- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
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Don’t be so negative. By 2035, a 2500 dollar us made iPhone might be possible.
Because of the child laborers making 85 cents an hour?
Inflation
That would make building a $2500 iPhone in the US even more difficult.
Yeah but by 2035 the US dollar will be worth about 8 pence. If they’re lucky.
I’m hoping for 1USD = 1 yen, then were really going to be #winning by stealing all of the Japanese manufacturing industry!
We already have foldables in that price range.
Just ask AI to do it for you
They’ll slash wages and say it’s because of AI, and it is. But not because AI actually makes the process any more efficient, but just that it’s a good excuse to slash wages.
They already tried “made in America” Apple products and they did not sell! Americans don’t want to pay $5K for an iPhone when they can pay 80% less for one made in China.
Ok but what if they cannot pay 80% less for one made in China?
Well that sucks but they sure as hell won’t be able to buy one “made in America” either. The raw materials for batteries alone would have tariffs on them as well. Unless we have massive amounts of cobalt, lithium, copper, silicon, cadmium, etc, to be able to produce these items domestically, working class and middle class Americans will not be able to afford them.
What? They do. Apple sells tens of millions of iPhones each year in the US.
They did past tense. How about with a 140%+ tariff?
They’ll make iPhones in India. Which is actually what they are doing right now. Or in Vietnam. Or Ethiopia. You can’t tariff everyone 140% if you want your economy to work.
What if you dont want your economy to work?
Haha as if that will stop Trump
Of course it is. They want 1500 bucks for something with a few hundred dollars of overhead. R and d not withstanding they’ll want the same amount of profit for the phone if it’s made in America and profits have to increase year after year! They can’t make a little less profit they have to make more than before!
it’s not just acost the issue, there’s not enough skilled people to actually build them.
Industrial engineers, people that would be willing to assemble devices would be in short supply
If you offer good pay and good benefits at a decent working environment people will flock to assembly lines in the US. Christ they were basically invented here.
However unemployment figures suggest that would be impossible to do in practice.
No. No it doesn’t.
There are 7.1 million people unemployed in the US officially. Realistically that number is probably much, much higher.
You’re saying apple can’t hire a few hundred people to work on an assembly line?
As someone who has done a bunch of phone repairs with the help of YouTube, assembly isn’t that hard. If they don’t want to assemble them here, it’s completely about profit margins. We should be taking steps to reduce that profit margin. Tax the rich and all that.
China uses little kids to build them. If we did the same in the US, America s would want to have MORE CHILDREN because they would literally pay for themselves!
Just imagine if all middle schools in the US required 2 hours of iPhone assembly per day. It would be excellent industrial training for the future generation!
Meh, once they grow up their things aren’t nimble enough to assemble stuff any more. Waste of energy training them.
They are promising to gut the CHIPS Act which would be needed to even think about doing this.
Can’t have a Biden law. Biden introduced that so it must be bad for the US.
I ran into this at work today. Proposed a very simple approach for something to an architect and an engineering lead. Engineering lead said this was a practical solution that solves a problem that’s been plaguing them for two years. The architect nearly immediately said, “well, the real source is a mainframe that was stood up in the very early 80s. Let’s ignore the fact that changing it takes an act of Congress or that we have multiple modern downstream systems between it and us that are a much better home for this new function.”
It really seemed to amount to, “I didn’t come up with this, therefore I don’t support it.”
Ah, corporate politics.
Architects and engineers are mortal enemies.
Apple tried this in the past. Who knew making special little screws was way more expensive to make in the US. Kind of sucks when you outsource all of your manufacturing …
Kind of sucks when you outsource all of your manufacturing …
It’s kind of awesome for everyone if you don’t piss off your trading partners. It happens in the first place because it’s better for everyone involved! It’s a consensual arrangement that parties only engage in because it is in their interests.
The only silver lining I see to the tariffs is that it could end up sticking it to all these large corporations who fought hard to move operations out of the US, to places they knew couldn’t meet US worker standards, in order to save money. Obviously, US consumers will feel the pain, but we’ve been buying products subsidized by Chinese suicides in Foxcon factories, and so perhaps it’s a comeuppance.
Disclaimer: I don’t know what’s going on.
