A Time and A Place

When I was young, I grew up playing civilization games, and watching my dad play them. I have always been a fan of grand strategy, politics, economics, and technological advancements. I was fascinated by how in human history, even after inventing all the pieces and discoveries required to make certain advances, how slowly technology has advanced until recent history. My father, when he played nearly any civilization game, plays the same way, he goes for early science, and then typically goes for the ability to use a republic as his form of government, then goes for a transition into democracy. When he plays, he plays as America, or as Rome or Greece. It doesn’t really matter what he does around that, or what method he uses to win in the end, but that’s the path that he goes down nearly every time. I always thought that it was fascinating that his ideological beliefs led him to never touch communism, fascism, monarchy, even in a video game, when it would lead to an advantage in the strategem he was using to win.

Ironically, this is definitely a form of toxic nationalism, which he would also stay away from, but he would certainly say that a democratic-republic is the best form of government, hands-down, no contest, and that any other form of government is in some way fundamentally wrong. Of course, when I asked him about these other forms of government, why they were wrong, or did not work, I would get non-sequitur answers, such as “because the communists in China massacred a bunch of people”, or “because they starved their people”, or “the Italian fascists were the bad guys of WWII”. While I could see that those governments did bad things to their people, it just never really explained my fundamental questions about their governments, which was how they functioned, and how their functioning could be “wrong” or “bad” in such a fundamental way. To me, all forms of government had sinned, and that governments like the USA’s were also responsible for atrocities.

It even seemed that he couldn’t accept a really basic cognitive dissonance that he had about monarchies and the monarchical language with which he would describe God, and even when I would point out this inconsistency, seemed immovable about keeping both true, that God was a good king, but there are no good monarchies, and that the system was inherently evil and tyrannical. I could never understand the fanatical devotion to his ideal of democracy and republicanism, which has morphed into something unrecognizable.

The inconsistency however, sparked my journey to look back through history, to find what actually makes a good leader. Who were the “good kings”, the “benevolent dictators”, and the “evil prime ministers”? What makes for stable government? What prevents corruption? How do we even judge such things through the lenses of history? What causes empires to fall, and for famine to overtake idealism?

I believe that the best form of government for a country is based on a combination of factors: the available resources, the level of infrastructure development, the level of technological development, and the objectives of the government. Each form of government has its drawbacks that can put it at risk of structural collapse, but with the appropriate combination of applied concepts, most of those risks can be mitigated.

For example, in a government that wishes to have a highly educated populace, with a number of high-value services, such as scientist, doctors, lawyers, programmers, engineers, and others, you would need to have a government that allows for the free exchange of ideas with few barriers, and would allow for educational support to increase the likelihood of any given citizen going into one of those professions. However, the free exchange of information allows for common people to organize, a drawback for a single-power state, as it allows for the creation of rival factions.

On the other hand, if the goal of the state was to generate wealth, you would want to have a government that strongly considers the interests of corporations, though without appropriate redistribution, and the ability for some upward mobility and support of the working populace, you could easily end up exploiting your working class too much. This is often the temptation, to drain resources in the short term, but this is always at the expense of long-term growth, and a nuanced understanding of economies tells us that poverty is a drag on society, and that you actually want economic policies that pull people from poverty to a middle-class standard to keep them content, and to ensure that they are more productive.

Because of this, sometimes the desires of a state and the ability of a state to meet those objectives are limited by the technology available. A government that had some flaws in it, such as difficulty managing bureaucracy, or distribution and allocation of resources across a state, or the necessity to divert segments of the economy towards defense, could work at a different point in history, where the circumstances have changed, such as technology, location, surrounding cultures, and societal norms. An attempt at a centralized state may work on a very small scale, but become impossible to manage without the advanced infrastructure of reliable globalized transportation that has only recently become available by land, air and sea.

It is through this lens which I look at the histories of these political empires, on scales large and small. To see what works, and what does not, and to consider counterfactual scenarios, where we can consider what things could have made it work. It is a somewhat dangerous task, I must admit, to ask questions like, “What would have made Mao’s communist China work better?” Because we must also consider the negative consequences it would have had for our own way of life now, such as a much earlier rise of China as a global power had it had access to the better agricultural and manufacturing techniques of the west just a few decades earlier, or if the state had expanded its educational system earlier, or simply had a better system of distributing resources. Would communism have had the power to sweep the globe?

