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"enforce political control and nationalistic tendencies of ethnic groups"?

This literally means stop nationalist secession movements. Literally no country on earth basically lets their citizens secede dude. Russians were ALSO the target of such programs.

It's like saying state atheism is uniquely Islamophobic or uniquely anti christian or uniquely antisemitic.

I'm not saying it's not repression. It totally is, but it's not racist.

Yeah because the internet didn't exist.

“Internment camps” and “concentration camps” are historical synonyms, the latter has subsequently taken on additional negative loading because of euphemistic use of the term for German extermination camps.

This is completely wrong.

The term concentration camp was invented in the Second Boer War. It described a tactic of war used by the English against to Boers and native Africans. Because Boers and Africans did not have centralized cities and lived off the land rather than having industrialized farming the developed tactics of disrupting the supply lines didn't work on them. The supply lines were too horizontal.

So first they burned and salted the land so that Boers and Africans could no longer subsist. Then they forced the people whose lives they destroyed into what they called concentration camps.

~50k people died in these concentration camps essentially every 3rd person that went in.

The forcible population transfer at gunpoint is what differentiates concentration camps from internment camps which were used by the Spanish in Cuba in the Ten Years War.

Unlike the English who simply treated humans like cattle and forced them to move the Spanish evicted Cubans and killed those who did not comply after 10 days. The US took the English route for the Japanese, while using the Spanish name to differentiate themselves from Nazis who also ran concentration camps.

Likewise it's really funny to say that GULAGs were genocidal while US internment wasn't, because literally there's less intent (in the Western legalistic sense) of genocide in the GULAG case. GULAGs were equal opportunity in terms of ethnicity. Japanese internment wasn't. GULAGs were a problem because the USSR got addicted to slave labor relations that it recreated from a previous era, the USA of all countries has no real standing to criticize it on those grounds because the US still does this to this day, which is why the old Sovietologists were grasping at straws to ideologically differentiate between two similar systems. The big 4 western theories of the function of GULAGs (Solzhetsyn, Consquest, Applebaum and Bauer) literally do not include ethnic cleansing. That's a neologism.

There's no point in continuing the discussion since you literally do not even know the history of what you're talking about.

Edit: To make it crystal clear.

The difference between the GULAG system and the Soviet population transfers and the US internment and deportations that gives more creedence to US commiting ethnic cleansing is the ethnic composition of the material benefactors of those actions and their victims.

The people who were victims in the US were targetted minorities who were disposessed of their wealth by their fellow white citizens.

The people who were victims in the USSR were not targeted minorities, and the benefactors were not an ethnic majority whose main benefit was taking their victim's property.

Okay how about this. Tell me which policies of the USSR were racist, who they were racist against and why you think they were racist.

This is a semantic argument that I have no real interest in arguing.

Call it genocide, call it ethnic cleansing. Genocide as a criminal charge is mostly a political matter.

California literally admitted that they targeted citizens of Mexican descent for the explicit purpose of illegally cajoling them into emigration and enforced deportation. You learn about it euphemistically as "repatriation" (if at all because almost no HS curriculum teaches this) because oopsie.

If the USSR rounded up all the Japanese and put them in a camp, you wouldn't hear the end of it in the West. Roosevelt himself used the term concentration camps. You learn about it euphemistically as "internment" because "they had a good reason to do it, and sometimes you know we get things wrong!!". An argument that can really only be used if you prelabel good guys and bad guys.

The main difference between US camps and USSR camps is that the US camps were nicer and had food.

The quality of repression scales with the wealth to some degree. The USSR couldn't support the same quality of life for their prisoners that the US could.

Today the US refuses to provide the same quality of life for their prisoners that less wealthy OECD countries do provide.

because everything you cite in support of this describes rather than refutes institutional racism.

Please expand on this.

The Iron Curtain was the barrier erected by the Soviets to prevent American media into the USSR. Not to prevent Soviet media into America.

What are you even talking about?

Uhh Japanese internment and Mexican repatriation were genocidal actions. The US only stopped mass stochastic involuntary sterilization of natives in the 1970's. Some still happen to this day.

If you don't know your own country's history why are you speculating on the history of the USSR?

During the Cold War, ethnic minorities in the Soviet Union were treated just as bad as US minorities.

This part is simply not true.

Today the situation is even worse.

This part is.

The USSR was never institutionally racist. Russian chauvanism was still a thing in the USSR and that was relic of the Tsarist era that keeps on giving.

