Tips to grow your North Korean Startup

I don't know about DPRK but I have been to Cuba for a 2 weeks vacation, so I had time to go out of the default tourists spots.

What I've seen is this: Those who have access to tourists or to the government are rich. Corruption is rampant as I've seen people bribing police right at the airport to have their things sorted out.

The mainstream corruption in society revolves around casa particulars and taxis. Essentially, you have right to rent a room and you have right to ride a taxi but there are strict limits on how much you can do it. So what more entrepreneurial people do? Simply distribute the business ownership to their friends and relatives on paper and keep growing and running their enterprises.

Also, there are two different types of shops and businesses: Locals only shops, locals only restaurants, locals only buses that are at very poor quality and I believe they are free or heavily subsidised and there are better quality versions that have prices similar to the European countries(prices way beyond a person with a salary can afford). So who do you think eats at these expensive restaurants? Yes, tourists - but also people who have access to tourists and people who work for the government.

One day a wandered around my casa particular in Havana and ended up in a place with very nice houses quite close to governmental buildings. I took some photos, enjoyed the place and ate at a restaurant. Then I noticed that the restaurant got very busy with military personel and well dressed people. Those were definitely not tourists, those were people from the nearby governmental buildings having a dinner after work.

Very interesting experience overall. Almost completely positive, full of life lessons about so many things including classes in the society where they are not supposed to exists. I'm also convinced that consumerism is not the only way to a happy life and abundance and excess are not necessarily the answer. The first week was hard, the second week I was completely happy to have only 2 options for beer and 1 option for chocolate.

You described quite well a few things here.

You missed to clarify that tourists use pesos convertibles which are artificially tied 1:1 to USD (1USD, 1 convertible) and that are basically what casas and taxi drivers accept. But you can totally go to local restaurants as a tourist (we did it a few times during our 3 weeks stay). And yeah, it can be sad to see how people lives there, and many try to flee but as you said makes you think about the real, deep impact of consumerism.

Actually that's not entirely correct. There's no rule about who uses what, anyone can convert between CUP(the official currency) and CUC(the pegged one) at an exchange(1:25 exchange rate) and shops would accept both but of course using CUC is more convenient when paying at a place where a meal costs half the salary of doctor.

I also went to local restaurants, they were extremely cheap but way too basic IMHO(However I think there was a special kind of a restaurant that is intended to be fancy but also for the locals. I was having a proper fish meal and a beer for about equivalent of 5$ in CUP at one of those). However I was told that I can't take any other bus than Viazul(the fancy tourist buses) for travelling between cities. Not that I would want to travel in one of those anyway, definitely not comfortable or safe to travel.

Here is one of the buses that the regular Cubans were traveling: https://imgur.com/a/jIynZMZ

For some reason, communists suck at automobile making.

OH! By the way, apparently CUC was discontinued a year ago in 1st of January 2021.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_convertible_peso

When I was there, some Cubans offered us a lobster meal. Some fisherman had brought them in, and of course they knew the tourists could pay for it. So since this seemed to be illegal, they arranged for us to drive to their house, and then immediately boarded up the garage so our car wasn't visible from the street.

Inside we got the lobsters as promised, maybe the only good food we had apart from the resorts. It came with some extremely stringy mangoes that I don't want to try again.

They also had friends come over to offer cigars and those peculiar Cuban shirts, I think taken from a factory. At least that was their story.

On the other side, they seemed to have a desire to buy clothes, in particular sports clothes like basketball tops. We didn't have that with us but we were told they'd swap the cigars for a top easily. Even just a shirt like you might wear for working in the City would fetch a lot of cigars, apparently.

Relax, I'm not American and the place is full of tourists and happy locals(not all, but it's fine. In which country everyone is happy?).

On the bright side, I never went to Saudi Arabia. I really don't like murderous regimes, especially those who suppress and kill journalists and get away with it because all US presidents want to sell them weapons and stuff.

Cuba is equivalent to NK? Doesn't Cuba mostly incarcerate journalists, while in NK people are publicly executed for importing Squid Game?

The embargo has had zero positive effect. Why pointlessly punish the people and strangle their economic livelihood just because you hate the government? We don’t do it to other countries with equally bad or worse governments. After reaching half a century it’s pretty clear it was pointless torture.

And besides, I’m not sure if there’s a single case of such actions truly helping the people. Authoritarians thrive when they can point to another country as their source of economic troubles. America’s greatest success came from endlessly pushing its consumer goods and media at other countries.

Serious question, not trying to start a debate. How does abject poverty in an openly communist country make you think about the "deep impact of consumerism?"

> For some reason, communists suck at automobile making.

Do you not think that embargoes have some degree of impact on this?

America has killed far more people in the name of various regimes than Cuba has.

Cuba gives free healthcare to its people and runs the largest medical school in the world [1] for free, with the explicit purpose of training foreign doctors so they can help their underprivileged communities.

Meanwhile, in the US, the richest country in the world, people are dying because they can't afford life-saving insulin. [2]

Life expectancy is higher in Cuba than the US! [3]

It's not all black and white. Every country does good things and bad things. You just choose to ignore the bad things one country does and solely focus on them for another one.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELAM_(Latin_American_School_of... [2] https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/rise-patients... [3] https://countryeconomy.com/countries/compare/cuba/usa?sc=XE2...

I'm not @darkwater but I will use this question to try to put my thoughts together a bit.

So, on my first week it was hard. I was working in very central London and I had access to peak consumers options. I like it, I was used to have anything that crossed my mind being readily accessible for me. Except for shorts that week, apparently. My order from Amazon did not arrive and I was trusting Amazon enough to skip going to a high street shop to buy one up until the last day.

