[travel] Commmunism tainted atheism

I think one thing that atheists such as myself who grew up in a post-Cold-War environment don't realize is that, for earlier generations, atheism has a strong link to communism. The communist leaders of Russia, China, and other countries worked as hard as they could to eradicate all traces of religion and religious authority. Religious buildings (churches, syangogues, mosques, temples etc) were bulldozed or repurposed,* religious leaders were sent to labor camps or executed, and religious rituals were banned. Religion was seen as an ideological competitor and a power threat by the communist leaders, so they did away with it.

Thus, from the perspective of a God-fearing Cold-War era American, atheists are linked ideologically to the communist ideology. Thus, for you atheists out there, if you're talking to an older religious person about atheism, keep this in mind.

*Fortunately for the future tourist industry, the largest and most beautiful monuments were often spared because there would have been huge popular uproar if they were destroyed.

[travel] Oppression and Recovery

Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia have recovered remarkably well from their half-century of oppression. If you don't stray from the downtown areas, it's hard to see any trace of it aside from the various monuments commemorating its end. They did get a lot of financial assistance from the EU, but simply throwing money at the problem is no guarantee of results; there was clearly the passion and knowledge on the part of the Baltic states to make the rapid recovery happen.

In the late 1980s as the old Soviet Union was weakening, the eastern European republics began to push for independence.* While the USSR was weak, it was still far more powerful than the tiny Baltic states that stood up to it. Russia sent troops to violently suppress these independence movements but ultimately they gave in to international pressure and let them break off.

It's impressive how resilient these countries were given what they experienced. On the eve of World War II, Hitler and Stalin secretly divided up the (independent) countries of Eastern Europe. Russia orchestrated takeovers of the Baltic republics and promptly exterminated religious and political leaders, intellectuals, businesspeople, and any other dissenting voices. Hundreds of thousands of people died. A couple of years later, when Germany turned on Russia, the Nazis took over the Baltic republics. Initially many residents saw them as liberators, but the Nazis soon made it clear they had other plans. They documentted the mass killings of the Russians, blamed these actions on the Jews, and then set up concentration camps to kill the city's Jewish population and anyone who had helped the Russians during their occupation. Toward the end of the war, Russia recaptured the country and again exterminated any dissenters as well as anyone who whad worked with the Germans. For the next 45 years, the countries were run into the ground by the distant, autocratic, and incompetent government in Moscow. (eg farmers were often directed by Moscow to grow crops that were unsuitable for the region.) Despite all of this, the residents of these countries were willing to stand up to the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and risk violent suppression to gain independence.

This is stunning when you think about it. Anyone who was 20 when the Baltics lost their independence would have been in their late sixties when the independence movement returned, so the vast majority of residents at the time would have known nothing but oppression.

Not surprisingly, these countries all have a strong national identity. Here's one concrete way of measuring it -- they are among the least populous countries to have their own domestic film industry. It's as if the residents of San Francisco spoke their own language, and big-budget films were made and marketed in this language for consumption purely by San Francisco residents.

*(In a Gandhi-esque moment of protest, the residents of the three countries formed an unbroken human chain from one end of the region to the other.)

[travel] Thinking about shared goods...

Flipping things around, what elements of communism are worth thinking about?

One thing I'm a fan of in some situations is communal ownership of goods.

In some cases, communal ownership allows for more efficient use of goods than private ownership. For example, most people only use their vacuum cleaners once a month, and the rest of the time they sit in people's closets taking up space. It wouldn't be hard to imagine a shared pool of vacuum cleaners for a neighborhood, with a local delivery service moving them around. I think that new technology could allow us to addres some of the traditional problems with shared goods, in particular the issue that you can't trust someone else to take proper care of your stuff. However, if these goods had sensors that allowed them to determine if they are being used properly, and there were reputation systems in place to track the trustworthiness of the users, then it might be possible to avoid the traditional problem of rough use of shared goods.

