They are? Most of what VC funded companies do has been done before at a smaller scale, often with less polish and at a higher price.
VC money is used to scale up, cut costs with scale, capture markets, and then usually prices go up later depending on the economics.
The Chinese state is basically just acting as a big VC fund for Chinese manufacturing industries. A VC fund with a sovereign currency and the ability to sustain burn-mode for decades.
It doesn’t always work. There are some absurd examples of Chinese waste produced this way like “ghost cities.” But when it works it works, and at tremendous scale, and they can just dominate entire industries.
It's questionable whether the ghost cities truly exist though. I was under the impression they were a product of China's bizarre savings and investment market, and that a lot of them have since filled up?
Amazon was wildly profitable on a unit cost basis from relatively early on. They didn’t show profits on paper because they reinvested everything into their capital buildout to reduce costs even more.
That's the most obvious example of failure of Chinese central planning. That and one child policy were abysmal failures that resulted from shoddy science coupled to effective central authority.
Look at the 12/13/14th 5 year plan (the most recently passed). Do you think they achieved their goals?
If your headcanon is that the CCP is inept because they caused crop failures 60 years ago... you could stand to take a look at what they're doing today.
I guess the summary is as simple as: Good five year plans are great, bad five year plans are terrible.
There are sooo many variables in how one could go about making and executing five year plans. They must have figured out a couple of things that tend to work.
The big difference recently from the past is instead of philosophers its scientists who are making the plans and decisions in China so are willing to course correct instead staying the course despite bad out comes.
I don't know if that tracks, senior leadership was heavily influenced towards implementing the one child policy by the works of Song Jian, who came from a rocketry background and presented a model whereby the population would grow to an unsustainable level unless corrective control was applied.
I think it is unlikely philosophers would have suggested to treat population growth like tuning a PID controller.
>treat population growth like tuning a PID controller.
Treating human resources like resources because 100s of millions of bodies ultimately subject to statistics. "Libtard" philosophers from small countries don't truly have to reckon with Malthusian pressure and law of large numbers.
And PRC family planning wasn't wrong, averted ~300m births, and bluntly PRC still left with ~400/1400m surplus mouths trapped in low-end farming and informal economy. Otherwise they'd have 1000m/1700m, more than 400+300 because every family with more kids is one that can't concentrate surplus/resources on tertiary/skill uplift. Now PRC left with TFR problem, but averted developmental doomsday scenario of too many subsistence peasants, aka where India trending towards.
A good read in this area is Dan Wang's book - Breakneck
One could probably summarize it as having engineering leaders solve engineering problems is good, but they can very efficiently implement very bad social policies. Likewise having non-STEM leaders in charge of things like agricultural planning is also bad.
That said modern China is less socialist/communist than a weird state capitalism machine with a dictatorship.
One big difference to modern China vs USSR for example is instead of having 1-2 car companies churning out the cars the state demands, you have more of a competitive local government subsidized market. So they have 50+ car companies all competing in the local marketplace for sales, and eventually some good car companies have surfaced. This was never going to happen with Lada.
> a weird state capitalism machine with a dictatorship.
That's not a completely new model, either - Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore all went through remarkably similar phases. Countries have tended to become freer and more democratic as they grow wealthy enough to build a sustainable middle-class and a genuine civil society that enjoys some basic independence from government.
Yes, and thats where the west ended up going wrong in our line of thinking. The assumption was if we facilitated their transition into middle class economy / rich world standards via trade deals and offshoring.. they'd follow the same path as our now allies - JP/TW/SK/SG/etc.
That is - the assumption was democracy/civil liberties would follow wealth. This has not held up. And the promotion of Xi to supreme leader probably for life has if anything pulled them further away from that path. Things like the great firewall have helped him in that effort.
China is very far from genuine rich-world standards though, especially if you look at the less developed inner provinces. The relatively tiny middle class they do have clearly lacks the incentive to demand any sudden change at present - they'd have way too much to lose. So we're still very much in the "authoritarian phase" of this whole dynamic.
That is actually bullshit fed to you all democracies that have been brought down in the last 60-70 years democracies have been brought down by the west. And most dictatorships propped up by them unless they threatened Israel or were perceived a threat to Israel. It was not civil liberties or any such reason that any moves were made it was about capitalism vs socialism or Israel. West capitalists have no interest in civil liberties or democracies hence they bring down any socialist democratic party or leader which has bring about fascists in power in the west.
> I don't know if that tracks, senior leadership was heavily influenced towards implementing the one child policy by the works of Song Jian, who came from a rocketry background and presented a model whereby the population would grow to an unsustainable level unless corrective control was applied.
The problem wasn't the idea of modeling itself, it was to not be aware of what we know today from Africa - with more wealth and especially less child mortality, reproduction will drop in about one generation, even without punitive governmental intervention. Even 60 years ago, people tended to have anywhere from 3 to 5 children, just because the chance was so high that at least two would simply die before reaching adulthood.
