Paul Cockshott & Soviet Cybernetics Thread

Once again, it's the thread about computer-aided economic planning and direct democracy and general Cockshott news I guess (old thread: 8ch.net/leftypol/res/2781898.html).

His latest blogpost: paulcockshott.wordpress.com/2019/05/14/input-output-or-harmony-planning/

Read "Towards a New Socialism" by Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell, if you haven't already: ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/socialism_book

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Other urls found in this thread:

archive.is/j942c
dataorienteddesign.com/dodbook/
microservices.io/
pastebin.com/bPyr7Vau
openstack.org/
b-ok.xyz/book/899907/0135f4
youtube.com/watch?v=TM-tjs6XSuA
youtube.com/watch?v=Mw_WQRPIBNU
aeon.co/ideas/think-everyone-died-young-in-ancient-societies-think-again
youtu.be/Uxp3I3qTy4M
youtube.com/watch?v=bcLvDZKp17I
ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/socialism_book/new_socialism.pdf).
youtube.com/watch?v=LM49VWXaaj4
twitter.com/SFWRedditVideos

So which in countries can you implement any of these ideas, taking into account their political realities?

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North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, China, Bolivia, Vietnam? Roj*ava?
These are all the most "socialist" countries out there, I think those have the best chances. Obviously it isn't in the interest of the bourgeoise to do this.

Can we also do a meme dump of all cockshott/cybernetics memes I’m especially looking for the vapor wave ones

here's another archive
archive.is/j942c

pdfs too

The better question is, what programming language will the econ planning system be written in? When we did a poll on it back in 2017, the answer was python, oddly enough. Thought I'm not sure python would be the best language for a production level numerical computing program. Probably 95%+ of it can be written in python(backend logic and APIs)and the intense numerical computing parts written in C++.

TBH im not sure about the whole apis thing since REST is now being phased out in favor of things like GRAPHQL. Instead of having a front end app call restful backend services, it makes one graphql query to a graphql api server, which then in turn calls the microservices that provide the info in a serialized format, after which point its returned to the front end app (written in whatever js framework is flavor of the month, or likely in the future as a web assembly).

Python has no multithreading, making it terrible for performant servers. As well, it has dynamic typing and lots of runtime errors, meaning it is not really secure.
Slow interpreted languages (IE, all of them aside from Lisp) should be phased out in communism. Compiled languages can be just as convenient and easy. As well, strong type systems are very important.
Go:
- Simple (friendly to workers of varying skill levels), nice multithreading, reasonable speed, compiled, typed. But kind of lame in some aspects. Rejects bourgeois OOP ideology.
Rust:
- Very fast, pretty easy, but complex. Fantastic safety guarantees, type system, etc, and more modern than ugly old ADA. Also rejects bourgeois OOP.
Java:
- Current dominant corporate language. Familiar to all worldwide. Pretty simple. Has fast modern web library (vertx). Awful OOP shit. Cockblast's POC program is written in it.

Lol, I'm using ada.

I'm a brainlet, why is OOP shit?

It's neural linguistic.

Parallel neural cybernetic networks made from dimorphic radiotropic fungi have THZ+ bandwidth.

C/C++ or nothing. There would be no free software without the GNU Compiler Collection.

My comrade right here.

wtf
your entire precious GNU system is written with barely any function/data coupling at all, and with no type inheritance.
In any case, C is good for what it is, but "everything is a nullable pointer" is one of history's greatest mistakes, it has UB, c-strings are not good, and it is just plain old.
C++ is a travesty, you only have to see one std template compile error barf to understand that.

ok, go rewrite linux in Go or some other meme language since you know what's best

BBC BASIC

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How are you going to secure the planning algorithm and handivote from hacking and sabotage?

I’m a programmer but I haven’t made any open source contributions because I’m too busy writing code for rent money in my 9-5 and porky owns all the code I’ve been making

In my view, the planning algorithm should be backed up by multiple independent agencies checking each other's calculations. The voting system would require advanced cryptography.

yeah sure linus, not like actually discussing language choice and architectural designs beforehand is good or anything, better to just start shitting out unmaintainable code in whatever language/platform/framework i feel like and stick the rest of the people who will work on it with those decisions for the rest of time amirite

Good question. The answer is pretty complicated, because there are so many levels of security - network level, physical access, vulnerabilities in the code. Basically the codebase would need to undergo periodic audits, as well as the networks/servers hosting the system which would need security/pen testing.

