Joshua says:
September 29, 2023 at 10:38 am
Indeed, certain black/white models were of fine quality.
And their power suppliers weren’t such a Russian murks, either (see Junost TV internals juck).
Whoever wanted to get a large, but pure b/w TV back in late 20th century simply had to give them a try.

By the time, West Germany had stopped production of big b/w CCIR TVs and had focused on PAL color TVs.
So even West Germans had to think about importing a b/w TV from GDR.

Also interesting: The GDR was about the last county still operating pure b/w transmitters.
That’s because SECAM had reduced b/w quality, even if the source material didn’t have color. So pure b/w programme were being aired in plain CCIR norm, not SECAM.

Joshua says:
September 29, 2023 at 10:45 am
What’s also notable, East German products were also being used by us West Germans.
They were sold via Quelle catalog, albeit with their origin being hidden.

Which is kind of sad, because we had no problems using GDR appliances.
Their RG28 mixer wasn’t worse than our Krupp model.

In general, GDR products weren’t made with planned obsolescence in mind yet, because the GDR didn’t even thought about such business practices (too naive, I suppose).

So yes, a lot of West Germans grew up with East German products, either knowingly or unknowingly.

The tip of the ice berg was that many gifts from West German relatives were from Quelle catalog. So East Germans literally got their own products back, depending on how we see it. :)

milldude says:
September 29, 2023 at 12:07 pm
The “lack” of planned obsolescence was not out of naiveté, but born out of necessity. The scarce resources and low production volumes meant long-lasting products came naturally. Also, in the “Planwirtschaft” system theory, if there would be no further (or rater, reduced) need of a certain product, the state-owned factorys just would reduce output of that good and produce something else instead. There was also an extensive recycling system for glass and metal containers, much like we have today.

Joshua says:
September 29, 2023 at 2:29 pm
Yes, but GDR had produced twofold, as far as I know.
a) for own use, to satisfy the needs of the people
b) for export, to make good money (D-Mark)

Usually, it was the way that the norm that the ‘good’ products were sold for export and the stuff with small defects (scratches etc) was sold in GDR to the own people.

Same goes for sweets and chewing gum. The export version was being sold in a shiny package, while the version for the people was sold in a dull package.

Officially, the explanation was that this was a trick, to fight capitalism with its own weapons. Unofficially, it was clear that the own people were less being worth to the regime.

Dude says:
October 1, 2023 at 12:18 am
GDR was a Potemkin village of the soviet system in the first place, so the quality of products was higher for the show of it.

Otherwise the soviet system was searching for the lowest “socially necessary” cost. The reason why soviet products were built so robust was because of a quirk of the accounting system: not money but kilometer-tonnes. People had production quotas, which could be filled more easily if you put unnecessary amounts of material in the design. Whether the product actually works – who cares?

What are these “clear rules of the road” or the thresholds that determine when a price or profit level becomes “excessive”? The memo doesn’t say, and the campaign did not answer questions I sent seeking clarification. //

It’s hard to exaggerate how bad this policy is. It is, in all but name, a sweeping set of government-enforced price controls across every industry, not only food. Supply and demand would no longer determine prices or profit levels. Far-off Washington bureaucrats would. The FTC would be able to tell, say, a Kroger in Ohio the acceptable price it can charge for milk.

At best, this would lead to shortages, black markets and hoarding, among other distortions seen previous times countries tried to limit price growth by fiat. (There’s a reason narrower “price gouging” laws that exist in some U.S. states are rarely invoked.) At worst, it might accidentally raise prices. //

But more to the point: If your opponent claims you’re a “communist,” maybe don’t start with an economic agenda that can (accurately) be labeled as federal price controls. //

The "policy" is horrible, but you're just supposed to be vibing on how she's going to take care of the evil corporations. She apparently vetted this policy like she vetted her running mate Tim Walz — which is to say not at all or keeping her eyes covered about all the bad stuff. //

anon-aqyc Jerry's Middle Finger
an hour ago
They are just following the playbook of every Marxist since the beginning of time. Promise the world and when you get in power bring out the iron fist.

I am aware that Marx did not write about it until the 19th century, but the idea was not new with him. //

St. Joseph, Terror of Demons Jerry's Middle Finger
an hour ago
They know it doesn’t work and they don’t care. If everything fails, that means the elites get more money and more power. //

Donner’s Party
an hour ago
WaPo must have gotten the Memo from Bezoes, that Kamala’s new Joy policy wasn’t going to work for Amazon.
No Amazon, No WaPo, No Job.

There is a billionaire who, for the most part, has gone under the radar pushing "reimagining capitalism." His name is Pierre Omidyar. Omidyar was born in France to Iranian parents. He later moved to the United States, where he founded eBay.

With over six billion dollars in personal wealth, he founded the Omidyar Network to influence not just the private sector but, more importantly, to inject human capital into the federal bureaucracy. His intent seems clear: to make structural changes. What type of changes? It’s no secret that Omidyar has his acolytes who are all-in on equal results, not equal treatment. In 2020, his Network produced a pamphlet titled: “Call to Reimagine Capitalism in America.” On its opening page, it calls for:

A more democratic economy is one in which the real creators – working people, consumers, individuals, small businesses, and families – can have equal voice, hold power, and get ahead.

