Dave Atlas

@PKBook22 @KrishnanNayar1 @Handre clearly

@da7las @KrishnanNayar1 @Handre Nothing you've said suggests I have anything to learn from you. It was presumptuous to believe I might.

The Berlin Wall created the most brutal controlled experiment in human history: identical people, split by ideology, watched for 41 years to see which system would prevail. West Germans embraced market economics while East Germans suffered under socialist central planning. The results? Devastating. By 1989, East German GDP per capita sat at roughly 30% of West Germany's level. East Germans consumed 40% fewer calories, owned cars at one-tenth the rate, and waited 12 years for a telephone connection. Meanwhile, their western cousins enjoyed rising living standards, technological innovation, and personal freedom that made West Germany an economic powerhouse. But the socialists had excuses ready. "East Germany started from a worse position after the war," they claimed. Bullshit. Both regions faced identical devastation in 1945. The Soviets actually stripped more industrial equipment from their zone (roughly $10 billion worth), yet this affected rural areas less than urban centers. And East Germany possessed abundant natural resources like lignite coal and uranium that should have provided economic advantages. The real difference? Property rights, price signals, and entrepreneurship versus state ownership, price controls, and bureaucratic allocation. West Germans could start businesses, invest capital, and respond to consumer demands. East Germans filled quotas set by party officials who had never run so much as a lemonade stand. You can't coordinate an economy through committee meetings and five-year plans when prices tell you nothing about real supply and demand. East Germans voted with their feet—2.7 million fled west before the Communists built their wall in 1961. After reunification, investigators found Stasi files on one-third of the population. When you need secret police watching every third citizen, your economic system has already failed.

@PKBook22 @KrishnanNayar1 @Handre So the common element here is they both had a lot of victims... No kind of relationship or similarity with any other factors at all. Just "they both had victims so HA GOTCHA!"? Do you really not understand why this is irrelevant?

@da7las @KrishnanNayar1 @Handre Was the "colonial invasion' victimless? Or might it have involved, countless deaths, destruction, enslavement, subjugation, displacement and imposition of cultures totally alien to those on whom they were imposed?

@joeroganhq It's still is 99% that way.

Joe Rogan says people in 1980 were sort of like wild animals that just had children and lived in bliss. "No one knew what was going on in the world, everybody was completely uninformed..."

@PKBook22 @KrishnanNayar1 @Handre There is a point. You might learn something. So let me ask a different way... How is a colonial invasion under a system that nobody argues failed, relevant to a bloody cultural revolution and eventual hybrid economic system that is largely regarded as successful?

@da7las @KrishnanNayar1 @Handre If you know, there's neither a need nor a point in me doing so.

@PKBook22 @KrishnanNayar1 @Handre I know what you're trying to suggest. I just want to hear you try to explain it.

@da7las @KrishnanNayar1 @Handre It really isn't difficult to work out, if you give it some thought...

@PKBook22 @KrishnanNayar1 @Handre How is that relevant?

@da7las @KrishnanNayar1 @Handre Tell that to Native Americans.

@KrishnanNayar1 @Handre Communism in China will be viewed as a success by anyone who ignores the 40+ million deaths it took to cull the herd into a controllable lump of sameness.

On the other hand Communists achieved significant results in China. Compare to India. And even in East Germany they created a more egalitarian society than in the West, with high educational and cultural standards. Brecht worked in the East. People went to East Berlin to see the Berliner Ensemble. Today East Germans often refer to the GDR with some respect.

@DeTocqueville14 Yeah but imagine buying the dip in 2008. All that money has to go somewhere.

When this all goes south, the banks will get a bailout, and the people who are struggling to feed their families will be forced to pay for it... again. Heads they win, tails you lose.

@elonmusk Socialists are sold the idea of a de-centralized and distributed system, but it's really just a wholly centralized redistribution system. The crazy part is that it's not a hidden feature, they genuinely just don't understand the difference.

Exactly

@StifflersMom44 @InsaneReality Doesn't everyone have a couch gun?

@InsaneReality The dude inside crib musta had his gun by his side cuz he was firing within 5 seconds of thst door bursting open

The way he clears that corner says everything

@WhiteHouse It means factory farmed with chemicals nobody wants and horrible conditions nobody approves of.

Born here. Raised here. Harvested here. Processed here. The TRUE AMERICAN standard. 🇺🇸

@BeaucampI @ah_lorelei @elonmusk And then Grok took it's place...

@ah_lorelei @elonmusk "Dario Amodei and Anthropic responded to this on Thursday the 26th with this brave and historically important statement that everyone should read."⤵️ lesswrong.com/posts/ppj7v4sS…

“Anthropic”

There's a good argument for always trying to stop the spread of (Bolshevik style) communism because that's where the violent and bloody cultural/ethnic revolutions against innocent people take place and the initial starvation deaths of all the non-working humans and general hold-outs. (weird how that's exactly what happens under fascism too) But once a regime is established, the best option appears to be, let communism die it's own guaranteed economic death, and ALLOW it to find it's own recovery solutions though economic freedom to prevent a hard societal crash. It makes the economics public facing and forces survival of the state via capitalism, or if they choose to just let it crash, they face their own revolution... But allowing it to use sanctions as the lever of propaganda doesn't seem to help anyone, except it helps the regime become even more entrenched like NK... If NK had nobody to blame but themselves, things would almost certainly be different there right now.

You can hate communism, as I do, and still recognize that 40+ years of sanctions and blockade is going to have a extra-negative effect on the PEOPLE who live in under any communist regime. You can't look at Cuba or NK and honestly say their condition is 100% caused by communism when they've been economically cut-off from the world for two generations. China is thriving because of economic connectivity, despite remaining largely communist. Russia still suffers under sanctions despite largely moving away from it. This is the reality that will be entirely ignored by extremism in upcoming propaganda cycles.

@anestary @CsabaSzekely7 @TerribleMaps Yes, basically. Not necessarily commercial ships but it's based on the size/depth of the natural channels (not the manmade ones) and historical usage.

@CsabaSzekely7 @TerribleMaps Is this as far as you could take a commercial ship or what is the limit here

Why has the US not built a canal here to rival the Panama Canal?

@FBIDirectorKash They aren't hackers, they are part of your friend group and you chose to put them in the list.

FBI will continue publishing recommendations and asking all Americans to take preventive steps to protect their data even on encrypted commercial messaging apps - as we have seen evidence of foreign adversaries targeting their information through phishing schemes. This is part of the Trump administration’s most comprehensive Cybersecurity initiative in history - staying ahead of the constantly changing threat landscape.

@elonmusk @JoeTegtmeyer Greenland?

No, that’s just the little advanced technology fab, where we will be iterating on chip designs. We couldn’t possibly fit the Terafab on the GigaTexas campus. It will be far bigger than everything else combined there. Several locations for Terafab are under consideration. It needs thousands of acres and over 10GW of power at full scale.

Actually more like 60+ years. I forget how old I am...

There are real reasons those sanctions were initially imposed, and I don't disagree with that, but 40 years... Nixon changed China entirely because he thought opening up economic activity for them would soften the regime and become a counter-weight to Soviet communism, and it did.

@johnbryanesq Replace them with robots. I'd feel a lot better being railroaded by something that's not supposed to have feelings to begin with.

Both cops and prosecutors are regularly using AI to prosecute and incarcerate innocent people without remorse or consequences.