The USSR's repressions were not a cut and dry wealth transfer between ethnicities unlike the US policies.

At their worst in terms of American morality, institutionally targeted programs were to enforce political control and break nationalistic tendencies of ethnic groups.

The vast majority of the repressions in the USSR were a result of the explosive growth of productive forces. It's very hard to make the case for the USSR that the benefits of those productive forces inherently benefitted Russians over everyone else.

It's very easy to make the case in the US for white supremacy.

Sure. Did they stop punishing people with their "actual meritocracy" metrics for taking it?

There's some apocrypha that I'd need to dig up the source to but IIRC the story goes that after WWI Keynes was researching the economic impacts of the WWI war economy. His conclusion was essentially that if normal people understood how capitalism worked in practice, they'd revolt because all industries effectively become rackets.

Yeah the reality is that a lot of people think that prior to and after WW2 and/or the Russian revolution the USSR was equivalent somehow to the US. That was never the case the USSR was a backwater and always behind. Tsarist Russia was a backwards undeveloped slave state. In that light the USSR punched above its weight.

The reality is that rapid industrialization regardless of your ideology is an extreme productive process which magnifies the effects of production which are not in and of themselves free of negative outputs. In USA capitalism like in USSR communism the negative outputs of production are simply ignored and the people who they affect have no choice in what negative effects they must bear and what is being produced.

yeah the funny thing about these comments you have a bunch of people conflating a lot of stuff.

For people who think the USSR was "more corrupt" they're often talking about a narrow conception of corruption that is defined by the US on technical terms. Or they're simply talking about the behavioral differences between rich vs poor countries.

Boeing's quality issues are a great example because it's very obviously corruption, but not in the US technical sense. But the reality is that Boeing and the US government basically said yeah fuck it, do your own QA for the 737 Max and then after the fuckups turned around and said okay we won't charge you the full fine. And that would have just gone away if the 787 fuckups didn't happen. Now suddnely people look really bad giving Boeing sweetheart enforcement deals.

Americans think corruption is a cop pocketing $ on the side of the highway, but it's not corruption when the cop confiscates $ on the side of the highway without trial, gives it to his police department, which pays out the confiscated funds as bonuses, new equipment, and other various frivolities.

At least the Soviets spit in your face when and how they wanted to and were limited by physicality. Americans make a Rube Golberg machine where saliva of their oligarchs is collected throughout the day in massive quantities and piped out of the building where it happens to land on your face 80% of the time. Then they will tell you it's your fault for being in the way of the spit pipes.

We cannot recognize corruption in the US because our corruption is mechanical, and we've precluded that mechanical things cannot be a form of corruption.

USSR corruption was more visceral and obvious, that's pretty much it. This makes a lot more sense if you understand that all measures of "corruption" don't define corruption but use the perception of corruption.

Another example. Ukraine is a corrupt country, no doubt about it. But the "anti-corruption" NGO complex in Ukraine essentially prevents certain laws from passing like sourcing laws which exist in all major developed countries. They see these laws as a form of corruption, which in and of themselves they're not. The other reality is that a lot of the anti-corruption NGO's are corrupt. The reason they argue against sourcing laws is because foreign entities stand to lose money if Ukraine has to buy a certain percentage of goods from Ukrainian factories. Foreign money buys NGO's easily there, so NGO's don't' want their funding to dry up. So everything is in stasis.

But by Western standards none of the above is "corruption" because while the people making these deals can likely speak freely, by Western standards it's really easy to hide this corruption as coincidental and unrelated business decisions.

In reality corruption itself is an industry because it's a way to make money and a tool to make money with. Corruption is not a really simple thing to adjudicate

Behavioral programming is just creating a specific type of rules engine which is very close to a state machine.

This example is also really complex in reality because it inherently requries muxing of temporal events, which is really difficult for most average industry programmers.

With event driven systems what I've seen is that your average programmer is comfortable and likes 1:1 maps but cannot handle any kind of reduce functionality esp over a temporal range.

Typically adoption of something like this would be easier if the event represented a change in the state of the whole board rather than a change in the state of a cell.

TBH this is somewhat reinventing Observables for React.

Yeah. just don't go on paternity/maternity leave.

It certainly is an example of the agency problem.

However the company itself doesn't want to allocate resources regardless of the actual cost.

Because regardless at your $/hr, a contract that protects the company in the same way and is understandable by the user takes MORE HOURS, than one that just protects the company and fuck the user.

