Zompist Bboard Again

man, you're quite up to speed on chilean politics lmao. don't get me wrong, i approve. the earlier polls were i think right, but our news cycle is quite fast. the media went all out with 'jadue venezuela jadue venezuela communism bad ten billion gorillion dead', and jiles went either crazy or perfor...

basic stuff, but marxists are all for getting something out of it when they work: in fact, our problem with capitalism is that you don't get your work's worth, cause they guy who is blessed by this particular fiction actually gets all of your work's outcomes and in returns gives you as little dosh ...

somebody asked me what's my take on the chilean election, and I didn't want to derail the thread in which they did so, so here it goes. in the very likely case somebody doesn't know what's going on in that long strip of land left of argentina, i'll provide some context. as a disclaimer, I'm very muc...

I see one big problem: education. You are allotted a bowling alley at 21, and you know nothing about bowling alleys. But maybe there's an easy fix: you learn what your allotment is at 18 so you have some years to prepare. Another problem: interest. I know nothing of bowling alleys, and everything I...

Honestly I kinda like economic sortition. Leftists like to treat profits as a moral failure, but I think it's an impasse. When you work at something, you expect to get something out of it in exchange, and that's normal enough. What's wrong is taking advantage of your position to swindle people out o...

Unrelated, but I'm sick and tired of the culture war. Sometimes it feels like people have stopped caring about problems in their own country/region in the last 2 years, instead focusing only on the US. i feel you. the yankee culture war stuff even permeates the politics of my small backwater country.

governments are kind of shite at research. universities are better, and they often have alliances with industry in order to research things. but no, this idea that basic, unmotivated research often leads to useful results is not really true. people didn't discover the internal combustion engine as a...

wait, so you don't have B2B transfers of material, or of specific services, like at all? you might as well just have an input product matrix at that point. like, I'm not against input product matrixes, but it's unclear what is the role of money. indeed, calling it investment seems superfluous: what...

wait, so you don't have B2B transfers of material, or of specific services, like at all? you might as well just have an input product matrix at that point. like, I'm not against input product matrixes, but it's unclear what is the role of money. indeed, calling it investment seems superfluous: what...

I would think so, yeah :lol: otherwise you'd just grow whatever part is closest to the delivery point. like, if you vomit your milk there's not much point in having boobs, you'd sooner grow -and be attracted to- big bouncy throatties. So you don't think much to the idea that they're false buttocks?...

(no, female Salthans do not have breasts like in The Elder Scrolls) This is something some creators of fantasy lizardfolk get wrong: lizardfolk aren't mammals, and thus their females don't have breasts! Are nipples necessary to the evolution of breasts? I would think so, yeah :lol: otherwise you'd ...

Apparently you haven't met any owners. I have; every one I've worked for has been principally motivated by the desire to sell the company they founded as quickly as possible. huuh.... I think you work in IT, right? there's nothing wrong with that, ofc, but I need to point out that not every busines...

wait, so you don't have B2B transfers of material, or of specific services, like at all? you might as well just have an input product matrix at that point. like, I'm not against input product matrixes, but it's unclear what is the role of money. indeed, calling it investment seems superfluous: what ...

Government can exert a monopoly on managing capital investments. That way there is no private ownership of the means of production and no ever-growing exploitative capitalist class. But you also have public oversight over investment, and companies are private enterprises run however they see fit, p...

wasn't cybersyn actually used to, like, break strikes

that famous CIA-funded trucker's strike, yeah.

yeah, even after you get rid of the economic aristocracy -capitalists- getting rid of money and profits and so on is going to be difficult and lengthy. It would be an interesting experiment to try a planned economy again, but using modern technologies and economic theories. yeah, we tried to do it h...

I disagree. the fact that planned economies didn't work better than market economies during the 20th century does not entail in an of itself that planned economies don't work: they do. they didn't send a guy to the moon, but they were close: no non-functioning economic system beats the premier globa...

About key functions of society, have you thought of state investment in worker cooperatives to provide them funding for things that are necessary for society but which are not profitable in and of themselves? E.g. in capitalist countries like the US, much of what the government does is in practice ...

Surely you would also agree that any socialist polity, hell any anticapitalist country of any kind, is going to need to defend itself from invasion, colonialization and subversion efforts from the capitalist powers, and this can't very well be managed privately by coops: in wartime even the 'democra...

Historically, communists have always been strongly pro-industrialization: it means the same things can be produced with less work, which means we all get to sleep in more, or do better things with our time. In another thread I said that we could make a healthy cheeto, and we should! cheetos are exce...