So I flew to Cuba with no short pants. Turns out its very hard to buy clothes in Cuba, I didn't know how locals manage to do it and I was out of luck. If you stay at a resort, there are shops in the hotel but I wasn't going to stay in a resort. I found out that there's a shopping mall in Havana and you can even use your credit card to do purchases(I went there with very little cash as my research indicated that ATMs work fine. In reality, not that fine). The mall was nothing like the ones I was used to and the shops sell knock offs at original prices.

Anyway, I was for a rough start so I was forced to improvise and not follow my initial plan. Later the things stabilised, I was able to find an ATM that will let me withdraw cash from my HSBC account but by the time I already befriended a few local people who would give me a glimpse into the actual daily life in Cuba. I went to the places I was planing to go, great beaches and everything but my mind got occupied with the way everything works in Cuba, so I kept paying attention.

First week, I was missing my routine in London. The snacks, the entertainment, even the food. I was feeling like missing out and I had no idea how to enjoy life without those things.

Then I realised that I was feeling bad because I was expecting to spend my time the way I spend it in London but I was not in London. The consumerist lifestyle in London has defined my expectation and I was annoyed because those expectations are not met by Cuba. A nice restaurant would take the edge of it but the core problem persisted.

Then I started looking inside. Do I really need to spend money for enjoyment? Do I really need to taste a different beer every time and judge it? Does my pizza needs to be proper Italian? Do I need advertisements to give me ideas to do or buy something? I found out that no, I don't need ads and I don't need to occupy my mind with the decision making of the kind if lager I should drink tonight. Instead of riding the amusement park of consumerism, I can simply be curios and explore!

My second week was much more chill. I knew which beer I like, I like Cristal and I have no interest in Bucanero or Presidente. Big deal, it's a nice beer and available pretty much everywhere. Maybe Heineken is better but I don't care anymore, that's not something that I would spend time on.

I need something sugary? Well, it's not available on every corner so I will just not have it now and If I still want it I will buy one of the few snacks that are available. It is alright not to have it now.

I found myself to consume much less and be quite content with it and I found out that I was enjoying the stuff I consumed much more. My actions were no longer guided by the consumer infrastructure and the simplest things were giving me more joy than the speciality stuff that I had to buy to out do the regular things I buy. A fish at a local restourant tastes much better when I'm hungry than the fish I would eat at the restaurant that is highly rated and endorsed by influencers.

Don't get me wrong, I do value and enjoy the variety of food, items and entertainment in the western societies however I no longer believe that these things are the main ingredients for a happy life or society. It's nice to have those things, it brings so much culture too but if you think that your life will be less fulfilling without those you will be wrong. These are nice to have but there is a danger to give up on actually fulfilling stuff in order to live a consumerist life. Let's not try to optimize for having ever more food and gadgets and things.

There are two things being confused here. Cuba wouldn't have an auto industry if it wasn't communist, unless it adopted weird protectionist policies- no comparable countries do. Therefore, it relies on imported vehicles. Partly because of the embargo, supply of these is limited- particularly in the case of personal cars, the government had better things to spend limited hard currency reserves on while people could keep the 50s American cars from before the Revolution running (often with the motors replaced with smaller, more modern imported diesels).

However, that 'bus' seems to be a locally modified truck, probably a Soviet-built ZiL-164. There is definitely an argument to be made that the cars and trucks produced under Communism, both in the USSR itself and in client states like East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Poland, weren't as good as their contemporary Western equivalents for all sorts of reasons.

No I don't think so. Cars made by the Soviets sucked too. Even cars made by East Germany sucked. They made amazing spacecraft and terrible cars.

I wrote a comment and then thought "I should really look up where the term consumerism comes from".

Because I didn't know and maybe I should. I spent half my life unaware of the origin of "capitalism".

In the early 20th century, "consumerism" was supposedly used to mean something like "consumer protection".

But in the mid 20th century, it was apparently adopted as a preferred term to "capitalism" in order to contrast Western economies with communism.

Then, by the 60s or so, it morphed into something like the modern sense of "a policy of encouraging consumption".

And what you are describing is part of the misery they are condemned to by the regime. They cannot trade normally, everything is treated as trafficking and the hihger layer has privileges, control and are corrupted and live from spoiling the rest.

You want to do something by yourself? Brive me, because it is illegal or you will have trouble. And anyway, if I want, you can have trouble any day, because you did something illegal. Also, the brived people are also in trouble, because receiving a brive is illegal also. Now you have a system where anyone, at any time can be arbitrarily accused of criminal actions. Criminal actions that the government allows to happen depending on their interests.

They do not allow the right to have dignity for the people there. It is really sad. The only truth is that the system imposed there works because of corruption, literally. It is the way it works: I do not let you eat bread, but you need bread. So I give you whatever I want, if there is scarcity you can do nothing, except illegal things to survive, such as trading.

BTW, some misconception here that I see so often: capitalism is not consuming a lot or too wildly. In fact, capitalism is not possible without saving, literally.

In order to raise our lives level there were previous savings that were reinvested in process improvement, which eventually kept raising our life standards. Capitalism is exactly about that: same product at better price or higher quality products.

We humans always try (yes, left wing people also!) to buy at the lowest price and sell at the highest price (in general terms). That is why competition is good, because it does not let business abuse a monopolistic position and the prices drop.

People try to associate excessive consumption to capitalism. I do not think it is a trait of capitalism per se.

Yes, choose between jail or death trying to make the former a good thing if you will. None should be allowed.

