That is one of the potential benefits of the authoritarian state, though that benefit heavily relies on the state itself taking responsibility over its own failings instead of utilizing minority groups as a scape goat.

So it’s more of a roll of the die instead of something that can be purposely developed as a plan of action by reactionary forces within the majority.

Spain lived under fascist rule for four decades. And many lives were lost in that fight. Europeans know first hand the horror of fascism.

Eh… I think the rapid rise of far right parties all across Europe would dispel the notion that Europe has received some kind of immunity to fascism.

In reality all democracies are vulnerable to fascism. The German jurist and political philosopher Carl Schmitt wrote about the inherent vulnerability of democracy in his book The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy in 1923. He basically wrote the playbook that every fascist still utilizes today.

Writing “Every actual democracy rests on the principle that not only are equals equal, but unequals will not be treated equally.” Basically, you can tear apart any democracy by framing diversity and minority opinions as existential threats to the political community, by exploiting this you can lay the groundwork for majoritarian tyranny and state-sponsored exclusion.

Over the last decade or so the growth in capacity has mostly been focused on Electric vehicles. Small electronics have definitely grown, but at a modest pace that hasn’t really kept up with new hardware’s ability to drain it.

An iPhone from 2016 had about 2k mah and a iPhone 16 has around 3.5k mah.

Well, I’m not blaming the technology itself, they’re inanimate objects.

I think a lot of tech companies have shifted focus from innovating to exploiting for profit motives, too busy increasing their share price to invest in developing technology.

Incomparably worse at the time. The living standard, quality of life, and access to political representation was all much much better in North Korea before the war.

Before and during the war the South Korean government was responsible for the vast majority of all warcrimes. Starting with the Jeju island uprising, where the South killed anywhere from 40-80k of its own citizens after they organized a general strike. It was one of the main events that precipitated the north invading.

Around 2-3 million civilians were killed during the Korean war, over 80% were killed by the South Korean/American government.

But that goes for each technology in it’s own time.

Which is why I specified a lot of technologies, and not all technology? We are certainly making some advances, but like I said it doesn’t seem to be at the pace we experienced in previous decades.

Take batteries. We have them for 160 years, and we thought they were a solved problem, but currently they make new jumps, and still ongoing

I don’t think anyone ever claimed batteries were a solved problem… We are making progress with them, but again, it’s been a pretty slow development over the last decade.

while smartphones are nearly solved

I don’t think I would make that claim either.

Therefore I say it’s his personal feelings that are having this certain cycle.

Or maybe you just lack perspective due to your age? Is there any particular technology that’s come out in the last 5-10 years that you consider groundbreaking? The only thing I can think of is LLM, and to be honest I’m not very impressed with them considering the societal cost.

That’s not what I got from the article, though I might be from a similar age bracket as the author.

It does seem that we have hit diminishing returns when it comes to a lot of technologies. For example there really hasn’t been a significant change in the experience or utility of my phone in the last 10 years or so.

Compare that from phones that came out from 2005 to 2015 and you’ll kinda get what they are saying. We went from Nokia bricks, razors, BlackBerry, and then iphones all within a couple years.

When I was younger the general assumption was that we would be continuing to progress at the same rapid pace as we did when transitioning from analog to digital. Instead, we get more memory and processing but there’s not much difference in experience because it gets neutralized by bigger and clunkier apps that don’t care about optimization.

For me i got really good at guessing what people are wanting and then subsequently became good at giving or then managing the negatives around not.

Yeah… Made me really good at lying on the fly and telling people what they want to hear. If you are going to catch a beating for being honest, ya might as well get good at spinning a tale.

not very good at making friends though. 3/10 would not recommend

I done pretty well at making a couple lifelong really close friendships. Not very good at talking about the weather or surface level friendships.

It was… educational. I don’t really have a lot of great childhood memories, but on the plus side I am really great under pressure and am basically immune to intimidation.

No one in my adult life has been quite as formidable as a tiny Asian woman armed with knowledge of enhanced interrogation techniques and a bamboo spatula.

Who could have guessed that the secret to being really good at job interviews was a moderate to severe dose of child abuse?..

¯_/(ツ)_/¯

My mom is Korean and was born immediately after the war and became a refugee after participating in student rebellions against a dictatorship. Pretty sure her goal while raising me was to make me resistant to government interrogation.

Not really, in the same speech he doubled down on the need to rapidly increase the arms industry to combat the Soviets.

1954 Eisenhower’s CIA overthrew democratically elected Guatemalan president Jacobo Árbenz

Also Eisenhower’s assassination of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo.

It always cracks me up when people quote his warning about the industrial war complex. It’s like a guy who just mugged you then warns you afterwards that the alley you walked down is really dangerous… Thanks I guess?

sided with the defense in both world wars and Korea

Eh… Defense doesn’t = good guys, especially when considering Korea. The government in South Korea was basically a war crimes machine being driven by an evil dictator.

Then Nixon and neoliberalism turn America into what it is today. But the US was good.

So long as you ignore the entirety of the southern hemisphere. It’s hard to claim they really cared about democracy when they overthrew several democracies in Africa and centra/south america just to install fascist dictators.

Cuba had struggled - although US sanctions are a big part of that - but they have somewhat recently started allowing some small businesses more officially.China is pretty capitalist these days. Sure, lots of central control. They are very much not communist or socialist.

Socialism is the transitional period between capitalism and Communism. Just because a socialist country has a mixed economy does not mean it isn’t socialist. So long as the government has the ability to control the means of production then it is a socialist country.

I’m not changing my opinion that the most successful countries use capitalism

It depends on how you are defining success. If you are judging it by acquisition of capital, then yeah… But we must be honest and realize that has only been possible by exploiting their own citizens, and by involving themselves with decades if not hundreds of years of imperialism over the southern hemisphere.

Thus I go back to highly regulated capitalism.

Highly regulated capitalism is still dependent on exploitation of the 3rd world.

Yes, I agree. And the problem with anything else is that it doesn’t work at all. lol.

According to who? China is a socialist government where the state has the power to take control over the means of production of any corporation in the country. It has gone from one of the poorest nations on the planet to one of the greatest super powers in a few decades.

Cuba has survived as a socialist nation and has done so despite being neighbors with a country that’s been stepping regime change for over 50 years.

Vietnam defeated the most powerful country in history and has dragged itself out of poverty…

of heavily regulated capitalism - to keep those influences in check. And it works, more or less, in some of the highest rated countries in the world (i.e. the US is not in that list) - think where the scan the navy in. :)

Yes… The point is once people accumulate enough wealth they can influence the government that is regulating the economy. The countries who follow the Nordic model also have the benefit of being relatively small populations who control a vast amount of or natural resources, which allow them to create large sovereign wealth funds.

Evenso wealth and income inequalities are already rising in these nations. Right winged parties have already started to gain traction in a lot of these countries due to immigration scares.

Thanks!

Lol, weird way to admit your entire argument is baseless, but okay.

Great rebuttal… especially considering that I’m right on the border of genx and millennial.

I’m on the border of genx and millennial, I don’t really know why this dude has a problem with genz. It’s not like my generation were any less consumerist than anyone before or after. And politically more genz are further left than any prior generation since ww2.

Hell, I was being called a pinko back in the day for things like publicly being against the invasion of Iraq, or saying Muslims weren’t all terrorists.

Lord, I hope you aren’t responsible for teaching anything on your campus. Personal property is not a concept unique to capitalism. What do you expect these kids to do… tailor their own clothes, build their own computers and phones?