t require ‘dismantling capitalism’. Notably, none of the really big countries involved here are capitalist (even the CCP, which is very business oriented, is a authoritarian market economy, not a capitalist one).
It would require ignoring human nature. After all, why would the folks whose property gets expropriated go along with this? (And think for a second what you would do if you were on the other side of the equation.)
It’s all fun and games until it’s taking your stuff to give to a bunch of currently homeless folks.
> It’s all fun and games until it’s taking your stuff to give to a bunch of currently homeless folks.
Expropriation mostly means taking from corporations and giving to everyone, and maybe you're in a more developed nation but in the USA that would just mean giving it to nearly the majority of the people there. E.g. clearing out grocery stores and giving people food, and moving people from slums into empty luxury condos. Plenty of housing to fit the homeless as well, but they're a small slice.
If the PRC isn't capitalist, neither is the USA. Market dynamics drive everything in the USA, they have a concept of private property (no 99 year rule has triggered), and the means of production are owned by a capital class that uses it to exploit labor for further profit. Just because they have strong regulations and the government injects money all over the place doesn't mean it's not capitalist. It's just like a supercharged version of some highly socialized version of a European nation, plus an oversized secret police operation, but that's more on the political side than the economic one.
> It would require ignoring human nature. After all, why would the folks whose property gets expropriated go along with this?
Mostly corporations, so, capitalism over, so, nothing lol. If you mean their billionaire owners, I guess they would probably be keeping their heads down in this kind of situation. The idea is the improvement of quality of life for all people, even the billionaire class could hardly complain at a massive reduction in poverty and thus crime.
They've been stealing for the majority of people for so long I think it's only fair to expropriate it back.
But ok, how do you shift the entire world off fossil fuels without dismantling capitalism? What profit motive would drive someone to choose a more expensive energy solution that requires reconfiguring equipment?
It's not a relevant question, in the same way the desires of the Confederacy for independence were irrelevant when they lost the Civil War.
But also, I did answer it: Some would probably go along with it because of the obvious overall improvement to society that would result, which they would enjoy just as much as anyone else. After all, they already pay taxes so that roads exist and homeless are at least fed (and thus not harassing people as much). I said this in my previous comment.
Yeah we could. Just not to the extremely wasteful American standards of living. Even America can only support them because it controls the whole world's money printer.
While I understand the sentiment, it is important to distinguish between mindless consumption and wanting a better quality of life.
Buying all kinds of useless crap (usually items of small value and little utility) should not be conflated with wanting to have better things. Better quality house, appliances, clothes, etc.
It is the latter that is useful and brings peace. People won't get too mad if their neighbors have more stuff as long as their stuff allows them a pretty good quality of life.
But problems arise when you cannot buy the better stuff to improve your life and instead the focus is redirected to stupid items.
This is what the article is about, in my opinion. In the end, filling your house with gadgets and gizmos of dubious usefulness/quality does not improve your life substantially.
But this is what much of the population has been relegated to, and it has a soul-crushing effect.
But still, are you saying that I'd better consume things I actually don't need because that's the only way to avoid war ? I'm not saying that you should stop buying things. We need objects in our life.
But are Apple Watches, Airpods or VR headsets or foldable phones protecting us from war ? I hope not because that sounds depressing.
(Asking genuine qestion, I'm not doing virtue signaling here, I do own a VR headset, a pair of airpods and an Apple Watch and none of those objects are making me happy actually)
The price of peace historically explains how most war is faught over resources or local status games. Both of those behaviors were mostly captured by world trade and consumerism which replaced each respectively.
But then what emerged is that the largest consumer engines of production and consumptions could control the global trade and resources in a way that would suppress warfare globally by creating an economic MAD game alongside the nuclear one.
People don’t understand how much violence this likely saved us. However it is of course not without consequences. I'm just saying so far the side effects have FAR FAR outweighed the sickness (world war)
No, I don't get 'this', because you have not actually said anything. Across this post and the ones above it you have pretty much only insulted me witouth saying anything I can either understand or misunderstand, because there is no content.
In a sibling I see that you actually drop the name of a book, as if you expect the world to read a book to respond to you.
I propose you formulate your argument, if you actually have something to say. Even if it is a summary of a book, summarise it into a argument which is relevant for this conversation. Who knows, maybe even I manage to understand you then.
My guy, the fundamentals of Neoliberalism are like newtonian physics at this point, if it's not my job to explain them for you from first principles. Born out of WW2 and specifically thrived from 'fixing the broken window of Europe and Japan.'
But basically speaking, games of destruction can be obviously extremely economical incentivized regardless of what humans call 'productive.' And economies and markets have never ever promised to be narrowly productive for a specific moral world view. Quite the opposite actually.
Please don't claim insult where basic knowledge is simply lacking.
As far as I can tell (as someone who worked on the early foundation of this tech at Google for 10 years) making up “shit” then using your force of will to make it true is a huge part of the construction of reality with intelligence.
Will to reality through forecasting possible worlds is one of our two primary functions.
This technology (which I had a small part in inventing) was not based on intelligently navigating the information space, it’s fundamentally based on forecasting your own thoughts by weighting your pre-linguistic vectors and feeding them back to you. Attention layers in conjunction of roof later allowed that to be grouped in higher order and scan a wider beam space to reward higher complexity answers.
When trained on chatting (a reflection system on your own thoughts) it mostly just uses a false mental model to pretend to be a desperate intelligence.
Thus the term stochastic parrot (which for many us actually pretty useful)
Thanks for your input - great to hear from someone involved that this is the direction of travel.
I remain highly skeptical of this idea that it will replace anyone - the biggest danger I see is people falling for the illusion. That the thing is intrinsically smart when it’s not - it can be highly useful in the hands of disciplined people who know a particular area well and augment their productivity no doubt. Because the way we humans come up with ideas and so on is highly complex. Personally my ideas come out of nowhere and mostly are derived from intuition that can only be expressed in logical statements ex-post.
Is intuition really that different than LLM having little knowledge about something? It's just responding with the most likely sequence of tokens using the most adjacent information to the topic... just like your intuition.
With all due respect I’m not even going to give a proper response to this… intuition that yields great ideas is based on deep understanding. LLM’s exhibit no such thing.
These comparisons are becoming really annoying to read.
It’s literally state sponsored monopolies.
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