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Typo posted:it's both ways, a feedback cycle if you will Yes, it is, but I would suggest that governments are primarily reactive. Their reactions drive new conditions which drive new reactions, but the role of the government is mostly to react to circumstances.
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Mar 12, 2019 21:46
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Eschat0n posted:... to be perfectly clear, mastodons were land animals, like wooly mammoths. Not that it matters. But also... look, you need to understand that the second law of thermodynamics does not say things can not return to a prior state; it says things cannot return to a prior state without the expenditure of more energy, ultimately leading to some of it being lost into irrecoverable forms because of the nature of its configuration. You could slowly breed Mastodons back into existence using DNA taken from frozen mastodon corpses we've found abundantly now that siberia is melting, use that in a cross with Elephant eggs, and just keep breeding more and more mastodon-like elephants using females created in the prior generation until the resulting animal was like 99.99+ % mastodon or whatever metric you wanted. But the process it would take to do that - even just if by some miracle of convergent evolution these animals were to arise again naturally - requires more energy input than the energy that anything can get out of it. That's just one of the fundamental truths of our universe - no change is perfectly lossless, and no process can reduce entropy except locally. ... Did you just "well akshully" me on the second law of thermodynamics? Okay, fine, no more simplifications. The second law of thermodynamics states that for an isolated system- a system for which there is no loss or gain in energy or matter - entropy never decreases. Entropy is equal to a constant times the natural log of all possible microstates or configurations of the system. Let's pretend you put an isolation shield over the Earth to make it an isolated system. Now, all these mastodons you got walking around are trapping particles into the configuration of a mastodon, limiting the microstates available. When the mastodon dies those particles are free to spread randomly, growing the number of microstates. So in that sense, you're right- in an isolated system extinction will increase entropy. Except treating the Earth or any aspect of Earth as an isolated system is insane. The particles of those Mastodons aren't floating around randomly, they're reintroduced into the biological world through decomposition and photosynthesis. Which would be impossible in an isolated system which doesn't have a burning chunk of gas blasting it with constant energy. I understand you're trying to say economies specifically are isolated but do you realize what EVERY economy shares as an origin? Agriculture. And do you know where those plants get their energy from? That's right - the loving sun. It's insane to try to argue that a system which has a virtually inexhaustible source of energy as a primary input is isolated. Eschat0n posted:Yes. Economic darwinism is part of what I'm thinking about; it is certainly a concern: how do you steer that natural process toward a solution we want, instead of what will naturally happen? We need to stop treating capitalism like a God who we serve and start treating it like the wild animal it is. The economy's big strength is the threat of starvation. Defang it, establish necessity as a human right not something you earn by our capitalist masters' grace.
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Mar 13, 2019 16:59
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OwlFancier posted:You're working backwards if you think policy drives circumstances rather than the other way around. Look, my outlook is dark, but not as dark as all that. As others have been attempting to argue with me up to now, politics has to be part of the solution. I actually agree with them that policy can help; I'm arguing against their notion that it is the fix. In that sense, you and I agree, or at least take stances not far from each other; policy does not drive circumstances; cultural change usually precedes it, generally-speaking. As you later said: OwlFancier posted:Yes, it is, but I would suggest that governments are primarily reactive. Their reactions drive new conditions which drive new reactions, but the role of the government is mostly to react to circumstances. We agree. WampaLord posted:Drop the tone argument bullshit, this is Something Awful and you're the one who created a thread of 'I understand economy better than everyone else, prove me wrong" "Because I'm not sure I understand fully, and that seems like it might be kinda important. I'm not going to try to ask for an Econ 101 here; I do come to this question with some prior knowledge, but it seems to me that there's a lot of confusion about economics stemming from suppositions about this fundamental assumption - that we know what we're talking about when we talk about wealth and its manifestations - money, capital, stock, debt, etc. This perceived issue is stemming either from a widespread lack of understanding or - much more likely - my own lack of understanding." These were the first two paragraphs of the first post I made in this thread, which was the first post in the thread. You are lying. At every step of the way in this conversation, in fact, I've been open to other people bringing in their systems and comparing them against my own. I've stated that by no means is what I'm talking about here meant to replace other economic theories, as it is not in and of itself sufficient to be a theory of economics. It is only a theory of wealth. And I think you know this; you know; so what you write is not only simple ignorance; it's a malicious lie. WampaLord posted:and now you're bitching because we're finally getting to the actual meat of your beliefs and oops, turns out they're very stupid, no matter how many words you use to try to disguise that fact. WampaLord posted:You appear to be terrified of hypothetical future bad economies disrupting our hypothetical future good economy, this is not a normal state of affairs to be in, when there are actual bad economies and we all currently live in them. Let's just work on making a good economy and we can worry about the bad ones if they actually do get angry enough to attack us for reducing carbon emissions. Eschat0n fucked around with this message at 14:29 on Mar 14, 2019 |
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Mar 14, 2019 14:26
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I see that Libertarianism thread 2.0 is going well. Including the usual misuse of Physics terms to benefit the wealthy.