There are of course rental services for everything from tuxedos to cars to vacuum cleaners, but the labor and retail costs involved in these setups often drives the price up to surprisingly high levels given the good's cost. I think that the use of sensors and reputation systems in addition to the cost savings of online coordination could allow a much cheaper, more efficient execution of this. I could see both a free version where people would have to arrange for their own pickup and delivery, and a commercial version that is more convenient and coordinates local pickup and dropoff of goods. The initial price of the good in the free version could be either paid for by the pool of users or paid for by the first user, with each subsequent user automatically reimbursing the first user for depreciation incurred.

I would also love to see this for software. On occasion I'd like to use a $1000 video editing program. Currently I could either shell out the money (which would result in a very high cost per hour of use) or I could get a pirated copy (in which case the software vendor loses out). In corporate environments there's the option of a site license, but that doesn't extend to individuals. However, imagine a shared scenario where someone buys a beefy $2000 laptop and $3,000 worth of software for it. If this computer were shared among a large community of users over three years, the cost per day of use would only be $5. It's too bad the software industry is too scared to try a per-hour business model for personal software use.

Overall, this system greatly benefits individuals because it lets them get access to goods they want while spending less money, or gets them access to much better goods for the same money. The trick is getting manufacturers to cooperate, as they would need to put features in place to facilitate shared use, and would experience a short-term drop in sales as users initially keep their original consumption choices but switch to shared goods.

I think it will ultimately be up to companies that are currently succeeding at selling pooled use (eg TechShop and CityCarShare) to put pressure on manufacturers, and to do that they will need to get big enough to have some leverage.

This is of course rather far from the communist version of shared ownership, but I'm trying to come up with something that actually works! :-)

[travel] Intellectual vs real communism

I am very surprised that communism was such a big thing with 1960s-era academic intellectuals. It was clear even back then that it failed horribly at the task of ensuring a good life for the common citizen. Stalin's mass exterminations and Mao's disastrous Great Leap Forward (which caused tens of millions of farmers to starve to death) were both known in the West by then. I suppose communist *ideals* lined up well with hippie ideals of the time, but I don't know whether the proponents of communism in America at the time made a distinction between the failures in Russia and China and some other version they felt might be more successful. Maybe those of you more in the know can enlighten me on this.

I'm curious if communism has ever been successful in anything bigger than a college dormitory.* I've now visited a rather large number of countries that tried it, and they all have had to abandon it, sometimes after as little as 10 years. It seems to have the problem that it is strongly dependent on a huge power structure to administer everything top-down.** This power structure attracts fascist leaders and does not have provisions for moderating their influence. Ho Chi Minh seems to have been the closest any communist leader came to practicing the true communist ideal, and even he was turned into more of a figurehead by his own party.*** It is possible communism could work in a larger system if there wasn't much at stake in the system (so fascists wouldn't be interested in running it) and the system could be set up to self-select for people who are most likely to enjoy living under such a system and act as productive members.

*The Indian province of Kerala has a democratically elected Marxist government, but their economy incorporates a lot of capitalist elements.

**Which is ironic given that most of the 1960s communists in America were very anti-authoritarian.

***I don't know much about Ho Chi Minh, but he appears to be one of the rare communist leaders who was not corrupted by the trappings of power. When he was president, he shunned the presidental palace, a leftover from the imperial days, and lived instead in a small, spare stilt house on the corner of the grounds. His last request was to be cremated and to have his ashes scattered across the country. However, the party leaders had other ideas. They rewrote his will so that he would be enbalmed, Lenin-style, in a massive fascist-looking tomb that people could visit. They put his picture on posters and billboards all over the country and on all the denominations of their money. They essentially used his legacy to legitimize their own rule.

[travel] Architects gone wild

50 strange buildings from around the world

I've seen about 10 of these. Hell, I had a nice conversation with the architect of #10, and driving past #7 for the first time at 3am was kind of shocking and nearly caused me to run off the road.