/tech/ - Technology

This is incredibly dangerous because this kind of access gives wireless control over essential movement functions. We're crossing a precipice very soon where it'll only be a matter of time before someone finds a software exploit that applies to a a vast body of car makes and models all at once and allows them to kill a massive number of people on a busy highway all at once.

>>12733
Not to mention spook agencies using car hacks to murder individuals like Michael Hastings.

>>12733
>incredibly dangerous kind of access over essential car movement functions
>software exploit to kill people
I agree with you on the principle that we should never build a remote-murder-switch into cars.

For the political side however, civil society should not have to fight this political battle on their own. We should find a car manufacturer willing to side with users against the inclusion of remote-murder-switches as well as other problems like fully protecting user privacy by doing away with data-collection. Then the political struggle can be turned into getting legislation passed that benefits the good guy producers at the expence of bad guy producers. That is something that is easier to do in capitalist conditions.

We have to be realistic about public perception, people will go along with remote override in case of big and powerful cars, because those are intimidating machines. Small cars with moderate power are much better candidates for driver rights. So the political push should focus on getting small cars exempt from this. This also has the political advantage that you can't get accused of being motivated by enabling speeding, if the cars you want to exempt are slow. That way it will be easy to focus on the remote-murder-switch angle.

I want to be honest, i think current cars are way too large anyway. I want to protect the driver rights of small economical prole-mobiles not ginormous booj-mobiles.

>>12734
>spook agencies using car hacks to murder individuals like Michael Hastings
That sounds scary, can you link me sources for this ?

That should make for an ironclad argument against technology backdoors shenanigans.

>>12736
Michael Hastings died in an extremely suspicious car accident while investigating war crimes of the Obama administration. The Vault 7 leaks in 2017 exposed car hacking tools the CIA had developed. Former CIA spook Ray McGovern thinks this is a pretty credible link to the death of Michael Hastings.

https://whowhatwhy.org/2015/02/20/car-hacking-report-refuels-concerns-michael-hastings-crash/

>>12737
That's rather sus indeed.

Kinda crazy, they want to mainline this ? All those politicians drive cars too, are they not worried that this might affect them.

>>12732
>Why the car-companies go along with this is puzzling
It's not puzzling when you realize we don't have a free market we have a planned economy and right now the plan is to get rid of motorized personal transport.

>cars are going to get banned in cities anyway and replaced with public transport
You are horrified by the idea of trusting your freedom of movement to a car you don't fully control. But trusting your freedom of movement to a bus/train service you don't control at all is perfectly fine?

>>12733
>it'll only be a matter of time before someone finds a software exploit that applies to a a vast body of car makes and models all at once and allows them to kill a massive number of people on a busy highway all at once.
You should be more worried about the government remotely disabling your car because you refused to inject yourself with the latest pharmaceutical product or tried to start a union at work.

>>12740
>It's not puzzling when you realize we don't have a free market we have a planned economy and right now the plan is to get rid of motorized personal transport.
If you define a free market as in free from monopolies and financial rentierism, then yes we don't have a free market economy. But it's not really a planned economy either because those don't suffer recessions, and our economies are in a recession right now.

>the plan is to get rid of motorized personal transport.
I agree with you to the extend that it really does appear as if the ruling class wants to constrain the mobility of the general public. The vision of the ruling class appears to be that they get extremely high mobility with things like private jets being able to go anywhere in the world, and the rest of the population is rendered stuck in a certain locality. Maybe less so than peasants in the middle ages being attached to the land, but a similar idea none the less.

However the reason why car-mobility specifically is declining isn't solely because of that. The experience of car-mobility is terrible, too much of the time you spend in a car is being stuck in a traffic jam, hunting for a parking spot, and being stressed out because driving conditions are kinda shit. Many people in cities now turn away from the nerve wrecking experience of driving a car in that environment. The best commuter experience is probably the elegant calm of floating in a commuter cable car (vid related).
https://farside.link/invidious/watch?v=Cv2tyX3uQUo

If you want a car for the masses, you need to go back to the roots of the socdem period and re-invent for modern conditions something along the lines of the French Citreon-2CV, the German WV-Beetle or the Soviet Trabant. Stuff like this has to be very practical, the technology has to be relatively simple and easy to maintain by regular people and non specialized repair service. It has to be good value and very reliable. It should be small, light and frugal, but it doesn't need to have performance. Such cars are rare these days. If I'm not mistaken Russians still make a slightly modernized but mostly original Lada Niva, which would probably qualify, at least for Russian conditions. The closest thing you might find today that qualifies as people's motorized personal transport is probably something made in India. Even Chinese cars are becoming very sophisticated, big and performant.

If you ask me motorized personal transport for the masses MPTM is not going to come from car-makers. Those move towards humongous luxury machines with an average cost upwards of 100k. They're going back to making horseless chariots for rich people, because the margins are higher.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s there were attempts by for example the German government to save its car-industry from itself by imposing size, weight and fuel consumption limitations on cars, but not much came of it. The Car industry has also become extremely hostile to consumers in other areas like the privacy violations data-gathering aspect and the technical design choices that make car-tweaking harder for car-modding enthusiasts. The repairability of cars has gotten worse also, although it's still better than with electronic gadgets.

