Zompist Bboard Again

The problem is that majority of Chinese people are no longer sweatshop workers - Chinese labor aristocracy (usually called middle class) numbers 500 mln people already and is constantly growing. Regarding conditions - what material conditions made a figure like Trump rise to power in the United Stat...

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The question is why should Chinese people even want the CCP out of power so badly? I remember an earlier post, I think it was in this very thread, where you harshly criticized the USA, and, I think, the West in general, for the way big corporations from the USA exploit workers in the Global South. ...

The revolution that brought the current regime to power was 76 years ago, which certainly qualifies as several generations. The decades-long stability of China and many other dictatorships demonstrates that they can endure indefinitely without war to topple them. For that matter, it's been nearly f...

global supply chains would certainly collapse, but that doesn't mean returning to medieval tech. people know how to operate lathes, how to build rudimentary forges, how to make basic steam machines. not everyone does, of course, but there's a fair amount of people who can get started with a vast he...

The question would be how much of the modern technology and machinery would survive that allows less than 5% of the people to work on farms and to feed the other 95% who do other jobs in a modern post-agrarian, post-industrial society. If we go back to traditional, low-productivity agriculture, bil...

It took me like 5 minutes to create this lol. Dunno if any human would do it that fast. theres an old saying: you want it fast or you want it good? Why do you assume that these two things will remain opposite? AI progresses at a fast pace. Even if LLMs exhaust their potential for improvement (and t...

It took me like 5 minutes to create this lol. Dunno if any human would do it that fast.

Remember that publically available genrative AI has been around for only 2.5 years, best available models are essentially equivalents of Commodore 64 in the world of personal computers.

Japonic, if not Future Japanese itself. What was the model, the prompt? Did you ask only for a text, or are there additional explanations? Did you gloss it yourself? Gemini 2.5 Pro in Google AI Studio. Prompt: "Create a conlang descended from Proto Japonic with Old Norse phonology and phonotac...

I do want to hear answers then!

@zompist
What's so controversial about my views?

I do believe that stable societies will emerge - this will take time. Over a century IMHO.

@zompist: One thing that the US has to a higher degree than Europe is income inequality. GINI coefficient for the US is 0.42 while it's 0.36 in China and 0.29 in Germany. As for the Middle Ages - crime rates were very high back then. IIRC murder rates were in the range of 20-50 per 100,000 while tod...

@zompist: If you look at, say, homicide rates - they are significantly higher in poor countries with weak (underfunded, corrupt etc.) law enforcement. Now imagine that your country (US?) goes back to basically medieval level of development - what happens? Also remember that you don't need to be a ps...

100% AI made. Guess the language family: Spēt fīðr tōkral tō fītsk nī ūmar ār, fōtomp tō tāsk kōt nī. /speːt fiːðr toːkral toː fiːtsk niː uːmar aːr | foːtomp toː taːsk koːt niː/ (All people free and equal in are-born are, dignity and just-things in.) Kālr sāðkrār ār kōtwar tō kōkr sēm. /kaːlr saːðkr...

@zompist: The problem is that when social order breaks down, antisocial elements benefit the most. In normal conditions these individuals are kept on a short leash by the law enforcement but during anarchy they are free to realize their "potential". Although that's probably how the state o...

Of course I don't want humanity to go extinct, by no means! By the way - politics, religion (or at least the way it's implemented), culture etc. - are largely products of material conditions of specific time and place. Western liberalism (democracy, individualism etc.) are a byproduct of the Industr...

Ok... No idea whether it should be here or in off topic subforum Let's say that at some point between 1980 and 1985 a worst case scenario nuclear war breaks out between the West and East. Vast majority of Europe, North America, East Asia (China, Japan, Koreas, Taiwan) are devastated by an almost uni...

@zompist

Thanks for your answer.

Was that avocado reference intentional?

@Raphael

Note that in 20th century command economies the planning was done by hand while nowdays we have powerful computers with stuff like AI and Big Data

(Non economist here) In short - it's a theory developed by Mises and Hayek saying that a centrally planned economy can never match the efficiency of a market one because due to lack of price signals, the central planners will never be able to correctly determine the demand for each product, and they...