Che Guevara wrote about in his book Critical Notes on Political Economy about how workers who are given full autonomy in their enterprises actually can become antagonistic towards society because they benefit solely from their own enterprise succeeding at the expense of all others, and thus they acquire similar motivations to the capitalist class, i.e. they want deregulations, dismantling of the public sector, more power to their individual enterprise, etc.

The solution is not to abandon workplace democracy but to balance it out also with public democracy. You have enterprises with a board that is both a mixture of direct appointments from the workers at that company with their direct input, as well as appointments by the public sector / central government. The public appointments are necessary to make sure the company is keeping inline with the will of everybody and not merely the people at that specific enterprise, because the actions of that enterprise can and does affect the rest of society.

Workplaces need to be democratic, but also not autonomous from the democratic will of the rest of society.

Yeah, the jacket is very different as well if you look at the front chest area. While people do say maybe he just changed his clothes, the problem is if he also changed his backpack, he couldn’t have just put the clothes in the backpack, meaning he would’ve had to have left them somewhere and there would’ve been a trail that probably would’ve been found by now. It doesn’t really add up for them to be the same person.

That’s not how political parties work, though. Political parties are largely ideological institutions, they exist first and foremost not to win elections but to propagate an ideology, and winning the election is just a sign that they succeeded in their goal of convincing people of their ideology, and so now enough people agree that it can take root in the state. When political parties lose, it’s very rare that they will interpret their loss as “we need to abandon all our values to match the opinion polls.” No, they interpret their loss as meaning they failed in their goal of convincing people of their values, and thus should change their strategy of their out-reach, not changing their whole ideological position.

Democrats going against the rich elites would be an abandonment of their party’s values and everything they stand for. In most countries, if you dislike the ideology of a party, you vote for someone else. The party itself has no obligation to change its entire ideology for you, such a thing very rarely occurs. If that was the case, then every political party would all have the exact same position, just all copy/pastes of whatever the opinion polls say.

I keep seeing all this bizarre rhetoric about how if the Democrats were “smart” they would just abandon their whole party’s platform and adopt some other platform, but this makes zero sense, because you have to consider motivation. Their motivation is not to just win the election, but to convince you of their ideology, and abandoning their ideology does not achieve this. Democrats are not stupid, they just don’t have the same motivations as you. Yes, they want to win, but they ultimately want to win on their platform, not on someone else’s platform.

That’s how political parties work. They have a platform, and the platform is paramount. If a green party adopted all pro-coal and pro-oil lobby positions just to win an election, that would not be a “smart” decision for them, because, even if it leads to their victory, it still is an abandonment of their ideology. Democrats are unabashedly a pro-rich elite party, it should not be smart for them to become anti-elite, because it is not aligned with their motivations.

Yes, it’s ultimately a cautionary tale as to why social democracy is unsustainable, as it is just the implementation of social policies while maintaining capitalist hegemony. There is no such thing as a benevolent oligarch. Capitalists have utilitarian reasons to implement pro-worker social policies, and it’s usually to reduce unrest or increase productivity. The moment those reasons no longer become relevant, they will begin to dismantle it. Much of western Europe in general right now is suffering from nonstop austerity for a long time now.

Bell’s theorem demonstrates that you cannot have a deterministic theory that would also be Lorentz invariant, that is to say, compatible with special relativity and the speed of light limit. The speed of light limit is very well tested over and over again, and no one to this day has ever been able to construct even a single mathematical model that could even approximately reconstruct the predictions of quantum field theory in a way that is deterministic. That suggests that any deterministic theory would actually make quantifiably different predictions than quantum field theory, and yet we don’t have any evidence that its predictions are violated, and quantum field theory is verified to 12 decimal places of precision.

I don’t really understand your point about the dice. If you have two “quantum” dice that are exactly the same, they are not guaranteed to land on the same thing, and that is precisely what it means to be nondeterministic, that even if all the initial conditions are the same, the outcome can be different. Yes, we cannot make the whole universe the same throughout the experiment, but to make sense of this, you cannot speak in vague philosophy but need to actually specify in mathematical terms what parts of the universe you think are determining the outcome, which, again, any attempt to specify such a thing would require contradicting the predictions of quantum field theory.

