It’s not about peaceful routes, it’s about sustainability and avoiding evil.

Not all Bolsheviks were awful, too. It’s just that the general agreement about “we are doing a marxist revolution and transforming a country worse than intended for that, and so we can only afford unity and centralism, and some hard solutions are necessary” meant that the hard solutions led from executions of some people to executions of many, and unity led to gradually destroying opposition (the communist kind), and centralism led ultimately to Stalin.

Your reading comprehension skill means you can’t have a serious conversation period.

I won’t try a third time.

Why are you arguing about USSR not knowing anything of it?

90% of your comment boils down

No, it doesn’t, that’s what I’m trying to explain you, these things were not because of some economic power disadvantage or even connected to it. It’s not about economic power.

You really don’t understand that the same goods would be available aplenty where they were produced or imported. It was because of Soviet logistics and planning not being functional, do you understand that? What private businesses do in your country, only the state could legally do in USSR, a private citizen trying to do that would be put into fucking jail if caught. And the state couldn’t manage the complexity of planning. The state also didn’t have good feedback for planning due to corruption, gaming metrics, all the things that happen when people providing feedback are the same whose performance is being measured. You don’t have to trust me on that, there are lectures and interviews by people who worked in Gosplan, one can find them in the Internet.

An example - red caviar was rare luxury in most of USSR, but in the areas where it was produced nobody would be able to eat it anymore, so fucking full of it they were. Same with kinds of Soviet beer that nobody far from the brewery’s location remembers actually seeing sold. That example can be repeated for almost any kind of goods.

And about exploitation of global south - LOL, yeah, USSR exploited itself. The thin layer of party official families and foreign communists (Soviet elite had that inferiority complex, so any foreigner in USSR enjoyed special conditions) and komsomol leaders was similar to European settlers in some African country, the rest were like aboriginal population.

Only really true for higher education. It was seen as a sort of “social payment” in exchange for the free education. Better than tuition loans IMO.

Ah, yes, USSR had plenty of “social payments”, it was considered that the reason wages are not so big is that you’ve been given the rest in the form of education, healthcare, everything else. People who were allowed to leave USSR in the 70s had to pay a sum approximating like a year of wages, to “compensate” the state for their education.

Uhhh… Do you think that doesn’t exist in the west right now? What do you think the SCHUFA does in Germany? Do you seriously think high tech companies don’t have a gray-legal-area history of your employment? At least back then it was a thing you could check…

It was worse, an employer could “lose” your labor book, then you were fucked a lot. These things are kinda the opposites of each other, in the USSR the power of that document was the problem I meant. It was like losing an ID. Modern problems where everyone has the information about you, augmented by interpretations and perspectives of various jerks, are different.

…as opposed to capitalism, where you’ll be left unemployed and without a wage if your boss doesn’t like you. What do you prefer?

Such a characteristic would possibly make it very hard to find a new job. In USSR, yes. And not having a job was illegal.

Housewives existed, what are you talking about?

If you mean staying at home all day and not having a job, no they didn’t. Anyway, most Soviet citizens didn’t make enough money for one of the two to not have a job.

If you mean that USSR had kinda backwards views of gender roles, so a woman would not just work all day, but also get back and then do laundry, cooking, cleaning and all that stuff, - then oh yes. That’s what you see in Soviet movies, not housewives in the western sense.

The only way to obtain an income in the Soviet Union was throughout work or throughout a pension (think widows, disabled, or retired people). This was by design, and it’s in my opinion a moral good.

Living off a farm where you alone work would be illegal, for example. Or selling things of some craft.

People on those pensions needed support from their friends and neighbors. They were bad even by Soviet measure.

Colour me surprised: there were racist people in the mid-20th century?! I’m sure that’s exclusive to the Soviet Union!

The particular economic system in which they couldn’t avoid being unemployed or barely employed due to that was.

Tell that to the millions of unemployed and homeless in the USA.

I agree that the lowest of the low was higher in the USSR than in the USA, maybe notably. But the average and the median were much lower.

We are also not talking modern USA, we are talking, suppose, 80s’ USA.

