You are making the extraordinary claim, that despite socialism being used throughout the world, it simply doesn’t work. Therefore the onus of proof is on you. So, can you please describe why socialism doesn’t work?
China, Cuba, Vietnam, and Laos are all examples of socialist countries today. China alone lifted over 800 million people out of poverty in recent decades. Compare that to the capitalist paradise in India.
Not really, Nordic model is capitalist because the capital owning class owns the means of production and holds power in society. Nordic model has generous social services and a social safety net, but that of itself does not make it socialist. A socialist model implies that it is the working class that holds power and that means of production are under a mix of public and cooperative ownership. This is the model that all western countries fight against.
You previously mentioned China. And China do have big companies like NetEase. Are such companies under a mix of public and cooperative ownershiprs? How it differs from IKEA? Not arguing, just trying to understand.
The difference with China is that capitalists don’t run the government and all the core economy is publicly owned. I can highly recommend this book discussing why China is fundamentally socialist
I find that comparing how China and India developed after WW2 is illustrative as well. India took the capitalist route while China remained socialist, and the difference today is stark. India has incredible amount of poverty and the situation continues to get worse, meanwhile China is responsible for the biggest poverty elimination programs in the world. The fact that China is developing differently from capitalist nations is a good indicator that something different is happening there.
I’m learning the material and I have a few questions.
You say that in China the capitalists do not run the government. But how do you know that they do not have their own business or are not affiliated with the capitalists? For example, in my country there is a law that does not allow deputies and the president to have their own business. But it does not work, these people simply register the business for other persons and, in fact, continue to own the business.
How China got out of poverty is amazing. But I also heard that the workers were very heavily exploited. This is one of the reasons why the US moved production there. And even now, workers in China are paid little despite the fact that the country is rich. How can this happen in a socialist country that should protect the interests of the workers?
As for the Nordic model, you said that it is not exactly socialism: it is capitalism, but with tough rules for business and good social programs. So they more centric then leftists really. And I don’t argue with that. But I don’t understand why if the capitalists run the country, they simply won’t loosen laws to make business easier and reduce social programs? How has this system not collapsed yet?
Sorry if some of the questions seem stupid, I’m just trying to how this all works.
As I pointed out, we can look at the tangible outcomes in China such as poverty reduction programs that simply aren’t happening in countries where capitalists are in charge. So, we don’t have to take their word for it, we can just look at the outcomes.
It’s also worth noting that 87.6% of young Chinese identify with Marxism, and the party has 95 million members. People in China learn about communism in school, and I think it’s reasonable to assume that a country where vast majority of young people identify as Marxist, would have a genuine communist government in charge.
Another indicator we can look at is that China doesn’t suffer from regular crashes seen under capitalism. An inherent contradiction within capitalism is that the capitalists always want to cut pay for their employees to minimize the costs, while they also require consumers with enough spending power to consume the commodities they produce. This is why capitalism results in regular economic crashes when wages fall below the point where consumption can keep up with the rate of commodity production. At that point you end up with overproduction and a crash. If China was capitalist then it should be experiencing these kinds of crashes regularly just like actual capitalist nations are in the Western world.
Working conditions and wages in China are improving rapidly. Real wage (i.e. the wage adjusted for the prices you pay) has gone up 4x in the past 25 years, more than any other country. This is staggering considering it’s the most populous country on the planet. Social mobility in China is actually higher than it is in US.
Finally, 90% of families in the country own their home giving China one of the highest home ownership rates in the world. What’s more is that 80% of these homes are owned outright, without mortgages or any other leans. This sort of home ownership is not seen in capitalist countries where housing has become a commodity.
The reason capitalists run the countries even under Nodric model is because they are able to use their wealth to create disproportionate influence on the society. Capitalists own the media, provide funding for political campaigns, and so on. This allows capitalists to run a propaganda campaign against the population of the country. A couple of excellent books on the subject are Inventing Reality and Manufacturing Consent.
And in fact, we do see this system erode over time. Here’s a discussion of what happened in Sweden since the 70s and how capitalists have been eroding social programs there jacobin.com/…/sweden-1970s-democratic-socialism-o…
I think if the west ever becomes socialist then the type of socialism we’ll see will necessarily be rooted in western culture and it’s going to be its own unique flavor. Even China says that their system is a product of their own conditions and history, it’s not a model that can be franchised to other countries directly. And Chinese model is far from perfect, so it’s worth looking at both the good and the bad to learn and improve upon what works there while avoiding the negative aspects.
Well that makes the assumption of no new service rises to replace twitter, which given development and spreading of Internet is pretty bad bet.
All this leads to is momentary disruption until people settle on the new replacement, whatever that ends up being.
All this does is caused sacking of twitter employees and Musk burning a pile of money. Oh and politics wonks and journalists have to change their congregation behavior to new place.
Almost certainly this isn’t anything to do with scraping. Like with Reddit, those with a stake in Twitter stand to benefit from AI and, as far as I know, there’s no mass reposting (retweeting?) effort to something like Mastodon.
That would be trivial to block anyway, since it would be easy to identity the service accounts and source IP’s of the requests. No need to impact average users.
What’s more likely is he hasn’t paid the bill for his cloud infrastructure and no longer has the capacity to serve so many users.
IMO, that’s what you get when you fire half of your staff.
I’m not so sure, there are a lot of businesses and people training their AI models right now and sites like reddit or twitter are very attractive huge collections of user generated content. It’s not the most outrageous assumption that they’ll try to get that data for free by scraping instead of paying for API access.
I don’t think however, that it is that hard to differentiate an AI scraper between an actual user, since AI scrapers would be scraping huge amounts of data, which the average user doesn’t. Correct me if I’m wrong. wdyt
No, you’re correct. Service accounts can consume data way faster than a human user ever could. A smart business always implements rate limits or you could bankrupt them with a simple curl command. They could bankrupt themselves in testing with a simple loop!
This can be fixed in many ways, not just by putting limitations on credentials but also on source addresses. If a certain address or range of addresses seems to be running multiple service accounts and pulling huge amounts of data, you can deny requests from those IP’s.
In short, this AI angle smells like BS to save face. Musk effectively fired the SRE team who looked after critical infrastructure. It was their job to ensure service reliability, so it should not be a surprise that Twitter now has issues with service reliability.
But also, hasn’t that boat left already for several AI companies? They’ve already trained it up, no need to scrape again, they just use what they got last time for their core training, it’s only the last couple of years/months they’re missing.
Assuming said data scraping is a real concern for both Twitter and Reddit, are Fediverse servers at similar risk from scrapers and various automated API hits? I don’t really know enough about networks to answer.
I think the data scraping problem is more of an opportunity cost (they think AIs should pay them more to use their content) than a concern for the traffic they account for. If traffic, and not profit, was a problem, Wikipedia would start saying they can’t support AIs either.
You make a great point about Wikipedia - it’s laughable to me that scraping is actually why Twitter is doing this. They’re just trying to find a convenient reason for why they’re failing that doesn’t stem from their own incompetence.
The idea that “AI scraping” is any more expensive than search engine indexing is flatly nonsense, only credible to people who have never run any network service at scale.
I watched it live on TV when it happened and I am pretty sure my face looked the exact same as the trainer in the upper right. We had the cup for all of 10 minutes before he tripped on the ice and dropped it coming in to the group picture Great memories!
I had it on the ZX Spectrum, where it was still absolutely vicious but not all that colourful! Seven year old me never completed it, even after I got it on Amiga, but I might just give it another go on seeing this. …I can still hear the theme tune…!
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