pcalau12i

Any time you do something to the particles on Earth, the ones on the Moon are affected also

The no-communication theorem already proves that manipulating one particle in an entangled pair has no impact at al on another. The proof uses the reduced density matrices of the particles which capture both their probabilities of showing up in a particular state as well as their coherence terms which capture their ability to exhibit interference effects. No change you can make to one particle in an entangled pair can possibly lead to an alteration of the reduced density matrix of the other particle.

You have not made any point at all. Your first reply to me entirely ignored the point of my post which you did not read followed with an attack, I reply pointing out you ignored the whole point of my post and just attacked me without actually respond to it, and now you respond again with literally nothing of substance at all just saying “you’re wrong! touch grass! word salad!”

You have nothing of substance to say, nothing to contribute to the discussion. You are either a complete troll trying to rile me up, or you just have a weird emotional attachment to this topic and felt an emotional need to respond and attack me prior to actually thinking up a coherent thing to criticize me on. Didn’t your momma ever teach you that “if you have nothing positive or constructive to say, don’t say anything at all”? Learn some manners, boy. Blocked.

I don’t really agree. US propaganda is absurdly effective and for some reason no other country has been capable of replicating it. I think the problem is socialist countries tend to be too honest. Their propaganda against western countries is often to just tell it like it is. A lot of people in the USSR doubted it and genuinely believed the USA was a utopia and the Soviet propaganda was just all lies, and so that’s why many supported Yeltsin. You see the same with China today, if you ask Chinese opinion on the USA you will be surprised that most don’t see the USA a dystopia but as a utopia. Many Chinese people have frequently told me they thought in the USA people only work four days a week and health care is free.

US propaganda is much more effective because they just make absurdly extreme lies, claiming that socialist countries are all literally hell on earth. The reason this is so effective because most reasonable people who recognize their state is probably going to lie to them for their own benefit are also afraid of becoming dogmatic in the opposite direction, and so they falsely assume that “the truth must be somewhere in the middle.” In other words, if the state says a country like the former USSR was literally hell on earth where everyone starved, the “reasonable” person isn’t just going to assume that the USSR wasn’t literally hell on earth, because they have a cognitive bias that makes them not want to come across as too dogmatic in the opposite direction, so they will instead conclude that he USSR was slightly hell on earth.

You see this tactic used all the time in liberal media. They always exaggerate things to the most ridiculous degree, like in the DPRK they publicly execute you with artillery for having the wrong haircut or feed you to dogs. This propaganda is so effective because even people who recognize this propaganda is indeed propaganda will still buy into it somewhat, and so the lie still works on them. An obvious example is the “100 million dead” claim which we all know is just a completely fabricated number, but even more “reasonable” people who recognize it is fabricated just assumes the number is less but still in the tens of millions, so they still have bought into the propagandistic framing that it even makes sense to blame socialism/communism for these kinds of deaths at all. They already buy into a framework which is biased against socialism/communism because they’ll never apply this same kind of arbitrary body count analysis to capitalism, and so they’re already successfully propagandized by assuming their is some truth to it even if they admit the 100 million number is exaggerated propaganda.

This tactic was first introduced by Adolf Hitler when had talked about what he called the “Big Lie” in Mein Kampf, explaining it as a propaganda tool the Nazis would use where they would make lies so extraordinarily exaggerated that most people assume there must be at least some truth to them, even if they don’t buy into it completely. But if you buy into it at all, you have already fallen for the lie, and so you are already successfully propagandized.

Western countries really have their propaganda down to a science and no one can compete. Chinese people do not have some sort of magical mental barrier that can block out all western propaganda, they are human beings just like all of us and are susceptible to the same kind of propaganda, and I fear it would have far more negative impact than positive to let a flood of western propaganda into China. I mean, this was already kind of attempted at a small scale in Hong Kong and we saw how that turned out.

To be clear, self-determination is not and never has been some fundamental principle of communism and as an absolute principle was something wholly rejected by Lenin.

The several demands of democracy, including self-determination, are not an absolute, but only a small part of the general-democratic (now: general-socialist) world movement. In individual concrete casts, the part may contradict the whole; if so, it must be rejected. It is possible that the republican movement in one country may be merely an instrument of the clerical or financial-monarchist intrigues of other countries; if so, we must not support this particular, concrete movement, but it would be ridiculous to delete the demand for a republic from the programme of international Social-Democracy on these grounds.

