Play Nice Random Chat Thread VI

[Ligma]

Yeah. Communism in Russia ended. Its more a corporate state now. As for China...

But this is all off the topic I was originally making which I've done to death just upthread.

Altho with Russia it was after the collapse of the USSR that the oligarchs/mafia looted a far bit of the countries wealth, with the support of Western govs, intelligence agencies and financial power. The Russian mafia and the CIA (and MI5/6) have been working with that lot for decades.

Which is completely contrary to what Tas said in the covid thread.

 

[Tas]

Yeah. Communism in Russia ended. Its more a corporate state now. As for China...

But this is all off the topic I was originally making which I've done to death just upthread.

Altho with Russia it was after the collapse of the USSR that the oligarchs/mafia looted a far bit of the countries wealth, with the support of Western govs, intelligence agencies and financial power. The Russian mafia and the CIA (and MI5/6) have been working with that lot for decades.

Which is completely contrary to what Tas said in the covid thread.

There is a reason they are no longer communist countries, they couldn't keep up with the pace of economic development in the west under mixed market economic systems.

It is why communism is a failure.

For communism to be resurrected, it would have to resolve some major structural flaws in terms of corruption, lack of incentives, lack of innovation, lack of competition. These cause serious stagnation over a period of time.

 

[koshari]

There is a reason they are no longer communist countries, they couldn't keep up with the pace of economic development in the west under mixed market economic systems.

It is why communism is a failure.

For communism to be resurrected, it would have to resolve some major structural flaws in terms of corruption, lack of incentives, lack of innovation, lack of competition. These cause serious stagnation over a period of time.

corruption is not unique to any political system however your other points from my experience are pretty valid,

my observations from visiting both china and cuba,

- Cuba was still operating pretty close to the marx model when we were there in 2013 as Raul hadn't long opened up the abilities for locals to run small enterprises. all workers were still getting the state wage of round 25USD per month plus vouchers ( for flour, suger and some other staples) regardless of occupation whether it be road worker or doctor, Internet access was virtually 14400 dial up speeds from the few places that has a line that they could connect from. so limited pretty much to text based emails etc and quite expensive. but from reports of friends when went there more recently it has changed a lot since then. the celluar system began offering minimal data across it available from sim card subscription which really helped the casa particulares ( guest houses and pensions) take bookings. wider infrastructure pretty much on its knees with parts to keep country running quite scarce and a lot f cottage industries repurposing stuff like electrical and machinery parts, architectually the buildings are fantastic all be it run down. lovely open coutrtyards, arches gardens and paving.

- China is a pretty bland place. the cities are really soulless. not to say there isnt still a lot of natural beauty however its dominated by the typical cut and paste designs of high rise housing apartment buildings that are really just modern tarted up versions of melbournes housing commision highrises such as Richmond and Flemington. censorship to internet resources such as youtube curtail innovation as peoples avenues to learn are restricted to state sponsored places. the people seem relatively happy i guess but its hard to fathom as you really cant get far from the tourist areas and the language barrier makes candid discussion with locals difficult. economically the disparity between wealthy and poor was far wider than cuba.

 

[Lomas]

Numbers are just going up and up in NSW now. I wonder how we a looking for the return to work in the office in January that so many businesses had planned.
I had three close calls at getting pinged this week already, two were events I had to pull out off because I was waiting for tradies. Bless you tradies.

 

[Tas]

corruption is not unique to any political system however your other points from my experience are pretty valid,

Yeah, corruption is a problem everywhere but with people having the ultimate power in democracies, those who are corrupt tend to be brought to justice when there is overwhelming evidence of it. Whilst it is probably common for politicians to pad their own wealth via kickbacks, donations for favours, etc it isn't in the form of nation-wide draining of resources like it is dictatorships, because once the people lose power over the government it is an inevitability that people who have unlimited power will abuse it for their own benefit. I am not aware of any dictator that hasn't robbed their country blind.

As Harry Truman said, "Show me a man who gets rich by being a politician, and I'll show you a crook."

That happens in every form of government, to the extent it occurs under communism is a major problem. It is a problem in the west as well, particularly in America where politicians are heavily entrenched in both the military industrial complex and wall street. It is on the precipice of degenerating into crony capitalism, but that has largely been because the people have not held their politicians to account and demanded better standards, it isn't a lack of ability to do so. The population is just apathetic, dulled by a system which continually offers them a choice between bad and worse leaders. With the formation of the People's Party perhaps things will change in the future, who knows. If you try to fix corruption in a dictatorship you will likely end up dead.

