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I think it is safe to say that Marx didn't see super freighters coming when he was thinking that stuff up. The idea of having whole other parts of the world making massive amounts of goods to ship and sell to wealthier parts of the world would have seemed impractical in scale had anyone somehow thought of it at the time.
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Jun 13, 2018 18:42
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But the people in the "wealthier parts of the world" still need to make money to buy those things, and their wages still have those same downward pressures. The goods being made "over there" still allows the system to work as he described it, regardless of whether "over there" is Birmingham or Bangkok.
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Jun 13, 2018 19:21
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Goon Danton posted:But the people in the "wealthier parts of the world" still need to make money to buy those things, and their wages still have those same downward pressures. The goods being made "over there" still allows the system to work as he described it, regardless of whether "over there" is Birmingham or Bangkok. Yeah, I think that the global economy really just kicks the can down the road. A bunch of other factors have been doing the same (easy access to debt, the death of the single earner household, etc).
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Jun 13, 2018 20:03
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QuarkJets posted:Yeah, I think that the global economy really just kicks the can down the road. I agree, but  . One thing I have learned is that Capitalism cares only about the right now and nothing else; business cannot think about the long term because insatiable shareholders want profits now, period. It will of course have huge long-term repercussions down the road from which the people most responsible will be insulated, but that's another one of capitalism's lovely features... benefits trickle upwards, suffering sifts toward the bottom.
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Jun 13, 2018 20:19
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nepetaMisekiryoiki posted:Why so many not understand money/value? I don't want this post - their first and only - to be forgotten. I kind of love it.
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Jun 13, 2018 20:27
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JustJeff88 posted:I agree, but 
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Jun 13, 2018 20:40
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Golbez posted:I don't want this post - their first and only - to be forgotten. I kind of love it.
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Jun 13, 2018 21:14
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Ze Pollack posted:there are more pure expressions of libertarianism, but "never admit you were wrong about a feel-good lie you pulled directly out of your rear end for fear otherwise people might think you're stupid" is still a pretty solid summation of the mindset Did you miss where I was being sarcastic?
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Jun 13, 2018 21:26
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https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/cesar-chavez-saves-workers-from-being-poisoned-hes-a-hero/ This is loving rich. My favorite part: quote:From a strictly humanitarian perspective, I have a hard time understanding how a human being could consciously choose to drop poison on fields in which other humans are toiling and which would clearly cause them harm. Are you new here?
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Jun 15, 2018 16:23
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QuarkJets posted:Yeah, I think that the global economy really just kicks the can down the road. A bunch of other factors have been doing the same (easy access to debt, the death of the single earner household, etc). This is what I was trying to get at, yeah.
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Jun 15, 2018 17:41
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Golbez posted:https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/cesar-chavez-saves-workers-from-being-poisoned-hes-a-hero/ seeing the words "humanitarian perspective" on a libertarian site is strange
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Jun 15, 2018 19:48
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large adult son posted:seeing the words "humanitarian perspective" on a libertarian site is strange Remember, human rights = property rights
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Jun 15, 2018 20:11
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I assume it's about people who want to eat other people.
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Jun 15, 2018 20:27
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I was wondering if we could go back in time a bit and talk more about the drawbacks of currency. I'm really fascinated by the idea of it being a very good system for the distribution of scarce resources but an extremely poor one for abundance.