It is my hope that by looking at the mistakes of governance and their successes through the ages that when the next wave of governmental experimentation occurs during the next wave of frontier exploration (space colonization of course), that we will have a more complete view of governing, and will be ready to evolve governance to its next stage. I predict this will be a hybrid model of governance which will include technology and human oversight as a part of its fundamental functions.

What I did this week 8/4/2020: The Business Stuff

This is part two of a two part post, read the first part here.

So first, my delivery work… It was non-existent, unfortunately. I had a lot of issues with roommates, being on call to drive a friend home from the hospital, and irregular sleep, I just could not gather the willpower to go out and do any deliveries. It was only just tonight that I managed to get myself to go out and do a few deliveries before doing these update posts. How did those deliveries go? Well, I ended up accidentally not stopping at a right on red, and getting a bunch of camera flashes in my face, so I’ll be looking forward to the ticket in the mail. That’s what happens when you take far deliveries to unfamiliar areas in the middle of the night, I guess. On top of that, the deliveries that I have done have generally had lower tips than early on in the pandemic, a trend that I predicted would happen way back here, and while I was pretty pessimistic in February, it still ended up being worse than I could have imagined. The money is still pretty decent, about $15-18/hour, I just can’t seem to really get myself to go do it much. Going to try to make up for that a little bit this week by just working a lot. Rent is paid though, so the pressure isn’t too high at the moment, though I’ve got my phone bill coming up in just over a week, so I gotta work some in the meantime.

It’s also been difficult to work as the card that I usually use for paying for things like gas, and groceries, and food, has just expired, and I haven’t gotten the replacement card in the mail yet. This is also the account that the money that I do make gets deposited to, so I currently only have access to the cash tips that I stash away for such emergencies, though that is already running low.

Outside of my direct delivery work, I’ve spent most of my time doing a few things, the first is research for my roommate, who is selling a bunch of her stuff to cut down on clutter. I’ve sold a couple of things for her, so I should get a bit of money from that, and hopefully the listings will sell pretty quickly, so I can get paid for that work.

For my roommate’s business that she’s starting, I’ve spent a lot of this week helping her set up her Amazon Store, the separate accounts for the business, to make accounting easier, and helping her figure out each of the steps she needs to get her sewing business up and running. Now, there’s still a lot more to go through with her, but she’s getting closer to having a storefront where she will actually have things to sell, and hopefully it’ll be popular enough to setup a real supply chain. As such, her rapid progress means that I will also soon have wizard robes to model, and there will be pictures, you can be sure!

That brings me to my programming projects. The original project file for my marble playground game thing was becoming far too large, since I was using it also to play around with various packages. The project was in the range of taking several minutes to open, with a ton of the files imported just being a waste of space for this particular project. So, I deleted the project, started a new one, and just imported the assets I made and the couple of packages that I actually need for it. Now I just need to finish going through the Oculus Sample Framework, so I know how to use all of their wonderful, pre-built utilities without having to go far for VR assets. Do you know how long it would take me to make a basic pair of hands, let alone animations and functionalities for those hands? Too long, I’ve got too many game ideas to deal with those low-level issues. Sure, someday, if I’ve got a real game company under my belt, I will absolutely have people make custom hands for my more ambitious VR ideas. However, now is about function over form, meaning, does the game actually function? At the moment, the answer to that is, no, so this next week I’ll have to make all the objects able to be grabbed and moved, with the track pieces staying in place, and the marbles not. I’ll also need to go to a dollar store or something, and buy a bag of marbles so I can record audio so that it’s not just awkward silence. I should also consider recording a very long jam track, similar to dwarf fortress’s fortress track, so that I have background music for it.

