thejdizzler
1d ago
No I think we have the same understanding here, I think there's just a confusion of terms. If you're in a factory making widgets, maybe the first twenty have a positive use value for you (maybe you can feed your robot pet with widgets). After that the use value of each widget quickly approaches 0, so you'd rather sell them on the market. The same is true for any commodity you might produce, as a subsistence farmer or otherwise. The only situation in which use value and exchange value are exactly equal (or use value is always higher) is when you have a society of hunter gatherers, as you note.
thejdizzler
1d ago
This is a good question. I think the massive labor glut eventually would have happened (see the US in the early 20th century/developing countries today where people voluntarily leave/left productive farms to pursue wealth in the big city), but labor saving would probably been a priority for capitalist investment even more than it already was. I think we would also probably have a much weaker union culture, although that might be a good thing depending on who you ask.
thejdizzler
1d ago
Other than mere survival, but that brings us back to the subsistence farmers, which we're not, and revealed preferences even at Marx time show that people would rather work at Dark Satanic Mills than farm.
Well not exactly. The enclosures act made subsistence farming less than subsistence for most farmers, so people either had to starve or migrate to cities. It wasn't a preference.
thejdizzler
2d ago
As promised my review of Marx! Blog version for nice photos
We finally did it! I started the first volume of Capital with an offshoot of my philosophy book club last July, and we wrapped up the book late last month. I’m very glad I read Marx, as I think his historical work, and some of his theories are incredibly insightful, most significantly his materialist analysis of history. However, I found myself incredibly frustrated by several of Marx’s assumptions, and his poor form when citing both sources and engaging with other philosophers. While I probably missed and misunderstood a fair chunk of the book , I think I clearly understood The Commodity and the Labor Theory of Value, The Historical Development of the Capitalist System, and Historical Materialism. The second of these is by far the best part of the book.
I would recommend that most serious philosophers of history read this book, and actually not the Communist Manifesto, as the later book is largely irrelevant to modern society, while I found much to take away from Capital that seemed relevant to how the world still works today.
My History with the Book
I’ve almost always been on the left politically, despite my disdain for identity and gender politics, and the disastrous political strategy and lack of discipline of the Democrats, at least in the United States, since the 1970s. In high-school and early college, this meant identifying with people like Sam Harris, but throughout college I began to move further and further left economically, voting for Bernie in the 2020 primary, and holding many communist-adjacent ideals going into graduate school. During this time, I also read Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century with my friend Billy, and found it convincing.
In my second year of graduate school however, one of my roommates gifted me a copy of James C. Scott’s Seeing like a State, which made me reconsider if I actually supported socialism or communism, as more often than not, these forms of government required coercive and damaging forms of political centralization. It was around this time that I suggested to philosophy book club that we read Marx: I wanted to understand what the problems of Capitalism that communism and socialism actually proposed solutions to, and to start to figure out if there might be other ways to address those problems besides coercive state action.
When we finally got around to reading the book nearly three years after I initially suggested it, my political outlook shifted almost totally. I became energy-pilled, and skeptical of modernity and progress in general, and a proponent of degrowth. This will be largely the lens through which I discuss Marx.
The Commodity and the Labor Theory of Value
Unlike the Communist Manifesto, Capital is a critique of Capitalism, not a proposal for an alternative system. Thus, throughout the book Marx is focused exposing the inherent contradictions of capitalism, rather than proposing solutions to those problems. Two key reasons to read this book rather than the Manifesto are that these critiques are still relevant today, and that Marx’s (and his successor’s) solutions often don’t work in practice.
Marx begins the book by attempting to define what value is. 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. If the two values were equal you wouldn’t participate in the exchange market because you would just use your commodity. Money was created to facilitate this exchange, as well as a marker of price. This dual nature of money creates the first problem of capitalism: the conflict between the need for the commodity behind money to be stable in value, but also adaptable enough to allow rapid exchange of commodities. I don’t we’ve found a satisfactory solution to this yet, given historical currency collapse following debasement. The current credit/petrodollar system doesn’t seem any more stable either.