But thanks due to better maternal healthcare, vaccinations and OSHA, that mortality rate dropped significantly, and so people adapted on their own - and that's before getting into women being able to control fertility on their own or housing/cost of living exploding in the same timeframe.
>I think it is unlikely philosophers would have suggested to treat population growth like tuning a PID controller.
We are talking about Marxist philosophers. These weren't some scholars of Christianity, who would have insisted on the inherent worth of human life and the injustice of state intervention deep into personal lives, these were the same "philosophers" who justified extermination programs based on the insufficient revolutionary spirit of the exterminated.
If your headcanon is "5 year plans are great because some chinese supplier has cheap DDR-4", I would submit a gentle introduction to history is helpful (i.e. we took a couple irrational great leaps forward from cheap DDR-4 => China owns the RAM market => 5 year plans are the way to go)
I think it’s at least valid to conclude that a nation-level commitment to taking over a specific industry can work. You can gut your competitors and then dominate. It’s the Uber strategy applied at the geopolitical level.
If you could figure out how to get your country to dominate the world economy without also allowing your leaders to commit campaigns of mass-internment and extermination, then maybe you’d have a decent political system.
It's not the Uber strategy, because there's a physical limit to how efficiently a human can drive another human around the city. The Uber strategy was to push out competitors then bring pricing back up.
Chinese PV isn't going to get more expensive. The massive subsidies seen by Chinese PV companies from 2005-2024 account for a whopping 3.2% of solar firm incomes. [1] Over that same 2004-2024 period, solar cells prices have fallen to about 4-5% of 2024 prices. Not a typo. It's not the Uber model if they win by actually making the product at a fraction of the cost.
What is impressive is that this has happened despite the great efforts of USA to sabotage the Chinese semiconductor industry in order to eliminate the competition for Micron.
The second wave of "sanctions" (after those against Huawei done to eliminate the competition of Qualcomm) have been enacted when Chinese companies were ready to take a dominant position on the SSD market. Even Apple had decided to use the Chinese SSDs in their products.
Without the so-called "sanctions", the market of memory devices, both for SSDs and for DRAM would have looked extremely different today and we would have not been hit by this shamelessly huge increases in the price of memory modules, SSDs and HDDs.
The so-called US "sanctions" have never been true "sanctions", because they have never been tied to any kind of political demands. They were just measures taken to destroy the competitors of certain US companies, which were implemented through various kinds of blackmailing methods that are available, for now, to the US government.
This comment makes several claims that don't survive scrutiny.
"Sanctions to eliminate the competition for Micron" — The October 2022 export controls and YMTC's Entity List designation were part of a sweeping national security policy targeting advanced compute capabilities, not a protectionist carve-out [1]. Multiple allied governments (UK, Australia, Japan, Netherlands) independently reached similar conclusions and imposed their own restrictions. If this was "for Micron," it backfired spectacularly: China retaliated by banning Micron from critical infrastructure projects in May 2023, costing Micron ~25% of its revenue [2].
"Huawei sanctions done to eliminate the competition of Qualcomm" — Huawei's CFO was indicted for bank fraud related to Iran sanctions violations [3]. The Five Eyes intelligence consensus on Huawei infrastructure risk predates the Trump administration by years (flagged since at least 2012) [4]. Reducing this to "helping Qualcomm" requires ignoring criminal indictments and an entire allied intelligence assessment.
"Chinese companies were ready to take a dominant position on the SSD market" — YMTC's global NAND share didn't reach ~10% until Q3 2025, three years after sanctions [5]. In 2022 they were a small player with single-digit share. Samsung alone held ~35% [6]. "Ready to take a dominant position" is not supported by any market data from that period.
"Even Apple had decided to use the Chinese SSDs" — Apple was in an exploratory testing phase and dropped YMTC in October 2022 before the Entity List designation in December, amid political scrutiny and its own risk assessment [7]. No Apple product ever shipped with YMTC memory. "Had decided" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
"This shamelessly huge increase in the price of memory" — This is the most egregious misattribution. The 2024+ memory price crisis is driven by: (1) Samsung/SK Hynix/Micron massively reallocating wafer capacity to HBM for AI accelerators, which requires far more wafer area per bit than conventional DRAM [8]; (2) deliberate production cuts in 2023 after the oversupply glut (Samsung posted its worst quarterly profit since 2009) [9]; (3) structural AI demand consuming enormous DRAM/NAND capacity [10]. Chinese memory companies at single-digit market share were nowhere near large enough to have prevented Samsung and SK Hynix from chasing the vastly more profitable HBM market. That's the price driver, not sanctions on YMTC.
The monocausal "US sanctions to protect Micron caused expensive memory" narrative requires overstating China's pre-sanctions market position, mischaracterizing Apple's exploratory talks as a commitment, ignoring the documented reasons for the sanctions, and attributing a price crisis driven by AI demand to restrictions on companies that held single-digit share.
> Huawei's CFO was indicted for bank fraud related to Iran sanctions violations
This is the official US justification. This does not mean that is also true.