— Lenin, The Discussion On Self-Determination Summed Up

The point is that, while self-determination is generally a good slogan, we should actually oppose self-determination if this self-determination is not actually beneficial to the global anti-imperialist struggle and is just a tool by the ruling class of some nation to further their own interests. It’s sort of like how western countries keep trying to funnel underground money into religious extremists in Xinjiang and encourages them to promote secession. This tactic is used for the purpose of trying to break apart China to weaken it for western imperialist interests, and so it shouldn’t be supported.

Ukraine’s government underwent a US-backed coup that immediately banned left-wing parties like the communist party and began to promote Ukrainian fascism. When you talk about self-determination of Ukraine, what you are really talking about is hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians being conscripted to the front-lines to die on behalf of the borders of this US-backed fascist proxy state. It is hardly even Ukrainian “self-determination” but just the right of the US bourgeoisie to dominate Ukrainian politics and determine their future for them.

Besides, it’s not like Russia has ever even stated their goal is to conquer all of Ukraine, anyways. They have stated since the beginning of their invasion that the goal was only to take control of the Donbas region which had seceded from Ukraine in a referendum. So if you want to talk about self-determination, what about the self-determination of LPR and DPR?

The claim that AI is a scam is a ridiculous and can only be stated by someone who doesn’t understand the technology. Are we genuinely supposed to believe that capitalists hate profits and capital accumulation and are just wasting their money on something worthless? It’s absurd. AI is already making huge breakthroughs in many fields, such as medicine with protein folding. I would recommend watching this video on that subject in particular. China has also been rapidly improving the speed of construction projects by coordinate them with AI.

To put it in laymen’s terms, traditional computation is like Vulcans: extremely logical and have to go compute everything logically step-by-step. This is very good if you want precise calculations, but very bad for many other kinds of tasks. Here’s an example: you’re hungry, you decide to go eat a pizza, you walk to the fridge and open it, take out the slice, put it in the microwave to heat it up, then eat it. Now, imagine if I gave you just the sensory data, such as, information about what a person is seeing and feeling (hunger), and then asked you to write a full-proof sequence of logical statements that, when evaluated alongside the sensory data, would give you the exact muscle contractions needed to cause the person to carry out this task.

You’ll never achieve it. Indeed, even very simple tasks humans do every day, like translating spoken words into written words, is something that nobody has ever achieved a set of logical if/else statements to replicate. Even something seemingly simple like this is far too complicated with far too many variables for someone to ever program, because everyone’s voice is a bit different, every audio recording is going to have slightly different background noise, etc, and to account for all of it with a giant logical proof would be practically impossible.

The preciseness of traditional computation is also its drawback: you simply cannot write a program to do very basic human tasks we do every day. You need a different form of computation that is more similar to how human brains process information, something that processes information in a massively parallel fashion through tweaking billions of parameters (strengths in neural connections) to produce approximate and not exact outputs that can effectively train itself (“learn”) without a human having to adjust those billions of parameters manually.

If you have ever used any device with speech recognition, such as writing a text message with spoken voice, you have used AI, since this is one of the earliest examples of AI algorithms actually being used in consumer devices. USPS heavily integrates AI to do optical-character recognition, to automatically read the addresses written on letters to get them to the right place, Tom Scott has a great video on this here on the marvel of engineering that is the United States Postal Service and how it is capable of processing the majority of mail entirely automatically thanks to AI. There have also been breakthroughs in nuclear fusion by stabilizing the plasma with AI because it is too chaotic and therefore too complex to manually write an algorithm to stabilize it. Many companies use it in the assembly line for object detection which is used to automatically sort things, and many security systems use it to detect things like people or cars to know when to record footage efficiently to save space.

Being anti-AI is just being a Luddite, it is oppose technological development. Of course, not all AI is particularly useful, some companies shove it into their products for marketing purposes and it doesn’t help much and may even make the experience worse. But to oppose the technology in general makes zero sense. It’s just a form of computation.

If we were to oppose AI then Ludwig von Mises wins and socialism is impossible. Mises believed that socialism is impossible because no human could compute the vastness of the economy by hand. Of course, we later invented computers and this accelerated the scale in which we can plan the economy, but traditional computation models still require you to manually write out the algorithm in a sequence of logical if/else statements, which has started to become too cumbersome as well. AI allows us to break free of this limitation with what are effectively self-writing programs as you just feed them massive amounts of data and they form the answer on their own, without the programmer even knowing how it solves the problem, it acts as kind of a black-box that produces the right output from a given input without having to know how it internally works, and in fact with the billions of parameter models, they are too complicated to even understand how they work internally.