The other issue that money creates is the mass production of commodities for their exchange value rather than their use value. This is not necessarily problematic, but tends to lead to things that certainly are. Commodity production creates a dependence on trade for subsistence, which creates fragility. The specialization inherent in specialized commodity production also alienates the laborer from the means of production actually necessary to his or her subsistence. This also leads to what Marx calls “commodity fetishism”, where certain properties are given to commodities that actually are caused by social relations. A good example of this is land rent, which seems like it comes from the “land” or “housing” commodity, but actually comes from the social relation of the landlord-tenant relationship. Neither hunter gatherers nor the Soviet Union had “rent”, so the concept can’t from the commodity in of itself.
Commodity fetishism leads Marx to the question of where value actually comes from, if it’s not from the goods in of themselves. He posits that this use-value comes from a single place: human labor, and that any profit in the capitalist system comes from stealing or appropriating some of this value from the worker. Marx was not the first to come up with this idea: the labor theory of value originates from Adam Smith, but Marx builds on this theory, and in fact the rest of the book is built on this one premise.
Unfortunately, I think the labor theory of value is wrong, or at least incomplete. The first problem with the theory is the issue of supply and demand, or put in another way, that a commodity can have vastly different use-values in different temporal and geographical locations. A winter coat will have much more value in Siberia in the winter than in India in the summer for example. Marx tries to get around this by defining only “social useful” labor as contributing to value, but this is so vague as to be incredibly unconvincing. The second issue comes from how Marx defines natural resources like land, sunlight, or clean water as “free gifts of nature”. These things are not truly free and require immense amounts of non-human labor to maintain and produce. The physiocrats were probably much more right than they were wrong.
Even if we do take the labor theory of value as true, Marx makes some headscratching exclusions. Neither merchants nor managers actually create value, despite the former enhancing use-value by transporting goods to distant markets, and the later creating value by enhancing the value of his charges’ labor.
If I had to replace the Labor Theory of Value with something it would be the Energy Theory of Value. This preserves some aspects of the Labor Theory of Value: human labor is the oldest form of energy transfer in the books, and makes space for the value added by sunlight (solar energy), the water cycle, and fossil fuels. Energy is also incredibly correlated to GDP in the way that labor value is not. Of course this still doesn’t fix the supply and demand problem, but I, unlike Marx, don’t require a totalizing explanation.
The Historical Development of the Capitalist System
After laying his groundwork, Marx then charts the development of the capitalist system, both in theory, and then in practice. Two elements are necessary to seed the creation of this system are separating peasants from their means of subsistence, and a large market for commodity trade. The first is necessary so the worker has no alternative other than to participate in the labor economy, as they are unable to go back to subsistence farming, either by law or because they couldn’t live off the land available. This part of the historical process has happened many times, from Sumner up to the modern day, but Marx most closely studies it in England, where starting with the Tudors, the government of England slowly stripped rights and privileges away from the peasantry that made it more and more difficult for these people to maintain themselves as independent farmers. The second element, commodity trade, is required to give the system a place to sell large amounts of goods, and thus outcompete artisans that don’t benefit from economies of scale.
Early capitalism developed from the medieval guild and workshop system, where the traditional apprentice-journeyman-master relationship began to breakdown and masters began to employ large numbers of journeymen or apprentices that would never have their own workshops. In this stage, masters began to try and more heavily exploit their workers through increasing work hours and reducing pay, but the amount that they could push was heavily limited due to the large amount of power that the workers had over the production process. Many societies, including Ancient Rome, reached this level of capitalist development, but were hamstrung by lack of access to critical technologies that allowed the harnessing of extra-somatic energy.