The Huawei sanctions happened immediately after Huawei had shown their next generation CPU for smartphones, which was better than the next generation CPU shown by Qualcomm, and also immediately after market surveys announced that Huawei will become in a few months the world leader in the smartphone market, in front of Samsung.
When something like the US sanctions happens, what matters is who is the beneficiary, not which is the official explanation. The beneficiaries have been mainly Qualcomm, Apple and Samsung. The US sanctions were exactly what they needed, the only thing that could stop their competition.
The accusation of dealing with Iran and the blackmailing of Huawei by arresting the daughter of the CEO in Canada, are probably based on true facts, but they have probably been known for many years and they have only been exposed at that time in order to legally justify the sanctions, but due to the timing and consequences of the sanctions it is completely implausible than the old deals with Iran were their real motivation. After all, USA has also made deals with Iran, when they had the interest to do this, and they have not sanctioned themselves in such a way that would affect world economy in unrelated markets. When USA forces citizens of other countries to lose money by buying more expensive smartphones, because there is lower competition, how exactly does this hurt Iran?
The sanctions against the makers of memory devices did not have any credible "national security" motivation, despite the official claims.
> "Ready to take a dominant position" is not supported by any market data
I am too lazy to search now for quotations, but some time before the announcement of the US sanctions there were published prognoses for the future market share of YTMC, which was projected to grow very fast, after they had announced a new generation of more dense SSDs, which they were willing to sell at lower prices, to get market share. The fact that Apple has stopped their plans to use YTMC as supplier, a short time before the announcement of the sanctions, does not prove anything, except that the Apple management was probably already aware of this outcome.
> "This shamelessly huge increase in the price of memory" — This is the most egregious misattribution.
I agree with what you said about the present causes of the memory price increases. However, that has nothing to do with what I have said, which did not contain any misattribution.
What I have said is that if an increased competition on the memory market would not have been prevented by the US government, today we would have had more vendors and more diverse vendors on this market. In such a market, a deal like that of Altman and the other deals for exclusive contracts with the memory vendors would have had a much less impact. So great price increases would not have happened, because the other vendors would have been eager to step in and increase their market share. The memory market would have been much more stable. Now, in markets with 2, 3 or at most 4 vendors that matter, just a few exclusive contracts are enough to destabilize the market.
I appreciate the detailed response, but I think several of your arguments actually undermine your own case on closer inspection.
tl;dr: "Who benefits is what matters, not the official explanation" is how you prove anything you want. Boeing benefits when Airbus has problems, that doesn't mean Boeing sabotaged them. And even on its own terms: Qualcomm collected royalties from Huawei on every handset sold (per their 2018 licensing deal), so Qualcomm had direct financial incentive for Huawei to sell more phones, not fewer. The "cui bono" doesn't even bono the right cui.
On "cui bono" as proof of motive:
"When something like the US sanctions happens, what matters is who is the beneficiary, not which is the official explanation" is a general-purpose conspiracy epistemology that can prove anything. Boeing benefits when Airbus has production problems, that doesn't mean Boeing sabotaged Airbus. Cui bono is a reason to investigate, not a reason to conclude.
But even on your own terms, the timeline doesn't work. You say the Huawei sanctions happened "immediately after" Huawei showed their next-gen CPU. The Kirin 980 was announced at IFA in August 2018 [1]. The Entity List designation came in May 2019, nine months later [2]. In the semiconductor industry, nine months is not "immediately after." The Snapdragon 855, which benchmarked significantly faster than the Kirin 980 in CPU and GPU, shipped in December 2018 [3]. If Qualcomm needed government protection from an inferior chip that launched earlier, that's not a very compelling story about competitive threat.
You're right that Huawei was on track to overtake Samsung in smartphone shipments. They hit #2 globally in 2019 [4]. But Huawei's strength was in price-competitive handsets in emerging markets, not in chip design threatening Qualcomm's licensing business. Qualcomm's revenue model is based on patent licensing across the entire industry; Huawei's rise in handset volume actually increased Qualcomm's licensing revenue, since Huawei paid Qualcomm royalties on every handset sold (they signed a patent license agreement in 2018). Qualcomm had financial incentive for Huawei to sell more phones, not fewer.
On "they knew about Iran for years":
You concede the Iran dealings are "probably based on true facts" but argue the timing was convenient. The actual timeline: HSBC's internal probe of the Huawei-Iran transactions began in late 2016, the DOJ investigation built on HSBC's disclosures throughout 2017-2018, and the arrest warrant was issued in August 2018 [5][6]. Criminal investigations of this complexity involving international banking, foreign defendants, and extradition treaties routinely take years. The idea that prosecutors had a ready-made case sitting in a drawer and deployed it at an opportune moment isn't how federal criminal prosecution works. Grand jury proceedings, evidence gathering, and extradition requests have their own institutional momentum and timeline.
Also: "USA has also made deals with Iran and they have not sanctioned themselves" is a non-sequitur. The sanctions against Huawei aren't for "dealing with Iran" in the abstract, they're for bank fraud, i.e., lying to HSBC about the nature of transactions to evade sanctions that were in force at the time. The US government conducting foreign policy with Iran through official channels is categorically different from a private company deceiving banks to circumvent sanctions law.
