(Thread IKs:
dead gay comedy forums)
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So if machine longevity increases profit permanently, but speed of output by a machine decreases... That kinda is the ebb and flow of trpf? And planned obsolescence is what tips the scale in favor of decline?
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May 11, 2024 00:48
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| # ? May 23, 2024 07:07 |
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is there a real world example you have in mind? as production machines age, their output doesn't decrease. if things break or wear out, they get replaced. if production slows down it's because the market is saturated so it's unprofitable for the capitalist to keep cracking the whip at 100% because that results in him needing to sit on a bunch of product he can't sell
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May 11, 2024 01:04
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These are based on a series of previous posts. Something great about Capital is the simple building blocks work without having to add in a lot of "real world" complexities. Western economics are built off the rational actor, once you move beyond introductory levels, things change a lot. It's a source of valid criticism in this thread. As far as longevity, a large number of machinery in its initial form fit the bill. To keep it simple, a steel axe outlasts a stone axe. It also holds a sharper edge and can produce faster, adding a competing rise and fall in profits as competitors also adopt a steel are. Market saturation isn't really relevant, and supply and demand certainly isn't.
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May 11, 2024 01:24
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e: missed a post
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May 11, 2024 02:12
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BillsPhoenix posted:These are based on a series of previous posts. which is it? machine longevity increases profit permanently or it causes a fall in profits. you're asserting contradictory stuff
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May 11, 2024 02:57
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BillsPhoenix posted:These are based on a series of previous posts. Yeah don't bother quoting those, you'd risk someone understanding what the gently caress you are talking about. quote:Something great about Capital is the simple building blocks work without having to add in a lot of "real world" complexities. Capitalism only works well if you don't consider reality, yes.
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May 11, 2024 11:51
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BillsPhoenix posted:Western economics are built off [a thing that does not exist]. It's a source of valid criticism in this thread. You know I think BP is very close to getting it
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May 11, 2024 14:05
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BillsPhoenix posted:These are based on a series of previous posts. hows it feel knowing that your entire ideology can be defeated by showing people graphs like this 
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May 11, 2024 16:00
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AnimeIsTrash posted:hows it feel knowing that your entire ideology can be defeated by showing people graphs like this Wow, socialist Bill Clinton!
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May 11, 2024 17:55
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fellas is it socialist to play the saxophone
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May 11, 2024 17:58
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BillsPhoenix posted:These are based on a series of previous posts. Ultimately when you're talking about the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, the machines themselves and their specific nature are irrelevant. It would function exactly the same with a workshop full of artisans as it would with an automated gigafactory, as long as the capitalist owns both. The tendency of the rate of profit to fall is a consequence of the competitive nature of capitalist social relations. If you're a capitalist making and selling keychains, you're going to be driven by the profit motive to make your keychains more cheaply, because that increases your profit margin at the same price point. Every time you figure out how to do this, everyone else who makes and sells keychains is going to take that idea and do it too. Then one of you is going to decide that you can take a smaller cut off each unit in order to gain more market share and make more profit in volume, because capitalists must compete with one another for higher profits or be eaten. Before you know it, now everyone who makes and sells keychains is doing your thing and the market reaches a new equilibrium at the lower price point. You're right back where you started, so when someone else comes up with a new way to make cheaper keychains, you're going to adopt the same strategy. This continues on and on in a never-ending race to the bottom. The core foundations of capitalism - competition and the profit motive - are the spring from which the tendency flows. You can try to expand the system by opening up new markets (the impetus for colonialism and imperialism), for example, but every strategy contains the same poison pill of diminishing returns. Market saturation and supply/demand are environmental forces both driving and reacting to this process.