What allowed the West to break out of the proto-capitalist→collapse cycle was two things: the discovery of the Americas and the advent of truly global trade, and the discovery of fossil fuels. The former opened huge markets that would reward economies of scale much larger than could be served with workshops, and raw materials to serve these larger “factories”. The later allowed the development of machine technologies that would replace the input of human laborers. Marx calls these machines “Capital”. Over time, capitalists are incentivized to replace more and more of their workers with these machines, to increase the investment in what Marx calls “fixed” capital, rather than variable capital. The capitalist might want to do this for a number of reasons. Firstly, machinery tends to be less complicated than artisanal hand crafts to operate, meaning less skilled workers are required to operate it, meaning the capitalist doesn’t need to pay his workers as much and can profit more. Secondly, machinery allows capital to harness extra-somatic energy to do work, which is much cheaper than paying a worker. Marx doesn’t really acknowledge this second reason, but I think it’s an important addition to his argument from an energy perspective. Over time as this process snowballs, workers have less and less power to fight back against the increases in working hours, loss of wages, etc. because the labor required is so unskilled that they are easily replaceable. This kind of labor is also extremely degrading mentally and morally, and leads to psychological harm and alienation.
Capital tends to accumulate in larger and larger conglomerations, which also has the dangerous effect of centralizing political power. Piketty extensively documents this in Capital in the 21st Century: we were only saved from a snowballing capital accumulation by the massive capital destruction of the world wars.
Marx documents this process in England extensively, and most of the second half of the book is taken up with showing that this system does indeed exist in England and has become significantly more exploitative over the last fifty years, to the point where parts of England are beginning to become depopulated because labor practices chew through workers so quickly. The conditions in 19th century English sweatshops were also famously documented by Charles Dickens, and were eventually put a stop to by the government due to the action of labor unions, excessive emigration, the issue of national defense, and moral outrage, among other things.
Today we can see the same behavior from tech companies, as they attempt to replace large chunks of their workforce with AI, perhaps the biggest capital expense in the history of capital expenses, which has already resulted in massive quality of life decreases for those tech workers that remain.
Historical Materialism
The final point I want to discuss is Marx’s development of historical materialism. The philosophy of history can be split into two general schools of thought. Idealism, where ideas drive the development of human societies, was the one I was taught in school. Feudalism→ Capitalism→ Enlightenment→ Democracy→ Global Prosperity. The other school, materialism, posits that the social relations and ideas of human societies are determined primarily by their material conditions. Of course it’s not really an either/or question, it’s a both/and: ideas and material conditions are symbiotically related to each other. But I tend to lean heavily towards the material side of the question: societies with similar material conditions tend to have similar ideas and institutions, and merely transplanting an idea from one society to another with completely different material conditions rarely, if ever leads to that idea taking root. This idea is central to Marx’s understanding of the development of capitalism, which he views as a deterministic process that flows from specific material conditions. While the exact teleological implications of this are not important for this book in particular, historical materialism is important for understanding what kind of policy and moral prescriptions might be effective.
For instance, in this book Marx discusses the interplay between the capitalist system of production and family structure. While some have erroneously interpreted his commentary as advocacy for destruction of the nuclear family, Marx merely is observing that the nuclear family cannot survive an economic system where women are required to work in the same way as men. The fertility decline and all its downstream “causes” (feminism, dating crisis, etc.) are due to this fact. As I have argued extensively before, if we want to reverse the fertility decline, we have to change the arrangement of labor that brought it about. Ideas are not enough.
Actually reading this book
As much as I got a ton out of reading this book, the actual experience of being immersed in Marx wasn’t terribly pleasant. Marx is a bit of snarky asshole, and the fact that I had not read any of his intellectual enemies made this snark confusing rather than funny. He also had a nasty habit of interpreting these same enemies in the worst possible light and of poorly paraphrasing or sometimes almost completely making up sources. I can see where modern leftists get some of their worst tendencies. Because of this, I can only give the book 4/5 stars.
Anyway, thanks for reading, and I would appreciate any corrections on my understanding of Marx and materialism in general.
thejdizzler
3d ago
I'm up 200% on $ZIM, which I bought for the Dividends back in 2023. They are supposed to be sold at $35/share at the end of the year to a German shipping company so will make even more money if I don't chicken out and sell before then. My other large position is $SB which mainly runs a Panama Canal route. They're doing pretty well too. I also have $KEK which makes river barges for oil transport and $TNK, both of which have been getting bodied by the war.
thejdizzler
3d ago
Good blog post dude.
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Work: Started writing my thesis last week. A bit overwhelmed with experiments/planning. Need to do less each day.