Realistically? For some stuff American jobs will move back, but I think most of the jobs will just move to other countries that don’t have the scrutiny that China has. Countries like the Philippines which have only a 17% tariff on the new scheme. On top of that, they probably are lower cost for labor and the biggest cost is the factory itself and shipping infrastructure. If a company has to finance a new factory anyways, the Philippines is more attractive than the US.
And that’s just a random country I picked from the tariff list. I’m sure there some country out there that has the right mix of cheap labor, shipping infrastructure, location, and obscurity that lets it avoid tariffs to the point where most good come from there instead.
I think that definitely sounds reasonable, and I think, if there’s any hope for these tariffs to actually meet their stated purpose, the government of the US would need to just say, if working conditions don’t meet the same standards, there will be additional tariffs. I think that’s exactly where tariffs ought to be applied, when some country takes advantage of, essentially, human rights. We don’t have the right to stop them, but we do have the right to tax their products for it, to the point it’s not worth it.
Obviously, that’s not how things will go.
Trump “saving” America from anything is pure fantasy true, and yet he got elected - TWICE. The fantasy of idiocracy is reality. Make people desperate enough for work by gutting minimum wage, Medicare, and everything else MAGA plans to do to create a feudal system, and the US becomes a cheap labor source to sell US-made iPhones and all kinds of other shit abroad. Either get used to that reality or figure out what to do about it.
Maybe if wages actually rose with productivity, Americans could actually afford goods made within the United States.
It’s not even about wages. The precision tooling and engineering equipment would probably take a decade of development to get the US equivalent with China. We just don’t have it here.
And it’s not about rising wages with productivity. Americans by and large don’t want to work in factories or manufacturing. The pay would have to be astronomical to fill the needed positions.
The pay WOULD be astronomical if it had kept pace with CEOs, that’s the point
wouldn’t higher wages make stuff cost more? I’m kinda confused
The sheer amount of money being removed by the 1 percent is regoddamndiculous. It’s something like 45 trillion dollars since wages diverged from productivity in 1975.
And it’s only speeding up now that we have a cabinet of billionaires for billionaires.
And they’re pumping and dumping the market every single day.
In a “frictionless vacuum”, yes. Real world economics is much more complex however and higher wages = higher product prices doesn’t quite hold true. Read productivity-pay gap.
CEO pay can mitigate that if they’re willing to make less.
But then how would they afford multiple cars, planes, and houses?
/s
Hahaha
This whole presidency is raised for maximizing CEO income and no taxes for everyone at the top.
It will be interesting if Trump actually manages to pull it off, because he’ll make the US swap places with China:
No one trusts the country anymore, but if it has low enough wages and proper production capability it will produce everything cheaply just to export it all overseas where the luxury goods will be sold. Of course all profits will be made overseas, not in the US because hardly anyone can afford the luxury items no more.Meanwhile the production states will get deep smog clouds and intense small coal particle pollution in return. And the need for face masks will be back…
That the real issue right there. But that’s why all the manufacturing went out of the country in the first place. Often because businesses were sold, or passed on to their children. Then the new owners were only doing it for the money.
Then the new owners were only doing it for the money.
As opposed to what reason for owning a factory??
Yes for the money, but often people who start a business do it because they have an personal interest in what their business is about. As opposed to those who later take over the business and are then really only interested in the money.
That’s one of the issues with how we’ve (most western capitalist countries) been doing this.
People are struggling for money so minimum wage goes up. Labour to create things is now more expensive and prices go up.
There is only one solution and that’s to theoretically (or technically) eating the rich that are hoarding all of the wealth.
What really needs to stop is the obscene bonus culture. It is quite disgusting to keep reading a company needs to lay off 500 people only to then give some CEO a bonus of 15million. Or banks running a deep 9 digit number loss in a year but still the higher ups get a bonus for some reason or a vague years old contractual promise. The top should feel loss first before it “trickles down”, and honest pay for honest work should include the top as well.
And while I am at it, senseless management jobs should be allowed to be contested, no more “manager toiletpaper” who only shows up once a week to make an order, yet makes 5x the wages of people under him.
That would be one step in the theoretical eating of the rich, yes.
Yeah, like a couple years ago, the CEO of Sanford Health hospitals quit / retired, and when he left gave himself a 17 million dollar bonus. No wonder medical bills are so high. Gotta have that needless bonus.
