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Russia continues work on homegrown game console despite technology and scale issues
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this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2024
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Sure, when you can force the workforce to do a thing, that thing tends to get done. But they'll probably do it slower than if they chose to do it. So other things will suffer if they force a certain initiative.
And that's what we saw in the USSR. Certain initiatives progressed well (space program, nuclear program, etc), while others suffered (food production, basic manufacturing, etc).
Yeah... turns out that homelessness is a great motivator.
Soooo... just like wage slaves, eh?
After 1947 there was no great problems with food production in the USSR. Still... you're not really wrong. The capitalist mode of production does offer a feedback system for consumer goods - even though it's a pretty terrible one that only works as long as the capitalists have to compete for a well-paid populace's buying power.
If I recall correctly the USSR was a pretty steady grain importer throughout their history
As far as I'm aware, the USSR started importing grain in the 60s - primarily to feed livestock as meat became a regular thing for Soviet citizens.
Lolwut? USSR recovered from being a devastated bomb crater of a country faster than Europe did on American dollar while waging a cold war against the rest of the world. They beat the US to space time and time again too.
Come the 80s, their manufacturing was well ahead of the west, and there weren't any food issues either, so I'm not sure what you mean? The horrors of Stalin's collectivisation efforts were a good bit before the cold war, and that wasn't really an issue of food manufacturing.
Nobody was forced to do any type of work more than anybody is under capitalism, if anything under capitalism as it is today - you take what you are given.
In the USSR, higher education being free (as is the socialist tradition) gave people a lot more choice, no need to balance student debt against future potential earnings and as such ability to pay health expenses, like we see in the US today.
They suffered from consumer goods issues because things like game consoles and tamagotchi can't exactly be planned in a planned economy.
It's why I personally believe in a dual-economy, where necessities are planned centrally, from housing to infrastructure to utilities and independent worker co-operatives do the rest, I think that's the lesson there ultimately. Oh and fuck the Russian Federation.
I think you're looking at history through rose-colored glasses. Read pretty much any story from those who left the USSR to get a better picture of how life was there. Here are a two that I've read:
Feel free to find your own, but I find real stories of people trying to flee more valuable in understanding life in an area than books with economic figures.
If life was so good there, why did so many try to flee? Leaving was incredibly hard, why was that?
I disagree, but we probably agree more than we disagree.
For example, I believe in a strong safety net (something like UBI), and believe we should eliminate minimum wages. If you don't need to work to meet basic needs (food and shelter), you won't take work unless it improves on that basic set of needs. Maybe that means we'll increase automation or immigration to fill roles nobody wants, or maybe that means pay will increase. Either way, it shouldn't be centrally planned.
I think the lesson from the USSR is that centrally planned economies are repressive, and that we need to come up with better ways of solving the needs of the poor or we'll have another popular uprising that goes way beyond what anyone actually wanted.
Socialist policies should be limited, imo, to voluntary associations, like co-ops and private unions. It shouldn't enter government policy because politicians like power more than actually helping people.
A very unbiased account indeed
I don't. People for the most part are morons that gulp down ivermectin and bleach enemas by the truckload to make their healing crystals work in time for Sunday church, so they can pray away the gay. People are fickle, and are often at odds with facts. As a trans person I know this well.
That's the neat part, I never claimed that. The USSR was a shithole, but the user I originally responded to was wrong as well. Two things can be true at once.
Or just nationalize necessities to cut out capitalist middlemen taking a cut. All a UBI of $100 will do is raise prices by $100 because people now have $100 more, and landlords et al. will want those $100. Under capitalism and neoliberalism the rich will always be at the top of the food chain in this manner.
So they can be easily crushed by capitalist lobbying in western """"democracies""".
I admire neolibs who genuinely want to make things better, and you have my respect for that, but I think you're just a bit naive and haven't quite thought everything through.
Oh certainly, any personal account is going to be full of selection bias. But it helps give a look behind the scenes to help interpret the stats and whatnot we see in academic papers. Those stats come with a cost, and the cost was often born by minorities and those who weren't well-connected. That's my point here.
That $100 has to come from somewhere, and if we follow a balanced budget, it's not coming from debt, but from taxes.
But yes, there will be some price adjustment if something like UBI is done in a vacuum. Look at the COVID subsidies for examples of just that, or the EV subsidies where dealers/manufacturers just jack up the price of EVs to match the credit.
I'm proposing replacing minimum wage w/ something like UBI (my preference is a Negative Income Tax for more of a direct replacement). That way that $100 isn't being added to peoples' means, but instead it's replacing wages. Just increasing wages kills jobs, and just increasing money available causes inflation. So if minimum wage is $15, with $10 of that being needed for subsistence (housing and food, no luxuries), you'd instead get $10/hr regardless and jobs would pay $5/hr or whatever. That gives employees the freedom to say no to poor working conditions and inadequate pay without worrying about where their next meal is coming from. If nobody wants to work for those wages, wages will go up. If immigrants or teenagers are willing to take those jobs, wages will go down. A lot of jobs aren't worth $15 and would be (and are) replaced with automation instead. This allows those jobs to continue to exist, without forcing people to be destitute. Likewise, if automation replaces a significant chunk of human labor, those people can continue to survive and pursue other options for employment (i.e. maybe they'll pursue art or something).