My issue with your argument is that, whether or not you intended this or not, what you are undeniably arguing is that all our current physical theories are currently wrong and making the wrong predictions, and they need to be adjusted to make the right predictions, and you are basing this off of what is ultimately a philosophical criticism, i.e. that it is not deterministic and you think it should be, without even having a viable model of what this determinism would look like. It just seems far too speculative to me.

Yes, you can always make the argument that “our old theories have been proven wrong before, like Newton’s gravity was replaced with Einstein’s gravity, so we shouldn’t put much stock into our current theories,” but I just find this unconvincing, as you can make this argument in literally any era, and thus it completely negates the possibility of using science to understand the properties of nature. Every scientific theory would have to always be interpreted as just something tentative that can’t tell us anything about nature, because it’s bound to be replaced later, and instead we’re just left arguing vague philosophy not based on anything empirical.

I will readily admit that if I base my understanding of reality on our best physical sciences of the era, those can be overturned and I could be shown to be wrong. However, I still find it to be the most reasonable position as opposed to trying to “intuit” our way to an understanding of nature. The person who strongly defended the Newtonian picture of nature prior to Einstein was later shown to be wrong, yes, but he was still far more correct than the majority of those who insisted upon trying to derive an understanding of nature entirely from intuition/philosophy. I am with Heisenberg who argued that until we actually have any experimental evidence that violates the predictions of quantum field theory and can only be corrected with the introduction of hidden variables, then positing their existence is pointless metaphysical speculation, not derived from anything empirical.

Ah yes, crying about “privilege” while you’re here demanding that people shouldn’t speak out against a literal modern day holocaust at the only time when they have the political power to make some sort of difference. Yeah, it’s totally those people who are “privileges” and not your white pasty ass who doesn’t have to worry about their extended family being slaughtered.

Not sure how getting rid of benches stops people from fighting.

Good. That’s when Democrats should be criticized the most, because that is the only time you have the power to exercise any leverage over them. Why would you refuse to criticize them when you actually have a tiny bit of leverage and wait until you have no power at all and your criticism is completely irrelevant and will be ignored? That is just someone who wants to complain but doesn’t actually want anything to change.

Neoclassical economists say rich people contribute to the economy by “allowing people to use their capital,” but allowing someone to do something isn’t work, it’s the absence of work. If I disallow someone to use my factory machines, it would require work for me to prevent them from using it, as I would have to get the police involved or at least some sort of private security. Allowing someone to use something is just choosing not to do anything, and supposedly they would have us believe that capitalists not doing anything contributes to the economy.

I don’t get it. Who is claiming that if we build one more LLM we will solve AGI? Maybe I just live under a rock. Top comment here is saying people believe LLMs will “solve climate change.” Who believes that? I do not know what any of this is on about, I have never seen these people.

I recall watching Kraut’s YouTube channel many many years ago, and I stopped following Kraut when he said “there is no such thing as a war crime.” Justifying a certain action during a war as a necessity is one thing, sometimes there are necessary evils. It wasn’t the particular thing he was justifying that even bothered me so much, but how he justified it. His argument wasn’t even that it was a necessary evil, rather, he straight-up said you should be allowed to do anything you want in war period, there can be no “evil” in war. That just rubbed me the wrong way, assumed he might be a bit off his rocker and stopped following him.

Democracy implies a system to translate people’s will into action, and that implies both physical institutions for collecting information relating to the demands of the population, physical technology for processing that information, and physical institutions that can act on those demands.

The problem is that westerners treat political systems as if they’re entirely built upon vibes. You can go to the poorest place in the world and as long as you have good vibes, as long as you get enough people to say the right “democracy” slogans and do the right “democracy” rituals, then you can introduce a true utopian democracy.