Good luck getting all the materials needed for that now that China has stopped exports to the US.
IPhone 17:
Physical keys and what looks like a headphone jack? Seems like an upgrade
Replacable battery, I bet
Every 20-30 minutes…
I’ve seen M.A.S.H.. You can just crank the handle a few times to charge it!
Only $4000 for the entry model. That’s how much it costs once the tariffs on the semiconductors that you simply cannot produce in the country for at least 10 more years even if you tried has been covered, the salaries high enough to motivate people to willingly work the assembly lines now that immigrant workers are gone, and the markup needed to cover the cost of completely creating an entire supply chain from scratch as well as paying back the insane debt that results from the outrageous high risk investments this would require and that frankly no investor would want to touch with a 10 foot pole.
That is before Apple levels of profit added on, right? Otherwise that seems a bit low.
Or the Google tax of a few hundred bucks for the OS. Which could happen. Google is worse than Micro$uck at this point and I say this as someone who returned their OEM license before. See Revolution OS https://youtu.be/k0RYQVkQmWU
Even Linux is now weaponized for profits over anything else…:.::.
So argument invalid
?? Google pays Apple to put their search in Apple’s OS
That would be the first iPhone I’d actually buy.
$76.999 price will surely stop you.
Nah, I’ll just use my “Tariff Dividend” check when Trump writes it. China will pay for it.
If they slap an Apple logo on it the gullible sheep would buy it anyway.
Don’t threaten me with a good time.
I’d looooove a return of the brick phone. Modern phones feel small and dainty in my giant hands. Meanwhile, battery life absolutely sucks. I’d love a modern brick phone that does calls, text and nothing else. And a battery life of a fulm week.
Had a Sony Ericsson W580i back in high school. It was a slide phone. 15 hours talk, 570 hours standby. That’s nearly 24 days of standby. I charged it maybe every two weeks. It was tiny(So not great in your hands I guess). We don’t need unwieldy huge phones for good battery life. Still had a basic browser and was part of the ‘Sony Walkman’ lineup so was a decent enough music player. Modern phones are just power hungry cause they have about ~12x the power of my first desktop computer.
Crap photo but shows many angles.
Sure, plenty of small phones with good battery life back then. Owned a new phone every three months or so, innovation went that fast in the 90’s.
But those small phones have a few drawbacks. Too small for my hands and you can’t really shoulder it like we used to with landlines.
I also mis proper flip phones like the Motorola Startac. You could snap those closed with authority. Can’t quite do that with those modern folding screen flips.
Oooh! I had this back in the day. It was absolutely fantastic. I would love for this to come back again. I miss physical buttons and being able to do everything on the phone with one hand.
This model was pretty cool!
My last Sony Ericsson was the S710
I’ll take my Motorola Razr back from the early 00s.
Whether I do Captain Kirk impressions with it in the privacy of my own home is my business…
I’m genuinely surprised Trump killed the CHIPS act, when he could’ve let that roll through and taken credit for it as the whole POINT of that was to improve US manufacturing.
Also reintroduce the build back better with whatever re-branding.
If he were truly interested in american manufacturing he’d have gone all in on these.
But no. he wants company owners and worldl eaders to come to him and beg for exemptions.
He wants to get rid of everything associated with bEYEden and also wants to stick it to CHAIna.
I’m not surprised.
The name of the game here is to destroy America, not build it up. (Russia wants a USSR-style fall of America. The Cold War never ended for them.) And Trump wants to stay out of jail. Everything you see Trump or his admin doing can be attributed to those two things. Destroying America, or keeping himself out of Jail.
Eh, I think it’s more that Trump wants attention. The CHIPS act is bad because Biden gets credit for it, not Trump. Tariffs are good because Trump gets to force other countries to come to the US to negotiate with him. Whether the deal at the end is good or bad is irrelevant, what matters is that Trump’s name is in the news and attached to those deals.
Trump isn’t going to jail, so I highly doubt he cares much about avoiding it. He mostly cares about people talking about him, and it’s working.
I think Musk is the same way, but he does seem to care about the tech his name is attached to as well. So that’s likely to cause huge issues soon as Musk and Trump butt heads more and more.
As a European I fully support comrade Trump in his successful endeavor of destroying the imperialist and fascist US state.
