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i say that because it was something i was confused about a few years back. wondering how people can even afford food when they’re living on <$1 a day in some third world countries, is food really that cheap there? turns out part of the answer is people are buying a lot less food in those societies and growing a lot more of their own. for some reason this never occurred to me for a long time
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Dec 8, 2023 16:50
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KomradeX posted:Hell even into the early 80s before all that industry was sent to Asia the Soviet Union wasn't that far off from the US in industrial output. The Soviet Union wasn't hopeless out produced by the US even at the height of American industry A major factor of American industry getting immense was due to the "great, broad Middle" that its territory afforded, which provided a comparative high level of domestic demand of consumer goods. Another was that industrial capitalists of the United States were very conscious of verticalization -- they leaned harder in integration of production than most of their counterparts in Europe, starting some good couple of decades before them. And perhaps most importantly, the Civil War created a structural framework for industrial development in many different ways. American industrial capacity thus became broad, not only to make lots of things but also many things, with a domestic market that could drive demand much higher than any other in the world to keep industrial growth pacing. However, it was a thoroughly capitalist development; it wasn't scientifically organized, it lacked comprehensive planning. The German industrialization, arranged a lot by the economic thinking of their Historical school, had a participative government acting steps beyond mere intervention to actually guide flows of capital into more effective uses. What took the Americans 70 years or so to reach in the global steel market the Germans got in less than half, with a much smaller domestic consumption base and territorial wealth. The point is that American industry had lots of capacity, but without organizing and structuring forces, it could be outpaced and surpassed by those economies who did have such things. A jolt of central planning during FDR got the American industry to surge forward in an absurd, ridiculous degree that otherwise would never have.
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Dec 8, 2023 17:17
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Don't forget the quarterly earning model of quantifying company performance is a very short sighted form of planning for industries.
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Dec 8, 2023 17:29
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America is a gas station with nukes, a payday loan shop, and a feed store.
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Dec 8, 2023 17:41
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Frosted Flake posted:Who knew the thing the entire modern world runs on was valuable? all of the people you'll ever encounter saying that are just parroting received wisdom, the origin of which is "raw material production and heavy industry don't produce the margins I deserve" thinking from finance capitalists it's trickle-down brain rot
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Dec 8, 2023 17:43
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Fish of hemp posted:So does Saudi Arabia. Do you consider them to be industrial power house or great military power? tell me more about the mighty saudi nuclear arsenal
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Dec 8, 2023 17:51
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The Oldest Man posted:all of the people you'll ever encounter saying that are just parroting received wisdom, the origin of which is "raw material production and heavy industry don't produce the margins I deserve" thinking from finance capitalists
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Dec 8, 2023 17:57
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Frosted Flake posted:The MIC has made defence worse even though it costs more money. I don't know how better to convey that to normal people. People on C-SPAM get it without a second thought, so idk what it is that makes it hard for regular degular office workers. A regular office worker goes to a store to buy groceries, and then they receive the groceries they paid for. If they buy more groceries and spend more money, they end up with more groceries. Inflation is noticeable over time, but on the same day, if you spend more at the same store, you likely bought more, or bought higher quality. People project their household economics onto countries: and it's an explicit part of a lot of political messaging, too. Couple this with deeply indoctrinated beliefs that the private industry is axiomatically efficient, that competition creates the best products at the best prices, and that everyone in government is smart and doing their best in the national interest and you get a pretty strong conviction.
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Dec 8, 2023 18:48
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Cerebral Bore posted:tell me more about the mighty saudi nuclear arsenal Supposedly they financed the Pakistani bomb and got a few of their own in the process. They propably don't have too many, just enough to keep Iran in check. This is of course all speculation and specifically denied by CIA so that makes it true, doesn't it?
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Dec 8, 2023 18:55
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Trabisnikof posted:America is a gas station with nukes, a payday loan shop, and a feed store. the feed store closed last week, its slated to become luxury condos
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Dec 8, 2023 19:18
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America is all health insurance, hospitals, and pharmaceuticals. Look at the top industries by whatever metric. It's the ultimate racket. If you don't pay, you die.
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Dec 8, 2023 19:29
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Fitzy Fitz posted:America is all health insurance, hospitals, and pharmaceuticals. Look at the top industries by whatever metric. It's the ultimate racket. If you don't pay, you die. guess which of these countries is a super power, which are gas stations, and which one spent all their money collecting hands:     USA, China, Russia, Belgium
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Dec 8, 2023 19:45
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Frosted Flake posted:Was it the inane Daily Show book that had a joke panel about the US streamlining the defence budget by just throwing money in a volcano? You could be thinking of this Onion sketch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnX-D4kkPOQ. Or maybe lots of people did sketchs about the US throwing money down the drain.
