I'd say it's arguably a degenerate case, but it's very arguable.
Few people would claim that each position in an order is a different category. And if I asked someone to categorise a pile of papers and they handed me back a single stack, I'd be unimpressed.
I think part of your question is, why does every p2p app not work on all platforms equally well. This is true of pretty much 90% of apps and software - they don't work on all platforms equally well. This is because of conscious design and business decisions taken by the builders.
I recall reading about one suggestion for using high altitude "kites", and i could have sworn i have also seen one where the sails would be more similar to what you find on a Junk.
In both instances the operations would be largely computer controlled, and reserved for the open seas.
The prices of modern appliances have come down due to really intricate miniaturization of many components, which enables larger scale manufacturing and cheaper supply chains.
Because of the prices being low, it's not really worth it to repair consumer goods anymore. And if it's worth it in some cases (iPhone), it can only be done by a specialist due to the extreme miniaturization.
I've discovered that modern appliances are repairable, thanks to the internet. There are people that have been making a business based on supplying parts (for example for made-in-China GE dishwashers) and videos on how to install them.
I think it's more accurate to say that first world labor costs are such that it's not usually worth it to pay someone to fix your devices these days, but it's becoming easier to DIY.
I also fixed an old laptop based on mail order parts and a youtube video. It really gave me a sense of accomplishment because I turned to programming computers very young partly out of ineptness with mechanical devices.
Yeah, the Internet is a godsend to people who repair their own appliances. For the most part you just have to figure out what's wrong (most appliances are pretty simple, so this isn't very hard), then look at the part for a model number and punch it into Google. Failing that you can enter the model number of the appliance and often get a parts list. The part you get usually won't be an exact match, but it should work, although you may have to fabricobble a bracket if the new part isn't the same size/shape or has mounting holes in a different location. This is pretty rare though, usually it's just bolting the part on.
This is also when you discover that even though Frigidare may sell dozens or hundreds of different fridge models at wildly different price points over the years, most of them use basically the same innards.
The key for someone like me is a site with videos for every little part for the exact model of appliance. And troubleshooting information, and possible causes of a symptom ranked by customer experience %.
There have always been DIYers, but I cannot do much of anything with just a service manual or parts list.
Sewing machines are hard to miniaturize. I'll give you that the newer crop are cheaper, but they will also only last a fraction of the time, that decrease in price has also come at the expense of quality.
Not that that matters as much any more, people tend to buy clothing rather than make clothing, this particular machine was a wedding gift from my grandfather (a tailor) to my mother and it was meant to last a lifetime, so that the family would have clothes to wear. Making clothing was so common nobody thought anything special of the skill involved, everybody could do it!
But if you tried to seriously keep a family of four clothed today based on fabric bought and a modern day sewing machine you'd be buying new sewing machines ever few years.
Modern sewing machines are cheaper because the intricately machined cams and drive mechanisms that connected the upper mechanism that moves the needle to the lower mechanism that moves the bobbin are no longer used. They're replaced by a pair of stepper motors that are driven by a microcontroller. Instead of having collars and set screws to adjust timing, it's all solidly built and ruined the minute the stepper motor slips or a tiny plastic part breaks and something no longer actuates. They're unrepairable because you'd have to get the actual OEM somewhere in China to release the source code and put a jtag pinout on their boards rather than getting the chips loaded at the factory where the main board is made. That's the difference. Same reason that cam machines have been replaced with vertical machining centers -- CNC is just waaaay cheaper.
Conversely, back in the days if you had any kind of a significant IBM mainframe installation you had an IBM technician if not a team of them on an on-site contract to keep the thing running. The idea of an unattended data center, filled with computers that can run reliably for years untouched, was unthinkable then.
When I was still working with mainframes we used the IBM diagnostics on a Sperry machine (it could emulate the IBM instruction set), they were so much better than the Sperry ones that hardware faults would be isolated much quicker.
One of the best hackers I ever worked with (a guy called Paul Poelenije, unfortunately deceased) had figured out how to load the microcode store and to pull this trick, I'm pretty sure that both IBM and Sperry would have been horrified at it in equal measures. For an encore, he wrote a completely new filesystem in assembler, and used it in production for the bank we both worked for. How he got away with that I'll never know but somehow he managed to get the blessing for his pet projects from the manager of the systems programming division to who I'm going to be eternally indebted because he had a big say in me coming to work for the IT department instead of the mailroom.