Lots of these lawyers at companies with internal council could do this are a resource that is over utilized already. There's no room for more hours.

The issue of legalese in ToS is the same issue of "bad code" or "bad engineering". The law is just another system, another conceptual language of communication, except one filled with way more vaguaries, edge cases and grey areas than any software we make.

Companies like they do not want to pay for "good engineering" don't want to pay for "understandable contracts".

I think it's really funny a lot of these scare pieces intimate that a US based PR guy for a Chinese company would be privy to intimate details about Uighur detention.

These grandstanding asks are just McCarthyism. It's like if the EU was asking a Facebook representative about ICE and CBP rounding up children.

"SIR SIR DO YOU ADMIT GOVERNMENT DOES CRIMES???"

This is really interesting. I wish their methodology page talked more about accuracy and blind spots in the system.

My usage of price controls in that way is intentional. The average argument against price controls (e.g. price ceiling sand price floors) is like saying knives bad because I can cut my fingers off. Price controls are tool, it's about how you use them.

Subsidies obviously work and have been shown to work for decades.

Subsidies obviously work and subsidies don't work in the same way that price controls obviously work and price controls don't work.

These are tools.

You're not talking about the application of tools, you're simply talking about ideologically preferential ways to change an economy.

Subsidies are considered good and price controls are considered bad because of how they affect private capital not due to any argument that a rigorous data driven modern application of economics would provide. By modern standards those statements "price controls are bad" and "subsidies are good" and their inverses are unfalsifiable.

Any payment transfer is a complex price control on money. UBI literally means for an individual, for a certain period of time, the first $X of spend cost nothing. That's a complex price floor for a complex commodity (money itself).

markets perform better than government planning, and fortunately we don't have to speculate on that question. Resoundingly, the historical record shows that central planning reduces the total amount of wealth available to be distributed.

Nobody actually makes this argument with any seriousness anymore in real academic economics. Modern economics is data driven, and the reality is that in order to make this argument like economists in the past have made you need to cherry pick not only your data, but cherry pick your goals. What does it mean to "perform better" why does it matter that the "total available wealth" is lower? You're attempting to use market logic to prove markets, market logic smooths everything into $ and by applying market logic to non-markets you can easily prove it's better by market logic. It's like saying races are the best way to judge vehicle performance.

Not only that but htis is a sociological arugment. Not an economic one. That's why Karl Marx is the father of sociology and not Carl Menger.

An example might be useful. Consider when California capped retail electricity prices in 2000. Even though this was far from a competitive market to begin with, the result was predictable: shortages. The price caps reduced utilities' incentive to expand production, and simultaneously increased consumers' incentive to use electricity. (There were other factors involved in this debacle, but the price caps were a key feature.)

You didn't actually answer the question. Shortages and market distortions are not the same thing. A shortage is a shortage. A market distortion is in the optimal abstract the inability of our system of value to accommodate for value that isn't speculative. In hindsight a market distortion is the "incorrect" pricing of goods. However practically, all markets are distorted as you concede in your second paragraph that it isn't about finding the optimal price.

You're simply saying market distortions are bad because some market distortions are also shortages. Rectangles are bad because some rectangles are also squares.

Suppose you're a pencil manufacturer. Of course you can calculate some output price for your pencils that reflects costs + some profit margin. However, we don't know if that output price will incentivize good pencil-purchasing behavior. Perhaps you're the only seller of pencils worldwide, and the price is too low. In this case, people who don't really value pencils buy them anyway, and your inventory is depleted. Now, pencils are sitting unused in random drawers, while there are art classes that have to be canceled because the students can't get the supplies they need. (You've mentioned a need to control distribution, but haven't suggested a way for these distributive decisions to be made.)

I could have stopped reading this paragraph at "we don't know if that output price will incentivize good pencil-purchasing behavior". The only need for pencil purchasing behavior in the case we are talking about the price controls case, is when profit is part of the mix. I've already conceded that price controls and profit are volatile. Price controls are about providing a service, in fact known commodities don't "really" have the issue of nobody wants to buy them. People need pencils. You're talking a lot here about how hard it is to get people to buy pencils AND make an optimal amount selling those pencils. That's simply not the case we are discussing with price controls.

(You've mentioned a need to control distribution, but haven't suggested a way for these distributive decisions to be made.)

A lot of these are easy for base commodity goods. And as a society we know how much the average person uses pencils / tooth brushes / etc. That's actually what markets are good at, experimenting and collecting data. You can survey people. You can collect information about shortages in real time. This is an inventory problem, these are simple computer models that can solve this.