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Jun 17, 2018 04:38
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JustJeff88 posted:I was wondering if we could go back in time a bit and talk more about the drawbacks of currency. I'm really fascinated by the idea of it being a very good system for the distribution of scarce resources but an extremely poor one for abundance. There's ultimately a limit to what one can consume. Despite what jrod thinks demand just isn't infinite. Could you eat 5,000,000 pizzas if they were available to you? No. You absolutely could not. If there are limited resources and everybody has limited currency then it puts limits on what individuals can consume. Generally speaking money is equal to time. If you have $100 then you can purchase $100 of other peoples' time. You do this by buying stuff. So if you buy $100 of burritos you're paying for the time that it took to make the ingredients, take them to the burrito factory, turn them into burritos, ship them to where you bought them, and sell them to you. Ignore taxes for a moment; we're talking pure theory. Also ignore for a moment rent seeking, profit, and what have you. Again, pure theory; this is "let's treat cows like perfect spheres in a vacuum" levels of approximation. Everything else works about the same way. If you buy $100 of hats then you're buying the time it took to produce $100 of hats. Now, there are not infinite burritos and infinite hats. There are only so many hats and burritos to go around. Maybe this year you want $70 of burritos and $30 of hats. Maybe next year you're tired of burritos but your hats all wore out. Ultimately the end result is the same; you bought $100 of other peoples' time. Generally speaking you earn money by selling your time. Perhaps you work in a factory that makes wine. When you get $100 of pay you're being paid to spend time doing something that produces wine. Now, there is only so much time to go around because there are only so many people able to work at a given moment. So we have both limited time and limited consumption. Now let's assume that suddenly somebody invents a burrito machine where the cost of burritos becomes negligible. It's so close to zero that burritos now have no value at all. It takes no effort to make burritos anymore. The above system assumes that it takes time to actually make things. Now however there are effectively infinite burritos for free. $100 of burritos is suddenly such an absurd amount of burritos that you could never eat them all. Because of that machine it now costs no time to actually make burritos and there are as many burritos as anybody could want. How do you distribute burritos? In that case you just ask everybody "hey, how many burritos you want this month? 100? Alright, here you go" and hand them out because why the gently caress not? Currency becomes utterly meaningless in that situation. The people making burritos would suddenly find themselves unable to get paid to make burritos or unable to profit off of burrito making. Interestingly you kind of see this in pornography right now thanks to the internet; there is more free porn available right now than you could ever possibly watch in a lifetime. We've achieved post-scarcity in porn. The porn industry is finding it harder to actually make money producing porn because really, why even pay for it at this point? Whenever you want porn you can just head over to any of a number of free porn websites, click on whatever flavor of porn trips your trigger, and get several years of video. Same goes for a lot of flavors of information too. Why bother buying an encyclopedia set when you can just use Wikipedia? It's free. The only thing Wikipedia actually needs money for is keeping the servers running. Right now they rely on donations but they could just as easily survive on government grants. All that matters is the expense of keeping the servers running. Compare that to when books were expensive as gently caress to make because paper got made by hand and then people wrote everything in them manually. Knowledge at that time was scarce as hell. Joe Farmer from Poopington had no hope whatsoever of ever reading a book. The main reason? He couldn't afford it. He probably didn't see much actual hard currency in his life and mostly paid food up the ladder, whatever that ladder was locally. As it became cheaper to print things it became cheaper to educate people. As there were more and more books in the world (and eventually the internet) knowledge became less and less scarce. At this point we're at post-scarcity knowledge. The only reason some of it is scarce is because of artificial scarcity. The cost to access Wikipedia is pretty much negligible. Hell you can go for a walk to your nearest library, hop on a computer, and read it completely for free if you want to. Basically everybody has a smart phone at this point so with a few dollars for a data plan you can access pretty much the entirety of humanity's knowledge for almost nothing. There is so much reading material on Wikipedia alone that you could never, ever read all of it. When everything is scarce money decides how much of that scarce stuff you get to have. So for that $100 maybe you bought $40 of burritos, $20 of hats, $20 of books, and $20 of porn. As things become less scarce that ends up netting you more stuff. If you're living before the printing press $20 of books might be a single page. Eventually that might get you a second hand encyclopedia set. Now certain kinds of books are effectively free thanks to the internet and it's only expanding. That $100 goes further because it costs less time to produce those things. However when things are so abundant that more exists than anybody could possibly consume money becomes absolutely meaningless. When everything has gone post-scarcity money has lost all of its meaning entirely. If everybody can get everything they can consume for no effort at all why bother with money? This is why abundance also pisses off capitalists. If everybody has all of the knowledge, porn, hats, and burritos they could ever want provided for them totally for free then you can't do any real rent seeking there nor can you capitalize on the situation to make profits. Incidentally this is why the wealthy telcos despise net neutrality; they want to be able to profit off of the currently post-scarcity stuff the internet is being used for. The other side of it is that if something is scarce one can say "I have the most of this thing. Therefore I am better than those that have less of it." If there is effectively infinite everything for everybody then you can't do that anymore.
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Jun 17, 2018 05:40
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And when control of large amounts of currency is the basis of all power, more or less, there are a lot of very powerful people very keen on ensuring that money never becomes farcical. The concept of a post scarcity society is not at all appealing to the kind of person who already never has to worry about scarcity, because it means they'd be just like everybody else.