Those Sperry's were massive machines, the two mainframes (primary and backup, or production and test depending on what we were up to) + peripherals took up all of one floor of a very large office building and there were always at least several people on duty to keep them running. This was mid 1980's and punch cards were still being used with some regularity.
And, all things considered, India's hardly done "terribly".
It's a remarkable achievement to maintain a united, democratic, mostly peaceful nation for 70 years straight (and counting). Most former colonies collapsed into destructive civil war, then military rule, within decades of independence. India has so far avoided that fate. Heck, most developed European countries have barely managed to avoid it in the past century.
India has as much (probably more than) linguistic, cultural, ethnic and religious variety as the European continent, far lower levels of education, absurd amounts of competition for resources, education, and jobs due to population pressure. All of those things are potential triggers for conflict and civil war.
I can't comment about other countries that may or may not have lived up to their economic potential (Brazil, Argentina, Russia etc) because I know next to nothing about them. But India is doing terrifically well, considering the hand we were dealt.
The colonies that fell apart we're ones where there wasn't much organization and what organization existed was for resource extraction.
The Dominions were built for settlement, so they were sustainable states. India and other Asian colonies already had their own very established cultures and civilizations, and hence fared much better.
Pretty remarkable India hasn't exploded into separatism due to resource pressure, but I don't know how sustainable that is given that the population is still increasing
It's hard to compare India to any other country except for China. No other nation is of a comparable size. It's all well and good to say "well Japan, South Korea, Singapore did great after being devastated by war and depression and famine". Just like software, scale matters for national development.
Japan post-war still had the relative advantages of having been an advanced industrial nation pre-war, with all that that entails: educated population, knowledge of how to run industry and finance, culture of industrial entrepreneurship etc. Plus it got tons of help from the US getting back to its feet. Ditto for South Korea; US help to keep them from falling over to the Communists. Both nations are also relatively homogenous ethnically, religiously, and culturally.
Singapore is tiny: a city-state. It's half the population of metropolitan Mumbai and has 1/3rd higher GDP. If Mumbai was an independent city-state with immigration controls, we'd likely be talking about it as an up-and-coming Asian tiger.
I'm not downplaying any of these countries' achievements. They are tremendous and they've done very well for themselves. I'm just pointing out the context of their achievements and how that doesn't apply to India.
I think it's impossible to say India hasn't lived up to its full potential because we can't run history backward and forward like a simulation, change a thing here (eg. make India a liberal free-market economy in the 60s instead of a closed, socialist one) and see the difference. China is doing great now but they had to go through the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution on the way there. India is doing not-as-well but at least millions didn't die.
Plunder is a silly excuse. Whatever plunder, it's been over for a long time. A lot of countries have managed to grow very fast from abject poverty to first-world status. Japan. South Korea. Argentina (then reverted -- what foreign power plundered them from the 50s onward, eh?!). The U.S., naturally. And others.
China is the latest: from the depths of the Great Leap Forward (backward) to now. And that's even though China too was plundered. That's a huge "so what" to the plunder thing.
Stop making excuses.
Incidentally, Argentina is a hugely important case-study. It was never really plundered. Its history has tremendous parallels to the United States', oddly enough. It had a tremendous growth between the 1880s and the Great Depression, and grew to be one of the wealthiest countries in the world at the time of WWII. Yet somehow it has missed out on decades of growth potential, and is now full of shanty towns, with a huge proportion of the population in true poverty (not what we call poverty in the U.S.). HOW IN THE WORLD DID THAT HAPPEN?! There were no significant wars in Argentina since its peak. There has been no foreign power plunder in Argentina in that time. The make-up of the population didn't change much. So what happened?? Well, it's easy to see what happened there: bad ideas.
"People, ideas, materiel. In that order!" - John Boyd, COL, USAF.
It's really isn't. "Colonial plunder" isn't a horde of soldiers rampaging through your country taking your gold and women. Colonial plunder is generations upon generations of domestic industry killed by high taxes to favor imports from the ruling country, turning peasants into serfs bonded to the land to pay taxes, exploiting and inflaming pre-existing class, caste, and religious differences time and time again to keep the people from uniting against the rulers. People (at large; there are outliers) stop getting an education or starting any business larger than a shop because what's the point? The financial system doesn't grow beyond small moneylenders. People become bitter and try to keep the little they have from their grasping neighbors, everyone fighting over the few crumbs the ruling country throws you. For hundreds of years.
> A lot of countries have managed to grow very fast from abject poverty to first-world status. Japan. South Korea.