The average material conditions in the Soviet Union, a country that begun to industrialize in 1929, were worse than in the USA, the literal core of world colonialism and imperialism which relies on exploited labour all over the global south, which industrialised in the 19th century. Hmmm, I wonder why that was…

The signum is not surprising, I mean that the scalar is much bigger than you think.

A young family having their own place, even if that’s one room, was not a thing. They’d live with the husband’s parents. Sometimes with the wife’s parents. Maybe with some aunts and uncles. Crammed like sardines. In those modular Khruschev-era houses (and that’s almost the optimal kind, say, I live in a flat in a Stalin-era brick house with high ceilings, that wasn’t common in any way, my grand-grandpa was a civilian railways analog of a general ; some people still lived in communal flats even in the 90s, that’d be one room per family, with common kitchen and bathroom), hearing and smelling all of your neighbors talking, sleeping, fucking, cooking and so on, with leaking walls, cockroaches etc.

There are things you don’t even think about and take them for granted. In USSR you couldn’t buy anything. There were a few basic kinds of goods that could be bought anytime. The rest would happen to be in stores occasionally. On those occasions there’d be enormous queues, people would stand in queues more than half of their time not at work, excluding sleep. People would take days off to stand in queues. To get things you can just buy if you have money. Like - some fruits. Or - some t-shirts. Mundane things.

That free healthcare was also not what you think healthcare to be, being a westerner. Dentists would work without anesthesia, a lot of surgeries would be done without it too or with very basic anesthesia. Doctors would have all kinds of medieval bullshit ideas, so people would be afraid to go to a doctor the normal way, they’d use acquaintances and connections and favors and barters to find a good doctor. Getting various nasty infections in medical institutions was normal.

How do I explain it to you - for a person 60-70 years old now, grown in USSR in a “normal” situation, foreigners, and especially westerners, are some kind of magical creatures from heaven. What you call bad and horrible is, for such a person, much less hopeless than their life when they were 20.

You didn’t, somebody else did. Or maybe you didn’t know it. Or maybe you have such a metabolism. Whatever.

But I always put an effort into separating my clean clothes from my room stink, and making sure I always showered before I left the house.

There is a huge space called depression, in some parts of it people can shower, in some other parts of it people can’t leave the bed.

But I also have the high masking flavor of autism, so maybe that’s why that level of effort has come naturally.

“Masking” and “natural” kinda contradict each other.

There are guys whose parents have spoiled them, but impressed it upon them that they are not spoiled. Behaving like that.

There are also ones like me, whose parents … not neglected them, rather didn’t understand shit about parenting and didn’t really try and were very arrogant, but did that with enough effort to instill the feeling of being spoiled and the shame for it indefinitely.

Nose blindness is terrible when you’re autistic. Or when you just had a vacation with no plans and just spent it all inside killing time being depressed.

I think that other guy was joking and the problem was, I dunno, fearing to stumble when standing up.

How does being so particular in body wash and demanding for accommodations from another guy become compatible with manliness? Especially the latter.

It’s also a bit funny to read “I ain’t no bitch” with caps and punctuation and all that, as if intentionally spelled out. Produces the impression opposite of what they were trying to make.

I think all those movies and series, say, with Jon Snow not cutting his hair (shaving and doing a haircut are not very technologically demanding processes, and starting with Iron Age they were norm in most places), looking greased in shit and wearing an animal skin, and talking in that perpetually hysterical “roaring/whining” voice, and similar portrayals of “real man” as what would be called “gay sex symbol” 50 years ago, have given sprouts.

No, I meant reduce distractions in the UI. Using all the same applications with native look. And reduce epilepsy-inducing elements in that native look.

I meant normal use.

I don’t mean that. I mean using a PC normally, but with a level of UI appearance adequacy approaching that of a DOS prompt.

BTW, I’m not OP, but just interested, about the general feel of the UI and solutions - how much of the 3d\blur\other effects can be turned off? Same with choosing a purely monochrome color scheme. These cause nausea for me every time I even look at MacOS screenshots.

And another question, about window management and solutions to that and the desktop and dock and launcher, - how simplified can that be? In addition to nausea, have anxiety from most things there, and every time touching a Mac wasn’t pleasant. Can one have a keyboard-controlled environment without rounded corners, without animations, without scrolled screens with icons to launch something? And how well can one hide the functionality of virtual desktop overview or whatever that is, to just forget it was there?