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Jun 17, 2018 06:37
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JustJeff88 posted:I was wondering if we could go back in time a bit and talk more about the drawbacks of currency. I'm really fascinated by the idea of it being a very good system for the distribution of scarce resources but an extremely poor one for abundance. Towards a New Socialism touches on the problems of currency http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/socialism_book/new_socialism.pdf It's an interesting read overall. But the general idea is that currency allows for hoarding and accumulation, which would produce class and power imbalances within any economic system over time. His proposed alternative are "labour tokens" which expire after time. You work 6 hours a day? You get 6 labour tokens a day. You still use it to buy stuff, to pay taxes, and what people are buying is still used to set prices, but it differs from a currency in a few key areas.
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Jun 17, 2018 19:55
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Baronjutter posted:Towards a New Socialism touches on the problems of currency Ehh - this feels like it immediately and directly converts the problem from "hoarding notional commodities in an abstract trading tool" to "just hoarding commodities directly". That would admittedly limit liquidity and turnaround, though.
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Jun 18, 2018 01:38
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Also most goods are inherently perishable, and thus limit the amount you can effectively hoard. The ones that aren't, well, that's the gold standard, and it has its own problems.
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Jun 18, 2018 02:54
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OwlFancier posted:Also most goods are inherently perishable, and thus limit the amount you can effectively hoard. The ones that aren't, well, that's the gold standard, and it has its own problems. This is actually part of the reason why fiat currency is a good thing; sure you can hoard it but the government can look at the hoarding and go "lol gently caress you, more money exists now." Similarly even if somebody hoards a poo poo load of it everything else can just adjust to the money supply that is currently not being hoarded because a fiat currency is best describe as an everything standard. If you want more wealth in a fiat-based economy you just like sell stuff. Doesn't matter what it is. Burritos, porn, hats, books, your time...just sell something and you get some money. If it's a gold standard the only way to get more wealth is getting more gold. Everything is suddenly inextricably tied to the gold. This also causes issues as external gold can be used to gently caress up your economy in strange and wonderful ways. If you don't have gold then...well, gently caress you buddy. You get nothing. Right now the funding of libertarian think tanks and idea havers and whatever comes from the super rich that would very much love to have more economic power. Going back to a gold standard would give them just that and in a wonderful "counterpoint: all of recorded history" way it's already been showing that a gold standard is bad for everybody that isn't nobility or super rich. Or both. The issue now is that fiat currency doesn't do much good in a post-scarcity situation. This is why I brought up porn; it's harder to make money making porn when there's just so drat much free porn out there. Every commodity works basically the same way. In the past you could probably make decent money off of a porn magazine or a video company. Now? Good luck competing with the internet. Even Larry Flint is like "yeah, Penthouse is dying. Fewer subscribers every year. Everything is on the internet now."
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Jun 18, 2018 04:13
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It is not special effect of `fiat currency` that you get it from selling things. Same holds true in ancient Rome, or XIX century England, or in XV century Mexico. Fiat currency makes it so proper control of money supply much easier to get right. Gold standard, silver standard, applesauce standard all too susceptible to disruption. That is why history show old time economy too vulnerable to wild swing from high inflation to high deflation and back. Average person or even rich man not deal much with the gold itself, and real estate remains vastly important for true wealth. Realistic, gold standard is not useful for vast amount of rich people. Very select group stands to gain from it being implemented because of existing silly investment based on doing so. Most rich people more likely to be inconvenienced by it. This why it remains fringe support instead of being implemented like labor union repression. Additional, fetisch artist make big money on porn. Big spending on things like livecam, pornographic game, custom requests too. Just unexceptional mainstream pornography that one can hardly sell. Idea that lack of scarcity erased porn profitability is missighted - is example of how lack of scarcity can instead drive further development. Is kind of difference between making money by selling a record versus making money playing live.
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Jun 18, 2018 05:10
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nepetaMisekiryoiki posted:Is kind of difference between making money by selling a record versus making money playing live. precisely. one of these is a hell of a lot cheaper, easier, and allows the hypothetical you, a person who knows nothing about making music but a lot about legal methods for controlling access to a scarce resource, to make a shitton of money off the back of maybe two days' work at the right time. the other one involves living on the road doing shows and kinda sucks tbqh
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Jun 18, 2018 05:58
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Could you eat 5,000,000 pizzas if they were available to you? No. You absolutely could not. This is a poor lead-in example for this audience.
