One is people's lived experience: "Hard-working families immigrate to a land of better opportunity and build a life for themselves, integrating as upstanding members of the community."
The other is nativist propaganda: "Hordes of scary 'aliens' are coming to take your jobs and destroy your way of life, bringing their drugs and crime and turning your neighborhood into a trash heap. They might even eat your pets!"
People have difficulty noticing that the second story is supposed to be a description of what they or their ancestors personally lived as the first story; people compartmentalize and sometimes believe the propaganda version even though it directly contradicts their lived experience.
Well they did it and got prosperous by successfully contributing to the economy and improving it for all of us.
In Binghamton there are Turkish immigrants who run Middle Eastern restaurants which our extended family love to go which are so much like the Italian restaurants that Italians still run and I'll see a teenager hanging out there who seems so much like an Italian teenager.
A person seeing that similarity could (and should) have a sense of "these people are going to come here and contribute and pay taxes and grow the economy to help support me" which is what the outcome is most of the time.
Logically, it seems insane that people who live on other people's taxes have the right to vote. Officials, public sector employees, and anyone else who receives money from the government rather than contributes to it shouldn't vote.
But this doesn't solve the problem in any way; it simply leads to production drop.
I mean, this is literally the logic of every communist government in the 20th century. They had the same logic that "given the mechanization of agriculture, food practically produces itself; you just need to throw a seed in the ground and give it a couple of tractor rides, and the earth will do the rest. Therefore, we need a tax on such activity, because we have enough resources to feed everyone".
In other words, it's literally a pure tax on automation. The results were mass deaths from starvation every single time.
There were so many contributing factors to those famines but my understanding is that it was far and away the broken incentives for reporting failures as successes to avoid immediate head chopping.
There has yet to be an attempt at a centrally planned economy that actually had accurate data to plan with.
Not advocating for central planning but the important point is that these failure modes are possible under any tyrannical regime. For an example of where capitalist competition fell down in a similar way, look no further than the Irish potato famines.
> it was far and away the broken incentives for reporting failures as successes to avoid immediate head chopping
Actually, no. What you're describing is more of a part of the next stage, designed to solve the already existing problem of famine, rather than its cause.
When communists come to power, they don't try in the first place to reorganize food production under strict centralization; this directly contradicts Marxism, according to which the state gradually withers away as a communist society is built. They simply try to redistribute what is already being produced in a more fair manner, to force peasants to contribute their "fair share" to society.
This causes production to plummet, people are dying of hunger, and only then the government takes control of organization of food production, and only after that do the factors you mentioned become relevant.
But the famine itself under communism, at least in its initial, most massive iteration, is not a consequence of a tyrannical regime, but is a consequence of the "taxation policy" being pursued.
Not sure that is the historical timeline for Collectivisation in USSR and definitely no China. Collectivisation and Land Reform was a primary goal in itself in China from the 1950s. Communist Liberation was 1949 so right from the onset.
"state gradually withers away as a communist society is built" is 19th century Marx. I think 20thc Leninism, in practice, had a less sanguine view of the evolution of the state. The NEP was a tactical move.
You could argue that Mao was always suspicious of state and party machinery which inherently had reactionary and counter revolutionary tendencies. However even when he was Mobilising the Masses, it was not restore to "autonomy" to the people but to clear the deck for further revolution. In Mao Zedong thought, "autonomy" is a very bourgeoisie.
Surely redistributing food (still effectively central planning) produced by a large number of peasant farmers is exactly equivalent to redistributive taxes on a very small number of very wealthy people who have captured the productivity gains of automation. Let's just dispense with the entire field of economics, all that fussy declining marginal utility and indifference curves, and just make a real zinger of an analogy.
Yes, it's EXACTLY equivalent. If you read the works of the communists who implemented all of this, you'll find literally the same arguments about unjust wealth created by productivity gains of automation (mechanization).
Do you think perhaps the totalitarian dictatorships perverted the communist aims of the proles perhaps just a little bit?
It's absolutely correct that we can easily feed, clothe, house everyone. We can even give everyone comforts. It's mostly greed that prevents it. Greed that capitalism spends $trillions cultivating by brain-washing us all to want more and never be satisfied.
Greed is a human axiom. Anything that depends on humans not being greedy isn't worth the paper it's printed on. That's why capitalism won, despite its many faults: it requires human greed to function.
Because its the only way the people who would like to be in power and can't manage to produce anything anyone else wants can see to get themselves put in charge: convince enough other people that despite their freedom, high standard of living, etc. they are somehow oppressed.
Do you think perhaps the totalitarian dictatorships perverted the communist aims of the proles perhaps just a little bit?
No, I don't think so. From a historical point of view, everything is quite clear: after communists came to power, the most severe famines occurred even before this totalitarian dictatorship is build, as a consequence of these very tax policies, the purpose of which is "easily feed, clothe, house everyone".
Totalitarian dictatorship comes later, as the problem transform to "we can easily feed, clothe, house everyone, but they don't want to, so we should force them"
Could you expand on your second paragraph - I'm not sure I understand your position. Are you saying you think we're not able to provide for basic necessities with our current level of technical ability and available workforce?
Right, you could disagree on which things to prioritize over dollar profits. My main point is that these preferences are not irrational like was asserted. At the scale of a sovereign wealth fund or pensions, you need to care about externalities; in the case of Denmark vs SpaceX you have something relatively concrete, in other cases we need to keep in mind that the goal of these funds are to improve the welfare of who they serve, and see past the dollar signs to take into account the consequences of the investments.
> it is fundamentally important that nobody has too much power
> taking power away from the capitalist class
An obvious and apparently irresolvable contradiction.
Capitalist power is inherently anarchic and isn't power at all. It's simply order emerging from the anarchy of the market. But the ability to take that power away from them, no matter how you measure it, itself falls into the category of "too much power" with wide margin. And with this amount of power there will be no change of hands that hold it.
Prices haven't risen THAT much and are quite affordable. And if you look at the improved quality of upscalers (DLLS 4.5 for example), gaming is now more affordable than ever, despite the increased cost of components.
Of course, the 5090 prices are insane, as are for SOME memory models, but that's nothing new and represents a fairly small market share.
> When I started building gaming pcs, the top top card was 750$ (NZD)
When I started building gaming PC, the top $700 cards didn't even provide comfortable performance or graphics. Back then, you were supposed to have several of this connected SLI or somethin. And even then, it wasn't always reliable, and it resulted in stuttering, lags, and graphical artifacts (in cases when it worked). Today, even $700 graphics cards are a much better product from a user perspective than the high-end cards of that time (and that's not even taking into account that $700 cards back then were much more expensive).
> When I started building gaming PC, the top $700 cards didn't even provide comfortable performance or graphics.
When would this have been? I can not remember a time this was accurate for the games of the time, outside of a handful of meme titles like the original crysis that made bad hardware bets. Most of them fulfilled the needs of the software and hardware of the time. I'd say the biggest issue was that for a time, software and hardware were advancing so rapidly that you wouldnt get very long out of your hardware, but that's just the reality of rapid development and not the fault or failure of any specific hardware release.
> Back then, you were supposed to have several of this connected SLI or somethin.
SLI was aimed squarely at enthusiasts, not at joe-average PC gamer and it was certainly never a requirement. It existed as a halo feature for people chasing maximum performance, benchmark scores, and bragging rights.
Improved quality used to be the justification for buying new hardware at a similar price to the old hardware when it came out new. Now the 5060/70s are 4 figure cards.
As for how much the prices have actually risen, it’s not hard to see if this is true or not. If doubling of prices doesn’t raise your eyebrows, I’m not sure what will.
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