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May 11, 2024 18:09
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BillsPhoenix posted:So if machine longevity increases profit permanently, but speed of output by a machine decreases... people argue about the inevitability of tprf precisely because of the hypothetical possibility of technical advances like your mk.2, which can just crank out twice as many commodities in the same time and for the same cost and with absolutely zero increase in necessary labor or investment or anything. in the real world it represents some kind of massive scientific insight or the correction of a major and heretofore unseen technical flaw. "you're telling me that ALL THIS TIME we could've been making a coat out of the other half of those materials instead of throwing them away?!?!" if all tech advances in production were 100% strictly superior upgrades like that, then it may well be that the rate of profit has no special reason to decrease over time. but, actually, most technical advances in production tend to increase fixed capital investment and decrease the need for human labor. a more realistic mk.2 might make more coats and with more automation (thereby requiring less human labor per coat) but at greater cost per machine. or, maybe, your mk.1 is the prototype, some plucky engineer notices an obvious design flaw that causes it to degrade twice as fast as it should, the mk. 2 is the fixed version that actually sets the industry standard, and then only the mk.3 can outdo the mk.2 in terms of speed or volume but is unfortunately pricier to build Ferrinus has issued a correction as of 18:21 on May 11, 2024 |
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May 11, 2024 18:19
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dont profitability crises also flow from the fact that ultimately the bulk of goods purchasing must come from the class of people who are paid less in aggregate than the capitalists must charge for those goods in aggregate to achieve profitability, which can only be alleviated by economic growth which is inherently bound by physical limitations of conservation of matter and energy?
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May 11, 2024 18:27
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workers themselves getting too poor to buy the commodities they're making is a problem but not as big as it might look because capitalists are also major customers of other capitalists, possibly bigger ones than workers. i'm not even talking about yachts or whatever here - the entire C in the C + V formula (in which, as we know, C tends to rise and V tends to fall over time) is money that only ever changes hands between capitalists since it represents the literal means of production, famously denied to proletarians as a basic condition of modernity. so even if workers can't afford too many of my knick knacks any more, that won't bother capitalists as a class too much, because the employers of those workers probably need to buy even bigger and more advanced machines that they use to exploit and immiserate those workers among other things this is why social democratic solutions don't really forestall crisis; yeah, it's nice if workers get to take home a little more money but overproduction and weak links in chains of credits and payment hit capitalists as hard or harder anyway
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May 11, 2024 18:34
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Ferrinus posted:people argue about the inevitability of tprf precisely because of the hypothetical possibility of technical advances like your mk.2, which can just crank out twice as many commodities in the same time and for the same cost and with absolutely zero increase in necessary labor or investment or anything. in the real world it represents some kind of massive scientific insight or the correction of a major and heretofore unseen technical flaw. "you're telling me that ALL THIS TIME we could've been making a coat out of the other half of those materials instead of throwing them away?!?!" Would this really help? So now you need half the working hours to produce a coat, but after a period of abnormal profits for some capitalists the value of the coat would just fall, no? So as a capitalist you're exactly where you started, except if you didn't have the cash or credit for the new machines, in which case you'd be dead.
