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Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
shieldfoss
motherboard.vice.com

Why American Farmers Are Hacking Their Tractors With Ukrainian Firmware
dagwolf

A license agreement John Deere required farmers to sign in October forbids nearly all repair and modification to farming equipment, and prevents farmers from suing for “crop loss, lost profits, loss of goodwill, loss of use of equipment … arising from the performance or non-performance of any aspect of the software.” The agreement applies to anyone who turns the key or otherwise uses a John Deere tractor with embedded software. It means that only John Deere dealerships and “authorized" repair shops can work on newer tractors.

“If a farmer bought the tractor, he should be able to do whatever he wants with it,” Kevin Kenney, a farmer and right-to-repair advocate in Nebraska, told me. “You want to replace a transmission and you take it to an independent mechanic—he can put in the new transmission but the tractor can’t drive out of the shop. Deere charges $230, plus $130 an hour for a technician to drive out and plug a connector into their USB port to authorize the part.”

ranma-official

This is a very strange cyberpunk future

blackblocberniebros

No one ever thinks about the farmers and rural areas in the cyberpunk future.

ranma-official

No one ever thinks about the farmers and rural areas regardless of the cyberpunk future.

shieldfoss

How can they get away with this? Do they have a monopoly on tractors? Are their tractors just so much better that people will buy them even with this bullshit in place?

mitigatedchaos

Patents ensure that any tractor by a start-up competitor will likely be 20 years out of date, making a small run of new tractors you aren’t sure people will buy is prohibitively expensive, but also Capitalist competition isn’t as powerful as Hard Capitalists say it is or should be.  Partially this is because Hard Capitalists assume that state interference is deeply unnatural and non-Capitalist, when in reality the state is necessary for Capitalism to exist, and the market incentivizes corporations to attempt to establish control of the state.

If there are few enough major tractor manufacturers, and tractors are absolutely vital to farming, then they can all start using restrictive EULAs all at the same time.  As long as they limit their rent-seeking to something less than the cost of a whole extra tractor, they can all benefit from it without engaging in tight collusion.  Farmers looking to violate the situation would have to do something like import tractors from Japan or Russia or something.

Source: dagwolf the invisible fist

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the-grey-tribe

You Can’t Have It All (even in communism)

thathopeyetlives

In past ages, communists, socialists, and anarchists were usually reacting to a world in which resources were scarce in general as well as in specific and in which the situation of the poor in general was one of miserable deprivation. Meanwhile, the future potential of automation and robotics – machines which might not merely reduce the amount of work that needed to be done, but largely eliminate it – was not really visible. 

Today things are… different. 


It’s pretty common that I see far leftists more-or-less promising the following after a Revolution: 

1. That it will no longer be neccessary for everybody to work, and moreover that people will be permitted not to work, and yet to have enough to live on, without needing to justify not working to anybody. 

2. That industry will change to vastly decrease damage to the enviroment

3. That material quality of life and industrial capacity will not catastrophically plummet, especially not in things like medical technology


I think that this is… very optimistic. The kind of optimistic that no wise person would ever bet on. 

Some far leftists claim that communism is more efficient and will do better than capitalism. This is unlikely. The Soviet Union did great things – industrializing rapidly after everyone else had a head start and after having the Nazis burn half their country – but they were just catching up to others, and they were oppressive, enviromentally destructive, and didn’t let people not work by any means. It didn’t last. 

(However, in the post-Stalin soviet union, there were some labor rights that would make Americans drool.)


If you combine this with confiscationism and the intersectionality thing where anybody’s position in the grand hierarchy of justified people can be questioned, you have a nightmare: a society that continually eats itself, finding new classes of “bourgeoise” and kulaks and “counter-revolutionaries” to force into slave labor or just murder and loot, so that the Beautiful People can have their gleaming solarpunk utopia and their communism of leisure. 


