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> This was not the "free and global market" I thought we were supposed to have at this point. Perhaps you haven't noticed but the pendulum has been swinging t

> This was not the "free and global market" I thought we were supposed to have at this point. Perhaps you haven't noticed but the pendulum has been swinging the other way for a while already and has a lot of momentum behind it. It's mentioned off-hand because the ongoing return to a multi-polar global order is covered elsewhere already, across dozens of articles every day.

draw_down 10mo ago
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marcosdumay 10mo ago
> has a lot of momentum behind it Does it? It's mostly the US pushing against globalism right now. Trump managed to unite almost the entire world.
- Loughla 10mo ago
  Is it? I'm fairly certain many countries have had a very strong showing from nationalist parties in recent years, or am I way off base?
  - kmeisthax 10mo ago
    You're not wrong, globalism and nationalism go hand in hand. All those Twitter bluechecks glazing Trump and trying to drum up the right-wing controversy of the day were exposed as people from third-world countries shitting up the American infosphere for cash. When British far-right nutters say "We can't import the third world", keep in mind that third-world dictators are saying the exact same shit about other parts of the third-world. Nationalists work in lock-step. Left-wingers are only globalist in the most literal sense of "well, I'd like it if we got rid of these migration barriers". "Internationalist" would be a better term for them. Globalist Nationalism is an ideology of contradictions. It purports that, no really, you're the real master race and everyone else's just a stooge that'll get taken out the moment we can get rid of these pesky liberals with their freedoms. They need shittons of spatial partitioning to make that work.
    - zozbot234 10mo ago
      You can't get rid of migration barriers without getting rid of the welfare state. Do left-wingers want to get rid of the welfare state? Do they even want to get rid of the migration barriers that can be done away with freely, namely barriers to movement for highly skilled labor and services?
      - kmeisthax 10mo ago
        This wasn't what I was talking about, but for what it's worth I don't think welfare and migration are exclusive. If your concern is free-riding, then you can require a certain number of working years before a migrant is eligible for certain social services; or have a scheme in which free migration is required to be reciprocal and bundled with a minimum standard for welfare programs. I believe the EU does both. The phrase "left-winger" is also kind of vague; lefties in America are very specifically left-libertarians and it was specifically that strain of leftism I was referring to. A lot of, say, European lefties are far less internationalist and far more authoritarian for my tastes. There's an argument in here that American lefties haven't ironed out the contradictions in their political ideologies yet. A lot of the support for free migration from American lefties and liberals only started because Trump took the opposite position and did so extremely. But I'd rather that than, say, mainstream American politics' obsession with endianness[0]. Additionally, the welfare state is currently being crushed under the weight of a bunch of retiring Baby Boomers. Which isn't a uniquely American problem. Every rich country with a welfare state has too many old people in the system. That's due to demographic collapse, which is itself a consequence of children being too expensive to raise in a world where effective birth control is easy to access. Immigration can actually make this less of a problem, by adding to the tax base. They don't even have to be highly-skilled immigrants, they just have to be generating taxable income that goes into the welfare system. The Globalist Nationalist argument is that this is bad because Those People™ are criminal or uncivilized in some way. But that begs the question: where do we find more taxpayers to keep our welfare state solvent? The answer is to take away birth control and hope enough horny teenagers get pregnant to fix the shortfall eventually. Except this doesn't solve the affordability problem[1]. So all those kids are going to be in broken homes or no home at all. This creates a crime wave. In fact, this is exactly why Those People™ from Those Countries™ are so damned scary! tl;dr The integrity of the welfare state is only tangentially related to the openness of its migration programs, because migrants can be both beneficiaries of and contributors to the system. [0] In the original sense of endianness being a culture war over what side to break eggs on. [1] The affordability problem is itself a cluster of related cost diseases endemic to urban centers. More people want to live in the city than there is housing available for them, so prices have to rise until somebody loses. And increasing the housing supply creates further demand for land, construction labor, and materials. That raises cost, meaning that housing has to get more expensive to make new units economic. And as housing gets more expensive, there's less children being born, which means less people working to build that housing, which makes the housing more expensive, so there's less children being born...
- swatcoder 10mo ago
  Britain? Russia? China? Admittedly, Europe was being slow to reconfigure until finally forced to do so this year but they've jumped on board now too. And in typical historical fashion, everybody with less little influence/independence to project their own sphere are now cautiously but attentively jockeying to accumulate the best deals they can gather among those they do. The world is far from united, even if many do happen to share opinion about the administration.
  - marcosdumay 10mo ago
    So... How are China and the UK working against globalism exactly?
- UltraSane 10mo ago
  "It's mostly the US pushing against globalism right now." This is completely wrong. China and Russia are very much working against it.
- jerome-jh 10mo ago
  In a world of international tensions, governments tend to favor their mega-corps and monopoly. It is a way of weakening your adversaries. It is commercial war.
motbus3 10mo ago
Although it is unknown what will happen with current generation of AI system, data is power. We have been slowly moving towards centralized computing again since 2010s With governments backing this trend of AI with military funds it is only natural for the others to follow and making computing even more centralized. By 2020s, Nvidia announce the plan to become more b2b only and then at some point a cloud only company, not even selling the assets. I don't mean you won't have your smartphone, but it is a dumb terminal compared to the capacities you'll have and maybe need daily.
- tremon 10mo ago
  data is power Far from it. Knowledge is power, but too much data can easily obfuscate whatever small signals of knowledge have been captured. Right now, data mostly requires power.
  - motbus3 10mo ago
    You are correct. But what I mean is that having the capacity for storing unlimited amounts of data allows you to go back in time to reveal something you didn't know that you didn't know or at help you creating complex models able to deal with the noise problem. When that happens, it becomes knowledge. An example of that, is that many car insurance companies are known to buy driving data from car dealers and mechanic shops to reveal driving habits of previous drivers.

draw_down 10mo ago

[dead]

marcosdumay 10mo ago

> has a lot of momentum behind it Does it? It's mostly the US pushing against globalism right now. Trump managed to unite almost the entire world.

