Comment by jordanb
17 hours ago
I've been noticing how our economy keeps getting more Soviet as it becomes more top-down. We basically have central planning now with all the pathologies inherent in that system, but unlike the soviets we just have a bunch of guys who happened to get rich or bribe the right people running our GOSPLAN.
Things definitely feel 'Soviet' at my company. AI usage has been mandated by upper management (despite the fact that it doesn't really make sense or solve any problems in my particular job). They literally call it an "AI revolution." If you dare question the wisdom of the company's 'AI-First' policy, it's like you risk being singled out as a "counter-revolutionary."
they are calling it "the ai era" around these parts lol... "coding in the ai era" it sounds so big and meaningful, but actually its just vapid.
Yeah, the stories I've heard from Meta are very Soviet-coded. Like, trying to exceed the plan but not too much, because then the new plan would be hopelessly unachievable and you'd be punished for not meeting the insane expectations.
So like Publix company earnings? You have to beat by a little so you're not just flat but beat by too much and you look incompetent/suspicious
YES! I've been trying to explain this about Publix for a week now but I couldn't put it to words.
Literally Stakhanovism.
The problem is that the founding fathers believed in constraining the state because it could be abusive, but they should have understood that all power ought to be subject to the people, not just state power.
I wonder what the largest and most powerful private enterprise the FFs knew about was. I suppose they'd probably heard of the Hudson's Bay Company, but I have no idea how they really felt about the potential that many normal people would feel equal amounts of domination from companies with revenue much larger than most countries' GDP.
The Dutch East India Company would've definitely been known, and was huge.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_East_India_Company
The FFs were literally bourgeois, the american revolution was a bourgeois revolution. They were the big private enterprises, and they wanted to stop giving a cut of their winnings to king george.
Surprise - capitalism has always been top down planning. The bosses are the planners, my friend.
soviet-coded minus the cheap/free housing and public transit
And famine