Car makers appear to be stuck in their ways, and one should probably look towards other kinds of vehicle makers, for something that can serve as a technical base to derive off a viable MPTM. Maybe some kind of small utility vehicle or something that appropriates the drive of an electric motorbike. For that to happen it might be necessary that the legacy car industry fade away enough to no longer have the political clout to impose their vision of mobility on society.

For car-enthusiasts, it's kind of a dark time right now. The next 10 years will probably be slim pickings and the best choice is probably to go with an electro retrofit of a old petrol car. It might be reasonable for many people to go the rout of diy electric bicycle instead and do the occasional rental-car substitution.

>>12741
>If you define a free market as in free from monopolies and financial rentierism,
Free market means free from political interference, i.e. business serves the people not the government.

>it's not really a planned economy
The central bank prints money and then chooses who to "invest" in based on arbitrary political goals. That's why hollywood won't go broke even though nobody watches their woke movies and why EV companies won't go broke even though nobody buys their cars.

>planned economies don't suffer recessions
What makes you think that, do you have an actual explanation?

We're in a recession because the central bank printed trillions of dollars to fund 30 years of wars in the middle east, printed more to fund lockdowns, printed more to fund ukraine and printing more now to fund israel. Recessions are causes by the market re-adjusting to the devaluation of our fiat currency by political interests.

>you need to go back to the roots of the socdem period and re-invent for modern conditions something along the lines of the French Citreon-2CV, the German WV-Beetle or the Soviet Trabant.
These are just artifacts of poverty, they are nothing to be romanticized.
If you want one buy one https://www.classic.com/m/citroen/2cv/

>>12742
>Free market means free from political interference, i.e. business serves the people not the government.
Only in the severally autistic Friedmanesque neoliberal interpretation of reality where markets have ever or could ever exist without states establishing the parameters to make them function. Classical political economists, who were a bit more practical and empirical in their discipline, defined it as markets free from the distorting power of monopolies and rent.

>>12743
Words are just labels what matters is the concepts behind the labels. Whatever word you think means a market free from political interference, use that instead of "free market" and make an actual counter-argument.

>>12744
I just made an argument but it seems to have flow right past your ideological tunnel vision: markets do not exist without state intervention. This has never been the case in history; it only exists in the highly idealized, neoliberal model of reality where they try to imagine economics divorced from politics.

>>12745
>markets do not exist without state intervention
Obviously human beings traded property before kings and governments existed. I guess now you will go on another tangent about what the word "markets" really means.

If you want a real discussion then stop the word games and just acknowledge that market intervention is a spectrum not a binary and pretend I said low government interference instead of zero interference. My argument still stands.

>>12742
>Free market means free from political interference, i.e. business serves the people not the government.
The problem with that is that consolidation of economic power and concentration of wealth is also political power. Political interference does not have to come from an external source.

>The central bank prints money and then chooses who to "invest" in based on arbitrary political goals.
>That's why hollywood won't go broke even though nobody watches their woke movies and why EV companies won't go broke even though nobody buys their cars.
I can see why you find it objectionable that wealthy investors may choose to arbitrarily spend money on political goals or prop up certain parts of the economy. But neither of that has anything to do with economic planning.

Economic planning only happens in capitalism when the state creates a command economy to mobilize the economy for war production. Economic planning is more common in socialist economies where it also gets used for stuff that has nothing to do with war. The key difference is that a command economy no longer uses money as intermediary, instead production is directly allocated. So for capitalist countries doing a war economy this means calculating how much metal and labor-power they need to produce tanks and then directly allocating people and metal to the tank factory. When there is full war-mobilization workers in the war factories won't even get a wage anymore, they only get ration-cards that grants them food-rations and essential-items-rations. The rigors of intense war can force even a capitalist system to directly calculate allocation of resources and labor.

<planned economies don't suffer recessions
>What makes you think that
Obviously a planned economy under socialism would not reflect the bleak nature of a capitalist war economy, where workers get labor-tokens for their work. They can spend those tokens on whatever goods and services they please. Think about labor-tokens as if money was printed in relation to and at the very moment a workers completes a work-task. When the worker spends that money on a purchase for a good or service, it gets destroyed. So this kind of money comes into existence through work and then it gets destroy when the result of work is consumed. The main reason for this rigamarole with labor-token getting created and destroyed is having an economy without a boom bust-cycle. There simply is no money sloshing around in the accounting system that could be used to fuel a boom cycle or the possibility of withheld capital investment causing a bust cycle. The secondary reason is a currency that is incapable of depreciating. Basically money gets created to buy the result of a completed work-task, which means that for the entire economy there will never be a situation where too much money can chase too few goods.

In contrast what you are describing could be called financial dirigism.

>These are just artifacts of poverty, they are nothing to be romanticized.
Well people considered those peoples cars a sign of their prosperity and rising fortunes, so you are wrong about that. Also this is not born from sentimentality. It comes from looking at the industrial input/output tables. Looking how much labor and material can be spend on cars for everybody while also producing all the other stuff that people want. Another very obvious factor is that if everybody gets to have a car, those necessarily have to be small, or else they won't all fit into the space that can be allocated to transport infrastructure.

>>12746
You seem to be under the impression that you're arguing with one anon here. In fact multiple people are calling you out on your ideological free market koolaid.

>>12747
>consolidation of economic power is also political power
Economic wealth comes from selling goods and services that people voluntarily pay for. Political wealth comes from using force to take it from people. It's important to separate the two because if you think that voluntary cooperation is impossible and everything just comes down to might is right then you get trapped in a very hateful and unproductive ideology.