As I mentioned in my reply to your other comment, they are much smaller, and had plenty of help from the US. Do you have any other examples?
> China is the latest: from the depths of the Great Leap Forward (backward) to now. And that's even though China too was plundered. That's a huge "so what" to the plunder thing.
Incontestably true; India hasn't done as well as China. China still isn't quite a developed country yet and India is maybe 20 years behind China. I don't think it's a great shame to come second to China. Their political system has always optimized for getting things done no matter the cost. India went a different, maybe softer, way. Probably not even deliberately, I'll admit.
To this day it saddens me when middle-class, educated, relatively well-off Indians say things like "I wish we had a government like China's so our roads won't have potholes anymore".
I don't think colonial plunder remotely explains Latin America. Also, why aren't plunderer Spain and Portugal super-wealthy? (Incidentally, the degree of "colonial plunder" in Latin America varies a great deal, from genocidal in Mexico, to practically none in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, but economic performance of the entire region has been lackluster, with the exception of Argentina between the 1880s and the 1930s.)
You're not entirely wrong about the impact of plunder being many generations-long, because, for example, Paraguay's bad performance almost certainly goes back (at least in part) to the ruinous Triple Alliance War, way, way back in the 1870s (in that war Paraguay lost almost all its males aged 12-60). But it doesn't have to be like that, and it isn't always. If it had to be like that then Europe might never have risen again after WWI or WWII, yet there it is. South Korea wouldn't have risen after Japan's occupation of it. China wouldn't either after the Japanese war, or the Opium wars.
> > A lot of countries have managed to grow very fast from abject poverty to first-world status. Japan. South Korea.
> As I mentioned in my reply to your other comment, they are much smaller, and had plenty of help from the US. Do you have any other examples?
Sure. I mentioned Argentina in another post, which grew fabulously fast between the 1880s and the Great Depression. China, of course, I mentioned above. Since the Industrial Revolution I think we've had these amazing growth stories: UK, US, Germany, Argentina, Japan, Japan and Germany again, South Korea, China. I'm probably missing a few. Many others had less spectacular but steady growth rates (think Australia, Canada, France, ...).
As for China, it's certainly on the cusp of first-world status. They have... a lot of bad ideas weighing them down though. The SOEs, for example, and the state-owned banks and their terrible lending practices, financial repression, unbelievable malinvestment following the 2008 crisis, unresponsive government, corruption, pollution, and so on. These bad ideas could easily sink China just as a very different set of bad ideas sank Argentina.
My thesis here is that some ideas are bad, and some are _terrible_, and others are at least not bad enough to crush the human creative spirit. Peronism (Argentina) falls into the 'bad' category, while Maoism (China) falls into the 'terrible' category. Capitalism inarguably is at least neither bad nor terrible -- I would argue it's awesome, and that it's not even an idea, but rather what results when you have freedom (which _is_ an idea, and a very good one at that), but I'm willing to let you have the last word (for this post's threads anyways) to the contrary provided you're willing to tell me how it is worse than Peronism or Maoism, or even just comparable to either (please don't blame Belgium's genocides in Congo on capitalism; that's a very lame and boring argument).
To me all of this is blindingly obvious. Again, the Argentine example is instructive, as it is one of the fantastic growth stories, but one that ended poorly when bad ideas were applied. China is another great example, with the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution being calamitous, with the rape of Nanking and the Opium wars not all that far in the past, yet it rose up when Deng Xiaoping put an end to the Maoist nonsense and brought a good enough measure of individual freedom (at least to trade) back into the picture, and then China bloomed. The difference between Mao's and Xiaoping's China is so stark that it is impossible not to see it as the difference between awful ideas on one hand and at-least-OKish ideas on the other.
The Argentina/China examples cannot be explained otherwise than above, or at least I've not seen alternative explanations -- none! not even unbelievable ones, or at least I don't recall any. China is certainly a counter-example to the plunder-explains-it-all theory. Though I expect that you'll tell me that the plunder of China was minimal in proportion to its population (but recall that the famines of the Great Leap Forward were not minimal that way!). At the end of the day, good ideas can lift a nation from a poor history, or they can sink it from a great history -- this much should be clear, and if that's true, then plunder is no excuse, or not enough of an excuse anyways.