> Cuba gives free healthcare to its people

I think you do not have basic notions of economy. How can something be free? If it is free, it is because someone is doing the work (the doctors). If the doctors do not get paid a market price they are being exploited (forced to work for less). So that is where it is paid. You get it for free, yes, at the expense of those people that could have a better life and in the name of the good for everyone else they are converted into a simple tool for the propaganda of their leaders.

I wonder if that is ethical. I mean: forcing others to do a work that you consider good for the rest without giving them a chance for alternatives. Are those people worse than the people that deserve that health care? Should they be a means to a goal? There are two kinds of humans? The ones that are a means (doctors, rich people, etc.) and the ones that get benefits from them (the users or receivers of those things). No, I say no. Noone should be the means of anyone else. If we want something we ask for permission or cooperate. The rest is just propaganda.

You paint a good picture of Cuba, but what is life as a jaded resident of The City like?

Indeed, the rampant consumerism of our current day is powered by government, not capitalism. The US government actively promotes consumption through tax policy, monetary polity, and spending policy.

Crazy what a blockade by the worlds largest economy 90 miles away for decades can do huh?

I think you do not have basic notions of economy and what you just said is just propaganda.

There's no two kinds of humans - from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs. The doctors will get free healthcare too, if they need it. Trying to put market value on medical care is inhumane and prioritizes an economic system over human life.

I'm not sure why you're talking about rich people here, but because you brought it up - the accumulation of capital is what's truly exploitative.

Value doesn't come from speculative markets, but from the sum of labor put into it. Rich people realized that if they use some of their capital to provide the means of production, they can skim off surplus value from the workers putting in the labor.

In other words, even though they don't do anything productive to create the value, they still take value that others created. That is exploitation.

Well one thing about going to a poor communist country is you still notice that a lot of people are doing regular people things like sending their children to school or dance lessons, having weddings, playing music, dancing, and drinking alcohol. The corollary to random consumer goods being in constant shortages is that other things are much more “affordable” than they’d be in a market economy.

Cuba is not really in abject poverty so much as they have a command-control economy (so some things are subsidized to be much cheaper than in our economic system, and others aren’t) that is pretty corrupt. They are definitely not a rich country on average or at p50, just not in abject poverty. According to some sources I found on Google their nominal/PPP GDP is actually pretty middling, which is likely due to what I mentioned about a lot of high-standard-of-living services being available despite low availability of goods.

The shortages of things are definitely bad. But the lack of variety in consumer goods really isn’t, and is probably what the parent comment was pointing out. There are not a million different things to buy as seen on TV/Instagram, but that in itself doesn’t appear to have a huge impact on life.

The use of consumerism as a euphemism for capitalism is a (alleged) historical fact.

From what I read, consumerism did not have the negative connotation mid-century, whereas capitalism did.

I don't know how it happened, but seemingly "consumerism" acquired a similarly negative connotation, which is a Sisyphean cycle with euphemisms.

As I understand it, "capitalism" was an invention of the writers of the Communist Manifesto, while ironically "communism" was not. When a concept is developed purely for oppositional purposes, it can and often does attract people to defend it.

But in some sense, I feel like it doesn't really exist due to its origin. It amounts to the status quo, plus a word that lets people feel like they are opposing (or supporting) some one or thing rather than fog.

Its called “making an example”. The Cuban people mostly suffer for their government’s alignment with the Soviets and deciding to put Nukes 90 miles from Miami.

We dont care that they are communists. We deal with all kinds of fucked up regimes around the world but the key difference is none of them have ever dared challenge us militarily with Nukes right off our border.

Cuba is basically perpetually fucked as punishment for that decision and its done as a warning to anyone else that might get in bed nearby with one of our existential enemies (Russia, China).

Do you know of a clear explanation how the US prevents Cuba from getting cars?

A lot of Americans haven't owned American cars since the 70s.

Other Caribbean islands import vehicles that are neither American nor even available in the US.

I know nothing about the auto industry, but South America is not that far away, and apart from tariffs, isn't it demonstrably economically viable to ship things long distances over the ocean? Because people do it, that's where all the consumerism comes from.

I would definitely not want to live under that regime. Cubans are generally happy people with good lives but they lack the opportunities for higher ambitions. Corrupt, planned economy is not something to be excited for nor is the being the lowest class in a “classless” society. They are also missing out about the world outside of their borders due to the restrictions on their communications.

It’s just that the western lifestyle is not without its own faults. There’s lessons to be learned about being happy without being full blown consumerists.

> The corollary to random consumer goods being in constant shortages is that other things are much more “affordable” than they’d be in a market economy.

No way for their wealth, to begin with, and why you should choose how people choose? They are animals?

Everything that is cheaper than its possible price is literally being paid by someone, with their labour or by others. Free things, literally, do not exist. And things below real price, do not exist. For that to exist someone along the way has to pay it with time or money or forced by slavery. Please keep in mind this every time someone talks about free. Free means "someone else pays". And someone else pays is as selfish and inconsiderate as if I went to you and I demanded from you an arbitrary effort on the basis that you owe me something for nothing.

> Also, there are two different types of shops and businesses: Locals only shops, locals only restaurants, locals only buses

This reminds me of the first MacDonald’s in Moscow near Pushkinskaya Square. I remember there being a separate section downstairs for tourists/people from away. However this is a childhood memory, and perhaps I’m not remembering correctly?

Do you think that's the conventional wisdom?

The Cubans that left Cuba and live in the US, do you think their grudge is over the Cuban missile crisis?

I don't wish to debate the question of what actually drives US policy. I am just wondering whether you recognize other points of view and if you think many people agree with you or you see yourself in a minority.

They could end the blockade at any time.