The problem is they ignore that we live in a physical world and not a vibes-based world, all societies are built upon a particular material foundations. The idea that you can go to a country that is so ridiculously impoverished that barely anyone can even read, like in Afghanistan, and then through good vibes convert it into a western-style democracy, is just completely ridiculous. The institutions just aren’t there, it takes decades to build that.

Westerners then use their vibe-based politics as justification to destroy these countries. “If you don’t agree that we should go to war with them, you’re just a dictator lover! You have bad vibes!!” Even westerners took centuries to actually evolve to their pseudodemocracies they have now, but they refuse to let other countries go through this same process. They insist they must skip this development process and just become western-style democracies right now, or else they’ll get bombed into the stone age, or the CIA will foster some sort of coup or color revolution to overthrow the government and plunge it into civil war or a military dictatorship.

But all this endless war does is make it harder to develop, so in reality western countries end up being the biggest barrier towards actually moving towards democracy. They keep destabilizing them, either through war, coups, or color revolution, which destroys the physical foundations of their society, destroys their institutions and infrastructure, and this makes it more difficult for them to actually progress as a society, and then westerners condemn them and paint them as genetically inferior for not having progressed as much.

People put way too much weight on the “power of human ideas.” They think if thee is a “free marketplace of ideas” then naturally the best ideas spread and take over. But that’s not how the real world works at all. The ideas that are propagated are those that reflect what is “going around on the ground” to speak, not whether or not the ideas are actually good or bad.

Complex numbers are just a way of representing an additional degree of freedom in an equation. You have to represent complex numbers not on a number line but on the complex plane, so each complex number is associated with two numbers. That means if you create a function that requires two inputs and two outputs, you could “compress” that function into a single input and output by using complex numbers.

Complex numbers are used all throughout classical mechanics. Waves are two-dimensional objects because they both have an amplitude and a wavelength. Classical wave dynamics thus very often use complex numbers because you can capture the properties of waves more concisely. An example of this is the Fourier transform. If you look up the function, it looks very scary, it has an integral and Euler’s number raised to the negative power of the imaginary number multiplied by pi. However, if you’ve worked with complex numbers a lot, you’d immediately recognize that raising Euler’s number to pi times the imaginary number is just how you represent rotations on the complex plane.

Despite how scary the Fourier transform looks, literally all it is actually doing is wrapping a wave around a circle. 3Blue1Brown has a good video on his channel of how to visualize the Fourier transform. The Fourier transform, again, isn’t inherently anything quantum mechanical, we use it all the time in classical mechanics, for example, if you ever used an old dial-up model and wondered why it made those weird noises, it was encoding data as sound wave by representing them as different harmonic waves that it would then add together, producing that sound. The Fourier transform could then be used by the modem at the other end to break the sound back apart into those harmonic waves and then decode it back into data.

In quantum mechanics, properties of systems always have an additional kind of “orientation” to them. When particles interact, if their orientations are aligned, the outcome of the interaction is deterministic. If they are misaligned, then it introduces randomness. For example, an electron’s spin state can either be up or down. However, its spin state also has a particular orientation to it, so you can only measure it “correctly” by having the orientation of the measuring device aligned with the electron. If they are misaligned, you introduce randomness. These orientations often are associated with physical rotations, for example, with the electron spins state, you measure it with something known as a Stern-Gerlach apparatus, and to measure the electron on a different orientation you have to physically rotate the whole apparatus.

Because the probability of measuring certain things directly relates to the relative orientation between your measuring device and the particle, it would be nice if we had a way to represent both the relative orientation and the probability at the same time. And, of course, you guessed it, we do. It turns out you can achieve this simply by representing your probability amplitudes (the % chance of something occurring) as complex numbers. This means in quantum mechanics, for example, an event can have a -70.7i% chance of occurring.

While that sounds weird at first, you quickly realize that the only reason we represent it this way is because it directly connects the relative orientation between the systems interacting and the probabilities of certain outcomes. You see, you can convert quantum probabilities to classical just by computing the distance from 0% on the complex plane and squaring it, which in the case of -70.7i% would give you 50%, which tells you this just means it is basically a fair coin flip. However, you can also compute from this number the relative orientation of the two measuring devices, which in this case you would find it to be rotated 90 degrees. Hence, because both values can be computed from the same number, if you rotate the measuring device it must necessarily alter the probabilities of different outcomes.

