Then who's going to do the mining? Adults? Do you want your iPhone, your car, your video games, your shoes, your plane trips, or not? All that stuff is gonna be "cost prohibitive" if all of these quarry kids go to school and all if these factory workers go home early. Cause: These unfortunate saps work 14 hours a day, eat straw, and have the philosophical thoughts whipped out of their brains. Effect: We live like kings and post all kinds of philosophy online. Don't believe me about this causality? Good, then we can go back to living like kings. You keep posting about ethics, and I'll keep posting about epistemology.
You want to trade off positions with those 10 year olds in the quarries? That's fine. I'd rather go home at night to my family, watch The Wire with my wife for the tenth time, and then when everyone goes to sleep I'd like to come here and post on Hacker News. Please report back with your experiences.
I don't know about that. I'm on a first name basis with my CTO. I hope to never see in person those wretched souls mining the cobalt for my Tesla. Ghastly!
You don't want to be divided from the miners who extract the minerals and the factory workers who assemble the crappy tech that we design? I do. It's absolutely squalid over there.
This is my first time hearing "central sensitization syndrome." I know back ~5 years ago John Sarno's "tension myoneural syndrome" was still the dominant diagnosis in the self-help circles of mindbody illness, and it at least had the mechanism of repression to enrich its explanatory power. Still a far cry from the richness of psychoanalytic theory, but at least it was a move in the right direction after such an epic retreat from Freud. Central sensitization syndrome seems like such a concession to the medical model, which I guess puts it in alignment with the poverty of therapy ("mindfulness," etc.).
The scope of Science has been set by private capital, but the Chinese lockdown is very clearly a scientific endeavor. Might as well compare vaccines vs. lockdown as two scientifically-informed tactics, although the two aren't mutually exclusive, as in the case of China.
That's right. So the "cultural difference" you were referring to is the capacity to commit horrendous atrocities against basic civil rights that the West is too benevolent to grasp. You just used the words "expunging basic civil rights" and "atrocities" instead of "evil." You're one step further in the logical progression than the people you were annoyed with in your first reply to me.
This unfolding progression is why we cannot take people at face value about what they "really mean." People don't know what they mean! See below: "I honestly couldn't imagine people in the West putting up with that, however I'm yet to fully understand why Chinese people continue to suffer the rules without riot." See? They don't understand it. Why not? What is being repressed, that their conscious could form these highly abstract and grammatically correct sentences, but yet they don't know from whence they came?
> All I am seeing on HN are people being careful to not offend, but at some point it stops being "cultural differences".
That's exactly my problem, too. Thankfully, someone in the replies to the tweet you sent finishes his sentence without ellipses. "Which is more sad: that they are locked up, or that they allow themselves to be locked up?" But this time he hides behind the rhetorical question mark! Just say the two things already: "Chinese people are docile and weak" and "Chinese people are evil, greedy liars." Let's just skip right to the Myth of the Jew. I just want people to take their beliefs seriously instead of hiding behind vague gestures and "fill in the blanks."
Much more interesting to follow live stories rather than throw around Adrian Zenz's crumbs years later. Here's the ongoing protest I was referring to, where "shattered lives" is a bruised back or (worse) the imaginary threat of becoming proletarian: https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/10/china/china-henan-bank-deposi...
There are differences between the systems of a private capital and of a nation (or for that matter, the entire globe, which has never been planned centrally; incidentally this explains black markets).
The difference in goods is a mere quantitative difference. (Amazon sells literally everything.) Still, the amount and diversity of crap managed by Amazon is much greater than that of North Korea (comparing net sales vs. GDP). "It seems that there is simply too much in an economy for one entity to wholly plan" has to be tongue-in-cheek if it's not simply a mindless mantra. It's a staggering ideological contradiction whose poles the Hacker News crowd must oscillate between. On one hand, we're on the cusp of generalized artificial intelligence, and on the other we can't figure out the linear algebra needed to maintain a input-output table that changes over time.
But the difference in competition is a qualitative difference. The laws that determine the "competition" between teams at Amazon are different (opposite, even) than the laws of competition between capitalist firms. This is an empirical question. We can certainly imagine Amazons teams undercutting each other's "prices" in order to maximize private "profit," leading to a centralization and concentration of "capital" in the hands of a "monopolistic" team, but this simply does not happen in practice. The categories of intra-firm operation are totally different than those of inter-firm operation.
Well empirically lower demand does not lead to higher prices. The hopes and dreams of sustained profits are dashed by the coercive forces of competition. It's very sad.
Within a single firm, particularly large ones, surpluses and deficits can be communicated absolutely and crises can be practically eliminated. (It would be unthinkable for Amazon to leave the coordination of its processes up to some sort of internal free market.) As for action between firms, the anarchy of the market is fundamental to capitalism. Real competition is a basic characteristic of capitalism and so perfect information is not a tendency of the system (despite its theoretical elevation in neoclassical economics).
So, no, there is no solution. To avoid crises of overproduction (including the subsequent adjustments), the planning that takes place within the capitalist firm has to be extended to the global network of production.