Lots of things in the US are subsidized too. We still have taxes that pay for “free” things like using public roads.

I am just describing the structure of the Cuban economy where market forces are less involved in how many of something gets produced for consumption. I don’t think it’s great either because it leads to food shortages. Just pointing out (having been to Cuba myself) they aren’t in abject poverty and in some ways punch above their weight for their economic reality (and what someone might think knowing how often they have goods shortages) due to some activites being prioritized over others.

False claims. First, it is an embargo. Second, not all products are blocked at all. Food and medicines can be freely bought. But wait... who blocks the entrance of those? Oh, yes... the customs.

Try to send dollars: the regime will keep them and will give CUPs to relatives of cubans.

I have heard (not confirmed data) that in the customs they can take as much as half of what you send. But yes, the embargo is the problem. Thieves.

I tell you from the point of view of a person that knows what happens there.

You are welcome.

The idea that if Cuba can't import new cars from America, then it can't get them from anywhere is just silly. America imports tons of new cars from Asia and Europe, as does every other nation in Latin America. Cuba just imports fewer of them due to financial constraints, as the typical wage is 20,200 CUP or about $780/month.

And Cuba does have some new cars. People focus on the old cars because it's so visually striking (and those cars are so beautiful!) but it's more a marker of poverty than America somehow threatening to torpedo any ship that brings new cars to Cuba, or convincing all the global auto manufacturers to never sell any cars to Cuba. There are modern BMWs, Toyotas, etc in Cuba right now. Just not many of them. Expectedly, BMW is doing brisk business selling much cheaper motorcycles and scooters in Cuba, which is also true of other Latin American nations.

What makes you think it’d be any different if the embargo were lifted?

True, capitalism was an invention of them :)

I consider myself capitalist in mindset and I am more mean spending than I would like to admit. I like to consume what is "necessary".

I'd rather use my money in ways that make a more positive impact. Though I am not rich enough for that I guess.

> Cuba is basically perpetually fucked

Well not perpetually. They could get back into the US's good graces if they were to embrace Freedom (tm) and adopt a government that looks something like what our 51st state would look like.

I will explain to you again, I have researched this topic deeply and for a long time. "will get free healthcare too". In order to get healthcare, someone provides it.

1. if a doctor spends time to provide free healthcare because a regime says they must, they are exploited. This is one option. 2. if a doctor does it and is paid, someone has to pay that bill for the doctor. If the doctor is free for you, someone else is paying. 3. you can pay yourself.

Those are essentially the three options. None of those are free. In 1. the doctor pays, in 2. a third person pays and in 3. you pay directly. No matter how hard you try, in every option you come up with someone will pay the bill. With time or with money or with any other exchange or will be pointed with a gun to do it.

>Every country does good things and bad things. You just choose to ignore the bad things one country does and solely focus on them for another one.

I agree. Comparing two countries in an unbiased way is very difficult.

>people are dying because they can't afford life-saving insulin

If I develop type 2 diabetes, do you think my life expectancy would be longer in Cuba? Who can I trust for relevant statistics and information?

please look up dollar amounts on corporate welfare in US

capitalism is as much about wealth accumulation via rent seeking behaviors

The US doesn’t block other countries from trading with Cuba. Only the US itself doesn’t trade with Cuba. Embargo, not blockade.

Cuba is under an almost complete blockade, that’s why it’s poor. And despite this blockade, it’s doing better than many other central and South American countries that are capitalist.

It also bans ships that anchored in Cuba from anchoring in the US. Who's gonna choose lil Cuba over the US right next door?

Blockade seems appropriate.

The U.S. does prevent trade with other countries.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_embargo_against_...

“In 1999, President Bill Clinton expanded the trade embargo by also disallowing foreign subsidiaries of U.S. companies to trade with Cuba.“

“The United States has threatened to stop financial aid to other countries if they trade non-food items with Cuba.”

I was there in the brief time when U.S. citizens were permitted by the U.S. government to visit on cruises. During my stay, I was constantly reminded that I was disallowed to spend money there on unsanctioned activities.

>the accumulation of capital is what's truly exploitative

When I think of "accumulation of capital" in modern society, semiconductor fabs are the ultimate example.

I can't imagine disagreeing that the building of such factories encompasses most of the world via supply chains and most of the exploitation in it.

But I feel like there's an ambiguity and I don't understand what is to be our goal.

Should we not have "accumulations of capital"? That is, should we tear down (and hopefully recycle) all of the incredibly expensive factories?

Or should we have accumulations of capital that are not owned by specific people? What is ownership?

I don't know about the real Mafia, but in fiction, there is the trope of the wealthy mob boss who owns nothing on paper, in order to avoid the law, but relies on relationships to define what he has.

On the other hand, many large companies are presently not majority owned by any human being, but mainly by collective entities like index funds. Is that good enough? Or is that irrelevant to an economic system because some people own more index funds than others?

The Cuban regime is responsible for its sins. The US is responsible for the consequences of its embargo. The whole point of these sanctions it to put pressure on the sanctioned economy; the more pain the economy experiences, and by extension the people who live there, the better. It is disingenuous to claim that US policy is not leading to economic suffering there.

How is this any different from the U.S., except the level of material available is slightly greater?

This is pretty much also how government works in San Francisco.

That exists everywhere in the world.

The only difference is that Cuba doesn't have the opportunity to exploit foreign nations to enrich itself (and get even fatter on taxes).

The original reason for the embargo was because when the lands were expropiated the americans forbid to basically trade with cubans to not trade with stolen property due to the revolution.

I tell you if you are not aware of the original reason. The original reason makes sense.

