>If you care about minimizing child mortality, increasing literacy, pulling people up out of poverty, you should be a capitalist, as it's empirically the best way to meet those goals
If you look at it empirically, the majority of people brought out of poverty (and I suspect the other metrics but am not as familiar with them) in the past few decades have been in China as the result of deliberate policies by the CPC.
YMTC also announced entry into the DRAM market a couple months back. CXMT recently announced DDR5-8000. Sanctions clearly aren't working to slow progress in China's tech sector, but they seem to be great for the profits of US vassal-states
> Applications that directly use DC from PV arrays is cheap
Direct DC is very underrated in America. Almost everyone I know with solar panels is grid tied and they're missing out. Antique belt drive shop tools are cheap, relatively easy to restore and maintain, and lend themselves to solar conversion (just add DC motor). Only downside is that you can only work while the sun's shining.
Marx addressed exactly this sort of improvement in productivity from automation. He was writing with full hindsight on the industrial revolution after all. I hope coding LLMs give professional computer touchers a wakeup call to develop some sorely lacking class consciousness.
>the capitalist who applies the improved method of production, appropriates to surplus-labour a greater portion of the working day, than the other capitalists in the same trade […] The law of the determination of value by labour-time, a law which brings under its sway the individual capitalist who applies the new method of production, by compelling him to sell his goods under their social value, this same law, acting as a coercive law of competition, forces his competitors to adopt the new method.