You technically don’t need to ever use complex numbers. You could, for example, take the Schrodinger equation and just break it up into two separate equations for the real and imaginary part, and have them both act on real numbers. Indeed, if you actually build a quantum computer simulator in a classical computer, most programming languages don’t include complex numbers, so all your algorithms have to break the complex numbers into two real numbers. It’s just when you are writing down these equations, they can get very messy this way. Complex numbers are just far more concise to represent additional degrees of freedom without needing additional equations/functions.

This is a rather reductive view of quantum cryptography.

Correct = reductive?

The two most common applications of it I hear about is the development of encryption algorithms resistant to being broken on quantum computers

First, I was talking about quantum encryption, not quantum cryptography, which is a bit more broad. Second, we already have cryptographic algorithms that run on classical computers that are not crackable by quantum computers, known as lattice-based cryptography which are way more practical than anything quantum cryptography could offer.

the way, say, Shur’s algorithm is known to break RSA

Shor’s algorithm. Yes, it breaks asymmetrical ciphers like RSA, but we have developed alternatives already it cannot break, like Kyber.

and techniques like quantum key distribution

Classical key exchange algorithms prevent someone from reading your key if they intercept the data packets between you. QKD is entirely impractical because it does not achieve this. Rather than preventing someone from reading your key if they intercept the data packets, it merely allows you to detect if someone is intercepting the data packets. You see, in regular cryptography, you want people to be able to intercept your data. It’s necessary for something like the internet to work, because packets of data have to be passed around the whole world, and it would suck if your packets got lost simply because someone read them in transit, which is why QKD is awful. If a single person reads the data packet in transit then they would effectively deny service to the recipient.

Both of these are real problems that don’t become meaningless just because one-time pads exist - you need to somehow securely distribute the keys for one-time-pad encryption.

One-time pad encryption is awful as I already explained, it would cut the entire internet bandwidth in half because if you wanted to transmit 10 gigabytes of data you would also need to transmit 10 gigabyte key. QKD is also awful for the fact that it would be unscalable to an “internet” because of how easy it is to deny service. It also doesn’t even guarantee you can detect someone snooping your packets because it is susceptible to a man-in-the-middle attack. Sure, the Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange is also susceptible to a man-in-the-middle attack, but we solve this using public key infrastructure. You cannot have public key infrastructure for quantum cryptography.

The only proposed quantum digital signature algorithms are unscalable because they rely on Holevo’s theorem, which basically says there is a limited amount of information about the quantum state of a qubit you can gather from a single measurement, thus creating a sort of one-way function that can be used for digital signatures. The issue with this is that Holevo’s theorem also says you can acquire more information if you have more copies of the same qubit, i.e. it means every time you distribute a copy of the public key, you increase the probability someone could guess it. Public keys would have to be consumable which would entirely prevent you from scaling it to any significantly large network.

That’s why one-time pads aren’t used everywhere, (“it would cut the whole internet bandwidth in half overnight” would not have been a sufficient reason - that’d be a tiny price to pay for unbreakable encryption, if it actually worked).

You are living in fairy tale lala land. Come back down to reality. If you offer someone an algorithm that is impossible to break in a trillion, trillion years, and another algorithm that is in principle impossible to break, but the former algorithm is twice as efficient, then every company on the entirety of planet earth will choose the former. No enterprise on earth is going to double their expenses for something entirely imaginary that could never be observed in practice. You are really stuck in delulu town if you unironically think the reason one-time pads aren’t used practically is due to lack of secure key distribution.