I understand that normal people is who suffer. That is true and sad.

Yes, but since I have never been to London, I am curious about this western consumerist lifestyle.

You're being coy, in not describing the things you find so tiresome.

Before Brexit, I worked for a company that opened a branch near London, in order to access the European market. I didn't make it my overriding goal to go there, but I probably could've, and a co-worker went there and subsequently got married and stayed.

The market is the will of people. Any alternative thing is going to be more incorrectly adapted to the demand from people.

No. The reason is the regime they have. More than anything else.

How better? No economic data here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Latin_American_and_Car.... I can say there were riots last July due to a lack of medicines and food.

What makes you think that the US would blockade Cuba if it would have no effect?

If you develop type-2 diabetes, you may be able to cure it by not eating any sugar for a few weeks. And, keep it off after, if you never eat sugar except with enough fiber. I.e., apples ok, donuts & froot loops not. That is good advice for all of us: there is never a good reason to give yourself type-2 diabetes.

For many people, cinnamon is a good temporary treatment for type-2 diabetes. But some people have a bad reaction to enough cinnamon, so start light.

Type 1 diabetes is much bigger trouble: you need to inject insulin, because your pancreas is damaged, probably forever.

Probably few Cubans have type-2 diabetes. It is a 1st-world problem; another name is Processed Food disease.

> If I develop type 2 diabetes, do you think my life expectancy would be longer in Cuba?

I think that depends on your socioeconomic class and your insurance in the US. I'd say for the median citizen, life expectancy in Cuba with diabetes is probably higher as insulin cost isn't an issue and they do very frequent health check-ins that would be prohibitively expensive for a lot of Americans.

But seeing how you post on HN, chances are you have better healthcare available to you than the median American...

Then again, it seems like Cuba has some pretty cool homegrown diabetes treatments available: https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/article/Let-s-open-the-d...

> Who can I trust for relevant statistics and information?

That's a good question and I don't have a good answer. Consensus internationally seems to be that the Cuban healthcare system is legit, but I must admit i haven't dug all that deep.

"Free" as in "my neighbor has an apple tree".

Who's the last government official you had to bribe?

Given that pre-revolution Cuba was not exactly democratic either, and had insane concentration of wealth, it's arguable whether that stolen property can be considered legitimately owned in the first place. A government of robbers announcing that what they robbed is legitimately owned doesn't make it so.

(The same, of course, applies to the post-revolution government - I'm not trying to claim that it's somehow better.)

To be fair, doing things for show - basically, to placate one's potential electorate - is par for the course in American politics. In case of Cuba, the embargo is there to placate the Cuban expats in Florida, mostly. Any actual effects that it does or does not have is secondary to that goal.

The market is one-dollar-one-vote. If you start with an equitable distribution of wealth, then sure, it's the will of the people. But if you start with wealth being disproportionally skewed towards a very small class - as is the case in every real-world developed economy today - the result is oligarchy, not democracy.

The problem with mainstream economic right is that it ignores that, or assumes that markets will eventually equalize naturally somehow. The problem with mainstream economic left is that it wants to strangle the market instead of freeing it from oligarchy.

Accumulation of capital is in the context of ownership, yes. Capitalism is a system in which ownership of capital is indistinguishable from any other property, which makes it possible to accumulate it indefinitely. The end result, in the absence of some countervailing force (such as anti-monopoly legislation), is its concentration in the hands of a few oligopolies. Which translates to concentration of power, and strangles democracy.

Corporations are also "collective entities" (of shareholders). The real question in this case is who effectively controls the entity. If the entity represents thousands of people, but is controlled by a few, you still get oligopolies and concentration of power. Something like a co-op is another story, although even there it all depends on how its governance is structured.

Right, because I'm the kind of person who posts on HN and has an incredible amount of privilege.

I think the means of production should be owned by the workers.

In this case, this could either be through a coop (e.g. those factories are directly owned by the workers working in them, decisions are made democratically) or through a worker's state (the factories are owned by the state as a representation of the workers - this is what the USSR tried to do, but failed miserably at).

I think any other scenario has people leeching off the work of the folks actually producing those semiconductors - e.g. exploitation.

Index funds don't do anything to help this - just cause it's a bigger group of strangers stealing the products of the worker's labor doesn't make it any less exploitative.

And nobody's saying we should tear down the factory, we just shouldn't let it be owned by people who have nothing to do with the work being done so they can make money from nothing but the fact they had money already.

>But seeing how you post on HN, chances are you have better healthcare available to you than the median American...

A family member with the condition relied on Medicare. That seems like the most likely scenario.

>Consensus internationally seems to be that the Cuban healthcare system is legit, but I must admit i haven't dug all that deep.

Neither have I. But this is interesting. A little over ten years ago, there were reports of "mass deaths" of patients of a mental hospital in Cuba due to the cold.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cuba-trial/cuba-tries-doc...

I guess it's due to my imagination, and the things I read when I was younger, but the more something is understated, the more it's downplayed, and the more details that are left out, the more horrifying it can be. Sometimes I have the impression that other people don't ask questions, either out loud, or in their mind. That they know where to stop, as if there were a nice neat line that separated us from what's beyond the pale.

How can you die of cold in Cuba is one question I think of. Well, it was down to about 38F, and reportedly the glass from the windows and doors was missing. Also the blankets.

Next question would be why was that stuff missing? Perhaps it was taken and sold?

Why would it be sold? Perhaps because it was worth vastly more on the open market than the staff were paid in salaries?

All rhetorical questions in my head, not questions for you particularly.

This story plants in my mind the idea of doctors to whom blankets and pieces of glass are such wealth.

