30.5 Days posted:

holy gently caress they're gonna false flag harris

i say swears online posted:

lol i just read that romania gave michael back a few royal properties in the last couple decades. rip, got an award from stalin and was exiled two years later because he couldn't stop monarching

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

The stakes couldn't possibly be lower for the British, especially after Brexit, yet still they're the most deranged.

Jeff Fatwood posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uD84dG-JAY

lol

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

https://twitter.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1494466064305909779?s=20&t=8ctHRWVkjUAX8yMGnNOE4g

The stakes couldn't possibly be lower for the British, especially after Brexit, yet still they're the most deranged.

cenotaph posted:

Bernie Panders

cenotaph posted:

This is something I had to struggle with a bit in the maturation of my thought. I'm fairly no-frills and have a tendency towards universalizing my impulse against ostentation and towards, if not asceticism, simplicity of dress, etc. However, the above clearly correct and most people you encounter (even some self-declared communists!) don't seem to understand it.

cenotaph posted:

This is from much earlier in the book but it made me laugh out loud and has become an intrusive thought. Imagine, basing your policies in objective reality! They're beating us right out of the gate!

mila kunis posted:

been seeing excerpts from this book How China Escaped Shock Therapy (https://www.amazon.com/Escaped-Ther...24399735&sr=8-1) and i really wanna read it now

quote:

After an overwhelming success in inducing output growth in agriculture, the Rural Development Group was looking into new pressing issues in reform in 1984. One of them was price reform. Song Guoqing, a peasant’s son, was a brigade leader before entering Peking University as a student in geometry, and he had combined his mathematical skills with his interest in political economy to study modern microeconomics. Song had recently joined the group, and he suggested an experiment to test the effects of two kinds of price reforms (Luo, 2017). At the time, Du Runsheng had been promoted to be the head of the Rural Development Research Center under the State Council. He supported the idea and contacted Gao Yang, an economist and revolutionary veteran who was at the time party secretary of Hebei Province (ibid.; Chen, 2013, 311; Editorial Board of Who’s Who in China, 1989a). Gao agreed to provide the young researchers with whatever they needed to carry out the experiment (Luo, 2017).


The experiment was designed to apply a more cautious price reform policy to one county and a more radical one to another. Song’s logic was based on the observation that the state-quota price for grain was lower than the market price. Song argued that, from the peasant’s perspective, delivering the quota to the state at the lower planned price amounted to paying a tax. Reminiscent of a similar proposal of the 1960s and Sun Yefang’s ideas (see Chapters 4 and 5), Song suggested that instead of delivering the quota, the peasants could pay a monetary tax that equaled the revenue loss they would otherwise face from selling their quota at a lower price. The state could then use the tax revenue to buy grain in the market. This policy was tested in Gaocheng county, which was at the time under the leadership of Gao Xiaomeng. The more radical policy was implemented in Ningjin county under the oversight of Luo Xiaopeng.


Luo explained in our interview that, in addition to the first policy, inputs— most importantly, chemical fertilizers and diesel—were also no longer allocated at state-set prices but had to be acquired by the peasants from the market. With the support of what Luo, looking back, described as unusually capable leadership, they issued a new local currency to avoid any cross-regional income effects and drew up budgets for all involved parties. Both experiments failed because of the success of the household responsibility system and the adjustment in grain procurement prices in raising agricultural output.

In his memoir, Zhao Ziyang noted on the unanticipated expansion of agricultural:



The rural energy that was unleashed in those years was magical, beyond what anyone could have imagined. A problem thought to be unsolvable had worked itself out in just a few years’ time. The food situation that was once so grave had turned into a situation where, by 1984, farmers actually had more grain than they could sell. The state grain storehouses were stacked full from the annual procurement program. (2009, 97–98)



The supply of grain had increased by 1984 to an extent that, for the first time, the planned price and the above-quota state procurement price were higher than the market price (Luo, 2017, 2008). Hence, selling the quota at the planned price was no longer a tax but a subsidy for the peasants, and selling the surplus above the quota to the state protected the peasants from bearing the whole burden of the falling market prices. This revealed a basic difference between Song’s taxation scheme based on microeconomic reasoning and the state procurement of grain.



The underlying Guanzian logic of the multi-tiered price system became apparent at this moment of great success of the new household responsibility system. The multi-tiered pricing initially had the effect of encouraging the peasants, who now harvested the fruits of their labor for their individual benefit, to produce more. But as the grain supply boomed and incurred a rapid fall in prices, the state procurement component of the household responsibility system protected the peasants from the consequences of violent price fluctuations. A direct tax is static. It would have been based on calculating the monetary cost of delivering a quote to the state at a price lower than the market price for some given price differential and quota. But as the grain output changed rapidly, so did the market price for crops. The household responsibility system adjusts automatically to price fluctuations. When the market price is high, the cost of having to deliver part of the harvest at a lower state-set price is high. But, thanks to the same high market prices, revenues for farmers are also high, and hence the harm from having to deliver part of the harvest at the lower state price is not too severe. When the market price is below the state-set price in times of bumper harvests, the state procurement quota changes from incurring a cost for the farmers to securing them against market price fluctuations. It turns out the state procurement under the household responsibility system dampened price fluctuations—just as the practice of the Ever Normal Granaries had done for centuries.