Further into the manifesto, it laments that America is rife with badness:

“structural racism, colonialism, paternalism,”

It calls for:

“an explicitly anti-racist and inclusive economy.” //

Since 2004, the Omidyar Network has spent $1.89 billion on social justice causes. //

The top-heavy influence of the Omidyar Network and related and funded entities and the injection of ideologues is unknown. Soros has had a remarkable influence on local politics by targeting district attorneys and local politicians. Omidyar is influencing policy at the federal level. //

anon-m0b0
15 hours ago edited
So a rich billionaire with buckets of money wants to create a society where he has more power and the people he says he is "helping" will be totally impoverished by the time he is done.

Its almost as if he accidentally created eBay and made money from it. Because he doesn't really believe in free markets.

Bill Whittle’s newest season of ‘What We Saw’ on Daily Wire Plus dips its toe in the oceans of blood Russia’s Communist revolution released.

The true crime genre is not big enough for what Communists and socialists did in Russia in the 20th century. It demands a new genre — perhaps call it true horror.

Bill Whittle’s newest season of “What We Saw” on Daily Wire Plus dips its toe in the oceans of blood Russia’s Communist revolution released. It’s grisly and difficult to take in. Whittle attempts to quantify the myriad forms of mass killings by comparing their death tolls to the erasure of several U.S. cities, yet still the numbers are numbing.

What’s not numbing is the question he includes in the season’s trailer comparing the Nazi Holocaust with the Soviet mass murder of an estimated 20 million: “Why are we encouraged to never forget one, and then intentionally taught to forget the other?” //

While it’s difficult to probe such manifestations of supernatural evil, doing so should be required of every human being. That’s because we need to look at evils like these and attempt to understand how they happen and what they say about human nature and history. Such knowledge is a fortification against it happening again — creating, for example, common knowledge that evil and corrupt governments often baselessly accuse their opponents of terrorism.

Here are four other things one can learn from studying Soviet history, as horrifying as that exercise can be.

1. Misery Is Normal in Human History

It’s hard to believe that when you’re an American and all you’ve ever known is clean and hot water coming out of the tap at a turn. But it’s also important to keep in mind. For one thing, it produces appropriate gratitude. For another, it should discipline hasty desires to “tear it all down,” and cultivate contempt for people who use the same lying words and policies as Communists.

2. People Are Not Innately Good

A heck of a lot of people somehow believe that humans are innately good. //

Soviet Russia is a tire iron to the back of that idea’s head. There can be no excuses for what the Communists did. No amount of bad potty training or poverty can excuse the mass murder of 20 million people and the enslavement of countless tens of millions more in gulag concentration camps. //

3. Socialists, Nazis, and Communists All Make the Same Hell on Earth

The truth is, socialists, Nazis, and Communists engage in furious infighting, but they’re all ultimately on the same side. They fight with each other, not because they disagree about collectivism, but because they all want to be on top of the dogpile of bodies their sister collectivist ideologies cause. Communists are Nazis are socialists are communists.

Socialist true believers will seek their collectivist ends “by any means necessary,” including government-sponsored terror, killing fields, and concentration camps. Anyone who proclaims himself a socialist in the face of historical facts about the hell on Earth socialism has always produced is a fool and fellow traveler, if not a covert supporter of mass terror.

4. We’d Better Keep America From Full Socialism

Let’s be honest: The United States is already partly socialist. We’re a pension plan with an army, as Andy Biggs noted, and every few years some other collectivist program that ratchets up the socialism is increased or enhanced, like Obamacare.

Brazil is a demographic and geographical giant ruled by Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, perhaps the hemisphere’s best known Marxist leader. Lula is also the founder of the Foro de Sao Paulo, the world’s largest grouping of Marxist parties and organizations.

The Foro threw its support behind the march in Argentina. Its executive secretary, Monica Valente, not only promoted the Jan. 24 protest and other demonstrations since Milei took office. She also shared on social media a Zoom meeting that over 200 global leftist unionists held with leaders of the main Argentine unions on Jan. 18, six days before the protest. //

Freire insisted that he and other international participants on the Zoom call were taking their cues from the three main Argentine union bosses leading the protest efforts.

But the figurative call to arms was unmistakable. Freire and the others spoke in apocalyptic tones about what would happen to the rest of the world if Milei succeeded, so the Argentines had better stop him lest Mileism spring up everywhere. //

“Argentina is a global laboratory,” Argentine union leader Roberto Baradel said during his remarks. Baradel decried how Milei was making “the right to property the central right in our social, political, and economic life.” //

This is what is arrayed against Milei, who only took office Dec. 10. There was no street violence against him in this dry run, but that isn’t guaranteed going forward. Milei remains immensely popular, an asset he will need.

