Hit the road Jack, or how Im hitchhiking between Tunka valley & Ulan-Ude. (Lots of photos!)
Hello Steemians! I am writing for you while on the road. Since we had a lot of rains in the last several weeks some bridges in Mongolia were damaged, and there is currently no way through Tunka valley, so my sister had to go via Ulaanbator. At the time of this writing she is already at home. I have no further reason to stay in Tunka. I packed up my things, and am currently trying to hitch my way to Ulan-Ude.
Here are are some photos before leaving:
A selfie with Irina who I was working with.
Ready for the road!
As usual the views in Tunka valley are simply breathaking, especially the clouds and the mountains. Bus tickets were sold out, so I had to walk my way out.
Just outside the village.
The turn towards the main road.
Thing is people weren't keen on stopping, so I walked for quite a while, until someone offered me a ride to the turn to Arshan (called "Strelka" by locals) where more mineral springs are. But after I had to walk some more.
Some more clouds and hills.
The river is shallow and the water so clear that I could see through to the bottom.
Encountered come cows on the road locked in a fierce argument.
Some more views. The darker clouds gave me some worry, since rain was possible.
Walking down the road I encountered...
...this little brook.
Endless road stretches
It runs towards horizon
Sun beats down on me
For another haiku contest this one by @steemswede
Only took a couple of photos before someone finaly offered me a ride.
We stopped at the cafe to have something to eat. I tried some mongolian tea. It is prepared with salt, milk, butter and some crushed & roasted wheat. Can also be done with tsampa. I was able to get all the way to Sludyanka which is situated on the coast of Lake Baikal. In Sludyanka I was dropped at the bus station, but the last bus to Ulan-Ude has already left, so I had to hit the road again.
This cool building is just a water tower, according to the locals.
Quite a few of statues in Sludyanka.
The road around Baikal is quite mountainous, so the views are good.
And get even better farther up the slope.
Yup, statues!
After I was busy walking on, until a bus that goes to Baikalsk came and picked me up. It dropped me near the "Rocket". And since I had to wait for another bus I started writing this log of my trip. The driver was kind enough to suggest a couple of places where I could get a ride on a freight truck, and I am currently sitting at such a place, that is called cafe "Siberia". I talked to some drivers and apparently got a ride early in the morning. Now all I have to do is wait. Wish me luck!
The Rocket.
It was getting chilly near Baikal so I had to dress up a bit:
Hello, Steemians!
My supper is really simple fare from roadside cafe. I blame @papa-pepper for wanting fish. :-D
Since it is a bit hard to comb through the site for links while hitchhiking, and my battery is a bit on the low side no links this time, sorry!
Thanks for sharing these photographs of the amazing landscape of the far east of Russia. I had heard of Lake Baikal, but now I see it, and the land around it, and I am enchanted. I live in Bulgaria and we have some amazing landscape here too. Maybe sometime when I get richer I will take a break for a couple of weeks, jump on the back of a motorcycle and blog it to the Steemosphere.
The 'Iron Curtain' and communism hid so much wonderous things, I am glad it's gone and the world is steadily becoming more open. It really shows, by looking at it, part of how the Soviet blocs managed to remain functional despite the idiotic government system for so long. You guys live in some of the most beautiful parts of this little blue dot in space.
It failed just before engineers were able to take over and cybernetize the whole thing (or because thay failed to do that). The execution was alittle iffy, but ideas behind them are okay. The end result they were working toward is stateless society, too bad that power corrupts. :-D Besides a lot of the trouble we see today was put in place in 70s to overcome the Soviet block countries. It helped short term, but now everyone is paying the price.
I think it's pretty funny. The energy that kept communism going so long, this energy is now with us. And look where we are! The very same land. I think Edgar Cayce was right. The people of Eastern Europe are going to prove to be the biggest force behind what sets the world to rights. Communism was wrong, but the thing that animated the people who thought it was right, this was never wrong.
You should probably read up on communism. It is one part anarchy, one part voluntarism, and several other different part. You can even start with the wikipedia article. I heard here on steemit that communism equals taxation.
Actually it has nothing to do with it.
Anyhow a lot of cool things that exist today first appeared because of "communism", reduced work week & work day. Mandatory safety techniques. The list is quite long actually. Check it out.