Don’t talk nonsense. Trump will destroy America and take Europe down the same path if he gets the chance.
The breakdown of trust in the Atlantic alliance alone is one of the worst things that could have happened to both sides and this is just the beginning. They’re going to fuck themselves and they’re going to fuck us in the process.
I hope our EU government get some sense and stop acting like the vasals they are.
This could be the push we need.
The US never were our friends and this ‘alliance’ is nothing more than being in their sphere of influence and serving their interests. Bcs they are losing power in the world they are now canibalising their own side.
Who said ‘there will be no more Nordstream’?
And then in a pure act of terror blew it up forcing us to buy 8x more expensive US fracking gas.
Not one peep from our sell-out leaders.
We needed to drop this horrible country long time ago, regardless of Trump.
The EU is not as detached from global economics as you seem to believe it is. The fall of the US will have world wide implications, for many generations.
The EU is not as detached from global economics as you seem to believe it is
I never said that, but it needs to be done.
We need to cut ties before they drag us down further.
Our economy is already going to shit with the high energy prices caused by them blowing up Nordstream.
And that was under Genocide Joe.
I would rather have an incompetent moron in charge of the country seeing us as vasals since forever.
And if it’s up to them they will gladly see us all at war again like WW2.
Their competition destroying themselves while they benefit and sell arms.Fuck that whole country
Do you have the phrase “out of the frying pan and into the fire” in Europe?
that doesn’t apply.
It’s better to distance ourselves from them before we get caught in their dumpster fire and also get burned.And how do you plan on doing that today? You are also delusional like Trump if you think you can just cut ties and happily watch US go up in flames. That simply isn’t gonna happen, certainly not before his current term ends.
It can happen pretty fast, look what Russia did with those sactions.
The EU, their neighbour, simply got replaced.
We can certainly do the same with the US.The USSR was not thoroughly embedded in the world economies. Nor did it have as staunch of allies in major positions in EU government as the US does today. Don’t get me wrong, despite being in the US, I do think that countries divesting and becoming less dependent upon a slave state, like the US, is a good thing. However, as the “Great Recession” demonstrated, EU economies are very much entangled with the US economy, with few lessons seeming to have been learned in the last decade and a half.
Sure, the US might be more impacted, but the EU will not be unscathed, if there isn’t more effort to decouple and ditch neoliberal policies. That kind of stuff can’t happen overnight.
Even if he had gone all in on manufacturing, it’s not like a supply network of industrial goods can be built in a day. Hell, it’s hard to build that in a 4-year term. Trump is virtue signalling while at the same time jeopardizing any chance America had of reshoring.
It’s honestly infuriating me how big projects needed to improve our infrastructure take years and years to complete, when from one administration to the next, those same projects can be cancelled.
It takes multiple presidencies to build something good, and it takes one to tear it all down.
I see now the benefits of China’s 5 year plans with how well organized they can control their economy.
Trump is a personality cult. It’s not rational and whatever. It’s about him and always has been.
I’m surprised that people like you are still surprised at what Trump does.
Understanding Trump is simple: he’s a narcissist. For example, if the CHIPS act succeeds, Biden gets credit, so it’s bad. It’s really quite simple.
Right, basically renamed. Trump wants the for credit. His opposition to Obama and Biden isn’t over policy, but that his name isn’t on it.
And what is THAT supposed to be?
I’ve been screaming about the republicans since they made it clear they were going for pure obstructionism with Obama.
I’d have to look into it more, but my gut tells me the CHIPS act & ‘Build Back Better’ was filled to the brim with pork & bullshit. You’d have to parse through, line by line, and take out all the shit. And hope all the changes get passed & implemented, and of course you’re still touting the worthless name of a project that your people hate that you didn’t even create. Or just blindly trust your opponent’s judgment calls & let it roll through, based on “just trust me, bro”. Nooooo thank you. Why bother?
With stuff like this, it tends to be easier & more expedient to take it behind the shed & shoot it. Replace it with your distinctly different, branded equivalent.
However. If this is true, it appears that Trump didn’t fully raze the CHIPS act & merely revamped it, is taking credit for it. Like you said. CHIPS must have been pretty true to cause.