Americans and Europeans who agree with Milei’s slogan of “Viva la Libertad, Carajo!” (or “Long Live Liberty, [Expletive]!”) have an interest in him succeeding. That’s because if he does succeed, there is a chance that rational policies can be tried at home.

The Argentine president’s success against the Big Global Left also would give us lessons about a possible return of 2020-style, Black Lives Matter-sponsored violence.

It turns out that this was the first time an artificial intelligence tool translated a speech by a world leader in real-time. //

fscarn | January 22, 2024 at 9:48 am
When the Founders/Framers spoke of freedom, they meant freedom FROM government,

Javier Milei gets it.

“It wasn’t what government did that made America great; it was what government was prevented from doing that made the difference,

“What set America apart from all other lands was freedom – for the individual. Freedom to work, to produce, to succeed and, especially, to keep the fruits of one’s labor.

“America became great precisely because the stifling effects of too much government had been prevented [by means of Constitutional limitations].”

Part of narration of Overview of America,

https://jbs.org/video/featured/overview-of-america/?mc_cid=aab99f82ce

What do you do when you decide the Soviet Union and Red China aren’t communist enough and “real communism hasn’t ever been tried”? Well, you give it a try!

Estimates of the number of Albanians murdered by the communist dictatorship range from 5,000 to 25,000, including 1,200 killed while trying to escape the slave state. Albania, with abundant hydroelectric power resources and petroleum, was the poorest country in Europe with GDP per capita around US$ 750 in the 1980s.

MILEI: Today, I'm here to tell you that the Western world is in danger. It is in danger because those who are supposed to defend the values of the West are co-opted by a vision of the world that inevitably leads to socialism and thereby to poverty. Unfortunately, in recent decades, motivated by some well-meaning individuals willing to help others, and others motivated by the wish to belong to a privileged class, the main leaders of the Western world have abandoned the model of freedom for different versions of what we call collectivism. We're here to tell you that collectivist experiments are never the solution to the problems that inflict the citizens of the world. Rather, they are the root cause. Do believe me, no one is in a better place than us, Argentines, to testify to these two points. //

The crowd at the WEF doesn't want to hear that, though, and Milei's urgings will certainly be dismissed. Still, it's important they are made. It's important people stand up to the onslaught that is coming from Klaus Schwab and company. If they have their way, freedom and upward mobility will no longer exist. People will simply become cogs in their machines as they continue to live the good life. Want proof? The big-wigs at the WEF are currently pushing the idea of a so-called "disease X" that will kill 20x more people than COVID-19. What's their solution? More control because that's always their solution.

There is no greater existential threat to freedom than the leadership class represented at the WEF. Terrorists aren't going to fundamentally change your way of life, but powerful heads of state all singing from the same sheet of socialist, anti-freedom music can and will. Milei is a much-welcomed voice in the fight against that. //

anon-62kn
2 hours ago
Not on the public agenda at the WEF are secret, backroom meetings with the sole focus to make sure Milei is a 1-term president, and that Trump does not win - or if he wins he is immediately neutered.

“Hungarians told me over and over, ‘the rhetoric coming out of the United States reminds us of our Soviet era,’” Bradley-Farrell recalled. “And the more I dug into that, the more that I realized that the things that we’re dealing with here and the so-called progressive agenda, the woke agenda, the Biden administration, they’re directly out of the playbook of communism,” she says.

As a deeply religious and freedom-loving nation, Hungary—which came out from under Soviet oppression in 1991—has long looked to America as a “light on a … hill,” Bradley-Farrell says. But Hungary is not a model for America because “America and our Constitution, our founding, is the model for the world,” she says.

However, “our Hungarian friends, the people that care about us, are saying, ‘Hey, your rhetoric is communist. You guys need to wake up, because you’re about to lose what we loved about you.’”

In her new book, “Last Warning to the West: Hungary’s Triumph Over Communism and the Woke Agenda,” Bradley-Farrell outlines a road map for how America can change course and learn from our friends in Hungary at this moment in history.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn dedicated his book about the end state of communism ‘to all those who did not live to tell it.’ //

My parents emigrated from the Soviet Union. From what they told me, I developed a deep reluctance to being frog-marched to Kolyma courtesy of unilateral disarmament peaceniks, who are nowadays called “woke” with alternate grievances but the same collectivist Borg mentality. //

In part I’s fourth chapter, Solzhenitsyn encourages humility about human vulnerability to evil. “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” //

In part VII’s third chapter, Solzhenitsyn excoriates apologists for Soviet misrule: “All you freedom-loving ‘left-wing’ thinkers in the West! … As far as you are concerned, this whole book of mine is a waste of effort. You may suddenly understand it all someday — but only when you yourselves hear ‘hands behind your backs there!’ and step ashore on our Archipelago.” He knew his disclosures would meet that era’s version of cancel culture. //

The will to dominate runs deep in the human psyche. Archipelago reminds us such despotic cruelty became commonplace in living memory with few held accountable.

Moreover, such atrocities continue today behind barbed wire in western China, North Korea, and elsewhere on the globe. Solzhenitsyn warns us all of the consequences should resistance to totalitarianism fail.