So socialism

[Lohrenswald]

What do you suggest?

I know I'm not doing a well job with this project, but I'd prefer to not have this kind of meddling

 

[Hygro]

You said objected to whataboutism, I gave you an example of it that you didn't. Simple as.

You don't think it's whataboutism because you think the things are related. This applies to things you consider whataboutism. It's an easy word to throw around, and it does have a use. But less than you'd think.


You don't seem to get the importance / significance of "more evil" including the phrase "evil".

Also, I'm also not sure you understand the impact of the US border wall conservatives want. It would, quite literally, be comparable. It would, ideally (note: in the eyes of those that considerv it ideal), empower people to shoot on sight. Have you been following anything of the border patrols in recent years?

This all comes back to trying to rank things as "good" and "not good". You use the phrase "more evil" here, but your argument has been one of justification throughout.

The Berlin Wall was already shoot on sight both directions. Yes it’s worse. That’s the point.

No, I’m not arguing for the USA wall, and nowhere outside your hopes that I am can you find that.

None of this about me ranking things in good or not good binary. I have zero idea why you think this, but nothing I’m saying should be unclear.

Like here you are saying “now you say evil….” I said evil already where, in one third of a sentence, articulated the entire point expanded later in a certain later post about assassinating Central American land reformers.

It’s already there, read it twice.

 

[EvaDK]

^It's only fair that the people who post in here, decide what an alternative title should be. That won't be me.

Would you say that any nordic societies have a form of socialism? Maybe Norway? (due to general oily affluence).

The Nordics are hybrid economies/socio-political systems. A mix of Capitalist/Liberalist and Socialist systems. So is most of Europe, but the Nordics sometimes get a bit more attention in US media (for better and worse), probably because of how our welfare states function and the wage levels of an average worker here.

 

[9gkj548hkm20vk79dj689bnj4]

if we talk socialized industries i'm pretty biased maybe, coming from a succesful country with a lot of its success rooted in socialized industries. whether the root is a cause or incidental i do not know, but i generally like my empiricism when dealing with policy. if i had to choose between two present systems, i like the one that seems to work better instead of collapsing.

for the matter at hand, healthcare:

i like socialized medicine because it's cheaper for the same efficiency.
(or at least what it really means when people say socialized medicine colloquially in europe; it means incredible government oversight. eg germany's healthcare is basically private but is harshly controlled by the government. the model would probably be considered socialist in the states*)

supply-demand is good for making money, but it's simply not efficient in industries where demand is effectively infinite. you can't put a price on what you'll want to pay for being alive

*edit sidenote but coming from denmark the fact that many people have a hard time conceptualizing some of the more finicky relations between public and private is why this whole conversation is so often a swamp; denmark has a massive public sector, but is wholly intervowen with private business, and there's much less red tape in our massive government for private ventures than many of the big industry players worldwide. mericans have a hard time relating to this situation because like "but they got massive taxes, huge public sector and more socialized industries industries than us, how can there be less government control over the private sector!????"

I should have said: actual government control of providing health care. which, amazingly, few countries actually have despite the political talk in the US about the need to get on the "bandwagon" of single-payer care.
I think Canada and the UK do, and...that might be it...?
many other places, like yours, seem to have a hybrid.
and in the Nordic countries, I thought, most of it is not centrally-controlled but controlled by each municipality

 

[Kyriakos]

Britain has private health care too, though maybe only through private insurance (?). Here, despite national healthcare (for anyone who works + protected groups), you can go to any private health service institution too (and there are LOADS of those). But afaik it rarely is done through special insurance; you just pay there and then.

 

[Hygro]

There are plenty of times where degrees of grey are important. I genuinely, humbly submit the conservative-driven anti-immigration policy in the US to not be one of those things. The closed garden is harmful, and I don't think it's necessarily beneficial for those inside it either.

(sorry for all the edits, on my phone and the touch typing is worse than usual)

Me too until now. Just saw this. Yes the USA wall is bad, not even good for us inside. But fundamentally less bad than the Berlin wall, as the USA wall doesn't exactly exist, and the fascists don't have total control of the border policy, nor enforcement, even if they are very over represented.

 

[Plains-Cow]

those are not high bars to clear in terms of managing a country. you can do better than them and still make life very miserable.

problem with ai is that a poorly aligned ai could (and experimentally, less sophisticated/easier to create ai right now frequently do this) have something different than a human conception of "good management" as its goal. at which point, it might very well optimize for something that results in greater catastrophe than ghadaffi could imagine, let alone implement. it's apparently not an easy problem, even for people a lot smarter than we are. that doesn't mean it's impossible, but giving the ai keys to policy before solving it would nevertheless be a really bad idea.

You can just have them present their solutions rather than give them the keys to everything. If that's the goal, then it can be done a step at a time regarding what % of critical industry/services they directly manage with little/no human oversight.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

You can just have them present their solutions rather than give them the keys to everything. If that's the goal, then it can be done a step at a time regarding what % of critical industry/services they directly manage with little/no human oversight.

there are a few reasons it won't be that simple. not the least of which is that if you're having a person interpret what the ai says and use that ai for credibility, you then have selective pressure on that person to influence what the ai says before it says it, or to liberally interpret the results, or both.

however, there are other failure modes too, such as optimizing for an outcome that isn't actually in peoples' best interest (either intentionally or otherwise) but operating on the assumption that it is. in a subset of these, you can indeed pave the road to hell with all parties having good intentions...even if most of those "good intentions" are genuine. happens with communist nations historically, and throwing a computer in there to say things as an intermediate step won't change it.

