Kind of hilarious to frame it as China relying on the US occupation of the region and then in the next sentence admit that it’s actually the US that’s the cause of the problems in the region.

The war also illustrates the limits of Chinese power. For decades, Beijing relied on U.S.-provided security architecture in the Middle East as it powered its economy on Gulf energy imports. Now it can do little to check U.S. military action in the region, and Xi’s call to open the Strait of Hormuz went unheeded.

and I’m here for it

the best possible outcome for the world

Same, it seems like they really thought that Americans would come to their senses at some point.

Exactly, Chinese scientists fleeing the US just have an easier time because China has massive science budget now. The scale of brain drain the US is experiencing is going to be disastrous. These are skills that will not be easy to rebuild in the future, assuming the US even survives as a state.

The question anarchists never seem to ask themselves is why hierarchies form in the first place, and what problem they solve. There’s a reason why in over a century of anarchist theory, no large scale or long lived applications of these ideas exist in the real world.

Hierarchies play a structural purpose facilitating scaling of organization. These are cognitive and organizational tools that enable large groups to coordinate effectively. It’s a form of abstraction, providing mental shortcuts that enable us to engage with complex systems at a meaningful level of detail, without being overwhelmed by their inner workings. Our ability to abstract is what allows us to manage the near infinite complexity of the world.

We don’t perceive people as trillions of individual molecules. Instead, we view them as individuals with intentions, ideas, and actions. Doing so allows us to focus our attention on relevant interactions rather than microscopic details. In fact, focusing on a manageable level of detail also governs our self-perception as well. Our minds don’t concern themselves with the granular operation of our organs, digestion, blood flow, or muscle contractions within our bodies. The decision to pick up a cup is processed at the level of intent, not the orchestration of muscular movements required to accomplish the task.

Similarly, using a phone app for internet browsing involves operating at an abstract level, interacting with website addresses and content, rather than the complexities of phone hardware, software execution, or network protocols. This abstraction allows us to utilize sophisticated tools effectively by focusing on the relevant layer of interaction.

The same principle applies to groups of people trying to accomplish a shared task. A team working on a shared goal can be viewed as a single unit. Outsiders don’t need to know every internal decision or workflow. They only need to understand the group’s inputs and outputs in order to engage with it effectively. This abstraction is enabled through delegation where groups nominate representatives to interface with other groups, and these representatives can then form higher-level teams of their own. These nested layers allow organizations to scale without requiring everyone to grasp every detail of every project.

Hierarchies naturally arise in systems that necessitate both specialized labor and complex coordination. We can see an example of this when we examine the multifaceted operations within a manufacturing plant. Instead of each worker individually constructing an entire product, the workflow is partitioned into distinct sets of responsibilities.

The production of any product involves a series of key roles. Design engineers initiate the process by conceptualizing and blueprinting the product, detailing specifications for each component. Material handlers then take over, procuring and transporting the necessary raw materials to various workstations. On the assembly line, teams of workers are responsible for producing individual parts and their assembly into the final product. Simultaneously, specialized technicians maintain the machinery for continuous operation. Quality control inspectors ensure standards are met by examining finished goods at various stages. Supervisors play a crucial role in overseeing specific sections of the production line, ensuring adherence to schedules and acting as communication nodes for their teams, addressing immediate issues. Ultimately, production managers coordinate the entire flow of work across departments, optimizing resource allocation and ensuring that all production stages align with overall targets.

A hierarchical structure, with its clear division of labor and defined lines of authority, maximizes efficiency by allowing individuals to develop deep expertise in their specific roles while establishing clear channels for communication and accountability across the entire production process. The partitioning of work arises out of strategic necessity for managing the complexity inherent in large-scale manufacturing. As a direct consequence of this inherent demand for both focused expertise and effective collaboration, a selection pressure emerges that favors the hierarchical organizational model. The example of the advantages observed in structured production environments are not unique to manufacturing. Hierarchies are a common feature across diverse industries, political structures, and pretty much every type of endeavor where large numbers of people with different types of skills need to collaborate to achieve common goals.

Conversely, the limitations of horizontal structures become apparent when considering communication overhead. In a flat organization, every decision requires consensus among all members. Meetings grow unproductive as more people join, and time is inevitably wasted on debates irrelevant to most participants. Specialists spend hours explaining context to non-experts, making any meaningful progress impossible. Countless studies show that large groups of people struggle to function horizontally. Complex tasks, like coordinating a national healthcare system or a general strike, demand roles and delegation. Hierarchies streamline communication by compartmentalizing responsibilities where engineers can focus on technical problems, organizers on logistics, and representatives on inter-group coordination.