I don't think that type of policy would meaningfully impact prices. First of all, NIT (basically income-based UBI) was championed by Milton Friedman, a respected economist, and he certainly looked into inflationary pressure of such a system. Price increases are tempered by fed borrowing rate increases and NIT/UBI payout adjustments, which can keep total inflation stable, so any price changes are just moving money from one pocket to another. It's only inflationary if we use borrowed money to fund it, but if it's budgeted for through taxes, it's not going to be inflationary.
Sure, and moving to socialism won't change that, all it does is replace "the rich" with "the well-connected."
People being rich isn't a problem, especially since generational wealth is often gone after 3 generations. Rockefeller's (arguably the richest person ever) wealth has bees significantly diluted, so even the mega-wealthy will eventually lose their wealth. I'm guessing in 100 years, Musk's, Bezos', and Gates' wealth will be largely diluted. Elon Musk wasn't "mega-wealthy" 15 years ago. Jeff Bezos became rich around 25 years ago. Bill Gates became rich about 40 years ago. Most of the top billionaires are recently wealthy, and the same is largely true for multi-millionaires as well.
The important thing is that who "the rich" are changes periodically so we don't get into a Russian oligarch situation.
Instead of looking at the income/wealth gap, we should be looking at standard of living changes for the average (median) person. As long as that's improving year-over-year, things are getting better. Whether some people have tens or hundreds of millions doesn't really impact me day-to-day.
So it will just accomplish nothing, as people will work the same (more if we follow current trends) for $9.00 and hour instead of $12.00, but will have an extra $3.00 from taxes on the middle class (the rich will avoid taxes always).
This is certainly a proposal.
Ah yeah, like right now where inflation is low and even decreasing, but things keep getting more expensive, jobs more and more scarce and actual value is ever smaller, while building true wealth through home ownership is ever more unreachable, while being poor is only more and more expensive and social mobility is at an all time low? Lol.
Measures of inflation are like COVID cases being low before we started testing more people.
That's the thing - it won't. Capitalists won't like this, and competing with one another by offering better working conditions will only make them worse off - they will instead band together and price fix the market, or simply complete the ongoing switch to using gig economy "contractors" instead of employees.
Capitalism is a race to the bottom. This is ofc a hypothetical, IRL they would never allow any such laws with actual teeth to pass unless a dictatorship of the proletariat showed them to the guillotines.
This is an argument so old Marx debunked it himself. But I'll say this: even if this is true, corruption is indeed possible in any system, but only in capitalism we worship it and call it "lobbying".
So just because it hasn't been 3 generations yet, Musk isn't a problem? Bezos? Zucc?
The Russian oligarchs are actually new rich too, most of them got wealthy by picking the corpse of the Soviet Union, during western enforced shock therapy, while the poors were left to heroin and dying of AIDS. What a woopsie that turned out to be with fascist Russia now eh?
Things have declined since the 1980s in terms of buying power of the middle income young people of today across the board, and that's before we get into the fact life itself got more expensive (e.g. now a starter crappy job needs an MSc, used to be they hired barely literate lead eaters, who are now bosses).
It's slightly offset if you measure happiness by socially-funded scientific and technological progress (internet was a government project) but even that is now debatable, as capitalism has sunk its teeth into that also, and more and more social services of the 20th century are privatized into oblivion.
And that's just the local, street-level stuff. What about the global evil of capitalism? Israel? Afghanistan? Iraq? Neo-colonialism of the global south, American corporations licking dictatorial boots the world over? the blockade of Cuba? Police racism and brutality? Sexism? Ableism?
The neoliberal imperialism of the United States through it's client-state in Israel alone is enough to wonder, whether this system should be left as-is.
Now the USSR did a fair bit of shit too, and China does a lot even worse, all of it is deserving of critique, but US's (and it's western vassals') issues are precisely as a result of its system. The US is very much an oligarchy, and is three corporations in a trenchcoat, and occasionally, when whistleblowers, whether corporate or military wind up dead, people look up, and it's important that they blame the right people, because otherwise, they'll blame each other, and fascism - the final form of neoliberal capitalism - wins.
If your goal is higher wages, then yes, it'll fail to meet that goal. But increasing wages directly doesn't really solve it because business owners would just increase prices in response. We saw just that when labor prices went up in the labor supply crunch due to COVID relief, and product prices followed.
But that's not the problem this is trying to solve. UBI/NIT provide a base standard of living, so people are empowered to leave abusive jobs. Many just accept it because they need the money to survive, which means employers can get away with poor labor practices.
