And you base this on what statistical sample of governments that followed the path defined by Karl Marx?
And in comparison to what glowing non-corrupt environmentally friendly examples again?
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How about applied in Catalonia in the 30s and was more efficient than capitalism, and may have stayed that way if they hadnât been stabbed in the back by their Stalinist âalliesâ in a desperate attempt to lose the Spanish civil war?
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Of course, Fusion is going to be a variant on that steam engine as well. Weâre just going to be sciencing some water until it throws off energies unseen outside of a star or a thermonuclear explosion, then run the big kettle and steam engine off that.
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Just a reminder fusion energy will be most likely be used to heat water and then use a kludgey steam engine to turn a generator to generate electricty.
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Thatâs true⌠although there are other energy harvesting tricks available, at least theoretically, thereâs no doubt that steam turbines are going to live on.
My point was that our research dollars should not be spent on refining the obsolete art of nuclear fission - they should instead be spent on looking for new ways to generate energy. Polywells and the like; and the kind of stuff that mainstream academia sneers at (thinking cold fusion here, obviously).
Outside of the research lab, of course, we need to invest in sustainable systems that already work.
Sorry didnât see you beat me to it.
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[quote=Bookchin]THE HISTORICAL LIMITS OF MARXISM
The idea that a man whose greatest theoretical contributions were made between 1840 and 1880 could âforeseeâ the entire dialectic of capitalism is, on the face of it, utterly preposterous. If we can still learn much from Marxâs insights, we can learn even more from the unavoidable errors of a man who was limited by an era of material scarcity and a technology that barely involved the use of electric power. We can learn how different our own era is from that of all past history, how qualitatively new are the potentialities that confront us, how unique are the issues, analyses and praxis that stand before us if we are to make a revolution and not another historical abortion.[/quote]
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Using those two words together in America is just going to immediately cause most folks to error out.
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Well, weâve got about 120PW of incoming sunlight, which is just about 8,000 times current world primary energy use and 1,000 times what it would take for 15 billion people to use as much as what Americans use today. Thatâs a good start, thereâs no shortage of silicon.
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That seems to be pretty much where things go awry.
Marx proposed a timeline of societal âevolutionâ by which one form of economic organization gives way to its inevitable successor.
The problem is that this never seems to have been given a chance to naturally come to pass in the way that Marx predicted it would.
âMarxistâ parties come to power in nations where the economies are vastly different from the 19th century British and German industrial states which Marx had in mind, or often the proletariat stubbornly refuses to follow Marxian theory and relentlessly strives to become more bourgeois.
This leads the Marxist parties to stubbornly double down and try to force societal evolution into the pathway which historically, of course, is âinevitableâ. Itâs like trying to go right to dinosaurs without having radiolaria and trilobites first.
And inevitably, the governing party decides that in view of all the tireless and thankless revolutionary vanguarding itâs doing, naturally it deserves to reward itself with some nice cars, summer homes, and a bigger food ration. Lather, rinse, repeatâŚ
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Correct, and it may not be an option to evolve that way.
Which contradicts the whole âMarxismâ point you just made up there that I agreed with.
So we have somebody who is an âUnabashed Marxistâ, but that can just mean they respect the general end goal and not every step along the way. It CERTAINLY doesnât mean theyâre pro-environmental-nuking. It DEFINITELY means theyâre not pro-totalitarian.
Hell, the article weâre talking about completely contradicts the association youâre making.
Besides, you missed the second half of my reply to you. Itâs important if youâre going down this road not to ignore the context of the world weâre in.
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I wish I had an animated .gif for this figure of speech.
Good night, all.
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Hey, does this book say anything about actually solving the computational problems associated with planned (democratically or otherwise 
) economies?
Or does it take the* âglory of human spirit will not be stopped by mind-shattering computational complexity of the taskâ* kind of approach?
Ref: http://crookedtimber.org/2012/05/30/in-soviet-union-optimization-problem-solves-you/
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Go multiscale.
Is there any evidence that MSDT is particularly, unusually good at reducing computational complexity of large-scale (~nation-state or so) economic planing?
It seems to me that itâs just a subcase of leveraging problem separability, and I tend to agree with Cosma Shalizi that it does not appear sufficient, at least, until some evidence of âhuge enoughâ computational gains from MSDT is presented
⌠hand-sewn felt puppets of characters from Wes Anderson filmsâŚ
Brilliant. I came for the theory, stayed for the lols.
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