I think the situation is more nuanced than that.

Of course, the F-35 program was an incredibly expensive mess (litterally the most expensive weapon program of all time), because of conflicting specs, data leaks, political infighting, cost overruns which are the stuff of legend, etc... At some moments, there were certainly reasons to think the whole program would collapse on itself like wet tissue paper.

But there are operational F35 now. 900+ as of 2023, which is 4 time more than the rest of Gen 5 fighters combined. And performance-wise, it is good, especially on the stealth & avionics parts. On the other side, the J-20 is largely unproven (probably a decent design, but not as good), and the Su-57 is a bunch of glorified prototypes.

Now sure, cost is high, maintenance is time-consuming, availability somewhat below target, but it's not particularly surprising for high-performance equipment. It may fall short of the ambition of the program on the cost part, but by itself it's a dangerous and fully operational fighter.

Crabs. All will be crabs.

It's definitely an issue, but it's not an unworkable one. Villeneuve films for exemple, while a bit hit-or-miss on the characters, definitely use the format in a way where you loose something if you watch it on TV instead of in a theater.

I don't assume that all critics don't know what they are talking about, but no offense, you did not in fact know the information required to understand Marx's Labor Voucher system.

My bad, that may have sounded a bit agressive. I just mean that I know people on Lemmy tends to have very... polarized opinions of the political literacy of other people they disagree with, and I know that I'm not immune to that either. That's more to show my position on this than to point out something you did specifically.

the USSR did in fact try to abolish "money," but went about it poorly and it failed.

Yep, that exactly my point. Money is kind of central to a complex economy, and the USSR had issues even while still using it.

The USSR planned everything by hand, and still managed to develop rapidly and provide for their people

You may want to look at the opinion of someone like Paul Krugman on that. He makes some interesting parallels in the rapid industrialization of countries like South Korea or Japan and what happened in the USSR before, using the difference between intensive and extensive growth. For him, the gist of it is that authoritarian control of the economy can provide impressive extensive growth (put people to work, mechanize agriculture, provide basic education, infrastructure, etc...), but that once you reach a somewhat prosperous but intermediary state, you need to switch to intensive growth (creating more output value for less inputs) to get to the "next stage", so to speak. He also argues that South Korea and Japan did this, while the USSR never managed and that's why from the 60's onward the economic prosperity of the USSR entered a long period of stagnation.

which aspects of Marx had issues? Do you have any actual examples I can look at?

I mostly disagree with the extreme reductionism of historical materialism, which affirm that the whole of history is the history of the possession of the means of production. That mean that while I understand that the bourgeoisie/proletariat dichotomy as a useful heuristic about social analysis, I don't belive it is necessarily the most useful one in all cases. From there, the notion of the superiority of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" becomes very shaky, so the political theory of action all goes downhill from there. And globally, the whole problem of Economic Calculation make the whole theory of the working of communism I extremely difficult to solve (but to the credit of Marx, this problem would only emerge due to a better understand of market-based economics, half a century later).

In that case, that means that the only workable economic system for Marx is a centrally planned economy (which, from what I know, is not the position of the majority of communists). Otherwise, you're going to have severe information transfer/cooperation issues at the system boundaries. Which is already historically what happened in the USSR and most strict application of central planning. And unless I'm mistaken, they still had money.

As for Marx... It's more that I read a subset of Marx works, found too many issues within the theories themselves, and honestly don't have unlimited time to see if he corrects it in some other works. And despite looking a bit for it in other forms (including discussion with some very left-leaning friends), I never found any answer I found really satisfactory.

And to be honest, I understand why you assume this is a propaganda issue : communist/socialist/anarchist theories are largely misrepresented in common discourse. That being said, don't make the mistake of believing that all critics don't know what they're talking about. Or even that mainstream theories are immune to this type of misrepresentation (because they most certainly are not).

Meh, this distinction seems largely artificial to me. Modern fiat money is already created and destroyed through use of debt, and I hardly think that's what communists think of. And a strict "non-transferability" would beg the question of why would the "productive forces" (companies, cooperatives, or whatever) try to do produce things if they can't accumulate value based on consumers spending preferences (which is an issue which happened in the USSR).

Even worse : if vouchers don't fulfill the roles people want, you're still going to have a kind of informal money (gasoline, tobacco, seashells, etc... as said above), just with vouchers in parallel.

That being said, I never had much respect for Marx' political theories, so I would totally understand if you wanted to drop the point.

If you go by the definition of money : "The primary functions which distinguish money are as a medium of exchange, a unit of account, a store of value and sometimes, a standard of deferred payment." (Wikipedia, but it's a workable definition).

It's a medium of exchange, because people can use them to buy things. It's a unit of account, because it will be used as a metric for economic calculation (ie accounting). It's a store of value too, because people don't have to spend it at a particular time. And the "standard of deferred payment" part is also fulfilled, as it quantify the work-time debt society (or simply a company) owe to a worker.

I honestly fail to see what difference you are trying to make.

That's money too.

Because public programs were somehow even more expensive for the same externalities and service.

Using "Moderate leftist politicians" to depict Melenchon and its party is a very dubious take. And I won't ho into the use of "nazi" for convenience, refardless of the truth of the matter.

I don't particularly want Lemmy instances to become echo-chambers, but "good faith disagreement" require a degree of trust between people.

Here in this thread, we see Hexbear users worried to be silenced because of political opinion, while Lemm.ee users seems to be mightily annoyed by Hexbear users as they act in in way that would be at home on 4Chan.

I'm not convinced that these actions are one of a minority within HB, but even if it is the case, it's going to be difficult to establish a basis of trust for these discussions...

There are already plenty of leftist in the non left-centric instances. Hell, if you really want a far-left perspective, there are others which doesn't consider obnoxiousness a virtue, which seems to be a core tenant of Hexbear.