- Cuba was still operating pretty close to the marx model when we were there in 2013 as Raul hadn't long opened up the abilities for locals to run small enterprises. all workers were still getting the state wage of round 25USD per month plus vouchers ( for flour, suger and some other staples) regardless of occupation whether it be road worker or doctor, Internet access was virtually 14400 dial up speeds from the few places that has a line that they could connect from. so limited pretty much to text based emails etc and quite expensive. but from reports of friends when went there more recently it has changed a lot since then. the celluar system began offering minimal data across it available from sim card subscription which really helped the casa particulares ( guest houses and pensions) take bookings. wider infrastructure pretty much on its knees with parts to keep country running quite scarce and a lot f cottage industries repurposing stuff like electrical and machinery parts, architectually the buildings are fantastic all be it run down. lovely open coutrtyards, arches gardens and paving.

Communism changes the social class hierarchy, it doesn't get rid of it like it dreams of doing so, what you see when you go to cuba is the destruction of the middle-class and morphs it into the lower class. This is ultimately the problem with communism, it destroys the incentive to go from from lower class roles into middle-class roles, this is the core wealth creation mechanism in an economy. The perception is that Australia is rich due to it's wealth of resources and agriculture but mining is 5.8% of our GDP (at the height of the mining boom only ever hit 8.4%), Agriculture is 2.8% of our GDP. Construction 7.4%, manufacturing 5.8%. Where is all our wealth generated from? Services... 62.7% of our GDP.

Communism destroys the middle class, it pushes everyone in the middle-class into the lower class, it changes the upper class, from people who inherited or created wealth to people in the political party, leaders in the army, the police. Whilst the peasants live off $25 USD a month or whatever it is now, they didn't bulldoze the mansions and estates. If you were rich, you would have seen that part of Cuba if you mingled in that environment, they have high speed internet, they have all the modern technology at their disposal. There will always be significant wealth inequality whilst we have scarcity of resources, regardless of the economic or political system. Communism just robs people of the opportunity of accessing more of those resources, it keeps everyone down who doesn't have political power.

- China is a pretty bland place. the cities are really soulless. not to say there isnt still a lot of natural beauty however its dominated by the typical cut and paste designs of high rise housing apartment buildings that are really just modern tarted up versions of melbournes housing commision highrises such as Richmond and Flemington. censorship to internet resources such as youtube curtail innovation as peoples avenues to learn are restricted to state sponsored places. the people seem relatively happy i guess but its hard to fathom as you really cant get far from the tourist areas and the language barrier makes candid discussion with locals difficult. economically the disparity between wealthy and poor was far wider than cuba.

China has a very odd construction focused economic system, it creates a lot of bland looking cities because they build them very quick, often shoddy quality depending on where they build them, and they have an over inflated housing market that puts Australia to shame. Whilst our housing market is overcooked, it is that way due to scarcity and negative gearing in terms of property investment. Property investment is seen as the main mechanism for people to move up the wealth ladder in China and people buy multiple properties that they usually struggle to find occupants for and due to the cost of financing the rent rates are atrociously high making it unaffordable for the legions of poor people in the country. So you have pretty much entire cities of property purchased before it was constructed, most of which remains empty. China has enough empty units built to house twice their population. I think they are heading for a bubble bursting that will make the global financial crisis seem like a blip on the radar. There is no underlying basis for their housing bubble other than people wanting to make money, there isn't the demand for the property by tenants.

 

[ferball]

There is a reason they are no longer communist countries, they couldn't keep up with the pace of economic development in the west under mixed market economic systems.

It is why communism is a failure.

For communism to be resurrected, it would have to resolve some major structural flaws in terms of corruption, lack of incentives, lack of innovation, lack of competition. These cause serious stagnation over a period of time.

Its way more complicated than that.

For example .... Pop culture in the West was more fun. The Communist states are also very puritannical and without a war to motivate your young people then they really just want to party.

Afghanistan bled their economy a bit as well.

Also the Russians could innovate. Especially when building big bombs.

But any ideology tends to stifle creativity so they probably missed it where it mattered.

Also the age of mass media probably helped bring them down - again simply cos culture in the West seemed like more fun.

 

[ferball]

Hehe, I do have a bias, because I studied economics and it has been nothing but an abject failure.

Back when? In 1917? The world was a shithole back then. Australia was a backwater penal colony that had been a country for less than two decades and since then we have now the 13th largest GDP in the world and 12th largest per capita. We are in a banana republic, run by morons, and we are still running laps around communist nations.

Its still shitloads better than what came before it. Convicts in Australia weren't much worse off than ordinary people in Cuba, China and Russia. And they had the pros[pect of freedom and economic independence if they were released.

As for where we are now ... we're like Wile E Coyote in the road runner. We've stepped off the cliff but we're still running and gravity hasn't noticed us yet.