I do not wish to suggest that I intend to be the enemy of hope; our current system is unjust and needs to be reformed. We can reform it in a way that will turn automation from a curse into a blessing, and which will improve peoples’ lives now and in the future. But this will not be revolution but counter-revolution, and will have no place for bloodstained red flags. 

rendakuenthusiast

Endorsed.

Source: thathopeyetlives politics the invisible fist mostly endorsed the red hammer
argumate
argumate

“Movies will be free after the revolution!”

Movies take the work of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people. How will we decide where to allocate our resources for the best results?

shlevy

Centralized committee!

argumate

Yes! The State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television smiles upon you!

mitigatedchaos

shtpost visual shtpost the mitigated exhibition what even is this blog the invisible fist the iron hand the red hammer

@argumate @collapsedsquid

The thing I like about the idea of mandatory safety insurance is that it introduces a new actor with new incentives into the problem.

Let us return to aircraft.

The State has determined that every airline company must carry two million dollars in insurance per passenger per flight, to be paid out in the event that the plane is destroyed and they die.  It has set certain rules, for instance that the insurance company must be sufficiently well-capitalized and it can’t just waive paying out because the company did something stupid.

Executive Todd has plans to reduce the maintenance on Tumblr Airlines aircraft.  He will be at the company for five years.  There is a 90% chance that if he does this, there will be no crash, and he gets a million dollar bonus and leaves.  There is a 10% chance that a plane will crash before he leaves and he’ll only have a personal fortune of ten million dollars and a mansion on Hawaii left, which he can retire to.

So Todd orders that the maintenance should be cut.

However, Blue Hellsite Insurance, Inc., Tumblr Airlines’ insurance company, depends for its funding entirely on carefully calculating risk and then charging a bit more than that, on an ongoing basis.  To do so, as part of their contract (and thanks to provisions passed in law by the State), they can set insurance agents out to inspect processes, planes, and so on.

BHI’s reaction to a plan that results in a 10% chance of a plane crash is “you WHAT?!”  Whereas the risk isn’t necessarily quite so visible or quantified to all others in the organization, or else they may have motivations to ignore it for the same reason as Executive Todd.

So BHI come back and say that either Todd’s plan isn’t going to fly, or the insurance rates are going to go up.

So what was an invisible cost that could have gotten kicked down the road to a successor is transmuted into a stubborn operating cost right now.

Tumblr Airlines makes less profit (upsetting shareholders), raises ticket prices to compensate (thus pricing the risk into the market and making them less competitive), or else doesn’t go through with the plan.

The State could even require that the portion of the cost which is the risk premium is printed on the ticket, informing consumers of roughly how dangerous a given flight is.  This is actually an enormous information gain by consumers, who as non-experts find it very difficult to not only judge airline safety, but obtain inside information about aircraft maintenance procedures.

the invisible fist policy the iron hand
argumate
mitigatedchaos

@argumate

essentially privatising the FAA and NTSB, although the NTSB already seems to do really good work and it’s unlikely quality would improve with privatisation.

Though really, I wanted to use aircraft to talk about building safety.  The field of aircraft is already pretty safe in general.

What I’m thinking with this building materials issue is that in addition to the Executive Todd Problem being worse (because the real estate will change hands more often than the aircraft and the builders will too), and there being no insurance requirement, a lot of problems (like asbestos, or that cladding) were either known beforehand, or would not have been that difficult to figure out if someone had bothered to check first.

Additionally, the insurance company, the builder, or the owner would be losing money for every month that problem was not repaired.  So instead of fighting a long legal battle and not fixing it, it’s more likely at least one of them would fix it now, then have the long legal battle about who finally gets compensated.

That would be the plan, anyway.  I have other insurance-based plans to distort the markets as well.

Source: mitigatedchaos policy the invisible fist
collapsedsquid
xhxhxhx

I was bored so I wanted to do a ballpark estimate for the excess deaths resulting from the Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War, assuming that a counterfactual Nationalist China would have the crude death rates of Taiwan rather than the crude death rates of China between 1953 and 1979.