Rust is the new Ada. Lisp = good for scripting
Haskell = language from 1000 years from the future that i cant understand because i dont have a phd in category theory. Really though haskell is great but every time i try, i just cant into it

sounds good
I agree that startup style hipster development, just shoving an inefficient half baked minimal viable product out the door as fast as possible would not be the goal of an open sourced project. You are really rustpilling me here
yes, we will have to wait to see how dotnet 5 does in 2020. If all goes well we will have a performant native dotnet implementation on all 3 major OS's

the bigger question is hosting though, obviously cloud hosting such as AWS, Google Cloud, Azure also digital ocean, ibm, oracle, vultr, and countless others is out of the question as almost all those companies are under the jurisdiction of the US government which means if you have a third world country that tries this they would need to have their own servers and network, 90s style. The only cloud provider even remotely considerable is alibaba cloud because its chinese.

Perhaps the planners would have to buy a bunch of servers/network equipment and implement their own private cloud using something like openstack. This itself is not outside the range of possibility as major corporations (Target, etc.) already do this

C/C++ would be great for the performant bits but youre not thinking broadly enough. What about the UI ? wouldnt it be better as a web app and why write that in C++?

yeah its the same at my work too, though in oracle stack rather than microsoft. Push all the logic into the database in the form of stored procedures etc. The problem is this is an old enterprise architectural style, in a major corporation for example you have not just multiple testing environments of the same app, but multiple apps (for HR, accounting, /whatever) on the same really really buff oracle or sql server because hey, the management shilled out a shit ton of money for it, so every app becomes dependent on it. Then you need a high paid database admin to babysit it, because if something goes wrong, large parts of the whole business critical functions stop working.

Nowdays things are shifting to a MICROSERVICES architecture:
microservices.io/
where every service = a business function and has its own internal data store

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You can download this html doc with javascript and run in your browser: pastebin.com/bPyr7Vau The purpose of this is to divide up a given amount of free identical cookies among individuals based on what they wish for without giving them an incentive to exaggerate (like would happen with scaling down all stated amounts by the same factor to make the sum equal to what's available). Just a few more features *cough* and we'll have a complete computer-communism package.

Is this even a relevant question? The way I'm imagining it the architecture of the planning software would be defined in human language, and there would be space for some diversity in how this schematic is implemented. What matters is how the different pieces of the planning system fit together and produce a result. Each node is a black box, what's going on inside doesn't matter as much as its external behaviour.
I'm not a programmer though, so maybe someone could enlighten me.
Something like this is probably how it'd end up working, I think.

Yeah, we don't live in the 80s anymore, so something particularly well-optimized isn't needed. The hardware cost really isn't an issue. Every component of the whole thing could be implemented in seven different ways, with different outputs by components dedicated to the same goal decided by a virtual vote among them.

Ideally the different implementations wouldn't all be running. Resources aren't as big of an issue as they used to be, but they still matter. What I imagine is different planning agencies regularly checking each other's calculations with their own software in order to prevent fraud.

Linus himself has said Rust is pretty good and solves important problems, but also that the core kernel code is, in his view, a solved problem. They have coding standards, a history, and procedures that make the core kernel pretty damn safe.
However, the core kernel is only like 200k LOC, meaning it wouldn't be wildly impossible to rewrite it. And as for kernel drivers, many of which are not up to the same standards as the core, Rust is very viable.
Go is GCed so it is not viable for any perf-critical code like a kernel.

The planning system and data (barring military secrets) should be open source so everyone can verify the plans on their own PCs or servers. As for general security stuff, same as any bank or server system. Actually, most banks have awful security from the 90s. The labor credit system would be much more secure. Aside from that, communism would heavily disincentivize illegal hacking, and there could be a great firewall.

If a country has a communist revolution, it can host its planning and banking systems in private servers, not the cloud. Cockshott's system is much more efficient than the modern banking system, as it gets rid of huge amounts of speculation, exchange between producers, service fees, and so on. The cloud is not some kind of miracle, it really sucks in many ways. If you're just making a demo app, the cloud is probably sufficient.

