the original actually looks better as the paw holding the bottle isn’t weird
☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆
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Cake day: January 18th, 2020
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I love how when faced with an actual paper showing how life expectancy increased, you counter with wikipedia further highlighting your intellectual prowess. The idiocy of your “argument” is to ignore what life expectancy was like BEFORE the revolution, and the fact that famines were already a common occurrence. If you spend a bit of time actually understanding the subject before opining on it, then you’ll be able to avoid making a clown of yourself in public in the future. Maybe start by actually reading the paper I linked.
great idea, here’s an alternative voting system
Meanwhile in the real world
Between 1950 and 1980, China experienced the most rapid sustained increase in life expectancy of any population in documented global history. We know of no study that has quantitatively assessed the relative importance of the various explanations proposed for this gain in survival. We have created and analysed a new, province-level panel data set spanning the decades between 1950 and 1980 by combining historical information from China’s public health archives, official provincial yearbooks, and infant and child mortality records contained in the 1988 National Survey of Fertility and Contraception. Although exploratory, our results suggest that gains in school enrolment and public health campaigns together are associated with 55-70 per cent of China’s dramatic reductions in infant and under-5 mortality during our study period. These results underscore the importance of non-medical determinants of population health, and suggest that, in some circumstances, general education of the population may amplify the effectiveness of public health interventions.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25495509/
Should do an AMA on what it’s like to put those clown shoes on every morning.
You’re right, this post would be removed there.
101·4 days agoI’m 13 and this is deep
a common theme song among capitalist economies
What actually happened in Germany was that capitalists funded the nazis, and social democrats sided with them against the communists.
After World War I, Italy had settled into a pattern of parliamentary democracy. The low pay scales were improving, and the trains were already running on time. But the capitalist economy was in a postwar recession. Investments stagnated, heavy industry operated far below capacity, and corporate profits and agribusiness exports were declining.
To maintain profit levels, the large landowners and industrialists would have to slash wages and raise prices. The state in turn would have to provide them with massive subsidies and tax exemptions. To finance this corporate welfarism, the populace would have to be taxed more heavily, and social services and welfare expenditures would have to be drastically cut - measures that might sound familiar to us today. But the government was not completely free to pursue this course. By 1921 , many Italian workers and peasants were unionized and had their own political organizations. With demonstrations, strikes, boycotts, factory takeovers, and the forceable occupation of farmlands, they had won the right to organize, along with concessions in wages and work conditions.
To impose a full measure of austerity upon workers and peasants, the ruling economic interests would have to abolish the democratic rights that helped the masses defend their modest living standards. The solution was to smash their unions, political organizations, and civil liberties. Industrialists and big landowners wanted someone at the helm who could break the power of organized workers and farm laborers and impose a stern order on the masses. For this task Benito Mussolini, armed with his gangs of Blackshirts, seemed the likely candidate.
In 1922, the Federazione Industriale, composed of the leaders of industry, along with representatives from the banking and agribusiness associations, met with Mussolini to plan the “March on Rome,” contributing 20 million lire to the undertaking. With the additional backing of Italy’s top military officers and police chiefs, the fascist “revolution”- really a coup d’etat - took place.
In Germany, a similar pattern of complicity between fascists and capitalists emerged. German workers and farm laborers had won the right to unionize, the eight-hour day, and unemployment insurance. But to revive profit levels, heavy industry and big finance wanted wage cuts for their workers and massive state subsidies and tax cuts for themselves.
During the 1920s, the Nazi Sturmabteilung or SA, the brown shirted storm troopers, subsidized by business, were used mostly as an antilabor paramilitary force whose function was to terrorize workers and farm laborers. By 1930, most of the tycoons had concluded that the Weimar Republic no longer served their needs and was too accommodating to the working class. They greatly increased their subsidies to Hitler, propelling the Nazi party onto the national stage. Business tycoons supplied the Nazis with generous funds for fleets of motor cars and loudspeakers to saturate the cities and villages of Germany, along with funds for Nazi party organizations, youth groups, and paramilitary forces. In the July 1932 campaign, Hitler had sufficient funds to fly to fifty cities in the last two weeks alone.
In that same campaign the Nazis received 37.3 percent of the vote, the highest they ever won in a democratic national election. They never had a majority of the people on their side. To the extent that they had any kind of reliable base, it generally was among the more affluent members of society. In addition, elements of the petty bourgeoisie and many lumpenproletariats served as strong-arm party thugs, organized into the SA storm troopers. But the great majority of the organized working class supported the Communists or Social Democrats to the very end.