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Mar 14, 2019 14:28
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CommieGIR posted:I see that Libertarianism thread 2.0 is going well. It sounds like you have an argument very different from my own if you think an argument is being made here which benefits the wealthy or is in any way libertarian. Feel free to present it so we may consider an alternative position.
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Mar 14, 2019 14:30
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Pointless astronomy pedantry: the Sun has 5 billion years left, the Earth will be engulfed by the Sun in about 1 billion years and cease to exist. Prior to both of these the Earth will become incapable of sustaining any form of life irrespective of any feasible human intervention. Somewhat humbling that in the 4.5 billion year history of life of earth, we are already in the last stretch. Entropy is usually used as a very specific concept in thermodynamics, sometimes information theory and few other areas. It is defined with fairly rigid mathematics and doesn't translate well into other domains. I'm otherwise mostly familiar with creationists and other similar groups abusing it through vague redefinitions to try and advance their "theories". If you want to use entropy as a term, I would recommend that you define it very precisely. Smiling Demon fucked around with this message at 07:08 on Mar 15, 2019 |
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Mar 15, 2019 06:59
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Just in case anyone is following along with my persistent trek down this rabbit hole for funsies: it turns out (of course, really), that I'm not even close to the first person to talk about economics this way, and in fact there are some interesting reading resources that I'll be going over and using in a future post here in this thread where I attempt to get a little more formal (or end up admitting I'm too stupid to accomplish that goal): http://economicentropy.com/ http://www.cadmusjournal.org/node/146 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoeconomics https://www.degruyter.com/downloadpdf/j/jheec.2016.3.issue-1/jheec-2016-0001/jheec-2016-0001.pdf http://cob.jmu.edu/rosserjb/ENTROPY%20AND%20ECONOPHYSICS.pdf http://entropyeconomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Startups-and-the-Remaking-of-the-Firm-High-Alpha-Entropy-Economics-Feb-2019.pdf Eschat0n fucked around with this message at 23:41 on Mar 15, 2019 |
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Mar 15, 2019 23:37
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Doesn't digging holes and filling them back in disprove the labor "theory" of value? If not, then how about Bitcoin? That used to cost more work to create than the current price. Why isn't it worth more?
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Mar 18, 2019 02:22
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The clue is in the name, LTV professes to calculate the value of a thing, not the price of a thing. If you think those things are the same thing then I've got a bridge to sell you which is guaranteed to appreciate in value. Also i think you might have missed the "socially necessary" bit of labour. Digging holes and filling them in is not socially necessary. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 02:41 on Mar 18, 2019 |
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Mar 18, 2019 02:39
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Potato chips and videogames aren't socially necessary, either.
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Mar 22, 2019 20:47
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neither are somethingawful forums strictly speaking
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Mar 22, 2019 20:49
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oliveoil posted:Potato chips and videogames aren't socially necessary, either. They are if you want to sell them. Nobody buys dug and refilled holes. LTV is working on the assumption that you are producing a product for use and/or sale as a commodity.
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Mar 22, 2019 20:59
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OwlFancier posted:They are if you want to sell them. Nobody buys dug and refilled holes. LTV is working on the assumption that you are producing a product for use and/or sale as a commodity. but isn't this just defining the value based on someone's willingness to purchase something?
