Are there really many parallels between a car and a house? The car is considerably more complex with dramatically less variation between builds. It is not like homes are constructed from raw materials, either, lots of the pieces are built in a factory and then brought on site to be connected.
There are enough to make meaningful comparisons vs, say, manufacturing a laptop. They're both too big to carry, and expensive enough that most people aren't able to afford more than a handful in their lives, and may possibly even just only rent one. So cars and houses are more similar in size then cellphones or a meal at a restaurant.
Every group thing where men play a big part alongside women or kids have a shortage of men. Men are simply way less social than women in today’s world.
China has succeeded so much by moving away from a planned economy when they were fully planned they were one of the poorest nations in the world. Most successful nations are mixed economies and yes, this is a settled question.
Past performance is no indication of future success. It doesn't matter what's been successful in the past, these things can change. Communism was considered more successful than capitalism for a large chunk of the 20th century (because it was), then that changed and so did the narrative.
None of this is settled, because it's a living system that changes over time. What may have been perfectly true in 1850 might not be remotely accurate in 2050.
> Communism was considered more successful than capitalism for a large chunk of the 20th century (because it was), then that changed
The word you're looking for is "collapse". It's when something is stable at one point in time, but then later breaks down. That's what "changed". It wasn't random like weather or something. The economic systems collapsed.
> None of this is settled
The fact that it has happened numerous times in different parts of the world makes it pretty settled in my mind.
Soviet Russia and early communist China both went from mostly-illiterate peasant economies to mostly-literate, partially industrialized, with home-grown heavy industry and weapons technology in the span of like 15-20 years.
Then the soviet system stagnated hard under Brezhnev while the Chinese pivoted under Deng. But those first gains definitely happened under full communism and no capitalist economy has modernized faster.
They were very poor before central planning, and the central planning is what got them from being very poor to relatively poor and economically powerful.
Only very partially free, though. The govt still has massive control over the markets, and especially the banks. They still plan a lot of their economy.
World War 2 did not demonstrate that, the USSR (and arguably the US) proved the exact opposite by conquering entire continents. What kind of narrative even is this?
> the USSR (and arguably the US) proved the exact opposite by conquering entire continents
WWII demonstrated it. America learned the lesson sort of, for a while. The USSR, arguably, did not. At the end of the day, the security infrastructure the USSR had to deploy to subdue its conquered poopulations (and its nonsense with China, to say nothing of its own idiocy in Afghanistan) pretty directly lead to the economic uncompetitiveness vis-à-vis its adversaries.
And no, America wasn't running around annexing foreign territory. Where we were trying to do so indirectly, through puppets, one, that's categorically different from annexation-aimed conquest, and two, we did it clandestinely and–I'd argue–in a way that in the long term was almost never accretive to American power and interests.
Before WWII, the Mexican-American war, the German unification, the Prussian unification, Japan's conquest of Manchuria, Japan's invasion of Taiwan and the Russo-Japanese wars were each pretty definitively winning moves for the instigators.
Since WWII, the only wars of conquest that may have yielded the victor more than it cost was arguably Israel's six-day war and, for a short time, Russia's conquest of Crimea. Both subsequently undid those gains by trying to double down. (I'm not counting India's invsasion of Bangladesh as a war of conquest since nothing was annexed. Same for America and the USSR intervening everywhere without annexing.)
People keep attempting wars of conquest, or to work clandestinely and find a loophole. Nobody has. It doesn't work. It absolutely used to. Acknowledging that might help prevent empire-ending mistakes like Iraq and Iraq 2 Trump in Iran Boogaloo.
Defense was an Orwellian spin on the greatest warfighting organization in the history of the world. This quote does nothing to change anything but is some weird appeal to authority when no authority is needed
I don’t know I think it’s really rich to see people who’ve spent a generation hooking the world on dopamine machines and making society full of hate suddenly act like those who work in the MIC are “going to far.”
People working at big tech are complicit in the destruction of communities and the mass depression and suicide of our youth, compared to that wanting your country to have the best military tech is altruistic. Military tech isn’t the problem foreign policy is, you can’t say the same about slop factory builders.
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