(Note: I am using the term “AI” interchangeably with technology based on artificial neural networks.)

They are incredibly efficient for short-term production, but very inefficient for long-term production. Destroying the environment is a long-term problem that doesn’t have immediate consequences on the businesses that engage in it. Sustainable production in the long-term requires foresight, which requires a plan. It also requires a more stable production environment, i.e. it cannot be competitive because if you are competing for survival you will only be able to act in your immediate interests to avoid being destroyed in the competition.

Most economists are under a delusion known as neoclassical economics which is literally a nonphysical theory that treats the basis of the economy as not the material world we actually live in but abstract human ideas which are assumed to operate according to their own internal logic without any material causes or influences. They then derive from these imagined “laws” regarding human ideas (which no one has ever experimentally demonstrated but were just invented in some economists’ armchair one day) that humans left to be completely free to make decisions without any regulations at all will maximize the “utils” of the population, making everyone as happy as possible.

With the complete failure of this policy leading to the US Great Depression, many economists recognized this was flawed and made some concessions, such as with Keynesianism, but they never abandoned the core idea. In fact, the core idea was just reformulated to be compatible with Keynesianism in what is called the neoclassical synthesis. It still exists as a fundamental belief to most every economist that completely unregulated market economy without any plan at all will automagically produce a society with maximal happiness, and while they will admit some caveats to this these days (such as the need for a central organization to manage currency in Keynesianism), these are treated as an exception and not the rule. Their beliefs are still incompatible with long-term sustainable planning because in their minds the success of markets from comes util-maximizing decisions built that are fundamental to the human psyche and so any long-term plan must contradict with this and lead to a bad economy that fails to maximize utils.

The rise of Popperism in western academia has also played a role here. A lot of material scientists have been rather skeptical of the social sciences and aren’t really going to take arguments like those based in neoclassical economics which is based largely in mysticism about human free will seriously, and so a second argument against long-term planning was put forward by Karl Popper which has become rather popular in western academia. Popper argued that it is impossible to learn from history because it is too complicated with too many variables and you cannot control them all. You would need a science that studies how human societies develop in order to justify a long-term development plan into the future, but if it’s impossible to study them to learn how they develop because they are too complicated, then it is impossible to have such a science, and thus impossible to justify any sort of long-term sustainable development plan. It would always be based on guesswork and so more likely to do more harm than good. Popper argued that instead of long-term development plans, the state should instead be purely ideological, what he called an “open society” operating purely on the ideology of liberalism rather getting involved in economics.

As long as both neoclassical economics and Popperism are dominate trends in western academia there will never be long-term sustainable planning because they are fundamentally incompatible ideas.

You did not read what I wrote, so it is unironic you call it “word salad” when you are not even aware of the words I wrote since you had an emotional response and wrote this reply without actually addressing what I argued. I stated that it is impossible to have an very large institution without strict rules that people follow, and this requires also the enforcement of the rules, and that means a hierarchy as you will have rule-enforcers.

Also, you are insisting your personal definition of anarchism is the one true definition that I am somehow stupid for disagreeing with, yet anyone can just scroll through the same comments on this thread and see there are other people disagreeing with you while also defending anarchism. A lot of anarchists do not believe anarchism means “no hierarchy,” like, seriously, do you unironically believe in entirely abolishing all hierarchies? Do you think a medical doctor should have as much authority on how to treat an injured patient as the janitor of the same hospital? Most anarchists aren’t even “no hierarchy” they are “no unjustified hierarchy.”

The fact you are entirely opposed to hierarchy makes your position even more silly than what I was criticizing.

All libertarian ideologies (including left and right wing anarchism) are anti-social and primitivist.

It is anti-social because it arises from a hatred of working in a large groups. It’s impossible to have any sort of large-scale institution without having rules that people want to follow, and libertarian ideology arises out of people hating to have to follow rules, i.e. to be a respectable member of society, i.e. they hate society and don’t want to be social. They thus desire very small institutions with limited rules and restrictions. Right-wing libertarians envision a society dominated by small private businesses while left-wing libertarians imagine a society dominated by either small worker-cooperative, communes, or some sort of community council.

