☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆
- 6.41K Posts
- 8.58K Comments
2·51 minutes agoThe situation in occupied Korea is a perfect case study of how late stage capitalism literally consumes its own future. The place is a pressure cooker, and the so-called economic miracle is built on a foundation that’s cracking wide open.
Let’s start with the economy. Everyone sees the global brands like Samsung and Hyundai, but the reality for most people is a brutal, two-tiered system. The economy is completely dominated by these chaebol conglomerates. They suck up all the talent and capital, leaving everyone else to fight for scraps in a world of insecure, low-wage gig work. Hence why you have a generation of the most educated young people in the country’s history drowning in debt and unable to find stable jobs. They call it Hell Joseon for a reason. The system demands you run this insane rat race from birth, only to find there’s no cheese at the end.
This leads directly to the single most damning statistic which is the collapsing birth rate. It’s a rational, collective strike against a system that makes having children an economic death sentence. You have insane housing costs, you’re saddled with debt, and if you’re a woman, your career is basically over if you have a kid thanks to a viciously patriarchal corporate culture. So people are opting out. It’s the most clear vote of no confidence a society can possibly make.
And this is where the death spiral kicks in. A shrinking young population means fewer workers to pay taxes and support a rapidly aging society. South Korea is on track to be the oldest society on earth. The national pension system is fundamentally a Ponzi scheme that is mathematically guaranteed to fail. We’re looking at a future where the state can’t pay pensions, can’t fund healthcare, and can’t even staff its own military. The very foundations of the social contract are rapidly dissolving.
All of that is supercharged by insane levels of inequality. You have the golden spoon class with their inherited wealth and chaebol connections, and then you have the dirt spoon majority struggling to get by. As a result, there is a lot of intergenerational and gender conflict, pitting everyone against each other for a shrinking piece of the pie, which is exactly how the capitalist class maintains control.
It’s not hard to see how it all connects. A predatory economic model creates hopelessness, which kills the demographic future, which then makes the economy completely unsustainable, leading to state collapse.
Now, contrast this with the North. Western media won’t talk about this, but the DPRK successfully weathered the "Arduous March in the 90s, a period of intense famine and hardship that was massively exacerbated by US-led efforts to strangle their economy and isolate them from global trade. They survived that brutal blockade. And now, with the US empire visibly fraying at the edges, the DPRK’s key alliances are strengthening. As Russia and China deepen economic ties and even tourism starts to pick up, the North is seeing real economic growth and a mood that’s largely optimistic about a future less constrained by American sanctions. They are building a resilience that the South, for all its flashy tech, completely lacks.
Now, contrast this with the North. Western media won’t talk about this, but the DPRK successfully weathered the Arduous March in the 90s. It’s important to understand the real trigger for the economic crisis was the collapse of the USSR, which had been the DPRK’s main trading partner and economic lifeline. This sudden shock along with being cut out from global trade by the US, is what sent their economy into a tailspin and caused that period of intense difficulties. But they managed to survive that total collapse of their established trade system. And now, with the US empire visibly fraying, the DPRK’s key alliances are strengthening again. As Russia and China renew economic ties and even tourism starts to pick up, the North is seeing real growth and a mood that’s largely optimistic about a future that’s no longer constrained by American sanctions. They are building a resilience that the South, for all its flashy tech, completely lacks.
From a socialist perspective, the best case scenario, internal failure of the Southern capitalist state could create the conditions for peaceful reunification with the North. We’re looking at a scenario where the South’s economy is in shambles, its social fabric is torn, and its people are utterly disillusioned with the empty promises of consumer capitalism. Meanwhile, the North is emerging from the worst of its isolation with a growing economy and a stable population.