>I can see why you find it objectionable that wealthy investors may choose to arbitrarily spend money on political goals or prop up certain parts of the economy.
The problem is that the money they use doesn't exist. They steal that wealth from workers through inflation. But banks are good because engles and lenin said so right.

>workers get labor-tokens for their work
>Think about labor-tokens as if money was printed in relation to and at the very moment a workers completes a work-task.
>When the worker spends that money on a purchase for a good or service, it gets destroyed.
You will still have recessions because there is no objective way to calculate how many tokens a cow farmer should get vs a chicken farmer. And you have no objective way of calculating how many cows vs chickens you need. So there will always be mismatches between the amount of tokens in circulation and the amount of real world resources you buy with those tokens. And those mismatches between fiat and reality are what cause boom-bust cycles.

>There simply is no money sloshing around
If your planned economy ends up producing too much milk that nobody wants not only do you need to dump the milk but all the tokens that went into producing that milk don't have any corresponding goods in the market so you have still created a situation where too much money is chasing too few goods.

>Another very obvious factor is that if everybody gets to have a car, those necessarily have to be small, or else they won't all fit into the space that can be allocated to transport infrastructure.
It is very obvious from history that the opposite is true. Only high level soviet commissars had access to very old and inferior Ladas and EMWs. Meanwhile in the west the average steel worker would drive home in a V8 Mustang. Not only did the freer markets do a better job of providing cars for all workers but the cars were also vastly superior.

>>12748
Feel free to join the discussion with an actual argument. You're already on /leftypol/ you don't need to prove your loyalty with empty virtue signalling.

>>12740
>right now the plan is to get rid of motorized personal transport.
Finally, some progress.

>>12749
>Economic wealth comes from selling goods and services that people voluntarily pay for.
Honest businessmen that make money by selling stuff that people want, those do exist. However the really wealthy capitalists like for example the oil mega-corps got rich overthrowing governments. They were just stealing other people's natural resources. You know the term 'Banana-republic' right ? Well that was coined when United Fruit company fucked up Guatemala in the 50s. There is an endless list of big capitalists getting rich crushing people and entire countries under their heal. Wall-street is currently trying to fuck up Argentina even more than they already have. While Capitalism does have a sphere of voluntary economic interactions, that's not where the big bucks are generated, it's ruthless coercion with unmatched brutality and endless application of hard power. Your rose colored view of Capitalism does not match up with reality.

>Political wealth comes from using force to take it from people.
That is one form of political power, and too often it's also for sale. There other forms of political power too, for example when people choose to give somebody political power willingly, not always, but often enough that is more potent.

>The problem is that the money they use doesn't exist. They steal that wealth from workers through inflation.
Yeah, neo-liberal monetary policy is shit but it is capitalism doing that. Inflation is a capitalist thing.
>But banks are good because engles and lenin said so right.
What gave you that impression ?
Have you actually read some of their writings ?

>You will still have recessions because there is no objective way to calculate how many tokens a cow farmer should get vs a chicken farmer.
Socialist economic planning calculations have been fully worked out. Labor-tokens are calculated based on average necessary labor-time and in addition to that types of labor get bonuses for things like skill or work-hazards. Before i type out a huge wall of text in vein, do you want a detailed explanation how socialist economics calculates prices ?

>soviet commissars had access to very old and inferior Ladas and EMWs.
It's true the Soviets only made budget-cars, but they had immaculate and beautiful Subways. The soviet Union didn't have a car-culture because their territory was so huge that it was and still is impossible to maintain nice roads. Without nice roads you never get a car culture.
>Meanwhile in the west the average steel worker would drive home in a V8 Mustang.
I call Bullshit on that, i know a lot of steel workers from the relative time-period and not one of them could afford a V8 Mustang or equivalent car, not even close.

>Not only did the freer markets do a better job of providing cars for all workers but the cars were also vastly superior.
May i remind you that western capitalist countries also mass-produced those small cars for the masses, like the VW Beetle, Citreon 2CV, Layland Mini, Fiat 500 and so on. That's what people could afford. This isn't even a Soviets vs the West debate, both produced the same type of car in the post war period. This isn't free market capitalism vs communist planning. This is about design parameters for a car to make it viable for the majority of people to get one. Capitalists could make (and profit off) a value optimized, compact, simple modular car that is designed for user maintenance and reliability over performance. They just don't want to do that anymore. We know that they can because they did in the past.

>>12751
>Honest businessmen that make money by selling stuff that people want, those do exist.
Good.

>While Capitalism does have a sphere of voluntary economic interactions, that's not where the big bucks are generated, it's ruthless coercion with unmatched brutality and endless application of hard power.
So to be clear, when someone like me says "free market" we mean exactly that sphere of voluntary economic interactions with no political bullshit mixed in. It goes without saying that's not the economic system we live in now.

>Yeah, neo-liberal monetary policy is shit but it is capitalism doing that. Inflation is a capitalist thing.
For most of its existence the USSR had worse inflation than anyone in the west. Inflation is a consequence of fiat money not "capitalism" (whatever you mean by that).

>Have you actually read some of their writings ?
Have you?
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/oct/01.htm
<Without big banks socialism would be impossible.