I am ambivalent about how "The Party" in USSR did things, but I wasn't there so it is somewhat hard to have informed opinion, since history is written by the winners.
I don't identify as communist, or any other way, but there are a lot of cool ideas there, check them out.
I have read plenty about communism. It's failure in general is because it is completely contrary to the natural laws of economics, and it in fact favours the power of corrupt elites.
But I think it is in fact the inherent strengths of the cultures where it flourished, that it did not fall in a heap in a year, which is exactly what would have happened in any capitalistic culture, either britain's far flung colonies, or most of western and especially north western europe.
I am not one for throwing the baby out with the bathwater either. But you don't need a top down authority. An insurance system punishes poor safety procedures. Insurance is more profitable when privately, and cooperatively run. Insurance agencies share data, as do lenders, who depend on the same kind of data. Information about risky clients enables them to minimise their losses and benefit more those who take the time to improve their safety procedures and security mechanisms.
Inevitably, there was good things that managed to arise within the communist bureaucracies. But a clock tells the right time once a day as well.
What worked with communism, has largely been adopted by not just non-communist governments, but also by private business. Communists were not alone and I am sure as time goes on more material will turn up to show that these inspired Aparatchiks were inspired by things they saw when they snuck out from behind the curtain or talked to someone who did.
Good ideas cannot be contained within ideologies, but grow within competitive meritocracies. This site itself demonstrates the power of that even just by the way that it weights votes by vested stakes, just as is done within corporate shareholder meetings.
I think that what allowed communism to survive so long was mainly because the people who accepted it, were humble, and mentally flexible. This is the only way people could manage to not have it destroy their morale so much that it was over the next day.
I am sorry, but you are confusing the communism, and the soviet establishment, which after some point had absolutely nothing to do with what communism is all about and is also coloured by the anti soviet propaganda. We were "The Enemy" for quite a while, right? For best results it is best to have your information from impartial source.
Communism is all about building the economics to remove the scarcity and enable people to cooperate on basis of mutual benefit based on their concious decisions. Once that point is reached there will be no need for state and money and both would be abolished.
Libertarians are somewhere between extreme left (communism) and extreme right (laissez faire capitalism). Took me a little while to understand that joke by Stand Up Economist.
Well, Anarchocapitalism is the successor that you are looking for. You see it in action right here. The objective of capitalism, in general, is to optimise resource distribution so as to diminish scarcity, first with most important things, and then steadily outwards to less important things.
There is a rhetorical mathematical puzzle that goes like this. If you want to get to some destination, which is x distance away, how long will it take for you to get there if every step you take is half the distance of the previous step. It is rhetorical, but it illustrates a mathematical concept called a 'limit'. The limit is effectively infinity. In the real world, everything has such a limitation on it. You can always go further, but you can never reach the ultimate destination. That is a place that will remain as far away for you now as it was for our ancestors, as for those living a billion years in the future. Zero scarcity is precisely a limit, and capitalism is the process of stepping forward towards that limit.
I recently learned about Lenin's New Economic Policy. This policy actually spread throughout the Communist Bloc to every part of it. This is why to this day, agriculture is still a vibrant and in fact, compared to the rest of the world, thriving business. This is why most farms in former communist nations are around 5 acres in size, and run by one family, not by a corporation, as is the more common situation in the USA, and much of the former British Commonwealth, and some of the western european nations.
This policy effectively limited the most socially destructive problem of communism, the centralised control of food production. Nothing will make people burn down parliament, or the palace, or the Bureau, or what have you, like empty bellies. Look at Venezuela right now.
Karl Marx was indeed one of the greatest economists - at the time he wrote his treatises. His work has been thoroughly disproven and far better models and theories that have proven themselves very well in the systems of decentralised, distributed cryptosystems that we see today. They really take as their most important Apostle, the great Ludwig von Mises, who used methodologies that he may or may not have taken from the at the time (1953) growing field of Chaos theory and Cybernetics. He called them 'mental experiments' and were a key tool within the text Human Action for justifying the decentralised economic regulation that he advocated.