Of course, everyone of all ideologies opposes submitting to hierarchies they find unjust, but hatred of submitting to hierarchies at all is just anti-social, as any society will have rules, people who write the rules, people who enforce the rules. It is necessary for any social institution to function. It is part of being an adult and learning to live in a society to learn to obey the rules, such as traffic rules. Sometimes it is annoying or inconvenient, but you do it because you are a respectable member of society and not a rebellious edgelord who makes things harder on everyone else because they don’t obey basic rules.

It is primitivist because some institutions simply only work if they are very large. You cannot have something like NASA that builds rocket ships operated by five people. You are going to always need an enormous institution which will have a ton of people, a lot of different levels of command (“hierarchy”), strict rules for everyone to follow, etc. If you tried to “bust up” something like NASA or SpaceX to be small businesses they simply would lose their ability to build rocket ships at all.

Of course, anarchists don’t mind, they will say, “who cares about rockets? They’re not important.” It reminds me of the old meme that spread around where someone asked anarchists how their tiny communes would be able to organize current massive supply chains in our modern societies and they responded by saying that the supply chain would be reduced to just people growing beans in their backyard and eating it, like a feudal peasant. They won’t even defend that their system could function as well as our modern economy but just says modern marvels of human engineering don’t even matter, because they are ultimately primitivists at heart.

I never understood the popularity of libertarian and anarchist beliefs in programming circles. We would never have entered the Information Age if we had an anarchism or libertarian system. No matter how much they might pretend these are the ideal systems, they don’t even believe it themselves. If a libertarian has a serious medical illness, they are either going to seek medical help at a public hospital or a corporate hospital. Nobody is going to seek medical help at a “hospital small business” ran out of someone’s garage. We all intuitively and implicitly understand that large swathes of economy that we all take advantage of simply cannot feasibly be ran by small organizations, but libertarians are just in denial.

Anarchism thus becomes meaningless as anyone who defends certain hierarchies obviously does so because they believe they are just. Literally everyone on earth is against “unjust hierarchies” at least in their own personal evaluation of said hierarchies. People who support capitalism do so because they believe the exploitative systems it engenders are justifiable and will usually immediately tell you what those justifications are. Sure, you and I might not agree with their argument, but that’s not the point. To say your ideology is to oppose “unjust hierarchies” is to not say anything at all, because even the capitalist, hell, even the fascist would probably agree that they oppose “unjust hierarchies” because in their minds the hierarchies they promote are indeed justified by whatever twisted logic they have in their head.

Telling me you oppose “unjust hierarchies” thus tells me nothing about what you actually believe, it does not tell me anything at all. It is as vague as saying “I oppose bad things.” It’s a meaningless statement on its own without clarifying what is meant by “bad” in this case. Similarly, “I oppose unjust hierarchies” is meaningless statement without clarifying what qualifies “just” and “unjust,” and once you tell me that, it would make more sense you label you based on your answer to that question. Anarchism thus becomes a meaningless word that tells me nothing about you. For example, you might tell me one unjust hierarchy you want to abolish is prison. It would make more sense for me to call you a prison abolitionist than an anarchist since that term at least carries meaning, and there are plenty of prison abolitionists who don’t identify as anarchist.

There were definitely things that happened on both sides that exacerbated the issue. The Chinese were very upset for example when Khrushchev made a deal with the US to specifically try to stop China from getting a nuclear weapon, which they needed for their sovereignty. The Soviets not only pulled all joint research with China per US request but even burned all their research in order to try and prevent the Chinese from recovering it and building the bomb. This was a bit slap in the face to China and sewed the seeds for distrust. Mao’s response to Khrushchev were not very reasonable either, Mao once equated Khrushchev to Adolf Hitler which seems a bit ridiculous imo.

quantum nature of the randomly generated numbers helped specifically with quantum computer simulations, but based on your reply you clearly just meant that you were using it as a multi-purpose RNG that is free of unwanted correlations between the randomly generated bits

It is used as the source of entropy for the simulator. Quantum mechanics is random, so to actually get the results you have to sample it. In quantum computing, this typically involves running the same program tens of thousands of times, which are called “shots,” and then forming a distribution of the results. The sampling with the simulator uses the QRNG for the source of entropy, so the sampling results are truly random.

Out of curiosity, have you found that the card works as well as advertised? I ask because it seems to me that any imprecision in the design and/or manufacture of the card could introduce systematic errors in the quantum measurements that would result in correlations in the sampled bits, so I am curious if you have been able to verify that is not something to be concerned about.