>Labor-tokens are calculated based on average necessary labor-time and in addition to that types of labor get bonuses for things like skill or work-hazards.
You can dress it up to sound as scientific as you want it is still just shooting arrows in the dark because no centralized system can extract all the knowledge and experience and subjective preferences and circumstance and relationships from people's heads and plan out all their economic needs. The best you can do is plan out what the leadership wants, for example how the USSR built up the largest military in the world and won the space race while ordinary citizens literally starved to death.

>do you want a detailed explanation how socialist economics calculates prices ?
You can post your sources if you want. I would find that interesting.

>May i remind you that western capitalist countries also mass-produced those small cars for the masses
The point though is that market economies unencumbered by political interference generated so much wealth so quickly that they moved on from those small cars. We're now at a point where giant gas guzzling SUVs have the biggest sales numbers and are therefor arguably the "car of the people" now, pretty much the opposite of what you're proposing.

Even japan who had extreme oil shortages post war figured out how to squeeze 500bhp out of tiny 2L engines. And meanwhile the USSR developed the same basic Lada model for 50 years and still had nowhere near universal car ownership for citizens.

>>12752
>So to be clear, when someone like me says "free market" we mean exactly that sphere of voluntary economic interactions with no political bullshit mixed in. It goes without saying that's not the economic system we live in now.
But you can use money to hire a bully to fuck people up, if you have tonnes of money you can raise entire armies, the violence is build in. I don't understand why you think that market exchange is peaceful by default and the violence is just added from the outside.

What ever it exactly is what you are looking for, it's not capitalism. And this voluntary market of yours that's something you need to have governments regulate into existence. By default in a free market without any interference from state-power it makes financial sense to hire a pyromaniac to burn down your competitor's factory to increase the demand for your wares.

You also have to content with the problem that even your ideal voluntary market will concentrate almost all of the money into a few hands. There's statistical proof for this, markets have a fixed distribution of how money is divided up among market participants. (See Video for illustration) And monopolies will also form. If you want this thing to actually exist in reality, you need an ideologically motivated activist government that constantly redistributes money, and breaks big companies down into smaller ones. Like that has to be default and preemptive behavior, not something the government does as reaction to monopolies getting so bad that they fuck everything up.

>the USSR had inflation
No they famously never raised prices for anything. The Soviets had a different problem tho they sometimes gave people more money as wages than there were goods in the shops to spend it on, and then people could empty out the shops. But that didn't lead to inflation because prices were fixed.

>Lenin Liked banks
Not really, check out the paragraph below the line you quoted:
<The big banks are the "state apparatus" which we need to bring about socialism, and which we take ready-made from capitalism; our task here is merely to lop off what capitalistically mutilates this excellent apparatus, to make it even bigger, even more democratic, even more comprehensive. Quantity will be into quality. A single State Bank, the biggest of the big, with branches in every rural district, in every factory, will constitute as much as nine-tenths of the socialist apparatus. This will be country wide book-keeping, country-wide accounting of the production and distribution of goods, this will be, so to speak, some thing in the nature of the skeleton of socialist society.
He just thought that socialists could take over the capitalist machine and re-purpose it for the ends of the workers, the positive tone you detect is because he figured out how, something the capitalists did, could be used against them. Lenin was a ruthlessly efficient revolutionary who looked at capitalism through the lense of what is capitalism doing and how can it be appropriated for the socialist cause.

By the way the Soviet Union did not have any institution that operated like a capitalist bank. What you would call capital investment, was done by a central planner via something that was called material balances, not monetary calculations. That means that they set targets for types of production. In a simplified way they gave commands to increase the industries that make wood-furniture, or decrease the industries that make gravel and so on. They calculate something that was called the Gosplan. That allowed them to calculate the prices for goods, and how much industry of a certain type they needed to make all the stuff that people wanted or needed. Are you interested in hearing more about how the Soviet system worked ? It's quite fascinating and not at all what you think. In many ways it's the complete opposite of how Wall-street does accounting. Concretely: Wallstreet has lots of numbers to count very abstract financial concepts that are far removed from material production of things. The Soviets on the other hand filled their tabulation-sheets with numbers that counted physical stuff. I'm brutally over-simplifying this, If you want more detail , pls ask.

>it is still just shooting arrows in the dark because no centralized system can extract all the knowledge and experience and subjective preferences and circumstance and relationships from people's heads and plan out all their economic needs.
First let me correct
>subjective preferences
to
<personal preferences
The word subjective means the ideological view-point from a subject, which means it's not personal. So you have a feudal Subject in a monarchy, and you have legal subjects in liberal capitalism and so on.

I'm perplexed why you think taste would be a problem, you can ask people what they want, you can do trial and error with new stuff that people don't know already. Socialists doing economic planning would do research and consumer polling just like what capitalists do in a market. This has nothing to do with the planning vs markets debate. The point is to calculate how to allocate resources and labor in the most efficient way. It's an answer to the question how you go about organizing the production of the stuff you want after you already figured out what you want. If you were particularly anal about being ideologically consistent with the planning ahead scheme, you could shift the consumer interaction towards everybody doing pre-orders based on pre-production-reviews as the way for people to communicate their personal preferences to the rest of the economy ahead of production runs.

>The point though is that market economies unencumbered by political interference generated so much wealth so quickly
The neo-liberals removed the "political interference" of the previous soc-dem system and the result was economic stagnation currently morphing into economic regression.

