I feel like people dunk on the "you're criticizing capitalism from your iphone" callout without acknowledging its fundamental correctness. Innovation and the production of consumer goods are two things that capitalism really is better at, whatever your political stancehttps://twitter.com/AyoCaesar/status/1255758942833172490 …
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I realize any attempt to discuss this founders instantly in the swamp of definitions. But I think of capitalism as kind of like an engine for economic activity. Saying that it can make things go fast doesn't imply that you have to be against seat belts, air bags, toll roads, etc
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It's a shame that a couple of the old line socialist economies weren't left over after 1989 to illustrate that purely as a method of organizing an economy and broadly raising the standard of living, socialism was unworkable. The USSR had the biggest microchips in the world
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I also find it interesting that all sorts of quality of life metrics in the west, like real wage growth, flatlined with the death of the old Communist bloc. It makes me wonder if the ideological battle didn't serve as a check on some of the worst aspects of monopoly capitalism
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But all that said, yeah, if you're tweeting from your iPhone about consumer capitalism being irredeemable and wrong, your beliefs about the world are incoherent. There's a reason it's an iPhone, and not a WePhone!
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The inability of the socialist bloc to make computers, even with a massive program of industrial espionage, had severe repercussions on both the Soviet military and central planning, and was one reason the whole system went belly up. It's a topic I would like to learn more about
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Replying to @Pinboard
@MazzucatoM has a lot to say on your original post (she says, tapping on her very old MacBook)https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jul/12/phone-state-private-sector-products-investment-innovation …1 reply 1 retweet 2 likes -
All modern microelectronics exists because the US Government wants to kill Communists. The Soviet military industrial complex excelled in other areas.
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The Soviets wanted to kill us just as bad, and they *really* wanted to build computers, but they couldn't do it. It's not that they chose to excel in other areas, they were badly hurt by the lack of computational power. It's an interesting story!
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The US military was one of the only customers buying computers since before WWII. It helped that the US military spending developed this supply chain, so they were able to fund the tech from the bleeding edge competitors. Intel came from Fairchild for a reason.
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