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Fitness: 11 hours last week, had a great workout this morning. HRV is still a little depressed so gotta make sure I take my recovery days easy.
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Intellectual Stuff: Limiting myself to one YouTube video and one blog post a day. Focusing on US history in English, and reading fiction in the Spanish and Italian. In the spirit of Cal Newport trying to only do one of these each day (Spanish, Italian, history reading) and give my full attention to it.
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Finances: Expenses are really low this month. As detailed in the main thread, sold quite a bit of my index funds and stocks and put the money into a combination of American oil stocks and CDs. I exaggerated a little the scale of the sale: I still kept most of my shipping and rail stocks, as well as Ebay, Takeda, and ADM, the later of which are a Pharma and farming company respectively. Parent's still haven't figured out how to transfer me shares, but they are going to the brokerage next Tuesday. Once they do and there is more clarity on the Iran situation I'm going to buy my friend's 2005 Toyota Camry for $1,000 or so.
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Dating: Met a girl at my friend's thesis defense party and we got coffee on Sunday. First time I've had fun on a first date for a while. She's moving to the UK for a PhD in the fall, but we'll see where it goes in the next few weeks.
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Tarot: Didn't do this week.
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Socializing: Saw Hoppers last night, Workout Wednesday, and my friend Simon is coming to stay this week Screen time: 1.4 hours.
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Mental health: have been very anxious for some reason (probably overwhelmed with different goals), so want to work on this. Taking Ashwaganda helps, but also think I need to stay away from arguing with people on the internet.
thejdizzler
3d ago
Sure, but it's not like I can't rebuy these index funds after the dip. This isn't day trading, but responding to a global event on the level of COVID.
Come on dude you are being obtuse. If the war ends I will immediately sell the oil stocks and get back into index funds. At most I've lost out on a couple percent of gains. The index funds are already down a couple points since I sold, so at worst it'll be a wash. I was going to sell most of my index funds at some point anyway, as they are way too heavily invested in NVIDIA and tech in general, and I want to rebalance away from that.
During the pandemic there was plenty of time to buy during the dip when it was clear that things were going back up. It's not that hard to time the market, it's hard to make max profits.
thejdizzler
3d ago
IDK Covid was a pretty big market oversight: the market reacted quite late (March) when it was clear there would be a problem in January-February. The market has also been retarded for a long long time when it comes to tech, so I do not share your blind faith.
I mean I don't see the downside from a personal financial standpoint. I put the money in 3 month CDs and American oil companies. I can always sell both of these instruments and get back into index funds if the situation changes...
thejdizzler
3d ago
Mainly because those are the companies listed on the NYSE and because US oil seems relatively safe from Middle East turmoil. There's no way quarterly profits don't go up from this. I can always sell if the war ends in the next 6 months.
thejdizzler
4d ago
Are the markets pricing the effects of this war correctly? As far as I understand it, the blockade (which seems to be in effect) of the strait of Hormuz is going to reduce the amount of oil in the market by about 20%, until either the war ends, or another pipeline workaround is found. This is going to be absolutely catastrophic for the world economy, especially for Asia, as there isn't a ready substitute. Even in the US, where we produce enough oil to cover domestic consumption, increased prices are going to hurt consumers and businesses significantly. It's not just oil: sulfuric acid for mining is made from Middle Eastern Crude, most of Europe's LNG comes from Qatar, and global air shipping routes are also going to become more costly. Even if we reach an agreement with Iran tomorrow (unlikely given the nature of the regime), the supply chain shock would be at least on the level of the Iraq War in 2003.
Yet the SP500 is only down 2% from January this year. Are investors not taking this war seriously, or is there really nowhere else to park money other than in US tech stocks?
I personally sold all my index funds and random stocks a few days ago and reinvested the money into US Oil Companies and 3-months CDs.
thejdizzler
8d ago
So I just finished the second book in Ian W. Toll's Pacific War Trilogy: Conquering Tide. This book begins with the battle for Guadalcanal, which takes up a third of the book and culminates in the disastrous (for the Japanese) battle of the Philippine Sea. I liked this one even more than Pacific Crucible, because it filled in many of the gaps that I saw in that book (submarine war, army/navy conflict), although the series continues to be very Navy and American-centric. This is not a problem for me as I'm trying to read this series to help me understand my country's history and don't mind reading another book to learn about ANZAC, Burma, and China. More thoughts listed in roughly chronological order below.