I still think the future is a socialist structure, a more idealistic star trekish type socialism, but I just can't see it working whilst we have scarcity of resources and the need to perform menial labor. Star Trek's solution is replicators, which transform energy into matter. Robotics has diminished the need for menial labour, it hasn't eliminated it and we have nothing that can provide what replicators do so resources are scarce and you need a viable system which can generate goods and services and distribute those good and services. We have almost infinite demand and finite resources, how do we allocate them? We need incentivisation for development, we need freedom for ideas to flourish. Both Russia and China had found more prosperity moving towards a mixed market system, similar to the rest of the world, they just chose to retain the regressive elements of the political structure.

I agree with pretty much all of this. And now we actually have the means to replace labour with robots but we are so wedded to the protestant work ethic that we invent stupid jobs and make people do pointless busy work instead of embracing what will inevitably come - mass unemployment because machines do all the work.

When that happens we will need to provide people with meaningful, creative "work" that is very different to what we consider work today. Less like a boring 9-5 job more like the work you have to put in as a professional AFL player ... ie it has meaning and the meaning is what motivates you at least as much as the financial rewards, most likely more.

But more generally....

Economics is based on "The Wealth of Nations" yeah?

Isn't that book built on some pretty foolish foundations? Specifically how money came about, the fact its based on colonialist empires - which basically means they have the power to go overseas/to other places and steal the s**t those people have (ie the wealth of other nations is what we use to build our own - A Smith) and that the market is something other than a convenient way to provide resources to standing armies and mercenaries.

If economic theories are so good why don't they ever predict market collapses properly? Or explain the financial world since 2008? Or Japan since 1990?

Maybe we should meet ata pub a few hours before a game next time I'm in Melbourne...

 

[Tas]

Its still shitloads better than what came before it.

Yeah, I agree. The main problem is over time Communism/Socialism has failed to keep up with the pace of Free/Mixed Market economies, it is the main reason most have had to move towards a mixed market

Convicts in Australia weren't much worse off than ordinary people in Cuba, China and Russia. And they had the pros[pect of freedom and economic independence if they were released.

As for where we are now ... we're like Wile E Coyote in the road runner. We've stepped off the cliff but we're still running and gravity hasn't noticed us yet.

But we were a backwater really until 1850s when the gold rush happened, pretty much the entire nation was built from 1900 onwards, we basically had to start from scratch as a nation. It is really amazing the progress we have made in a such a short period of time. I think it was due to pre industrialisation, most countries had pretty much nothing to show for it, the old wealth pales in comparison to what a modern economy can produce. It is why we have passed most of the old European empires.

I agree with pretty much all of this. And now we actually have the means to replace labour with robots but we are so wedded to the protestant work ethic that we invent stupid jobs and make people do pointless busy work instead of embracing what will inevitably come - mass unemployment because machines do all the work.

Robotics can replace human labour but the problem is with their ability to learn tasks, it is fairly trivial to say setup a robot that can replace one job like a car worker that just welds, but to replace someone who does a number of menial roles requires adaptability and the ability to learn, robotics is an important step but it will be that in conjunction with AI that will see the ability to automate a much wider array of jobs and then it has to be more economic feasible than just hiring someone.

When that happens we will need to provide people with meaningful, creative "work" that is very different to what we consider work today. Less like a boring 9-5 job more like the work you have to put in as a professional AFL player ... ie it has meaning and the meaning is what motivates you at least as much as the financial rewards, most likely more.

But more generally....

A lot will depend on what our values are and in what state the world is in by that time.

Economics is based on "The Wealth of Nations" yeah?

It was the precursor to the study of economics. Economics is a social science which studies human behaviour and attempts to predict how people react and it's effect on different economic and political systems. It is no surprise that both Adam Smith and Karl Marx were philosophers. Smith believed his book before Wealth of Nations called Theory of Moral Sentiments was his more important work, it was the basis for him creating Wealth of Nations. The first book explored what humans desired from a society, the later how best to achieve it, given he only experienced feudalism and the start of the industrial revolution.

Isn't that book built on some pretty foolish foundations? Specifically how money came about, the fact its based on colonialist empires - which basically means they have the power to go overseas/to other places and steal the sh*t those people have (ie the wealth of other nations is what we use to build our own - A Smith) and that the market is something other than a convenient way to provide resources to standing armies and mercenaries.

He has a relatively short chapter on the origins of money, he referenced a work of Homer where he said something or other was worth a number of Ox, he basically drew that everything had an intrinsic value based on it's rarity or scarcity and that when someone wanted to trade something they had a surplus of for something that they wanted, they needed a system to value a good or service. Then he discussed the inconsistency of measuring systems, etc and suggested money came around as a more convenient and accurate medium for the exchange of goods and services.

We now know that we have used money for more than 5,000 years and we in fact have no recorded history of any civilisation ever using bartering as it's main exchange system, what we understand is that people in ye olden days only bartered with strangers or potential enemies, so they wanted an equal value of goods or service in exchange. They normally used a gift/credit system, which was in effect a credit system and form of currency for people within their communities.