I think we were talking about backend. Frontend definitely should be a functional reactive framework like Elm, ReasonML, Elmish etc. Zero runtime errors. Preferably on WebASM, or we could do as god intended and switch browser scripting to a Lisp interpreter.
Wouldn't hurt to have a standalone desktop app either, so everyone just has it in their package manager. But you could do that in QT, or we could have a new desktop GUI framework that uses FRP and data oriented programming.

I think it just depends on which component. The labor credit banking should obviously have a webapp. The numbers-crunching parts of the program are more suited to a desktop or CLI app.

Absolutely bourgeois. This mentality is why our programs keep getting slower in spite of hardware speedups. As well, we are at like 7nm transistors now. The age of ever-increasing CPU speeds is over. We need to preserve the environment by making faster, more efficient programs and selling slower, less power-hungry hardware that lasts a long time.
Look how much slower Python, PHP, etc are compared to Go, vertx, actix, etc. Some of the best modern backend systems are literally 50x faster than Django or Rails. That means, if you have a socialist cloud service, Python users are taking up a massive amount of resources other people need.

I was more thinking along the lines of one big agency doing the same calculations in several places. You need to have redundancy in that stuff – and not just in software, but hardware, since even when humans do everything right there is always the risk of cosmic radiation flipping a bit; my inspiration is NASA/NGE. Not really a fan of having regional planning agencies.

yeah by making its own private cloud using the computers and networking equipment they have on hand using open sourced software like openstack
openstack.org/
the whole reason for this is to conserve computing resources by using virtual machines and lightweight function as a service. if you have to make each service on an actual hardware then when its not being utilized 100% its basically just sitting there using up power. It saves energy, compute cycles, and is more environmental to make more efficient use of computers/servers by having them as the basis of a private cloud system under open stack and implementing the necessary services on VM's/ FAAS on that. I forsee each socialist country in the future having its own cloud, basically.
switching browser to lisp (probably scheme in that case) sounds good but it would mean having to roll our own browser or browser plugin to parse lisp and execute it… unless youre talking about clojurescript or something.
correct. Although i will point out that PHP7+ actually has way faster execution that python.

This is more applicable to embedded software than apps running on normal servers. Unless you plan to be running the software on a satellite in orbit or something I don't think this will be a problem

Thank you for pointing this out.

For a government project, it would be relatively easy to fork Firefox and give it a Lisp interpreter alongside its JS interpreter. JS was originally just supposed to be a flavor of Scheme anyway. Scheme would be nice for FRP, and a good transpilation target. However, WASM does make transpiling a bit redundant.

I have heard this about PHP7, but it is still PHP.

Gonna share two posts from /marx/ regarding Cybernetics:

Cybernetics was most popular in the USSR in the Khrushchev period, when the CPSU was claiming that Soviet citizens would be experiencing communism in 20 years' time, colonizing planets, etc. But supporters of cybernetics had opposition from both "the establishment" (government ministries didn't want to replace existing planning methods and were concerned about issues like unemployment if so much human labor was no longer necessary) and from supporters of a more market-based approach (who argued that cybernetics was a waste of time and resources which would only result in a further centralization of the economy to the detriment of its efficiency.)

There's a book about the subject titled From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: A History of Soviet Cybernetics, which can be found here: b-ok.xyz/book/899907/0135f4

Here's an excerpt from page 273:

With issues like that, it isn't surprising that cybernetics was criticized as impractical. Soviet planners and Party leaders did constantly talk about the need to implement the "scientific and technological revolution," but they envisioned it as assisting current methods to plan the economy rather than anything drastic.