Whenever I read a comment about the Cuban health care system, I will think of it.

>If you develop type-2 diabetes, you may be able to cure it by not eating any sugar for a few weeks.

Developing type-2 diabetes will be a process that happens over several decades. So which few weeks is it that I need to stop eating sugar? I need to know because I was going to make cookies.

>there is never a good reason to give yourself type-2 diabetes

I've taken medication that progressively leads to type 2 diabetes for about 17 years. You don't think I have a good reason? Or you just never imagined one?

>Probably few Cubans have type-2 diabetes. It is a 1st-world problem; another name is Processed Food disease.

Being able to get medication that causes type 2 diabetes as a side effect might be a first world thing too. I would be concerned about that.

>Type 1 diabetes is much bigger trouble: you need to inject insulin

People inject insulin for type 2 diabetes; I'm not sure what you are referring to.

> Free things, literally, do not exist

If free things don't exist, what are for-sale things made of?

There is no mainstream economic left.

We call it "lobbying" here and it's only available to people far richer than most of us.

Medication that causes type-2 diabetes is news to me. Most people get type-2, or insulin resistance, as a consequence of damaging their liver, and soaking in excess uric acid. Maybe your medication is hepatotoxic? If you are partially insulin-resistant, maybe it takes extra insulin to get the needed effect?

Robert Lustig has been curing fatty-liver-disease-induced type 2 diabetes in children by eliminating sugar from their diet. Of course kids get better faster than adults.

I would expect someone who knows he has induced type-2 diabetes to already be pretty damn careful about sugar intake...

But: I am not a physician. None of the above is competent medical advice.

That said, Robert Lustig says most physicians are woefully uninformed about liver pathology.

"Left" and "right" are relative terms, not absolute. Mainstream economic left is whatever the majority of people who are left of center hold to.

This is something people here either choose to ignore or can't understand. "Cuba has free healthcare" -- at a very high human cost. When the government controls all resources and gets to make all decisions, it's easy to put all that into a free mega med school for the world. The USSR had an impressive space program but people were dirt-poor and oppressed. That said, the famous healthcare system was built during the time the country was being heavily subsidized by the USSR. Today the country is so decapitalized hospitals are in ruins and there is corruption at every level because doctors earn so little.

The economic left isn't allowed into the mainstream of politics.

"Left" is not a synonym for "socialism".

Socialism is a word that can be defined in absolute terms. But left/right is defined relative to society as a whole. Whoever is left of center in political mainstream is the economic left, by definition.

For Cuba to be fine, UK doesn't need to be bad. I do love the British way of life and the economic and social freedoms in the UK.

My point is that, happiness and life satisfaction are not tied to the abundance of consumer goods. When you are sad you don't have to buy something, it's alright to have a few options and your happiness level doesn't need to change by your next purchase. You can experience that in Cuba.

oh, didn't know about the CUC going away! TIL

So then the US is equivalent to the DPRK for wanting to put Julian Assange and Edward Snowden in prison?

An oligarchy serves itself from the regulators to keep its power. In a free market they would not be able to abuse that power to get privileges.

So the problem you see there is mostly a regulation problem, not a wealth inequality problem.

I do not understand your question. But my point is that things are not done by magic.

Someone works on them, someone gets the material (if it is a product). Someone spends time.

If a machine does it, someone created the machine (it is usually many people for a single industrial machine) and someone bought it.

There is literally always, someone, at some point in time that paid with time and/or money to trade something. Even if someone gives away something for free from her effort, it is the person who did the effort who"paid" in that case.

There is no such thing as free and coming from nowhwere. Someone pays the price. Voluntarily or not is another matter.

That is why I criticize a lot when someone says that we can get xyz for free. No. There will still be work involved. The manufacturing, the delivery, the service... whatever. So if we want something for free we should think who is paying that. I guess most of us do not want to work for free. In general terms, I do not want, I could do an exception... but not in general. So when we ask for others to do things for free what we are saying is that someone should not get its part of reward or that someone else has to pay it for us, making those people a means to our ends. I would not call that social cooperation.

GDP isn't a measure of human development or happiness. Cuba has lower infant mortality and higher life expectancy than most countries on the same continent, despite the brutal (and illegal) blockade by the US. They're doing a great deal with very little, which if anything suggests the "regime" is very effective.

There were some protests in Cuba, of course as usual presented in the western media as anti-government. Unsurprisingly, they were dwarfed by pro-government counter-protests.

Seems like you're trying to define words in a way that makes the actual state of affairs in the USA impossible to describe.

No matter if all leftists are removed from society, leftism must still be said to be half of what remains.

Nothing in mainstream USA politics should be described as "economic left."

I am really interested in knowing what "exploiting foreign nations" means for you.

Exploiting is what Cuba does with its doctors when they send them abroad and take 70% and kidnap their passports as if they were animals, or when you are assigned an arbitrary government salary for the sake of it without any possibility of alternatives.

Please explain to me what exploiting is: paying less than what you think they deserve? Note that those exploited foreign countries get investment from outside to improve lives of people there, not to worsen them, otherwise those people would not take a foreigner company job in the first play.They usually pay more than local companies except a few exceptions FYI. At least in Vietnam. In Vietnam working for an american, korean, japanese company means you are mostly blessed.

I know the factories topic well from Vietnam. If you want we can talk about why that is not exploiting but what Cuba does to its citizens is indeed. There is a big difference.

>Do you know of a clear explanation how the US prevents Cuba from getting cars?

It doesn't directly. It just makes it harder for Cuba to obtain hard currency to buy new cars.

> There is literally always, someone, at some point in time that paid with time and/or money to trade something.