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Submarines were absolutely vital for the American effort in the Pacific, and were responsible for sinking something like 60% of the enemy tonnage throughout the course of the war. My favorite chapter in the book was one in which we followed the submarine crew of the Wahoo and its crazy Skipper "Mush" Morton throughout most of 1943. Unlike the Allies in the Atlantic, the Japanese didn't really give much of an effort in developing anti-submarine tactics, because of the "low prestige" of the job, nor did they really ramp up their own submarine attacks on American shipping. This seems like a huge oversight.
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Guadalcanal seems like it absolutely fucking sucked for everyone. Swampy malarial jungle, poor supply situation, and constant aerial bombardments meant neither the Japanese nor the Americans got much rest when they weren't fighting.
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American strategy at Guadalcanal seemed extremely smart to me: contest the islands just enough to continuously bleed Japanese air and sea power from bases further up the Solomons/Bismarks (mainly Rabaul). Kind of like the original plan for Verdun.
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Japanese leadership in general seemed extremely bad. A lot of decisions seemed to be made for ego-stroking reasons, rather than around any kind of grand strategy to win the war. Of course if Japan had had competent leadership, it never would have bombed Pearl Harbor, or even invaded China in the first place, but even so, there were many things that the Japanese leadership could have done to improve their performance in the war. More careful shepherding of human resources, above all pilots, more extensive aviation training programs, strategic giving up of territory, better cooperation between the army and navy all would have turned many of Japan's most catastrophic losses into victories, or at least less bloody retreats. The two worst examples of this were lack of pilot rotations, meaning almost all experienced pilots were killed in 1942-early 1943, and the army's repeated use of Banzai tactics against US marines. It's not the 19th century anymore folks! In contrast the US leadership, especially Nimitz, seemed to me to be extremely high caliber. Maybe this was because the US military actually had some oversight from the civilian government so incompetents and fanatics could be removed?
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Ideas like Elan, Warrior Spirit, and Bushido seem to be total bullshit in modern war. Time and time again Japanese troops and pilots make extremely brave and daring calls, but these aren't enough to overcome, and sometimes reinforce tactical stupidity. In contrast, the Americans are much more on a bell curve of bravery, but win the day because of better leadership and equipment. Of course the war was ultimately decided by American material might, but early in the book around Guadalcanal, Americans won engagements that they shouldn't have on paper because of far superior leadership and planning, despite maybe lower overall "quality" in the enlisted men.
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At the same time, American tolerance for causalities is super low. In the first island hopping campaign in the Marshalls, Toll makes a big deal about Americans losing ~2k dead taking Tarawa. Casualties are similarly low for much of the rest of the action of the book, including on Saipan and Guam. Even on Iwo Jima and Okinawa had only about 12k dead each. Compared to the Eastern Front, WW1, or even the Civil War, these are pathetic numbers that the media made a storm about. I don't mean to take these deaths lightly, but proportionally this is nothing. This attitude has only gotten worse (Vietnam, Iraq, Afganistan, current Iran war), and I think it makes it increasingly difficult to accomplish our geopolitical goals.
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Battle of the Philippine Sea (the biggest carrier battle ever apparently) was kind of sad and anticlimactic. The Japanese pilots were so undertrained that they were shot out of the sky like turkeys by American aces. Earlier in the war, better pilots might have taken down quite a bit of the American Navy.
