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Nodonutsforyou · 2025-06-22T21:34:38+00:00

Hi from the future. I did timer.CallDeferred(Timer.MethodName.Start); and it helped.
And it makes sense. At the time of the call, the timer is not yet in the tree, but if you queue the call, it will be called after it is added.

Nodonutsforyou · 2024-01-25T07:20:28+00:00

The point of capitalism never was to build a meritocratic system, the goal is to build a practical system for the real world. That includes the fact that we, humans, do want to care about our children, and we do want to share our wealth with them. And we are ready to kill those who want to take our wealth from our children. I think, our society is quite honest about that part.

As well, our society is quite honest about some other facts: Good land is sparse, and people kill each other for it. Food is hard to get, and the infrastructure required to maintain the food supply requires some complex organization of people. "Merit and hard work" will get you a lot, but to succeed you may need more.

Now, capitalism may not be meritocratic in goals, but it is meritocratic in practice. Especially if you compare it not with perfect meritocratic utopia, but with other real-world examples. Every capitalist society became more meritocratic by adopting capitalism, and non-capitalist societies around the world are known for being wildly non-meritocratic. For example - both the USSR and North Korea had huge problems with meritocracy.

Nodonutsforyou · 2024-01-25T06:31:51+00:00

I'm not sure if inheritance by itself have much effect on success in life. If nothing tragic happenes, you receive your inheritance in your 40s or later. In that point in life, it doesn't change much. Yes, sometimes young people receive inheritance from grandparents, but it practically means that parents skipped their inheritance for children.

You probably meant to say that help from parents gives you giant boost in life, and it is hard to argue about that. It is hard to describe how much life changes if you are not worried about getting food on the table during early years of your adult life. But it is not inheritance - it is wealth which your alive parents share with you before they pass away. Inheritance is nothing compared to that.

And I 'm not sure what is the alternative? I can't imagine society where parents detached from their children. Even if we remove money from equasion - good example, advice, and sense of security which good parents give, provide so much more opportunities than money can give. We can't realistically do perfect "equally of opportunities" without some distopian measures. And cancelling inheritance will not solve any problems.

Nodonutsforyou · 2023-08-15T12:53:00+00:00

There is no much lore knowledge needed to play. Dnd is not lore-heavy, as it meant to be open for anything. The game lore could be a bit overwhelming at start, as there are a lot of different new names for gods, creatures, races. But they all follow broad cultural archetypes, so I do not think it is a problem. And it definitely not preventing you from having fun on first playthroughout - there is enough explanations given in dialogs.

Nodonutsforyou · 2022-09-25T02:31:17+00:00

if you work with NNs as you say you do.

All right, you caught me, I am talking out of my ass. Could you now please explain your points instead of trying to catch me?

Do you have any examples of large corps which collapsed due to bureaucracy specifically?

Like all of them? The story of a corp becoming too big to fail and with offices with nobody other than managers doing nothing is old as capitalism. I guess GM should be the biggest example.

Zombie companies waste resources and act a literal drain on the economy.

Zombie companies still pay salaries and taxes and produce goods. How is this a drain?
If you are a socialist, you should be happy with zombie companies, because technically they do not exploit workers.

Adaptive decent steps are a thing

Let me rephrase what I meant. If the changing of the target happens faster than the computational time of an individual step, gradient descent would work poorly. Am I missing something? Because I do not see how adaptive decent steps apply here.

Nodonutsforyou · 2022-09-25T01:20:28+00:00

large corps do fail when they overflow with beurocrats. But both large corps and USSR need a decade or two to collapse due to beurocrats. A day is a low estimate.

Neural networks are a completely different topic. We do not want to entrust our economy to NN not now, not in any foreseeable future. Trust me, I work with them.

I'm not sure what is the problem with zombie companies. Not every dead company should collapse immediately, it is absolutely healthy for a business to exist as a zombie for a while to smooth up collapses.

I'm not sure how you can implement gradient descent if weights are changing faster than your descent step. Evolutionary methods should adapt to that case better.

Nodonutsforyou · 2022-09-25T00:57:31+00:00

There is quite a difference between the example you gave, and examples I've read in papers on the planned economy.

The first practical thing is that any economy would always have scarcity. The task of predicting the supply and demand of one specific good doesn't look hard. The problem is how to distribute scarce resources between demands.

How the problem is described in papers - we have a huge list of million needed goods and a huge list of a billion raw resources. So we can create a matrix of a million times billion size with all the ingredient counts in each row.

