This thread seems entirely filled with people who seem to not grasp my core point.
We grasp the core point: vim is not typical. This is not insightful.
What we care more about is the link to the jobs portal of the company there will be an opening at soon that uses vim as it's standard dev tool chain.
It doesn’t make the assumptions you made in your original comment, that elites are necessary or that they can be integrated by making society more complex without increasing the relative resources available for them
Elite positions are as necessary as the stability of the social systems under which they're necessitated. If your argument is that elites are unnecessary then you'd need to explain a viable socio-political model where they do not exist.
We can argue about the elite efficiency, e.g. minimizing to necessary elites. However even the USSR, China, Makhnovshchina, and ELZN have elites. So it's not like they're going to go away without a new radical socio-technology that does not exist.
As far as the complexity argument, that's literally the path that many societies had effectively chosen to stave off elite overproduction issues from coming to a boil. Tsarist Russia for example arguably ran a century and a half by doing makework bullshit for elites (see the linked blog). I never argued that it effectively solved the root causes of elite overproduction simply that it was a solution.
The arguments here can easily be applied to "Pol Pot", which again is also not something I am advocating, but something I am enumerating.
In the modern era that's basically it (because higher education represents the biggest generation of elites), but it's more general.
Elite in this case is simply the highest caste, class or social strata that enforces some form of power over the lower ones.
Let's say there's X amount of elite "positions" (cuz being a King is not a job and this applies to history as well) every year, presidents, senators, bankers, CEO's, all the way to some upper middle class jobs.
Every year this set of jobs can expand or contract. These positions require (through culture or ability) social elites to fulfill their function, people of privilege, college educated, connected, skilled, etc. Let's call the amount of elites Y
Elite overproduction essentially is a phenomenon in a country where Y > X and grows Y at a greater rate than X year over year.
In Tsarist Russia for example Y (represented by the nobility) grew at a rate of 2.5 over ~75 years. In that same time X had only grown through fake make work councils which could not subsume all of the elites being produced.
However that's not all the Y there was, Russia was also growing like the world was and petty bourgoisie were also growing adding to Y.
Historically the conflict between the nobility and the bourgeoisie has been a conflict of the nobility refusing to make de jure space for the bourgeoisie and being de facto evicted from that space. That's literally the French Revolution.
This isn't just Marxism rebranded because this applies to socialist countries in history such as the USSR, and currently such as China.
The predator prey models are not used in elite over reproduction work. They're used in his medieval geopolitical work.
Paper: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/82s3p5hj
Explainer: https://www.historica.org/blog/cliodynamics-and-mathematical-models-in-history-part-2
The elite overproduction paper does not use them: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6qp8x28p
First off, Turchin isn't a Marxist. He accepts Marxist and Marxian ideas though especially when proven through empirical data. He obviously must he's a sociologist. He's ambivalent / neutral about Marxism.
His model is summed up as: When excess elites are not absorbed into the existing power structure and are locked out due to lack of space in that power structure, they become aggrieved by their low status and seek alternatives to that power structure in various ways. Since they are elites they have some means whether knowledge, skill or material, thus have the means to destabilize the power structure itself.
This quite literally describes the conditions that made Lenin and much of the intellectual vanguard themselves as they related to the power structure of Tsarist Russia. One of the things that many here do not really focus on is that Lenin and the Bolsheviks weren't just solving a problem for the proletariat, they were solving a problem for themselves too.
Here's a good blog putting together the historical info but focusing on the general nobility rather than the Bolsheviks only.
https://novum.substack.com/p/elite-overproduction-a-story-of-russia?s=w
Turchin's book is called Secular Cycles.
Turchin's substack is here: https://peterturchin.substack.com/archive?sort=top
He has a fairly interesting series called "A Chronicle of Revolution" that talks about the meta of revolutions themselves and relates it to current/historical happenings.
Turchin's father was Valentin Turchin who was a fairly famous Soviet cyberntician who left the USSR after defending Sakharov, because he didn't want his science career to plummet in the same way. His life story is literally based in elite over reproduction.