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May 11, 2024 19:08
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genericnick posted:Would this really help? So now you need half the working hours to produce a coat, but after a period of abnormal profits for some capitalists the value of the coat would just fall, no? So as a capitalist you're exactly where you started, except if you didn't have the cash or credit for the new machines, in which case you'd be dead. well, in billsphoenix's existing example, the actual working hours and raw material needed to produce a coat didn't change a whit; the only difference was that the machine involved in the process could fabricate twice as many coat as before without breaking down. this effectively reduced the materials cost of the average coat without reducing its labor cost, so coats were cheaper to make but each individual coat actually contained a higher proportion of surplus labor as compared to paid labor. this is just a pure and unqualified benefit for everyone involved, first for the early-adopter capitalists who enjoy its temporary competitive advantages but ultimately for literally all humans, because capitalists' profits have increased (though to a level below what the early adopters temporarily enjoyed) and workers, who haven't actually seen any extra MONEY, can at least buy coats for cheaper than before. now, if we let time pass a bit and also widen the scope of our simulation, we can expect capitalists to eventually capture all of this benefit for themselves, without even allowing workers to enjoy the perks of paying less of their paycheck when it's time to get a new coat. specifically, coats being cheaper means that the "basket of goods" required for a proletarian to survive is cheaper, which means that workers can live on less, which means that capitalists can (absent political opposition by organized workers) lower wages to a slightly lower level than they were before. since coats remain cheaper, this means workers are back where they started, and capitalists are one percentage point or whatever richer. but, either way, the thing i want to emphasize here is that because billsphoenix described an extremely rare all-upside technical achievement generally associated with the development of entirely new power sources or fabrication techniques or other such technological revolutions, the economic effects are also pretty much all-upside. but the same would be true of like, all disease being banished from the world in a flash of light tomorrow; this would be a real problem for the insurance industry, but it would broadly improve humanity's ability to survive in the physical world and make efficient use of its resources, and, in the current era, lead to an increase in profits
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May 11, 2024 23:48
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stumblebum posted:dont profitability crises also flow from the fact that ultimately the bulk of goods purchasing must come from the class of people who are paid less in aggregate than the capitalists must charge for those goods in aggregate to achieve profitability, which can only be alleviated by economic growth which is inherently bound by physical limitations of conservation of matter and energy? there's another pretty obvious way to solve the particular contradiction you're looking at
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May 12, 2024 00:17
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what's that?
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May 12, 2024 00:25
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ferrinus, rightly, dismissed it as delaying the inevitable, but cutting profits and paying labor better does stand to increase profit over and above the loss taken to increase wages. there's also force redistribution of wealth by the dictatorship of the proletariat which solves the problem in a better and more permanent way
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May 12, 2024 01:03
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BillsPhoenix posted:People did a good job of addressing this, and trying to use their same, unusual definitions to do so. This thread really is cool. I got more. Just seen this guy post again today. SOME GUY posted:The whole “economics is thermodynamics” meme is based on a naïve understanding of manufacturing. Manufacturing is much more than adding energy to raw materials.
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May 12, 2024 12:11
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What
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May 12, 2024 13:31
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It's all 1s and 0s
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May 12, 2024 13:37
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Harold Fjord posted:What LOL, literally my reply. Then I did edit it to ask to expand upon such musings.
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May 12, 2024 13:43
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well gently caress try to eat information how about that
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May 12, 2024 16:28
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It's framed completely stupidly but it sort of halfway understands that efficiency gains are a thing. "But we'll get more efficient" isn't really a counterargument, as we all know. It seems to think we are going to out-efficiency entropy because our lightbulbs are very small and precisely assembled. Lol.
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May 12, 2024 17:06
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if I am getting it right it's a consequence of techno-salvationism (there are variations to it but I am using a pretty generic way to describe that), "assuming a sufficiently powerful processing capability..." etc "but even if you have that much you couldn't solve that" "you don't know that because if there's MORE capacity, it can solve things in ways we can't even conceive" and so it goes
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May 12, 2024 17:22
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It’s “eight billion humans can have a lot of ingenuity we cannot even comprehend” with extra steps. I come across these kinds every now and then on places that talk about resource limits and economic decline. It is very much the other religion (aside from Mammon) which STEM sorts revere because technology, as we all know, is limitless in application. We know this because of semiconductor miniaturisation over the last few decades. Please, don’t look into the efficiency gains in anything else that go against the exponential improvement paradigm.
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May 12, 2024 17:30
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Well, some follow up in case anyone cared. I was hoping he'd go more into his take on Marxist thought.SOME GUY posted:Well we could start from the top: Compare the results we get with what we know is possible. Me posted:I mean, a carrot and a phone are quite different. One has the benefit of literally billions of years of evolutionary tinkering to make it, while the other is through human industry primarily of the last few decades. But you can’t say there are orders of magnitude worth of increases in efficiency to be gained here, even if there are improvements. To go back to another example already mentioned, LED lighting is about the most efficient possible way of producing light electrically we know. There are no orders of magnitude cost savings or boosts in output efficiency we could glean, we’re well into diminishing returns. But the existence of bioluminescence in fireflies and their assumed “cost” of creation does not translate to us missing some big picture that nature sussed out. Nature, for instance, has no wheels or gears and so locomotion is way more inefficient there.