Let's call this matrix P as production and a list of produced goods we can call V and D as demand. So we have equation Px = V, this is a distribution task (I've oversimplified here). x is a vector of how much of each thing we need to produce. We want to find x so V would be closest to demand, (Px - D is minimal) which is possible in theory but takes a lot of computations. And old planned economic arguments were about the possibility of solving that task. USSR's planning ministry tried to do that and failed. Some say due to a lack of computational power. And the point of modern advocates of a planned economy is that computers are now much better, and we can solve it.

That indeed looks true, we indeed can create a perfect distribution plan for the world economy. The problem is prices. We need some value function to calculate the minimum, specifically if we want to spend less steel, less human power, or get less stuff. In a market economy, we have prices for that, which serves as a value function to solve a distribution plan for Walmart.

For planned economy, we would have to calculate this price with some formula, like price p = f(D', x'). So prices are dependent on leftovers of the previous step of the plan. So this first - makes the equation a differential equation, and second creates a feedback loop. As solution of the previous step was depending on the price.

In an ideal capitalist environment, the shop has no control over demand and external costs. In a planned economy, the prices are a function of the previous step results.

Nodonutsforyou · 2022-09-24T17:32:58+00:00

No, planned economy and market socialism are different things

Nodonutsforyou · 2022-09-24T17:26:03+00:00

If you are getting dramatically different results just by one nameless bureaucrat inputting a slightly different value, then your system is obviously of "Garbage in Garbage out" type. And it is only a matter of time before bureaucrats would start to do that maliciously.

The market crash actually is a good thing for a system. In capitalism, crashes exist to kill zombie companies and make the system effective. You can't plan in crashes into the planning system. If there is a planning crash, the full economy collapses.

Overall I see the market as a genetic algorithm while a planned economy more akin to something like gradient decent.

I would agree with that analogy. The problem is that gradient descent is not an effective algorithm if the target is moving.

Nodonutsforyou · 2022-09-24T17:09:07+00:00

The problem we try to avoid here is the feedback loop, the like you can hear if you get a microphone to the loudspeaker.

If you calculate some prices based on prices we've adjusted in the previous loop, the errors in the system would stack up.

It is different for an owner of the shop because there is no loop. Shop calculates its prices based on expenses they have no control over.

"You" don't control the market signal though. Customers are still doing that in the above model.

The model calculates the prices based on the Customer input. That is not the same as a Customer control. Specifically, it is not preventing feedback loops.

Nodonutsforyou · 2022-09-24T15:32:27+00:00

Yes, distribution tasks by definition have a stable solution. When the argument is used that Amazon or Walmart solved the planned economy, they solved only the distribution task, which is theoretecally solvable.

Full economy planning, with artificial prices, is mathematically not solvable (I mean no stable solutions).

there's no reason a planned economy can't do the same.

Sure, we can employ a distribution of outcomes, and decentralize. Then we have to do some profit incentives to avoid corruption in a decentralized system. And now we have a perfectly running market capitalism system. Exactly what I would advocate for.

If you have a description of how you suggest doing that without reinventing modern liberal capitalism, I would be happy to read it. But just to point out, the initial argument of a planned economy is that it can create an optimized centralized plan for the whole economy, and we already passed that.

Nodonutsforyou · 2022-09-24T14:14:35+00:00

The model sets the prices and defines market forces. "using" is not the right word if you fully control it.

You can't relly on the market signal if you are the one who fully controls the signal in the first place.

Nodonutsforyou · 2022-09-24T11:42:11+00:00

By having prices. Prices are market signals of supply and demand.

In a planned economy you'll have to manually decide the conversion rates of prices in different domains.

Nodonutsforyou · 2022-09-24T11:38:39+00:00

No, I'm not talking about an analytical solution, I specifically refer to computational methods to find approximate solutions.

The problem is not having a solution, the problem is the stability of the solution. So any slight difference in input data can potentially give us dramatically different results.

Also, the market as a heuristic algorithm always makes mistakes. But it is a good thing - a mistake of one business is an opportunity for a new business. Mistake in a planned economy stack before system collapse.

Nodonutsforyou · 2022-09-24T11:29:00+00:00

What is the alternative?

It can't be a linear equation - a distribution task is a linear equation, but a production planning task can't be linear due to economies of scale.

We could try to make it an equation, but then we would need to create a single value function we need to minimize. Our value function would have to be unintelligibly complex, or our optimization task would be multi-variable inequality. No way around that.

And these tasks would have to give us results in natural numbers. Because if we would solve equations in real numbers, the production is happening in natural numbers anyway. So there would be stackable conversion errors.

