deciplex

> done something grossly incompetent like used floats for those calculations

So, in another life I worked on reporting software for a foreign branch of a US bank. You've heard of the bank. You would probably recognize the CEO's name, in fact.

We had been fucking this up for years. I fixed it. We had some customers who yelled at us because our reports were "wrong" i.e. they were double checking our work and apparently making the same mistake. They could not be reasoned with. Bear in mind, we're talking about differences of pennies, or a few dollars on very large transactions. Some of our customers insisted we were calculating the values incorrectly and demanded we "fix" it.

What do you think happened next? You have one guess.

> on the same device

This is the issue.

At least with revenue share the amount you owe is bounded by the revenue you've realized from sales.

Agree on the first three of your four bullet points. You're kinda missing the point on that last one: if you can correctly identify the value of the labor (again, including capital goods) that go into making a product, then what you have is the minimum value that a product will sell for in the long term. And, importantly, in a free market the price of the good should tend to be around that value. I kind of alluded to it in my previous post but didn't quite spell it out completely I think. Effectively, it is the value at which you get zero profit from the sale.

All else being equal, competitors will not be able to go any lower either (until and unless they gain some technical advantage) without selling at a loss. Exactly as you point out: there are various factors that can reduce that value - Marx points this out as well of course and I think it's sort of meant to be among the main contributions capitalism makes to historical economic development. But, for any interval of time over which there are no major technical advancements in the industry in question, in theory at least (i.e. in a more-or-less "pure" market with rigorous competition) the price of the product on the market will approach the point at which profit is minimized i.e. the value of the labor required to produce the good.

Looked at another way: the real value of capital goods (in an economic sense, anyway) is not in the production they enable, but that they allow for more efficient use of future labor time. If, and only if, the savings a capital good provides in labor time to produce a product, is greater than the value in labor required to produce the capital good in the first place, is it "worthwhile" to produce the capital good and put it to use.

You might hire someone with a sophisticated ditch-digging machine to dig your ditches for you, but would you still do it if you knew that producing that one ditch-digging machine took 500 men working 10-hour days for a month? And it was only good for digging 10 miles of ditches before breaking? Probably not, and the labor theory of value does a good job explaining why, IMO.

All that said, of course that's not at all how our market functions especially nowadays, and there is a Marxist approach to analyzing that as well - but that's out of scope of this thread.

There is the notion of "socially-necessary labor" and the amount of that required to produce a thing does depend on the capital goods available to the people doing the work (that is, the technological sophistication and level of economic development). The expectation is that it will go down the higher the economic development. This can even make things that previously weren't worth doing before, worth doing now, because their value in labor is finally less than their use value.

In principle market forces are supposed to drive down prices, are they not? Absent collusion and corruption, etc., we would expect the price of a good to be very close to the cost to produce it. This is what pro-capitalist, pro-market economists keep telling us, anyway - and that is at least the theory. But that cost to produce it is exactly the capital used in the production plus the labor applied to that capital. But if capital is just the product of labor, then in fact the cost to produce the item - and thus the price I will expect to pay in a competitive market, does in fact correlate quite well with the labor that goes into production.

> An hour of labor can produce wildly different amounts of value with different tasks, skill, materials, and especially capital equipment.

This is what I mean when I say "you should understand the labor theory of value before critiquing it." Capital goods are labor. They represent the accumulated labor required to produce them. If producing something requires a large amount of capital goods, then the labor that went into producing those capital goods is incorporated into the value of the product. You can apply a similar argument to acquired skills, etc.

What about the invention of currency negates it?

There is a distinction drawn in the definition between capital goods and goods in general. This is the classic "can you own a toothbrush in a communist country" argument and the answer is, as it always has been, of course yes.

> Labor theory of value is trivially provable wrong (daily fluctuating prices, loss of value because of introduction of better products, etc.).

I think, at a minimum, you should understand what the Labor Theory of Value is, before claiming that it is trivial to prove it wrong.

I think part of the (perhaps unconscious) resistance to thinking clearly about the floor is that the hiring side (i.e. people who do this every day, rather than once every few years) have a knack for sussing out what that floor is and ensuring that that's what you get and not a penny more.

Maybe there is a kind of madman theory of salary negotiation as well, heh: throw out some numbers, don't think about it too much, randomly blow up the negotiation for any reason, or for no reason, etc.

For my part I just accept that I'll be getting the floor or very close to it.

> the fastest way to turn around a failing company is to search through company e-mail archives, find everyone who has ever used the phrase "add value", and purge them from the company

but you'd purge the entire c-suite if you did that!

Okay explain for us the realistic mechanism by which CO2 conversion technology allows oil companies to not only sell more fossil fuels than they do now, but most importantly does so with a greater ROI than the open bribery that our institutions not only allow for but actually require to function.