The second one is less related to Cybernetics but more about problems socialist countries have faced:

The Chinese and Cubans are still trying to figure that out, and there's no shortage of authors in the West with their own views (e.g. Paul Cockshott.) However, I can quote Parenti for some examples of problems the socialist countries faced. From his "Blackshirts and Reds," pp. 60-61:

What's the effect of a bug? This is not about software for a factory, it is about software for a continent. Its output does not get an extra check by humans going over it and having a discussion what to do with it, the updates are too frequent for that; so even though it's humans down the line that order other humans and not the Computergod blackmailing you with leaking your nudes, the frequency and quantity of the program output won't leave room for anything but turning the recommendations into directly binding orders. The human control is only changing the parameters for the program, which happens at much lower frequency, between these updates the program plays with itself and generates thousands of short-term plans. How can you be sure a program is bug-free unless it isn't much more complex than Tic-tac-toe? This project isn't like making a smartphone game, it is more serious than writing software for hospitals. That's why there needs to be redundancy with several implementations.

well, the core calculation algorithms are very short pieces of code. easy to verify and write tests for. of course some kinds of bugs could creep up in the db, interface, network, and elsewhere. However, I think you are overstating the precision of the issue here. The plans are clearly very precise compared to capitalism or soviet socialism, but at the end of the day, we will need to build tolerances for human error and random stuff happening into the way the system is enforced. make a "see something, say something" campaign for people to notice weird things going on in the plan. don't sweat minor cases of overproduction or underproduction. stuff like that.

the whole byzantine generals issue is because it is embedded software running in a hostile environment, not an air conditioned server in a warehouse datacenter not being hit by massive solar radiation every day. Hardware fault tolerance has been a solved issue for decades now except in quantum computers, the problems like that would have been corrected at a lower level of abstraction, as application level programmers we can largely trust the computer unless you want to make it as an embedded program on custom hardware/plcs designed by electrical engineers specifically

What about getting hit by an earthquake or NATO bombing?

sure there should be escrow backup sites, but that is for redundancy and data backup purposes, being geographically distributed. nothing to do with errors in calculation. If the server is bombed it wont give a wrong answer it will just stop functioning altogehter

I'll start with basics:
foreach (Citizen comrade in citizens.FindAll(c => c.ReadingList.Contains("Capital") && c.Bunker.Built == false)){ comrade.Bunker.Priority++;}

interested in computer aided direct democracy, what's a good book to start?

Towards new socialism by cockshott
>>>/gnussr/545

youtube.com/watch?v=TM-tjs6XSuA
This is just adorable.

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I think managers don't have that much to do with innovation, actually. There's R&D, which managers are usually to dumb for unless they are also engineers, and when a manager who is also an engineer does develop a useful engineering idea I'd say it's mostly not due to management-specific knowledge. There are many ideas from the shop floor. The manager can listen to that and get a fat bonus, the person on the shop floor gets a t-shirt.
Measuring quantity instead of quality is a general problem, not a socialist one. How can you systematically improve and not just by luck if you don't even have a measure? Better scoring rules were developed – the score for the big goal has to be made of of scores for distinct goals which have required minimum thresholds, and what's above that is weighted and aggregated not using arithmetic mean, but geometric or harmonic mean (as proposed by Miroslav Toms and others) – but this is very annoying to do with pencil and paper and using snail mail or phone call. With spreadsheets on a computer reluctance to use something like that is much lower and plants can now also easily send the details about the composition of what goes into these aggregate scores. There is a huge change here towards higher efficiency for socialism without need for a new big-brained theory.
A lot of that can be avoided by a change in the accounting rules. Just like with computers and the internet, we can "steal" from developments that have already happened in capitalism. When you take the historical cost of unused inventory as a given, it appears as wealth in your part of the system, whether it is over-supplied or outdated stuff, you then have some serious extra thinking to do to fix that, and a lot of that is going to be speculation about the future importance of the stuff. If instead you focus on throughput, inventory just looks like 'locked up money (or locked up labor time) which you try to transform into throughput. Inventory is a cost.
This is muddled phrasing (probably also muddled thinking). A factory isn't a person. Which individual should be punished or rewarded for what? What are you responsible for? If there are good tools and bad tools and you work with good tools, you should be rewarded or punished based on what one can do with the good tools UNLESS choosing/creating those tools was your achievement. And if you were given these superior tools, why shouldn't you be expected to do better? Of course, places with better technology (whether the responsibility for having them lies there or not) should get higher production quotas, don't call that punishment. To the extent the higher productivity is due to decisions and hard work at that place, we can still reward that with promotion and very quick feedback with a remuneration bonus.
Lower production quota is sensible here. If the subsidies are earmarked for obtaining better technology, if the difference in productivity lies in that, that is sensible. This is not a kafkaesque situation. Remember we still got the tool of punishment by lowering salaries/demoting managers and workers, insofar as this lower productivity is due to them and not factors outside their responsibilities.

