To paraphrase Tim Curry, communism and capitalism are both red herrings.

Oh that big punch up between the Soviet Union and the United States, decadent capitalism vs brutalist communism. Who won? According to the scoreboard as of 2026: Israel.

The catch phrase I’ve always heard about communism is “the people own the means of production.” Has that ever been true in practice? Did Soviet citizens own any piece of the means of production? Did anything resembling “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” ever once happen under the hammer and sickle? Or was that the false narrative the idiot asshole in charge used to cow the unwashed masses?

Similar questions could be asked of my fellow capitalist Americans. Capitalism is allegedly about the free market, supply and demand, if there is a demand someone will provide a supply, probably multiple someones, competitors will compete, those who do it faster, cheaper or better will succeed until someone else does it even fasterer, cheaperer and betterer repeat until someone else comes along with a completely different idea, welcome to the infinite cycle of meritocracy where the cream rises to the top. How’s that working out? Some substance has risen to the top, not sure it’s cream.

A common problem I see between the Soviet Union and the United States: Weak systems for preventing psychotic despots from ruining it all.

Further expanding on this: My understanding of the Soviet Union: Something something the Bolsheviks, something something communist revolution, They just about have an election, that Lenin overthrows because it isn’t going his way. Lenin is King Shit Of Turd Mountain until his death, then the dumb guy from the ghetto he kept around because he’s good at hurting people, Josef “probably worse than Hitler” Stalin takes the throne. The entire run of the Soviet Union is essentially a dictatorship with a command economy and remains thoroughly miserable.

The United States, meanwhile, has gone through phases. Tides have ebbed and flowed, robber barons have come and gone, consumer protection laws have come and gone. Times when a very few, very rich men have been mostly miserable for most people; times when those assholes get knocked down a peg and the common man has a chance to make a decent living get better.

The problem is a few ultimately rich assholes in charge.

I can list at least one.

Can’t think of a communist democracy, though.

(I was thinking of the likes of Shostakovich, born 1906 died 1975, but he did symphonies, not ballets? I think of Soviet performance art and I smell orchestra pit.)

I’m all ears for ideas.

Copyright and patent are a compromise.

Society is iterative. Every work of art or technology is significantly based on prior work. So if you go to the extremes, where “I intented it, it is mine forever and passed to my children” society stalls as technoligarchs never license their patents. If you go full blyatski and outlaw personal ownership, you get Soviet Russia, a nation whose contribution to global culture has been a few ballets, some long depressing books and precisely one video game, because nobody is given incentive or even opportunity to create anything, so they don’t.

Give us a full copy of your work, enough information to make a full copy of it. This will be held in trust by the government. We will give you full, exclusive right to monetize your invention for a couple decades, and the copy stored with the government is the stake in your claim, the proof you need to win your lawsuit. After those couple decades are over, the idea becomes public property. Our inventors get to make a living, society gets to progress.

Copyright has gone cancerous, with terms lengthened far beyond a human lifetime to benefit major corporations and not individual creators. We need to fix that.

You’re talking like my main man John Thorndike and his fundamental principles of learning.

The principle of Recency: Memory fades with time, skills and knowledge practiced in the distant past tend to be more difficult to recall than those practiced recently. This is why we review at the end of chapters, units, classes.

The principle of Exercise: What people mean when they say “practice makes perfect” though I take issue with that phraseology, when training instructor candidates I make sure to stress that one can learn to do something wrong. When I was in 7th grade, my band teacher handed me the all-county band audition music and told me to go learn it on my own. I took it home, misread the sheet music, and became adept at playing something that wasn’t the assigned piece. I was not accepted to all-county band. “practice” requires a regulator, either a teacher or coach, or a student who has the means and ability to detect incorrect performance.

But who gives a shit? These college programs aren’t about learning anything, they’re about extracting money from young people.

The tests are designed to be crammed by students who are required to show up to lecture halls in pajama bottoms to listen to someone who has never worked outside an academic setting speak too fast. Learning is an active process, lecture halls encourage passive behavior, such lectures are almost entirely a waste of time. Professors know this, they know only their students who already give a shit are going to actually study, so they design their tests to be crammable otherwise UNC would have 3 graduates a decade. So students sit in a lecture hall almost falling asleep then they spend the last half of December and May cramming.

So why not do all the cramming back to back to back and graduate in 3 months? What’s the point of stretching it to 4 years? Because universities have very lucrative housing and food service divisions.

Not gonna lie, I kinda want an excavator. Mostly because it would transform my life from “earning a living” to “having my demands met” but…it digs but like, bigger. Haha. Maybe a back hoe?

As adorable as that is, hunger and cold have ways of asserting themselves.

Define “credentialism?”