But how did the trade get started?

Does it go back into an infinite past? An infinite series of trades, with neither an end, nor even beginning?

Otherwise it would seem something must be free.

Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creatio_ex_nihilo

I will add that for everybody who has type-2 diabetes as a side effect of medication, there must be tens or hundreds of thousands who came by it much more accidentally (except insofar as it is a direct consequence of phenomenally, catastrophically, absurdly harmful public policy still in force in the US).

I'm referring to the influence a master nation exerts spiritually, psychologically, and materially on another, and its peoples, for the purpose of enriching itself materially.

Cuba's exploitation of its doctor is a piece (one I do not have a full-understanding of, nor the care) of a greater whole.

Slavery and exerting power on a select group of people is obvious, and clear to see -- but the boundaries are clear and isolated.

Colonialism and exerting power on a whole peoples is less obvious, and harder to see -- because its boundaries are muddy and the things it affects are innumerable.

We can go even more high-level, but I do not know yet how to describe it.

I am uninterested in isolated "pieces" of the greater puzzle. In my view, they are ever-changing and indicative of greater causes; ones that are systemic, all-encroaching, and much more valuable to identify and root out---if I want the isolated incidents to stop fractaling, and reappearing.

Isolated injustices, like Cuba's, are of little concern to me. This is not my battle; it is the battle of the Cuban peoples. My battle is against the Rube Goldberg machine of my humanity, and the rest.

>Cubans are generally happy people with good lives

Some, but definitely not most. Step out of the touristic areas sometime and you will see. Poverty, poor healthcare, slow, overpriced internet, blackouts, food shortages, very low wages and very high prices, some places only get tap water for a few hours a day (sometimes every few days)... Such good lives they have.

> Colonialism and exerting power on a whole peoples is less obvious, and harder to see

Give me examples of colonialism nowadays. Or what you consider colonialism.

For me exploiting is only one thing: forcing the other part to do something under threat or coaction.

Namely: "we should pay more to x, y, z" is not exploiting. Going to them and forcing them to work for us, it is. When someone does not have alternative and you have something to offer, that is not exploiting, even if it looks like little to us. The solution for these people to get more is to have more people trying to employ them, then salaries get higher. This is a relatively slow process, but it happens (it happened in history).

We go to less developed nations because it is cheaper. True. And they benefit from it. Are they worse than us? No, it is just their countries did not reach the same conditions yet. But you would say: hey, we should pay them more, give them a better place to live, blabla, which I get, it is ok, I am with you in part, but there is a problem: people buy the products that are cheaper for the same kind of product. And it makes sense: you will not pay more than you need for something (I mean a meaningful extra amount that limits what you can do, not one cent more or less, of course), since you have a limited amount of money, which is resources.

So at the end you have a chain of supply where if you raise the prices much, people will stop buying. If people stop buying, people in developing countries go unemployed. It is all a chain. So now you would ask: how do you raise the salaries for these people? Letting many employers, I mean as many as possible, enter the country, because that means that employers start competing for the employees and the salaries get higher. They cut on their profits if they cannot find workers.

This is how it works. Many people do not understand it. I have been there, working there, living there in places where this happens. And the difference between some of these people having an employment that is probably three times and health care insurance (I talk about Vietnam, but this happens in many developing countries in similar ways) is that the sister of one of those guys does not end up doing what you are thinking and instead goes to university with the help of the family.

This is the reason why I cannot call that exploiting. They improve their lives, eventually they will learn and compete with us (they already do in some areas or are starting to).

I find very hypocrite people complaining about better conditions for others (we all want that I guess) when it is not them who pay the bill.

There is no replacement for this way of developing IMHO, and it has been the model of success, with all its problems.

Forced redistribution is awful to make people wealthy, even if it looks counter-intuitive, because we all have a tendency to think that if someone has a lot and someone has too little, then we take away from one and give to another.

But what many people do not take into account is that doing that kills the incentive to create the wealth in the first place.

It has always existed. When men collected food and survived they shared. If there is an surplus of something you do not need, what do you do with it? Eventually, I guess, they started bartering. Bartering is a primitive way of trading. That trading is possible accumulating enough, otherwise you would need it all for yourself.

I do not think it is difficult to see the beginning of these patterns, they seem relatively natural to me: if I can plant a big field of potatoes and you can hunt well, we assess the cost of each activity and x kg of potatoes equal y kg of meat.

I think you are mixing the fact of something being free as in "no money involved" with the fact that time is "money" or that spending time doing something is also money: it is consuming time, which is also a kind of capital.

So you could pay in coins, in sheep, in yarn, with your time or in whatever. That is not important, it is still an exchange and equivalent to trading.

Cuba in the 50s was the 3nd wealthies country in Hispanic America. I think it was after Argentina, not sure if Venezuela. Now it is in the poor side of things, and Hispanic America is not too wealthy...

> It has always existed. When men collected food and survived they shared. If there is an surplus of something you do not need, what do you do with it? Eventually, I guess, they started bartering. Bartering is a primitive way of trading. That trading is possible accumulating enough, otherwise you would need it all for yourself.

This is Adam Smith's just-so story, but he was wrong - no society has ever been shown to survive on a barter economy. Anthropologists have shown that what existed before trade was the same as what exists today when trade collapses: informally held debt. Alice knows how to work leather, Bob knows how to work wood; Bob needs a pair of shoes; Alice gives Bob a pair of shoes to satisfy his need and both Alice and Bob remember that; later, when Alice's house needs repairs she knows whose shoulder to tap on.