In the December 1932 election, three candidates ran for president: the conservative incumbent Field Marshal von Hindenburg, the Nazi candidate Adolph Hitler, and the Communist party candidate Ernst Thaelmann. In his campaign, Thaelmann argued that a vote for Hindenburg amounted to a vote for Hitler and that Hitler would lead Germany into war. The bourgeois press, including the Social Democrats, denounced this view as “Moscow inspired.” Hindenburg was re-elected while the Nazis dropped approximately two million votes in the Reichstag election as compared to their peak of over 13.7 million.
True to form, the Social Democrat leaders refused the Communist party’s proposal to form an eleventh-hour coalition against Nazism. As in many other countries past and present, so in Germany, the Social Democrats would sooner ally themselves with the reactionary Right than make common cause with the Reds. Meanwhile a number of right-wing parties coalesced behind the Nazis and in January 1933, just weeks after the election, Hindenburg invited Hitler to become chancellor.
Meanwhile in the real world:
Quality of nutrition improved after the Soviet revolution, and the last time USSR had a famine was in 1940s. CIA data suggests they ate just as much as Americans after WW2 peroid while having better nutrition:
Professor of Economic History, Robert C. Allen, concludes in his study without the 1917 revolution is directly responsible for rapid growth
Study demonstrating the steady increase in quality of life during the Soviet period (including under Stalin). Includes the fact that Soviet life expectancy grew faster than any other nation recorded at the time:
A large study using world bank data analyzing the quality of life in Capitalist vs Socialist countries and finds overwhelmingly at similar levels of development with socialism bringing better quality of life:
This study compared capitalist and socialist countries in measures of the physical quality of life (PQL), taking into account the level of economic development.
This study shows that unprecedented mortality crisis struck Eastern Europe during the 1990s, causing around 7 million excess deaths. The first quantitative analysis of the association between deindustrialization and mortality in Eastern Europe.
Romania, the inustrialization of an agrarian economy under socialist planning
If we accepted the arguments that humans are selfish, then it’s an argument for communism and not against it. We should be creating social systems that encourage socially positive behavior and inhibit socially destructive behavior. Capitalism is like taking a drunk to a happy hour at the bar. The fact that people keep repeating this trope shows complete and utter lack of critical thinking on their part.
We’re not as fragile around here. :)
the only thing funny here is the fact that you felt the need to write that vapid comment of yours
Fun times ahead, and at the end of the day I do think the key part is to redirect the hate from the tech itself towards what’s actually causing problems. Whatever we may think of AI, it’s no longer possible to put toothpaste back in the tube so to speak. This tech exists, and it’s not going to go away because people are mad about it. It’s better to be constructive and focus the discussion on how it’s going to be applied going forward.
It’s also useful for finding stuff in large documents or codebases. For example, I was recently trying to understand how different concepts in a paper related to each other, and LLM was able to find the relevant parts of the paper which helped me piece things together.
I very much agree, we’re now in the hype phase of this tech and people are trying to use it for everything. Eventually, we’ll settle on the use cases that actually make sense. It’s going to be interesting to watch how it gets applied in places like Vietnam and China compared to the west as well. We get to see a direct contrast of how potentially transformative tech will be applied under socialism and capitalism.
Exactly, the hate for AI is reactionary in nature. What people are actually upset about is how this tech ends up being applied under capitalism, and that’s where the anger should be directed. It’s also worth noting how differently AI is applied in China where it’s predominantly used in industry and robotics. Even stuff like LLMs are being applied towards socially useful purposes like improving healthcare or government services. There’s also a big difference in the way it’s being developed with Chinese companies treating AI as a commodity, often releasing models as open source and aiming to optimize them for efficiency, while western approach has been to try and make them into services that can be monetized.
Personally, I’ve found AI to be a very useful tool for coding. It’s sped up my workflow significantly because it’s able to handle a lot of boilerplate. It’s particularly good for stuff like making UIs quickly. I can throw some sample JSON at a model and have it produce a decent looking React component. It used to take me hours to figure out styling and handling different behaviors, which I find really tedious to do. I also find it’s very handy for discovering language features. I haven’t had to work with JavaScript for a long time, and the language evolved significantly since I last touched it. Now I have a project using it at work, and I can work with the language much faster without having to constantly hunt for how to do a particular thing using it.
My experience is that this is already a useful tool, and it’s only going to keep getting better going forward. At the same time, it’s not magic, and you still have to learn how to get the most out of it and how to apply it effectively.
And a couple of more articles I can recommend that have good takes on the subject.
lol that wasn’t why it was in China in the first place, as Tim Cook explains here https://peertube.mesnumeriques.fr/w/ek3Q1mdFUMEBMxhT46Qrev