Lastly, I think, other than the idea that I had for a pretty simple game this week, that being a giant VR maze with trippy geometry, and an interesting sky, would be the sculpt that I have been working on. Unfortunately, with people here more this week, and a lot of the floor space filled with things for my roommate’s business projects, diving into VR do work on my sculpture has been limited. Now, I have done some work on it, in fact, I colored the first couple of major segments, and now am mostly left with the detailed line coloring. It looks really good so far, but it took almost 6 hours to color what I’ve done so far, and looks like it may take another 6-10 of coloring to finish the main eye. Once I’m finished with that, I’ll do the outer eyes, which will be much smaller and much less detailed, and then finally export time, with possible renderings to come with interesting lighting and whatnot. It was quite amusing, on Facebook, someone asked me what it was for. What is art for but to be seen? Maybe I’ll sell it to a developer, or an artist who wants to use the base model for something. Maybe I’ll use it myself, who knows? But I’m definitely going to show it off.

Anyways, I think that should be just about everything for this week. I was feeling really depressed, like I hadn’t really done anything, but that was my mind tricking me because I just didn’t make much money this week, and didn’t work my traditional gig. When I look back at this post, and part one, I realize that I actually did a bunch of stuff, and that I really didn’t mess around much, so I feel better about how the week went in retrospect. Hopefully next week I’ll have a couple more books finished, a lot of podcasts listened to, some projects closer to being ready to be seen, and manage to get myself out and working more.

Some Knock-on Effects of COVID-19 to Look Out For

So as the coronavirus COVID-19 has been declared a pandemic this week, and has now begun to severely affect the global economy. Sure that today things seem to have started to recover just a little bit from their lows this weeks. However, we should take that touch of green with a grain of salt, and should consider some of the other things that are going on in the economy before saying that everything is going to be fine. The first thing that we need to look out for is the employment rate, which is likely to fall in the following months due to the lack of revenue being pulled in by various sectors of the economy. This would be something that could be managed if there weren’t other factors that we were pushing against.

The main concern of mine is the sheer amount of  debt that exists on both the consumer’s heads, as well as the record amount of corporate debt that has been taken on, a lot of it at junk quality, forcing higher interest rates for companies to have to repay. At the same time, many of the major companies are trying to brace investors for bad news for this quarter at least. Of course, we all know what goes first on the balance sheet when profits are squeezed, labor costs, resulting in fewer jobs, and fewer hours worked for employees.

Now, when people who need to work over 40 hours a week lose their jobs, or whose hours are cut are forced to contend with the huge amount of consumer debt that already exists, with roughly a third of it already in default, and on top of that, the new method of measuring FICO scores is set to come out later this year, it will become impossible for the consumers to, at-large, finance their lives. This will make keeping their heads above water on things like car payments, mortgage payments, credit cards, and even necessities difficult for people to afford.

Now, the worst of these effects are going to be diffused through some parts of the economy, and will take some time for different levels of the economy to feel those effects, but we can start to see the major impacts past share prices once the earnings reports for Q1 begin to roll in for major corporations, especially those with large manufacturing bases in China. Once these reports roll in, companies will need to start taking actions to keep company values afloat, cutting jobs, hours, reducing production capacity, closing factories, selling off assets, or perhaps actions that could anger shareholders, such as  suspending dividend payments, though the fear that shareholders inspire may prevent that last action from being feasible in most cases.

Things are going to get worse before they get better, and the effects just from the beginning of this year to now may not be truly felt until late summer/fall. If you are a poor consumer, I highly suggest saving what you can now, and buying extra canned goods for the next few months of shopping trips, because there are so many people who even a small interruption in their work schedule could result in economic disaster for their household. Good luck out there to everyone, stay safe, and wash those hands!

Some thoughts on the Coronavirus and China’s Economy

Well, it seems that the coronavirus is going to have more impact than what a lot of people initially suspected. Many people started by comparing the outbreak to that of SARS in the early 2000’s. There were a few differences in what set the two apart that are really important though. First, there is the rate of infections from COVID-19, which is significantly higher than that of SARS. Secondly, the rate of deaths from the new virus is significantly lower. Third, the incubation period and the infectious period  for this virus seem to overlap. Together, this makes for a virus that transmits quickly, is transmittable even if a person is not yet showing symptoms, and is capable of being spread easily. Now, the low death rate for the virus is certainly a thing to be thankful for, as a virus with more severe symptoms could have resulted in many more lives lost.