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Dec 8, 2023 21:29
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Trabisnikof posted:guess which of these countries is a super power, which are gas stations, and which one spent all their money collecting hands: Mystery country number 4 must be a real power house.
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Dec 8, 2023 22:12
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Trabisnikof posted:guess which of these countries is a super power, which are gas stations, and which one spent all their money collecting hands: A quick look at this makes it immediately clear what the top priority of US foreign policy should be. Good job doing the exact opposite of that lol
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Dec 8, 2023 22:28
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crepeface posted:i think i played xcom2 before i was really politically aware and i posted awhile ago that i vaguely remember not liking the vibe and gradenko_2000 reminded me this was the finale: made all the funnier because the semi official free mod Long War explicitly made it so you had to run an insurgency, had to free people from the ayylmaos by killing off collaborators enough to strike at their command and control center etc. It was a cool way to do babby's first insurgency sim.
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Dec 8, 2023 23:26
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Russia is dreadfully far behind in app developers, scam finance, bloated administration, and generally people emailing each other endlessly. How could they possibly compete globally? California alone has more makework drones and app developers! While China has started producing more app developers they continue to be stuck in a 20th century communist mindset and haven't moved all of their tedious material industries to cheaper neighbors. This is why we must confront China because in a decade or two they could match or exceed us in the critical industry of 'did you get that thing I sent?'.
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Dec 9, 2023 00:28
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JAY ZERO SUM GAME posted:Unrelated to this thread, but maybe some of you can help: Maybe Embracing Defeat by John Dower? It's kind of the definitive text on the subject.
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Dec 9, 2023 00:57
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The irony is that Russia has all the endless mailing, app development, and bloated administration that exists in the West (Yandex is their google), but somehow they figured out that the state probably should own arms production.
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Dec 9, 2023 01:05
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samogonka posted:A quick look at this makes it immediately clear what the top priority of US foreign policy should be. hahaha yeah totally obvious…. can you just say what those are, for, uhhh, anyone that’s afraid to ask
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Dec 9, 2023 01:05
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PhilippAchtel posted:Maybe Embracing Defeat by John Dower? It's kind of the definitive text on the subject.
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Dec 9, 2023 01:09
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poisonpill posted:hahaha yeah totally obvious…. can you just say what those are, for, uhhh, anyone that’s afraid to ask The US needs to make more "Commodities Not Specified According to Kind".
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Dec 9, 2023 01:33
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samogonka posted:A quick look at this makes it immediately clear what the top priority of US foreign policy should be. Good job doing the exact opposite of that lol This stat is misleading, because the only important US export is the US dollar. Since Nixon, the US has to actively move the domestic industries out of the country because they have to consistently spend the (freely printed) currency to buy actual poo poo from other countries, to maintain the USD circulation. All the other industries the US still keep are mostly in service of supporting the dollar hegemony, particularly the MIC and the oil industries. The only problem is the US can't even keep the military in top shape with the free money.
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Dec 9, 2023 01:48
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I had to take a bunch of liberal philosophy, polisci and econ courses which represent my lowest marks across my degrees. What has always bothered me is that the definition of value in liberalism, or capitalism or whatever leads to this kind of thinking and poor historical analysis. Historically militaries and military equipment represented a huge share, almost always the largest, of state expenditure. They were the foundation of the modern state, blah blah blah Italian Wars. Okay, well it's not just that more expensive = more capable, and that's very easy to see, because even medieval armies kept books and we can see what they were spending money on. Their costs were nearly always labour (duh), and then from the early modern era, ships and siege trains. Why? A bronze cannon took, I can't even guess at how many hours of extremely skilled labour. The first cannons were made by bell foundries and those were considered craftsmen par excellence. It's hard to explain or imagine that church bells were both fine art and heavy industry, but if you think about old European cities, all of the parts of early gunpowder warfare are there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95g5MPpYVaY Not only are some church bells and early mortars practically identical, you can see where the craftsmanship for gun carriages, and later particularly the timing for firearms locks came from. So, the labour and materials for guns and muskets was incredibly expensive, and even moreso for ships. Remember that a ship of the line had has many cannon as an army (up to 80 or more), and bigger ones too (4-6lb guns were the norm on land, ships had 12-16pdr guns). So the costs, I mean, you can see what they were paying for. The same is true all the way through the Royal Navy eating up 40% of the British budget, because maintaining cruisers on foreign stations required engineering, labour and materials that are basically unimaginable. But without a labour theory of value, I don't know, do liberals just think spending more got you a better army? Without realizing that the costs represented the value of both the labourers and the soldiers labour? Because that's the only way I can see them believing that paying more for a military with far fewer people, that does not industrially produce logistics, is better.
