cars posted:

how did stealing things make Chinese fast food beat McDonalds

One big factor are the strong anti monopoly laws in China that especially punish foreign investors attempting to make large profits off IP monopolies. Qualcomm for example was fined like a billion dollars in 2015 for doing something we perceive as "normal" in the US - preferential pricing of licenses for Apple and other massive companies. Now they have to sell their IP for a flat rate to any size cell phone manufacturer. The flip side of this is that foreign companies have to bust ass to prove damages from IP violation and the bigger the real damages, the more likely they're already running afoul of anti monopoly laws. So imagine if Fat Tony's Burger Shack that sits across the street from McDonald's had access to the same supply chains at the same prices as Mcdonalds. Tony can immediately drop prices down to at least compete with McDonalds since 1. there's no parasitic corporate structure above Tony and 2. McDonalds can't rely on its one real competitive advantage which is supply chain management. So Tony is able to "duplicate" Mcdonalds in that Tony can create the exact same business at a smaller scale that is more desirable in its region than any chain could be. Realizing this Mcdonalds franchised off all its ~2500 Chinese locations with CITIC holding majority ownership. So i think the reference to "stealing" is not like, some local Inner Mongolia bigshot opening up a bunch of WcDonald's, it's that Mcdonald's is not allowed to protect its unique competitive advantages from widespread duplication. IMO

swampman posted:

cars posted:

how did stealing things make Chinese fast food beat McDonalds

One big factor are the strong anti monopoly laws in China that especially punish foreign investors attempting to make large profits off IP monopolies. Qualcomm for example was fined like a billion dollars in 2015 for doing something we perceive as "normal" in the US - preferential pricing of licenses for Apple and other massive companies. Now they have to sell their IP for a flat rate to any size cell phone manufacturer. The flip side of this is that foreign companies have to bust ass to prove damages from IP violation and the bigger the real damages, the more likely they're already running afoul of anti monopoly laws. So imagine if Fat Tony's Burger Shack that sits across the street from McDonald's had access to the same supply chains at the same prices as Mcdonalds. Tony can immediately drop prices down to at least compete with McDonalds since 1. there's no parasitic corporate structure above Tony and 2. McDonalds can't rely on its one real competitive advantage which is supply chain management. So Tony is able to "duplicate" Mcdonalds in that Tony can create the exact same business at a smaller scale that is more desirable in its region than any chain could be. Realizing this Mcdonalds franchised off all its ~2500 Chinese locations with CITIC holding majority ownership. So i think the reference to "stealing" is not like, some local Inner Mongolia bigshot opening up a bunch of WcDonald's, it's that Mcdonald's is not allowed to protect its unique competitive advantages from widespread duplication. IMO

ok thanks.

toyotathon posted:

is there a china thread? i found this interview super fascinating https://rupeindia.wordpress.com/2018/01/19/the-struggle-of-actually-building-socialism-an-interview-with-fred-engst/

thanks so much for posting this

tears posted:

http://mcmansionhell.com/

Commercial Horizontalization

The depletion of urban density was not just a matter of people moving to little boxes on winding streets. Business moved as well. Factories, once located in dense urban settings, moved to the suburbs, where massive horizontal plants were created to streamline the work process. After all, the assembly line works horizontally.

If you’ve ever traveled outside of Chicago, you pass through the exurb of Naperville. While also being a verifiable McMansion Hell (perhaps no group of people own more McMansions than the managerial class), the I-88 corridor from Naperville to Aurora offers one of the most spectacular arrays of office parks in existence. Uncommonly more than five floors and rarely more than ten, these monoliths languidly straddle the flat prairie landscape, neatly bundled up by ribbons of highway.

with this quote rattling round in my head while i do

JS: That’s the underlying historical thing that can happen, but it isn’t going to deal with the whole political struggle, which we’re now engaged in, because, of course, the white settler population has essentially had a historic 400-year pact with capitalism, which is that they will get the best of everything. Maybe that won’t be a lot, but it will be the best of the little. They will get the best of everything that is available in return for supporting capitalism and the U.S. empire and its conquest over other people, as well as its exploitation. Well, frankly, globalization and the desettlerization of North America is threatening that. How long can you have a population in which more and more people don’t actually work? I mean, you say the word ‘welfare’ in America and everybody’s supposed to picture a Black woman in a housing project. But the real welfare is for white middle-class people. You have entire office buildings and cities full of people who don’t actually produce anything. They move paper around, they bill people, they do things, but they don’t actually produce anything. Everything that is produced is produced somewhere else by somebody else. And the question is how long can that be maintained?

