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.
GTA Joe Biden when? 🤣
Again, the issue is that once you burn fossil fuel, you are not turning it into fossil fuel in any meaningful amount of time.
On the other hand, let’s say that a field used for producing plants for biofuel does not capture any carbon at all to simplify. So deforesting an area releases all the carbon a forest held. The difference is that the fossil fuel gives you energy one time, while the field produces it yearly. We need energy yearly. So if you deforest an area for biofuel, you release CO2 from deforestation but all the CO2 released in the future is what was recaptured by the plants. It is one time CO2 release for perpetual energy delivery. If you go with fossil fuels, you will keep burning more and more every year until it is much worse than deforesting an area.
So reforesting can capture CO2 already released, but that only offsets fossil fuels for some period of time. Even if you cover the whole planet in forests, there is a finite amount of fossil fuels you can burn before it is negated. That is why eliminating fossil fuel use, and quickly, is far more important than protecting forests. Once you burn fossil fuel, you can’t recapture it into fossil fuel and would have to increase fores area permanently to compensate.
the alternative to burning biomass would need to have very high emissions in order to come out ahead.
Not really, that’s the point. Soil has a max capacity of carbon it will hold. Just like biomass. So even if the fossil fuels release tiny amount of CO2, they release it continually vs deforestation releasing it one time. The only thing that changes is how long it takes for biomass to break even. But after thousands of years, the one time big release will always turn out better than continual small releases.
Of course, avoiding both deforestation and fossil fuels is even better.
It is superior if letting the forest grow means using fossil fuels. That was the point of my comment. It releases CO2, but only once and then is sustainable without additional CO2.
Of course, having the forest and e.g. nuclear power would be even better but that does not work very well for mobile applications, such as vehicles.
A very good question.
It is a very common misconception that trees and plants just always absorb CO2. The Carbon © in CO2 does not just disappear when plants produce Oxygen (O2). Plants use it as material to grow themselves and their fruits. Once they are fully grown, they don’t really absorb any more. So if you burn a tree in a fireplace and grow a new tree in its place, the new tree will eventually re-capture all the CO2 burning the wood released as it grows. This works even better with fast growing plants used for biofuel. The CO2 released by burning biofuel is re-captured when you grow more plants to make more biofuel.
So chopping down a forest to create fields is bad in the short term since it releases and does not recapture the CO2 from the trees, but is sustainable in the long term since you “recycle” the same Carbon.
Then does the nation have to be a certain size? There are plenty of micronations in the world. Tuvalu has only around 12,000 people. Does socialism not work in such nations? What about nations with 5 million people? What is the minimum?
As for taxes, what is the issue there? Surely even in communism, you would have to give some portion of production to the government to build infrastructure, run emergency services etc.
Wouldn’t financial integration be an issue on international level if it is an issue on inter-company level? (PS: what even is the issue? Is it just being uncompetitive?)
And what is the issue with land and property ownership? Do you mean you can’t seize them by force or do you mean it can’t be collectively owned? Because I am not a lawyer but I think you can own stuff collectively if you write your contracts and documents correctly.
PS: As for anticommunists interfering with your business, there is actually a law against it.
Where the hell do you live that starving to death due to a resume gap is a concern?
PS: I just realized how ironic it is to call capitalists out for starving people who disagree with them.
No, I am saying that getting funding for new businesses is a necessary part of any economic system. It is clear to me how that works under capitalism. I have never seen a sane explanation on how that would work in democratic communism.
Depends what you mean maintain itself. From real outside threats, I don’t see an issue. If you mean from people fairly competing or peacefully changing it from the inside, I feel the same way as any other unjustified violence.
Ok, you got me there. I just ment I don’t care.
Let me know when it can run GrapheneOS. Until then, who cares?
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.