>managers are usually too dumb
>_

My intention with multiple agencies isn't that different regions will do independent planning, but rather that there are multiple independent observers making sure planners are following the proper instructions. These observers can represent different regional or demographic interests and such, so that everyone is able to trust that the plan represents them as advertised.

If we tie central planning to a single state apparatus, I don't see how the state will ever be able to just whither away. For that to happen planning needs to exist as a free agreement between workers. They negotiate a set of abstract principles that constitute planning, and all these "planning agencies" then do is figure out what the concrete results of these principles are.

In other words, planning should be scientific. If we have just one planning agency we run the risk of it introducing all kinds of arbitrary determinations that do not properly represent the wishes of the working class. But if we have multiple agencies checking on each other, there will be a single equilibrium in which interests of the workers are best represented. Basically it's the equivalent of peer review.

I hope that makes sense. To me this seems like a very important point, although I have difficulty finding the right words for it.

They are, you’ve obviously never worked as an engineer for a non technical manager

It was a comment on my own typo.

Management typically has more to do with being capable of handling people than anything else, unsurprisingly. That's not even close to what it takes for innovation and development.

Looks like Cockshott just made a video on this youtube.com/watch?v=Mw_WQRPIBNU

I dont want to live under the tyranny of statistics. Men should rule themselves, never bow before gods or machines

Lame

Transhumanists get hunted and gathered.

Fear the anprim tribe

I wonder how much Paul enjoys/detests some of the shitposts left as comments under his video. I'm sure he's glad us yung'uns are taking to socialism, but he's also an older man, and our rambunctiousness just might rub him the wrong way. All I'm saying is that pic related is definitely from our little board, possibly on this thread right now, and perhaps not best representing the young communist movement to older, more serious minded ones.

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enjoy dying at 30

Yeah that comment looks fucking horrible there.

Nice profile pic

Detests. All of them. How is this even a question?
I'm sure he would have seen it the same way at 20. The big problem is how to grow the radical left. Doing subcultural injokes outside of subculture gatherings is a really bad idea, unless you really only care about your subculture and delight in how people in the mainstream (and even others of the far left) don't get you.

Thanks, I made it myself

Well I'm glad yall agree with me. I'm sure there's dozens, maybe a hundred leftypolers watching his videos, and most of them stay quiet, but between comments like this (though I must say Install Gentoo has overall been respectful and fairly well composed, exception being this one comment, and thank god Paul probably doesn't know wtf a trap gf is), but shit like this sticks out like a sore thumb.
I think to some extent, he must understand that the younger generation is undoubtedly going to have some cultural and behavioral differences from his own generation, and there's something to be said for social misfits and weirdos being more likely to adopt a very unpopular political position, but there's no need to go over the top. So it's one thing having a profile pic of an anime boy, and it's another calling yourself "The Hunter x Hunter 2011 Dickriding Association". Must say though, THxH2011DRA doesn't post trashy comments, from what I recall, but one commenter on the early vids did invite Paul to Zig Forums to, and I quote "shitpost with us". And finally, maybe it's time for me to put away that stirner/cheetos-cat OC for my pic, I made that a long time ago and am no longer particularly interested in Stirner.

-self crit over

Rhetorical question, but yeah.
Totally agree, and few of our jokes aren't even designed as bait to gain interest in socialism. traps and nazbols are just shitpost material. Fuck, man. We need a new website bad. I really fucking appreciate the existence of Zig Forums but we need to advance beyond being one board on a nazi/weeaboo/trap-lover's forum. It's good, in my mind, to keep this board here as long as possible, as a thorn in the side of the aut-right, and as a place for leftists to talk shit without ruining their image, but for constructive discussion and organization, a new format is required.

It's always that one retard who is shitposting.