i dont think i will ever be able to explain how fascinated i am by american geogeraphy an layouts and the predominance of horizontal occupation of space over vertical in the usa does anyone have any reading recomendations on this i love this

I worked along that stretch for a month. you can take it!

tears posted:

i feel so confused here, when did the different brains theory get resurected as a thing? im going back to reading about ecconomic and drug trafficking, i cant handle this

kind of a weird counterfeminist backlash in the late 90s and early 00s that arose partly for cultural reasons and partly because PCR and MRI machines became far more ubiquitous and accessible to neuroscientists and research psychologists.... thus sex differences became a rich vein of low hanging fruit for researchers to look for their keys under the lamp-post like an Alabama sharpshooter and grist for the mill in the publish-or-die system. metaphor cocktail mmm

xipe posted:

RIP Bob Parry

https://consortiumnews.com/2018/01/28/robert-parrys-legacy-and-the-future-of-consortiumnews/

How Western Media's main source on "russiagate" responded to his death...

This completely wrong story is an appropriate tribute to Robert Parry's legacy of spreading lies in the service of brutally corrupt regimes that are at war with us.

He is, no doubt, hot-bunking it in hell with Lord Haw-Haw. Good riddance. https://t.co/polGXBBb5m

— PropOrNot ID Service (@propornot) January 29, 2018

littlegreenpills posted:

tears posted:

i feel so confused here, when did the different brains theory get resurected as a thing? im going back to reading about ecconomic and drug trafficking, i cant handle this

kind of a weird counterfeminist backlash in the late 90s and early 00s that arose partly for cultural reasons and partly because PCR and MRI machines became far more ubiquitous and accessible to neuroscientists and research psychologists.... thus sex differences became a rich vein of low hanging fruit for researchers to look for their keys under the lamp-post like an Alabama sharpshooter and grist for the mill in the publish-or-die system. metaphor cocktail mmm

biodeterminist theory of brain gender, but from the left

https://web.archive.org/web/20070820175157/http://www.aworldtowin.org/back_issues/1999-25/PolPot_eng25.htm posted:

To return to the four issues posed at the beginning of this article:
First, the CPK's handling of the Vietnam question: Vietnamese disdain for the revolution in Cambodia and attempts to subordinate it to their own national interests was becoming the main factor conditioning the development of the Cambodian revolution. That this was a condition, an external factor, cannot be emphasised too much, because this external factor did not determine the response of the Cambodian revolutionaries.

It should be kept in mind that the military connection and interpenetration of the two national liberation struggles made it possible for the Vietnamese to influence the course of the Cambodian struggle, but the opposite was also not impossible, and if an increasingly wrong line on the part of the VWP was a big problem for Cambodia, it was to prove even more disastrous for the masses of people in Vietnam.25 Vietnam was a problem for the Cambodian revolution, but it was also a big advantage. The US had been defeated there and it was full of people who had sacrificed everything for the anti-imperialist struggle. The fact that so many Cambodians lived in Vietnam and vice-versa was a potentially wide-open door through which a revolutionary line in Cambodia could have impact in the whole region. But the CPK couldn't see that. All they could see was the negative aspect of the situation. They couldn't see beyond their own conception of Cambodian national interests, any more than the Vietnamese revisionists could understand why they should be concerned about revolution in Cambodia. In response to the Vietnamese line that tended to reduce the Indochinese struggle to revolution in Vietnam and support for that in the other two countries, the CPK was equally incapable of seeing the need and possibility of spreading thorough-going, proletarian internationalist revolution throughout Indochina, in unity with the world's people (including Maoist China, a very important element in this situation).

Second, this, of course, raises the question of what kind of revolution they wanted to carry out. That was to become increasingly clear in the few years in which the CPK held countrywide political power, as we'll see in the next section. But already, these measures taken in 1973 herald the line that called for leaping over the stage of national democratic revolution and even socialism, which was to take an astonishing form after nation-wide liberation. The target was skewed: instead of focusing revolutionary fire on the US and the Lon Nol regime, private property in general was declared the enemy, in a country where most people had some property, and the greatest humiliation portrayed as the fact that some middle-class young men had motorcycles while Khmer Rouge fighters walked in the dust. (Note that for Tung Padevat, the fact that previously landless peasants had got land is not considered a factor that could fan their enthusiasm for revolution to go further; rather the conclusion is that their land should be confiscated.) The CPK's inability to even imagine the possibility of uniting the Indochinese people on a revolutionary basis was matched by its inability to grasp the importance of uniting the vast majority of people to make revolution in Cambodia.

