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A comment on How Google Discovered the Value of Surveillance. Parent comment

Re:How Google Discovered the Value of Surveillance by TeMPOraL on Monday September 23, 2019 @04:47PM (#21053440)
The extra problem here is: can the alternative forms of economy survive in competition with capitalism? If not, then they're unfortunately a non-starter.

(It's like with what is said about early humans discovering agriculture. Settling down and growing crops led to worse health and less happy life than hunter-gathering, but still gave people competitive advantage over the societies that did not make the transition.)

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Re:How Google Discovered the Value of Surveillance by uoaei on Monday September 23, 2019 @05:23PM (#21053858)
This is exactly the reason the USSR fell. Sure, a lot of morally reprehensible actions were performed on innocent citizens, but that's not what actually ended it. The US et al. fought the USSR by destroying their crops and imposing high tariffs. The USSR couldn't produce everything it needed and so suffered because it still had to defer to the capitalist nations for the rest (who were, measured using the capitalist GDP metric, accelerating far in front of the USSR). The "communism" employed by the leaders of the USSR wasn't as profit-hungry as other strategies and so the federation suffered.
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