'cave men' didn't die at 30.

what happened in ancient societies was high infant mortality, which drove life expectancy down.

aeon.co/ideas/think-everyone-died-young-in-ancient-societies-think-again

Well, in that case, I am now an prim. Fuck you, babies.

Shitposting is infused into the DNA of my soul.

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I think most sane an-prims would go to the nearest city full of trans(sub)humanists for medical care beyond what our knowledge of the forest could provide.

I dont think anyone really believes the whole world will be on board with an an-prim lifestyle, even if it's the only way to save the earth. You can put computers in your brain and live in a robot skin suit, but I and at least a few others would like to live in the natural state that society has deprived us of for so long. Go out an colonize the galaxy in your tin cans and brain interfaces, but I want to live and die here as a natural human excelling at what I'm evolved to do. Ambition will not be my downfall

There are plenty of voting methods that take rankings or ratings as input and output rankings or scores. Managing makes extensive use of charts and diagrams for planning stuff. Of course, different individuals or small groups can create plan proposals and then a much bigger group can vote to pick a winner from one of these using range voting or whatever. But is there software for more direct and democratic creation of planning diagrams themselves?

youtu.be/Uxp3I3qTy4M

Did you miss his last video?

thanks, watching it now

In Cockshott's lecture here,

youtube.com/watch?v=bcLvDZKp17I

At 00:55:10 he discusses paying Doctors and Workers. Is he saying Doctors won't be paid more under socialism? Apologies for the stupidity of the question.

Not if they work more hours. Cockshott wants people's pay to be equall to work they've done. his position in the book is a bit different though. To quote from Towards a new socialism

"We can envision the establishment of a baseline level of general education: workers educated to this level only will be regarded as ‘simple labour’, while the labour of workers who have received additional special education is treated as a ‘produced input’, much like other means of production. This notion of skilled labour as a produced input may be illustrated by example. Suppose that becoming a competent engineer requires four years of study beyond the basic level of education. This four-year production process for skilled engineering labour involves a variety of labour inputs. First there is the work of the student—attending lectures, study in the library, lab work, etc. As stated earlier, this is regarded as valid productive work and is rewarded accordingly." The pages 34 to 40 on the book illustrate what he means by that in depth(ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/socialism_book/new_socialism.pdf).

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So if a doctor were to perform surgery that takes 5 hours while a worker were to perform the same number of hours work doing menial tasks, they'd be paid the same?

No, the doctor would be paid more since it takes longer to produce a doctor. I also think the logic Cockshott applies to cigarettes, that their price might be put higher to discourage people from smoking, can be used for people of skills that are hard to get by, with them being paid more to encourage their labor.

In capitalism doctors must take on huge debts in order to finance the cost of their education. These debts are then later repaid out of future earnings. The rationale under capitalism for a doctor's higher pay is precisely that - he must be paid higher because his initial investment of time and resources was higher, so the costs must be distributed via higher prices for his services.

Cockshott & Cottrell's idea was that education should be seen as work and students should be paid for their time spent acquiring skills that can be used in the workplace. So in their model of socialism a doctor, instead of having to pay huge sums to learn medicine, would in fact be paid to study. At an economic level there is no longer any rationale for doctors earning huge sums of money since they received compensation for their time spent in the education process. The basic principle would be that one hour of work = one hour of work. The system would affirm the basic equality of human beings by giving everyone equal access to material goods.

It is still possible that society may choose to reward doctors or other professionals with a higher rate of pay based upon the idea that skilled labor can be quantified as a multiple of simple labor. Or, it could form part of a higher "grade" of labor than otherwise. It's also possible that a shortage of doctors may induce society to offer increased compensation or benefits to attract more individuals to the field.

That isn't the position argued for in TANS. In TANS world, education is covered by the public at large, so somebody who studies to become a doctor doesn't go into debt and even gets a basic salary for living expenses on top of that while studying. Likewise, for learning tasks that are specific to producing specific products that are allocated via consumption vouchers, the training costs of society do not translate into a right for a higher salary (though they can form part of the product price, since the product price (short-term fluctuations put aside) has to justify not only the work directly involved and the work going into machinery used, but also the work going into training). And why should it be a right? It's only something to do if brain drain becomes too big an issue, not because it is right and just according to some weird philosophy.