Third, another grave portent was the handling of contradictions within the Party (particularly the unjust handling of returning cadre from Vietnam). As we have seen, the struggle against the "Vietnamese" influence in the CPK was in fact a two-line struggle within the Cambodian Party, an endeavour to chalk out a revolutionary line in conflict with the non-revolutionary line that had predominated. But because this struggle itself was seen from a nationalist perspective, it was summed up incorrectly as mainly a struggle against an external enemy (Vietnam and "Vietnamese minds"). This summation itself became an enormous obstacle to the Party's development, undermining the more revolutionary orientation that had won out. Because these questions were not treated politically in a straight-on fashion, which could have strengthened the understanding and unity of the CPK, this situation weakened the Party. Rather than learning from this error, it was to systematise this approach.

Lastly, the CPK needed to develop a critique of the political, ideological and military line of the Vietnamese Party, whose bearings were never firm and which had been increasingly drawn into the political and ideological orbit of the USSR. Such a criticism would have been essential for clarifying the road to liberation and socialism in Cambodia and uniting the Party, but it was no less desperately needed in Vietnam and Laos as well. This was one aspect of "foreign experience" that the CPK could ignore only at the risk of losing their own bearings and their ability to lead any revolution at all. The other was Mao's polemic against Soviet-led modern revisionism and his developing summation of the historical experience of the international communist movement, and the line and experience of the Cultural Revolution. But instead of making the ideology and interests of the international proletariat their starting point, they reacted to Vietnamese chauvinism on a nationalist basis themselves, making this contradiction insoluble. Despite the CPK's very real and acknowledged leadership over broad masses of the Cambodian people and its valuable and heroic role in the struggle against US imperialism, which made an important contribution to the international proletarian revolution, as the CPK developed a consolidated line in the course of the war, it was heading further and further up a blind alley.

...

New Democratic Revolution
In countries of this kind, as the Declaration of RIM succinctly puts it, "The target of the revolution... is foreign imperialism and the comprador-bureaucrat bourgeoisie and feudals, which are classes closely linked to and dependent on imperialism. In these countries, the revolution will pass through two stages: a first, new democratic revolution which leads directly to the second, socialist revolution. The character, target and tasks of the first stage of the revolution enables and requires the proletariat to form a broad united front of all classes and strata that can be won to support the new democratic programme. It must do so, however, on the basis of developing and strengthening the independent forces of the proletariat, including in appropriate conditions its own armed forces and establishing the hegemony of the proletariat among other sections of the revolutionary masses, especially the poor peasants. The cornerstone of this alliance is the worker-peasant alliance and the carrying out of the agrarian revolution (i.e., the struggle against semi-feudal exploitation in the countryside and/or the fulfilment of the slogan 'land to the tiller') occupies a central part of the new democratic programme."77

Even this first, new democratic stage of the revolution was not thoroughly carried out in Cambodia. Initially, the targets were correctly selected and the peasants mobilised in a war of national liberation and agrarian revolution, but even in the two years or so before liberation there was a tendency to confuse the aims. By 1976, contrasting Cambodia's "Super Great Leap Forward", one year after liberation, to China's mere Great Leap Forward seven years after liberation there, the CPK was to write: "Certainly our Party didn't hesitate. We didn't go through a period of land reform or social change. We leaped from a people's democratic revolution into socialism."78 This means that the difference was not just one of pace, but of road.

Cambodia's "co-operatives" were not a sequel to a revolutionary redistribution of the land. Instead, they simply amounted to confiscation of whatever land many peasants did have by a state whose economic plans would effectively chain them more tightly to the world market. The claim that Cambodia had become "basically a collective society"79 cannot be accepted if we accept the Manifesto's distinction between capitalism and socialism: "In bourgeois society, living labour is but a means to increase accumulated labour. In Communist society , accumulated labour is but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the labourer." In light of all we have seen about Democratic Kampuchea, which category best describes the existence of the masses of people there is obvious. The leap was not into socialism but into capitalism.