Date: Sun, 12 Jan 97 4:36:17 EST
From: boddhisatva <kbevans-AT-panix.com>
Subject: Re: M-I: Re: Cooperatives





		To whom...,



	THursday night Louis Proyect revealed one of theunderlying
misconceptions of planned econoic thinking when he isisted that some products
are a matter of taste while others- like machine tools - are perfectly
quantifiable in their performance.  That is simply not true.  If it was true
than there would be no reason for 10 major American suppliers for electric
drills and many more suppliers of machine tools who design many innovations
in machine tools every year that may or may not be adopted into industry. 
Some tools cut cleaner:some cut faster; some use less energy; some are
smaller; some are programable; some allow custom work; some can cut in
multiple planes; some are simpler, quiter, less dangerous to operate; some
are easier to repair and some come with better service, ;some are simply more
familiar to certain workers.   Clearly this means that multiple suppliers are
necessary.  Who decides what trends in machine tools will go forward and what
ones are not worth the trouble?  Ultimately, it is a compromise between
customers and producers, with the producer who can give the customer the
lion's share of the compromise getting the most orders, but ultimately there
is an arbitrary component to any purchase decision.  Add together only a few
arbitrary components and you have chaos - with shich computers are singularly
bad at dealing.  



	A computer was recently tasked with accounting for arbitrariness in a
vastly simple, perfectly well defined problem set for which its multiple
parallel processors had been programmed specifically, for years by the top
experts in the field at the leading company in the field and it failed.  Or
perhaps I should say "lost" because it was Deep Blue and it got creamed by
Gary Kasparov in chess.  In chess there are no accidents, no oil embargos or
bombings or product tampering or bad weather or any or the myriad
unprediactable factors that there are even in small sectors of the economy.  



	A state economy is a troubled proposition.  A planned economy is a
goofy one.  







	peace





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