>We're now at a point where giant gas guzzling SUVs have the biggest sales numbers and are therefor arguably the "car of the people" now, pretty much the opposite of what you're proposing.
You seriously think that the masses can afford to buy those cars ?
Bruh, you wonder off into a dreamland ?
Wake up, the masses struggle to buy a new washing-machine if the old one breaks.

>>12753
>But you can use money to hire a bully to fuck people up
That is still crossing a line into something else. Shitting in the soup is always an option, that doesn't mean that all soup has shit in it or that I'm a fool for wanting to engineer a system where we just have soup with no shit in it.

>I don't understand why you think that market exchange is peaceful by default
It is peaceful by definition. Once you add violence it is not a voluntary interaction anymore.

>this voluntary market of yours that's something you need to have governments regulate into existence.
Even if you you think markets can't exist without a state to enforce contracts that is still not the same thing as the state interfering with the market.

>even your ideal voluntary market will concentrate almost all of the money into a few hands
Wealth acquired through force will always concentrate into a few hands. Wealth acquired through voluntary interactions will always be more distributed and harder to hold onto.

>No they famously never raised prices for anything. The Soviets had a different problem tho they sometimes gave people more money as wages than there were goods in the shops to spend it on, and then people could empty out the shops. But that didn't lead to inflation because prices were fixed.
The technical definition of inflation is too much money chasing too few goods. What you're talking about is price inflation. I stand by my original statement that the USSR destroyed the value of their fiat currency just as well as any "capitalist" country.

>Not really, check out the paragraph below the line you quoted
My point is that the fiat money banking system (i.e. bankers literally printing money and giving it to themselves) is what drives the wealth gap and causes inflation which is responsible for most of the suffering felt by the poor and working class. But marxists have been trained to never attack the banking system because your thought leaders regard it as something to be captured not destroyed.

>What you would call capital investment, was done by a central planner via something that was called material balances
Just because you murder someone with a knife instead of a gun doesn't make it a different crime.

>I'm perplexed why you think taste would be a problem, you can ask people what they want
In that case I want lobster, steak and champagne for every meal. Disconnecting desires from cost only makes sense if you have infinite resources.

>Socialists doing economic planning would do research and consumer polling just like what capitalists do in a market.
The key thing that makes capitalism work is that when a capitalist misjudges what consumers want it he alone who suffers the cost of wasted resources. Central planners are always playing with other people's resources and other people's lives so they don't have the same incentive structure or feedback mechanism.

>You seriously think that the masses can afford to buy those cars ?
The roads are full of them aren't they.

>You can post your sources if you want. I would find that interesting.
I was serious by the way. Especially if you have anything on algorithmic central planning not just old white men in the kremlin demanding more steel for their bombs.

>>12754
>That is still crossing a line into something else. Shitting in the soup is always an option, that doesn't mean that all soup has shit in it or that I'm a fool for wanting to engineer a system where we just have soup with no shit in it.
I guess i don't know what you want then. You talk about a market without any political interference. Some people create mercenary units, guns for hire in colloquial vernacular, and they will sell murder and destruction as a service to anybody who pays them. Do you consider that a type of activity part voluntary market interactions ? I'm giving you the benefit of doubt and assume that you are opposed to this type of terror, and ask you how you propose to prevent this ?

>It is peaceful by definition. Once you add violence it is not a voluntary interaction anymore.
A very considerable section of the people that proclaim to want free markets, do include a "freedom to buy violence as a services" of sorts. So maybe you should consider rebranding your ideology to Voluntary markets to distinguish your self from that.
And you have to explain how you plan to frustrate all the usual coercion methods that exist in market economies. Not just the problems with direct violence for hire. Like all the other mechanisms of coercion. Large corporations or "people of super-wealth" have a thousand ways to bully people with more indirect forms of violence. Lets go for a concrete example. Bill Gates funded a organization that did medical testing in Africa, in a location that barely had any regulations constraining what they could do. They ended up killing and crippling a lot of people. The marketing said "philanthropist brings medical care to people in need", but the reality was more like billionaire found a loop-hole to conduct fatal human-experimentation.

My advice would be if you want Voluntary markets' you need to pre-empt power-consolidation. Put in a automatic wealth-cap and automatic mechanisms that breaks up companies that grow too large. That would greatly diminish the capacity for coercion. This doesn't fix everything, but it'd be a good start. A automatic wealth-cap can be had by changing how money works (that's a very technical topic, ask if you want details). To prevent consolidation into large mega-corps you only need to grant the ability of sections of a company to split off from the parent company.

>The technical definition of inflation is too much money chasing too few goods. What you're talking about is price inflation. I stand by my original statement that the USSR destroyed the value of their fiat currency just as well as any "capitalist" country.
The real definition for inflation is a rationing mechanism that prioritizes purchasing power of affluent customers over poor customers

Inflation is not possible in an economy that has fixed prices. In the Soviet case the economic error led to prioritization of the quickest customer, not the richest. This was a economic failure that ought to be avoided but it was not inflation. The Soviets did not have too few goods either, the specific instance where this happened (people emptying out the shops) was in Poland and it concerned meat production. During that time the Soviets could have more meat in their diet any any other country in the world except for the US, so the shortage theory can be ruled out.

