PRC is way more capitalist than Norway or some other European countries. Approximately, one is capitalist dictatorship and the other socialist democracy.
Yes PRC government was originally propped by USSR but that's it. If you look at labor protection laws, social security, etc it's nowhere near.
Smells like "no true scotsman" fallacy because they are nearly synonyms. Nobody in USSR could tell the exact difference or at least there was no consensus, and you are expecting modern Americans to do better huh?
This basically sums it up:
> According to the Encyclopædia Britannica, "Exactly how communism differs from socialism has long been a matter of debate, but the distinction rests largely on the communists' adherence to the revolutionary socialism of Karl Marx." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism#Communism_and_social...)
(To make it more fun Marxism is also its own thing)
But this is to privilege 100+ year old origins of these terms over their actual application and development in most of Western Europe. It’s anachronistic and misleading.
No, this was true in USSR so like even 40 years ago, I grew up exposed to that a lot and believe me no one can say for sure which is which.
To keep things fun, USSR was not communist either for most of the time, it was sort of socialist I guess. There are a lot of jokes reflecting the confusion between socialism and communism and how we always go to communism but never reach it
Today there are examples of socialist but not communist countries in Europe. But if you compare them to Venezuela or Brazil you would be crazy.
I think we’re actually agreeing the terms are confusing. The point is that Western European socialism is not the same as the thing that was essentially synonymous with communism in the USSR in the early 20th century.
In the UK at least, the distinction was important because calling oneself a socialist was acceptable, whereas being a communist during the Cold War was not.
The USSR was economically socialist, ideologically communist, and politically somewhere on the autocracy-dictatorship spectrum. (That last varied over time, as is normal for such governments. Underlings always want autocracy, which means more power for them. The top guy almost always wants an absolute dictatorship.)
There were plenty of communists who didn't like that last part - but they were brutally purged by the autocratic-dictatorial faction. Famously: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Trotsky
I'd blame the angry, simplistic Western denunciations of anything vaguely resembling communism (including socialism) on the Western monied classes. Whether Old Money, Plutocrats, Wall Streeters, wanna-be's, sycophants, or whatever - those folks generally hate any idea which might mean less for them, and more for the 99%.
That's entirely orthogonal to the fact that Americans thend to label literally anything and everything they don't like as communist. Especially any sort of social(ist) policy good for the people and bad for the 1%.
It doesn't help that a lot of the suggested policies are mind numbingly stupid. Like "wealth tax" for people who own controlling equity in companies. Someone else values your company more and now you are forced by law to sell it and lose control, probably destroying the company.
The German Social Democratic Party is the literal actual identical party of Marx and Engels.
That we assign to the Bolsheviks the mantle of one or another 19th c epithet is a kind of secret pact between the two sides of the Cold War. It is itself doctrinal Leninism even if the State Department spreads it. Its func
Where cash is stigmatized? I haven't seen such a place except PRC.
Most people want government to be able to seize assets of baddies. It is possible with cash, it is possible with banks, hardly possible with crypto.
The technology to scam people at scale with untraceable emoney is not everybody's cup of tea.
Speaking from a country that invaded its neighbor, for our government (as well as north korea) it is lovely to have a way around sanctions. Libertarian crypto bros of the west are a godsend.
They are also a godsend to current American president which loves a nice side of washed crypto along with all the other theft.
It is absolutely possible to like cash and dislike crypto
Everyone in China has to and will accept cash in practice (no idea about big transactions though). Cash is also more frequent among locals in remote places.
Also if you're talking about Russia, people are switching back to cash en masse because cashless transfer between people is essentially half-criminalized. You run the risk of getting all your bank accounts blocked instantly on mere suspicion or for things outside of your control, with almost no real rules, accountability, or practical ways to push back. It's the way to avoid the runaway government process in the first place.
> Everyone in China has to and will accept cash in practice
False. If you say this as advice to anyone you are putting them in danger. Cash is a no go for most vendors and you may struggle to buy food if you only have cash. I was personally rejected numerous times and told to scan QR or go home.
> if you're talking about Russia, people are switching back to cash en masse
Also false. I don't know a single person to switch to cash. Friend of a friend lost bank card and was basically on QR for months, no cash no plastic.
Here is what I know:
- There are limits on dollars basically since the beginning of war. (Normal people aren't affected because they don't use dollars)
- There was apparently a brief scare that banks cannot satisfy if you want to withdraw a lot of ruble and then the gov quickly claimed it to be false (of course). The amounts were too high for any normal person.
- a bit of cash is helpful to help because censorship infrastructure caused internet hiccups so electronic payments occasionally don't go through, but it seems rare now
- in western regions people tend to carry more cash simply because mobile internet is regularly unavailable. After all if you can't access your banking app to pay for coffee while civilians in Ukraine across the border are getting bombed, it's a bit embarrasing.