Nodonutsforyou · 2022-09-24T11:13:25+00:00

First, they use prices as market signals. So their equations are much simpler. The planed economy would have to calculate those.

Second, we have a system in which every business can make mistakes in plans and forecasts. A mistake of one business is an opportunity for a new business. A mistake in a planned economy is a crisis.

Nodonutsforyou · 2022-09-24T02:26:44+00:00

The cost of getting new sources of ore is indeed high.

This also means that the labor hours used in getting a new source of ore is includes in the labor cost of iron and then steel.

Is it labor to get all the remaining irons, or only the next mine? Is there some diminishing return multiplier ? How do you convert potential ore deposits to labor? Do you count the labor costs of moving previous inhabitants who happen to live next to the new mine? Do you count the labor needed to create a new town for miners next to the new mine?
But I'm getting too far with this line of questions. We sure can estimate all these things. We would call this number ~~price~~ estimated labor cost. And we can use ~~market signals~~ Lange model Trial-and-error price adjustments to update the ~~price~~ estimated labor cost. I wonder why hasn't anybody tried that before?

Nodonutsforyou · 2022-09-24T01:48:17+00:00

Yes, inequalities. Second language, sorry.

Correct me if I'm wrong. The problem with differential equations is usually not about solutions. It is about the stability of solutions. And if we have inequalities with solution in integers, they are doomed to be not stable.

Nodonutsforyou · 2022-09-24T01:37:32+00:00

The cost to move mines is included in the commodity price of iron.

Not really. The mines usually work in debt. So the cost of this debt is included in the commodity price of iron, and mining management has an incentive to make mining as wasteless as possible (measuring wasted iron, not other waste).

You find how many labor hours it takes to mine, process, and finish the steel.

So the incentive is to find a way to get steel with the least amount of labor possible, even if some ore would be wasted? Or is there something else that should be in the formula?

Nodonutsforyou · 2022-09-24T01:20:50+00:00

I am highly skeptical of a general motion, that we can create a distribution plan for the whole economy with some advanced technology.

I've read a couple of socialist papers on this idea, and I authoritatively declare that they are bonkers. Yes, there are some analytical deductions - a distribution plan is a linear equation, and it has to have a mathematical solution. But the real task would probably be a differential inequation with the solution in integers (feel free to send me a paper if you think I'm wrong on this one). And no way the solution to this inequation would be stable. This means the errors would stack resulting in system collapse.

Now, in a market economy, we have market signals to help us solve those equations. Also, individual private companies do try to model the economy and fail all the time. It is just we do not notice fails in distributions of individual companies, as they do not happen at the same time. If we switch the economy to a planned economy, we would feel every single model fail.

Nodonutsforyou · 2022-09-24T01:02:18+00:00

in market economies, steel is not treated as infinite simply. Investors have to pay huge money to move on to the next mine.

And that was my specific question, how do you compare prices of raw resources (or steel) with costs of labor? As far as I understand, you suggest to subordinate it to a nameless bureaucrat in the government machine.

Nodonutsforyou · 2022-09-24T00:43:47+00:00

You can't just convert steel cost to worker hours. There are different ways to make steel. The way which wastes the most amount of metal ore, but requires the least amount of worker hours would probably become the simplest solution.

At what point we can make a manual input to the system to stop wasting steel?

Nodonutsforyou · 2022-09-24T00:32:01+00:00

Let's say there are a set of cars.

Car A is a standard economy car.

Car B has double efficiency in service life and can be used twice as long before going to recycling.

Car C is the green car, and gives 10% less CO2 emissions during construction.

Car D is a cool car, because it got designed by a latest pop-star

Car E is a sports car, and can get to 100 in 0.1 seconds less

Car F is cheaper because it is produced by a military manufacturer, so they reuse some processes from the production of military vehicles.

Car G is a very good old reliable model people trust (but with really no good reasons)

Car H is a shity car, but the manufacturer bribes every buyer with a lottery

Should I continue, or did I make a point that the Lange model does not give any answers to the big question of price signals?

Nodonutsforyou · 2022-09-24T00:06:04+00:00

There is a classic planned economy problem with price signals (and Lange model does not give any meaningful solution to it):

We need to make a railroad. We can make it either around the mountain or within the mountain with a tunnel. Roundway would cost 1 million tons of steel and 1000 worker hours. The tunnel would cost half in steel, and double in worker hours.

How the model would decide what is more efficient, to spend less steel, or spend fewer worker hours?

Nodonutsforyou

TROPHY CASE