It’s about 158 to 161 million.

Now, that isn’t appropriate or fair. It’s not appropriate because CDRs aren’t comparable across populations with different age structures – once you get to the 1980s It’s unfair because Taiwan had lower CDRs than Mainland China when the comparison started. 

We can also ask the question of how rapidly the Nationalists and Communists reduced its mortality from the same starting point. Because the Nationalists had 18 deaths per 1,000 in 1947, we might as well start there; the Communists had the same death rate a decade later, in 1957. So what happens if we start the clock running in 1957? How does that look?

Not great for the Communists. The Communists still have about 80 million excess deaths between 1957 and 1979, of which about 39 million are from period between 1958 and 1961.

Well, I guess you can’t win ‘em all.

argumate

hey you can’t make an omelette without killing fifty million people

collapsedsquid

Like others, Ryan reasonably selects as Exhibit A of the criminal indictment the Chinese famines of 1958-61, with a death toll of 25-40 million, he reports, a sizeable chunk of the 100 million corpses the “recording angels” attribute to “Communism” (whatever that is, but let us use the conventional term). The terrible atrocity fully merits the harsh condemnation it has received for many years, renewed here. It is, furthermore, proper to attribute the famine to Communism. That conclusion was established most authoritatively in the work of economist Amartya Sen, whose comparison of the Chinese famine to the record of democratic India received particular attention when he won the Nobel Prize a few years ago.

Writing in the early 1980s, Sen observed that India had suffered no such famine. He attributed the India-China difference to India’s “political system of adversarial journalism and opposition,” while in contrast, China’s totalitarian regime suffered from “misinformation” that undercut a serious response, and there was “little political pressure” from opposition groups and an informed public (Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen, Hunger and Public Action, 1989; they estimate deaths at 16.5 to 29.5 million).

The example stands as a dramatic “criminal indictment” of totalitarian Communism, exactly as Ryan writes. But before closing the book on the indictment we might want to turn to the other half of Sen’s India-China comparison, which somehow never seems to surface despite the emphasis Sen placed on it. He observes that India and China had “similarities that were quite striking” when development planning began 50 years ago, including death rates. “But there is little doubt that as far as morbidity, mortality and longevity are concerned, China has a large and decisive lead over India” (in education and other social indicators as well). He estimates the excess of mortality in India over China to be close to 4 million a year: “India seems to manage to fill its cupboard with more skeletons every eight years than China put there in its years of shame,” 1958-1961 (Dreze and Sen).

In both cases, the outcomes have to do with the “ideological predispositions” of the political systems: for China, relatively equitable distribution of medical resources, including rural health services, and public distribution of food, all lacking in India. This was before 1979, when “the downward trend in mortality [in China] has been at least halted, and possibly reversed,” thanks to the market reforms instituted that year.

Overcoming amnesia, suppose we now apply the methodology of the Black Book and its reviewers to the full story, not just the doctrinally acceptable half. We therefore conclude that in India the democratic capitalist “experiment” since 1947 has caused more deaths than in the entire history of the “colossal, wholly failed…experiment” of Communism everywhere since 1917: over 100 million deaths by 1979, tens of millions more since, in India alone.

That’s Noam Chomsky’s point.

collapsedsquid

xhxhxhx:  right, but Taiwan seems to have managed it without the surplus corpses

Do you think that’s because it’s a smaller island with a lot fewer people on it maybe?

mitigatedchaos

Or, just gonna put this out here,

The cultural starting conditions between China and India are not the same.

We’re supposed to consider that irrelevant because all cultures are equal and human beings are just economybots, but… have you observed the records for overseas Chinese as compared to other populations?  