Otherwise everyone is as cashless as usual, people moving money out of banks en masse is probably made up.
I'm saying that as someone who traveled across China in a (legally and physically) hardest way possible, including crossing the Taklamakan Desert where I wasn't even supposed to be. I have no idea what you're talking about - I've been mostly using cash even in tier 1 cities for everything from motor oil to street food, with occasional mobile for things like DiDi. Hotels, some vendors and others east of the Hu line can turn you down just because you're a foreigner, they don't like cash but will accept it. West of the Hu line cash is the primary way, if you're in the middle of nowhere in Qinghai it can even be the only way.
>Also false. I don't know a single person to switch to cash.
I'm sorry but either you have a pretty specific circle or you're not living in Russia (Moscow isn't). I'm talking about private transfers, not x5 groceries. Electricians, plumbers, and other workers I happened to hire in the recent several months were all reluctant to deal with bank transfers. I advise reading the federal law 161 and the actual "enforcement" practice. I personally know two debanked people, both are elderly, one is a scam victim and another was trying to move her own savings. In the second case it took months of refusals, unclear procedures, and a metric ton of paperwork to get out of it, and it was only possible because I was helping.
This is correct attitude, for example some people actually got arresred for supporting ukraine efforts on war. I disagree that all my assets must be seized because i donated few bucks for sake protecting invaded country.
Ukraine event's is prime example why finanical privacy is important. I think we're solving taxing issue from wrong angle, we should be look this another angle: Merchants should be identifiable and taxable while customer stay private. GNU's solution "Talor" is very interesting and promising.
>Where cash is stigmatized? I haven't seen such a place except PRC.
I don't know about stigma, per se, but there are a few places where businesses have a pretty explicit legal right to refuse cash, UK, Netherlands, Sweden, US. Oddly in PRC refusing cash is illegal.
Because "cash" isn't actually real, it's entirely a form of completion of a contract. The same contract that you could agree to complete by trading chickens, or bottles of bath water.
I don't understand what is meant by "hardly possible with crypto." I've been hearing that for a long time but I've also heard so many stories about theft of crypto assets and seizures by government. In the US that seems to have slowed to near nothing with the current administration but it doesn't seem to be a capability issue. Or maybe I misunderstand you or the situation?
there is high consensus on that, but not high enough to enshrine it into the constitution. in countries with strong rule of law, the courts have continued to uphold this whenever the state gets bold enough to move on a previously tolerated "baddie"
capital, as an aggregate expression of people's desires, moves like water. if will flow through any small opening
capital controls will flow through any weak link, whether that's a Shanghai free trade zone, a freeport at the airport in JFK or Zurich, physical cash, illiquid assets traded through a trust, or natively in crypto, or crypto wrapped within the same aforementioned structures, no matter what the prevailing or commoner's view is everywhere else in the region
even countries that can change on the whims of an all powerful head of state, they don't really mess with the capital because it drives everyone else away and reduces the head of state's own liquidity and economic driver.
Besides, the one thing Mozilla could do to be relevant to 99.9% of web users is to move somewhere other San Francisco and turn their office their into a homeless shelter. They should go to Dublin or Frankfurt or Barcelona, anywhere.
> the fact that is the first thing you learn humanises the username behind the keyboard
The username is macOS26. The name is "Agent!". As in "Agentic AI for your entire Mac Desktop". All commits are made by this entity.
Until someone here told me there is a real guy behind it I sincerely gotta say, it looks like there's no human behind the keyboard and actually there's no keyboard at all.
Combined with cancer message on top it made me think some LLM "agent" is trying different tricks because it was prompted to achieve maximum stars and forks. I feel shitty for saying this but how not to be cynical because literally that's what we degraded to thanks to "ai".
> Combined with cancer message on top it made me think some LLM "agent" is trying different tricks because it was prompted to achieve maximum stars and forks. I feel shitty for saying this but how not to be cynical because literally that's what we degraded to thanks to "ai".
AI might increase the volume of shitty things on the internet, but it's not like GitHub accounts weren't anonymous before AI, and it's not like people weren't using scammy tactics to boost their star count before AI.
If the fear of AI turn us into worse people in our interactions, that's kind of on us, not AI
I honestly don't think anyone starred, watched or forked it because it was a person with cancer. They starred it because it's a good app. One that is missing on macOS.
Today, I used it to weed out hundreds of Linkedin "followings" with Safari. worked like a champ. It does very well at coding tasks too and automating Xcode builds.
Yes PRC government was originally propped by USSR but that's it. If you look at labor protection laws, social security, etc it's nowhere near.
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