A the chaos resulting from a social collapse in the South could force a radical re-evaluation. It could break the power of the chaebol and US imperial influence permanently. The resulting power vacuum could be a fertile ground for a genuine, pan-Korean movement. The two halves could finally meet on new terms. They could build a new, unified Korea from the ground up, one that rejects the brutal neoliberal inequality of the South. It would be a difficult, monumental task, but the only true liberation for the Korean people lies in a single, independent, and socialist Korea, finally free from the colonial division imposed upon them.
dronie go home
^ and here we a great example of a self referential comment
My point is that the problem is systemic, and all corporations end up leaning towards similar practices in the end because that’s what the selection pressures under capitalism drive them to.
If you’re using a modern computer then you’re buying it from one of the handful megacorps around. Apple isn’t really special in this regard.
does that run on Asahi though, I couldn’t figure out how to
Erlang isn’t special because it’s functional, but rather it’s functional because that was the only way to make its specific architecture work. Joe Armstrong and his team at Ericsson set out to build a system with nine nines of reliability. They quickly realized that to have a system that never goes down, you need to be able to let parts of it crash and restart without taking down the rest. That requirement for total isolation forced their hand on the architecture, which in turn dictated the language features.
The specialness is entirely in the BEAM VM itself, which acts less like a language runtime like the JVM or CLR, and more like a mini operating system. In almost every other environment, threads share a giant heap of memory. If one thread corrupts that memory, the whole ship sinks. In Erlang, every single virtual process has its own tiny, private heap. This is the killer architectural feature that makes Erlang special. Because nothing is shared, the VM can garbage collect a single process without stopping the world, and if a process crashes, it takes its private memory with it, leaving the rest of the system untouched.
The functional programming aspect is just the necessary glue to make a shared nothing architecture usable. If you had mutable state scattered everywhere, you couldn’t trivially restart a process to a known good state. So, they stripped out mutation to enforce isolation. The result is that Erlang creates a distributed system inside a single chip. It treats two processes running on the same core with the same level of mistrust and isolation as two servers running on opposite sides of the Atlantic.
Learning functional style can be a bit of a brain teaser, and I would highly recommend it. Once you learn to think in this style it will help you write imperative code as well because you’re going to have a whole new perspective on state management.
And yeah there are functional languages that don’t rely on using a VM, Carp is a good example https://github.com/carp-lang/Carp
RISCV would be a huge step forward, and there are projects like this one working on making a high performance architecture using it. But I’d argue that we should really be rethinking the way we do programming as well.
The problem goes deeper than just the translation layer because modern chips are still contorting themselves to maintain a fiction for a legacy architecture. We are basically burning silicon and electricity to pretend that modern hardware acts like a PDP-11 from the 1970s because that is what C expects. C assumes a serial abstract machine where one thing happens after another in a flat memory space, but real hardware hasn’t worked that way in decades. To bridge that gap, modern processors have to implement insane amounts of instruction level parallelism just to keep the execution units busy.
This obsession with pretending to be a simple serial machine also causes security nightmares like Meltdown and Spectre. When the processor speculates past an access check and guesses wrong, it throws the work away, but that discarded work leaves side effects in the cache that attackers can measure. It’s a massive security liability introduced solely to let programmers believe they are writing low level code when they are actually writing for a legacy abstraction. on top of that, you have things like the register rename engine, which is a huge consumer of power and die area, running constantly to manage dependencies in scalar code. If we could actually code for the hardware, like how GPUs handle explicit threading, we wouldn’t need all this dark silicon wasting power on renaming and speculation just to extract speed from a language that refuses to acknowledge how modern computers actually work. This is a fantastic read on the whole thing https://spawn-queue.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3212477.3212479
We can look at Erlang OTP for an example of a language platform looks like when it stops lying about hardware and actually embraces how modern chips work. Erlang was designed from the ground up for massive concurrency and fault tolerance. In C, creating a thread is an expensive OS-level operation, and managing shared memory between them is a nightmare that requires complex locking using mutexes and forces the CPU to work overtime maintaining cache coherency.