Source: xhxhxhx the invisible fist the red hammer
ranma-official
cnbc.com

McDonald's hits all-time high as Wall Street cheers replacement of cashiers with kiosks

Cowen believes McDonald's digital ordering upgrades will drive the fast-food chain's sales higher.
Tae Kim
triggeredmedia

Demand unsustainable wages, get replaced. Pretty fucking simple. 

cottoncatking

Lose out on work experience early in life, get penalized for it later, lose opportunities to help the family out, get a degree, go into debt, struggle to find a job that pays decently. But Wall Street is happy so that’s good.

rainy-days-are-over

>Get paid minimum wage

>Minimum wage never increases

>Lose job to machine anyway

Wow this is really an improvement, people should starve so I can get a wopper for $2 god bless capitalism wanting to live is for communists

triggeredmedia

I hear Cuba is nice this time of year. 

I got you, though.

#not real communism

rainy-days-are-over

Yanks are genuinely this retarded.

ranma-official

Triggervs Medivs, 200 AD: “Slavery is good, slaves just have to outcompete horses while working for less”

mitigatedchaos

In which it is impossible that increasing automation across all sectors simultaneously which arrives at a speed exceeding would-be employee retraining could cause significant unemployment and downward pressure on wages below the levels necessary for long-term wellness.

But don’t worry, Libertarians’ anti-nationalist sentiment means that they’ll bring in ethnic groups that favor increased state intervention (on average), because Libertarianism assumes the political will necessary for itself.  The alternative, after all, would involve buying off low income voter groups in clever ways so that they are supported by the nation and support the nation in turn.

Source: triggeredmedia the invisible fist
argumate
uk.businessinsider.com

There are almost 20,000 'ghost' homes sitting empty in London

Research from Property Partner shows London is the vacant home capital of the country, with 19,845 homes sitting idle for over six months in 2016.
Oscar Williams-Grut, Business Insider UK
commissarchrisman

The hotspot for ‘ghost’ houses — those left empty to appreciate in value — is in the affluent borough of Kensington & Chelsea in London, where 1,399 houses sit empty. The number represents an 8.5% rise on 2015 and a 22.7% rise between 2006 and 2016.

Why on Earth are any people from Grenfell still sleeping in sports halls after the disaster? London and Kensington especially is chock full of empty luxury apartments being sat on by speculators. These must be opened up immediately.

the-darkest-of-souls

Unless they’re owned by the gov you can’t just take people’s bloody property even if it’s empty that’s why

ace-pervert

thats fucked up

notyourmoderate

The problem in essence is that property owners would rather leave their property empty than to accept less than market value for rent. The question is not “no rent”, it’s “less rent”. Virtually anyone you find sleeping rough on the streets is going to have *some* degree of walking-around money, hardly anyone has literally *no* money. But, the owners of housing don’t want that money, they want market value. They believe that a better offer will come along, and if they accept a low offer they will miss their opportunity for the high offer. It’s a failing of people’s payoff-to-probability calculation.

And also it’s a failing of core concepts of how contemporary capitalism is executed. Not to go too deep into it, the crux is this: If they accept a low offer, their property is worth less. If a fork is sold for five dollars, it is worth five dollars. If a fork is sold for five cents, it is worth five cents. So marking down the rent on a property depreciates the property, marking it up appreciates the property. Because value is determined by common belief rather than any concrete consistencies, sellers try to fix the value of property high and buyers try to negotiate value low. So if one party wants to raise their profit, and one party wants to not sleep on a bench, they have similar ability to set the price but wildly disproportionate levels of need. It’s a conundrum, and there’s virtually no way to feasibly and achievably solve that problem.

argumate

set a reasonable level of land tax, then holding on to an empty house in an expensive area costs you money, encouraging you to rent it out or sell it.

mitigatedchaos

Alternatively, allow them to actually build more housing units.  Japan isn’t seeing similar massive price spikes in its cities that are undergoing population growth.  Send a guy over there and copy whatever it is they’re doing.

Source: commissarchrisman urban planning the invisible fist
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