Why should someone who works more hours be paid more than someone who works fewer hours?

Do you think it should be the other way?

Doesn't the doctor have more labour hours embed into him? Page 36 of TANS says this

"The figure of 0.33, for instance, tells us that our engineer, whose skills are
depreciated over a 15 year horizon, transmits 0.33 hours of embodied labour
per hour worked. Unlike the machine, which only transmits labour embodied
in the past, our engineer also works one hour per hour. The total direct plus
indirect labour contribution of our engineer would therefore be 1.33 hours per
hour, a multiple of the simple labour rate. In other words, if the planners are
contemplating the employment of a million hours of skilled engineering labour
in the context of a long-run plan, they should recognise that this is equivalent
to a commitment of 1.33 million hours of simple labour.
We do not mean to imply that just because a skilled worker is rated as
costing society a third more than a worker of average skill, then they should
be paid a third more. This extra third represents the additional cost to society
of using skilled labour. Society has already met the ‘extra third’ in paying for
the worker’s education, so there is no justification for paying the individual any
extra. Although it has no implications for the distribution of personal income,
the skilled labour multiplier is important in working out the true social cost of
projects. A task that requires skilled labour is more costly to society even if the
skilled workers are paid the same as unskilled ones."

Don't you think it certainly should be used? If there will be a new large scale socialist country, it will first of all be atacked by capitalist powers, like it happened to every time. Second, the capitalist will raise the living standards of the proletariat and petit bourgeoisie, which will make braindrain harder to counter-act. Third, expect crippling sanctions. I think in such case there will be more urgent matters to care about than equality.

Doesn't social democracy fix this tho? We have free University where I live, including medicine.

The relevant part is here:
This extra third represents the additional cost to society of using skilled labour. Society has already met the ‘extra third’ in paying for the worker’s education, so there is no justification for paying the individual any extra.'' Although it has no implications for the distribution of personal income, the skilled labour multiplier is important in working out the true social cost of projects. A task that requires skilled labour is more costly to society even if the skilled workers are paid the same as unskilled ones.

I would imagine in countries where the cost of education for doctors is heavily subsidized their earnings are also significantly lower.

let's assume there is a cybersocialist country in the future that implements cybernetic planning. what would the university education pertaining to that look like? would there be a degree just for cybernetics? what would be part of the curriculum?

basically im asking if someone could write down an approximate curriculum for a socialist cybernetics degree. which areas of study would our future planners need?

read marx
read cockshott
stop spamming the thread

Exactly, the only jobs that should pay more are jobs that people dont want to do/ not enough people are there to do it, to incentivize people to do it. Someone who cleans toilets should make more per hour than a surgeon, because it's very easy to convince someone to become a surgeon, but very hard to convince someone to clean toilets

u srs bro?

youtube.com/watch?v=LM49VWXaaj4

Yes, I am. In a socialist society with free education we would have a surplus of surgeons and a shortage of people willing to clean toilets. Cashmoney incentives seems a lot better than the alternative of using force. It also removes any stigma it might have, you wouldn't know wether the toilet cleaner is just an unskilled simpleton or an engineer who wants a little extra money to go on a nice vacation

I would have it that a toilet cleaner works less often for similar pay as more "prestogious" jobs. We don't need armies of neurosurgeons, but we do need a ton of people working in sanitation.

What if you made it a requirement that if you got a job in a certain field you were also responsible for cleaning up your workplace, toilets and all? Also, where has a surplus of surgeons ever came from any nation with taxpayer funded colleges?

Jobs like sanitation should be automated in the future, and sense getting education would be easier, it would be best to just do away with the jobs people don't like doing altogether by automating them.

Anyone can clean a well designed toilet easily according to procedure safely and effectively
Just `value` the labour time, which is the number of labour hours and therefore recieved labour vouchers of a toilet based on a total newb following the procedure sheet step by step including the time spent checking off the step on the sheet including prep like gloves sterilizing and post cleaning hygene like shower, recovery, rest and relaxation etc etc

Shove the cleaning schedule of toilets into Harmony and done

Yeah, cleaning your own workplace is a good solution too. But even with automation there will be jobs people dont want to do. These are the jobs that should pay the most in a socialist economy.