The “well rounded person” shit is only ever given as a justification for forcing STEM majors to pay for liberal arts courses. I’ve never seen it go the other way, and it should. For every credit hour a STEM major spends in a humanities course, a liberal arts major should have to spend in a technical course.

Because guess what? That “just technical stuff” is the society we live in. Your ability to put current events into context because you studied the collapse of the Roman Empire won’t stop you from bleeding to death from multiple puncture wounds to the face, throat and chest caused by the rhinestones you glued to the hub of your steering wheel, turning your airbag into a claymore mine. You might not have crashed at all if you’d have taken your car to the shop when it started squealing every time you stepped on the brake pedal, you were relieved when it stopped that on its own.

The amount of staggering stupidity I’ve seen out of allegedly educated people…

“The way to get a job.”

The way to get certain jobs, like doctor, lawyer, scientist, engineer. Professions.

Don’t put education on some kind of pedestal. The very few people who were wealthy enough to attempt that shit had servants. They were rich enough to pursue the capstone of Maslowe’s pyramid. Nearly no one else is. The rest of us require a trade or profession to make ends meet. Until you solve scarcity, one way or another, reject as decadent the image of the angelic lofty scholar who learns for the sake of learning.

I keep saying it about AI written essays, but it applies here: College as we know it is bullshit and I hope this technology sparks the fire that burns it down.

The business model of quasi-requiring all young people to spend 4 years going into massive debt for the privilege of mostly repeating high school needs to die.

This shit about “become a well-rounded individual” also needs to die. That nonsense came about in the mid-20th century when it seemed industry, automation and electrical gadgetry was going to free us of toil, that in the future, George Jetson spends 3 hours a day, 3 days a week putting his feet up on his desk, so schools should teach art and music and literature classes to give people healthy hobbies so they know what to do with all this time they have. Wash that through the baby boomer intellect and it comes out “EXPLAIN THE THEMES IN WUTHERING HEIGHTS OR DIE A DITCH DIGGER.”

No such reduction in toil has happened. Artificial, gaseous toil has been created that expands to take up all available time.

We cling to this idea that “You are young. This is school time. You learn until you’re adult. When adult, you stop learn and start work. Never school again only work.” Which is the dumbest thing ever. We should offer all kinds of classes to all ages of people. You should be able to take a sociology class as a 38 year old man as casually as you can take yoga. Formal courses of study should be for earning certifications. You want to fly a plane? You need to complete this entire syllabus and take and pass this lengthy practical test so that we’re sure you won’t negligently crash into a neighborhood. You want to be a civil engineer? You need to complete this entire syllabus and pass this lengthy practical test so that we’re sure you won’t negligently sign off on a building that will collapse.

Humanities classes, arts and crafts, fine arts, culinary skills…this stuff needs to be available to anyone who wants them and not tacked onto technical training as a way to wring more money out of students.

No, the Decepticons are not misunderstood as the good guys. You are giving the Transformers series WAY too much credit.

First of all, let’s address this lie about decades and decades of woke comic books. That’s mostly marketing for the MCU that the movie industry has told you. Some comic books from some publishers some of the time have had social justice allegories. Stan Lee did it a lot. That was far from the standard; elsewhere in the industry you’d find nationalist propaganda like Captain America or just…DC spent a lot of time just doing salacious shit for the sake of salaciousness. Batman has been anything from goofy shit for children to a grimdark showcase of mental illness. Wonder Woman was an excuse for one author to write about his bondage fetish.

That’s not where Transformers came from. Transformers was a toy line first; Hasboro imported a line of Japanese toys and then created comics and cartoons around them as a marketing exercise. In the Ronald Reagan 1980’s. There’s a lot of people who have correct memories of Transformers being about a team of virtuous, American-made automobiles lead by a Red, White and Blue Peterbilt^® in their glorious fight against the fundamentally Evil, dark-colored foreigners. And those eye rolling The More You Know segments the Gubmint makes em do.

So, explain why you think this is anything other than a waste of time for engineering students?

Ben Rich, aeronautical engineer and second head of Lockeed’s Skunkworks after Kelly Johnson mentions Harvard Business School in his autobiography. He was apparently sent to a program they taught there for professionals already working in industry to become more business savvy. Kelly Johnson sent Ben Rich to this program, and when Rich got back, Johnson asked him what he learned. He said “Okay let me show you.” and he turned to the blackboard and wrote “2/3 HBS = BS” on the blackboard.

And with a hypothesis.

Who figured out this is a thing that works?

Would it have been a meme 20 years ago?

White collar engineers? Paying attention to blue collar techs? That’s the plot of the next Andy Weir novel, isn’t it? A hilariously naive notion of people working together to solve problems? Sounds like his work.

I couldn’t solve all the world’s problems if I was given this power, but it would make people who are damaged in the same way I am laugh for a couple months out of the year.