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May 12, 2024 19:26
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The improvements in one very specific and definable sector means the possibilities are infinite and unknowable. "In general, manufacturing tends to improve the more units are produced. These “experience curves” are pretty much universal, suggesting that all manufacturing can be improved. " Let's break this down. "Manufacturing tends to improve the more units are produced. This is an experience curve." Ok. So as units produces goes up, so does improvements, and it's not a lineair relationshop, so probably first improvement accelerates as more units are produced, and then it starts to decelerate and eventually regress towards some value that is the optimal possibility. The only other way to make it a curve is to say the rate of improvement continues to accelerate forever, which I hope I don't have to explain why that's dumb and can't possibly be true. So a curve that eventually flattens out at some value. "Suggesting that all manufacturing can be improved." So this does not follow what was said before. For example, a manufacturing process already at the optimum point can not longer be improved, as all the improvements have already happened. Unless, again, the claim here is infinite possible improvement, on a curve, meaning infinite and infinitely accelerating improvement. Like, the guy can't string two sentences together and make sense. How do you even argue with people like this? Orange Devil has issued a correction as of 19:34 on May 12, 2024 |
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May 12, 2024 19:29
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Orange Devil posted:
Masochism. But actually, curiosity. Genuinely wondering how this mental model applies to the world. From my take, they seem to be hinting that possible improvements are so vast, that even on a declining net energy slope as fossil fuels wind down, industry will find ways to not only not make it an issue, but improve the way of life through whatever they manage. I don’t know why smartphones are always brought up (okay, I do, but…), just maybe it’s not so obvious the last two centuries have more than gotten to the point of marginal gains being all that’s left for capital to exploit. Is someone, somewhere able to make a small EV more efficiently and cheaper than the BYD Seagull?
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May 12, 2024 19:43
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It's completely magical thinking is what it is. Don't worry about all these issues that are currently turning into huge problems which have been foreseeable for decades. It'll be fine. Because magic. It always has this element of faux-humility in it too. "Oh there's so much going on we can't possibly comprehend it". Which is like, no, *you* can't comprehend it. *I* can and it's very bad.
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May 12, 2024 19:44
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A blog I follow by a physics professor at UCLA went into this kind of limitless improvement to handwave away limitations. The kind of things that would offset the headwinds in the pipeline are basically physics breaking. They also can’t seemingly connect that, if these kinds of improvements were possible in how labour performs or technology develops, why is it that we’re seeing industries globally get into ever more convoluted rent seeking to boost profits? The answer is: they don’t exist. No one is leaving that money on a table. To think otherwise is purely to assuage fears that, actually, there is big poo poo going down that might draw attention to how these corporations go conducting themselves. Look at airlines and car companies doing fintech services because they can’t up their profitability or reduce their costs via production improvements or new tech. EVs are a bust already just on cost alone for all but Chinese firms where the resources are readily available to feed into the vertically integrated industry.
