You know, you know how communism was supposed to be this nirvana where a central authority would collect all the information and dictate all operations for the good of the people? I.e. centrally planned economy? And in practice it didn't work out because of corruption and information bottlenecks and such?
I wonder if a corporation type org could actually make this work by going all in on AI deeply integrated into everything, code commits, tickets, slack, emails.. directing everything. So basically one boss with infinite bandwidth, that foresees and proactively preempts shadow hierarchies that are bound to form. Would be an interesting experiment.
USSR tried to digitize economy (OGAS) under Khrushchev but project was killed by pen and paper bureaucrats scared for their jobs. They barely would have had the resources to set it up though. Chile under Allende tried a similar short-lived socialist computer economy project called Cybersyn before the coup.
Marx apologists often point out he did not believe Russia could bypass capitalism on its own, without help from more advanced socialist countries formed by revolutions in the industrialized West. He also said the cotton gin was the engine of revolution and new technology has to come first before a new social system. The well known failures of command economies aside, arguably it did work with the right policies, especially when compared to other developing countries, it just didn't grow as fast as Western capitalism. The USSR didn't so much collapse as it was shut down by decree bc the leaders looked at the numbers and decided to give up.
Maybe the hypothetical bossless corp will be accidentally created by capitalism as more and more management positions are eliminated to save money.
Huge corporations like Walmart and Amazon are actually proof that central planning works. And that not planning internally is not viable, as Sears demonstrated.
But this internal planning is not enough and comes up against the limits of capitalism: production for profit and not for need, the market and the nation state. All these contributed to create a system where "too much is produced", that is too much compared to what can be sold for profit, not what is needed.
Ultimately what was missing in the Soviet Union, the democratic aspect of planning, is also what is missing today (on top of the other issues that come with production for profit).
> You know, you know how communism was supposed to be this nirvana where a central authority would collect all the information and dictate all operations for the good of the people?
Was it? Really? Doesn't sound like a commune to me. Sounds more like Walmart[0]. Marx did not specify a particular planning strategy; in fact, his co-author Engels said that "the time of... small conscious minorities at the head of masses lacking consciousness is past."
Peter Kropotkin envisions a decentralized, federated economy of communes. Murray Bookchin advocates for decentralized, directly democratic municipalities that federate and coordinate economic decisions from the bottom up. Rosa Luxemburg--co-founder of the Communist Party of Germany who famously warned "socialism or barbarism"--consistently critiqued centralism, asserting, eg "the errors committed by a truly revolutionary movement are infinitely more fruitful than the infallibility of the cleverest Central Committee."
"The essence of socialist society," Luxemburg declares in her 1918 What Does the Spartacus League Want?[1], "consists in the fact that the great laboring mass ceases to be a dominated mass, but rather, makes the entire political and economic life its own life and gives that life a conscious, free, and autonomous direction."
Whether or not that sounds particularly pleasant or effective, it's clearly not a proposal for central-planning.
TBH I don't know where that meme came from, it's something they used to harp on in Yugoslav schools before the breakup. But as a concept it certainly exists and I will beg your forgiveness for mixing it up with the history of socialism ideas salad. The point still doesn't change, can central planning finally succeed with smart enough technology such as new crop of AI seems to be? With fewer greedy/corrupt humans in the loop?
I dunno, we were "social mediaing" back in 2000s sometime, that's when most of the youth started posting pictures of themselves on the internet and using computers+webcams for communicating among ourselves, many of us used our Sony Ericsson (or similar) phones for taking pictures. I think that particular website that started it all, peaked around 2007 sometime, and was shut down by 2010 already, because of lack of activity. Plenty of sites between 2000-2010 that was the predators to modern social media too, some of them literally centered around sharing and commenting on images, kind of like Instagram, but way before.
For the impact to be felt as a generational shift that is observable IRL, the social media had to reach a certain point of critical mass. The apps/algo needed to be tweaked for addiction. It also become a firehose of content that was pretty realtime, so as to induce FOMO
Things like Flickr was a social site that had absolutely no impact on anyone’s behavior. There was no FOMO because it was just something you browsed at your own pace. Async web forums and email became synchronous chats. The phone started spending more time in your hand than your pocket.