Thankfully, it seems that the virus is on the decline, at least slightly, though removal of quarantine restrictions could cause the rate of infections to bump back up. As a result of the quarantines and sickness though, there will be economic consequences. Of course China’s GDP growth has been speculated to be cut by nearly 3%, down to less than 5%. Of course, this would still be reflecting the state-given numbers. If we further adjust that the inflated numbers that some people suspect are boosted by up to 5%, we can see that in reality, China may be sitting near or below 0% average quarterly growth by the end of 2020. This will unfortunately have knock-on effects for the global economy. We’ve already seen reduced earnings estimations from a number of US corporations, notably Apple. Reduced earnings from service based businesses, especially theaters, being crowded public gathering spaces where illness could easily spread, will be hit particularly hard, as it will be difficult for those businesses to make up for the lost income during this time with consumers. As a result, the global box office numbers for 2020 have been lower proportionally to their domestic takes than what is typical, by nearly 10%. Usually a release in the US, upon international release will earn its domestic gross once more plus 10-30%. So far this year, the percentage is nearly 50-50 for foreign and domestic gross. This translates to tens of millions in lost revenue just for the US film industry.

 

Other industries, such as steel and manufacturing sectors will be hit by the virus, but at least have the ability to recover some of the backed-up production by performing overtime work and increasing capacity to meet the demand, though the longer that the quarantines remain in place, the more difficult it will be for production to catch up. Today’s more flexible supply chains mean that companies can more easily move their supply chains to other low labor cost countries, and will do so to a greater extent, the longer that this goes on.

First, the Chinese companies will absorb the first line of costs, then, the costs that they cannot absorb will be taken on by the US corporations further down the line, in an attempt to not raise prices, which can make margins very slim, before passing the remaining costs onto the consumers themselves. This process will take some time before US consumers really start to see the effects of this stateside. This fortunately means that with the exception of the already hurting US manufacturing sector, and some vulnerable service industries, the US economy likely won’t really feel the effects of this until late this year. However, while the impact that this has overall on the market and the economy might not be huge, it may push the US economy over a critical tipping point that we are approaching, along with the building consumer-debt and corporate debt crises that are looming on the horizon, we may find ourselves at the end of our long-running economic expansion.

Now, China has the biggest capacity to save their own business sectors, and by proxy, parachute this slow-rolling economic disaster. The easiest thing that they could do is subsidize businesses that were shut down during the quarantine. This could be direct subsidies, or it could come with some type of strings attached, but it is already clear that doing nothing would not only hurt the Chinese people and economy, but the downstream effects could be slowing the whole global economy.

 

Anyways, it had been a while since I had contributed anything to the global economic conversation. I can’t gloat about my correct predictions if I don’t write them down!

 

A Deal With The Devil?

So I’ve been thinking about Trump calling for China to help him dig up dirt on his opponents. I predicted that we would discover additional countries that he attempted with, and China certainly was near the top of my list of guesses, though I’m still waiting to hear that he asked MBS to “jokingly” take care of one of his political opponents. Might be waiting for once the Democratic primary is over.

In any case, I think that China giving into Trump’s request to manufacture dirt is the wrong move for China. Trump will of course float the idea that it would be a bargaining chip in a trade deal, though it will be through his mobster language that is incredibly transparent, yet allows for Republicans to pretend it’s opaque. China shouldn’t fall for this though, as first, these things tend to get out, and may damage international standing, which China is still working hard on accruing, and second, Trump will not follow through on his promise, even if the Chinese managed to get it in writing, or him saying it directly.

There is a terrible stereotype that ALL the Chinese do is plagiarize from others, which has some truth to it, but isn’t all there is to their technology. This however, is an opportunity for China to put that stereotype to use. China has been practicing image maintenance through the use of state-owned Twitter accounts on issues like the Hong Kong protests and the Uighur detention camps, but if they were to copy the Russian methodology, as conveniently laid out in the Mueller Report, but with ten, or a hundred times the funding (still a paltry $10 million for such a large economy), they could employ a propaganda hurricane that could sweep through the Western media, and possibly damage Republican enthusiasm enough to allow for at least presidential victory for the Democrats.