Because it sounds to me, speaking of "punchy but not particularly realistic" that you have some idea in your head of how our politics and economics work, that is contrary to even a cursory examination of material reality, and is laughably naive. And I earnestly want to hear it, because I could use a laugh today.

Why spend on tech that might not be a sure thing when bribery has been working for decades?

what is historical fact compared to what my imagination tells me should have happened?

> A fossil fuels company has deep incentive to minimize the harm of fossil fuels.

They have a deep incentive to capture the regulatory framework that might hold them accountable for that harm, which they have accomplished.

I didn't lose any money to SBF, or any other crypto schemes, for what it's worth.

Well, we evaluate them rather differently than the Sackler family, that's for certain.

> Is there some reason the SBFs of the world are "puzzlers" and the hundreds of thousands of other people in prison are just criminals?

There were about 26 billion reasons for that, at one point.

e: to be clear, I am pointing out a fact of how the world works here, not condoning it

> Hell, there's even one case where they tried to sue themselves.

did they win?

I mean, everyone's gotta eat. I think there's plenty of instances of someone building a tool that they personally find useful and then making that tool available for free, unsure of what the reception will be and not expecting a lot of users. But if that something does very well and finds a wide audience I think it's natural to try to earn a living from it. And, if the attempts to "monetize" fail (as they often do) and someone is offering a lot of money in a lump sum to take it off their hands, well frankly I think they'd be foolish not to take it. And if that arrangement happens to turn out poorly for the userbase, well hopefully that will be another small object lesson in paying for things you find useful, when politely asked.

(And yes, I'm aware that's a lesson that really should have been learned by now, if it was going to be learned at all. Alas.)

Seems like a developer that is getting literally nothing for his app or plugin is more likely to sell it than a developer that's getting some income from it. At the least, the buyer would need to match the current value that the app provides its author.

Note that I'm reading 'There's not much middle ground between "try to have some fun at work because there's no reason not to" and "don't do something someone might take issue with",' as a general assertion on your part - now I'm thinking maybe that's not what you meant. In that case some of what I said might not apply.

that said:

> You're saying there are pure non-creepy fun actions for everyone that a business can do.

I didn't say that. I don't think you'll please everyone with team-building exercises and frankly some people find the entire concept distasteful which is fair enough. That doesn't mean that all team-building stuff is equally bad (or, equally good).

In the context of our current work culture, yes I think I agree with that. But I think that's a symptom of how dysfunctional our current work culture is.

edit:

> Can you tell us more?

I literally can't actually, at least not as a reply to you, because dang has once again limited my ability to post on HN. Too many left-leaning folks here already, I guess. Here is what my reply would have been:

> If you're happy with the wholly adversarial relationship between employee and employer along with management practices that pit people against each other etc then more power to you. If you think this results in the best outcomes both in terms of working conditions and also productivity, then go off king. I don't think anything I could say here would convince you otherwise, anyway.

...and now I'll be exiting this conversation as I've been given no other choice - see ya!

You don't see the middle ground between "make no one uncomfortable" and "make everyone uncomfortable?" It seems to me you're viewing this completely in black and white and then insisting that it really is black and white in actual reality, when in fact what you need is a better TV.

(To strain the turn of phrase to its breaking point.)

e: I mean, shit, even in the false dichotomy of "make no one uncomfortable" and "make everyone uncomfortable" there is middle ground: making everyone a little bit uncomfortable vs making everyone extremely uncomfortable.

Completely agree with this, but at the same time there is something deeply dysfunctional about our mercenary attitude toward our work relationships. For any given individual I think they have no choice to approach it this way, but I do hope we eventually land somewhere a little healthier, as a culture.

> There's not much middle ground between "try to have some fun at work because there's no reason not to" and "don't do something someone might take issue with".

What? There is miles of middle ground there.

The CPC has nearly 100 million members. A hundred or so people who followed in the footsteps of their parents who were prominent party members in the past, does not make an "aristocracy." To compare this to a dynasty like the Rockefellers or the Rothschilds or the Astors is just beyond ridiculous.

Again, all you're really saying here is "mass death and misery in the wake of the fall of the USSR was worth it because a handful of criminals got insanely rich" which is exactly the sort of demented take I'd expect from a community bound together by their worship of Mammon, but for those with conscience I must report you're not making a strong argument in favor of the Larry Summers, Shock Therapy approach.

That is not an aristocracy.

> Yes? That number is decreasing, is the point.

This is factually incorrect, or perhaps more generously: out of date. SOE market capitalization as a percentage of the total has been increasing for about two years now, and the CPC has stated their intention that SOEs will play a bigger role in the economy going forward.

> The owners of those public-invested private companies. The state didn't decide to buy a majority stake in company A over company B because company A was meritocratically superior; the state had a personal connection to the ownership of company A.

[Citation needed]