I have tried several hardware random number generators and usually there is no bias either because they specifically designed it not to have a bias or they have some level of post-processing to remove the bias. If there is a bias, it is possible to remove the bias yourself. There are two methods that I tend to use that depends upon the source of the bias.

To be “random” simply means each bit is statistically independent of each other bit, not necessarily that the outcome is uniform, i.e. 50% chance of 0 and 50% chance of 1. It can still be considered truly random with a non-uniform distribution, such as 52% chance of 0 and 48% chance of 1, as long as each successive bit is entirely independent of any previous bit, i.e. there is no statistical analysis you could ever perform on the bits to improve your chances of predicting the next one beyond the initial distribution of 52%/48%.

In the case where it is genuinely random (statistical independence) yet is non-uniform (which we can call nondeterministic bias), you can transform it into a uniform distribution using what is known as a von Neumann extractor. This takes advantage of a simple probability rule for statistically independent data whereby Pr(A)Pr(B)=Pr(B)Pr(A). Let’s say A=0 and B=1, then Pr(0)Pr(1)=Pr(1)Pr(0). That means you can read two bits at a time rather than one and throw out all results that are 00 and 11 and only keep results that are 01 or 10, and then you can map 01 to 0 and 10 to 1. You would then be mathematically guaranteed that the resulting distribution of bits are perfectly uniform with 50% chance of 0 and 50% chance of 1.

I have used this method to develop my own hardware random number generator that can pull random numbers from the air, by analyzing tiny fluctuations in electrical noise in your environment using an antenna. The problem is that electromagnetic waves are not always hitting the antenna, so there can often be long strings of zeros, so if you set something up like this, you will find your random numbers are massively skewed towards zero (like 95% chance of 0 and 5% chance of 1). However, since each bit still is truly independent of the successive bit, using this method will give you a uniform distribution of 50% 0 and 50% 1.

Although, one thing to keep in mind is the bigger the skew, the more data you have to throw out. With my own hardware random number generator I built myself that pulls the numbers from the air, it ends up throwing out the vast majority of the data due to the huge bias, so it can be very slow. There are other algorithms which throw out less data but they can be much more mathematically complicated and require far more resources.

In the cases where it may not be genuinely random because the bias is caused by some imperfection in the design (which we can call deterministic bias), you can still uniformly distribute the bias across all the bits so that not only would be much more difficult to detect the bias, but you will still get uniform results. The way to do this is to take your random number and XOR it with some data set that is non-random but uniform, which you can generate from a pseudorandom number generator like the C’s rand() function.

This will not improve the quality of the random numbers because, let’s say if it is biased 52% to 48% but you use this method to de-bias it so the distribution is 50% to 50%, if someone can predict the next value of the rand() function that would increase their ability to make a prediction back to 52% to 48%. You can make it more difficult to do so by using a higher quality pseudorandom number generator like using something like AES to generate the pseudorandom numbers. NIST even has standards for this kind of post-processing.

But ultimately using this method is only obfuscation, making it more and more difficult to discover the deterministic bias by hiding it away more cleverly, but does not truly get rid of it. It’s impossible to take a random data set with some deterministic bias and trulyget rid of the deterministic bias purely through deterministic mathematical transformations,. You can only hide it away very cleverly. Only if the bias is nondeterministic can you get rid of it with a mathematical transformation.

It is impossible to reduce the quality of the random numbers this way. If the entropy source is truly random and truly non-biased, then XORing it with the C rand() function, despite it being a low-quality pseudorandom number generator, is mathematically guaranteed to still output something truly random and non-biased. So there is never harm in doing this.

However, in my experience if you find your hardware random number generator is biased (most aren’t), the bias usually isn’t very large. If something is truly random but biased so that there is a 52% chance of 0 and 48% chance of 1, this isn’t enough of a bias to actually cause much issues. You could even use it for something like cryptography and even if someone does figure out the bias, it would not increase their ability to predict keys enough to actually put anything at risk. If you use a cryptographysically secure pseudorandom number generator (CSPRNG) in place of something like C rand(), they will likely not be able to discover the bias in the first place, as these do a very good job at obfuscating the bias to the point that it will likely be undetectable.

I’m not sure what you mean by “turning into into a classical random number.” The only point of the card is to make sure that the sampling results from the simulator are truly random, down to a quantum level, and have no deterministic patterns in them. Indeed, actually using quantum optics for this purpose is a bit overkill as there are hardware random number generators which are not quantum-based and produce something good enough for all practical purposes, like Intel Secure Key Technology which is built into most modern x86 CPUs.