Consider also that graphite is an input price. How much should that cost? It's useful for making pencils, but it's also used in nuclear reactors and lithium-ion batteries. If the Department of Homeland Prices is going to choose a good price for graphite, they're going to need to decide how many pencils the world needs, how many nuclear reactors, and how many lithium-ion batteries. Of course, those items feed into other items...

The government in various layers already chooses how much consumption happens. You've hit on one here which you've ironically not commented on. Governments all around the world essentially some to a lesser degree and some to a command economy degree control the distribution and allocation of power plants.

Yeah let's talk about the price of graphite though. The current price of graphite is a speculative price based on what the average buyer is willing to pay for it. Does that price accurately reflect the cost of extracting that graphite? At what scale of extraction does that price reflect the extraction of graphite? How much capital expenses are needed to extract graphite? What happens when the cost of graphite is less than the actual cost of extracting it, but demand does not change? What if the price equilibrium of graphite and all of it's dependent commodities or some other commodity is predicated on slave labor?

In this entire chain someone is getting fucked breathing in graphite fumes and getting compensated pennies for the actual value of their work. This is entirely the problem with how markets are applied, it's making software for software's sake, not making software for people. This is just spinning cubes untethered to the real needs of humans, making numbers go up. You're just playing EVE online IRL.

Seriously EVE Online shows you how you can easily solve this problem. All the data is there and it's actually "open". Even better that EVE ISK doesn't need to feed anyone. You can compute the costs of entire supply chain of EVE very simply. Literally https://evetycoon.com/ solves the very problem (pricing out the whole chain accurately) you're trying to say is a huge unsolvable problem by a singular entity. All you need is the data and the rest of the software is just basic calculations of supply costs and a constraint solver that includes every commodity weighted by demand.

This mystification of capitalism as being a complex beast was simply the woo of a bunch of 20th century men (and a minority of 19th century men -- e.g. Austrian school founders) who were too lazy, too dumb, or didn't have enough tools to cope with the explosion of commodities and production of the second industrial revolution (first industrial revolution for the 19th century guys, and also they were dumb and/or lazy not giving them the tooling doubt -- e.g. Menger and the gang).

This entire line of thinking has been swiftly discredited within the last 30 years in the mainstream because it is not just ideological, it's just plain wrong. It is also a fun house mirror of those it credits to make the claims. The "Invisible Hand" of Adam Smith was a pejorative for a market that dominates the lives of people living under it, not a fantastical near utopia where men are entitled to the sweat of their brow.

In context you've unlocked the tautology that underpins capitalism.

Pareto inefficiency

almost impossible to know what the “correct” price

Yes it's really really hard to price things, but the market itself is Pareto inefficient unless you labor under the axiom that the market price is the "correct" price, which it cannot actually be.

market distortions

Why is this a bad thing?

they aren’t a scalable solution to anything

Do you believe in UBI or that UBI is scalable? That's a price control. Again every public transportation system in the world is price controlled, market distorted, and Pareto inefficient. So they are a scalable solution to providing a public service of regional/urban travel.

Also, it’s almost impossible to know what the “correct” price of a good should be because the factors that determine that are part of a very complex network.

Most companies that are not trying to grow and are trying to turn a profit literally have prices that not only take into account the cost of the good but marginal profit on a unit basis. This chain goes all the way back to digging out the raw materials from the earth.

Your entire "complex" network of calculations is done there. Why can it not be done elsewhere?

TIL is an engagement farming subreddit. It's a popular post because it's engagement farming. It's a form of infotainment for consumers.

Maybe worst of all are the “snark” subreddits for celebrity gossip and catty bullying.

My hobby is better than your hobby.

HN is literally marketing....

Startups literally "launch" on here whether they're Y Combinator affiliates or not.

The content of any forum cannot be mostly marketing, because that literally means there's a lack of organic impressions and the money / time /effort is better spent elsewhere.

It’s more likely that it’s the PG effect!

You've described a marketing phenomenon.

HN's political "neutrality" is predicated on the fact that a lot of this site is rooted in convincing billionaires and multimillionaires to give you money for a passion project, and any kind of redistributive policies means that there's less money for them to give to you.

If you excised the startup founder culture from HN (which you cant) you'd be left with a bunch of straight forward Dem party politics guys and a handful of libertarians.