This debate about the impact of plunder reminds me too of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. Prussia won that, and imposed what it thought would be crushing reparations on France, which it intended to use to improve the wealth of the German people. But it didn't work. France managed to borrow what it needed to pay those reparations, underwent very fast growth, and paid off its debt in just a few years, all the while Germany under-performed. One might call what Prussia did "plunder" (is it not?), yet it failed, just as the Versailles reparations in the other direction after WWI had the same exact effect, but reversed because the reparations direction reversed too. Plunder is not the explanation that you think it is -- it can be in specific cases, but may not even be a good rule of thumb.
> Also, why aren't plunderer Spain and Portugal super-wealthy?
Well they're not exactly poor either. They're still considered first-world, advanced nations. And they've had some "bad ideas" like, military rule, since the end of colonialism. Seems like their past plunder has insulated them somewhat from these missteps.
> Since the Industrial Revolution I think we've had these amazing growth stories: UK, US, Germany, Argentina...Many others had less spectacular but steady growth rates (think Australia, Canada, France, ...).
Right but the thing all these countries have in common: they weren't under the colonial yoke during the Industrial Revolution like India was (Argentina attained independence in 1816, for example). India wasn't allowed to have an Industrial Revolution; it was suppressed by British tax and trade policies. Don't you think that's at least a partial explanation for why India's behind today?
Post WW2 Japan, Germany don't count: they still had most of their pre-war population and memory of being a prosperous society. South Korea benefited from generous US aid (and still does, in terms of military aid). The US was highly incentivized to help SK as much as possible because they feared it turning communist. India, at the time of Independence, hadn't been a prosperous nation for at least 200 years; the educated, skilled class was tiny.
> Capitalism inarguably is at least neither bad nor terrible -- I would argue it's awesome, and that it's not even an idea, but rather what results when you have freedom (which _is_ an idea, and a very good one at that), but I'm willing to let you have the last word (for this post's threads anyways) to the contrary provided you're willing to tell me how it is worse than Peronism or Maoism, or even just comparable to either
I'm with you all the way there. I never contested the benefits of capitalism for a country; it has a much better track record than Peronism or Maoism. The evidence shows it's been great for poverty reduction. But, and I keep coming back to this, India didn't have the opportunity to determine its own economic policy until only 70 years ago. And we ended up with a socialist for our first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. Arguably he earned the right to be the Prime Minister by being the most prominent freedom struggle leader after Mahatma Gandhi and he was accordingly popular, no matter his economic policies. You can't legislate for randomness like that.
> My thesis here is that some ideas are bad, and some are _terrible_, and others are at least not bad enough to crush the human creative spirit.
To me it seems like there's two ways for good ideas to take hold: the people have the freedom to choose their leaders, can recognize good ideas and choose accordingly, or the government isn't democratic but the leadership is "enlightened" and focused on national development over personal enrichment (or at least makes development a priority).
In India's case it had a government focused on enriching Britain till 1947. Afterwards voters simply voted for the most popular guy (sort of like George Washington) who happened to be a socialist who espoused five-year plans and centrally-planned growth. Remember, at the time, those ideas hadn't been completely discredited. And this may be slightly controversial but, lacking any sort of democratic or political culture, and having a low level of education on average, voters may simply not have known "good" ideas from "bad". As a counterpoint, he US didn't initially have universal suffrage: only white property-owning males could vote. This, while unfair, ensured that voters were educated, somewhat prosperous, and invested in growth rather than populist handouts. Whereas by the time India attained independence, universal suffrage was expected of any democracy.
Also an important factor: the nation isn't acted upon by negative external forces. Chile, Argentina, Guatemala (to name just 3 South American underachievers) have suffered from foreign countries (I won't name which ones but it's easy to find on Wikipedia) financing military coups and assassinations against socialist leaders and socialist governments. You can argue all you want that a socialist government isn't good for growth but any democratically-elected government has more legitimacy than a military junta.
There's so many factors that can blunt the impact of good ideas or ensure they never take root.
> To me all of this is blindingly obvious. Again, the Argentine example is instructive, as it is one of the fantastic growth stories, but one that ended poorly when bad ideas were applied. China is another great example, with the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution being calamitous, with the rape of Nanking and the Opium wars not all that far in the past, yet it rose up when Deng Xiaoping put an end to the Maoist nonsense and brought a good enough measure of individual freedom (at least to trade) back into the picture, and then China bloomed.
And what I'm saying is history is far more random than that. What if Mao had been replaced by someone with even worse ideas? What if they'd gone to a liberal democracy immediately rather than a government laser-focused on development at the cost of everything else?