 

[Yeekim]

Sometimes, a short 2-minute news story straight from Russian TV tells you more than I ever could.
But is socialism to blame? Or distinct lack of it?

 

[amadeus]

In response to why the Soviet Union is discussed in tandem with socialism—and I’m too lazy to go and quote anyone who brought it up—would it be fair to state the following?

1. There are branches of socialist thought.
2. One of the branches held the Soviet Union as a model to work towards.

If both are true, then I think it’s fair to talk about it when that pro-Soviet group of socialists are present. Now if we go back to Attlee, Mitterrand, Norman Thomas, etc. then I don’t think we’re talking about the same thing and I wouldn’t use the Soviets as an example.

 

[sophie]

In response to why the Soviet Union is discussed in tandem with socialism—and I’m too lazy to go and quote anyone who brought it up—would it be fair to state the following?

1. There are branches of socialist thought.
2. One of the branches held the Soviet Union as a model to work towards.

If both are true, then I think it’s fair to talk about it when that pro-Soviet group of socialists are present. Now if we go back to Attlee, Mitterrand, Norman Thomas, etc. then I don’t think we’re talking about the same thing and I wouldn’t use the Soviets as an example.

Which pro-Soviet socialists are you talking about? Aside from inno who came in later with one drive-by post?

 

[Caesar of Bread]

Wait what did i miss?

 

[Caesar of Bread]

Sometimes, a short 2-minute news story straight from Russian TV tells you more than I ever could.
But is socialism to blame? Or distinct lack of it?

I admit, that was me. I really needed it.

 

[amadeus]

Which pro-Soviet socialists are you talking about? Aside from inno who came in later with one drive-by post?

Is it relevant if they are present here in the forum, or is it a broader discussion? Excuse my poor memory because I don’t remember how we drifted on to the subject.

If it is relevant and they’re not here, I can stop talking about it. I think it’s just one of those snowball things that happens on internet forums.

 

[Birdjaguar]

UBI one step at a time.

$500 a Month, No Strings: Chicago Experiments With a Guaranteed Income​

For recipients, it’s a lifeline. For liberal supporters, it shows how expanding government can make a difference. For conservatives, it’s a return to wasteful welfare handouts.

CHICAGO — Christopher Ellington’s South Side photography studio crashed in 2020 with the onset of the pandemic. By March 2021, he was scraping by on a tax preparation and financial advice business when gunshots rang out one day as he was leaving work. Two bullets from a drive-by shooter pierced his head and left him permanently blind. The creditors were closing in, the rent notices piling up. And then a helping hand came late last summer from Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s administration: the first of a year’s worth of monthly $500 checks, with no strings attached and almost no questions asked. “Talk about shock,” said Mr. Ellington, 32. “It was ‘Hey, the government is doing this? Wait a minute. I don’t have to, you know, report this and report that, and you don’t have to go through all of my business and I don’t have to watch what I say?’ I was like, ‘This is how it should be.’”

Chicago and the surrounding suburbs of Cook County are conducting the largest experiment of its kind in the nation, an effort to supply thousands of residents with a basic level of subsistence, not in the form of food, housing or child care — just cash. Ms. Lightfoot’s $31.5 million Resilient Communities Pilot selected 5,000 city residents in August to receive a guaranteed cash income for a year. The first $500 checks from a separate program, a $42 million county pilot, went out in December to 3,250 residents concentrated in the near-in Chicago suburbs.

More here:

$500 a Month, No Strings: Chicago Experiments With a Guaranteed Income

For recipients, it’s a lifeline. For liberal supporters, it shows how expanding government can make a difference. For conservatives, it’s a return to wasteful welfare handouts.

www.nytimes.com

 

[Hygro]

These are always wild successes that get shut down so fast.

 

[Birdjaguar]

It will run for a year.

 

[amadeus]

Don’t misinterpret my post as being for/against (I’m against, but anyway), however I’m not sure what meaningful data can be gleaned from these experiments where they are: small in amount, and more importantly, temporary.

If you gave me an extra $6,000 once, I’m not going to change my behavior as much as I would if you gave me $30,000 per year. If you want to find the results of the latter, you have to implement that first and not extrapolate from another, entirely different experiment.

 

[Farm Boy]

These are always wild successes that get shut down so fast.

When unemployment tried this for a year it paid people more than I got paid to work, and inflation nailed my gas, my heat, my groceries, and my taxes. Now, apparently, they're finding unprecedented fraud.

Godawful stunts when applied without regards to the recipients. Let Them Eat Cake. The idle are still too heavy, whatever whingeing about technology they rationalize with. The working poor, fine, this might equalize some of the BS political fiat rewards douchebags give thier spewspawns.

 

[Plains-Cow]

there are a few reasons it won't be that simple. not the least of which is that if you're having a person interpret what the ai says and use that ai for credibility, you then have selective pressure on that person to influence what the ai says before it says it, or to liberally interpret the results, or both.

however, there are other failure modes too, such as optimizing for an outcome that isn't actually in peoples' best interest (either intentionally or otherwise) but operating on the assumption that it is. in a subset of these, you can indeed pave the road to hell with all parties having good intentions...even if most of those "good intentions" are genuine. happens with communist nations historically, and throwing a computer in there to say things as an intermediate step won't change it.

New technology always comes around, and it's inevitable that this will be something we need to deal with. Might as well try to get a handle on it rather than wing it as we go or try to be like the Amish and freeze ourselves on the tech tree.