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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: November 17th, 2024

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  • In a free country, you can tell the government to go fuck itself without a mask

    Political infrastructure works well until it is not. U.S. used to have okay political infrastructure in protecting democracy, then patriot’s act happened and many of its loophole identified, now president can just kidnap a foreign president as “law enforcement”.

    I would love a system where people don’t have any need to be anynomized, it would make many things much simpler, but that seems hard to imagine for me. And I am not from the U.S. and I have lived in both U.S., U.K., and outside of the west, so it is likely not caused by “U.S. brainwashing”.

    I am not entirely sure what is the “EU secret sauce” to prevent Politician in utilizing these loopholes or strong centiments to gradually regulate speech. One day, they might be able to make use of these data. People in U.S. protested, they shot protester, and no one can protest forever, unfortunately. I am curious what would prevent EU to replay what US have now, except with much much more targeted data at the government’s disposal.







  • Sounds pretty ideal. I am not political scientist, nor do I think political scientist can have solid prediction about success of a macro political system at this level of a abstraction – it is simply too complex of a system.

    I feel from the past experiment regarding socialism, there seems to be a conflict between large state and large state serving the will of the people. Power corrupt: for a social democracy to be functional, I believe needs to have (at least the following) two characteristic:

    1. Most people should not have to feel the worry for the lack of resources. Thus, wealth display will naturally be unnesscary, if not frowned upon. Eliminating the culture of admiring people with excessive assets.
    2. A strong democratic system that discourages the consolidation of power under a couple oligarchs.

  • Socialism only states the public ownership of means of production (sometimes called capital), but there is no requirement in the removal of market.

    One of the way socialism can develop is when the cost of capital is way below cost of labour, making worker owning their own capital trivial.

    However, there is really no requirement on the side of removal of market, universal healthcare, or universal educations etc; these are often consequence of a strong public sector and (at least attempts at) efficient allocation of resource through said public power. In most places people usually equate socialism with big government, that IMO really is Marx-Leninism (which is formulated by neither Marx or Lenin, but Stalin).

    Marxism–Leninism holds that a two-stage communist revolution is needed to replace capitalism. A vanguard party, organized through democratic centralism, would seize power on behalf of the proletariat and establish a one-party communist state. The state would control the means of production, suppress opposition, counter-revolution, and the bourgeoisie, and promote Soviet collectivism, to pave the way for an eventual communist society that would be classless and stateless.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxism–Leninism

    Either with market or not, in a socialist society, worker are still compensated for their labor and expertise. In the scenario I described earlier, even more than a capitalist society, since labor is the more valuable resource given the low value of capital.









  • Engineers can laterally move to more prestigious or challenging projects if they prove worthy based on their skills and connections. One former staffer tells WIRED that this made the company feel like a meritocracy where the best people, and the best ideas, naturally rise to the top.

    I am very interested in the culture and psychology of these supposed “meritocratic” companies. Personally, I don’t believe we have a reasonable approximation of the hyper-efficient merit-based resource allocation that is promoted by the ultra-rich.

    Usually I find these so-called “meritocratic” policies do not encourage good ideas, but enable hyper-competitive environments.

    These kind of environments likely do not support solid well-thought-out proposals; instead, pushes the quick implementation of mediocre ideas (a.k.a move fast and break things). A hyper-competitive environment can also discourage collaboration, which often can be crucial to “solve the hard problems”.

    And the article mentions that this environment boosts employee retention, which I find extremely interesting. I wonder if the constant competitions can keep triggering a sense of “winning” and “accomplishment” in a perhaps mundane job.