Loughla 10mo ago
Is it? I'm fairly certain many countries have had a very strong showing from nationalist parties in recent years, or am I way off base?
- kmeisthax 10mo ago
  You're not wrong, globalism and nationalism go hand in hand. All those Twitter bluechecks glazing Trump and trying to drum up the right-wing controversy of the day were exposed as people from third-world countries shitting up the American infosphere for cash. When British far-right nutters say "We can't import the third world", keep in mind that third-world dictators are saying the exact same shit about other parts of the third-world. Nationalists work in lock-step. Left-wingers are only globalist in the most literal sense of "well, I'd like it if we got rid of these migration barriers". "Internationalist" would be a better term for them. Globalist Nationalism is an ideology of contradictions. It purports that, no really, you're the real master race and everyone else's just a stooge that'll get taken out the moment we can get rid of these pesky liberals with their freedoms. They need shittons of spatial partitioning to make that work.
  - zozbot234 10mo ago
    You can't get rid of migration barriers without getting rid of the welfare state. Do left-wingers want to get rid of the welfare state? Do they even want to get rid of the migration barriers that can be done away with freely, namely barriers to movement for highly skilled labor and services?
    - kmeisthax 10mo ago
      This wasn't what I was talking about, but for what it's worth I don't think welfare and migration are exclusive. If your concern is free-riding, then you can require a certain number of working years before a migrant is eligible for certain social services; or have a scheme in which free migration is required to be reciprocal and bundled with a minimum standard for welfare programs. I believe the EU does both. The phrase "left-winger" is also kind of vague; lefties in America are very specifically left-libertarians and it was specifically that strain of leftism I was referring to. A lot of, say, European lefties are far less internationalist and far more authoritarian for my tastes. There's an argument in here that American lefties haven't ironed out the contradictions in their political ideologies yet. A lot of the support for free migration from American lefties and liberals only started because Trump took the opposite position and did so extremely. But I'd rather that than, say, mainstream American politics' obsession with endianness[0]. Additionally, the welfare state is currently being crushed under the weight of a bunch of retiring Baby Boomers. Which isn't a uniquely American problem. Every rich country with a welfare state has too many old people in the system. That's due to demographic collapse, which is itself a consequence of children being too expensive to raise in a world where effective birth control is easy to access. Immigration can actually make this less of a problem, by adding to the tax base. They don't even have to be highly-skilled immigrants, they just have to be generating taxable income that goes into the welfare system. The Globalist Nationalist argument is that this is bad because Those People™ are criminal or uncivilized in some way. But that begs the question: where do we find more taxpayers to keep our welfare state solvent? The answer is to take away birth control and hope enough horny teenagers get pregnant to fix the shortfall eventually. Except this doesn't solve the affordability problem[1]. So all those kids are going to be in broken homes or no home at all. This creates a crime wave. In fact, this is exactly why Those People™ from Those Countries™ are so damned scary! tl;dr The integrity of the welfare state is only tangentially related to the openness of its migration programs, because migrants can be both beneficiaries of and contributors to the system. [0] In the original sense of endianness being a culture war over what side to break eggs on. [1] The affordability problem is itself a cluster of related cost diseases endemic to urban centers. More people want to live in the city than there is housing available for them, so prices have to rise until somebody loses. And increasing the housing supply creates further demand for land, construction labor, and materials. That raises cost, meaning that housing has to get more expensive to make new units economic. And as housing gets more expensive, there's less children being born, which means less people working to build that housing, which makes the housing more expensive, so there's less children being born...
swatcoder 10mo ago
Britain? Russia? China? Admittedly, Europe was being slow to reconfigure until finally forced to do so this year but they've jumped on board now too. And in typical historical fashion, everybody with less little influence/independence to project their own sphere are now cautiously but attentively jockeying to accumulate the best deals they can gather among those they do. The world is far from united, even if many do happen to share opinion about the administration.
- marcosdumay 10mo ago
  So... How are China and the UK working against globalism exactly?
UltraSane 10mo ago
"It's mostly the US pushing against globalism right now." This is completely wrong. China and Russia are very much working against it.
jerome-jh 10mo ago
In a world of international tensions, governments tend to favor their mega-corps and monopoly. It is a way of weakening your adversaries. It is commercial war.

motbus3 10mo ago

Although it is unknown what will happen with current generation of AI system, data is power. We have been slowly moving towards centralized computing again since 2010s With governments backing this trend of AI with military funds it is only natural for the others to follow and making computing even more centralized. By 2020s, Nvidia announce the plan to become more b2b only and then at some point a cloud only company, not even selling the assets. I don't mean you won't have your smartphone, but it is a dumb terminal compared to the capacities you'll have and maybe need daily.

tremon 10mo ago
data is power Far from it. Knowledge is power, but too much data can easily obfuscate whatever small signals of knowledge have been captured. Right now, data mostly requires power.
- motbus3 10mo ago
  You are correct. But what I mean is that having the capacity for storing unlimited amounts of data allows you to go back in time to reveal something you didn't know that you didn't know or at help you creating complex models able to deal with the noise problem. When that happens, it becomes knowledge. An example of that, is that many car insurance companies are known to buy driving data from car dealers and mechanic shops to reveal driving habits of previous drivers.