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May 12, 2024 19:54
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Skaffen-Amtiskaw posted:Masochism. because of the semipermanence of the intellectual component of productive capacities it's easy to fall into a trap where the intellectual side can be mistakenly separated from the physical labor side. once you do that trick you're free to imagine free energy and limitless growth and whatever other nonsense because you're no longer shackled to the requirements of maintaining the physical. then you end up with a technology fetishism where innovations and technological progress are self generating products of the mind. obviously ignoring that mental work requires a ton of investment in the people possessing the minds and that anything related to technology rests on thousands of years of material development in addition to the thousands of years of built up knowledge. a goon in the gip emergency prep thread summed it up pretty well, knowing how to make a steam engine might be a useful thing in the post collapse world, but you would still need mining and forging and precision measurement stuff to be able to build one. techno optimists would really rather not have to acknowledge that there's a physical historical tether to everything because their miracles can't happen if there is
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May 12, 2024 20:21
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dead gay comedy forums posted:well gently caress try to eat information how about that it's even more painful because information theory in cs is literally a lift from theromdynamics
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May 12, 2024 20:38
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The Voice of Labor posted:because of the semipermanence of the intellectual component of productive capacities it's easy to fall into a trap where the intellectual side can be mistakenly separated from the physical labor side. once you do that trick you're free to imagine free energy and limitless growth and whatever other nonsense because you're no longer shackled to the requirements of maintaining the physical. then you end up with a technology fetishism where innovations and technological progress are self generating products of the mind. obviously ignoring that mental work requires a ton of investment in the people possessing the minds and that anything related to technology rests on thousands of years of material development in addition to the thousands of years of built up knowledge. a goon in the gip emergency prep thread summed it up pretty well, knowing how to make a steam engine might be a useful thing in the post collapse world, but you would still need mining and forging and precision measurement stuff to be able to build one. techno optimists would really rather not have to acknowledge that there's a physical historical tether to everything because their miracles can't happen if there is The exercises in making a pencil or a toaster from scratch spring to mind. It’s one of the best illustrations of how disconnected modernity is from material reality in showing how two very basic consumer products are the output of countless labour hours and processes and resources being applied correctly. The fetishism just manifests these things on a whim when the market needs it. Even the brain trusts of the AI boom must appreciate that their virtual trickery to solve everything is still predicated on a truly massive infrastructure system. I’m fed up of hearing how the cloud and service sector is somehow indicative of deleveraging from impacts on the environment. I guess if you can only imagine a better spreadsheet as a way to make your profits soar next quarter, then the idea that there is something supporting that which can’t be magicked into enabling this advance is most frustrating. It takes on average ten years to setup a new mine after prospecting. And we’re meant to somehow do this on a scale multiple times larger than the already insane levels we have now, simply to allow the Green New Deal to proceed. It’s absolutely doable and definitely not a way of siphoning off money to companies that make out like they’re saving the world AND turning a good profit for the shareholders. If you take it at face value, of course you’re going to think there must be whole new ways of doing everything. I got into this same predicament with someone who got a Quooker tap for their kitchen. When I asked why, they said it’s because it’s far more efficient than a kettle. When I mentioned that the thermal energy to boil water is the same regardless of technology, and that electric kettles are already that efficient, they practically regurgitated marketing spiel from the brochure. People don’t know poo poo about physics and/or the economy. It’s baffling how we’re not already Mad Max right now, guessing it’s coasting on momentum from glories past. Like how Victorians looked forward to London sewer management in the 20th century, whereas today we’d be lucky to even consider ten years hence and keep the project on budget and on time.
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May 12, 2024 20:40
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boiling water out of the tap are you loving crazy yeah boy i hate my skin cant wait to slough it off
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May 12, 2024 21:16
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Brain Candy posted:it's even more painful because information theory in cs is literally a lift from theromdynamics yeah to the point of literally using terms like entropy
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May 12, 2024 21:30
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Skaffen-Amtiskaw posted:People don’t know poo poo about physics and/or the economy. It’s baffling how we’re not already Mad Max right now, guessing it’s coasting on momentum from glories past. physics and the economy aren't load bearing knowledge that the public has to know. just about everything runs on the labor of extremely specialized technicians who don't know anything other than their own field.
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May 12, 2024 21:46
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the people cry out for a cybernetic education
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May 12, 2024 22:18
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| # ? May 23, 2024 07:07 |
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I guess I just wish people would not openly proselytise to a cause they don’t understand and act shocked when the reality is pointed out.
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May 12, 2024 22:21
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