☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆
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a common theme song among capitalist economies
1·17 hours agoapparently this one https://lemmy.ml/post/4082699 bigger version since original pic is gone
and that’s the top comment https://lemmy.ml/post/5534638/4219049
Here’s how it tends to happen I find. You start with a small, well-understood problem, and it’s faster to code it yourself than to find some off the shelf library. Then you inevitably start getting constant “just one more thing” requests. You keep bolting on features until, oops, you’ve accidentally rebuilt an existing tool. By then, switching would require a massive rewrite, so you’re stuck maintaining your Frankenstein solution forever.
2·21 hours agoSticking head in the sand is the standard practice here.
I mean that’s why you read the article? 🤷
Given that the title literally
non-nuclearin the title, there’s absolutely nothing misleading about it.
What actually happened in Germany was that capitalists funded the nazis, and social democrats sided with them against the communists.
After World War I, Italy had settled into a pattern of parliamentary democracy. The low pay scales were improving, and the trains were already running on time. But the capitalist economy was in a postwar recession. Investments stagnated, heavy industry operated far below capacity, and corporate profits and agribusiness exports were declining.
To maintain profit levels, the large landowners and industrialists would have to slash wages and raise prices. The state in turn would have to provide them with massive subsidies and tax exemptions. To finance this corporate welfarism, the populace would have to be taxed more heavily, and social services and welfare expenditures would have to be drastically cut - measures that might sound familiar to us today. But the government was not completely free to pursue this course. By 1921 , many Italian workers and peasants were unionized and had their own political organizations. With demonstrations, strikes, boycotts, factory takeovers, and the forceable occupation of farmlands, they had won the right to organize, along with concessions in wages and work conditions.
To impose a full measure of austerity upon workers and peasants, the ruling economic interests would have to abolish the democratic rights that helped the masses defend their modest living standards. The solution was to smash their unions, political organizations, and civil liberties. Industrialists and big landowners wanted someone at the helm who could break the power of organized workers and farm laborers and impose a stern order on the masses. For this task Benito Mussolini, armed with his gangs of Blackshirts, seemed the likely candidate.
In 1922, the Federazione Industriale, composed of the leaders of industry, along with representatives from the banking and agribusiness associations, met with Mussolini to plan the “March on Rome,” contributing 20 million lire to the undertaking. With the additional backing of Italy’s top military officers and police chiefs, the fascist “revolution”- really a coup d’etat - took place.
In Germany, a similar pattern of complicity between fascists and capitalists emerged. German workers and farm laborers had won the right to unionize, the eight-hour day, and unemployment insurance. But to revive profit levels, heavy industry and big finance wanted wage cuts for their workers and massive state subsidies and tax cuts for themselves.
During the 1920s, the Nazi Sturmabteilung or SA, the brown shirted storm troopers, subsidized by business, were used mostly as an antilabor paramilitary force whose function was to terrorize workers and farm laborers. By 1930, most of the tycoons had concluded that the Weimar Republic no longer served their needs and was too accommodating to the working class. They greatly increased their subsidies to Hitler, propelling the Nazi party onto the national stage. Business tycoons supplied the Nazis with generous funds for fleets of motor cars and loudspeakers to saturate the cities and villages of Germany, along with funds for Nazi party organizations, youth groups, and paramilitary forces. In the July 1932 campaign, Hitler had sufficient funds to fly to fifty cities in the last two weeks alone.
In that same campaign the Nazis received 37.3 percent of the vote, the highest they ever won in a democratic national election. They never had a majority of the people on their side. To the extent that they had any kind of reliable base, it generally was among the more affluent members of society. In addition, elements of the petty bourgeoisie and many lumpenproletariats served as strong-arm party thugs, organized into the SA storm troopers. But the great majority of the organized working class supported the Communists or Social Democrats to the very end.
In the December 1932 election, three candidates ran for president: the conservative incumbent Field Marshal von Hindenburg, the Nazi candidate Adolph Hitler, and the Communist party candidate Ernst Thaelmann. In his campaign, Thaelmann argued that a vote for Hindenburg amounted to a vote for Hitler and that Hitler would lead Germany into war. The bourgeois press, including the Social Democrats, denounced this view as “Moscow inspired.” Hindenburg was re-elected while the Nazis dropped approximately two million votes in the Reichstag election as compared to their peak of over 13.7 million.