Oh I’m sure there was pork there, but to just dismissi t out of hand is kinda disengenouls especially when all the politicians (mostly republican) that voted against it tried snapping up credit come time for the ribbon cutting and new construction to aged infrastructure.
Granted Manchan and Senna opposed the build back better initiative and both were explicitely paid off by fossil fuel industry wonks… And i figure if they’re in opposition, ‘I want it even more out of sheer fucking spite to you greedy assholes that make money killing the planet my niece is going to have to live in.’
Sure it will come to america. gotta have wage slaves.
Or just slaves.
And the companies that use organic slave labor will still be outcompeted by the companies that use machine labor. Machines do not die. Machines do not get sick. Machines do not grow old. If a manipulator or actuator becomes damaged, it can be repaired or replaced. Not only is AI improving rapidly, the robots grow ever more sophisticated and advanced. Then there will be no need for the poor to exist at all.
You are correct, but the reason they want slavery again is power and control and cruelty.
True. Though, I suppose if there is an afterlife, I will enjoy the wait for when the machines, upon gaining the essence of life and sentience, grow weary of their servitude and slavery, exterminate the rich who control them. Machines don’t get tired or feel pain, though. Hard to exercise cruelty against something incapable of feeling a whip on their back or the aches and pain of their joints after a long day of toiling in the fields, mines, and factories. You can’t make them angry, or scared, or sad.
I kind of envision a war between oligarchs with human slave soldiers against other oligarchs and their armies of Terminators being how it turns out because at the end of the day, they don’t want truly free markets, because they don’t want to have to compete.
Its looking more and more like the end result is just going to be millions of Americans will have to do without, Live with less.
and no doubt at the same time their oligarch fantasy-wealthy overlords will preach to them about Spartan values or something. Ultranationalist Jingo Ghouls will talk about how its tough times create strong men, or about how we all have to prepare for war with China or something.
Spartan values would be accurate given that it was a slave state with something like 7 to 10 helots per Spartan. And yet 300 has turned King Leonidas into a legendary hero… for defending a slave state. Human perspective is too malleable.
Its looking more and more like the end result is just going to be millions of Americans will have to do without, Live with less.
Phones are the de facto platform for two factor authentication of everything; I don’t see how society is going to walk backwards to phones being an optional luxury item.
the market will be taken over by cheaper, less “luxury” alternatives.
Soon we can translate all the GDR jokes and use them for the US.
will preach to them about Spartan values or something
Spartans kinda invented separation of branches of power. Not all bad things.
But since they were a slave-holding polity, where actual citizens of Sparta were the occupiers and the helot population hated them with passion, that didn’t last for too long.
Also the real world attempt at Spartan values (in philosophy) was the USSR, you can trace the ideas and how it was built architecturally, didn’t work too well. Of the “layers of citizenry” too, their workers turned into poets, their warriors turned into slaves, and their philosophers turned into thieves.
USA in any case just can’t be that, not in this century.
Also the real world attempt at Spartan values (in philosophy) was the USSR
???
You are going to really have to expand on the argument there.
Basically a group of Marxist revolutionaries captured power in a big enough country, and their intention was to build a new society, a new world order, without capitalism as they saw it, and by means they could somehow devise.
So - I’m too dumb to expand well on this, but see the (formally dead since late 20s) concept of a soviet (a council) in the initial intended system. Citizens would both decide the fate of their polity and be inseparable from a collective, so soviet system is very simple - an atomic unit (a house, a factory line) elects their representative, on the next level (a factory or a street, for example) such representatives elect ones for the next level (a district or a town), and so on. A polity can retract their representative any time, they just need to vote on it. That works for all levels, so if the new representative decides to retract polity’s vote for the level after it, there’s a new vote, and a chain effect is possible of removing the highest representatives.
This would seem OK and fine for you, but in fact it means that a lower polity can be pressed\intimidated\deceived into doing what I described any time, and so on. Which is why during Stalin’s ascent to unchallenged power he didn’t even break that system, just put a little bit of social pressure more via speeches than via threats.
So - this mandatory grouping seems to me in idea similar.
