You're gonna need to expand on that one. As is, it sounds like you're saying Cold War domino theory is a live concern in 2023, but that would be just too absurd a position to imagine anyone seriously taking.
In any case, what cost MacArthur his job was putting too many toes over the bright line of civilian control of the military. I don't think Minihan's being as brazen about trying to influence policy as MacArthur was, but I suspect he may be being brazen enough, both from someone having leaked this memo in the first place, and from this:
> A U.S. defense official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, said that Minihan’s comments “are not representative of the department’s view on China.”
If you don't know how to read these things, let me help you: this is DoD/military bureaucracy speak for "he fucked up."
Or this could have been leaked purposefully to send a signal to China that the US prepared for war if it acts against Taiwan—even if the official position is more diplomatic.
A deliberate leak to reinforce a hawkish foreign policy stance, for one thing, doesn't come out of a staff command. For another, it doesn't get disavowed by DoD in the military's official news outlet. There's a significant difference between "deniable" and "denied".
Doubt, those companies are in an even worse position - all the money that rushed in to fund them just got turned off.
The ones that will do well for the coming economic cycle are the ones that are the IBM/Oracle/Cisco tier.
Microsoft and Amazon have never had operating losses, not ever.
Google and Facebook did. But they are the product of a very blue ocean for their respective markets. The first people who did it will were going to absolutely clean up, and both of their current strategies are focused on finding the next market that works that way and get there first.
That business model isn't plausible in a high rate environment.
The industrial revolution moved 90% of workers out of farming, yes 90% of employment in 1870 was agricultural, literally producing calories.
We sometimes mourn for this in the form of back to the land pastoralism, but quality of life empirics suggest the industrial revolution was a benefit anyway.
Instead of luddism, we should try to find ways that the coming apocalypse of white collar knowledge work can benefit humanity as a whole, and learn from our mistakes in the rust belt.
Ned Ludd's premise was of the quality of autonomy and life of the workers that were being automated. As automation came in, workers got less money, treated worse, and had worse lives.
Being called a 'Luddite' was NEVER about technology, but whom gains from technology.
And I dare-say he was right in his concerns. The gains of technology are privatized by the owner class, even though we worker class are the ones who utilize them. One needs to look no further than the "gig economy".
> quality of life empirics suggest the industrial revolution was a benefit anyway. [citation needed]
I'm not trying to stuff AI back into Pandora's box. It's here, and it's coming. It can be a really great thing, or it can be catastrophic. So I mostly agree with your last point. But it we're going to talk about learning from our mistakes, the industrial revolution gave us The Jungle, and Amazon, and the obliteration of The Amazon.
Things didn't work out for the best; many of them worked out horribly. And things that did work out did so because the road was paved with human bodies (and tens of billions of nonhuman bodies).
The Luddites were not broadly opposed to new technology, they were opposed to the ownership structure which cut them out of the higher profits the new technology brought.
> We sometimes mourn for this in the form of back to the land pastoralism, but quality of life empirics suggest the industrial revolution was a benefit anyway.
Nope. That 'moved workforce' started living in industrial slums and dying at a ripe old age of ~40 instead of living until their late 60s.
Technology and science changed the living standards. Not capitalism or industrial revolution by themselves. In fact, average age for adults was already within 60-70 range before the industrial revolution - what brought down the averages was children dying early. Medicine during scientific revolution solved that. In that period, every bit of knowledge was being shared openly by everyone, entire science and technology was open source.
In fact Capitalist mode of economics has changed that. It pushed patents, and it started to monopolize and control science and technology starting from the latter part of the 19th century. That is also why the pace of scientific progress slows down around that time.
That link is unhinged. It considers people to be self-sufficient on mere subsistence. A society which creates collective incentives towards collaboration and away from violent domination, creating wealth and value in excess of subsistence, and opening up the massive quality of life increase to all, is a significant departure in a positive direction from mere subsistence for an agrarian peasant that survives at the whim of people who could brutally and violently take from them.
That has to be the most hilariously and sadly unhinged reading and retelling of history I have ever seen. A wonderful example of lying with truths. The author seems to be part of a communist online writer collective, I suppose that should be unsurprising given the subject matter. Commies are wild.
Human history is full of violence, and not all of it is between "betters" and "lessers", it's just people being violent towards one another to get what they want. Post-industrial society established social order and rule of law much more clearly than anything prior. A big piece of this was due to compulsory and inclusive education, but many other factors including the rise of enterprises which required social interactions to reach personal success changed society to a structure where collaboration was rewarded much more so than violence, which was punished.
This was not the case prior to industrialization. You have some idyllic pastoral fantasy in mind, which was not true.
> enterprises required social interactions to reach personal success changed society to a structure where collaboration was rewarded much more so than violence, which was punished.
One big hole in your argument - mexican cartels. Modern industrial society, loads of collaboration inside the cartel, very violent people achieve massive success. I am confident that life of a medieval farmer was far less violent that living with a violent cartel.