For that reason, my software does allow you to select other hardware random number generators. For example, you can easily get an entire build (including the GPU) that can run simulations of 14 qubits for only a few hundred dollars if you just use the Intel Secure Key Technology option. It also supports a much cheaper device called TrueRNGv3 which is a USB device. It also has an option to use a pseudorandom number generator if you’re not that interested in randomness accuracy, and when using the pseudorandom number generator option it also supports “hidden variables” which really just act as the seed to the pseudorandom number generator.

For most most practical purpose, no, you do not need this card and it’s definitely overkill. The main reason I even bought it was just because I was adding support for hardware random number generators to my software and I wanted to support a quantum one and so I needed to buy it to actually test it and make sure it works for it. But now I use it regularly for the back-end to my simulator just because I think it is neat.

I own a quantum random number generator on a PCie card that uses optical effects for random number generation. It cost me over $2000. I use it for quantum computer simulations.

Maybe. In one Chinese textbook I read, the author routinely criticized the USSR’s policies in the way it enforced socialism in other countries, usually enforcing a vision of socialism of specifically Russian origin and oppressing local socialist movements who wanted to tailor socialism to their own material conditions. The Chinese did not like this kind of domination and were fearful of it because they did not want to become a Soviet puppet. I think the Soviets could have potentially made decisions to show it was less interested in domination, but I also do think it is fair to say the Chinese could have been less paranoid as well. It’s hard for me to specifically pick a side because both Mao and Khrushchev did/said some unhinged things at times.

Personally, I think people exaggerate the “revisionist” ideology involved in the sino-soviet split as the only major factor at play, and they miss the other huge factor at play. China just came out of its Century of Humiliation. There was naturally an incredibly strong paranoia that they would get imperialized again. The Soviets did not help assuage these fears when they started to become heavily influential in China’s direct bordering neighbors; Korea, Mongolia, Vietnam, and later Afghanistan.

If the sino-soviet split was purely about Mao trying to fight Soviet “revisionism,” why did it continue after Mao’s administration ended? It’s not like the Deng administration adhered to the Stalin Model at all, yet the split remained. Well, actually relations did start to finally normalize in the later 1980s culminating in the Sino-Soviet Summit. The reason was that Gorbachev had agreed to some of China’s long-standing demands: to withdraw troops from places like Afghanistan and Mongolia.

You see, Mongolia is on China’s northern border, Vietnam+Cambodia is on China’s southern border, and Afghanistan is on China’s western border. (The eastern border is just the sea.) In all those three land borders, there was huge Soviet presence, so they were basically surrounded by the Soviet military and given their history, they were naturally paranoid of any big country surrounding them and viewed it as an existential threat.

China has a very long history of constantly breaking apart and reforming again in new eras. This process is very messy, a lot of violence and, more importantly, border changes. Many times in history that his led to Vietnam being invaded by China. So, naturally, the Vietnamese also are a bit fearful of China and do not have the best relationship.

Vietnam sought very close relations with the Soviets as a way to offset this, to the point of having a Soviet military presence in Vietnam. The Chinese did not like a foreign country having a military presence in a bordering power that they have mixed relations with, so they, under Mao’s administration, tried to ally closely with Cambodia to offset this.

However, Cambodia decided to attack Vietnam and then lost the war they started. As the losers, the Vietnamese got to replace their government, and thus Cambodia became a borderline Vietnamese puppet state, which increased tensions between China and the Soviets even more since this meant by proxy more Soviet influence in the region also extended to Cambodia. Just look at what the Cambodia’s People Party did after the USSR fell apart. They immediately flip-flopped from a Marxist-Leninist party to a right-wing monarchist party basically overnight. Unlike the Vietnamese, the Cambodian leadership didn’t really actually embrace Marxism-Leninism and were largely just propped up by a foreign power.

That’s why the Deng administration attacked Vietnam, not with the intent of actually conquering it but as a show of force to say basically “we’re still the boss of this region” since the fall of Cambodia meant a fall of Chinese influence in Cambodia and its replacement by Vietnamese influence and, by proxy, Soviet influence.

A lot of the conflict was realpolitik of China very untrustworthy of any other big powers due to the Century of Humiliation and viewing the Soviets as an expansionist power and thus an existential threat to China, and so relations did not really start normalizing until the Soviets agreed to reduce their influence in the region. But by that point the USSR was already falling apart.