So, while Trump’s inability to follow through on contractual agreements is an excellent reason not to support him in this way, why would they specifically want a Democrat to win in 2020 over Trump? First of all, whoever it is will make efforts to repair the global economic damage that Trump has done by doing things like stabilizing trade. Secondly, it will give China continued access to our market for their technology, and may still be with enough time to be competitive in the U.S. Third, the continued economic integration with the west will allow for China to continue exerting its influence on American corporations, with the most important of those being producers of American culture, which is now conveniently and explicitly more pro-Chinese, and is exported across the globe. With a fractured global economy (you have to remember that China may force the states that it exerts soft power on to retaliate against America as well), China may lose its ability to hijack the influence of American media, and easily export their values through secondary level propaganda. Lastly, if the tensions escalate, scientific and educational materials that are produced in the U.S. may become inaccessible to China. Cooperative labs may lose their funding, or find that their contracts mysteriously aren’t given renewal for their funding. Exchange programs between the two countries may end, limiting access to new technologies, and stifling scientific progress across the board.

China, I know you’re listening, you’re always listening, so listen, I may have a whole different set of reasons to support a Democrat, and I may be incredibly concerned about the advancement of the authoritarian state in China, but that doesn’t mean that four more years of Trump is something that China actually wants, despite how much of a kiss-ass Trump is to authoritarians.

A Couple of Thoughts About China and Bitcoin

On October 25th, the president of China Xi Jinping  announced that China should seize the opportunity to adopt blockchain technology. Now this announcement came as a surprise to many, considering how tightly the Chinese government has previously cracked down on cryptocurrency transfers. Now though, it looks as though the Chinese have had a sudden change of heart regarding blockchain, but why?

 

Personally, this change came as no surprise to me. China is developing what I like to refer to as Laplace’s economic demon, a twist on the classic French though experiment developed by Pierre Laplace in the 1800’s. His version of the demon knew the momentum, position and spin for every atom in a room, or in the universe, which would allow for the demon to be able to calculate the state of the universe at any other point. My version of the demon is a little bit different. My demon knows every transaction made in an economy, which allows allows for the demon to predict where resources should be allocated in an economy.

 

Now the math for such calculating something so complex and multidimensional as the economy seems far beyond the predictive power of our current mathematical models of it. Additionally such a demon would require being able to track the amounts and contents of nearly every transaction in the system. A human may not be able to accomplish this (though economists certainly love to try), but I certainly believe that it is possible for artificial intelligence to be able to manage it.

 

Now what could an advanced, centrally-planned economy do? Such an AI could serve poor families household necessities, it could react to job losses to provide financial or food assistance to those families. An example of this would be a government version of Walmart’s grocery delivery service, but combined with the predictive power of Amazon’s product re-ordering recommendations. The government sees that you are low on groceries, and need assistance, so they send someone to your home with staples, while the AI searches through the economy to find replacement work for your particular skill sets.

 

To some, such possibilities may seem like a dream, but to others, it is a dystopian nightmare. The ability for the government to have a full view of every consumer’s discretionary spending  becomes problematic when the government decides that people aren’t spending money the way that they think the people should, and decides to interfere. Now, some people would say that such a thing would be impossible, or that even if it was possible, that it never could happen, because people would not stand idly by and allow for such a system to be put in place. It would require too much data, it would require a way to track nearly every transaction, and would require an intense surveillance state, the likes of which have been unseen by society.

 

Back to China, who is currently in the process of building this system. Now, do the upper elites in China already have this laid out as their plan? It seems fairly unlikely that this is the specific plan that they have, but it does seem that they are putting together all the individual pieces of such a system separately. Let’s step through the major steps that China is taking towards this goal, and how these steps could come together, shall we?

 

The first thing that would be required would be for the government to have the ability to observe its citizens as they live their lives, on a granular level, that would allow for any given citizen to be tracked wherever they go, as they move throughout the economy. Now, China doesn’t have a system like this set up across the whole of their country, but that doesn’t mean that they are not working on it. The Chinese government is currently testing the technology, and setting up the initial systems on populations that they want to suppress, most recently their large population of Uighur Muslims. They have begun by setting up an enormous amount of cameras on street corners, and placing mini police stands all over the place, creating a system of checkpoints that make it impossible to leave one’s house without being tracked.