Meanwhile, in the Erlang world, you don’t have threads sharing memory. Instead, you have lightweight processes, that use something like 300 words of memory, that share nothing and only communicate by sending messages. Because the data is immutable and isolated, the CPU doesn’t have to waste cycles worrying about one core overwriting what another core is reading. You don’t need complex hardware logic to guess what happens next because the parallelism is explicit in the code, not hidden. The Erlang VM basically spins up a scheduler on each physical core and just churns through these millions of tiny processes. It feeds the hardware independent, parallel chunks of work without the illusion of serial execution which is exactly what it wants. So, if you designed a whole stack from hardware to software around this idea, you could get a far better overall architecture.
it’s all ARM now, there’s software x86 emulation on macos. I guess you could run x86 vm on Linux, but not sure how fast that will be.
The main problem is you’re pretty limited with software since you can only run stuff that’s been compiled against it.
I got one from a startup I worked at a couple of years ago, and then when the whole Silicon Valley bank crash happened they laid me off, but let me keep it. And yeah Asashi is still pretty barebones mainly cause you can basically just use open source apps on it that can be compiled against it. I’m really hoping to see something like M series from China but using RISCV and with Linux.
Sure, they are expensive, I’m simply pointing out that it is a genuinely good architecture. And you really can’t get the same performance with CISC. I’m personally hoping we’ll start seeing RISCV based machines that are built in a similar way.
Saying M series is far behind is a wild take when you look at the actual numbers. Check out the benchmarks. The M5 isn’t just keeping up. but literally beating the flagship desktop chips in single-core performance.
Check the latest Tom’s Hardware coverage on the base M5. The M5 is actively humiliating flagship desktop silicon in single-thread performance. In a recent CPU-Z benchmark, a virtualized M5—running through a translation layer on Windows 11, mind you, and still scored roughly 1,600 points. Compare that to AMD’s upcoming gaming king, the Ryzen 9 9950X3D, which sits around 867.
That’s a roughly 84% gap in favor of a mobile chip running in a VM. While a base 10-core M5 obviously won’t beat a 16-core/32-thread desktop monster in raw multi-core totals, the fact that it’s gapping the fastest x86 cores in existence by nearly double in single-core IPC, while sipping tablet-tier power, is genuinely absurd. The mobile-grade architecture argument actually works against your point here.
Incidentally, a good rundown of why RISC and SoC architecture is so performant https://archive.ph/Nmgp3
There’s literally nothing on the market that even remotely compares to M series chips right now in terms of performance and battery life. Macbooks are great machines in terms of hardware, and while macos has been enshittifying, it’s still a unix that works fine for dev work. So plenty of experienced devs use macs. You can also put Asahi Linux on them, which works fairly well at this point. The only thing that it can’t do is hibernate. Of course, app selection with it is more limited, but still works as a daily driver.
Liberalism is literally the problem here. It’s an ideology that exists to justify capitalist relations that emerged as a counter to feudalism. It consists of two main parts. First is political liberalism which focuses on individual freedoms, democracy, and human rights. Second is economic liberalism which centers around free markets, private property, and wealth accumulation. These two aspects form a contradiction. Political liberalism purports to support everyone’s freedom, while economic liberalism enshrines private property rights as sacred in laws and constitutions, effectively removing them from political debate.
Liberalism justifies the use of state violence to safeguard property rights, over supporting ordinary people, which contradicts the promises of fairness and equality. Private property is seen as a key part of individual freedom under liberalism, and this provides the foundational justification for the rich to keep their wealth while ignoring the needs of everyone else. The talks of promoting freedom and democracy is just a fig leaf to provide cover for justifying capitalist relations.
This is an excellent primer on the subject https://orgrad.wordpress.com/articles/liberalism-the-two-faced-tyranny-of-wealth
literally ever socdem ever
when you definitely know what RAND is
imagine thinking that your drivel needs a sophisticated rebuttal