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Post by Baron von Lotsov on Aug 18, 2024 22:28:54 GMT
I've been having some thoughts about systems. Systems are mathematical constructs and vice versa. A system of roads is a mathematical construct known as a graph. Maths teaches you to look at these systems in the abstract and find various abstract laws that can be applied back to all systems that fall under the definition the law applies to. Another graph might be the telephone cables. They connect like roads and you can use graph theory to apply to both and be equally correct.
Another key point is known as the complexity of a system. Some systems are simple and only have a few different possible configurations, but a lot of systems are complex. A road network is a complex system. The number of different permutations of ways you can connect the roads is just mindboggling. A human brain would not be able to work it out in the time the universe has left to run. We call a problem like optimising the road system a "hard problem", as a specific meaning of hard is how long would to take to compute. Like another hard problem is factoring primes in large numbers, which is the basis of RSA encryption.
Most systems are both complex and hard to compute longhand. In order to get by we use solutions that are educated guesses and we try them out and via an iterative process we can approximate a solution that is good enough. Sometimes we can converge on a solution this way and sometimes not, depending on what we are trying to solve. there is a problem with this method known as the local minima. Imagine some uneven surface where you are trying to find the lowest point, the optimum solution. Your algorithm says head in the direction which points down hill. You can easily get stuck in a ditch where over yonder is a much lower point, but you have to climb up before heading back down again. It's like a firm has a system and in order to make more profit it needs to do thing that make less profit until it has reached a point where the real profit is located.
Now of course the above is all abstract theory, but once upon a time I really got into building a very complex system and picked up a lot of tricks of the trade in system architecture. These are general tricks which could I suppose work just as well for designing a program as a system of government or a company that manufactures something useful. Conservatives tend to use the successive approximation technique where Labour wants a revolution. For me and my program a revolution would be what they call a complete re-write, but that was many years of work. I think a good analogy would be another hard problem which is like fitting a large number of irregular shapes of different sizes into the smallest space possible. The large ones you fit at the bottom and all the way up to the smallest ones at the top. Shuffling the bottom ones around, being the largest can have the largest saving of space, but each time you move a large one you have to rearrange all the ones you places above it. The deeper you fiddle the more trouble you can have, as per akin to a more and more serious revolution. How to play that game eh?
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Post by piglet on Aug 19, 2024 9:54:54 GMT
Christ.
The faults of mankind cannot be solved with a pen and paper fitting in shapes into a small space.
What is this? Unbelievable. The problem is the hearts of men.
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Post by Vinny on Aug 19, 2024 11:04:29 GMT
Overthrowing Communists mostly worked.
The only former Soviet countries that are not better off, are those that are still dictatorships.
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Post by jimhacker on Sept 2, 2024 13:44:37 GMT
Overthrowing Communists mostly worked. The only former Soviet countries that are not better off, are those that are still dictatorships. Which is most of them. Central Asia and the Caucuses, Belarus, Russia itself, all under authoritarian regimes. Except the Baltic states. |
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Post by Vinny on Sept 2, 2024 14:43:25 GMT
East Germany, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Ukraine and many more former Communist places have enjoyed decades of democracy. Ok, Putin is trying to rebuild the Soviet Union's empire, but he's failing.
And one day he'll be gone.
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Post by Baron von Lotsov on Sept 4, 2024 9:18:19 GMT
Overthrowing Communists mostly worked. The only former Soviet countries that are not better off, are those that are still dictatorships. Which is most of them. Central Asia and the Caucuses, Belarus, Russia itself, all under authoritarian regimes. Except the Baltic states. The problem with the way you are looking at it is you see an association between authoritarian and communist and believe that proves the statement 'Communist systems are authoritarian and because of this they will fail'. However, given the facts that communism was authoritarian and communism did fail in the soviet Union there is a different statement that also holds consistent with these facts, and that is, 'The soviet communist system was flawed and this flaw caused it to fail and because it was failing it had to become authoritarian'.
By the way, I'm unsure if you people are aware, but in early business computer systems, especially around the time of the IBM 360 sort of time, IBM and a few others produced these giant computers to manage the data of large corporations. The de facto way of storing data was in a hierarchy, so for example if you wanted to store details of personnel, you may have the top of the hierarchy might be a list of divisions, and within each division a list of personnel, and with each person they might have a list of roles they have worked in the company. The data was physically stored and accessed via these relations. Every single business computer stored data in this fashion until a certain Dr Codd en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_F._Codd came along and thought, this is stupid. He was a mathematician and devised a system of using a series of separate lists and joining one list to another in mathematical ways (and, or, cross product) and this ad hoc method meant you separated the data from the relations. It was a far more flexible system and could be modified on the fly without restoring all the data in a different order. No one uses the old system these days unless there is a very specific reason for doing so, and certainly not in your standard corporate computer systems. The trend these days is distributed computer systems where you can pull data from all over the place to solve your query.
Can you see the similarities here between soviet command economics and the free market where any business can come to any other business and say hey guys, like what you do, lets do some business together and get out a new product with our combined facilities, in a kind of ad hoc way which just suits them at the time as market conditions say this is what we need in the here and now.
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Post by jimhacker on Sept 15, 2024 5:44:46 GMT
I never said that authoritarian regimes always fail or that there are no differences between types of them, particularly Communism and other types of authoritarian or totalitarian governments. Egypt has had one pharaoh after another since about 3000 BC and most of the time, it experienced internally-stable rule. (Though that may have been due to the characteristics and particulars of a time and place of which we have incomplete evidence.) The Ba'athists of Iraq may have held onto power for a while, too, had our governments not collaborated in the farce that removed it from power.
But Communism did fail through its fatal flaws. Anyone selling you utopia is always full of ****. Today there are less communist parties and more stock exchanges than there were before the 1990s. Many countries that are still authoritarian have adopted capitalist economics. You will have to go through great effort to convince me that Soviet-style command economics and free market economies are similar in the way you mentioned in your last sentence.
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Post by piglet on Sept 15, 2024 10:06:49 GMT
Democracies are authoritarian, at the end of the day one man decides. The west is different because theres a lot of chat about whatever first, and you dont have to toe the big leaders line, but he will want you too with parliamentary whips. Its not possible to govern effectively by concensus.
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Post by Baron von Lotsov on Sept 15, 2024 10:41:17 GMT
I never said that authoritarian regimes always fail or that there are no differences between types of them, particularly Communism and other types of authoritarian or totalitarian governments. Egypt has had one pharaoh after another since about 3000 BC and most of the time, it experienced internally-stable rule. (Though that may have been due to the characteristics and particulars of a time and place of which we have incomplete evidence.) The Ba'athists of Iraq may have held onto power for a while, too, had our governments not collaborated in the farce that removed it from power. But Communism did fail through its fatal flaws. Anyone selling you utopia is always full of ****. Today there are less communist parties and more stock exchanges than there were before the 1990s. Many countries that are still authoritarian have adopted capitalist economics. You will have to go through great effort to convince me that Soviet-style command economics and free market economies are similar in the way you mentioned in your last sentence. The construction of a national rail system is a classic case where a command structure will yield the best result. It's just a mathematical truism. The mathematical term for it is a graph (vertices and edges). The vertices are the stations, and the edges are the tracks. It is obvious why a free market is impossible for track and station builders. It is a market that can not operate independently. You can not build a station where a track does not exist, and there is little point building two in the same place. |
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Post by Montegriffo on Sept 15, 2024 10:54:00 GMT
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