 

Now, how do they track you specifically, instead of just having a general idea for your location? Between location tracking on phones, the camera locations, and the boots on the ground state agents, they can create a fine-grain map of movements, from your home, to the store, to your work, and of course where all of the people you care about live. China’s state facial recognition software may be on par with Facebook’s, or even better by now, due to the enormous amount of facial data that is being fed through the tens of thousands of cameras they use.

 

However, even with over a billion faces, and untold numbers of cameras, without sufficient knowledge of how to create the algorithms that process them, you would have an ocean of data, with only a paddle-boat to navigate it. Unfortunately though, the Chinese are working on the tools necessary to process this enormous amount of data with AI. For years, I’ve heard from people that the Chinese aren’t a threat because of the large amount of plagiarism in their academic work. Now this may have been true a decade ago, but the tides have changed, and the field of AI research has advanced enough that AI’s created in other countries have been able to create entirely new products. Who needs to be creative, when you can create an AI to do even that for you? China has opened thousands of universities in the past few decades, and is continuing to ramp up its production of AI research papers at a faster rate than any other country. It’s only a matter of time before the Chinese government takes this technique steps further.

 

Artificial Intelligence is unique as a field of intellectual study, and advancement, as AI acts as an intellectual capital multiplier, as opposed to many other technologies, which were labor capital multipliers. Assembly lines allowed for a single worker to perform the same specialized task hundreds or thousands of times faster than without the use of manufacturing equipment, but an algorithm that specializes in intellectual labor can invent hundreds or thousands of times faster than a human, and can create designs that a human mind would be far too limited to even comprehend.

 

This brings us back to cryptocurrency, and China’s adoption of block-chain technology. Of course it’s possible that it could allow for a more transparent economic system, but the possible metadata that could be collected by the state could allow for a whole new level of control, with absolute control over every citizen’s assets. No more cash in your mattresses. I think that those who like the liberal, or libertarian values associated with bitcoin, liberty, fairness, anonymity, freedom from governmental control, they should take this adoption of a new technology with a grain of salt, and be wary of where this may be headed, because if China manages to be successful, they will export their success to other countries.

 

Lastly, it is important not to simply dismiss China’s growing economic and technological threat. Simply because they are not as big of a threat in these regards yet, doesn’t mean they won’t be soon. These endeavors take time, and only now are the fruits of their long plan beginning to come to fruition. We cannot assume that democracy and freedom and capitalism will win the day simply by their own virtues. The twisting of Hong Kong’s capitalist origins, leveraged for the benefit of China has not produced revolutions like was guessed when trading was opened with them, nor did the introduction of the internet spread truth and knowledge as had been hoped. Instead, each became a tool for their agenda, and AI is simply the next step, and they know that if they can get far enough ahead on this, no one else will be able to catch up.

How China is Developing its Communist Vision

I remember several years ago, when I got into an argument with my father. At the time we were talking about audiology, specifically I was discussing some of my economic policy ideas, and at some point in the conversation my dad simply shut me down, saying my ideas were “Communist Bullshit”. at that point I asked my father if he had ever read The Communist manifesto to which he replied that he had not. I have not read it either, so I had managed to make my way through the translation notes for the different editions, but I had never actually made it through the text of the manifesto itself. The argument was noteworthy in that it was the first ideological argument where my father ran out of counterarguments first, I specifically recall we were discussing minimum wage and the employment rate. It was also the moment that I realized that my father was blighted with poor critical thinking faculties, and that while he knew what I thought was a lot, his ability to reason through his ideas were limited by what he was told about those ideas, and that he hadn’t ever really thought about those things more deeply. It was this that caused me to reflect on much of what I was told by him and my mother while being raised, and could see how deeply this had permeated into our family. So, at that point I began to work even harder examining exactly what I believe about a number of subjects and precisely why I believed those things. After spending a great deal of time learning about more advanced economic principles, political systems, and historical background, I felt adequately prepared to read the text with a critical eye, so I dug into it.