On YMTC's projected dominance:
You say there were "published prognoses" for YMTC's rapid growth. I don't doubt that bullish analyst projections existed. But even the most optimistic 2022 forecasts projected YMTC reaching perhaps 8-10% of NAND by 2025 [7], which is roughly what actually happened despite the sanctions [8]. "Dominant position" means something like Samsung's 35%. Single-digit-to-low-double-digit share, even at aggressive prices, is "credible new entrant," not "dominant position."
On Apple: You say Apple dropping YMTC before the Entity List "doesn't prove anything, except that Apple management was probably already aware of this outcome." This is unfalsifiable. If Apple dropped them after sanctions: "they were forced to." If Apple dropped them before: "they had inside knowledge." What evidence would you accept that Apple made an independent commercial/reputational risk decision?
On memory prices:
I actually think you have the kernel of a legitimate argument here, and I should have engaged with it more carefully. You're right that the memory market is a tight oligopoly with a documented history of anticompetitive behavior: Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron have literally pled guilty to DRAM price fixing, paying $731 million in criminal fines in the 2000s, and faced renewed price-fixing allegations in 2018 [9]. More vendors would structurally improve this market.
But the distance between "more vendors would be good for competition" and "US sanctions on YMTC caused the current price crisis" remains enormous. Even in your restated version, the counterfactual requires YMTC to have grown large enough by 2024-2025 to serve as a meaningful alternative when Samsung/SK Hynix pivoted to HBM. Given that YMTC actually did reach ~10-13% NAND share by late 2025 even under sanctions [8], and prices still spiked, the evidence suggests the HBM reallocation would have overwhelmed any competitive pressure from a mid-sized Chinese entrant. The structural problem is that three companies control >90% of DRAM, and YMTC doesn't make DRAM at all, they make NAND. CXMT's DRAM operation is far smaller and wasn't even targeted by the same sanctions.
The memory price crisis is real, the oligopoly is real, and more competition would help. But attributing the current crisis primarily to sanctions rather than to AI-driven demand reallocation and the inherent fragility of a 3-player oligopoly (which existed long before any Chinese entrant) conflates a contributing factor with the primary cause.
You can only "gut" the competition if you're genuinely able to supply at lowest cost in a sustainable way. Selling at a loss and trying to make it up in volume is not a very good strategy. The Uber strategy was betting on having robotaxis everywhere, and then raising prices when they found out that this wouldn't be a viable solution in the near term.
The current memory prices are many times higher than the costs. Last month I was forced to buy some memory and it was more than 3 times more expensive than last summer. Moreover, this was in Europe, where currently computers and related products are cheaper than in USA, unlike in the previous years. The same memories that I have bought in Europe were much more expensive on Newegg.
If you can make memories, selling them at half the price demanded by Micron and the like is not selling at a dumping price, but it is selling with what in normal times would have been considered as a huge profit margin.
Studies of the 20th century manufacturing learning rate suggests that creation of arbitrary goods drops on the order of 15-20% every time you double production volume. This is before general purpose robotics and AI! Just interchangeable tooling, Taylorism, Ford style assembly lines, Toyota's supply chain ideas.
Selling at a modest loss and making the volume happen eventually means you're not selling at a loss anymore.
OP's point exactly: the Great Leap Forward is the classic example of society murdering people to make the line go up every quarter, no matter the cost or the truth.
Deaths in the Great Leap Forward were heavily concentrated as compared to the Industrial Revolution but the death tolls from IR-related famines weren't really all that far off. Industrialization was messy everywhere.
The Irish Potato Famine alone killed 15% of Ireland vs the GLF killing 5% of China.
That's not a reason not to plan 5 years in advance... is it? Any more than the Potato Famine is a reason we should't have capitalism.
I can't say that I've ever heard the argument that a plan led to a famine therefore we should never make plans, when we have great counterexamples that not planning also led to famine. Feels like learning the wrong lesson here.
[edit] I also think it's worth pointing out that America's response to the Dust Bowl was the Farm Bill, which it could be argued is one of the largest-scale examples of central planning in history. It continues to this day, and is part of the reason Americans pay less as a share of their spending on food than any other country on earth.
People say everyone remembers the hits, nobody remembers the misses - but that is the opposite of true for government. Everyone remembers the misses, nobody thinks twice about the hits.
The Irish Potato Famine was a constructed starvation by England to Ireland. All of their real foodstuffs were being stolen by England to run world-level wars everywhere, and the Irish grew what they were permitted to. Potatoes.
Great leaders use human resources as resources, that's historically why they're great, acquire territory, build state capacity, both at expenditure of regenerating resources - lives. A few 5 year plans that traded a few million lives to save more millions later. And by million we mean low single digit percent, i.e. historic rounding error that isn't remarkable nor worth the fixation except by muh liberal value types.