He did not, as did his student, Murray Rothbard, outright reject authoritarianism, but if you spend a few weeks like I did, and read Human Action, and fully digest it (it took me two reads to fully absorb), you will also think as I do, and also notice that Mises great treatise effectively condemns any form of centralised economic management.
It was revolutionary for its time, and the subsequent development of Cybernetic and Chaos theory (a label, the latter, has been deprecated, but I think that is because people in mathematics don't think the ancient meaning of the word Chaos is very marketable), has further bolstered the theoretical supports that his economic theory is built upon, and these have been proven over and over again in computer science, in the last 30 years.
I think that within 100 years, Mises will be elevated to the position of a widely regarded visionary whose early vision predated most of the hard methodologies that have led to the Information Age.
Um, Russia had quite a capitalistic culture, as well as really strong traditions of meritocracy (a lot of Russian bourgeoisie was ex serfs that were given permission to follow their ideas, that allowed them to by their own freedom).
Anyhow, as an engineer that worked in the field for about ten years I understand what the limit is. As well as that the scarcity is generally a thing of the past. But the problem is not with scarcity, but with logistics.
Um. If that is the objective of capitalism, then why is there such fields as advertising & marketing? They bring no value other then artificially create demand. Anyhow, here is quite funny and interesting blog about Chaos Marxism. I stumbled upon it while leafing through my discordian library, there was a "Chaos Marxism Primer" there. Please take a peek at it when you have some free time.
Speaking about "top down authority", thing is Russia had a period of communism, and it is actually characterised by bottom up authority. Check out the "soviets". They were low level committees of workers to decide on the best course of action. But at some point they were abolished.
Also NEP has nothing to do with big farms in USSR and elsewhere. It was closed somewhere in late 20s & eraly 30s.
Another thing is that right now the agro-corporations are working at displacing whatever farmers we have.
Another thing I'd like to mention is this guy Stafford Beer, as well something called Cybersyn which is The only viable attempt at planned economics! Thing is the economics in USSR wasn't truly planned. That is run by engineers and flexibly adjusted from the ground up with solutions sought at the bottom and rising if they can't be solved at that level. But the Chileans, they tried it. One if the highlights is:
This is beside the point. What we have here is first of all Anarchist experiment. Is it capitalist or communist anarchism the time will tell. But since we all exist in the capitalist societies, it is helping people, and that is important.
I made note to read Rothbard & Mises. I'll write something as soon as that happens. :-)
I have no doubt that you will write after you read Mises, in particular.
My refutation of the 'communist' side of the anarchist philosophy is based on his methodology. As is the refutation of others, like @larkenrose and probably you can coax a discussion out of big figures who have got to the top of the trending feed here, @charlieshrem and @dollarvigilante and @marcstevens.
The thing that refutations of capitalism always conveniently leave out, is that the so-called 'capitalist governments' still operate using the covert and vicious methods of the old monarchies and dictatorships.
As for whether leninism's NEP affected the way that things are done in the former communist blocs, these changes towards corporatised farm ownership are in fact new, and are one of the tactics of globalists, amongst which such as the Hungarian George Soros are using their influence and if you have heard about the recent leak of Open Society Foundation's emails, this guy is actively promoting social disharmony and political smear campaigns and propaganda to advance his agendas.
and by the way, I have been reading a bit of history books lately. I think the Tsars were actually not doing so badly, but the Bolsheviks were so well funded by the western banker elite to perform their coup, that only modern decentralised technology could have stopped their successful destruction of the good things the Tsars did.
I am a Russophile, I have been for a long time. You don't need to convince me that amongst the slavic cultures in the last 150 years there has been many very important thinkers. For me it is a novelty because I was not able to learn about it sooner than I did, being on the other side of the curtain.
I moved to Bulgaria by accident, and it could just as easily have been Ukraine or Russia, were it as easy for me to go there. To me, Bulgaria is the most slavic of the nations that have signed up for the EU, and I have dutch citizenship, so this is mainly why I chose this place. But after coming, the locals have taught me about their history, like for example that it was a Bulgarian and a Macedonian monk who devised the Cyrillic writing system. Bulgaria is the second nation to join the EU who have resisted latinisation, thus on the euro notes you can see евро written in the denomination next to the greek. For me this has been quite an exciting thing, because, personally, I LOVE LOVE кирилица. I love the culture of the east of europe. I would be happy to live out my life in this part of the world, I am a huge fan.