Suppose my ideal of tranquility would be a DOS prompt, gray on black. How close can one get to that?

Hypothetically.

That’s why I specifically addressed food. “Mouths to feed” is a small problem.

If the results of automation allowing more output are somehow distributed to people without buying ability anymore, then it’s not yet a problem. If they are not, then other people, not as productive as said automation, have a market for their work. That’s what I meant.

Psychological toll … yeah, that’s where, again, something like Soviet ideology would be of some use. And some kind of more even distribution of work. As in - labor is virtuous, but it’s a good thing when you can do less labor for the same result.

BTW, all those people whining about oh holy Stalin, oh beautiful USSR, we were not good enough to have you, they ignore the obvious fact that what’s been done once can be done again, especially with technological means better fit for it. Maybe they were onto something, who knows. Not just Soviet ideologists, but a certain Norbert Wiener predicted a moment when the problems will have to be solved in ways different from now.

Bigger population means bigger cultural space. It is important. There are many things machines can’t do.

I don’t want to appear snobbish, but if economic prospects are bad, then you need even more people. In economics scale makes everything better.

Basic food is, if we think about it, very cheap. Even the USSR managed to solve that problem. Everyone could find buckwheat\rice\some other grain\potatoes\vegetables to eat, salt sold for food was mandated to be iodized, for prevention of scurvy even on very basic diet, and some (bad, ugly, but edible) fish conserves were generally available everywhere, also “sea cabbage”.

Depending on area there’d also be (bad, thin, kinda soup-only, not the broilers you’re used to, though about USA I’ve read that food products quality is not nice generally) chicken, some fish, some meat. Some fruit, something else. The previous paragraph described the baseline that was always there.

So hunger is avoidable even if the economy sucks huge stinking donkey balls.

If hunger is avoidable, having more people is, of course, a disadvantage in terms of social conflicts, but they don’t have to fear that - the most angry and dumb part of the population is voting for them.

Notice that it doesn’t matter whether you think that AI can replace people, it only matters whether companies think that AI can replace people. Now, having children costs a lot of money, at least $100K, depending on where you live, and i understand people being reluctant about having children.

There’s a bit of tunnel vision here, I think. It costs that to have children in the USA, but in Mexico it’d be cheaper probably.

That’s because value is created by labor, if your labor isn’t needed and you don’t have a job, then you’d still produce value if you had one. And when you can’t afford something, that disadvantaged labor might produce it. OK, I’m a shitty explainer, what I mean is that, if there are no regulations directly preventing it, there’s a feedback of creating another bucket of demand and thus jobs to fulfill it. Not an economist.

I also advocate for UBI (universal basic income), but the way i see it today, there’s a high likelyhood that it will come, but will be too little to actually cover cost-of-living costs. I.e., it might be a “support”, providing $400/month no-strings-attached and it would definitely improve the living conditions of many people, especially in low-income households. But it would still not solve all problems.

It might create hyperinflation, first and foremost affecting those owning money and not assets. And your average person is more dependent on money as opposed to assets than a businessman or a company or a fund. I’m not an economist, that’s just how I see it.

Seems that, but can be aimed at anyone different from what their herd considers normal too.

And the herd never barks at psychopaths, because it fears them. It’s the non-predatory conditions that the herd openly hates.

a vast majority of office jobs could be done by nearly anyone. If they just stopped requiring a college degree to do those jobs and trained people

Oh, I thought it’s just Russia’s problem that everyone requires a bullshit degree to, I dunno, clean PCs and reinstall Windows

You start building swarm-enabled FPV drones with AI targeting, screw ethics.

You will anyway, I mean, for the cost of one tank you can build such an amount of these to take out a dozen.

I mean, his promises kinda are socialism, just wrapped into rebel flag racist and qanon crap. Including “returning industries back from China” parts, those are not ideal clean socialism so to say, but they match USSR. And the anti-diversity parts - as Soviet-socialist in emotion as it gets. Just aimed at minorities “unjustly getting special treatment”.

Let him. Also why would Harvard need federal grants.

That’s been tried in a certain republic of the past, but the idea is fine generally.

I mean, most people hating Trump have some mental condition from DSM. Most people loving Trump as well.