There's a reason there was persistent Chinese famines before GLF, and none after, because early industrial policies sorted out land resource management via massive rural mobilization/infra/industrial efforts, i.e. why PRC industrialization % and lifespan was vastly higher than developing peers in 70s... that's all because GLF broadly worked, adding about cumulative 200 milliion lives in terms of extended lifespan and likely ~100m+ in terms of averted famine deaths. Most historically competent Chinese leadership is return to farseeing utilitarianism, willing to trade lives for progress, which always sucks for the people during time of upheaval, but ultimately net good.
There are so many projects I could use pocketbase for, if only it supported Postgres.
I get the philosophical reasons behind why it doesn’t and why it’s SQLite only.
It’s just that in a corporate environment, I could trivially deliver full production ready applications because there is a team that handles all the Postgres replication/failover/ha/dr/backups/recovery for me. Pocketbase with pg would be super simple to deploy to a pod, getting 95% of production readiness done.
No. OP said they want to handle the database to their team. They didn't say anything about the auth, analytics, admin dashboards, real time change data management proxies, connection poolers to their team. Your modern backend as a service that's not pocketbase usually has a dozen moving parts.
Most enterprise teams have plug and play SQL databases ready to go, anything else would require more work with DevOps.
I am also building similar product but with different approach
And just using SQLite for now but plan on adding Postgres support ( orm I am using supports it ) … but nowhere near production ready. Due to buzz around products like litestream I feel like just SQLite is also viable nowadays. I also have own cdc based replication thing wip but yeah just having fun stage
setup is easy but you're stuck with one instance. they stripped all multi-tenant features and even the selfhosted version is missing essential features, scaling is off the table though.
It's at least a starting point, since it's just a few different services and a docker-compose you can set up your own scaling. It's not like Pocketbase has multi-tenant or is able to scale OOTB either.
Yup, after getting a Tesla with a free FSD trial period, it was obviously a death trap if used in any kind of slightly complex situation (like the highway on-ramp that was under construction for a year).
At least once every few days, it would do something extremely dangerous, like try to drive straight into a concrete median at 40mph.
The way I describe it is: yeah, it’s self-driving and doesn’t quite require the full attention of normal driving, but it still requires the same amount of attention as supervising a teenager in the first week of their learning permit.
If Tesla were serious about FSD safety claims, they would release data on driver interventions per mile.
Also, the language when turning on FSD in vehicle is just insulting—the whole thing about how if it were an iPhone app but shucks the lawyers are just so silly and conservative we have to call it beta.
I understand not restarting from a stop unprompted. There are simply too many situations on the road where automatically moving from a stop may be undesirable in case the driver isn't paying attention. Stop signs, four way stops, yield situations, probably more. Safer overall to make it an intentioned action by the driver.
I kind of get it but it reality sucks in bumper to bumper. But why cut off at 25mph? Like I can’t use it in a camera zone to maintain snail speed below the camera threshold
It's not, since voluntary transactions can happen as a result of said squabbling without resorting to the violence of 'power.' Maybe we need more of that and less of ramming decisions down the throats of the powerless.
Yeah I sometimes think you could have a government you select, e.g. each state could have its own rules and laws and the federal government should not have the power to overrule them. Then you could choose if you wanted immigration or lower taxes or whatever, seems like a good system who can suggest it?
Yes the 10th amendment was supposed to ensure a lot of that that but it was largely waived away during the progressive era and in acts related to the civil war. But cuz slavery for some reason it also has to apply to all sorts of other things that have nothing to do with slaves or even civil rights (in the sense of negative rights) and you are racist or love slaves or something for pointing this out.
Is it? In the US, our constitution is setup to prevent absolute democracy from occurring. The idea of an absolute democracy where the government always acts on the will of the majority as an ideal is hardly a universal value.
Yes, that is my point. You can't take power out of politics, and you can't take money (which is one form of power) out of politics. Best you can do is manage it.
They are obviously related, but it is a very loose correlation. If a billionaire (who does not pay me) gives me an order I will laugh in his face. If a traffic cop gives me an order, I will comply.
Perhaps the billionaire can't buy your willingness to do something, but they can very much affect the material world around you, and therefore, you.
If you rent they can probably find a way to kick you out of your apartment. If someone around you _is_ willing to take an order, influencing what people around you do very much influences you. If they want something from you, and you're not willing to sell it, there will be people willing to steal it, etc.
Money very much is proxy of power. Perhaps not everything can be bought, sure. But money gives you operational range to attempt to impose your will when it doesn't.
Its happened before, over labor disputes and unionization.
A LOT of people died, both in anti-union and union sides.
And thats why we have, well, had, the National Labor Relations Board. It was to make a peaceful way to negotiate worker rights.
Maybe if it did go away completely, and the violence comes back, that people in power would be reminded WHY we had union structure and law in the federal government to begin with. It wasn't for the warm fuzzies.
The civil court system is basically a way for wealthy people and corporations to use money to silence and/or coerce behavior out of less wealthy people. If Elon Musk or Larry Ellison woke up one day and decided to sue me, and defending myself would cost 100X my net worth, I'm probably just going to give up and do whatever they want me to do.