As far as I am aware, it didn't invalidate the point he made, currency systems have made it easier to exchange goods and have more certainty.

I am not sure he promoted colonialism, been a long time since I read the book. We probably read things through different ideological lenses so probably wouldn't help if I re-read the book.

If economic theories are so good why don't they ever predict market collapses properly? Or explain the financial world since 2008? Or Japan since 1990?

We know the mechanics work, what nobody knows or can predict over the long term is how people will behave. There are just too many moving parts in a nation. The difference between the stock of a company booming or busting is solely based on confidence and how people react, if a significant number of people illogically start dumping a stock and it creates a trend, a company can go into free fall. A rumour about bitcoin can send the price crashing, a statement that bitcoin will replace the USD one day sees the price boom. People are morons, trying to predict how morons will react isn't easy. A nation is far more complex, it has a lot of internal and external mechanisms which will impact how they perform.

Most of the nuts and bolts of an economic system are fairly simple to calculate and predict, other mechanisms are very hard to predict. We generally only have issue with the harder to predict elements.

 

[Ligma]

My first abusive customer experience today!

This guy comes in to my area and is served by my coworker and tells the girl to “login to my wife’s email” for an online return, in which we cannot log into peoples emails. He proceeds to absolutely yell at us, I step in and say “Sir we are unable to do that, if you need more assistance please go to the hub because they specialise in online returns” he proceeds to yell at me for trying to move him to other places lol. Then a customer steps in and this arsehole literally called the Good Samaritan the F slur then proceeds to cry about 1.5 meters and “were in a pandemic” and then I say “sir then where is your mask” he shut up then lol. My adrenaline was pumping, I was shaking serving other customers oh boy if I was serving him I would refuse him service.

oh and btw I tried to call my floor manager but she was on another floor

 

[Usayed Givashe]

Well my coworker said he got $200 bonus so hopefully I WILL GET MORE!!! If I do I will buy you a family feast

If they don’t pay you in full, including bonuses, next shift… someone’s pays $1000 in cash, enter the entire order as a pair of ‘undies’, pocket the remaining cash and tell the customer their receipt will be emailed to them.

 

[Eggs11]

If I’m working overtime like 9 days in a row and I don’t get a bonus what do I do

Tell your boss’s boss that you’re hard working and ambitious. You’d like to talk about opportunities to make a difference to the company and its customers and develop your career in the process.

 

[goalieboy82]

Coach Emeritus Scamper from today

this was after he got a mouse and ate the whole thing (no photos since i got you all the chipmunk photo)

 

[koshari]

Coach Emeritus Scamper from today
View attachment 1301159
this was after he got a mouse and ate the whole thing (no photos since i got you all the chipmunk photo)

no snow today?

 

[koshari]

If I’m working overtime like 9 days in a row and I don’t get a bonus what do I do

with overtime the bonus is doube time.

 

[goalieboy82]

no snow today?

nope

 

[goalieboy82]

no snow today?

no but...

 

[koshari]

looks like someone subbed our New JRT with a gremlin,

 

[Val Keating]

The lives of German workers improved under the Nazis, but that doesn't make it a good system.
Systems other than communism could have improved China or Cuba at the time. There's nothing really specific about communism that made those improvements.

But your main point is right, it's silly not to acknowledge improvements to people lives under communism when it has occurred.

The lives of some Germans (except for everyone they hated) improved under the Nazis only because Hitler blamed losing WW1 on the strikes caused by the Bolsheviks that took place amongst the workers in Germany because they were pouring all their resources into the war effort so the men in the fighting the war didn’t get the supplies needed. In WW2 Hitler thought that if he kept the workers well fed and the supply chain flowing they wouldn’t have the same problem.

 

[Intothewind]

The world economy improved after the depression, Getman unemployment dropped, and in classic scumbag politician style, he took the credit.

 

[Val Keating]

The world economy improved after the depression, Getman unemployment dropped, and in classic scumbag politician style, he took the credit.

He literally states that as the reason they lost the First World War in his book….which he tied to the Jews.

 

[SpiderBurton22]

My mate just got bitten by a Tiger snake, 3rd time he's been bitten.

 

[ferball]

Was he mutton birding?

 

[SpiderBurton22]

Was he mutton birding?

Dunno, he posted a photo in hospital with his arm bandaged up. Most likely clearing s**t from under the tractor, that's what happened last time

 

[Lomas]

My mate just got bitten by a Tiger snake, 3rd time he's been bitten.

They say that’s the charm?

 

[Lomas]

Apparently Greg Hunt has a staff member who is expecting, and this played a role in the decision to seek another candidate in the next election. Confusing to say the least.
I don’t know why parents, even staffers, in parliament aren’t given more support.