I wrote my thesis on this! Application-specific system design can get you orders of magnitude performance improvement, as well as better scalability/fault tolerance properties. I focused on graph analytics, but it's reasonable to think it applies more broadly.
Definitely true that application-specific design is often not worth the investment though. Chasing that 1000x improvement can easily cost you a year or two.
The confusion is the system working as intended I think. It is taught from a young age that Marxism/socialism is about annihilating freedom and personal property, while capitalism rewards hard work etc etc.
So you get these well-meaning posts about how maybe life would be better if we could keep personal property and freedom and progress as a species, but lose the alienation from labour, coercive pressure, and basically everything else that literally defines capitalism and perpetuates what is bad about our system.
I had the same blind spot for most of my life, but at some point it dawned on me that everything I like about the current system is compatible with socialism, but the changes I would like to see are incompatible with capitalism.
> at some point it dawned on me that everything I like about the current system is compatible with socialism, but the changes I would like to see are incompatible with capitalism.
That, sir, is a political platform with some level of appeal.
You cannot have capitalism without the bad stuff unless capital's interests are best served in abstaining from bad stuff. Unfortunately, it seems impossible to set up a system that aligns the world's interests with capital's, because our lawmakers are predominantly capitalists and act in their own best interests at the expense of everything else.
When money is the name of the game in elections, the legislature, and even the justice system, how is it even theoretically possible to implement capitalism without the bad stuff? The best you can do is hope the capitalists are nice.
Despite having capitalism, we still have many good social programs that help many people.
There is lots of bad stuff too, but the social programs can (theoretically) minimize the negative impacts of capitalism.
If everyone has access to food, shelter, transportation, health care, and mental health care (regardless of whether it's gourmet food or luxury shelter), people as a whole are going to be much better off than they currently are, and it will very much weaken the ability of capital to compel people to do things they'd rather not.
I'd argue there would still be problems with such a system, but it's leagues better than what we have now.
If everyone has access to food, shelter, transportation, and health care, in what ways would we even still have capitalism? Like, what happens to landlords? Will we fund this stuff with heavy taxation on the wealthy? Will defense budgets be cut?
I obviously agree that social programs are necessary for a just and humane society.
But I also think the opposition from military-industrial complex, energy lobbies, and rent-seekers of all stripes make it impossible to implement these programs effectively. Because at the end of the day the root of the problem is capitalism.
If social programs don't provide luxuries, but just essentials, people are still going to want luxuries, and there can be markets around those. I'm not convinced that communism or even complete socialism are better than what I've described, which I think is somewhere between demsoc and socdem, but not entirely those things either.
We haven't really seen socialism/communism without a high degree of authoritarianism, which I also don't really like, so I'm inclined to support working towards socialism democratically rather than trying to overthrow the government in a bloody revolution.
I do think we need a radical rethinking of the role of state in this in order to make it work though; ideally the state and worker collectives benefit from advantages that make it difficult for the capitalists to steamroll over them on the market, which over time leads to the weakening of capital. An example would be high property taxes for people/businesses owning a house that isn't their primary residence, which would go to fund social housing.
> We haven't really seen socialism/communism without a high degree of authoritarianism, which I also don't really like, so I'm inclined to support working towards socialism democratically rather than trying to overthrow the government in a bloody revolution.
And we haven't had capitalism without rampant homelessness, corruption, systemic violence, exploitation of the global poor, and various other forms of avoidable misery. The status quo is bloody too, just not for people like me (and I assume like you).
> I do think we need a radical rethinking of the role of state in this in order to make it work though; ideally the state and worker collectives benefit from advantages that make it difficult for the capitalists to steamroll over them on the market, which over time leads to the weakening of capital
I want the same thing, but my understanding is that you can't get the state to align with workers against capital because capital will always outcompete workers at amassing resources simply through scale. One capitalist can extract surplus value from many many many workers at once, and use that value to buy more workers, to the ultimate end of buying the state through lobbying and funding campaigns.
Is there some way we don't end up back where we began?
We have many instances where the state ostensibly aligns with workers against capital. Minimum wage. 40 hr weeks. Vacation days. Social health care. Food stamps.
You may say these things can be considered to benefit capital (because workers who get vacation work better) and I don't necessarily disagree with that point. But the truth is, the existence of a social safety net makes workers unwilling to tolerate some degree of abuse from capital (instead they now have to use undocumented workers if they really need a pool of workers who will tolerate high levels of abuse.)