The same need for managing complexity through structured roles extends to the realm of political organization. A party acts as a hierarchical abstraction layer. It synthesizes grassroots input into actionable policies, balancing decision making with accountability through feedback from below. Centralizing expertise allows for efficient use of resources necessary for effective action. The division of labor afforded by hierarchies allows movements to manage complexity, specialize labor, and act decisively. Meanwhile, flat structures limit organizing potential to small, disconnected groups that cannot meaningfully challenge existing power structures which are themselves hierarchical.

Anarchists tend to argue that hierarchy necessarily leads to oppression, but this conflates hierarchy as a structural tool with the way this tool is applied under capitalism. The actual problem lies with lack of accountability of those at the top of the hierarchy to those at the bottom within power structures that serve private profit rather than collective needs.

I guess they realized that would be rather unpopular and would be a pretext for the west to invade. Doing it in response to the US invading and losing, completely reframes it.

it sure can

I don’t find anything odd about a country minding its own business and making trade relations based on mutual benefit rather than ideology.

https://archive.ph/xuEqO

I disagree that that there was anything amicable during Biden years. Biden picked up exactly where Trump left off before him and he escalated tensions with stuff like CHIPS act, ban on Chinese EVs and so on. There’s been a continuation of policy here across administration since Obama’s pivot to Asia when the US decided that China was the main adversary. Things have been steadily escalating, and now they’re entering into an openly hostile territory.

It certainly can, but there’s zero actual evidence to that’s happening. What we do see though is that turd reich is regressing along all of these metrics. Burgerlander military doctrine has been defeated by Iran. The economy of the turd reich is collapsing, and the society is tearing itself apart. It’s pretty clear that America is a failed social experiment at this point.

Whatever helps you sleep at night I suppose.

You look like you were painted by Picasso.

I love how you don’t let facts influence your opinion.

I mean they want that, but it’s just not happening with the way the tech works right now. Unless you have a deep understanding of the problem you have the model solve, then you have no way to evaluate whether it solved it correctly or not. And it’s basically like an evil genie where it will interpret your request in a dumbest way possible by default. So, you get decent results when you already know what the shape of the solution should be, and you give the model concrete direction on the approach to take, algorithms to use, and so on. And that’s why the whole idea of deskilling workers or replacing them with automation is not really working out. You’d need genuine artificial intelligence for that and LLMs aren’t it.

Right, there’s nothing wrong with disagreement because it just means people have different perspectives. Discussing these perspectives in a civilized fashion creates a more complete understanding for everybody. That’s what debates are meant for, people present their positions and defend them, so that the counterparty can point out problems or inconsistencies. And through this process you build shared understanding of things.

But when debate happens in our media is just a spectacle of idiots yelling at one another and talking over each other incoherently. And that’s presented as providing different views. There’s no depth, no substance, and no actual debate happening. It’s just a bunch of people yelling I’m right.

And that’s a broader problem in the media too now where there’s no more investigative journalism. The media outlets simply parrot whatever the official narrative is, there’s no analysis, no historical context, and no push back. In a sense, the only real debate happening is the one between mainstream and social media. And, in a way, it’s kind of hilarious how regular people do a better job explaining things now than professional news outlets. Hence why social media is winning the debate.

I’ve been using opencode for actual projects at work. DeepSeek v4 can code up a lot of stuff fairly confidently. If you give it clear requirements, tell it to make a phased plan, use TDD, and commit after each phase, it tends to produce decent code. I just do code reviews against the diff and then tell it to fix anything I don’t like. It’s also great for spelunking through large codebaes. You can easily trace through how an endpoint works for example, get it to write stuff like sample curl queries, etc.

But the thing is that you don’t actually work all that much faster. You still have to review everything. You have to actually manually use the app and make sure it works functionally. Like you basically can’t trust anything it does. So, it makes my life easier. I don’t have to look up API docs, figure out how random libraries work, or having to write a bunch of boilerplate. But it doesn’t replace me, and it doesn’t actually result in me working significantly faster.

Oh it’s very much that. Every single study that’s come out on companies adopting AI shows that it makes no meaningful difference to productivity. So, it’s very clearly just an excuse to do layoffs.