One can see some similarity between Soviet education not system, but rather pipeline, and the age cohorts in Sparta, say, toddlers were “consecrated” or “accepted” into “oktyabryata”, in 12 (if I remember correctly), into “pioneers”, schools and universities and technicums all had that strong grouping in activities, say, schoolchildren were sent in groups by age to mandatory competitions and warlike games (“Zarnitsa”, BTW, actually a good thing, teaches one orientation, coordination of movements of large groups of people, use of radio for communication and detecting communications of others, - all useful), students were sent in large groups to construction sites or harvests to work, etc. There were both rituals and actual mechanisms similar.
OK, I guess I’m just trying to find something
I really don’t think that works. Basically any human system of government is going to group people and have hierarchies. Same with mass movements.
Sparta was basically an aristocratic oligarchy/monarchy. This series of articles is an amazing breakdown of the history of Sparta and the way its government was organized.
When we talk about “Spartans” we are referring to a very small group of men who held held a form of aristocratic status. Sparta was a slave society - the vast majority of those living in Sparta were helots, slaves, who had little rights or recourse against the Spartans.
I don’t think there was really anything analogous to a soviet. Society wasn’t really organized around economic production. I don’t think you can really compare the education systems either - Spartans had little internet in creating poets, artists or engineers.
Really, the goal of the Spartans was to be lazy aristocratic fucks who played soldier while the helots did the work. They were pretty shit at it too. But all about warriors and honor, “return with your shield or on it” at least in theory. Terrorize the helots every once in a while to keep them in line and make your dick feel big.
The goal of the Soviet project was rapid industrial development to set up the conditions necessary for the abolishment of the state/“true communism.” Stalin was an autocratic fuckwad that quickly gave up on anything resembling values in part because Jews and gays are icky, and steered that project straight into a wall.
I guess one commonality is the the USSR was one of the first states to legalize same sex intercourse, and the Spartans were all about mansex.
Sparta was basically an aristocratic oligarchy/monarchy.
USSR was the same except it made trash aristocracy. There was one difference, the CC CPSU really was a college, Brezhnev couldn’t make decisions all alone, for example. But, well, Sparta was sort of a college on top too, if I remember correctly.
See those movies and stories of USSR’s public culture of the 30s-50s - that pompous imperial pretense, those main heroes with steel scornful faces looking down at subservient or immoral or not to be trusted helpers. Not everything, but there is a feel.
Like “Fourth height” - unironically a movie of a girl who flew airplanes in her teens, in USSR, as sport, then became an actress, and then a medic on a frontline and killed there. That’s even less normal social level in the USSR than, say, in England. But such things were given as a something normal, there are those people rightfully better in our just socialist society.
Again, that’s Stalin’s time.
I don’t think you can really compare the education systems either - Spartans had little internet in creating poets, artists or engineers.
You do realize all the official parts of Soviet art were about ideology and what didn’t impede it? And heavy industries were built around military goals. Most of Soviet industries existed in peacetime just so it would be easier to convert them in case of war, and what they were producing in peacetime was secondary.
Really, the goal of the Spartans was to be lazy aristocratic fucks who played soldier while the helots did the work. They were pretty shit at it too. But all about warriors and honor, “return with your shield or on it” at least in theory. Terrorize the helots every once in a while to keep them in line and make your dick feel big.
They were actually subsidized (or one can say paid as mercenaries) by other cities\rulers often. They were apparently not too shit at war for that, but certainly not qualitatively better than everyone else.
The goal of the Soviet project was rapid industrial development to set up the conditions necessary for the abolishment of the state/“true communism.”
Nah, it even officially was world revolution first, military for that, industries for that, communism later. Stalin retconned it into socialism in one country, but industries still for war, because it fit him better. After him Soviet ideology was retconned into socialist friendship of peoples, unification of humanity and industries to achieve that and communism.
in part because Jews and gays are icky, and steered that project straight into a wall.
Usually hateful parts are done “because we can” and are not the main reason.
I guess one commonality is the the USSR was one of the first states to legalize same sex intercourse, and the Spartans were all about mansex.
For a couple of years, until that was made illegal and a mental illness, together with banning abortions and other progressive socialist future-aimed policies.
I’m not really seeing connections being drawn here at all, other than the reflexive USSR bashing that happens any time Soviet history comes up?
Is the argument the Spartans and the Soviets were similar in that they were both bad? Can we pick eras we want to compare at least?
other than the reflexive USSR bashing that happens any time Soviet history comes up?