>My point is that the fiat money banking system (i.e. bankers literally printing money and giving it to themselves) is what drives the wealth gap and causes inflation which is responsible for most of the suffering felt by the poor and working class.
Here we agree, you are describing one of the major mechanisms used to squeeze people. I guess technically inflation is a form of expropriation.
>But marxists have been trained to never attack the banking system because your thought leaders regard it as something to be captured not destroyed.
What most Marxists are saying is that the banks are part of the state, and if you privatize part of the state, ie. turn it into a form of capital that capitalists can own, then why are you surprised that capitalists who own banks would try to use it to make money with it, in what ever way they can, which apparently includes printing lots of fiat currency. If a capitalist manages to get a public road privatized they put a toll-booth on it and then they squeeze you that way, you're getting screwed just the same, but in a different form.

You appear to have this persistent illusion that the archetypal capitalist is some kind of clever innovator who tries to produce nice products that people want. That certainly is A possibility to make a profit, but doing right by the customer is not the most profitable path. Some producers are honest, but they are doing this despite of capitalism not because of it. The most profitable business-models in capitalism are very predatory. I don't understand why you uphold capitalism when it clearly is not promoting the stuff you value. Capitalism put the big banks on the throne, and the small producers making stuff they're just tolerated.

Also you could not be more wrong about marxist intentions. One of the primary goals, is to create a money-less society, which means banks go away. The intention behind capturing the banks is to convert money-based accounting into material accounting. The intention is to measure physical quantities of stuff, instead of currency. Marxists consider money be a obfuscatory veil over the economy that hides the reality of production. Fixing economic problems begins with analyzing the real thing.

I guess you want to destroy the power of finance capitalism in order to go back to industrial capitalism, that's what the soc-dems did after WW2. And it's what the Chinese are doing now. I'm not an ideological purist and i would go along with that because it seems like it would improve the material conditions of the workers. But if you want to sell me on the idea of reforming capitalism, you have to throw in irreversible reforms. (I don't want neo-liberalism undoing social democracy a second time). Every concession that workers win can never be taken back, circumvented or otherwise neutralized under any circumstance. You have to create special military enforcement that is tasked with upholding this above all else and by any means, it has to be the first priority for the state and baked into every institution.

I'll be honest with you, a part of me thinks you're just a small capitalist trying to use me as a useful idiot to get rid of a bigger capitalist rival. Once you have eliminated that bigger capitalist that is blocking your path, you'll flipp and become the same thing, and try to crush me just the same. I don't want to fight for getting stepped on by a different boot.

>In that case I want lobster, steak and champagne for every meal. Disconnecting desires from cost only makes sense if you have infinite resources.
Well you are technically wrong in the sense that humans are finite creatures and therefore everything about humans is finite, including desires. Demand is finite and it can be met. Obviously socialists don't cater to lunatics who think they are gods that ought to rule all of existence, because that's just a mental disorder. But you are not wrong about the general direction of socialist economics striving towards the elimination of scarcity. While we probably can't achieve 100% post-scarcity status for everything, we'll probably get pretty close, and only a few items like giant space-ships will be subject to rationing. Obviously one of the goals is creating molecular synthesis production tools that can make you any meal you can think off, by assembling it atom by atom. So yeah the unlimited lobster, steak and champagne deal that's like top priority. Although we're going for a much broader variety of food choices. Only protein and alcohol for sustenance, that'll get old quick.

>The key thing that makes capitalism work is that when a capitalist misjudges what consumers want it he alone who suffers the cost of wasted resources.
Sorry but have you heard about "too big too fail", the argument that capitalists are rewarded for shrewd risk management, that's not applicable anymore. Besides if a company goes bust, the worker looses their lively-hood and have to suffer severe reduction of quality of life (including homelessness), while most capitalists have sufficient reserve's that they never have to worry about reproducing their personal existence or even suffering a diminished lifestyle. Workers carry most of the risks.
>Central planners are always playing with other people's resources and other people's lives so they don't have the same incentive structure or feedback mechanism.
The task of the central planner is to calculate prices, it's like you replace the market with a computer program that calculates the optimal prices exactly, compared to even the most ideal markets that can only approximate it. The task of setting the priorities for what direction the economy takes is decided by the proletariat, via democratic polling. You get some kind of computer interface where you can adjust the priorities for surplus allocation, in however much detail you like, and then that will be counted like a vote.

>The roads are full of cars
Massive cars clog up the roads much quicker than small cars, who'd've thunk.
Also not many of those nice cars are actually payed for.

>Especially if you have anything on algorithmic central planning
I recommend TANS:Towards a new socialism (pdf attached). That's a short and relatively newbie friendly book on Cybernetic Socialist economic planning. It's very different from the Soviet model. It was written in the 80s so there are some outdated technology references, but everything else is still relevant. Written by W. Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell. Cockshott also does Videos:
https://farside.link/invidious/channel/UCVBfIU1_zO-P_R9keEGdDHQ

He has some rather technical video on planning algorithms, and a git-hub repo with example software.
https://farside.link/invidious/watch?v=czcnmQ3ua0Y
https://farside.link/invidious/watch?v=rtZQtEnGtLc
https://farside.link/invidious/watch?v=Pqzj5hrnDCk
https://farside.link/invidious/watch?v=IuQpzKW3_e8
This is more like intermediate to advanced material you probably want start out with the book. It's only 200 pages.

gov Email

http://xewz7ett5fiwygjatdeuyfh6ovyv2xsbibm3snzqpbbqejuwi4g2ofad.onion

>>12756
What is this link?

>>12757
>What is this link?
It ends in dot onion so it appears to be a link to a website in the tor network. I would strongly advise against going to a random tor-site. While the tor network is not particularly dangerous in general, some caution is advised none the less. It's reckless to click on tor links, you have no idea where they take you.