This is "barter" in the sense that Alice's and Bob's services have been transacted through time, but you'd be moving the goalposts since you just defined barter as Alice and Bob sitting down and determining precisely how much wood-labour equates to a fixed quantity of leather-labour at the point of purchase.

If you'd like to learn more, then David Graeber's book Debt: The First 5,000 Years, is something of a standard reference on the subject. It's on the Internet Archive.

> So you could pay in coins, in sheep, in yarn, with your time or in whatever. That is not important, it is still an exchange and equivalent to trading.

But how do coins, sheep, yarn, or whatever, originally come to be? If nothing is free, there must be an infinite chain of trade, leading back to an infinite past. But cosmology and evolution suggest otherwise.

Lada cars were actually pretty good, if rugged and lacking comfort. The propaganda against them was mostly that, propaganda. They were good for budget cars [1].

Now, you can argue they were a joint-venture with Fiat and not an entirely original idea (though the Soviets made improvements in ruggedness and ease of self-service), but whatever: cars made by the Soviets didn't suck.

--

[1] from Wikipedia:

> The rugged Lada was popular in Europe, Canada and South America for customers looking for more affordable alternatives to local brands, and sales of the new cars were extremely successful, reaching as far as New Zealand. In the West, their construction was frequently described as cheap and that inspired jokes at the car's expense; nonetheless, Lada "gained a reputation as a maker of solid, unpretentious and reliable cars for motorists who wanted to drive on a budget."

Wikipedia uses as reference Andy Thompson. Cars of the Soviet Union, Haynes Publishing, 2008.

>Index funds don't do anything to help this - just cause it's a bigger group of strangers stealing the products of the worker's labor doesn't make it any less exploitative.

I had a hard time understanding this, but I think I got it.

You are saying that if I work for, say, Xerox, I should own a portion of Xerox, because their capital belongs to me, because I use it to create value.

This is better, you are saying, than me owning an index fund that has a little of every company. Because if I do that, then I am exploiting all the workers in all the other companies.

As a self-contained system of belief, I guess it has a certain logic to it.

But if Xerox goes down the tubes then I don't want to lose my job and all my retirement savings!

I also think I see an inconsistency. If owning part of another company is exploiting their workers, then I should also be concerned that any form of ownership by workers at my company could involve exploitation.

Simply because we do different jobs using different amounts and types of capital. Averaging things out must be exploitation of workers by workers in the same way as owning mutual funds and such.

>Medication that causes type-2 diabetes is news to me.

I believe in the ballpark of 5 to 6 million patients take this kind of medication in the US. If they all eventually got diabetes, it might be up to 15% of cases. However, not everybody lives long enough.

I honest-to-God don't know how you live, and what it is you get away from in Cuba.

I've been to NYC a couple of times.

Things I got there (in more than one trip):

   a terrible pretzel from a street vendor (cold and *wet*)
   a *fantastic* cup of coffee at a cafe where I was meeting someone
   a bowl of lentil soup (surprisingly very cheap)
   some chicken lo mein, about the same price and exactly the same generic dish as anywhere I've been in the US, except perfectly executed, really fresh and hot
   a chicken souvlaki pita, one of the best, although the place (in Queens) smelled kinda like urine

As you can see, everything that was memorable consumer-wise was cheap food. I didn't have any expensive meals or buy any "consumer goods" that I recall.

Flamewar like this will get you banned here. What a horrible thread. No more of this, please—it's totally against the rules and spirit of what this site is supposed to be for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Flamewar like this is not ok on this site. Please stop and don't do it again. We ban accounts that keep flaming like this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Sorry, I got carried away when I was blamed for being a dictator supporter when I was talking about a vacation I had a few years back. I wasn't expecting to be attacked.

I'm born in Bulgaria, We had plenty of Soviet are cars around up until early 2000's, so I'm very familiar with Lasa, Moskvitch, Tranbant and so on.

They are terrible cars. Some of their aspects, like being very basic is considered a plus by some people and that's about the only positive thing that can be said about these cars. The affordability for the Westerners came from the income difference, these cars were not affordable for for the locals as they had to save money for years to buy one.

Very bad, very unreliable, very inefficient, very uncomfortable cars can be popular only when they are extremely cheep or the only option.

Thanks for the pointer. It is an interesting point of view indeed.

However, I think bartering has always existed for a reason, and when it did not or trading was forbidden, what you end up is with poorer or more violent societies.

This is the same reason why we specialize our labour and we do not do all things: shoes, food, blankets, bridges, roads, trains, planes, computers. Because if we had to self-supply fully, our lives would be much more miserable. From there it follows that trading is a natural choice: I can give something valuable and someone else can give me something valuable in exchange. Of course that gets mixed with debt and other stuff (I did not read your reference yet so I cannot assess how true it is in my very limited opinion) but the alternative to bartering, trading, etc. is violence. Every time.

There is an analysis from a well-known spanish philosopher that died short ago, his name is Antonio Escohotado, well-known for having written a book about the history of drugs that was translated to many languages.

He wrote a 3-volumes book that is called "Los enemigos del comercio" (The enemies of trade).

He researched the topic with unusual passion, since when he was young he used to be a communist. He wanted to explain to himself why he was so communist at some point. He spend around 15 years writing that. One of his main conclusion is that the alternative to trading is trading people (slaves) and the conquer of the other (violence). I really think it is true. He establishes some relationships between the amount of trading and the violence in societies (military vs trade societies). I think it is a nice read, but I am not sure it is translated to other languages as of now. The one for the drugs it is.

Greetings.

A country can be wealthy as a whole while still having a large part of the population leaving in squalor if wealth inequality is great enough.

Or they can have most of the population in really deplorable conditions, which is what happened after the revolution.