mila kunis posted:

'cast interviewing the author of a book about cybersyn: https://www.greaterthancode.com/2018/08/15/093-book-club-cybernetic-revolutionaries-with-eden-medina/

anyone know of good papers/research/theory into the viability of planned economies with modern computing tools and data science?

Finicums Wake posted:

Cockshott - toward a new socialism

mila kunis posted:

'cast interviewing the author of a book about cybersyn: https://www.greaterthancode.com/2018/08/15/093-book-club-cybernetic-revolutionaries-with-eden-medina/

anyone know of good papers/research/theory into the viability of planned economies with modern computing tools and data science?

SKULL.GIF posted:

https://twitter.com/kpomerleau/status/1030546270069374977

Homeless Friend posted:

qkkl posted:

what is so amazing about california that causes everyone to want to live there despite massive firestorms, droughts, earthquakes, and astronomical rents.

Homeless Friend posted:

readingatwork posted:

The firestorms almost never actually burn your house down and the earthquakes are nowhere near as scary as people think they are. The droughts raise your water bill periodically but it’s liveable.

The rents though... Jesus loving christ are they out of control. If you want to live anywhere south of LA you’ll be looking at around $1600/month for a fairly lovely 1B + 1B in a crappy neighborhood. It’s completely unsustainable and getting worse as time goes on.

H.P. Hovercraft posted:

we pay $4k for a 2bd 2ba 900sqft apartment in silicon valley lmao we're getting the hell outta here for sac

H.P. Hovercraft posted:

there are jobs here and strong state labor laws and paid maternity & paternity leave

quote:

Real estate is something that is not taught in any course in the United States economics. 80 percent of bank loans in America, England and much of Europe are real estate loans, but in the textbooks that students learn economics from, it is as if banks lend money to industry. Banks don’t lend a penny to industry to invest in capital goods and hire people. They lend money to buy out industry, to take it over, to cannibalize it and to strip assets, but not to create capital. They lend it as mortgages, they basically lend against assets, against homes, commercial real estate, stocks or bonds or some assets. [...] I had to take a money and banking course taught by an ideological Greek professor Stephen Rousseas, who had never worked in a bank in his life. I said, “Look, what you called a commercial banking system is one bank, the bank I work for and we don’t make any loans at all to the economy. We buy bonds.”

So I got a C-plus in the course, he said I didn’t understand textbook economics. I realized that there was an absolute contradiction between how the real economy worked and what was in the textbooks.

quote:

There was a professor at the New York University, Solomon Fabricant, as in the word “fabricate”. He was the head of the National Bureau of Economic Research. I went into his office he said, “The first thing I want you to do, I want you to join the CIA. I’m recruiting.”

quote:

So I thought there’s a money and banking professor uptown, Walter Haines, who wrote a textbook. He must know about banking. I passed all the orals of all the professors I’d studied with, economic history, third world development, but the money and banking man said I knew nothing about banking, that my idea of how banking worked was not at all what was in the textbooks and I had to retake the orals after reading about a fictitious world. So I became aware of the fact that academic economics is very fictitious.

quote:

They’re Liberia and Panama, countries that only use the US dollar, not their own currency. So the oil industry doesn’t have a currency risk. They are flags of convenience and they don’t have any income tax. He explained to me that Standard Oil sold its oil at a very low price from the Near East to Liberia or Panama or Lagos, or wherever they have a flag of convenience and no income tax. Then they would sell it at a very high price to its refineries in Europe and America, at such a high price that these “downstream” affiliates don’t make any income. So there’s no tax to pay. For all US oil investment in Europe, there’s no tax to pay because the oil companies’ accountants price it so high, and pay so little per barrel to third world countries such as Saudi Arabia, that they only get a royalty. Standard Oil and other U.S. oil companies – and also mining companies – don’t earn an income there, because they sell it so low, all the profits are reported to be taken in Liberia or Panama. These are non-countries.

That gave me the clue about what people these days talk about money laundering.

quote:

I was going up to my office on the ninth floor and a man got on the elevator and said, “I was just coming to your office, Michael. Here is a report. I’m from the State Department (I assumed that this meant CIA). “We want to calculate how much money the US could get if we set up bank branches and became the bank for all the criminal capital in the world.” He said, “We figured out we can finance, (and he said this in an elevator), we can finance the Vietnam War with all the drug money coming into America, all of the criminal money. Can you make a calculation of how much that might be?”

So I spent three months figuring out how much money goes to Switzerland, from drug dealings, what’s the dollar volume of drug dealings. They helped me with all sorts of statistics on that, and said, “We can become the criminal capital of the world and it’ll finance the dollar and this will enable us to afford the spending to defeat communism in Vietnam and elsewhere. If we don’t do that, the bomb throwers will come to New York.”

quote:

And who should be the Undersecretary of the Treasury but my old mentor from Standard Oil who had explained to me how offshore banking centers worked. He explained to Herman and me that he told the Saudi Arabians, “You can charge whatever you want for oil.” This was right after America quadrupled the price of grain to finance the Vietnam War in 1972-73, and OPEC
responded by quadrupling the price of oil. The Undersecretary of the Treasury explained to me that they could charge whatever they wanted for oil. He knew that the higher they charged, the more the American companies would be able to charge on domestic oil. But the Saudis had to recycle all of their dollars into the United States, into Treasury bonds or the stock market. “You can’t buy American companies, you can only buy stocks or bonds, and you have to price your oil in dollars. If you don’t, we’ll consider that an act of war.”