So if the working class can organize to revolutionize the role of state, and have it compete in the markets for things like social housing, social food, etc, then the state is now working for the people, and aligning with capital will go against the state's interests in addition to the interests of proletarians.
Let's disregard that the USA encouraged Sadam to invade Kuwait and implied he would face no recourse if he did.
Would you have been okay with Russia going to Iraq's aid when the USA invaded the second time? You think it's fine if Russia not only fought American troops in Iraq, but bombed the USA as well? That would have been defense by your logic, since that's exactly what the USA did to Iraq in 1991.
"Let's disregard that the USA encouraged Sadam to invade Kuwait and implied he would face no recourse if he did."
That never happened. The only thing that happened was SH having a talk to a US diplomat who was noncommittal because there was no official position on it yet. Because nobody expected SH to do something that stupid.
Where are you seeing $44k? The link you gave shows payscales for postdocs, and points to another page [1] showing that predoctoral trainees get $27k.
Also, in my field and in my region, $27k is massive funding. I don't know anybody who makes that much, let alone $44k, and we also don't get tuition or benefits covered. Our TA/RA union is currently striking because it's essentially impossible to live off of funding alone.
I'll give you that I misread bullet 2, so the total is a little over 31k. But grants that fund salaries for predoctoral scholars don't just fund the salary itself, they also cover the additional funds listed on that page. You can't partially fund a trainee on a grant. In any case, this wildly misses the forest for the trees - 1.2 mil in grants does not cover 6 years of salary plus research costs for 2 trainees and 2 professors full stop.
Absolutely, 6 years with a 1.2mil grant is ridiculous. I was just hopeful that somewhere there were PhD students making enough money to live from research
Any chance you could expand on this? I hear about pattern matching for fraud analytics but I have never seen concrete examples, or even anything in the literature.
As true and as insidious as that is, the problem is much worse in allegedly “socialist” countries historically. Note that I am not really including Western Europe in my definition of socialist, even though they have larger social programs than the U.S. Having a democracy lowers the degree of shamelessness with which funds for a social benefit like free daycare or universal healthcare can be used for things other than their ostensible purpose with no consequence and for a long period of time. It’s all relative. Americans sometimes make bad analogies to their own government (“are we really that much better than X”) and take for granted how our government avoids a lot of egregious abuses that you’d find in socialist dictatorships, regardless of which party is in power.
Of course I’m speaking only of internal politics - American foreign policy is another can of worms and we don’t even have complete information to properly assess it. Are we secretly propping up a dictator who is slaughtering his own people? Who knows, maybe we’ll find out when that information is declassified in a few decades, or never.
You're talking about democracy vs dictatorship, which is orthogonal to socialism vs capitalism.
In a socialist utopia you have more democracy than in a capitalist utopia, because "true" socialism gives workers democratic control over their workplace, where as "true" capitalism gives full control of the workplace to the capitalist.
Indeed, democracy is better at preventing corruption than dictatorship.
I don't know what you expect me to measure about two different visions of non-existent utopia.
Are you suggesting capitalism is not supposed to give control to the capitalist? Or that socialism is not supposed to give control to the workers?
I thought my assessment was pretty uncontroversial. The point about which system yields "more" democracy is a pretty simple inference from there.
Or do you mean my last statement that democracy prevents corruption more than dictatorship? What do you propose we measure to verify or reject my hypothesis?
No amount of data can prove it.
But there's a pretty clear argument in favor of democracy: you can't stop corruption in a dictatorship if the dictator is corrupt; you can stop corruption in a democracy so long as the majority are not corrupt. A dictatorship can have close to 0 corruption or close to 100% corruption, it all depends on the dictator.
Maciej Besta, the first author of this paper, is a machine.
Aside from coordinating big groups to write tons of papers, he does a bunch of impressive wilderness exploration. I recommend checking out his website, there's some stunning photos:
Torsten is PI of that group not Maciej so you're half right, since being Maciej is first author on this one he probably did most of the technical work (and who cares about "coordination").
[1] argues a crucial component of greening is trees "pumping" water from the oceans inland and creating nutritious soil. Otherwise evaporated water is simply blown away by the wind. I'm sure other local terrain (e.g., mountains) play a part in locally retaining evaporated water and creating conditions for rain.
[1] The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate—Discoveries from A Secret World by Peter Wohlleben.
Definitely true that application-specific design is often not worth the investment though. Chasing that 1000x improvement can easily cost you a year or two.