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Mar 22, 2019 21:01
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Typo posted:but isn't this just defining the value based on someone's willingness to purchase something? No that's the framework under which LTV operates. It is applied to production not just anything. Ditch digging isn't production, it's not producing anything, so LTV doesn't apply to it. Though if you do try to apply it you reach the correct conclusion that ditch digging has no value because there is no socially necessary labour required to produce a refilled hole, because a refilled hole is the same as no hole. The point of ditch digging or other make-work programs is not to actually produce things it's to make people suffer in return for money. It's cargo cult capitalism. It doesn't have any relation to analysis of how things are produced. What people who suggest them are actually saying is "throw lots of money into the bottom of the economy to give it a kick up the bracket" but because we live in a society where people get conniptions at the prospect of just giving money to people who aren't already obscenely rich they have to invent some arbitrary and pointless hardship conditional to it. Same thing that informs aspects of many welfare programs where you gotta do something miserable or jump through means testing hoops because if you don't suffer for your subsistence it's not right. Broadly LTV is a moral theory most useful to explain why the worker can never actually be paid the value of their labour, though Marx also suggests (I think) that the entire value of the economy can be determined by it. That the economy as a whole is zero sum even while individual commodities vary wildly in price. So if something is sold for far more than the value of the labour required to create it, or at a huge markup, that can only sustainably happen because something else is being sold at a price far below its true value. So, ultra luxury markets can only exist because labour is being sold (by the workers) at below its true value, thus allowing accumulation to occur and facilitating the ultra luxury ridiculously inflated price market on things like properties and art and diamond encrusted phones. As to the distinction between value and price, value is the labour embodied in the product, all the work that went into it, and into the materials and tools that were used to make it. This, it could be argued, would be the "natural" price of the item, but obviously the whole point of trade for a capitalist is to sell things for more than they're worth, or at least, for more than you paid for them. The thing Marx argues is that this cannot generate value despite what more liberal understandings of economics might suggest, all it can do is move around the value that has been created by labour. And that the reason that capitalists can sell things at above their price is that all this surplus value is actually coming from workers being consistently underpaid for their labour. If you buy fifty houses, sit on them until there's a housing shortage, and sell them, then you have not actually made any value, or any money, what you have done is shuffled the money and stored value around so that you now control more of the stored value that has been generated in the past by other people. And the reason you can do this is because you already had control of enough money to buy the houses in the first place. Money = power = the power to acquire more power. Thus capitalism is inherently accumulatory and unstable. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 21:38 on Mar 22, 2019 |
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Mar 22, 2019 21:07
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OwlFancier posted:And the reason you can do this is because you already had control of enough money to buy the houses in the first place. Money = power = the power to acquire more power. Thus capitalism is inherently accumulatory and unstable. You don't have to buy a house. Anybody can invest in real estate mutual funds with a significantly smaller barrier of entry and get about the same percent return as what that homeowner got.
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Mar 23, 2019 00:09
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Volkerball posted:You don't have to buy a house. Anybody can invest in real estate mutual funds with a significantly smaller barrier of entry and get about the same percent return as what that homeowner got. "anybody"
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Mar 23, 2019 01:08
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OwlFancier posted:"anybody" Pretty much every 401k provider will have a real estate fund, and if that's not available, one can easily get access by opening up an IRA or brokerage account for free.
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Mar 23, 2019 01:29
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Private pensions and whatever the poo poo a brokerage account is, definitely things we all have. Like sure my bank account pays 1% interest, and because I have gently caress all in it, I get gently caress all out of it. Percentages of gently caress all are still gently caress all. If I had a billion pounds of course I'd have enough to buy dozens of houses a year on interest alone but yeah we're all real equal cos we can all have have brokerage accounts or some poo poo. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 01:47 on Mar 23, 2019 |
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Mar 23, 2019 01:42
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Volkerball posted:You don't have to buy a house. Anybody can invest in real estate mutual funds with a significantly smaller barrier of entry and get about the same percent return as what that homeowner got. People without money can not do that.
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Mar 23, 2019 01:43
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WampaLord posted:People without money can not do that.
