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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • Big doubt on the size being the main factor, though it contributes. IMO the main factor is scarcity. An underfunded large organization will find way to operate efficiently. See NASA or some large charities.

    A small startup with nearly unlimited Venture Capital will most of the time find a way to squander that money and get results that shouldn’t take tenth of the money.

    The difference being that there are natural mechanism to correct waste in private companies, if it becomes significant compared to its scale. A public company often won’t have the same. E.g. which politician is going to go order layoffs? Hope he does not plan to get elected again. I think there is a good chance, if your company was public, the sw engineers would still be wasting time and resources. Perhaps on a different pointless project.

    And that is before even addressing outright corruption and embezzlement.



  • It means that the planner says, we need to have the designs and ability to mass produce low cost, high performance RISC-V cores for PCB integration by 2025.

    But this is the hard part. Who is qualified to say that RISC-V is the way to go instead of x86? An elected politician? Experts? If experts, how do you select them? Who checks they really are experts? Who holds them accountable?

    If there’s someone who wants to start working on a design with a new team, there’s going to be capital available for a startup.

    Who and how decides if a startup is worthy of funding? How do you prevent ideas being rejected for personal reasons, e.g. religious objection? How do you prevent fraudulent startups?

    If they need more capital they get it.

    Who and how decides when it is no longer worth it? How do you avoid fraud, wastefulness, etc.?


  • Economic growth is just easy to check data.

    That’s debatable but ok.

    Generally markets and competition do well in figuring out how to do something we don’t know how to do well and cheap. Once we figure that out for some product or category, profits fall competitors fail and consolidation sets in, cost of production falls further due to decreasing duplication and increased scale.

    Absolutely yes.

    A sector that hasn’t been relaxed for example is banking and for a good reason.

    Yes, very good reason.

    But beyond relaxing control, the other very important thing that was relaxed was foreign direct investment.

    So the other big part of capitalism.

    On Walmart, I think what you’re looking at is the feedback mechanism of shop/factory data going up the stack.

    I think this comes back to what you said before. If we are talking about established items, that you already have suppliers for, then you can centralize it.

    But good luck getting beer from a small local brewery stocked. The more centralized, the less flexible and innovative.

    Imo if you centralize on a scale of an entire national economy, you would have very hard time dealing with anything that’s not a well established supply line already.



  • DreamlandLividity@lemmy.worldtoPolitical Memes@lemmy.worldDon't be fooled
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    24 days ago

    First of all, it is hilarious that as part of criticizing capitalism, you use economic growth as a metric instead of let’s say availability of goods in stores. Yes, if your economy revolves around state directed things like building weapons, infrastructure and growing industry, it gets easier to manage than unpredictable consumer demands.

    China started it’s explosive growth when they relaxed their central control. I am not advocating some absolute libertarian market freedom either. Yes, state exerting control, ideally with consumer interests in mind, can be a good thing to avoid the pitfalls of “pure” capitalism. But there are also risks to that, see China overbuilding high speed rail and housing.

    And finally, isn’t Walmart the poster example of decentralized planning? It does the “planning” at the level of store selling final goods, where there is best access to data, such as shopping habits and trends. That’s the point of decentralized planning, not having unreliable ad-hoc supply chains.

    PS: To be clear, you also have many good points. I addressed only the ones I disagreed with.



  • DreamlandLividity@lemmy.worldtoPolitical Memes@lemmy.worldDon't be fooled
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    25 days ago

    In contrast, a socialist economy allocates resources and labour according to society’s needs, which are determined by some mix of economic planning and limited market dynamics.

    The only problem being, that while nice in theory, socialist economies never actually did that in practice. Since humanity has never figured out, how to actually do economic planning in some centralized or semi-centralized way without being very inefficient and corrupt. I used to think AI could do that one day, but I guess that was too optimistic…

    It’s easy to see capitalism is terrible. It’s hard to see a better system, that could replace it.




  • Again, the issue is that once you burn fossil fuel, you are not turning it into fossil fuel in any meaningful amount of time.

    On the other hand, let’s say that a field used for producing plants for biofuel does not capture any carbon at all to simplify. So deforesting an area releases all the carbon a forest held. The difference is that the fossil fuel gives you energy one time, while the field produces it yearly. We need energy yearly. So if you deforest an area for biofuel, you release CO2 from deforestation but all the CO2 released in the future is what was recaptured by the plants. It is one time CO2 release for perpetual energy delivery. If you go with fossil fuels, you will keep burning more and more every year until it is much worse than deforesting an area.

    So reforesting can capture CO2 already released, but that only offsets fossil fuels for some period of time. Even if you cover the whole planet in forests, there is a finite amount of fossil fuels you can burn before it is negated. That is why eliminating fossil fuel use, and quickly, is far more important than protecting forests. Once you burn fossil fuel, you can’t recapture it into fossil fuel and would have to increase fores area permanently to compensate.


  • the alternative to burning biomass would need to have very high emissions in order to come out ahead.

    Not really, that’s the point. Soil has a max capacity of carbon it will hold. Just like biomass. So even if the fossil fuels release tiny amount of CO2, they release it continually vs deforestation releasing it one time. The only thing that changes is how long it takes for biomass to break even. But after thousands of years, the one time big release will always turn out better than continual small releases.

    Of course, avoiding both deforestation and fossil fuels is even better.




  • DreamlandLividity@lemmy.worldtolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldJust something I made
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    4 months ago

    You’re defending him—intentionally or not—because you’re giving legitimacy to the idea that, somehow, the party that kicked him out is in the wrong.

    Yeah, I am tired of this shit. My entire comment repeatedly spells out that criticizing one party does not mean supporting the other. Both FDO and Vaxry can be in the wrong. If you can’t even comprehend that, there is nothing else to talk about.


  • DreamlandLividity@lemmy.worldtolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldJust something I made
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    4 months ago

    First off, I don’t know anything about Vaxry or the Hyperland community, so I am definitely not defending him or implying it is not bad or anything of the sorts. I am saying the public reasoning for the ban is manufactured BS, and I am pretty sure that is because it is hard to call yourself “free” anything if you want to police peoples behavior unrelated to your project.

    If you think projects should do such policing, that’s fine. It even makes sense, if you ignore the potential for misuse. But they certainly shouldn’t advertise themselves as free. It’s the hypocrisy of trying to do both by manufacturing an excuse I am calling out.

    As for the rest of what you write, I feel it all comes to the same unhinged idea that because someone is a bad person, everything they touch, create or any person engaging with them is also bad.

    I dislike Brave, and it’s founder. Doesn’t mean everything Brave does is bad or can’t be promoted by me as good. If you choose to not do it for your personal beliefs, that is fine. But the idea that I am not allowed to praise Brave browser features or other actions because of something unrelated its founder did or said is ridiculous.

    EDIT: Regarding your edit, yes. I criticize parts of DEI or stupid anti-Trump arguments. That’s the whole point. Stupid arguments are stupid even if a good person is making them and good arguments are good, even if evil person like Trump makes them. Parts of DEI can be bad, even though discrimination is also bad. The world is not black and white.

    EDIT2: Here is my post on DEI if anyone wants to read it and decide for themselves whether it is reasonable criticism or not.