Burial at Sea by MONO https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEvpqR6B8ns

I find it helps to develop a mindset of thinking in terms of dynamic systems where you can identify forces acting upon the system and try to understand likely ways the system will evolve as whole. For example, if we’re dealing with capitalist relations be it today or a century ago, the forces within the system form an invariant. We have people who own substantial capital and those who do not. Their interests form a contradiction because they are fundamentally opposed to each other. If I’m a business owner then my desire is to minimize my costs an maximize profits, while if I’m a worker selling my labour I want to maximize my salary and benefits. Once we frame the problem in these terms we can try to think about potential resolutions to these contradictions, and that’s where historical record becomes informative. If we can identify similar situations in the past, they can inform us on what we can expect going forward.

Given the reactionary position people in tech are increasingly taking with AI, I think we know the answer to that.

I found this particular book was incredibly eye opening because it clarified a lot of the mechanics of how our system works for me. What I found most shocking was how it’s pretty clear exact same types of debates that we’re having today regarding reforming the system were happening a century ago. And that goes back to your original question of how relevant this stuff is. If we’re still having these same discussions about the same kinds of problems, then we have to inform ourselves on the history of these debates. There is a huge wealth of knowledge and experince that’s been built up that’s being ignored today.

The problem here is that businesses only think about their own needs, and nobody is actually running the nation as a whole. Businesses being in charge is akin to a bunch of cancers running amok and killing the host.

I really can’t recommend reading The State and Revolution enough. It is the most lucid explanation of what’s currently happening and why. It’s a short read and you’re going to be surprised how relevant it feels to the current moment. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/

The dynamics in Asia are indeed different, and China acts as a stabilizing force there. The economies there are hedging against the west, and they’re increasingly focusing on trade amongst themselves and the developing world.

Js is indeed painful. I find the right approach is to simply treat it as a compile target. I’ve worked with ClojureScript when I had to do front end work, and I find it’s a huge improvement because it has sane language semantics. You have things like proper equality, comparison by value, immutable data structures, and so on. It’s not perfect because you still have to deal with stuff like source maps to get errors out of minified bundles, and you have to interop when you deal with Js libraries, but it’s a huge improvement overall I’ve found.

I don’t think human society has fundamentally changed in a century. I think the problems the Bolsheviks dealt with stem from the exact same material relations as the problems we face today. Nobody has proposed a better solution that’s been demonstrated to work in the past century that I’m aware of.

Both world wars wore a direct result of capitalism, and had the Europeans not shat the bed after the Soviet revolution, we may have moved past the capitalist stage of development by now. The longer capitalist regimes are allowed to continue to exist the more likely the scenario you fear will come to pass.

https://redsails.org/witbd-rs-abridged/

The government doesn’t just exist in a vacuum as you seem to think. It represents the interests of those who hold power in a particular society. In the US, it is the capital owning class, and these are the people who decide to cut your healthcare, to gouge you for education, and so on. The government simply exercises their will. Entire books have been written on the subject, yet here you are confidently attempting to debate a topic you clearly haven’t spent even a few minutes thinking about.

Also, if a large central government was the problem, then we’d see the same kind of shit happening in China that’s happening under capitalist regimes.

Nah, they did it through the power of class dictatorship.

For the same reason Republicans haven’t released the Epstien client list. Many of them and their donors are on the list.

seems fine for me, here’s the content:

Mainland China is on track to surpass Taiwan in semiconductor foundry capacity by 2030, according to a report from Yole Group, underscoring Beijing’s progress in its push for chip self-sufficiency amid ongoing US tech restrictions. The mainland’s share of global foundry capacity is projected to reach 30 per cent by the end of the decade, up from 21 per cent in 2024, the French market research firm said. Taiwan is currently the market leader with a 23 per cent share last year, while mainland China is already ahead of South Korea at 19 per cent, Japan at 13 per cent and the US at 10 per cent. “Mainland China is rapidly becoming a central player,” Yole Group said, attributing the shift to Beijing’s intensified efforts to build a self-sufficient domestic semiconductor ecosystem since Washington launched a tech war that aimed to curb China’s progress in critical areas such as chips and artificial intelligence (AI). Beijing has doubled down on its “whole nation” approach to its self-sufficiency drive. The state-backed China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund, known as the “Big Fund”, has successfully fostered the development of key companies such as Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC) and Hua Hong Semiconductor, two of the country’s leading wafer foundries. Domestic fabs are set to play a bigger role over the next few years, according to the report, which said local chipmakers accounted for 15 per cent of foundry capacity in 2024. That share will be “significantly more” by 2030, the report said. Chinese chipmakers have been investing heavily in expanding their facilities to meet surging demand from sectors such as automotive and generative AI. China was expected to start three new fab construction projects this year, one-sixth of the world’s total, according to a report published in January by US-based industry association SEMI. China’s self-sufficiency strategy, along with expected demand from automotive and internet-of-things applications, would help boost capacity by 6 per cent for chips made with process nodes between 8 and 45 nanometres, SEMI added. Despite the projected gains, the mainland still trails Taiwan and South Korea in advanced process nodes, which are crucial for producing high-performance chips with greater transistor density. SMIC, China’s top foundry, had difficulty advancing its process nodes from 7-nm to 5-nm, Canadian research firm TechInsights said in a report last month. Two years after its 7-nm chip first appeared in a Huawei Technologies smartphone, “SMIC’s 5nm process node remains elusive,” TechInsights said. The report came after it looked into the chip used in Huawei’s new laptop with a foldable display, which also used 7-nm chips from SMIC. Meanwhile, global leaders Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) and Samsung Electronics are locked in a race to achieve mass production at the 2-nm node level. TSMC was expected to reach that level this year, while Samsung has reportedly planned to reach the same stage in early 2026.

I think a lot of it comes down to the historical advantages the US enjoyed since the end of WW2. A deep dive into the whole thing https://dialecticaldispatches.substack.com/p/the-stress-test-liberalism-never

I really don’t. The purpose of the US military industrial complex is to soak up as much tax money as possible and put it back in the hands of the oligarchs. Stockpiling arms goes directly against this principle because it requires maintaining factories, and weapons stores, curating supply chains, hiring many workers, and so on. All of that translates into costs. A much better approach is to create projects like F35 which are built in artisanal batches over many years, and require expensive maintenance contracts for function. You can suck up billions for each toy you deliver, and you don’t have to ramp up large scale production.

Other statistic indirectly show just how pitiful the industrial base in the US really is. For example, only 192,474 of American students pursue engineering degrees our of 3 million total degrees, a mere 6.4%. Not only that, but only 37% of students begin an engineering career after completing an engineering degree. The number of engineers acts as a proxy for technicians, skilled workers, and a general industrial capacity.

The lack of engineering talent is the reason Raytheon had to get retirees back to restart missile production.

I think that’s exactly what’s gonna happen in the long run. Right now we’re in the hype phase of a new technology, but one the hype dies down we’ll start identifying use cases where the tech actually works well. At the same time the tech itself is going to mature, and people will figure out how to work with it effectively.

Raytheon stock goes brrr, Raytheon output not so much.

Yeah, like how do they not see this project as being strategic for them.

A local park, looks especially awesome in fall when it’s foggy. Some pics from last year.