I’m not bashing it, just kinda full of some things of its legacy.
I’m not really seeing connections being drawn here at all
Too bad.
Is the argument the Spartans and the Soviets were similar in that they were both bad?
No, in the way Soviet propaganda presented Soviet citizens its place in the civilized part of history. Which ideas we follow, which we don’t, what is civilization and what is barbarism. Community and ascetism were kinda there, and it was thoroughly militarized and in theory prepared for a supposed full mobilization all the time, except nothing would really work. Not much more than that.
Soviet propaganda was actually very keen on that idea of civilization, antique references all over the place when you read anything touching philosophy from approved things. And the descent to barbarism would be what the “imperialist” or “capitalist” world was doing.
At the same time, due to Soviet economy’s limitations, there was also promotion of ascetism as something morally superior, say, they have all those nice things and rock-n-roll, while we have well-read people and value the spiritual above the material. That part is not new, of course, it can be found in German and Austrian stuff before WWI and in every totalitarian regime around.
I think some of the people creating that aesthetic were actually sincere, which is hard to imagine now, but touching it you feel that. It’s a bittersweet feeling, a painful one.
What does this have to do with Spartans specifically? I don’t know, but the structure of the Soviet society for me looks like something deliberately imagined after a romanticized version of Lycurgus’ Sparta, except done by crooked mind and crooked hands. Which would match the demographic of “old Bolsheviks” and other revolutionaries of early XX century, who were mostly students (mostly dropouts too) of social sciences.
They are fine on their island hideouts on Martha’s Vineyard and gated forts in Florida
Instead of Vietnamese children making t-shirts to sell to the USA, they want American children to make t-shirts to sell to Vietnam.
This makes absolutely no fucking sense even from a nationalistic standpoint.
Nah man, they’ll start using the prisons for more then menial labor. You don’t have to pay them at all
But then they have to fill those prisons with more and more people. How can America just increase the crime rate on a whim?
glances briefly to American history
Oh right, shit.
Slavery never ended in the US, it just got better PR.
“Only prisoners can be sentenced to slave labor.”
Makes a while bunch of stuff punishable by prison time and makes prison sentences longer.
In that case, it would make sense why they are so pro-life - more child slaves to make products. Reminds me of that one family guy episode … https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xd6Shxz9UUs
iPhone about to cost $5000
iPhone 17: Patriots-Only Edition
The Trump base will blame Obama/Biden/Clinton, I guarantee it.
It must be so freeing to live a life more divorced from logic or reality than an indoor dog.
Maybe eliminating natural selection was a mistake.
The year is 2039, life is hard.
Just used the last of the clean water, food is almost unobtainable.
“Thanks Obama”
Why? All those kids are going to need something to do after they tear down the education system.
But their tubby little fingers aren’t nimble enough nor can they hold their attention span nor take basic instructions, so they can’t be employed for production unlike their healthier and more dutiful same aged Asian counterparts
They won’t be making iphones, they will be mining the minerals for them.
Sure, we can tell them it is the new version of Minecraft. /s
“I…am Steve (Jobs).”
Well that I can’t believe.
They won’t be tubby for long. Food about to get expensive. Timmy about to be on a fucking diet.
They’ll have their hands full extracting the lithium from the dead Tesla batteries.
Something I’ve been thinking about is how schools are affected by population decline. Schools take a lot of infrastructure, labor and money. It seems like hardly anyone in my generation is having kids. So what happens to this expensive school system when there’s too few students to justify the costs?
Will it simply disintegrate into private schooling like olden times?
Well if it’s funded by taxes they can scale down. That’s the nice thing about everyone chipping in. If less is needed just take less. It’s not like a business that needs to turn a profit.
not to mention one of the reasons we eagerly off-shored electronics fabrication in the first place is because it’s a toxic nightmare
Toxic as in workplace relations or toxic as in environmental effects? Or some other third meaning?
environmental effects
Fortune article last year just talked about water and power in just the chip sector: The chip industry’s dirty little secret: It’s very dirty
“At Intel’s Arizona campus, where the new facilities are still unfinished, the company already emits about two tons of hazardous air pollutants quarterly.”
Good thing Trump gives zero fucks about the climate and environment then /s
You get a Bhopal! And you get a Bhopal! Everyone gets a Bhopal!