Ideology did play a role but it was moreso tangential and not the fundamental reason for the split. Given China’s history, they were already very uneasy about a major power like the Soviets having so much influence in the region, and Mao viewed de-Stalinization as a betrayal, and so ideology played a role as a tipping point. But you then have to ask the question, why were the relations so fragile in the first place that de-Stalinization was enough to cause friendly powers to suddenly become incredibly hostile towards each other? It’s because the relations were already built upon sand, given China’s historical situation combined with the Soviet’s desire to expand their influence.

I hadn’t read it in awhile, but one thing I do recall that I found rather interesting is that Mao’s acknowledgement of an ambiguity in Stalin’s proposals, and personally I see it as an ambiguity in Marxism generally which still hasn’t been fully fleshed out, and personally I think it is underdiscussed.

Socialism’s material foundations is the socialization of labor, which upon it socialism is built through the socialization of appropriation. You cannot socialization appropriation unless labor is socialized, but the socialization of labor is something that arises naturally as a result of the development of the forces of production.

It is clear from many Marxists such as Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Hilferding, Bukharin, etc, that this suggests the immediate abolition of all commodity production is not possible, because small producers cannot be “abolished” as small production (of which commodity production is inevitable) is a result of underdeveloped productive forces, and so you can only encourage the small producers to develop instead.

This is ultimately why socialist countries have always allowed for some level of commodity production. To demand the immediate abolition of all small producers is anti-Marxist and idealist. Even in the Manifesto Marx and Engels do not call for this but only an extension of industries owned by the state, alongside with an encouragement of the development of the forces of production, as this would encourage small producers to develop into large producers (or go bankrupt).

The ambiguity is that, in the transition from small producer to large producer, i.e. from private labor to socialized labor, at some point the socialist state will have to absorb that large producer into the public sector. To my knowledge, Marx or Engels did not write much on how this would actually work. This was also, from what I recall, was one of Mao’s criticisms of Stalin. He did not nationalize part of the agricultural sector (the kolkhoz) viewing it as too underdeveloped, and so that sector of the economy still engaged in commodity production, but never presented a plan on how the kolkhoz sector would eventually be incorporated into the public sector as it developed.

Indeed, it is a bit ambiguous as to how developed a sector of the economy, or even a single enterprise, needs to be prior to it being nationalized, so Mao found it problematic that there wasn’t much of an answer to this question. Stalin’s work almost seems to suggest that the kolkhoz sector would develop and become part of the public sector automatically, but Mao argued that clearly at some point there needs to be a political decision made, and so it cannot just be automatic. I think he’s right, the socialization of labor is in some sense “automatic” as it occurs naturally, even in capitalist societies, as industry develops. But the socialization of appropriation is not, that is an active political decision.

I recall Mao complaining about this in a couple areas as well, not just that work.

It reminds me of Che Guevara’s book on political economy where he also has some loosely related comments. He argued that all forms of production inevitably promote a particular superstructure, and so the public sector and collective kolkhoz sector, since they operated differently, must promote competing and contradictory superstructures. He warned that if the Soviets did not take this seriously, if they did not have some sort of active political plan to combat this, then the kolkhoz will promote a superstructure that is detrimental to the socialist state, because they will benefit from encouraging the weakening of the socialist state by reducing public control and selling off assets to the collective farms.

Interestingly, Che used Khruschev’s closing down of the machine tractor stations and selling off of state-owned means of production to the kolkhoz as evidence that this was occurring. Meanwhile, I got the impression from Mao’s works that he viewed Khrushchev’s actions here positively. He believed that not allowing the collective farms to own their own means of production was only serving to sow distrust among the peasantry which would only make it more difficult to later integrate them into the public sector later down the line.

Communist parties are meant to be organizations of action rather than simply representing an ideology. They are supposed to do stuff. When there is a natural disaster in China for example, they often send out the CPC members to help with disaster relief. You are actually expected to participate in things so naturally you have to be a bit picky.

A person does not have to be a member of the party to view it positively. People generally view their fire department positively despite not being firefighters themselves. As long as the party is doing good work people will view it positively even if they are not themselves a member of it. In fact, letting in people willy-nilly can hurt the party’s reputation if it negatively impacts their work.

My gaming PC has a Samsung 990 EVO and a couple SK hynix Platinum P41. Both have worked great for me without any issues.

uh oh

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