Truly, we live in the worst timeline
I am for crypto and AI but at the same time against big tech bias
this post was submitted on 06 Dec 2024
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chapotraphouse
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Mao era backyard forges making pig iron
Except it's 21st century Americans burning coal to power a tiny generator to mine miniscule amounts of crypto to hit Trump quotas so as to afford 75mL of raw milk for their family
Mao era backyard forges making pig iron
Tell me more,
So communes in China were encouraged to produce steel during the Great Leap Forward to help with the modernisation of China.
However, many (but not all) communes lacked the ability to produce steel straight up. Sometimes due to equipment, other times due to a lack of expertise or materials. These small scale blast furnaces (think of your classic medieval RPG forge/furnace, with coal, ore, flux and a "blast" of pressurized air from a blower of some type) would reliably smelt copper from copper ore and "pig iron" from iron ore, which is a brittle high carbon iron, much weaker than cast iron or wrought iron. Also, this method was fairly archaic, it's a literal pre-medieval technique as the first step for producing steel
While many critics point to this as a policy failure because many contemporary steel mills in the west and USSR could smelt iron ore then work it into steel without an intermediate step, en masse and electric, pig iron itself isn't a wasted or useless product because it can then be worked into wrought iron or steel at a higher temperature furnace.
This was all roughly 5-6 years before China's first successful nuclear bomb, as a frame of reference.
This was all roughly 5-6 years before China's first successful nuclear bomb, as a frame of reference.
This context really does change the way the way the west talks about the GLF
superpower speedrun any %
If you take 3 steps back and 10 steps forward, you're still way ahead of people who are debating the necessity of progress due to nostalgia for the past. Even by the liberals' metric, the population and life expectancy of China went up exponentially during the so called "mass murders".
为人民服务。
Medieval forge next to a nuclear bomb factory
Amazing
>Rebuilding from the second world war
>Rebuilding from the civil war
>Catching up on healthcare and education
>Reforming society after millenia of misogyny, feudalism, colonialism, warlord banditry and classism
>Taking earthquakes, families, droughts, floods and typhoons on the chin
>Dealing with the Sino Soviet split
>Target of propaganda, foreign funded colour revolutions and hostile economic policy and internal division
>???
>So feared that the imperial core is dedicating billions to pay for propaganda against you, funding your rivals, tariffing your goods and blocking scientific co-operation instead of spending said money on welfare or healthcare
>About to overtake the richest country in the history of the world, which had a head start of having free slave labour and stolen land
Khrushchev you fucking dipshit. You absolute nonce. What could have been if you weren't such a short sighted piece of shit, I could be writing this on Mars right now.
... earthquakes, families, droughts
Damn families, Engels was really unto something
Anyways, 
It's also my understanding that this was also used as a means of dealing with supply and logistics issues in the country. If a remote rural village needed new tools in time for harvest season, it was unlikely they would arrive in time and the food would be lost, but if they had self-sufficiency and could manufacture their own tools, they could still manage well enough. Obviously it didn't work out as well as it was intended, but the western media often presents this as "dumb Communist China so primitive they use medieval methods to make steel." So I do think it is important to push back on that side of the narrative. There was a problem, and this was intended as a stop-gap solution to that problem.
We're making a sparrow czar, folks
I love how both managing crypto and ai are lumped into one position despite them being completely different things.
Seems like trump is just throwing away the people he doesn't give a shit about like someone might gather all their trash in one place.
Ah yes, the Federal Grift and Scam Agency
It is the same thing from a dollar perspective. They’re pumping all the dollar investment into crypto and AI to drive the strength of dollar high.
Which is extremely ironic for the whole crypto community because the crypto was supposed to be this groundbreaking decentralized currency that can take on the central bank and the dollar (you know, when it crashes). It turns out that crypto is itself being used to fuel the strength of the dollar instead.
Like, what do these people expect when they hand over their dollars to buy crypto (which is now tethered to the dollar)? Where do they think those dollars go?
The greatest trick about finance capitalism is that you can invest in anything that is not productive, like real estate, or crypto, or AI (which has its uses but most investment went into the overhyped nonsense), and you end up with a very lucrative position quickly. Why invest in an industry or company that takes 30 years to see return, when you can get rich from investing in speculative assets less than a year?
because crypto was supposed to be this groundbreaking decentralized currency that can take on the central bank and the dollar
Even those who would critique capital end up reinforcing it instead
Can you give a similar analysis to the stock market? Alls I normally see on Crypto is “it’s a scam” with nothing deeper, and I’m curious as to how it compares.
Edit; corrected a spelling error.
Crypto and AI are related in that they're both loosely defined new frontiers that tech corporations desperately want to exist because their existing businesses can no longer grow. Everybody who is a potential customer for facebook, google or whatsapp is already using those services, but the number still needs to go up somehow, so the tech giants are clawing onto anything that could become the "next big thing" so they can capitalize on it and promise more growth to their shareholders.
Cryptocurrency, the metaverse and now AI are all iterations of this cycle. With very vague definitions and the wildest of promises, this is basically the government department of grifting shareholders. Which would honestly be funny if it wasn't also boiling the oceans.
They both use GPUs and consume power to do no useful computation. Should have made him the GPU czar.
To me this reads as Trump sidelining all the weird techbros that attached themselves to his campaign. Like here you go crypto AI czar and 
gets D.O.G.E now get the fuck out of here. I believe someone on Trashfuture called it the Department of Jangling Keys.
I support anyone with the title "Czar" ending up like the last real one
https://www.historynewsnetwork.org/article/presidential-czars-a-constitutional-aberration
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1qnw767
Some people say that the very idea is unconstitutional
Increasingly likely that it will be bad for their constitution.
I'm starting to think accelationists were right about Trump
Someone should tell Trump that being a Tsar is cooler than a president and that he should rename the office. It would make any US revolution so much funnier.
Because it's the imperial core and revolution will likely happen here last and because we live in a stupid timeline I bet at one point if there's a civil war one side will have a "Czar" and the other will have a "Tsar." Both then get toppled in the revolution.
why has he started calling government positions ''czars'' what's up with that
Naming positions after Caesar so they're destined to get stabbed 23 times is a good bit.
Delivering targets for communist revolutionaries.
he didnt start it, it's been a tradition for a while now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czar_(political_term)#United_States
I thought it was a term that's been in use for a long time. I remember hearing about a something czar in dubya's government
But who is the czar czar
Nobody. The revolutionaries of 1917 took care of it
A "legal framework for the crypto industry" is such a farcical concept. "Here's your decentralized ledger, now please refer to this central authority on what you're allowed to do with it."
I suppose in 2024 nobody even pretends that it's about currencies anymore.
Most crypto isn't even decentralized anymore. It's theoretically decentralized.
i had a dream a few years ago where i lived in a world where a shitty rotten government let the crypto bros in and i remember waking up thinking it was so stupid in the exact way stuff-that-actually-happens was stupid.
Lots of people lose their ass and your paychecks just come in as a variable sum that is usually worth a bit less than what was promised, otherwise some people recover and life mostly goes on, slightly worse, with Feds on the blockchain monitoring your Good Citizen purchases. i think the prospect kinda sucks and i'm horrified that it might actually happen now.