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Dec 9, 2023 02:18
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Frosted Flake posted:I had to take a bunch of liberal philosophy, polisci and econ courses which represent my lowest marks across my degrees. Shooting off the hip, but it's most likely a combination of commodity fetishism, education and socialization, and the bourgeois (proletarian)'s alienation from doing any labor at all. Basically, because chattering class have been raised up to think that quality literally equals money and have zero life experience to contradict that axiom the almighty dollar thus represents combat power and a $2,000 shell thus is objectively superior to a $500 shell. Everyone from politicians to economists to think tankers to NGO people agree this is the case and people objecting to this have bad politics (be it reactionary or leftist) which ipso facto makes them wrong. Thanks to the extreme individualism of neoliberalism as mediated by the internet even watching someone lose a war because there is literally no industrial production for it will not shake them of their conviction that GDP measures economy and thus military might. Current events of note currently happening is that liberal propaganda are trying to tell people their eyes are lying to them about the crash in spending money because of the increase in food, rent, gas, so on. Also building industrial supply chains inevitably reintroduce trade unions and tankies as a political force once more and by Fukuyama they must not allow that to pass.
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Dec 9, 2023 02:49
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I had to take a bunch of liberal philosophy, polisci and econ courses which represent my lowest marks across my degrees. What has always bothered me is that the definition of value in liberalism, or capitalism or whatever leads to this kind of thinking and poor historical analysis. Historically militaries and military equipment represented a huge share, almost always the largest, of state expenditure. They were the foundation of the modern state, blah blah blah Italian Wars. Okay, well it's not just that more expensive = more capable, and that's very easy to see, because even medieval armies kept books and we can see what they were spending money on. Their costs were nearly always labour (duh), and then from the early modern era, ships and siege trains. Why? A bronze cannon took, I can't even guess at how many hours of extremely skilled labour. The first cannons were made by bell foundries and those were considered craftsmen par excellence. It's hard to explain or imagine that church bells were both fine art and heavy industry, but if you think about old European cities, all of the parts of early gunpowder warfare are there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95g5MPpYVaY Not only are some church bells and early mortars practically identical, you can see where the craftsmanship for gun carriages, and later particularly the timing for firearms locks came from. So, the labour and materials for guns and muskets was incredibly expensive, and even moreso for ships. Remember that a ship of the line had has many cannon as an army (up to 80 or more), and bigger ones too (4-6lb guns were the norm on land, ships had 12-16pdr guns). So the costs, I mean, you can see what they were paying for. The same is true all the way through the Royal Navy eating up 40% of the British budget, because maintaining cruisers on foreign stations required engineering, labour and materials that are basically unimaginable. But without a labour theory of value, I don't know, do liberals just think spending more got you a better army? Without realizing that the costs represented the value of both the labourers and the soldiers labour? Because that's the only way I can see them believing that paying more for a military with far fewer people, that does not industrially produce logistics, is better.
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Dec 9, 2023 03:17
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Frosted Flake posted:do liberals just think spending more got you a better army? Yes. It's the military version of conspicious consumption. My jet is ten times more expensive therefore its ten times better. No wait it's raining, get it under cover!
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Dec 9, 2023 08:48
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Dec 9, 2023 09:03
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Truga posted:what i love most about all this is that these people *know* the material reality of.. well, reality. they see the reports, they know the numbers because their ~bottom line~ depends on them Just read an article where the guy KIND of gets it in that he's realised that faffing around trying to create hi-tech wonder weapons is an expensive distraction that doesn't actually win wars. But he doesn't then go on to argue for the West building up its productive military manufacturing capacity like Russia has; he suggests that the solution is to buy large amounts of standard equipment 'off the shelf' and ship it to Ukraine. He seems to think that arms manufacturers just have thousands of tanks and jets and artillery pieces sat round in warehouses, waiting for someone to come along and buy them. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/12/09/putin-russia-war-economy-an-existential-threat-to-europe/
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Dec 9, 2023 09:49
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Granted that was the whole idea in the beginning, just send them a bunch of surplus old Soviet equipment from Eastern Europe and a couple random other places and use it up. The problem is it got used up, and Western countries reached the point they had to physically dismantle their own militaries to keep the Ukrainians equipped. Even commercial drones come from China have they have put more restrictions on their sale.