This price-stabilization effect of the responsibility system was not by accident, but by design. In our interview, Luo Xiaopeng stressed that Wan Li, who is generally recognized as the pioneer of agricultural reform, was keenly aware of this stabilizing function of the household responsibility system and multi-tiered pricing. When some members of the Rural Development Group had previously suggested a similar experiment to him, Wan had vigorously opposed the idea of replacing the state’s participation in the grain market with taxes. In 1984, he again lobbied for maintaining the state grain procurement, despite the favorable conditions for abolishing it (Luo, 2017).



From the failed experiment, those within the Rural Development Group who might have believed in a quick and radical price reform had learned their lesson. Even when the situation appeared favorable, as it did in light of the output explosion in agriculture, a cautious approach was superior to the risk of a policy-induced shock liberalization. Furthermore, the failed experiment had demonstrated to the Rural Development Group the important function of state procurement not only in generating fiscal income and circulating commodities across regions, but also in stabilizing prices and thereby protecting both consumers and producers from violent cycles. The experiment had shown that, in contrast to the neoclassical interpretation, the dual-track price system was not simply a high tax on an initial amount of output, but a regulated agricultural production through state participation in the market.

the scars from the GLF and GPCR really instilled a sense of caution in chinese policy people and carefully experimenting and testing stuff on local scales before implementing them on a larger one across the country. how china got from where it was to where it is now seems to be: by thinking about things very carefully and state planning.

pancake rabbit posted:

crepeface posted:

can you post what the reference is called is about demsocs and 'social capitalism'? (Gao 2007)

Maximo Roboto posted:

https://twitter.com/PopulismUpdates/status/1494374550972223493
https://twitter.com/PopulismUpdates/status/1494381286504353802

Frosted Flake posted:

But still, if you must report me, remember that I’m bravely standing against covid and heroically divulged my identity. Please send all complaints to HQ BTY, CFAS, GAGETOWN, NB. Hold the Line, Honk Honk, etc.

The real hilarious poo poo is proposals like using Iron Dome and CRAM so that enemy artillery can just be ignored. This came about because at a certain point they gave up on trying to find Taliban mortars so, much like covid, they looked for ways To Live With The Shelling. I read a bunch of Max Boot rear end papers about how because the CRAM radar can track and engage x shells a minute, as long as we had enough we’d be invincible. Even more after the hype for Iron Dome. Okay, so ignore for a minute it’s not 100% reliable or effective, then scale up for all the troops you’d need to protect in a conventional heavy NATO formation, scale up again for the size of the threat and the “plan” would cost…

etc etc etc

Atrocious Joe posted:

Lori Lightfoot celebrates the independence of Kosovo
https://twitter.com/ArberAjeti/status/1494472619931979778?s=20&t=i3Db8UYTaCezB_tWtO5wQA

Why does Chicago have an Eastern European foreign policy

cenotaph posted:

Gao, Fang. 2007. Bainian lai kexue shehuizhuyi yu minzhu shehuizhuyi guanxi de yanbian – jian tan ‘zhiyou shehuizhuyi minzhu caineng jiu Zhongguo.’ Lilun xuekan 2007 (6): 15–22.

cenotaph posted:

This is something I had to struggle with a bit in the maturation of my thought. I'm fairly no-frills and have a tendency towards universalizing my impulse against ostentation and towards, if not asceticism, simplicity of dress, etc. However, the above clearly correct and most people you encounter (even some self-declared communists!) don't seem to understand it.

pissinthewind posted:

what book?

cenotaph posted:

Socialism with Chinese Characteristics: A Guide for Foreigners by Roland Boer.

fart simpson posted:

i downloaded it the other day but havent started it yet. do you think its worth reading?

crepeface posted:

also yeah. as a STEMlord, my entire intellectual training has been directed towards reductionism and it's a constant effort to consider complexity as a good thing

Crusader posted:

crepeface posted:

he's going to win because he's hot and has name recognition then he's going to chase those crypto bucks causing an economic crisis that will make taiwan have to reunite with the mainland, absolving the sins of his ancestor, shrek.

Zedhe Khoja posted:

NATO making a second Turkey before our very eyes
lol
lmao

Shear Modulus posted:

unleash chang!!!!!

Palladium posted:

What does that mean

Some Guy TT posted:

https://mobile.twitter.com/MaximEristavi/status/1494006734972764160