Even things like streaming television wasn’t a binary but an evolution. Netflix streaming started in 2007. It wasn’t until 2012 they became a producer and started the binge phenomenon by releasing a full series all at once. Those first five years practically didn’t matter for Netflix. Many people saw no advantage over the traditional DVD shipping service. Once binging began people were jumping onto the streaming service in droves. It still took a few more years to really reach a point of saturation. Then, there was massive cord cutting and birth of the streaming service landscape of today that is heavily fragmented. But also provides an unlimited supply of entertainment that keeps people appeased and out of meatspace.
Wouldn't it be great if we had a simulator like the MIT violin simulator [1] but for cooking ingredients! Then you don't have to throw out pounds of perfectly good ingredients just because broccoli doesn't go with Nutella.
I have a hard time believing that that weak an acid can have a noticeable effect vs just the extra cooking time. Sorry for being a skeptic :-) Most of the time I deal with beef either it's the particular chunk of meat I bought that day or marinating it in salt for over a day or just stewing it for a long amount of time.
Once upon a time I had a car, a daily driver. I kept it clean, vacuum/wash/polish with crazy waxes and the works. Stressed out about people riding with dirty shoes, drinks, etc., and when I asked myself why, the usual self-justification was "ah it's for the resale value." Hearing relatives get charged various fees at lease returns just fed that attitude, even though I owned the car outright. One day it was time to replace the car, so I brought it to the dealer as tradein. They scanned the VIN, looked in their computer, and just quoted me a price without ever looking at the car, either cosmetics or mechanicals. That was the day I decided that I own the cars, not the other way around, and this attitude slowly expanded to real estate too ;). So now there is a clover field in our front yard and I ripped out the irrigation too. When we eventually sell this home in 2060 the buyers can take it or leave it
Of course, you should never sell the car to the dealer and should always make the effort to sell private party, which will often get you 50% or more greater than the dealers best offer.
50% is a stretch. 20% maybe, depending on the vehicle.
But here is another consideration. Sales tax. If I buy a car and trade one in, the sale price that I pay taxes on is the price of the vehicle I am buying minus the trade in.
For instance, if I buy a new car for $30,000 and trade in a vehicle and they give me $15k for it, I pay sales tax only on $15k. That saves me about $1k in my area in sales tax. If I could have sold the used car for over $16k, then I would technically be money ahead. But your time is also worth something. For it to be worth it to me, I would need to be able to get at least $17k for the used vehicle to make it worth the effort.
Yes there are all those arguments. But it's a lot more work for still a pitiful amount of money.
Then on top of that after COVID dealer gave me $5k tradein for an Ecoboost car with a leaking cylinder wall, check engine light, missing parts, etc. where KBB was less than that. I really don't get it.
> But it's a lot more work for still a pitiful amount of money
It’s really not a lot of work and if $2000+ for a few hours work is pitiful, I envy your financial position. List on Craigslist at bottom market prices (you’ll still come out way ahead of the dealer), aggressively filter out tire kickers, sell it within 3-4 showings.
The law is very favorable to people being allowed to sell their personal vehicle without jumping through additional regulatory hoops.
The sales tax deduction makes up most of the difference between private party and dealer resale. For a lot of people getting that last little bit of equity isn't worth the time, hassle and fraud risk
> I think we've seen this play out before with other tech companies where discounting early use ends up entrenching demand and allowing the company to build larger and more efficient infrastructure.
We've also seen failures who were convinced "they would make it up in volume." I guess the bet is that infra will get that much more efficient, but it's not clear how much slack there is.
A lot - and over the coming 2 years, even more. Utilization rates are under 50% across the board, and special and cheaper chips are coming out all the time for inference. And a truckload of research - TurboQuant, HC (deepseek), etc, etc..
Gnutella was decentralized like Freenet, but it's broadcast search approach limited scalability relative to Freenet's "small-world" approach which can scale indefinitely.
I wonder if a corporation type org could actually make this work by going all in on AI deeply integrated into everything, code commits, tickets, slack, emails.. directing everything. So basically one boss with infinite bandwidth, that foresees and proactively preempts shadow hierarchies that are bound to form. Would be an interesting experiment.
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