Even prior to the discovery of Shor’s algorithm, we were issuing DHKE which, at the time, was believed to be pretty much an unbreakable way to share keys. Yet, even in this time before people knew DHKE could be potentially broken by quantum computers, nobody used DHKE to exchange keys for one-time pads. DHKE is always used to exchange keys for symmetrical ciphers like AES. AES256 is not breakable by quantum computers in practice as even a quantum computer would require trillions of years to break it. There is zero reason to use a one-time pad when something like AES exists. It’s the industry standard for a reason and I bet you my entire life savings we are not going to abandon it for one-time pads ever.

No, they are not, they are incredibly wealthy millionaires whose campaigns are bought and paid for by billionaires. The Democrat party is actively supporting an ongoing holocaust, an industrial scale genocide and ethnic cleansing of millions of people from their homeland. The idea that these people are all secretly saints who are just too scared to act on it is such a completely ridiculous belief. They do not do moral things because they are not moral. They are not saints. They simply do not represent those values. You elect a party that openly believes X and then claim they don’t do Y because they’re too scared to do it. No, they don’t do Y because they don’t represent Y, they represent X. Democrats are by no means in any way “soft-willed.” Whenever it comes to something they actually believe in, they are very good at rallying the votes to get it passed, such as when they are passing something in favor of the military industrial complex or the Israel lobby.

Democrats are heartless genocidal freaks, and hardly “spineless” they just don’t care. It’s a party of billionaires. I have no idea how you can unironically believe this ethos that they’re all a bunch of bleeding hearts but are just too scared, quivering in their boots to act but they all mean well… apparently! No, they just never fight for those values you want them to fight for because their party does not represent those values, and pretending they do at this point… I have a bridge to sell you.

Democrats like losing because they only disagree on Republicans on like 2 issues and their funding is great when Republicans are in power.

You are claiming that Trump automatically wins if nobody votes. That’s objectively not how US elections work. He still has to get the plurality of votes to win. People who do not cast votes don’t automatically support Trump, it just doesn’t sway the election at all. Please stick to the facts and not to the fake news. Election misinformation is not cool.

Quantum encryption won’t ever be a “thing.”

All cryptography requires a pool of random numbers as inputs, and while different cryptographic methods are more secure than others, all of them are only as secure as their random number pool. The most secure cipher possible is known as a one-time pad which can be proven to be as secure as a cryptographic algorithm could possibly be, and so the only thing that could possibly lead to it being hacked is a poor random number pool. Since quantum mechanics can be used to generate truly random numbers, you could have a perfect random number pool, combined with a perfect cipher, gives you perfect encryption.

That sounds awesome right? Well… no. Because it is trivially easy these days to get regular old classical computers to spit out basically an indefinite number of pseudorandom numbers that are indistinguishable from truly random numbers. Why do you think modern operating systems allow you to encrypt your whole drive? You can have a file tens of gigabytes bit and you click it and it opens instantly, despite your whole drive being encrypted, because your CPU can generate tens of gigabytes of random numbers good enough for cryptography faster than you can even blink.

Random number generation is already largely a solved problem for classical computers. I own a quantum random number generator. I can compare it in various test suites such as the one released by NIST to test the quality of a random number generator, and it can’t tell the different between that and my CPU’s internal random number generator. Yes, the CPU. Most modern CPUs both have the ability to collect entropy data from thermal noise to seed a pseudorandom number generator, as well as having a hardware-level pseudorandom number, such as x86’s RDSEED and RDRAND instructions, so they can generate random numbers good enough for cryptography at blazing speeds.

The point is that in practice you will never actually notice, even if you were a whole team of PhD statisticians and mathematicians, the difference between a message encrypted by a quantum computer and a message encrypted by a classical computer using an industry-approved library. Yet, it is not just that they’re equal, quantum encryption would be far worse. We don’t use one-time pads in practice despite their security because they require keys as long as the message itself, and thus if we adopted them, it would cut the whole internet bandwidth in half overnight. Pseudorandom number generators are superior to use as the basis for cryptography because the key can be very small and then it can spit out the rest of what is needed to encrypt/decrypt the message from it, and deterministic encryption/decryption algorithms like AES and ChaCha20 are not crackable even by a quantum computer.