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Jun 18, 2018 06:03
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Discendo Vox posted:This is a poor lead-in example for this audience. Even Jrod would admit that loving 5 million watermelons in a day (or year) is impossible.
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Jun 18, 2018 09:51
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Ze Pollack posted:precisely. one of these is a hell of a lot cheaper, easier, and allows the hypothetical you, a person who knows nothing about making music but a lot about legal methods for controlling access to a scarce resource, to make a shitton of money off the back of maybe two days' work at the right time. In either case, the guy who makes all the money off the system, he can still sit back in his mansion miles away while the artist puts in the hard days of travel and work.
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Jun 18, 2018 14:50
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nepetaMisekiryoiki posted:In either case, the guy who makes all the money off the system, he can still sit back in his mansion miles away while the artist puts in the hard days of travel and work. Agreed. One of my biggest pet peeves, and it's the size of a brontosaurus, is this idea that you have to work hard to get wealthy and that only hard-working people make a lot of money. It's easily disproven, but it's an extension of the Just-World Fallacy/Prosperity Gospel, which is the most dangerous and erroneous human myth ever. Let's be frank... there are three ways to make a lot of money in this world: dumb luck (win the lottery), be entertaining (actor, musician, athlete etc) or become an entrepreneur and let everyone else do the work while you take all the money and credit. I suppose that I could include "invent something really great", but that falls into the third category. Either someone sells their idea to a company who patents it and keeps it from going to anyone who can't pay their price, or more likely some huge company steals it or sues the inventor using overly broad patent laws in a system that horribly favours big business.
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Jun 18, 2018 16:17
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Omobono posted:Even Jrod would admit that loving 5 million watermelons in a day (or year) is impossible. We're goons. The demand for pizza is infinite.
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Jun 18, 2018 16:40
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Discendo Vox posted:We're goons. The demand for pizza is infinite. Goons only gently caress pizza that's been left under their bed for a month
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Jun 18, 2018 16:46
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aware of dog posted:Goons only gently caress pizza that's been left under their bed for a month For some, it's the closest thing to a long-term relationship that he'll ever get.
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Jun 18, 2018 16:51
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For some, watermelons are easy prey. The true challenge is in the pizza gently caress.
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Jun 18, 2018 16:51
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JustJeff88 posted:Agreed. One of my biggest pet peeves, and it's the size of a brontosaurus, is this idea that you have to work hard to get wealthy and that only hard-working people make a lot of money. It's easily disproven, but it's an extension of the Just-World Fallacy/Prosperity Gospel, which is the most dangerous and erroneous human myth ever. And the third part: that working hard will make you wealthy. I've had this conversation a bunch with my parents, that everyone I know works hard and they haven't gotten anywhere, but they just don't seem to be able to let go of that idea at least as a truism.
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Jun 18, 2018 16:55
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OwlFancier posted:And the third part: that working hard will make you wealthy. Yeah, it's taken as a truism and infuriating. If you're not wealthy, that means you're not really working hard, or are at fault for not getting a better job. The onus is always on the individual, never on the system. Somewhat related is what I call the parable of McDonalds. I was always told growing up, and I suspect this is still depressingly true, that you have to study hard and go to college or else you'll end up working at McDonalds. So people take on a ton of student debt (I was exceptionally fortunate to avoid this) and them graduate and can't get decent work because the economy's gone off a cliff again due to unconstrained capitalism, and when you complain older people say "whoa, what's this? College boy's too good to get a job at McDonalds?" So you grit your teeth and get the drat job at McDonalds which pays for poo poo and you can only barely afford to exist, and when you saying anything they respond "well what do you expect, working at McDonalds? Get a better job, you lazy bum!" This would be the point where, had I experienced all of this firsthand rather than through bitter gripes of friends, I'd recommend starting fires.
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Jun 18, 2018 17:21
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Should have done the right degree then.  Because what society really needs is a million underemployed CS grads posting libertarian memes at each other.
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Jun 18, 2018 17:28
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It's like the Grail room in The Last Crusade but which Grail is right keeps changing also there is a dozen Nazis giving you the same bad picks.