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Dec 9, 2023 09:56
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Pistol_Pete posted:Just read an article where the guy KIND of gets it in that he's realised that faffing around trying to create hi-tech wonder weapons is an expensive distraction that doesn't actually win wars. But he doesn't then go on to argue for the West building up its productive military manufacturing capacity like Russia has; he suggests that the solution is to buy large amounts of standard equipment 'off the shelf' and ship it to Ukraine. He seems to think that arms manufacturers just have thousands of tanks and jets and artillery pieces sat round in warehouses, waiting for someone to come along and buy them. lol same thinking as anarchists who think they can get the materials to supply their horizontally organized fish camp commune from the local supermarket without a functioning state
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Dec 9, 2023 10:33
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Pistol_Pete posted:Just read an article where the guy KIND of gets it in that he's realised that faffing around trying to create hi-tech wonder weapons is an expensive distraction that doesn't actually win wars. But he doesn't then go on to argue for the West building up its productive military manufacturing capacity like Russia has; he suggests that the solution is to buy large amounts of standard equipment 'off the shelf' and ship it to Ukraine. He seems to think that arms manufacturers just have thousands of tanks and jets and artillery pieces sat round in warehouses, waiting for someone to come along and buy them. He grew up in a world where people get fast food delivered to their doors by underpaid foreign students desperate for money. Of course it makes sense to him that you order military stuff the same way. Hello yes I would like a dozen tanks, 2 jets, a large mixed bag of ammo and a large diet coke.
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Dec 9, 2023 11:14
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and lol if you think sleazy stingy neolibs aren't gonna play fast and loose on paying for foreign military deals
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Dec 9, 2023 11:21
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Palladium posted:and lol if you think sleazy stingy neolibs aren't gonna play fast and loose on paying for foreign military deals How many tanks can I get for this virtual briefcase full of NFTs? Oooh! We'll sell tank NFTs! When you need an actual tank you can trade it in, maybe, theoretically, don't read the fine print.
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Dec 9, 2023 11:23
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one gundam please
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Dec 9, 2023 11:28
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crepeface posted:one gundam please We'll sell you a preorder for one. Delivery date to be determined, cash up front. Along with some clauses about mandatory additional payments if the unit price increases over time.
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Dec 9, 2023 11:43
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Pistol_Pete posted:Just read an article where the guy KIND of gets it in that he's realised that faffing around trying to create hi-tech wonder weapons is an expensive distraction that doesn't actually win wars. But he doesn't then go on to argue for the West building up its productive military manufacturing capacity like Russia has; he suggests that the solution is to buy large amounts of standard equipment 'off the shelf' and ship it to Ukraine. He seems to think that arms manufacturers just have thousands of tanks and jets and artillery pieces sat round in warehouses, waiting for someone to come along and buy them. amazing
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Dec 9, 2023 11:45
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DancingShade posted:We'll sell you a preorder for one. Delivery date to be determined, cash up front. Along with some clauses about mandatory additional payments if the unit price increases over time. yes im sure the guy with the ultimate weapon that can vaporize every american carrier group in one hour is gonna sell it to the highest bidder
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Dec 9, 2023 11:45
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Palladium posted:yes im sure the guy with the ultimate weapon that can vaporize every american carrier group in one hour is gonna sell it to the highest bidder The key words were "preorder" and "cash up front". Much like a nuke rental you don't expect repeat customers.
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Dec 9, 2023 12:05
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Frosted Flake posted:I had to take a bunch of liberal philosophy, polisci and econ courses which represent my lowest marks across my degrees. What alienation from real labor does to a mfer. The liberal way of thinking about the labor process has only been made worse in the past 50 or so years of globalization moving factory jobs to China, India, Mexico or wherever else westerners don't have to be reminded of their existence. David Graeber once made the point that our way of thinking about this stuff is almost theological and full of patriarchal bias. To paraphrase him: God wields magical powers of creation, and as a result of the original sin, we were punished with a lesser version of those powers: production. For women that meant "producing" babies, the closest thing to actual ex nihilo creation that a human can do (in the eyes of someone from an older era who understands biology much less, but from whom we've borrowed a lot of our ways of thinking about the world), whereas for men it meant "work", mainly agricultural work. Liberals think that "labor" is some mysterious yet painful process that results in products being magically ejected from factories, just like how babies magically leap out of women's bodies. Our idea of what constitutes "work" is also heavily biased towards stereotypically male jobs rather than stereotypically female jobs that are more about tending to/maintaining people and objects rather than constructing new ones, which is just as important but not as glamorous.
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Dec 9, 2023 12:16
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