Can you actually bring any empirical evidence that victorian-age factory life was more peaceful than agrarian life 100 years prior? I think you are engaging in self-delusion, or comparing today to 500 years ago - which is unfair
Indeed. Also missing from the picture is the violence inherent in the system - the majority shareholders, ceos and execs of healthcare corporations that deny people treatment if they cant pay are inflicting much more violence than the tyrants of the past - its systemic, all-encompassing without any discrimination as to its target. But because the violent part is outsourced to the state's police to kick out and keep out those who cant pay, its magically 'not violent'. Whereas its possibly the worst systemic violence that ever invented in human history.
> A society which creates collective incentives towards collaboration
There is no 'collaboration' in industrial slums. Its machinized slavery.
> Commies are wild.
From the other perspective, your knee-jerk dismissal of the widely known and discussed 'tragedy of the commons' sounds like a religious fundamentalism. Especially to non-Americans.
The people of the age openly described what was happening, criticized it and lamented what they lost. The perpetrators of the act had no qualms in openly declaring their intentions and doing what they declared, because they openly and actually proudly thought that was the way it should be.
The social awareness that we have today was not present in those ages - back then peasants had to 'know their place' and 'their betters' had all the right to do whatever they pleased with what they owned. So they had no problem in openly declaring things that we would find as sociopathic today.
If what you read in that small bit of article shocks and surprises you, wait until you read the actual memoirs of the aristocrats and industrialists from that age...
I don't think you're reading the article as-written.
It'd be nice to see some sources for the quoted pamphlets, but if we assume that they are actual quotes from primary source material, it's quite telling.
The article does get a lot wrong, e.g. conflating feudalism with modern industrialized capitalism (hunting was been controlled by central political authorities for centuries before the industrial revolution).
But there's also a good point being made, that breaking up communal economic systems can be used as a tool of subjugation and control. There's nothing in here about self-sufficiency or subsistence per se.
tbh he's not wrong that the article says more about the partisan slant of the authors than it does about British industrial history. The article touches upon self sufficiency with the argument that that peasants could have made their own shoes from their own leather in a matter of hours so buying them proved they were poorer (a particular load of er... old cobblers) and I'm not sure various quotes about peasants being lazy proves anything more than the fact snobbery existed.
There's plenty of actually problematic stuff (the Enclosure Act) that happened to the British peasantry mostly before the Industrial Revolution without taking the view that peasantry was a particularly pleasant lifestyle that nobody would volunteer to change.
> (the Enclosure Act) that happened to the British peasantry mostly before the Industrial Revolution
The industrial revolution was already starting at that point. We associate the industrial revolution with machinization, but it was in fact translation of old feudal modes of land ownership to the entire economy. This trend started with the wool trade and the feudal lords finding wool trade more profitable than feudal land ownership. Coupled with the new modes of economic organization created during the Age of Exploration (corporations, stocks), this removed the incentive for the feudal aristocracy to maintain farming as a means of income and pushed them to maximize their revenue by moving to various emerging trades, with wool trade being the first. The pushing out of the peasants from the commons started around that time. What extra happened during the period that is directly labeled as the Industrial Revolution is just using the same method to push the peasantry into factories.
I think it's completely legitimate to ask, who benefits from denigrating peasants?
There is historical precedent for social biases being developed in order to justify economic and political institutions. It's often said for example that this is where modern racism comes from, a moral workaround for the obvious immorality of the Atlantic slave trade.
Thus, the presence of some kind of social or cultural bias might be a useful indicator of the presence of a developing or existing socioeconomic/political power dynamic.
I think self-sufficiency is a red herring here. Maybe the author was taken in by some kind of Marxist pre-industrial pastoral fantasy, but that doesn't mean they didn't make some good points along the way.
> conflating feudalism with modern industrialized capitalism
They are precisely the same - the ownership structures of modern capitalism already existed in the form of ownership of non-land resources (roads, mines, water passages, even buying/selling rights of specific commodities) in the middle ages and then with the invention of corporations at the start of the age of exploration, they were fully fleshed out as the things we know today. From shareholders to stock market, from rights to own and use anything to transferrable concepts.
Industrial revolution has been merely the machinization of the already existing structure.
It didn't work out well for a great many of those workers or their children. The people who got rich would not accept an ROI two generations down the road. Are you willing to accept that now - lose your career, much of your income, so that the changes in society will benefit your grandchildren (while billionaires and their children cash in right now)?
'It works out in the long run' is BS, and is always applied to someone else.
I think the next level is post scarcity. In a post scarcity world maybe we don’t labor and toil to live because it’s unnecessary to tie home, health, food, and life necessities to labor if our labor isn’t useful. Maybe life becomes about something other than working to live and living to work. Maybe tying labor to life necessities was necessary given scarcity of labor, but when labor scales independently of people we need a new way of allocating resources.
Why do contemporary discussions of post scarcity always require something in the future rather than appearing in the past due to "the assembly line" or "agriculture"?
Surely in the vast universe of past human discovery it seems likely if post-scarcity were possible in any form, that we'd have already discovered what will initiate post-scarcity so it should be here now... and it seems unlikely that any individual invention in the future will kick it off if none of the past inventions did.
