alt Hacker NewsBack when I read "Cybernetic Revolutionaries" I followed it up with "People's Republic of Walmart" and came away with a bit of a different conclusion to your point 1. IMO lots of US-based hyperscalars are managing what are effectively command economies, and it's allowed them to ex. scale their infrastructure so aggressively these last ~2 years.
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FMCGs work very much like command economies, including specialized tooling to shift production between customers when orders fall through.
Unlike USSR they simply do it on shorter timescales, too, and with better customer feedback. Something Cybersyn actually targeted, as it's closer to Toyota Production System (as much done at lowest level in small decision loops) than centrally managed GOSPLAN or large american FMCG giants
Yeah, the economy is basically a bunch of oligarchical/dictatorial command economies, or what we like to call companies. It's funny, a lot of leftist people use them as examples of how a larger command economy could work (usually the reaction a lot of leftists I know had to People's Republic of Walmart), whereas it makes me wonder what more democratic, free market companies would be like.
Right. WalMart and Amazon are closer to command economies than Gosplan ever was. They're not choking on the scale of what they do; they're thriving on it. Gosplan, the USSR's central planning system, ran on monthly reporting and annual plans. WalMart at one point ran on daily reporting and weekly plans. It's probably even faster now.
The problem of getting accurate data started to be solved when bar codes and RFID tags came in. It's possible for a factory to fake "we made 431 washing machines today." It's hard to fake "we made 431 washing machines today, their serial numbers were scanned as they left the factory, scanned again as they arrived at the various distribution centers, and scanned again when they were shipped to a customer, and scanned again when the customer received them." It's not airtight, but faking it requires a sizable fakery operation which tends to be detected eventually. Much real world activity is driven by all that "where's my stuff" data, and if the data is way off, people notice.
For large classes of products and services today, there is no real price competition. There just aren't enough players to make a market. The magic number seems to be four, from an EU study. Less than four major players in direct competition, and prices don't go down.