There still is something to it. You could bring your billion to Dubai and it might buy you some pardons from personal indiscretions and a cadre of quasi-slaves but the monarchs would never grant you real systemic political power.
If you bring a billion anywhere you won't get systemic political power unless you seek it. Political power isn't about having money, but money gives you the operational range you need to seek political power.
There's a lot of money in Dubai, so if your operation is to just hope to impress and be offered power without much effort on your end, 1 billion won't be enough. Perhaps 100 or 1,000 billion could work? Hard to tell.
If you only have 1 billion though, you need to play your cards in a smarter way. Who can you become friends with? What clubs and parties do you need to attend to make it happen? Which politicians and royals can you get dirt on? Who can you bribe for information? What gifts can you give to gain someones trust? 1 billion is enough operational range for this.
for a lot of people in the newly rich class, a kind of virtual currency best compared to a high score in a videogame. Symbolic and representing status. It's why when they attempt to translate it into power this particular class thankfully fares fairly badly, from the article:
"TogetherSF, a similar nonprofit backed by venture capitalist Michael Moritz, crashed and burned after the 2024 elections when its $9.5 million ballot measure to reform the city charter lost to a progressive counter-measure backed by about $117,000."
It has actually been scientifically proven otherwise in crowd theory : with the right setup, the crowd is more effective to take a good decision that the top1 best decision maker.
Exemple : a crowd playing chess may beat the top1 chess player, even though the crowd individually cannot beat him.
Yea in fact this thing has been done before multiple times as exhibitions (Kasparov vs 50k, Carlsen vs 132k, etc).
And yea, no surprise, the masses do not win. Even when in the latter case, a huge chunk of the 132k was obviously using stockfish cranked to the gills (though the did get a draw out of it?).
Hell no, California has this and it’s a catastrophe. Prop 13 is one of the worst policies enacted by a democratic polity in the 20th century, and has been wrecking the state for decades.
So do you believe in democracy or not? And I do not mean this as a loaded question because the value of democracy is a legitimately arguable point. If the majority of Californians want caps on property tax, then I do not see a good argument that they should not get it that is also compatible with democracy.
Democracy can mean a lot of things: direct, representative, etc. Voting for yourself is different from voting for your constituents. Ideally, the latter will also consider community effects.
If you put a question to the electorate like 'should we tax only people whose last name begins with an X, Y or Z?', it's liable to pass.
Nobody really advocates for Direct Democracy. It isn't viable: 'tyranny of the majority' etc.
Most Western governments are Liberal Democracies - where some issues aren't subject to a vote - partly so that the mob can't persecute outnumbered subgroups.
That is highly unlikely. People may seem stupid when acting as a larger group, but I think part of that is that our current democracy doesn't require much engagement. If we moved to direct democracy then imo we'd get some bad policies that would quickly be reverted once the effects become apparent, and then voters are going to be a bit more careful. For example, "only taxing people whose last name begins with X, Y, Z", I don't think voters would currently be that dumb, but if they were then how many weeks of zero tax money would it take to get that undone?
I can't muster the enthusiasm to debate this. There are centuries of literature on this topic involving people smarter and more eloquent than me. The following wikipedia entry has examples you may find more persuasive than mine:
If majority of people in a country want to persecute an outnumbered subgroup, then what prevents the majority of delegates wanting the same as well?
You have an implicit assumption that the delegates are going to be smarter and better people that are going to lie to the majority to get elected and then will valiantly protect the subgroup.
But that have not happened anywhere. In fact in every case it is the delegates who organize persecution of various subgroups, even in situations when the share of population truly wanting to persecute subgroup is far from being a majority.
I refuse to believe that anyone reading this is incapable of remembering at least five historical examples in which the public was happy to treat an unpopular group unjustly.
There is no foolproof system that can guard against it, however declaring 'rights' and delegating the responsibility to protect them to the judiciary at least is a mitigation.
Direct voting does not replace judiciary or even senate, it only augments the house of congress.
If that is the Direct Democracy you had in mind, than we have no disagreement.
What I originally commented on was this:
So do you believe in democracy or not?
I take issue with the implication that it's all or nothing. If we characterize anything less than a direct vote on every issue as anti-democratic, then the only people left standing will be kooks.
I hope you will agree that the overall goal is maximizing freedom and autonomy, that is allowing every person or group to pursue happiness the way they want make mistakes or good choices and bear the consequences.
The representative democracy has a problem with delegates not faithfully representing the people they are supposed to represent. It allows politician to be elected by campaigning for issue X which is popular with majority, then do Y and Z that almost no one wants, and then campaign again on other party undoing X, leaving people no way to communicate that they want X and not Y Z.
Social media have greatly increased the impact of this instability, the only way to improve situation is adding some elements of direct voting that would improve efficiency of communication between people and the government.