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Complete and utter failure of Japanese intelligence and reconnaissance. The amount of times I read the words "surprisingly, the American fleet arrived undetected" was shocking, and indicates a lack of investment in code-breaking and reconnaissance by the Japanese leadership. Of course some of this was luck, but if something happens almost every time, it's not luck.
thejdizzler
9d ago
I totally agree. The two exes ago girl (last girl I was probably in love with) begged me to stay friends with her after she broke up with me, despite the fact the first time I had hung out with her we had fucked. The entire relationship was completely romantic (we had sex 80+% of the times we ever hung out), but she seemed to think that somehow the relationship had a strong platonic foundation that we could maintain. I initially agreed because I thought I could change her mind back. That obviously didn't work out, and I learned that this woman was a terrible person to be friends with because her extreme dogmatism combined with terrible mental health. I ended up terminating the friendship after a couple months because I realized she was never going to get back together with me, and that I didn't really want her to anyway.
On the flip side of the coin, I think having female friends who you have no intention of sleeping with ever is perfectly fine and perhaps even good. Women are just as diverse as men when it comes to platonic personality, and it seems crazy to remove 50% of the population from the friendship pool solely because someone might get feelings. I have few very close female friends from college/work that I have absolutely no feelings for and I'm very glad they're in my life. I would never be open to a relationship with any of these women, and unless you plan to get married, I think the friendship->lover boundary should never be crossed, because unfortunately you can't really go back.
thejdizzler
10d ago
- Work: Trying to implement some of Cal Newport's Deep Work ideas, and am realizing that my focus is shot, need to plan better. Wrote out a plan this morning of all the experiments that I need to do to graduate, and it seems very achievable. Starting to look for postdoc positions as well as industry jobs in Baltimore.
- Fitness: 7.5 hours (only running) last week. Foot is a little sore, so going to a). focus on cross training this week and b). make sure I stretch better.
- Intellectual Stuff: Limiting myself to one YouTube video and one blog post a day. Focusing on US history in English, and reading fiction in the Spanish and Italian. In the spirit of Cal Newport trying to only do one of these each day (Spanish, Italian, history reading) and give my full attention to it.
- Finances: This month is looking like it's going to be very light on expenses. We're halfway through and I've only spent $1200, and that includes rent. Still working on my parents' transfer.
- Dating: Have been really bad with masturbation this week, but no porn.
- Tarot: Didn't do this week.
- Socializing: Thesis defense party for my friend, workout Wednesday and probably swing dancing friday.
- Screen time: 1.5 hours again, which is pretty surprising, given I was on my phone for a lot of the conference.
Systems goals this month:
- Prioritize exercise, this is the year I go big.
- Reduce screen time via a combination of hard locks and behavioral change
- Simplify my life as much as possible!
thejdizzler
10d ago
Why is this strange? Italian is the closest living language to Italian.
thejdizzler
10d ago
I think it's 100% digital entertainment. Postman started to see this in 70s and 80s with TV, and the quantity and quality of mass entertainment options has only gotten more enticing and more splintered. While part of me thinks it's great that we have so many movies/shows/novels available now, I think it's pretty terrible for shared culture because people don't have a corpus of shared media in common. AI is only going to make this worse, as people can silo themselves into infinite realms of their favorite fan-fic slop that literally no one else in the world has read/watched.
thejdizzler
10d ago
Finishing Ethics marks the end of our metaphysical era in philosophy book club, started in the summer of 2025 when we read Hume. Can't say I'll be entirely sad to see it go, but I've learned a lot, and have been humbled (although Spinoza would say that's an evil emotion) by my weak grasp of logic.
This book did not start off very well for me; I remember texting my friend Amanda about how much I hated the first chapter. Ethics presented me with two challenges: the geometrical proof style of philosophy which often made Spinoza's reasoning a bit difficult to follow, as well as his appropriation of colloquial language to mean something different from what we understand it to be (the most confusing of these is probably the word God, which would maybe be better understood to mean nature or the universe, at least according to Schopenhauer). These two challenges, combined with some of Spinoza's assumptions, like the existence of cause and effect, made the beginning of this book frustrating and unconvincing. However, as we got into the nature of the mind, and then human psychology, and finally Spinoza's view of human freedom I began to like this tragic Jew of Amsterdam more and more.