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Mar 23, 2019 02:08
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I also want to suggest that "bitcoin disproves LTV" is a weird position to take given the entire basis of cryptocurrencies is that they're produced and function by via proof of work. Literally the only way to make more bitcoins is to perform the work that is deemed necessary by the society of bitcoin users.
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Mar 23, 2019 02:19
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OwlFancier posted:Private pensions and whatever the poo poo a brokerage account is, definitely things we all have. In the US, 80% of the workforce has a 401k option available. If you meaningfully contribute to the countries production, it's open to you. And with the employer contribution, you get extra money on top of your paycheck that you can put towards those same sorts of investments. And no, that's not how compound interest works. Those percentages over decades end up surpassing the principal amount you invested several times over. There's a huge opportunity there for everybody, not just for billionaires, at least in the US. It's not unfair for somebody to get a return on an investment when you have that exact same investment available to you if you want it. And at the same time, if that dude made the wrong call and that neighborhood goes to poo poo and the property values plummet, it's a loss that according the your definition of how the system works, is not available for the lower classes to have to deal with. roomforthetuna posted:Sure they can, they can get a 5% return on zero, and it's even less effort than getting a 5% return on a lot of money! Obviously it's absolutely fair that a person with zero money can get a 5% return, exactly the same percent as a person who inherited a billion dollars would get. I don't know how anyone could think there's any sort of imbalance there. More than half of all lottery tickets are purchased by the poorest 1/3 of households. Sure a lot of people have a lot of hurdles in their life, but a lot of people are really stupid with their money too. That's an educational issue, not an inherent flaw in the system. 80% of millionaires are first generation, so there's obviously the potential there.
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Mar 23, 2019 02:19
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oooo poo poo the capitalism defender has logged on if only them goddamn poors weren't so irresponsible with their money they could all be millionaires that take might actually be even more ancient than loving marx let's all just put lots of money into investment schemes and invest invest invest our way to millions! just gotta put money in the investment and then it magically appears out of nowhere
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Mar 23, 2019 02:21
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It's not magic and you need to take a breath.
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Mar 23, 2019 02:29
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guys have you considered that actually the cause of poverty is lottery tickets and poor people not investing their capital in property? and have you thought about the poor property tycoons who sometimes don't make enormous amounts of money from buying things??? whose the real victim is all im asking
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Mar 23, 2019 02:30
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going into character and raving like a madman doesn't actually further your point op
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Mar 23, 2019 02:35
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I'm carefully tailoring my argument to exactly the amount of credence your position merits.
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Mar 23, 2019 02:36
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OwlFancier posted:I'm carefully tailoring my argument to exactly the amount of credence your position merits. With about as much effort as you're tailoring your families future from the sound of things.
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Mar 23, 2019 02:38
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aaaahahahaha tell me more about personal responsibility
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Mar 23, 2019 02:38
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Volkerball posted:More than half of all lottery tickets are purchased by the poorest 1/3 of households. Sure a lot of people have a lot of hurdles in their life, but a lot of people are really stupid with their money too. That's an educational issue, not an inherent flaw in the system. 80% of millionaires are first generation, so there's obviously the potential there. Ah yes, it's those drat lottery tickets holding all the poors back, well that and all the avocado toast, natch. Surely it's not stagnating wages combined with rapidly increasing costs of living, all that inequality is just a behavioral problem, the system works!
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Mar 23, 2019 02:39
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if you manage to keep £1000 lying around doing nothing for 20 years at 5% interest, at the end of it you'd have a whole £2500! that's like, enough to buy.... half a car that won't break down all the time! living in loving luuuxury here lads
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Mar 23, 2019 02:42
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WampaLord posted:Ah yes, it's those drat lottery tickets holding all the poors back, well that and all the avocado toast, natch. Surely it's not stagnating wages combined with rapidly increasing costs of living, all that inequality is just a behavioral problem, the system works! I wouldn't dispute that all of those things are issues. This isn't a black and white thing where there's only one dynamic at play. There's a bunch, and financial illiteracy is one of them.