No one in this thread have suggested to completely replace everything with direct voting, and yet many people vehemently argue against that. Meanwhile there is a much more interesting discussion: how to make cooperation between people more efficient using the new technologies that we have.
No one in this thread have suggested to completely replace everything with direct voting
I take the original comment to imply exactly that, since it positions someone taking issue with any direct vote as being against Democracy wholesale. If I missed something, @terminalshort can reply to clarify.
the only way to improve situation is adding some elements of direct voting that would improve efficiency of communication between people and the government.
There are two issues:
1) What are a good set of rules for the system.
2) If the existing system can no longer self-correct, how can one implement a good set of rules.
'Direct vote' might address the second issue. It's not the only way, but it's better than a violent revolution.
I'm not opposed to all direct voting, but it does have inherent problems. The most obvious is that the world is far too complicated for a majority of citizens to research all the issues that affect them. In a well-functioning representative democracy, a politician would have the resources and time to understand the issues. Granted, that seldom is the case in reality.
That is the same argument proponents of planned economy use. It doesn't work in reality because no one knows what other people need and no one cares. Representatives care about being reelected, but they have a very hard time figuring out what people want of them because vote ones in 4 years, or angry people on social media is too unreliable channel of communication.
The monetary system under capitalism is not the same as direct democracy.
A planned economy under direct democracy would be at least as bad as a planned economy under a representative democracy because the average voter has even less knowledge about economics and business than a government planner.
The best thing about direct democracy is that, unlike representative democracy, we don't have it and therefore cannot instantly think of its flaws.
The average person reads under a sixth grade level, cannot perform long division, and quite possibly couldn't tell you how many years have passed since Jesus was born.
Whether a direct vote is appropriate for an issue depends on which is a greater danger: the corruption of a politician, or the ignorance and flakiness of the average voter.
Well it kinda is the same, in any transaction today two people vote to transfer goods and the rest of the people in the country vote to take a percentage of that as tax.
We only need to make sure that decisions affect the smallest number of people possible and only those who make decision bear its good or bad consequences.
Same can work with other issues, like do we want to build a road or stadium, how do we want to deal with homeless in our part of the city etc.
Online, open voting, with possibility to trade votes, and requirement to reach almost 100% accept vote for decisions, can work much better than systems we have now.
As for average person being not smart, average buyer poorly understands biology, and ends up buying things that are harmful to eat or eats to much, but we do not have representative doctors who will decide who eats how much in restaurants. The important thing is to create an arrangement where poor choices of a person do not affect others.
Why do you think that similar law could not be passed without direct vote? The problem is not direct democracy but the fact that it is being done in a wrong way.
Voting should be done without anonymity, online. One should be able to either vote for everything manually, or delegate the vote to any other person.
If some change is supported by 100% of the voters it should be implemented immediately. But if smaller percent supports the change, then there needs to be a vesting time (e.g. 10 years for 60%, infinity for 50%+1).
This allows people to either trade support for policies (i'll vote yes for your initiative if you vote for mine, or give me money), or to get high level of support locally and try out various laws on local level.
The same site that manages voting should also show detailed budget of city/state/country, where people can see where their taxes are being spent and should be able to redirect the money they have paid.
First, how about if you show that you've spent more than five seconds thinking about why every democratic country on earth uses secret ballots? Why are secret ballots codified in both the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights?
There are other parts of your scheme that are also spectacularly bad ideas, but let's just deal with this one for now.
That's a very good question, for instance for most of its republican period Rome did not have secret ballot, and voting was open. That have changed in 138BC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballot_laws_of_the_Roman_Repub... and have caused major instability, political violence and eventually demise of the republic.
The issue was that the poor people could vote for Gracchi brothers, but were too afraid to protect them, and one without the other only have brought to a worse outcome where they could not vote at all.
Even today if you are afraid of saying openly what policies or which politician you support, how can you hope to enact these policies?
Secret ballot started being introduced in US starting from 1888 and it did not bring any of positive changes that its supporters thought that it would.
In places where a group can intimidate majority of voters and force to vote one way, secret ballot does not help at all because that group can also fake the results. It even makes situation worse, by hiding the actual data from opposition.
Gosh, you make it sound like the near-universal use of secret ballots is all just some sort of misunderstanding that could be rectified if only everyone would listen to you. Tilt away if that's your favorite windmill, I guess.
Well if you knew a good reason for secret ballots you could tell us that, instead of telling that you are smarter than me. You really should take another look at hn commenting guidelines, it is useful outside of hn too https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Billionaire goes: get $10 off at my store, called Scamazon, for these votes (lists votes). And naturally even the $10 is manipulated to be recouped with dynamic pricing.
What we have now is a politician saying vote for me and i'll pass laws that will give you 10k in next 4 years, people vote for the politician who then takes money from scamazon gives 10 to voters and takes 10mln to get elected again.
Eliminating the middleman makes things better already.
But more importantly with vesting time, large number of votes, ease of reversing a decision in a new vote, take $10 and vote for something that costs you more simply won't work.