Because productivity still scaled linearly with consuming humans, even if the constants improved. AI and other advances offer a potential for nearly autonomous productivity allow for productivity that scales independently of available labor.
Additionally I would say that each advance brought us closer to post scarcity. We have close to eliminated extreme poverty globally. Compared to hunter gatherer society’s we already live post scarcity.
Finally we may very well be post scarcity, but the notion of nobility in work and morality of labor means we can’t yet seriously consider decoupling work from life necessities. At some point there won’t be enough bullshit jobs left to justify pretending people need to labor to eat, and society will either collapse or we will move beyond work to live.
I would posit however the invention left undone is the one we use humans for now. Their ability to reason, make independent decisions, synthesize new ideas in any situation, learn new and different skills, interacting with a complex field of visual, auditory, and sensory stimulus effectively towards a goal, etc. That’s why we research AI. If our tools have that, then our tools don’t need us. If our tools don’t need us, we don’t have to do the work. If we don’t have to do the work, there is no scarcity because work scales independent of us.
There are also other inventions we know of but haven’t perfected that help here. Efficient fusion is one. With that energy is cheap and plentiful and presumably clean. Energy is the ability to do work. With artificial minds that can produce minds that can in turn produce minds, fueled with plentiful energy, what’s left?
So I disagree that we’ve invented everything that might be useful, or that what hasn’t yet been invented won’t lead to improved productivity to the point that human labor is redundant and all human needs can be met without it.
Would be lovely if there was actually any movement to avert the employment apocalypse. So far all I see is talk, and I have no idea how to do anything beyond that myself
You have to show they actually benefit the members as a whole. Union laws in the US are extremely strong, and anti union sentiment is largely a hangover from the 70s, where features of unions limited our manufacturing sectors ability to compete internationally with catastrophic consequences for the Rust Belt.
Unfortunately when unions are weak, they are negative value - and when they are strong they are the UAW. Workers are not a firm, and structuring labor as it's own firm is known as contracting and or a guild.
I think we can give Google executives a little more credit.
They care a bounded amount.
A rough approximation of how much they care would be the rational incentives to not produce a culture of fear in the regular workforce + the amount of being nice to employees that Google can afford due to their dominant market position.
Similarly, when I shop for employers there are fringe benefits, cultural differences, etc that matter - but they aren't going to matter in the face of another $100,000 in salary.
Definitely wouldn't go somewhere else for a few hundred bucks tho.
I don’t think nice things can be characterised as caring, though. If their decisions were actively harming the company in order to benefit the humanity of their employees, that would be reasonable evidence that they care, but I don’t think we can interpret every nice thing for a person as caring.
For example, providing benefits above and beyond what other companies provide has a clear justification for the business: happier employees means better work from people that are better retained.
A good question would be: if Google stood to benefit from making their employees lives miserable, would they do it? I’d argue, yes, absolutely, and there’s much evidence of it. For example, Google (and many other big tech companies) pay human moderators low wages to do work that causes psychological damage.
Caring about people as people and not employees isn’t demonstrated by giving them nice benefits around the edge, it’s demonstrate by putting their humanity above their employment.
Google does not have evidence that their outrageous salaries couldn't be cut some and still maintain the line outside of the door.
The gyms and perks are not purely a cynical ploy to make people stay later.
Google wouldn't make their employees lives miserable to increase revenue by 0.1%, because they care - the people at the top aren't literal lizardpeople.
This is where I bring in "bounded", because if that same choice would increase revenue by 100%, Google execs do it every time.
The exact lines change depending on local customs and competition (Google is a dominant market monopoly, so can afford gyms and adult playgrounds and all the really cringe Google perks) but it's also why low margin businesses have shittier working environments - there's more competition and less room for executives to care.
It's not a recent myth, saying that the purpose of an organization or class of organization "is" something depends on legal and social context.
Friedman popularized the idea of fiduciary duty in the field of economics, and even popular left economists like Keynes didn't foundationally dispute that premise.
You can think it shouldn't be popular among economists for moral, aesthetic, or even empirical reasons - but to suggest somehow that the 1880s model of companies is "more correct" and assert it as truth is just as much a "myth" if you are framing these ideas about institutional purpose as "truth".
The robber barons you speak of have created the single largest reduction in poverty in human history. Most of the west, and even poor Americans are living truly historically blessed lives - and by letting the robber barons loose, the CCP was able to lift nearly 1b people to a standard of living unimaginable to Chinese people in 1970.
Capitalist thought and action is not immune to criticism, but the empirics are on capitalist ideas. Most of the common areas where Americans complain about "capitalist" processes are not capitalist under the hood at all.
I am not on coinbase's side, because the advent of cryptocurrency, should it work - will make it trivially easy to avoid nasty letter regulation as it exists today.
They are taking steps to comply with a regulatory policy that is not voted on, nor written by legislature, and failing to make their case to the people that they should own their own money.
I understand why, but it bothers me that the CEO is pro crypto, has tons of money, and yet consistently fails to fight for the user.