And wow, I gotta say that I learned a great deal. First was that I was unaware that the manifesto discusses various types of socialism, in their historical and geopolitical contexts, differentiating Communism from each of them. Of particular interest was Germany’s “True Socialism”, which Marx criticized because “it ceased in the hands of the German to express the struggle of one class with the other… not the interests of the proletariat, but the interests of Human Nature, of Man in general…” He goes on to describe the philosophical conditions that would allow for German Socialism to become co-opted by German Fascism later in the form of the post-Night of the Long Knives Nazi party.

The remainder of the text actually discusses Communist beliefs, and how those beliefs could be put into practice, and how it differs from Socialism. The primary differences are simply the methodology by which each is brought about, and the extent to which each goes. Socialism seeks to bring class inequality down significantly, while keeping institutions in place, essentially placing patches and fixes on the institutions, while never changing the core structure, and maintaining a capitalist economic system. Marx on the other hand, makes it quite clear he believes that these are simply half-measures, and that the working class will simply continue to be oppressed until they rise up, and tear down the capitalist distribution of resources. A common misconception about Communism is that Marx does see not the value of money as a medium of exchange between individuals. To an extent, Marx does actually see the need for money, at least in such a society where resources are sufficiently scarce.

Now I would like to diverge from my reading of the text for a little bit and instead go on a bit about related thoughts, but more practically applied. As I was reading the text, I could not but help think of the current states of Russia and China. Russia as the example of kleptocracy disguised as socialism, and China as the prime example of the power and influence that a continuously reforming communist state can achieve. Russia on one hand is small and weak when it comes to economic power, and is forced to rely on cheap, though still quite effective espionage tactics, though the turmoil in the upper echelons does mean that corruption is rampant throughout the government. In contrast, China has recently been working hard to, it seems, refine their system to more closely reflect the communism seen in the manifesto, and to learn from the mistakes of the past, even if that means that they occasionally over-correct for those mistakes.

To really figure out where China stands in relation to its objective, increased influence and power in the upcoming decades, one must see where the shortfalls of early communism were most prominent. To boil it down to what could be described as the major factors, we can attribute it to: poor infrastructure/supply chains. insufficient data and data processing capacity, and lastly, a poor knowledge base to draw upon. Corrupt officials are a source of failure as well, though I am going to be generous in this regard, and chalk much of it up to incompetence on the part of those running the system. In this way, we will give ourselves the freedom to think a bit more critically about the history. Why does democratic-socialism work so well in a number of European countries, but has so many difficulties in 20th century China? Also, when we consider China today, what has China done more recently, and what does it mean for the future?

The first question was actually a trick question, the reasons that the European countries succeeded was for the same reasons that China failed. Powerful bureaucracies with anti-corruption measures, effective supply-chains capable of handling large influxes of resources, a generally more educated labor class with the ability of the governments to monitor the reactions and general feelings of the populace, and a fairly well-established education system that encourages high levels of education gave rise to a more educated working class that was actually immunized from the fascist propaganda that permeated much of the continent at the time (see the Dutch resistance to Nazi occupation). China, with the exception of an extended bureaucracy, lacked the rest of those components, with until the 1979, when China implemented what could be considered its modern economic plan.

How has China changed since that turning point? Well, of course it has not been all roses, as things like the one-child policy have been controversial, however, in regard to those key indicators mentioned previously, there has been significant changes. China has opened thousands of private universities since the first opened in 1985, and now is considered to have the second-highest number of top universities. In the manifesto, Marx talks about the importance of the proletariat to be educated to have the tools to work the machinery of the capitalist. This has led to more urbanization, and a generally more educated work force, with in recent years much focus being placed on the advancement of AI and biotech research, with just recently, it being announced that they had produced the first person from a gene-edited embryo, and even managed to be the first country to land a probe on the far side of the moon.

In regard to their economic development, it was during the implementation of their new economic plan where two major changes have helped expand China’s economic power arguably the most. The first is the change in the distribution of wages, from a common rate, to a rate based on the productivity of the worker, and moving from being a consumer economy, to becoming a producer economy. The first change allowed for a more authentic market for growth, and the second allowed for the development of the vast network of supply-chains that stretch not only across China, but across the world at large now.