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Jun 18, 2018 17:45
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I actually understand in part the Just World Fallacy, because without it humans lose all sense of hope, which is the basis for what pathetic morality people still have. Nevertheless, it's poison to a society because it makes victims out of the victimised and casts the exploited (the poor) as the victims while turning the real leeches in society (entrepreneurs) into heroes. A lot of countries are bad about this, but it's one of the things I hate... especially about the US where it's the worst. A combination of religious ideals and "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" is a horrible cocktail, and if there is a culture that despises the poor and worships celebrities and the wealthy even more than the USA, I don't want to see it. I think that people discount the role that Christianity in the west has played in the vilification of the underclass, though this hatred of the oppressed seems to be much stronger among Protestants than Catholics in my experience. I was raised both Protestant by my mother's family and Jewish by my father's; I was both baptised and underwent a brit milah (bris) as well as having a bar mitzvah. Believe it or not, I actually had a pretty positive experience with Christianity as I was exposed to it. There were no "fire and brimstone" speeches where you were threatened with hell for every supposed fault, nobody told me to set fire to homosexuals and it was mostly about being nice to people, not stealing and learning lessons from Jesus. My Jewish grandfather even told me that while he didn't believe in the divinity of Jesus, he always said that he was a mensch and a pretty good role model in some ways. Nevertheless, as I grew older I could no longer reconcile the Prosperity Gospel myth that is inherent to Christianity and I drifted away from it. I don't know if there are any other Jews in this thread (possibly WrenP?), but Judaism has always had this underpinning of "Life sucks, make the best of it" that I can accept. It's most likely a result of all of the horrible things that have been done to the Jewish people over the centuries for no reason while Christians have almost always been the oppressors, but it's a culture that clearly recognizes that one can do everything "right" in life and still get hosed over hard. Capitalist disillusionment and personal struggle made me realise that if there even is a god then he either doesn't care, can't get involved or chooses not to, so there's no point in assuming that one reaps what one sows. CommieGIR posted:For some, watermelons are easy prey. Not if they are rolling down a hill... I assume.
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Jun 18, 2018 17:56
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It's really not that hard to abandon the idea of an inherent justice in the world and instead accept that there is none but what we make. Mostly I think people just get into the habit of thinking the former and don't want to bother changing to the latter. Prosperity gospel poo poo is a very American phenomenon afaik, I'm sure it's percolated to other places over the years but it's not inherent to all forms of christianity or even all protestants. Sure they all have the bad habit of thinking that some things are not for humans to interfere with or judge, but a lot of the really lovely ideology comes from specifically American branches of protestantism and feels a lot more like exporting Americanness via the medium of religion than the other way around. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 18:01 on Jun 18, 2018 |
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Jun 18, 2018 17:58
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Yes, I too am Jewish and don't have more to add other than I suddenly realized your username was more unfortunate than I had realized and saying "oh no, Jeff!" aloud.
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Jun 18, 2018 18:20
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OwlFancier posted:It's really not that hard to abandon the idea of an inherent justice in the world and instead accept that there is none but what we make. I respect you very much OwlFancier and adore your sig, but I'm going to disagree with you here. As much as I hate the just-world fallacy, I can understand why people cling to it because, without it, life loses meaning. Having to cope with the idea that you can work hard, never harm anyone and be a decent person and still get horridly hosed over is hard to accept. As the model of a disenfranchised "millennial", even though I'm a bit too old for that label, I've realised that all of my studying and indebtedness and hard work mean gently caress all. I've tried to channel it into a desire to be a better, more empathetic person, but I can easily see how it could make someone give in to total despair. WrenP-Complete posted:Yes, I too am Jewish and don't have more to add other than I suddenly realized your username was more unfortunate than I had realized and saying "oh no, Jeff!" aloud. Care to elaborate? My username is actually a joke on my given name; if there is any other hidden meaning it's total serendipity. JustJeff88 fucked around with this message at 18:46 on Jun 18, 2018 |
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Jun 18, 2018 18:41
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The number 88 has connotations.
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Jun 18, 2018 18:44
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Keeshhound posted:The number 88 has connotations. I understand what you mean now, but I wasn't raised in the US and I quite genuinely didn't understand the connotations of 14, 88 or 1488 until just a few years ago. 88 has been my "lucky number" since I was little and I've always worn it when I did sport and the like. If it's upsetting to some people then that's unfortunate and I mean no harm, but it was a very unlucky coincidence and nothing more. I'm totally skint right now and can't afford to change my user name regardless, if that's even possible.
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Jun 18, 2018 18:53
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