H.P. Hovercraft posted:

we pay $4k for a 2bd 2ba 900sqft apartment in silicon valley lmao we're getting the hell outta here for sac

mila kunis posted:

im reading this book by him and so far its pretty good: https://www.amazon.com/Killing-Host-Financial-Parasites-Bondage/dp/3981484282

Often Abbreviated posted:

Thirty three dollars! Let me tell you who the real fuckin financial parasites are!

Seriously tho thanks this looks like good readin

mila kunis posted:

this was a really good fuckin read/interview: http://michael-hudson.com/2018/08/life-thought-an-autobiography/

so many gems, heres a few that stood out:

quote:

Lack of Context (Anonymous + Individual/Personal) – Companies like Yik Yak, Secret, and Whisper pioneered the anonymous social network on the consumer side. However, they were beleaguered by cyberbullying, and served more as a digital exhaust pipe for teenage angst and trolling. Perhaps the most successful semi-anonymous social network today is Reddit, where legions of loyal community members cover every topic imaginable. However, what all of these anonymous communities lack is the critical element of shared context and circumstance.

Put another way, your fellow community members on Reddit may share your interest in ice fishing, but they likely will not understand who you are. As Blind cofounder Kyum Kim puts it, “it’s hard for someone to complain on Reddit about feeling poor while making $200K a year without fear of backlash, but on Blind, your coworkers are in the same income bracket, and likely similar education levels, neighborhoods, etc. They can empathize with your situation.” On Blind, there is a single community (your workplace) that spans multiple topics, and there’s a baseline, tacit understanding of each other’s life circumstances, allowing for deeper conversations.

etalian posted:

On Blind, there is a single community (your workplace) that spans multiple topics, and there’s a baseline, tacit understanding of each other’s life circumstances, allowing for deeper conversations.

mila kunis posted:

this was a really good fuckin read/interview: http://michael-hudson.com/2018/08/life-thought-an-autobiography/

quote:

He said, “well okay you’re not good at joining the CIA”. I couldn’t believe he didn’t know about my background, but that didn’t matter. I told him I wanted to write my dissertation about concepts of productivity, as I was interested in classical economics. As a Marxist

etalian posted:

it’s hard for someone to complain on Reddit about feeling poor while making $200K a year without fear of backlash

not a cult posted:

guillotine.txt

quote:

He brought in a Stalinist, Steve Hymer, ostensibly to teach trade theory, and I said, “That’s fine, I’ll teach monetary theory and banking theory.

Hymer was a proselytizer for LSD. He would tell the students to take LSD and then listen to his course. About a year after he joined, he went to the American Economic Association meeting in Montreal, had students take LSD and stand on their head. On the way back to New York he drove his car into a truck and his group died. It’s really dangerous to take LSD when you’re driving.

quote:

My friend Andre Sharon there also was a protege of Terence McCarthy said, “We’re going to have an annual meeting, we’re going to introduce you to Herman Kahn,” who was a brilliant military theorist. Andre said, “He’s going to talk to you, he talks very fast, he’s a brilliant guy. After he hears you speak, he’s going to offer you a job. You probably can’t understand what he’s saying, but just say yes. You’ve got to get out of academia, you don’t belong there.”

So I gave the speech about the oil industry and how America was exploiting the world and how going off gold meant that there was only one thing that foreign countries could do with their balance-of-payments surpluses. These dollars were being thrown off by the US balance-of-payments deficit for military spending. Foreign central banks henceforth would have to buy Treasury bonds. So the military would spend dollars abroad, pump the dollars into the European and Asian economies, which then would lend the money back to the United States government by buying bonds, to finance the war and their own military encirclement.

After I told that to the Wall Street meeting, Herman Kahn said, “This is brilliant. We’ve run rings around the British imperialists. This is a great story. Leave academia, I will triple your salary if you’ll come to work for me.”

WampaLord posted:

OH WORD?!?

It's almost like that "backlash" is extremely necessary social feedback so that you don't develop the idiotic idea that you're poor when you're making TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS A YEAR

mila kunis posted:

this was a really good fuckin read/interview: http://michael-hudson.com/2018/08/life-thought-an-autobiography/

so many gems, heres a few that stood out:

quote:

He had graduated from the University of Minnesota with a Master of Business in 1929 and the depression came. He had wanted to go to Latin America to become a millionaire and when the Depression came he thought that capitalism wasn’t fair and that’s what made him a Trotskyist and he became editor of the Northwest Organizer which was the labor newspaper.

Homeless Friend posted:

Teal posted:

See though that's the ideal network for seeding dissent and inciting class war among proles or would be if proles actually were going to use this

Atrocious Joe posted:

That guy's entire story is gold


Trotskyism.txt

Phone posted:

general intellect unit just talked about cybersyn on a recent pod

it's a good podcast. http://generalintellectunit.net/

Food Boner posted:

this is not a good podcast

quote:

That led me to be invited to give a lecture at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research in New York. At the time I was analyzing the Vietnam War, I had to analyze copper prices. Every soldier in Vietnam used one ton of copper per year, I think that it’s as if they were fighting each other with ingots of copper. So I was forecasting copper prices by looking at the troop build-up, one ton of copper per army person, and forecasting that the price of copper would go up. So I was known for a while as Mr. Copper. As I said, Anaconda was Chase’s main client, and Kennecott was the client of Citibank, and they’re a group of commodity people in Wall Street that just love copper. I love copper and when one head of the group said, “Aluminum is a poo poo metal,” I felt the same way that copper is nice.

Jose posted:

hell yeah

https://twitter.com/ABC/status/1030658088947408897