I think it'll eventually lead to higher wages, but that's not and shouldn't be the point, or we'll just end up chasing inflation.
Pretty much every statement here is wrong.
Inflation is at the top end of normal (in the US). The target is usually 2-3%, and we're at 3.3% annualized, so we're back to normal. That means things are getting more expensive at an acceptable and desirable rate. Inflation was lower than the target for several years, then exploded in 2021 and 2022 (I blame COVID relief spending), and now higher borrowing rates brought it back to normal. Inflation measures haven't changed for a long time, and changing them will just invalidate the usefulness of that data and just overfit to whatever we want it to show.
Jobs aren't scarce, we're around normal @ ~4% unemployment. We just got out of a labor crunch, so this is what "normal" looks like. Real wages are also still going up, just slower than the huge runup just prior to COVID (i.e. people's incomes are increasing faster than inflation).
For housing, it's a fantastic time to own a house, but a hard time to buy. There's still an undersupply (due to shortages during COVID), high demand, and borrowing rates are around historical averages (but higher than recent history). This means mortgages aren't particularly affordable, though since inflation is back to normal, those rates are being relaxed.
This is what "normal" looks like, we just came off a long bull run with abnormally low rates and low inflation, followed by a supply crunch. I expect to see more layoffs as employers adjust to a higher rate environment, but nothing that's going spike unemployment.
If you don't believe me, look at the data yourself.
True, which is why we're not doing it. It's not because of inflation or that it'll kill incentives to work, it's that it'll empower workers to leave abusive employers, and employers don't like that. The opposition is largely FUD from the wealthy to try to kill it. And that's precisely why we should seriously consider doing it.
Do you really want a dictatorship? All that'll change is who the haves are (leaders of the revolution), the poor will still be poor, and they'll have even less upward mobility.
Don't just switch oppressors, fight to remove power from your existing oppressors. Revolution is a last resort, not an ideal.
Here's real personal income (as in, inflation adjusted), which is up since the 80s. This isn't specifically young people, but I'm happy to look at any data you have.
Also, the standard of living is considerably higher. Personal computers were unaffordable in the 80s, and now everyone has one in their pocket. Air conditioning was pretty rare, now it's ubiquitous. The average person (yes, including the poor) are better off today in absolute terms than the 80s.
The thing that has changed is income inequality. So the rich are getting richer faster than the poor are getting richer, but both are getting richer.
None of that has anything to do with capitalism. Capitalism hates war and prioritizes trade. What you're seeing there is imperialism and cronyism, both of which are enemies to capitalism since they promote centralization of power in the government. Capitalists like free money though, so defense contractors will push for more conflict, but that's not capitalism.
It shouldn't, and something like UBI/NIT is part of that. We should be stripping governments of control, and this gives people more options to fight against bad employers without having to go to the government and ask for more regulations, and regulations come with side effects that empower big businesses and increase cronyism.
That's not true. While the USSR did have a significant manufacturing capacity, it was often inefficient due to the planned economy. This led to factories closing after 1991 because they couldn't compete with the free market. The quality of products was often subpar, and there was a lack of diversity and functionality. In fact, many essential items weren't even manufactured.
This was a major contributor to the Soviet Union's economic downfall and eventual collapse. If you read archival records (available through various books, for instance), you'll find that even high-ranking officials like ministers and vice ministers were writing letters to each other in the 80s about the poor output in their respective sectors, including the oil industry, which was struggling due to outdated technology.
The idea that the Soviet Union had exceptional higher education is a myth. In reality, their education system was overly focused on technical skills, neglecting essential life skills like critical thinking, creativity, decision-making, and many others.
This became apparent in the 90s when many supposedly 'highly educated' individuals were involved in fraudulent schemes, failed to build and stand for democracy. While it's true that the USSR produced some outstanding scientists, that's where the excellence ended. A society cannot thrive solely on the backs of scientists and enginners. A well-rounded education is essential for prosperity.
The US is the only country in the western world that teaches strictly extra-curricular matters at a university level, afaik. I went to uni in the UK for computer science, all of my classes were only about computer science and it's subdomains only, there are no "life skills" classes.
As opposed to the low levels of fraud and extremely healthy democracies of which countries exactly?
As for the rest of your claims I would like to see direct sources. The "essential items" tidbit in particular I find suspect because the definition is quite fickle and the idea is subjective and depends on circumstances. Cars were famously not very common amongst USSR citizens. What was though is public transport, and we're now in the west finding out that neglecting public transport and shifting towards personal vehicles has been a huge mistake, so that's that.
We get extra curricular in universities in Canada as well
I'd recommend reading some books about the Soviet Union, particularly its later years. It's not feasible for me to provide an in-depth education on this topic in a single post. It's clear that you are not knowledgeable, and I'm not sure why you're arguing without being informed on the subject ¯\_(ツ)_/¯