Especially since that post above only contains a strange cryptic message comprised of only 2 words.

>>12735
1 ton hitting you at 100 miles per hour will paste you with no issue. Economical prole-mobiles might look nice but are about a 30% efficiency improvement over very large single occupancy trucks at the very best. This isn't practical.

>>12775
>1 ton hitting you at 100 miles per hour will paste you with no issue.
Cars can be made lighter than that. I figure 650kg/1400pounds are doable. A top speed of 135km/h 85mph is probably good enough. As far as potential energy stored as kinetic momentum goes, that's no longer scary. This won't break through any barriers intended to keep cars from exiting the road with destructive consequences. For the politics of control since this type of car can be contained with a simple barrier, there is no need to install a back-door/murder-switch into it.

If you want to get radical with optimizing the design, you can go 6 wheels. That'll reduce capital costs because 6 small off-the-shelf industrial-motors will make enough power to move such a light car. Hence no need for bespoke motors. Spreading the load 6 ways instead of 4 will let you get away with lighter/simpler suspension, smaller wheels and less structural strength for the car-frame. Rear wheels stay fixed, middle wheels can rotate while being spring centered and front wheels steer like normal. Making smaller parts but more of it, means you can get away with smaller machine capital. Letting the smaller machine run longer to make more small parts is cheaper, especially now that so much of car assembly is automated.

If you go electric with this, a small and light car, means you can get away with a smaller battery, and battery swapping for quick-recharge situations might even become economical. Or you could go with a tiny commuter range build in battery using standard battery-chem like Lithium-Ion, Lithium-phosphate or Sodium-Ion. And then for long range trips you have a single use Zink-Air or Aluminum-Air cells that'll give you a crazy range of around 3000km 1900miles. Those have to be mechanically refurbished after every discharge, but that can be done in the already existing metal recycling industry. Unused, these cells have indefinite shelf-life, which means unlike gasoline and diesel those won't spoil, and that'll make logistics easier. And there's an upgrade path to H2-fuel-cell range extender packs once we figure out economical H2storage.

>a 30% efficiency improvement
That's huge. 30% more efficient times how ever many hundreds of millions of cars, will make a big dent. The 0.65 tonne cars i have in mind will net you greater savings still. And there are other cost factors, like wear on roads is much lower with lighter vehicles, you can shrink parking-lots and so on.

>very large single occupancy trucks
>practical.
The people that need those large trucks are people living in rural areas doing stuff like farming. Those people can still have their massive vehicles. Most people only need a dinky car and can rent a bigger vehicle for the rare occasion they need it.

I think that the choice isn't going to be between large cars versus small cars. It will be between small cars or no cars. If you look at how car prices are developing , most people won't be able to afford a car in the not so distant future. People who can't afford cars want bus-lanes, bicycle-lanes and train-stations, and once that's most people, the political incentives will sharply turn against car infrastructure. Do you understand the implication ? Once enough people get disconnected from car mobility, they'll become very hostile to it, they will look at people who drive a car as imposing on them. They'll begin seeing things like break-pad and tire-abrasion dust as something that negatively affects their health without having any upsides for them. All the commotion involved in car traffic will appear as nothing but a quality of life reduction that costs a lot of public spending, which could be used for something else that benefits them.

>>12777
I am not an expert but I still very much doubt the impotency of any thing measured in hundreds of pounds going over 40 miles per hour.

The 6 wheels idea is cool. I believe it would increase rolling friction, but would still be interested to see it. My idea which I have not idea of practicality is to electrify the roads so you're usually not using a battery at all, and make cars capable of hooking together with the car in front, increasing efficiency more. Even more of a pipe dream than your ideas, I'm sure.

I doubt you can shrink lanes and parking spaces with smaller vehicles and keep comfort and safety margins. I've seen small city cars bang their mirrors off on busses on a historic street near me. Til you have self driving, humans are too imprecise so most of the lane extra space is there for human error, not car variation from what I can tell.

I'd guess it'll be luxury/business cars and no cars. I doubt a small car saves more than say… 35% the costs of a current toyota corolla to build and operate over its life, so once the costs start going up, through government or market, proles will be priced out period unless they have a high willingness to pay. You see it today with aircraft- many status symbols luxury models at different price points from upper class to billionaire, many business models like cropdusters and airbusses. Not many prolemobiles. I'm sure there are some different factors here of course. Also, I'm not totally sure public opinion matters that much. There are plenty of airports in the US, despite most general aviation probably being bad for the poor. Could be wrong here- going over the sound barrier is still illegal over the US.

>>12779
>I am not an expert but I still very much doubt the impotency of any thing measured in hundreds of pounds going over 40 miles per hour.
40mph or 65km/h is a speed that you can go with a bicycle if you are really fit or going down a long and steep slope. But you are mostly correct in your assessment. For a 0.65 tonne vehicle the maximum comfortable cruising speed is 90km/h 55mph. The top speed of 135km/h 85mph is something only useful for a brief period during an overtaking maneuver. Keep in mind that e-cars get the benefit of a low center of gravity which improve stability.

>The 6 wheels idea is cool. I believe it would increase rolling friction, but would still be interested to see it.
Yes there would be a very marginal increase because you add 2 additional bearings. Friction with the road surface does not change, 6 small wheels would have the same contact area with the road than 4 larger wheels. However this is academic. For light vehicles the dominant type of friction is atmospheric drag.

