Could you please define this. As it stands authoritarian is the thought terminating cliche of choice for the unintelligent and uneducated to avoid having to investigate and reckon with the questions of substance such as class content of the state, state form, satisfaction of the people with the government etc.

Normally I don't respond to low level comments like this, but the intellectual laziness here is mind boggling. Dictionaries exist for a reason.

The people hold them accountable, through the mechanisms I described previously

So, free and fair elections. Well, now we're back to square one, and pretty much describing how Western democracies work.

Nordic countries offer sizable concessions to their working classes because the Soviets were right next to them, and already offered better safety nets.

Ah, yes, the soviet Union, definitely not imperialist. Sarcasm aside, they literally did not allow their population to leave. They killed people who dared to leave. That's not a sign of things going well, to mention just one.

The state serves private interests in capitalism

Just because you repeat it a hundred times doesn't make it true. The very mechanisms you described are used (with varying degrees of success depending on how well the democracy functions) to keep the state accountable to the people.

you're again giving examples of concessions given largely because of working class organization, not through the "democratic processes."

So then why are these mostly things that parties campaigned on, got voted into power for and then implemented?

Fascism is a result of the decay in capitalism and imperialism

That's a very, very broad interpretation that many historians would disagree with. But let's say, for the sake of argument, that it's the case. How do these capitalist structures decay into imperialism then?

consultative democracy

Yes, but who enforces the consulting and the usage of the information gathered from consulting? Without accountability, that's just fantasy and/or simping for authoritarianism. Let's not forget, every authoritarian leader, party or Organisation has its supporters who will claim they're not authoritarian.

Capitalism inevitably tends towards centralization of the essential means of production and distribution into fewer and fewer hand

Except when it doesn't. There are plenty of examples where countries that have capitalism based economies moved significantly to the left. Look at Nordic countries, for instance.

Very few leftist parties can get anything done in western countries because the media is largely controlled by capitalists

What about all the public broadcasters? There are many countries where they're quite strong. And as to parties getting things done, what about:

• Minimum wages
• Welfare systems
• Massive improvements in workplace safety
• Universal healthcare
• Childcare

I could go on and on, but that's not the point. The point is that fascists are trying to weaken the electoral system because they know how effective it can be. Otherwise, they wouldn't give a fuck. And part of the way they do that is by downplaying its efficacy in order to wear it down and eventually get rid of it.

A single party system can be more democratic if it's a consultative democracy and reflects the will of the majority, like how it works in China

Oh really? How do you hold the people in power accountable, then, if they're part of the only party that is allowed to exist (which that party itself decided, what a coincidence!)?

In capitalism, a tiny class of people controls the most essential means of production and distribution for society.

False, that is the result of capitalism when it goes unchecked, not the definition. And different countries have different levels of checks on capitalism.

The state represents their interests, and any parties that exist must represent them

Yeah, no, that's not the case. Otherwise explain to me how many western countries have leftist parties and even marxist-leninist parties. It's just not the will of the majority. Which leads me back to the point: your (or even my) satisfaction with the results don't measure how democratic a country is, despite the FUD spread by authoritarians and wannabe authoritarians to destabilize democracies by encouraging people to not participate.

How the hell are elections not indicative of democracy? I mean, just because you have elections doesn't mean you have a proper democracy (e.g. if there is only one party available), but how those elections are run says a lot. They're the core of any democracy. Democracy is, by definition, the people being ruled by the people. So you need some form of governance that is accountable to the people.

And capital is far from the only thing that determines if parties are viable. Yes, it plays too much of a role (especially in the US, but there are many western countries that aren't the US), but let's not pretend it's some mysterious being that decides everything. That ignores so many important factors.

Just because the majority of the people in a country disagree with you doesn't mean it's not a democracy. In many western countries there are (still) free and fair elections. This is verifiable. But democracy lives off of active participation, and there are people (read: fascists) who see democracy as a threat and do everything they can to sow FUD in order to reduce election participation.

...maybe because many westerners are worried about losing their democracy? I mean, when democracies Fall, they usually don't make room for better democracies, historically speaking.

Well it has, indirectly. Plenty of times, it has given politics and unions a basis for demanding those improvements. Looking back over the last century or so, conditions have improved, drastically.

Unfortunately there are a lot of answers that aren't really properly explaining why and just taking the opportunity to piss on AI...

LLMs (the currently hyped form of AI) is seen by many as the "next big thing". And honestly, it's not surprising. LLMs are impressive. They're the closest we've ever gotten to mimicking human behavior. A lot of us have seen a lot of LLM-generated stuff and are sick of it, but think back to the first time you saw or heard an LLM string together sentences that are grammatically not gibberish, and in many cases quite coherent. That's already enough to spark interest from companies and investors.

And the development isn't stopping, at least not in the next while. Even in the last few years LLMs have noticeably improved. And the question is: where does it go from here? There's definitely a scenario where this whole thing is a bubble that pops at some point, 90% of the things the current use cases for LLMs disappear as pointless, and we're left with the remaining 10% that actually help people. But there's also a scenario where LLMs improve to the point where they can vastly improve productivity. There's definitely precedent - think computer and Internet or steam engines. And in those cases, those who got in at the right time made a lot of money. Think of the railroad barons and today's tech companies. There were people then who said "why do we need all this, it's terribly unreliable and not worth the expense", as well. The flip side of this is: there are many people who thought other technologies would be really successful who turned out to be completely wrong, think blimps and Google Glass (stories which, by the way, are often quickly forgotten since they are, in hindsight, irrelevant). That's one part of the answer.

The other part of the answer is that in the long term, there's generally an increase of productivity, and companies try to outcompete each other. It's nothing new - companies who were able to use the Internet to be more efficient, for instance, survived much better than those who didn't. The companies who used steam engines to decrease the costs survived much better than those who didn't. So, naturally, if companies see something they might be able to use to become more efficient, they do what they can to adopt it before everyone else. (Who should profit from those efficiencies is an entirely different question.)

And that's really the problem: it's hard to know exactly where this whole thing is going. After all the hype dies down I see some use cases, improving search results being one of the main ones, or improving the auto complete functions so we can use them much better than we currently do. I don't see the current environment with AI chatbots being offered at every corner as sustainable or something that will last. But I could also be wrong. You generally never know it 100% for sure when you're in a bubble, you only know for sure when the bubble pops.

That's somewhat average, I would say. I was actually told that the Japanese only keep their high speed trains on service for about 20 years, this is obviously longer than that. In many other countries, high speed trains built in the 90s are still in service. Mind you, the birth of high speed trains was around 1990, so it's hard to really compare with much. Conventional rail vehicles can last very long, though - rolling stock that is 40 years old or older isn't exactly the exception. Often the problem is less the state of the rolling stock (especially with the older stuff, which was often built more solidly), but passengers' expectations. In fact, passenger expectations changing too quickly for durable, long lasting trains can be a significant issue.