So, they’ve expanded their economy, and they are the producers of a huge amount of the world’s consumer goods, so what? They haven’t made many new moves on other territories that haven’t already been fight over, unlike Russia, who annexed Crimea within the last decade, and is fighting proxy wars in the Middle East. What’s more concerning is that China has not needed to. Now that China has managed to work out some of the kinks in their system, they’ve acquired enough wealth to begin to throw it around, using their new tools to peacefully subjugate a large portion of the world to Chinese colonial rule. With this I’m of course referring to Africa, which, despite the slowing of China’s GDP growth, has continued to pour massive amounts of money into infrastructure projects across the continent. Like many of the endeavors of the Chinese state, many of the early projects have had difficulties in their executions in their early years. Now though, compared to the scale of their investments from the early 2000’s, shows the greater confidence China has with choosing key infrastructure projects that are likely to pay off, and are more conscientious as to the extended range of factors that might make a good investment.

At the moment, the Chinese government does not meddle with domestic affairs of the countries that it lends to. However, should the next rounds of infrastructure projects that the Chinese invest in go well, the level of interdependence between China and African nations could become problematic, as China by proxy gains control over the vast amounts of raw resources that as of yet remain undeveloped on the continent.

What is the solution to this? Well, the United States, along with the EU, could increase aid investment spending on African projects, or could work on funding that more efficiently impacts socioeconomic development. It’s important that we maintain our funding and influence in the region however, as failing to do so could lead to authoritarian interests dominating the region. Will President Trump do this? It seems he would be likely to try to remove this funding, if he was aware of it, though, given the recent developments about his administration, I feel that he is too distracted to pay any mind to an issue so far from his mind, which means that any efforts to catch up, will only be exacerbated by time until a president comes into power who is capable enough to deal with the threat of spreading  authoritarianism.

A Blockchain Government: Voting

Blockchain technology has the possibility to secure information, to create transparent government, and to reduce bureaucratic overhead. One of the ways this can happen is by assigning blockchain identities to citizens, giving them a unique fingerprint, like a social security number, but more secure. This would act somewhat like a cryptowallet, specifically one with tokenization capabilities. This would allow for tokens to be created for a large variety of different kinds of projects. It could be used to distribute specific categories of welfare that could only be used for those goods or services, such as a housing token that could only be used for paying rents, or a food stamp-like token that could only be used for the purchase of food goods, etc.

It could also though, be used for voting.

There are a number of ways that you could design the system, depending on how transparent or secretive the ballot process is decided to be. Of course, the more secretive methods could be used by authoritarian states to theoretically rig elections, though that level of control could be made difficult.

One way that such a voting system could work would be that citizens were given “vote tokens”, an amount of tokens representing the number of categories to vote for, or could be used in a ranked-choice voting system. The citizens would then vote for their desired choices of candidates or policy decisions, and those tokens would be transferred to the appropriate “vote wallet”. Simply, between the vote wallets, the options with the most tokens win.

Now, how the votes are verified could be done a number of ways, and on different levels, depending on the level of ballot secrecy required. The transaction records could be encrypted, but the token totals available for view, with the system itself verifying the transactions on the network behind the scenes, which has the benefit of an attacker required to hijack the whole network to make any changes to the transaction records, though if this did occur, there would be no way to verify it until after the fact. Another way this could be done is by allowing the transaction records to be seen, which would allow individuals to verify their own vote records on the blockchain, though this has the drawback of making it possible for other people to potentially see another person’s voting record given the right set of information. Lastly, you could just open up the whole system, so that you can see the ID numbers of every person who voted for what category and at what rank. This has the advantage of total vote transparency. A discrepancy between someone’s vote and their record of that vote would be readily available, though this does provide lists of people who might have voted for the wrong person in the case of a more oppressive regime.

So it matters how these technologies are implemented greatly, if we want to leverage the power of technology in government, but this one example  shows the ways that such a technology could be used to both make democracy transparent, or to create an all-knowing techno-fascist state.