They can hardly industrialize on a sustainable scale right? Tourism is their only possible lifeblood, along with extractive stuff like mining and fishing and being a tax haven. What viable path is there for them under a communist system?
They can hardly industrialize on a sustainable scale right? Tourism is their only possible lifeblood, along with extractive stuff like mining and fishing and being a tax haven. What viable path is there for them under a communist system?
I'm not sure I really understand the question. They'd just vibe? Other people would send them stuff they need bc we'd be efficiently allocating goods and industrial machinery? Folks would visit and hang out?
One of the things we mostly assume would happen if we ever manage to break capitalism is most of the false scarcity in society would go away. There's no incentive for infinite growth or planned obsolescence or profit seeking or rent seeking. People lived just fine on Islands for thousands of years.
And there's plenty of stuff to go around. We could build stuff to be vastly more durable and long lasting than we do. There are plenty of century old machines still functioning just fine. There's no real reason to have a better phone every year except conspicuous consumption and planned obsolescence. What even drives people to get new phones? Better cameras? I suspect it's mostly planned obsolesence crap - broken screens, old batteries, all difficult to repaitr by design. I used to have a joke about how the soviet iphone would weigh six pounds, have a complete circuit diagram etched on the inside of it's casing, have all user serviceable parts, be ugly as fuck, and get 5 bars on the moon.
it wouldn't look like capitalist planned obsolescence but you do want some product lifetime management where things eventually fail and can be replaced by actual advances in technology. if everything is maximally durable you've wasted all those extra resources when a better MRI machine is invented or whatever and you replace things with decades of usable life that are mechanically obsolete.
Circular economies have entered the chat.
Highly durable materials are much easier to dismantle and reprocess. The entire waste argument against durability presupposes an economy where we just throw everything into a landfill instead of putting the materials back into the economy. No economy can sustain itself on MRI machines being disposable.
there are a lot of components in things that aren't particularly reusable even in devices designed to last over a decade. MRI machines are by no means disposable, but they're going to break down at some rate, and imaging technology will improve at some rate and there's a sweet spot were you're not wasting resources over-building the things but they last long enough to be replaced on what amounts to a schedule.
there's also efficiency gains. It's all well and good that my monitor from 15 years ago still works, but it uses more electricity than a newer one the same size so at some point it's worth the cost to me personally now to get a new one and stop using this one even though i don't "need" to, and in a post-revolutionary society it would be worth the resources of manufacture to replace it even though it's not broken depending on the generation and other needs of the community. maybe some of these components are reusable but there are diminishing returns on energy intensive recycling processes.
Yes, and those components are waste. Reducing waste is a critical aspect of sustainable society, which means it's a critical aspect of communism. Components that are waste should not cause reusable components to be dumped in a landfill. They should be engineered to be removable without much effort or ideally engineered out completely. Inefficient older models can be returned to a reclamation center to reclaim the materials to create the circular economy. You can't claim energy efficiency as your goal when you rely on externalizing the waste of billions of products.
Yeah I might be overthinking it. I guess with this question I wanted to open up discussion of how communist globalization or trade logistics would work? If I'm understanding you correctly, other countries with stronger industrial bases would "subsidize" them, for lack of a better word. I certainly have nothing against that, I mean it's only fair.
nah it'd be all that stuff but only 5 ounces. Samsung galaxy S5 was around in 2014 and did basically everything today's phones do, but had a removable battery and was lightweight
low weight and low volume is a practical thing, so commie tech would pursue it.