>My idea which I have not idea of practicality is to electrify the roads so you're usually not using a battery at all, and make cars capable of hooking together with the car in front, increasing efficiency even more.
It's economical to add induction charging loops into high traffic roads, that keep car batteries topped up. Linking car-columns into adhoc trains can be done but in a different way. You build a high speed cargo train. It needs special train-stations and train-cars, that allow for quick access via automobiles. So you and a bunch of others drive their cars ontop of trains, and then the trains take passengers inside their cars to a far away destination at high speed around 400km/h 250mph. The extra effort needs to yield a efficiency and a speed bonus, to make it worth it for people to bother with the extra steps.
>a pipe dream
If you accept my modifications than all of that already exists.

>I doubt you can shrink lanes and parking spaces with smaller vehicles and keep comfort and safety margins.
You can't shrink road lanes anyway because buses and large utility vehicles like firetrucks still need to fit. But you can shrink parking spaces. If we are going to do so many redesigns, we should add some level of low speed bumper-car driving capacity. so cars don't get dinged during parking.

>I doubt a small car saves more than say… 35% the costs of a current toyota corolla to build and operate over its life
It is true that combustion engine cars didn't scale down that well, because many of the cost driving aspects were not tied to mass or size. But for e-cars the biggest cost factor is the battery-pack and that scales perfectly linear with mass. As far the costs external to making the car goes, i would expect greater than linear cost reduction. Keep in mind that if you lower the price on a good that means that more people can afford it and you get economy of scale effects for production and maintenance logistics.

>proles will be priced out period unless they have a high willingness to pay. You see it today with aircraft- many status symbols luxury models at different price points from upper class to billionaire
No you are wrong about this, once the masses get priced out of cars, car infrastructure goes away. Cities and towns will begin banning private cars from most of the town/city-roadnetwork once the people that live there don't have cars anymore. There will be a few exceptions for handicapped people and for vehicles used by service providers. It's different for aircraft because airports can be tucked away out of sight, some distance away from population centers, in a way that roads just can't be. Also cars only function as a status-symbol between car-drivers. People that do not own or drive cars, look down upon drivers as the harbinger of the metal-box plague. Without the prole-mobile, the booj-mobil will get banished to the edge of society, and most roads will be turned into pedestrian only zones.

>>12782
Everything you said seemed reasonable and in accordance with what I've seen. I wasn't thinking about the massive value of the land used on automobile transport. I wonder if you could really miniaturize the prole-mobile into something like a large electric wheelchair, so they'd pack well into trains, and could lock to the floor, allowing for safe high speed high density travel, and really solving the parking issue, since you could just stay in it all day, or they'd be small enough to stack much more efficiently. With self driving, you could be napping, reading or working/playing on a laptop not only on the 'drive to work,' but the 'walk from the parking lot' or even while standing in line. Sort of like in the movie wall-E.

I really would like people to be able to preserve having their own private compartment in, as I think it's more psychologically healthy, what with our being adapted only to know so many people, and have so much to focus on. I think changing transportation has the potential to free up such a massive amount of productive time, but I hope it won't all go to dealing with stressful changing environments full of strangers. At some point though, density must conflict with privacy and low stress. Do you think people could sit on a large electric wheelchair with walls and not be too claustrophobic? IDK, just an idea I find interesting to play with. All I've got on my end is idle chit chat about this very interesting topic. Do you think there's anything I ought to be doing? I could try make a startup lol, but that's 99.9% not going to happen. Thanks again for your post.

>>12784
WallE hoverchairs are technically doable but putting maglev-tech into all the roadways that'll be very pricey. On the more affordable side of things, there's the so called micro-cars. But those are kinda niche atm and don't work well out-side of a city, at the moment it's mostly wealthy urbanites that buy these as a second car.

I'm unsure how well you can miniaturize this. A well optimized and small 1 person transport machine already exists and it's an electric bicycle or motorcycle. I know you want some kind of personal-space compartment. But at that size, were talking a tube-frame with fabric stretched over it. If you shrink a container, volume decreases much faster than surface area, so in relative terms the body will make up a much bigger fraction of the weight. If you put a metal body on a tiny vehicle it'll get heavy and sluggish. The question becomes do people want tiny tent-cars? To make this economical We're looking at an empty-vehicle weight-goal of about 165kg 360pounds. And you want to spend about half of that on a battery-pack. Aiming for a top speed of 55km/h 35mph.

My guess is that claustrophobia would be ameliorated by having large windows in it. Also the point of optimizing transport to have a small footprint isn't really about crowding people. You can use the gained space for nice things like green patches.

>Do you think there's anything I ought to be doing? I could try make a startup lol, but that's 99.9% not going to happen.
I'm probably the last person you should ask for business advice, but it doesn't really look like the current economic structure accommodates starting a business. The Neo-liberals give all the money to wall-street, the military complex, the surveillance complex and large corporations. Currently the predominant business-model in the consumer space is enshitification, basically copy something old that works well enough and make it worse by adding a subscription fee and spyware. If soc-dems get into political power and redistribute wealth, regular people will once again get enough "disposable income" to give small companies that just "started up" a chance and try out their new product ideas. That's probably the time to build something like this. I guess that at present you could work out all the technical details so that you have something ready to go once the political winds change and blow into a more favorable direction.