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Mar 23, 2019 02:43
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just gotta be more ~*financially literate*~ and then you'll be loving set for the future! just invest all that spare money youve got you loving paup
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Mar 23, 2019 02:44
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tell me how much did mammy and daddy give you to start your portfolio (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Mar 23, 2019 02:45
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OwlFancier posted:tell me how much did mammy and daddy give you to start your portfolio I work in a factory off the back of a community college certificate. My single mother of three will be mostly dependent on me when she retires as she's always lived paycheck to paycheck, and I haven't spoken to my dad in my adult life. If it's accessible to me, it's accessible to the vast majority of people. I mean if you want to be broke to own the neocons and their magical investments, feel free, but it's totally doable. If you invest $20 a week for 30 years, you'll have invested a total of $31,200, but your balance from investing in something as basic as the S&P 500 index would conservatively get you in the neighborhood of $100,000 as your final balance. A $70k profit. And over the next 5 years, if you continued, it would go up another $50k. If $20 a week sounds like something you would have to squeeze your budget to make happen, then that is probably twice or more of your annual salary that you would get as a return if you managed to do it. That's not chump change by any means. There's opportunity in the system, it's just a matter of making sure it's more accessible and that people know how to do it.
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Mar 23, 2019 03:03
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Right so obviously the reason your mum is dependent on you is because she's a feckless poor who knows nothing, rather than say, the fact that she lives paycheck to paycheck and thus, has never had any money to invest in fabulous property portfolios owing to spending it all bringing your worthless arse up.
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Mar 23, 2019 03:09
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Volkerball posted:My single mother of three will be mostly dependent on me when she retires as she's always lived paycheck to paycheck So if it's so loving easy to make mad money, why does your mother live paycheck to paycheck? Why didn't she just save $20 a week and be financially secure forever? Or are you just vastly simplifying the issue? quote:If it's accessible to me, it's accessible to the vast majority of people. Except your mother, apparently!
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Mar 23, 2019 03:10
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Also loving lol that the triumph of capitalism is that if you save up your entire loving life and nothing goes wrong and you never need to actually use any of your savings you could have.... two years salary at the end of it!!! Hope you got no medical bills or nothing gets stolen or your car doesn't break down or you're out of work or any of that! Would be a real shame if anything were to happen to all that tasty opportunity. Also better hope none of that ever happens to say, your 3 kids, cos otherwise you'd have to cover them and that'd get in the way of planning for your family's future. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 03:23 on Mar 23, 2019 |
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Mar 23, 2019 03:19
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Volkerball posted:More than half of all lottery tickets are purchased by the poorest 1/3 of households.
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Mar 23, 2019 03:34
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OwlFancier posted:Right so obviously the reason your mum is dependent on you is because she's a feckless poor who knows nothing, rather than say, the fact that she lives paycheck to paycheck and thus, has never had any money to invest in fabulous property portfolios owing to spending it all bringing your worthless arse up. She's got two vested 401ks from different nursing homes, plus she'll have social security, so she might be totally fine depending on how much she budgeted all those years, and she's still got time to make a lot more. I suppose I'm just preparing for the worst because I haven't seen her financials. But it's true, I did get better financial footing since I didn't have kids as young as she did, I didn't get hosed in a divorce with an idiot, and I'm interested in finance. That's a pretty big bowl of poo poo for someone to eat though, and at that point, we're discussing welfare and where the social floor should be rather than what the potential is of the opportunities available to everybody. OwlFancier posted:Also loving lol that the triumph of capitalism is that if you save up your entire loving life and nothing goes wrong and you never need to actually use any of your savings you could have.... two years salary at the end of it!!! I mean I'm on pace to make way more than that, I just used the $20 a week figure because it's so low that only extreme outliers wouldn't be able to make that work. This is the example where you save your entire loving life but you save so little that you barely even loving noticed it and still walked away with enough money to drastically change your financial situation. The more you put in, the more you get back, obviously. And you'll be happy you did when those emergencies pop around because the money you saved gives you flexibility to deal with them. Again, I am aware not every single person can do this, but the vast majority can, and the vast majority of those people choose not to. It isn't some inherent fault of capitalism if those people don't maximize their earning potential. It's just a missed opportunity that can be fixed with education and a better social safety net. And the less people there are that fall through the cracks, the easier it is to provide for them.
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Mar 23, 2019 03:49
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