This CGTN video seems like a good explainer: https://youtu.be/64FHSkc5ORs
He’s so pretty 
Death to the Catholic Church, unironically. This is just one more peanut in the massive turd of horrors that the Catholic Church has unleashed on humanity throughout its dark history.
It’s funny you mention German/Swiss engineering as an example, because I’ve noticed engineering from certain countries often shows a certain emphasis. Not sure if the differences are real or it’s just me stereotyping based on my own subconscious bias, but here’s what I’ve noticed:
German/Swiss engineering - Focus on being very precise and designed to do a certain thing very very well, but as you say this is often at the expense of making things less complicated to manufacture or use.
Chinese engineering - Designed and built in a way that is mostly concerned with being manufactured efficiently and at a lower cost than competitors.
Russian/Soviet engineering - Designed and built with durability in mind.
Japanese engineering - Designed with creative/novel solutions to certain engineering challenges.
American engineering - Designed to be easy for the end user to use and maintain.
I also have a really hard time socializing, but here are some things that help me:
- Hanging out in Hextube sometimes during movie nights, which is a great place full of great people.
- VRChat, which you don’t actually need VR for - The public rooms are full of creeps and screaming kids but there are groups for meeting people that have regular (usually weekly) events. DM me if you’re interested and I can point you to one.
- Discord servers - I know of some stuff on discord that might help. Again, let me know if you’re looking for suggestions on that.
Describing me as a whole-ass person is generous considering I usually feel like a half-ass person.
I suspect what will end up happening is similar to what the BYD bus plant in CA does. That is, manufacturing being done in China and assembly being done in the US (or possibly Mexico).
No problem! To my knowledge, I don't think Cockshott was associated with the Cybersyn project, but his name is associated with socialist cybernetics generally. I'd say the difference between them is that Beer's work is more concerned with broad ideas of system design and how systems work (especially the Viable System Model), while Cockshott's work is more of a grab bag of ideas to implement in a hypothetical socialist society. I haven't listened to or read everything of Cockshott though so maybe I'm not giving him a fair shake, but that's my impression based on what I have seen of his so far.
Oh also, while it's not as in depth as Beer's stuff and is a little lib in some parts, The People's Republic of Walmart is a great book imo as an introduction to socialist economic planning and how it could work with modern tech. I'd definitely recommend it if you're looking for good intro material about the topic.
Yes! He's well worth reading imo, but be ready for confusion and re-reading parts several times to understand it. Designing Freedom is easy to get ahold of, and an easier read. The Brain of the Firm is difficult to get a copy cheap (ebook versions are all crappy PDFs), and it's a bit of a slog to read through, but it's very interesting. It's organizational theory that's very dense and often difficult to grasp at first, but still worth the trouble of reading and trying to make sense of. I do have a physical copy I had to pay way too much for, and awhile back I tried started a project to make a proper ebook version of it, but abandoned it because I didn't think many people would be interested. I scanned one of the crappy PDF copies and transcribed it with software, but there are a lot of errors so much of what I did was manually reviewing it and fixing issues I find. At some point I'd also need to scan all the figures/charts separately and include those somewhere, and then somehow correctly convert it all to HTML. Might be quicker using chatGPT, but I'd have to go back and look at what is all left. Maybe it's worth revisiting?
This video is potato quality but a good short intro to Cybersyn and his ideas generally, and there's more in the playlist: https://youtu.be/e_bXlEvygHg?list=PLJIs9OvcbZKvyDwr6267Kw9iB3cxitt5U
Also General Intellect Unit podcast has a pretty in depth 45 part series on Brain of the Firm. This is the first episode: http://generalintellectunit.net/e/b01-brain-of-the-firm-chapter-1/
Can we have a little pony emoji, as a treat?
This one?