Btw, name Murray Rothbard sounded familiar. Is it the same guy that Robert Anton Wilson polemizes with in "Natual Law, or Don't put a rubber on your willy"? It would be interesting reading him, since I've recently read most of Natural Law. Perhaps I should finish it first though.
Heh, I love Robert Anton Wilson. I spent a lot of years reading books by him, the whole New Falcon stable, Aleister Crowley, and others, AOS, I even read stuff by the Order of Nine Angles, a particularly rabid individualist branch of Satanism. Everything I think has been shaped by especially these writers, and their love for Individualism and philosophy and logic.
My inquiries into communism are actually a consequence of question everything thing. Oh and probably hippies. :-> While I am ambivalent about them (I am more or less ambivalent about everything) in small communities their model looks good. I plan to start or join a cyber hippy commune. Or something.
I think that Steem is precisely the cyber-anarcho-capitalist citadel I have been looking for in a very long time. A true meritocracy. In a physical commune or village situation, it is a matter of luck. This system has the engineering to make it precisely this, down to the last cent. I say 'citadel' because I think that it also has built into it the defences that a free zone requires in order to prosper. This is why normally, autonomous zones are either small or temporary.
I am also a fan of Peter Lamborn Wilson, aka Hakim Bey, who was a significant figure in the anarcho-side of the early stages of the cyber revolution that sprung up as the internet came online. At the time I discovered him, I was also reading Situationist and related Individualist Anarchist texts. I was in fact, living in a room behind an Anarchist bookshop, and while today I am more fervently capitalist, than I was then (because I had not learned about economics), but I have never been any kind of collectivist anarchist. I read almost completely one red anarchist text, at the time, and I had the opportunity to read anything I wanted, and I gravitated towards the individualist. There was no anarcho-capitalist texts in this bookshop.
To me, Individualism comes first, but Capitalism provides a mechanism and a theory to enable the individual to prevail against the depredations of collectivism, which in fact is the core belief of statists and those who support government. So as an individual, I choose capitalism as my Theory, because it works, and the modern world more than adequately refutes any argument to the contrary. The scumbag elites used it to achieve their modern collossal power. But when you put that power in the hands of individuals, well... look. here you are. this is why you are here. this is why everyone who is here not just to 'win votes' is here.
Anyhow, I've just done some comparative reading on the topic, and apparently whatever term we use we are talking about the system where people cooperate as fully concious actors to produce cool shit that, will improve their life and go towards post-scarcity society. That was the goal that the Marx outlined in his works. It is also opposed to the current corporate capitalist society. Which is a great thing, no mater how it is called!
I mean, even such a loaded term as collectivism has two meanings/styles: horizontal which is all about decentralization and considers all actors to be equal and peruse their own and collective interest. And vertical collectivism which is all about authoritarian centralized models, and assumes that some people are better than others. :-/
Ok, I can agree with this model you describe. Horizontal collectivism. I call that 'anarchocapitalism'. But having said that, it really comes into its own with distributed networks, which flatten the communication network.
Really, none of this convergence would have been possible without the internet. You give me hope that both sides of the 'horizontal collectivism' picture can find a common ground and then start to work together.
and yes! economists are supposed to be about refining the understanding of the methodologies how to minimise scarcity. That's why they are called 'economist' right?
traveleI d abound europe, asia, north america but I keep coming back to this not beautiful road. thank you for photos!
Yup, the area around Baikal is great!
You have so funny look x) I like your nature photo!
I am just your local lovable vagabond man!
It is probably the nature. With the sun beating down as it did today, I barely could see what was going on in the pictures. Perhaps in the future I'd have to invest in DSLR camera.
Красивые виды. Обожаю небо с такими объёмными облаками, разнообразными, пушистыми, интересными. Класс!
Забавные скульптуры.
И сразу рыбки копчёной захотелось, омулька)
Там прямо всякие колесницы, замки и прочие эпические штуки. А много где бывал, но таких облаков мало где видел. Они обычно как-то проще.
Love the beard and bells :0
and the landscape is absolutely amazing. I was thinking to stop painting flat plains, but you just gave me a good reason not to. Amazing stuff! More please :)