6 ms·
It's amazing what can be achieved when you can plan 5 years in advance, instead of just making the line go up for the next quarter.
by RobotToaster 8mo ago
It's amazing what can be achieved when you can plan 5 years in advance, instead of just making the line go up for the next quarter.
- nine_k 8mo agoNot five, but likely twenty-five. Not specific plans but attention: situation changes all the time, but the interest remains.
- abtinf 8mo agoHistory is littered with the corpses of those slaughtered by the millions in the name of great leader’s 5 year plans. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward
- ceejayoz 8mo agoAnd you don’t think short term profit chasing has a death count?
- 0_____0 8mo agoThat's the most obvious example of failure of Chinese central planning. That and one child policy were abysmal failures that resulted from shoddy science coupled to effective central authority. Look at the 12/13/14th 5 year plan (the most recently passed). Do you think they achieved their goals? If your headcanon is that the CCP is inept because they caused crop failures 60 years ago... you could stand to take a look at what they're doing today.
- ahartmetz 8mo agoI guess the summary is as simple as: Good five year plans are great, bad five year plans are terrible. There are sooo many variables in how one could go about making and executing five year plans. They must have figured out a couple of things that tend to work.
- refulgentis 8mo agoIf your headcanon is "5 year plans are great because some chinese supplier has cheap DDR-4", I would submit a gentle introduction to history is helpful (i.e. we took a couple irrational great leaps forward from cheap DDR-4 => China owns the RAM market => 5 year plans are the way to go)
- christophilus 8mo agoI think it’s at least valid to conclude that a nation-level commitment to taking over a specific industry can work. You can gut your competitors and then dominate. It’s the Uber strategy applied at the geopolitical level. If you could figure out how to get your country to dominate the world economy without also allowing your leaders to commit campaigns of mass-internment and extermination, then maybe you’d have a decent political system.
- zozbot234 8mo agoYou can only "gut" the competition if you're genuinely able to supply at lowest cost in a sustainable way. Selling at a loss and trying to make it up in volume is not a very good strategy. The Uber strategy was betting on having robotaxis everywhere, and then raising prices when they found out that this wouldn't be a viable solution in the near term.
- adrian_b 8mo agoThe current memory prices are many times higher than the costs. Last month I was forced to buy some memory and it was more than 3 times more expensive than last summer. Moreover, this was in Europe, where currently computers and related products are cheaper than in USA, unlike in the previous years. The same memories that I have bought in Europe were much more expensive on Newegg. If you can make memories, selling them at half the price demanded by Micron and the like is not selling at a dumping price, but it is selling with what in normal times would have been considered as a huge profit margin.
- mapt 8mo agoStudies of the 20th century manufacturing learning rate suggests that creation of arbitrary goods drops on the order of 15-20% every time you double production volume. This is before general purpose robotics and AI! Just interchangeable tooling, Taylorism, Ford style assembly lines, Toyota's supply chain ideas. Selling at a modest loss and making the volume happen eventually means you're not selling at a loss anymore.
- xbmcuser 8mo agoThe big difference recently from the past is instead of philosophers its scientists who are making the plans and decisions in China so are willing to course correct instead staying the course despite bad out comes.
- impure-aqua 8mo agoI don't know if that tracks, senior leadership was heavily influenced towards implementing the one child policy by the works of Song Jian, who came from a rocketry background and presented a model whereby the population would grow to an unsustainable level unless corrective control was applied. I think it is unlikely philosophers would have suggested to treat population growth like tuning a PID controller.
- daymanstep 8mo agoUN birth rate projections have also been consistently wrong for the past decades. I think even most experts did not expect fertility rates to follow the trend that it has been following for the past few decades.
- mschuster91 8mo ago> I don't know if that tracks, senior leadership was heavily influenced towards implementing the one child policy by the works of Song Jian, who came from a rocketry background and presented a model whereby the population would grow to an unsustainable level unless corrective control was applied. The problem wasn't the idea of modeling itself, it was to not be aware of what we know today from Africa - with more wealth and especially less child mortality, reproduction will drop in about one generation, even without punitive governmental intervention. Even 60 years ago, people tended to have anywhere from 3 to 5 children, just because the chance was so high that at least two would simply die before reaching adulthood. But thanks due to better maternal healthcare, vaccinations and OSHA, that mortality rate dropped significantly, and so people adapted on their own - and that's before getting into women being able to control fertility on their own or housing/cost of living exploding in the same timeframe.