(The amount of tankie delusion on Reddit baffles me as well though)

I really love it when people think there's a "real" left anymore on Reddit. It was thoroughly decimated in 2016 and most left for Lemmy, Hexbear or Yesterweb

HN's worst times was at peak free money tech optimism.

Plenty of pretending that running a "successful" startup wasn't 90% scamming. The actual tech and programming didn't matter, all that mattered was that your `hello world.proj` was a money pump from users to shareholders or from shareholders to founders.

Just find all the old posts that say Uber/WeWork/Theranos/Tesla/SpaceX/etc will all make bajillions in 10 years and their tech is amazing and the problems are actually not that hard.

price controls really are bad,

Citation needed and not from some ooga booga free marketer.

Price control schemes exist in almost every country and in the US, every subsidy is a form of price control. Price controls are not just ceilings and floors. The Prime Interest rate is a price control for money. Ration cards are price controls.

The reason that price controls are dangerous to an economy (esp. a capitalist one) is typically that if you're controlling for price (via floor and ceiling) you have to also control for distribution. Price controlled goods must be distributed as a nonprofit service with limits rather than a for profit enterprise. That's often the "fuck up" that's most cited but that's a "learn basic economics" issue.

Literally that was Nixon's entire fuck up, and it was compounded by the death of Bretton Woods. Price controls worked just fine before/during/after WWI and WWII.

Public transit is the most obvious form of price controls that work because the distribution and the commodity/service are both run as a nonprofit service.

Also if you care about the whole 'OMG BLACK MARKETS' thing, see distribution, and understand that if you have a price that actually represents the cost of delivering a commodity to a consumer, a black market forming around that commodity is the same kind of market as a "free market". It is simply dudes trying to get the most amount of profit for arbitrage of a good they get at cost.

Also "subsidies don't work", the subsidy often not a consumer subsidy it's a producer profit subsidy. See EV's which all have subsidies built into their price except the Leaf.

You see the problem here? In order to actually do this correctly and have the desired effect on consumers, you need everyone to open their books. That's not going to happen in a capitalist system. So their alternative is "get lucky". Private profit guides economic policy more than the actual data or methodology.

The more interesting thing of "regulation" here. Is if the government can effectively regulate a company's backlog. Apple's walled garden is intentionally constructed on their side such that there cannot be competition because the controls for such competition are unbuilt. The PWA issue in the EU shows that if you take them at face value which I would having worked with Apple products and done a bit of jail breaking back in the day. So effectively they need to create public features for supporting alternative wallets in a secure way.

Outside of iMessage, wallets are the only real thing the gov has to stand on.

Super apps are just a semantic exercise.

Cloud-streaming is a non-issue Apple doesn't compete in a cloud streaming vertical. Apple Arcade is just a subscription to an app store. They don't stream the games.

The Smart Watches thing is also bunk. Samsung does the same thing, with watches and headphones. If I switch to a Google Pixel my headphones lose features. Unless the government is in the mood to create and regulate open tech standards this a nothing burger.

It's in practice arguing that Apple cannot have a private SDK which I would be fine with but they're not actually arguing that.

The reason that this is not like US vs MS is because MS's settlement did not result in forcing MS to CHANGE the code, only allowing OEM's to bundle other browsers. US vs MS in practicality was just a big nothing burger. Not even the EU government is in a place to regulate and enforce Open APIs.

Also speaking of ooga booga free marketers. Milton Friedman predicted that US vs MS is going to be a dark age of government regulation of tech and prevent innovation. Lmao.

That's because the government's definition of anti-competitive is ticky-tacky and is rooted in bullshit.

US anti-competitive policy and enforcement has always been dancing around the double standards of who can do market manipulation, the double standards of white collar crime enforcement, the double standards of "consumer benefit" in a capitalist system, etc.

"Consumer benefit" for example is a cowardly way to say price controls. Consumer benefit is inversely correlated with price. That implies the US government should be doing price controls and setting acceptable profit margins for everyone, but in practice due to the enforcement issues and the way the law is constructed it means that the government regulates prices only in extremely detailed technical cases.

Meaning you can manipulate consumer benefit AKA prices AKA extract profits all you want as long as you don't get into these narrowly defined, often unenforced technical cases.

In fact all of these charges or facsimiles of them existed in different forms 10 years ago, they were there on launch 15 years ago. Apple is being sued now simply because other large powerful interests like Epic games, don't like the revenue split rules on the App store.

Most of these laws are written not as regulations, but ways not to regulate.