Spinoza posits God as the one supreme substance that makes up the entirety of the universe and existence. Contained within the umbrella of God are the mental and physical planes, which are separate, but not independent like Decartes thought, but rather perfect reflections of each other. Everything that happens in the physical world has its equivalent in the mental plane and vis-versa. Human beings, not being God and having limited knowledge, have an incomplete understanding of this connection and of the world in general. The more complete our understanding of the world and ourselves is, the greater the power that we have to act in the world (rather than be acted on by external forces including our own emotions) and the more joyful we will be. Spinoza posits all the primary emotions in relation to the change in this power level: we feel sadness when it is diminished, and joy when it increases, and other emotions derive from these two in relation to other people, our desire (also a primary emotion) and the environment. Thus to be happy, according to Spinoza, is to maximize our own power in the world. While this might sound libertarian AF, just like Epicureanism sounds a little bit like luxury space communism, it actually isn't at all, as a truly rational being recognizes that his or her powers are at their strongest in a society of like-minded rational beings and strives to bring that reality about. Happiness, for Spinoza, as it will be for Nietzsche 250 years later, is about self-knowledge and actually taking action in the world. As I like to say, seek strength, and the rest will follow.
However, that doesn't mean I agree with everything Spinoza is saying. He seems to have a blind spot about non-human intelligence: despite admitting that everything has a mind, he states that non-human animals are fair game for complete exploitation because they do not have the same nature as humans, despite the fact that by his own logic they probably share quite a bit of that nature. This is a dangerous attitude that can serve as justification of rapacious exploitation of the natural world, something that Spinoza would probably find abhorrent. And as previously mentioned there is the problem of some of his axioms, which will not be fully solved until Kant successfully integrates Hume's critique of the rationalists almost a hundred years later.
thejdizzler
11d ago
Leading is indeed much harder because you have to decide what to do.
thejdizzler
11d ago
Lots of discussion in the last few weeks on the dating recession, and I wanted to add another (anecdotal) data point to the pile.
I've been swing dancing here in Baltimore on and off for about the last three years (started in 2024 after my girlfriend broke up with me). Initially classes and actual dancing were heavily female dominated, often at ratios of 5:4 or even 3:2. This year that has completely changed: my class tonight was short 11 follows in a class of ~30 total people, meaning the ratio of men to women is about 2:1. The instructors managed to get some more advanced people to drop in to help out as follows, but half of them were dudes who wanted to learn the follow part. This was roughly true in the last session of the class as well although not as pronounced.
What I hypothesize that has happened is the message that dating apps don't seem to work has trickled down to the male part of the population. Around the same amount of women are taking this class as in the before times (2024), but the number of men has almost doubled. Men are starting out to try and meet people in real life again! Which is awesome. But for whatever reason, this hasn't happened with women.
I'm not entirely sure why this is, because dating apps don't seem to particularly work for women either. Maybe the illusion of abundance is enough to keep them from thinking that they need to meet people in real life? Maybe they're all in a situationship with the same man (lol)? Maybe women just have stronger social connections in general and don't need to do something like dancing to meet people?
Thoughts TheMotte?
thejdizzler
12d ago
I'll have to check out both of those books. If I have one criticism of Toll is that this trilogy is a 100% focused on the USA. Australian and British efforts are a complete sideshow.
In terms of Civil War, we are planning on reading Bruce Catton's Army of The Potomac Trilogy.
Finishing Spinoza's Ethics. Actually came around to it after the very confusing first section. Also reading the second book of Ian Toll's Pacific War trilogy and the Golden Compass in Italian.
thejdizzler
14d ago
As a comparison for P/E of a company in a mature industry.
thejdizzler
14d ago
Google has a P/E of 27, AMZN 29, MSFT 25, NVDA: 36 Target: 15.
thejdizzler
14d ago
Well he's certainly right about this one. I'll see if I can find the specific piece, but there's no magic that justifies a higher P/E ratio for tech companies vs. say target or Union Pacific Rail other than promises of growth. At some point NVIDIA, GOOGL and AMZN have to trade at the same P/E range as the rest of the S&P. The only thing that justifies a higher ratio is a promise of above market growth, which will eventually stop at some point. I think we are currently at that point.
I did get a lot of out of it, so it wasn't a total waste, but yeah the theory doesn't really fully clarify things. Back to being a pretty shelf decoration I guess.
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