- steveBK123 8mo ago
- trueismywork 8mo agoOne child policy has brought a demographic problem today but has solved an existential problem in 70s
- mystraline 8mo agoNotice the go-to for capitalists against communism is "Look at how many people they killed!!!" No such metric is available for capitalist countries. Thats because its *always* an individual failure in capitalism, not political/societal. You CHOSE not to have healthcare. (You work 1099, or work a job that doesnt provide healthcare, due to tying job and health.) You CHOSE to go with UnitedHealthCare that denies 30% for baseless reasons. (The company chose your plan, you have no real choice here.) You CHOSE to be homeless. (You can't force companies to interview or hire you.) You CHOSE to eat the only food nearby (You live in a food desert). Just from Hepatitis C, the company that makes Solvaldi makes a cure. Costs $84k, $1000 a pill for 84 days. But we see more and more deaths from Hep C. But this is a "personal failure", not a systemic one in a capitalist country.
- steveBK123 8mo ago"Under capitalism, man oppresses man. Under socialism, it's just the opposite"
- arcticbull 8mo agoDeaths in the Great Leap Forward were heavily concentrated as compared to the Industrial Revolution but the death tolls from IR-related famines weren't really all that far off. Industrialization was messy everywhere. The Irish Potato Famine alone killed 15% of Ireland vs the GLF killing 5% of China. That's not a reason not to plan 5 years in advance... is it? Any more than the Potato Famine is a reason we should't have capitalism. I can't say that I've ever heard the argument that a plan led to a famine therefore we should never make plans, when we have great counterexamples that not planning also led to famine. Feels like learning the wrong lesson here. [edit] I also think it's worth pointing out that America's response to the Dust Bowl was the Farm Bill, which it could be argued is one of the largest-scale examples of central planning in history. It continues to this day, and is part of the reason Americans pay less as a share of their spending on food than any other country on earth. People say everyone remembers the hits, nobody remembers the misses - but that is the opposite of true for government. Everyone remembers the misses, nobody thinks twice about the hits.
- mystraline 8mo agoThe Irish Potato Famine was a constructed starvation by England to Ireland. All of their real foodstuffs were being stolen by England to run world-level wars everywhere, and the Irish grew what they were permitted to. Potatoes. Then the disease hit.
- nxobject 8mo agoOP's point exactly: the Great Leap Forward is the classic example of society murdering people to make the line go up every quarter, no matter the cost or the truth.
- gchamonlive 8mo agoHistory is littered with corpses. For those willing to see them.
- maxglute 8mo agoGreat leaders use human resources as resources, that's historically why they're great, acquire territory, build state capacity, both at expenditure of regenerating resources - lives. A few 5 year plans that traded a few million lives to save more millions later. And by million we mean low single digit percent, i.e. historic rounding error that isn't remarkable nor worth the fixation except by muh liberal value types. There's a reason there was persistent Chinese famines before GLF, and none after, because early industrial policies sorted out land resource management via massive rural mobilization/infra/industrial efforts, i.e. why PRC industrialization % and lifespan was vastly higher than developing peers in 70s... that's all because GLF broadly worked, adding about cumulative 200 milliion lives in terms of extended lifespan and likely ~100m+ in terms of averted famine deaths. Most historically competent Chinese leadership is return to farseeing utilitarianism, willing to trade lives for progress, which always sucks for the people during time of upheaval, but ultimately net good.
- victorbjorklund 8mo agoDon’t forget all the times those plans fail because the world did not turn out to be what you thought it would.
- andersmurphy 8mo agoBut, we do plan 5 years in advance. Cloud, VR, Crypto, and now AI. All glorious five year plans from the Silicon Valley Planning Bureau comrade.
- supertrope 8mo agoThe CEO reads the WSJ and their McKinsey report and says “We must leverage AI to keep up and accelerate innovation!” Each division’s executive vice president sets a current year goal to use AI to increase productivity and simultaneously decrease cost. The VPs below them are given a goal to increase their department productivity by 30% by the end of Q3. The middle managers require line managers to train all individual contributors on AI (specifically LLMs) by the end of Q2 to get their bonus. Line managers email their direct reports links to LinkedIn courses and set a deadline by the end of Q1. When the end of the year comes AI has not raised productivity by 30% and AI spending has increased costs. To make Wall Street happy 10% of employees are laid off.
- andersmurphy 8mo agoFor decades the economic planners of the west have used the most effective tool at their disposal: the business class inflight magazine. Only recently surpassed by the VC telegram group chat.
- odiroot 8mo agoMost importantly it's amazing what you can achieve if you can cut the red tape.
- constantcrying 8mo agoThis has nothing to do with 5 year plans, but with having a functional and competent government enable to enact a coherent long term policy. In western countries every couple of years we elect a new clown show, which then proceeds to destroy whatever the last clown show tried to accomplish. That has happened again and again for decades, truly awesome "our democracy".
- ponector 8mo agoAlso amazing what could be wasted when you can plan 5 years in the wrong direction. Remember USSR computers? They also been planned years in advance.
- xnx 8mo agoIf CXMT new what was coming 5 years ago, they could've bought NVDA stock and 14x their investment.