Turchin was at the University of Moscow before his family left the USSR.
What's always interesting about these discussions of elite overproduction is they're never framed as understanding elite management as a social control model rather elite overproduction is framed as a natural expression of needing a certain labor mix that spirals out of control.
Nobody seems to take the 3rd order logic step of saying, if society needs smart people, but hierarchical societies can only aggrandize these individuals with a limited number of positions, and that the creation of members of this class becomes easier as we advance in technology that leads to a couple of "solutions":
The USSR struggled with this as well in terms of students in the 80's which thought they were better than kolkhoz. The Jeans Generation was not just a Georgian phenomenon, it was all over the USSR. It's fairly inarguable that class stratification reemerged in various was in socialist states, just not in the classical capitalist form. It will be interesting to see how China deals with this going forward given that graduating with a Masters Degree is currently a great way to be unemployed.
Partner and I have been watching The Last of Us because we stan Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey.
I was telling my partner not to expect a good character story for The Last of Us Season 2 since the show has been faithfully relaying the plot of the games especially in it's scene composition.
Neil Druckman (grew up as a West Bank Settler as a child, until his family moved to the US) has explicitly gone on the record to say that the story was inspired by the 2000 Ramallah lynching among other experiences in the West Bank. He's a reflexive center left Zionist which means he's an ultra lib loser and he donated $2,500 to both sides after October 7th and the subsequent reprisal. Also he's a huge loser who fell for the beheaded babies propaganda.
He has explicitly gone on the record to say he wanted to essentially do what Kill BIll did for the concept of "when you seek revenge dig 2 graves", where the ending both reifies it but also waters down its inherent tragedy in the eyes of the audience.
“I landed on this emotional idea of, can we, over the course of the game, make you feel this intense hate that is universal in the same way that unconditional love is universal?” Druckmann told the Post. “This hate that people feel has the same kind of universality. You hate someone so much that you want them to suffer in the way they’ve made someone you love suffer.”
So essentially the POV is that you're supposed to want to feel the currently very Israeli coded feeling of being so racist, self righteous and hateful that it drives your society to hollow itself out in it's irrational crusade to extinguish the subject of these feelings. But in a, you know, rationalizing, this is fine, this is normal, this is just people and there's nothing you can do and some of it is kinda good actually way.
I'm incredibly curious as to how TLOU Season 2 walks this tight rope with the source material, political climate, and especially since Bella Ramsey has been so outspoken about the genocide.
Because the cold open is Isaac torturing a Seraphite while reiterating Israeli style talking points about how he doesn't care about who's actually doing the most killing, and that he has some abstract right to kill all of the Seraphites as revenge / preemptive self defense / etc. When the Seraphite tells him that the WLF is eating itself and their troops are joining the Seraphites and never leaving, it leads to him getting irrationally mad and just straight up executing the Seraphite. Outside the door one of WLF guards looks a bit upset for a second before the second one said "Good he got what he deserved".
Grimly realistic stuff. Gonna be interesting how they thread this needle.
Last night the comments were turned off. I thought the NYT was trying to protect their reputation from their readership and their readership from themselves. They're turned on this morning. I present to you this gem:
That avi looks familiar hmm.....
Everyone's libing out hard over this. I've seen this my entire fucking life.
Watch any municipal or state town hall where it's an issue with real stakes where the cops have shot someone, where there's an unequal land deal with developer money behind it, or literally just like be black in America.
The only difference here is that your status as Mr. Senator no longer protects you. These types of arrests and laws have existed in America and have always been used this way. This is why disturbing the peace, disorderly conduct and and vagrancy laws are often only criminally enforced on those who cannot afford good lawyers or plead out. These cases get dropped upon challenge because most applications of these laws won't pass a smell test, and the jurisdictions don't want to lose them.
Likewise most courts won't per se strike down these laws because this kind of stuff is really where the rubber meets the road with liberal legalism.
These laws are basically what makes that cop saying "you can beat the rap but you can't beat the ride" possible.