I think the situation is more nuanced than that.

Of course, the F-35 program was an incredibly expensive mess (litterally the most expensive weapon program of all time), because of conflicting specs, data leaks, political infighting, cost overruns which are the stuff of legend, etc... At some moments, there were certainly reasons to think the whole program would collapse on itself like wet tissue paper.

But there are operational F35 now. 900+ as of 2023, which is 4 time more than the rest of Gen 5 fighters combined. And performance-wise, it is good, especially on the stealth & avionics parts. On the other side, the J-20 is largely unproven (probably a decent design, but not as good), and the Su-57 is a bunch of glorified prototypes.

Now sure, cost is high, maintenance is time-consuming, availability somewhat below target, but it's not particularly surprising for high-performance equipment. It may fall short of the ambition of the program on the cost part, but by itself it's a dangerous and fully operational fighter.

Crabs. All will be crabs.

The problem of the "Punch a Nazi" line of thought is not particularly that Nazis are subject to violence : most people (centrists included) couldn't care less about what happens to them specifically.

No, the real issue here is that people don't trust the perception of others. You don't attack a fascist, you attack someone who you think is a fascist. And polarization of the political discourse mean that you can be easily accused of crypto-fascism for pretty much anything (see Hexbear for example). And some people will take it at face value, and hence feel justified to attack you.

Yep, Giga-Euro.

I'm not sure. Public transportation infrastructure is insanely expensive. Where I live (France), there was a project to add a new subway line. A single one. Estimated cost was more than 2 G€. And that's before taking into the numerous issues of another subway line modernization program...

Well, I think we'll have disagree here : you take on the calculation problem is the opposite of both my theorical framework and practical experience of industry (I work as an Electrical Engineer).

You can try to predict the demand of course, but the prediction is always fairly different from reality. Often, it's workable. Sometimes it's not.

But to be honest, the Economic Calculation Problem is ill-named, because from a Signal Processing persepctive, it's not really a processing power problem. No, the problem is in the Signal-to-noise ratio of the signals used to do these calculation.

Ultimately, if you have a very noisy signal (and economic signals are incredibly noisy), there's really not much you can do with just more processing power. And I have good reason to believe (based on Psycho-social understanding) that the way these signals are transmitted in Centrally Planned system (socialist or not), are particularly noisy themselves. Much more than prices-and-market based systems.

That being said, I don't think we'll see eye to eye here. Thanks for the discussion tho, it is always interesting to hear how other people think.

In that case, that means that the only workable economic system for Marx is a centrally planned economy (which, from what I know, is not the position of the majority of communists). Otherwise, you're going to have severe information transfer/cooperation issues at the system boundaries. Which is already historically what happened in the USSR and most strict application of central planning. And unless I'm mistaken, they still had money.

As for Marx... It's more that I read a subset of Marx works, found too many issues within the theories themselves, and honestly don't have unlimited time to see if he corrects it in some other works. And despite looking a bit for it in other forms (including discussion with some very left-leaning friends), I never found any answer I found really satisfactory.

And to be honest, I understand why you assume this is a propaganda issue : communist/socialist/anarchist theories are largely misrepresented in common discourse. That being said, don't make the mistake of believing that all critics don't know what they're talking about. Or even that mainstream theories are immune to this type of misrepresentation (because they most certainly are not).

Meh, this distinction seems largely artificial to me. Modern fiat money is already created and destroyed through use of debt, and I hardly think that's what communists think of. And a strict "non-transferability" would beg the question of why would the "productive forces" (companies, cooperatives, or whatever) try to do produce things if they can't accumulate value based on consumers spending preferences (which is an issue which happened in the USSR).

Even worse : if vouchers don't fulfill the roles people want, you're still going to have a kind of informal money (gasoline, tobacco, seashells, etc... as said above), just with vouchers in parallel.

That being said, I never had much respect for Marx' political theories, so I would totally understand if you wanted to drop the point.

If you go by the definition of money : "The primary functions which distinguish money are as a medium of exchange, a unit of account, a store of value and sometimes, a standard of deferred payment." (Wikipedia, but it's a workable definition).

It's a medium of exchange, because people can use them to buy things. It's a unit of account, because it will be used as a metric for economic calculation (ie accounting). It's a store of value too, because people don't have to spend it at a particular time. And the "standard of deferred payment" part is also fulfilled, as it quantify the work-time debt society (or simply a company) owe to a worker.

I honestly fail to see what difference you are trying to make.

That's money too.

I don't particularly want Lemmy instances to become echo-chambers, but "good faith disagreement" require a degree of trust between people.

Here in this thread, we see Hexbear users worried to be silenced because of political opinion, while Lemm.ee users seems to be mightily annoyed by Hexbear users as they act in in way that would be at home on 4Chan.

I'm not convinced that these actions are one of a minority within HB, but even if it is the case, it's going to be difficult to establish a basis of trust for these discussions...

There are already plenty of leftist in the non left-centric instances. Hell, if you really want a far-left perspective, there are others which doesn't consider obnoxiousness a virtue, which seems to be a core tenant of Hexbear.