comicsansstein
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User ID: 582
comicsansstein
2d ago
Right, so it seems to me like Marx describes a basic feature of any society more complex than an anprim one, and goes "A ha! This is an inherent problem with capitalism!". How would that follow? It's like the apocryphal story about Euler and Diderot.
comicsansstein
2d ago
Noted. Although now I'm interested in how the industrial revolution would look like if the inclosures never happened. Theoretically, less available workforce would put a premium on labor, which could drive innovations in labor efficiency faster, otoh there could've been not enough "critical mass" to make the early industry feasible.
If the two values were equal you wouldn’t participate in the exchange market because you would just use your commodity.
Am I missing something obvious here, or is this immediately debunked by the word "specialization"? The only people who could "just use their commodity" for the entirety of their needs are subsistence farmers, who I guess still existed when the book was written, but were on the way out already. And even that's only if you squint heavily, because they would need to also miraculously have every construction material they ever need in the surrounding area, which at this point moves us further back to the hunter-gathers, more or less.
He does this in the context of what he calls the commodity, an item like wheat, or coats, or coal that has both a use-value (how useful it is) and an exchange-value (how much it’s worth on the market). These two things can obviously be different, and according to Marx almost always have to be.
I'd argue that access to information flattens the variance here, and prices are asymptotically approaching some kind of equilibrium, as exemplified by the The Digital Provide paper (see graphs at page 21). Obviously, such equilibrium would include some amount of profit for the fishermen - steelmanning the first thing I've quoted, certainly you have to get more from your work that you put in it, otherwise why work at all? Other than mere survival, but that brings us back to the subsistence farmers, which we're not, and revealed preferences even at Marx's time show that people would rather work at Dark Satanic Mills than farm.
comicsansstein
5d ago
If you're cynical enough, the purpose of organized politics is pork barrel spending. Thus, the optimal amounts of votes to get is 50% plus the tiniest epsilon - it allows you to control the flow of money, with the smallest possible clientele to spend it on. Anything more, and you're spreading the profits thinner.
comicsansstein
9d ago
Do you think that mathematical theorems are discovered or invented? I have a segue I want to make from this question (it involves a book that was popular w few years ago), but first I'd like to hear your opinions on that.
I have his name blocked on twitter so that not only do I not see him, I don't even want to see any mention of him. Much like with Tate or Candace, every single piece of information I get about this person is against my will.
Why would you care about statements like this? He's a troll, expecting a coherent action to follow from it is a fool's errand. He's not stating it as a serious policy, he's making mouth sounds (well, pixels on a screen) to get a rise out of people. In which, mission accomplished I guess, 3/10 made me respond.
comicsansstein
17d ago
I've recently come up with an even more biting definition that's guaranteed to please no one, yet I think fits most actual "use cases": fascism is using communist means to achieve non-communist ends.
(Paramilitary youth groups, mass surveillance, centralization of power, expropriation of private enterprises, media censorship, etc.)
comicsansstein
25d ago
Huh, I haven't heard of that one before, and up till this point, I thought I'd read pretty much everything he's ever written.
It contains nothing new, it's just a compilation of some of his short stories, in a chronological order.
The one good thing I can say about it is that it made me dislike Charles Stross less, because up until that point I had them mixed up and I thought Incorruptible was Stross'. About two stories in that compilation I thought to myself "wait, I recognize that brand of misanthropy" and the mixup resolved itself. If anything, this proves that this voice is strong enough to be recognizable across translation, as I read the linked story in original English. Btw, in mind mind that story kinda rhymes with The Giving Plague, only more edgy and worse.
Anyways, to Watts and people like him I'd like to present the following question: suppose you get what you want materially - the environmental issues get reversed and healed - but nobody get hurt and punished. Would you take the deal? Or is, as the kids say, the cruelty the point?
comicsansstein
28d ago
I've read a compilation of his short stories, aptly titled An Antidote to Optimism in Polish. I don't think your "mostly a joke" is actually a joke, at least for me.
Notably, Chuck Norris facts were a more popular variation of earlier Vin Diesel facts.
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