True to form, the Social Democrat leaders refused the Communist party’s proposal to form an eleventh-hour coalition against Nazism. As in many other countries past and present, so in Germany, the Social Democrats would sooner ally themselves with the reactionary Right than make common cause with the Reds. Meanwhile a number of right-wing parties coalesced behind the Nazis and in January 1933, just weeks after the election, Hindenburg invited Hitler to become chancellor.
2·3 days agoSure that’s fair, and definitely agree that it is worth learning from each other to make the left more effective as a whole. For what it’s worth, I am rather partial to ideas from anarcho-syndicalism, and I think it’s absolutely the correct way to organize labor.
Oh yeah that’s a good use case as well, it’s a kind of a low risk and tedious task where these things excel at.
It’s cause their oligarch owned media told them it was true, and the oligarchs would never lie.
That’s what I find appealing about anarchism - focusing on organizing people and building the new world now, in your community, in whatever ways you can.
I don’t see how that’s exclusive to anarchism, communists do the exact same thing and that’s a prerequisite for having any sort of a revolution. The difference is that communists organize with this greater goal in mind and they accept the necessary power structures from the start. That’s why communists have managed to achieve many successful revolutions around the world.
We’re at a point where we need to get people organized at all, and the best way to do that is to start making their lives tangibly better.
Sure, the west is no where close to a revolutionary moment right now, and any kind of organizing is ultimately better than no organizing. We can agree on that.
I love how wasps think they know better than people actually living in China. 🤣
I find they’re pretty good at some coding tasks. For example, it’s very easy to make a reasonable UI given a sample JSON payload you might get from an endpoint. They’re good at doing stuff like crafting farily complex SQL queries or making shell scripts. As long as the task is reasonably focused, they tend to get it right a lot of the time. I find they’re also useful for discovering language features working with languages I’m not as familiar with. I also find LLMs are great at translation and transcribing images. They’re also useful for summaries and finding information within documents, including codebases. I’ve found it makes it a lot easier to search through papers where you might want to find relationships between concepts or definitions for things. They’re also good at subtitle generation and well as doing text to speech tasks. Another task I find they’re great at is proofreading and providing suggestions for phrasing. They can also make a good sounding board. If there’s a topic you understand, and you just want to bounce ideas off, it’s great to be able to talk through that with a LLM. Often the output it produces can stimulate a new idea in my head. I also use LLM as a tutor when I practice Chinese, they’re great for doing free form conversational practice when learning a new language. These are a just a few areas I use LLMs in on nearly daily basis now.
Pretty much the only way a new computing substrate will be developed is through massive government funding. No company will spend billions of dollars and years of research on something that may or may not pan out in the end. It’s just too much risk coupled with lack of short term profit. Meanwhile, the US has convinced Chinese government that they need to start doing precisely this kind of long term investment into computing tech, and now we’re seeing a huge amount of innovation coming out of China in this domain.
The LLM is what I use to build the specific UI using the components from these great UI libraries. There’s practically no logic involved here, it’s just handling layout for components and hooking up events. It’s fantastic to be able to take a JSON payload from an endpoint throw it at a model and get a reasonable UI in seconds.
Meanwhile in the real world:
Quality of nutrition improved after the Soviet revolution, and the last time USSR had a famine was in 1940s. CIA data suggests they ate just as much as Americans after WW2 peroid while having better nutrition:
Professor of Economic History, Robert C. Allen, concludes in his study without the 1917 revolution is directly responsible for rapid growth
Study demonstrating the steady increase in quality of life during the Soviet period (including under Stalin). Includes the fact that Soviet life expectancy grew faster than any other nation recorded at the time:
A large study using world bank data analyzing the quality of life in Capitalist vs Socialist countries and finds overwhelmingly at similar levels of development with socialism bringing better quality of life:
This study compared capitalist and socialist countries in measures of the physical quality of life (PQL), taking into account the level of economic development.
This study shows that unprecedented mortality crisis struck Eastern Europe during the 1990s, causing around 7 million excess deaths. The first quantitative analysis of the association between deindustrialization and mortality in Eastern Europe.
Romania, the inustrialization of an agrarian economy under socialist planning
Like every technological advancement before it, AI under capitalism will inevitably become a tool for human exploitation. The issue was never the technology itself, it’s the rotten social and economic system that determines its use. The West’s profit-driven relations guarantee even our brightest innovations will be weaponized against workers.