Prop 13 isnt bad. Its all the money pumped in to political
advertisements that turn this from "1 person, 1 vote" to "1$, 1 vote".
And that goes to the heart of the matter, that corporations aren't people, no matter what some court or law says. And they should be heavily restricted on speech. (I include spending money on political adverts and similar.)
Humans can commit crimes worthy of the death penalty. Wells Fargo shouldn't exist due to their decade long fraud. Nor should United Health Care, for actively denying humans their health coverage until the humans died. Or countless other cases.
When a company gets "killed", and all assets get assigned to the wronged, I'll start to believe they are humans. Haven't seen that yet. Likely won't ever, in the USA.
If you think you've incurred damages due to a company's illegal actions, you can go to court already. If the company is liable and its assets do not suffice to pay full compensation, it enters bankruptcy proceedings and ultimately gets dissolved, just like you're saying.
15 years ago, I worked at Walmart. Note the poverty income, no unions, no real savings. Basically average US citizen, not the HN bubble.
I got injured with a malfunctioning pallet jack. Went to ER and got Xrays.
Week later, was fired. My paperwork explicitly said I got fired for getting injured at work and costing the company money.
Went to 6 different lawyers. Had to ask for pro-bono. I couldn't afford a lawyer.
All refused. Why? None of them could deal with a Walmart lawsuit. None.
I had them dead-to-rights with a wrongful termination. Double manager signature. Even recorded their termination on my phone, on the sly (in single party state). They even admitted to forging a different manager. None of it matters.
Prop 13 is a nothingburger. Median homeownership period in california vs nationally is only like 2 years longer. It shouldn't be affecting costs that much in other words since median property is back to market rate every 15 years or so.
And what costs are we talking about anyhow? Tax shortfalls for local government? Decades later that has been rectified through other taxes and funding mechanisms and we still get new roads and schools in california. Housing costs increasing? I would say the fact that cities today are zoned within a few percentage points of present population levels (vs zoned for 10x present population levels pre 1970) is the actual source of that sucking sound from the chest.
That's not really the point. Prop 13 is known to be a huge disincentive to efficient transfers in home ownership - people will strenuously avoid selling their homes and buying something that's closer to the kind of shelter they actually prefer, because they might have to pay a higher assessed property tax if they did that. These effects are very real and well documented.
Prop 13 wouldn't lead to those incentives if property prices didn't increase so aggressively. Once again comes back to zoning as the root cause. Is prop 13 bad? Only in the face of inappropriate zoned capacity, it seems. Which begs the question of what prop 13 removal would even do in such a situation? Zoning capacity isn't changing so prices will still go up beyond what is affordable for the median worker. The only thing changing is people won't be insulated from that rise at the end of their life when they are on a fixed income is all. Does that solve the housing crisis? No, but it does ensure more people are regularly displaced from their homes.
All reactions are taking this comment seriously, but I think it can be also read as "money equals power" (which I strongly believe - there's some power without money and sometimes money without power, but mostly those two are fungible) - and then pointing to the futility of getting money out of politics, since politics is about power.
But really what people mean is "prevent paid political advertisement of all kinds", which seems about as hard as "get rid of all kinds of advertisement" - at some point, you're back to power, communication, attention.
Hard problems. Probably there's a reason all ancient democracies did not survive.
> The problem with extremely smart people is not many people understand them. They're typically going to be non-conformist in any event, and may come across as arrogant if they have an intricate belief system that you may not take the time to understand.
This is the bucket Ayn Rand falls into. Her philosophy is radically different, revolutionizing the entire field, to the point that most people can’t even grasp that the things she questions are open to debate.
LMAO Ayn Rand could get rolled up by an 8th grader.
No idea about how social systems actually work, or how real humans act.
If there's one thing that was real about Rand it was that ego.
There's few people that can make an ass of themselves to multiple fields so quickly, but if you stuck an artist, an economist, and an anthropologist in the room with Rand, after 15 minutes they could have all left with a laugh on Rands behalf.
It's also so funny to me the modern US libertarians that claim to love her so much. Rand hated libertarians! She thought they were crybabies and had no moral or logical foundation.
IIRC, I was able to watch the videos on my 486. It was quite something being able to do that l, while in Windows 95 and switching between apps. Prior to that, I’d only seen FMV in a few video games.
Distr is a modern Open Source alternative to Replicated. We have a more in-depth comparison over here https://distr.sh/compare/replicated/. If you have any questions, I’m happy to help.
Sure, happy to follow up with a detailed comparison.
TL;DR: Octopus Deploy has a strong focus on CD, providing a Cloud based framework to push your software to multiple targets. Distr also supports directly and continuously deploying your software to various deployment targets, but it additionally supports the pull approach, where the customer fully self-manages their infrastructure and simply fetches the application or artifacts from Distr.
Octopus Deploy also offers deep Argo CD integration (after they acquired Codefresh). On the other hand, Distr is completely open source and can be self-hosted if desired.
If you’re interested in specific features, I’m happy to go into more detail.
I challenge you to name a single successful example of this that isn’t state enforced.
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