jwmhjwmh

I'm Gen Z and I learned cursive in elementary school. I've forgotten most of it, though.

If you automate everything, how is profit made? Say every firm charges a 5% markup above costs of materials and machine upkeep. A given firm must pay other firms' 5% markups on the materials it needs, making it cheaper for the firm to produce those materials itself. This tends toward complete centralization. There are two ways to fix this. The first is to have an economy based on many monopolies trading resources. This obviously suboptimal for economic calculation. The second way is to adopt a planned economy.

As labor productivity increases, profitability decreases, as historical data shows[1]. In the long term, this problem of capitalism cannot be avoided.

[1]: https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2022/01/22/a-world-ra...

The article is paywalled, so I'm just going by the title, but one thing holding back labor productivity is low wages. When wages are low, labor-saving technology is less likely to be cost-effective. It's funny when Hacker News' innovation-loving capitalists oppose minimum wages, since by doing so they are holding innovation back.

The increasing prevalence of "dead labor" (maybe another term for it is "fixed capital"?) depends on the changing processes of production. An example of the process is the switch from human-powered hoeing to animal-powered ploughing in agriculture (animals count as dead in this case, I guess.) Ploughing is more efficient, but requires more investment.

I think the orthodox Marxist position is that prices gravitate around labor values in a competitive market. The main reason for profit is that people can produce more value than is necessary to sustain themselves, so capitalists don't need to pay them for the all the value they produce. Some of the value produced becomes profit. It is true that the rate of profit falls over time, but I think this is because of increasing automation in the economy, increasing the proportion of dead labor to living labor. Capitalists have less and less living labor to profit from relative to their costs of production.

Specifically, profit made selling goods at their equilibrium price is made by exploiting workers. If you introduce a new good, you will have a monopoly on it for a time, meaning you could turn a profit selling it without exploiting your workers, theoretically. That's my understanding, at least.

Privatizing the police seems like a bad idea. For one thing, it exacerbates inequality between those who can pay for security and those who cannot (or can only pay for inferior service.) If private security becomes the go-to for the well-off, who have a very disproportionate say in society, they will stop caring about universally-provided security of the police, and will let the institution wither, increasing inequality further. Inequality is bad for the cohesion of society.

After many tries, I finished level 12 in one stroke.

It would be nice to be able to skip the starting animation.

> Comparing what Russia is doing in Ukraine to anything the US has done in the last 100 years is an exercise in false equivalence. One so blatant that it defies any attempt to interpret in good faith.

Are you fucking kidding me? Are you completely ignorant of history? What about Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Iraq?

There were two other coups in the years leading up to Sankara's taking power, so I wouldn't say that the country was exactly in a stable state.

I don't think the problem is the lack of training in democracy. I think the problem is the powerful forces opposed to democracy. When he assassinated Sankara, Blaise Compaoré represented the interests of imperialists.

I believe Burkina Faso did very well under Thomas Sankara, whether or not you want to call him a "strongman". He definitely was not aligned with the West. In fact, he had close relations with Cuba.

Apparently a mother was seen applying an insect to her child. I doubt she would purposefully poison her own offspring.

> You can mess around in the garden (overseas) as much as you want, as long as you keep the house clean.

> That’s not fair, but it is consistent.

I guess xanaxagoras was just assuming that the CEO of Namecheap had basic human decency.

Other people who have also taken time to study how the system works will tell you that it is the issue.

Jimmy Carter did some bad stuff too. From his Wikipedia page:

> During Carter's presidency, the U.S. continued to support Indonesia as a cold war ally, in spite of human rights violations in East Timor. The violations followed Indonesia's December 1975 invasion and occupation of East Timor. It did so even though antithetical to Carter's stated policy "of not selling weapons if it would exacerbate a potential conflict in a region of the world."

Very well. Let me just say that any large company involves humans telling other humans what to do, even if the workers work there "voluntarily". Many people have no choice but to work for such companies.

I'm not an economist either. It just seems the business cycle has been a persistent feature of capitalist economies.

> central planning does not fix those deficiencies, it makes them worse

How would the system I'm describing make inequality and the resulting conflict worse?

> you have to count the communication between the nodes as part of the computation.

But surely the nodes themselves must be the ones to perform the physical computation in the end? If the computing power of distributed systems scales exponentially with the number of nodes, why doesn't the computing power of a supercomputer scale exponentially with its number of cores?

> Every time socialism fails, socialist ideologues say it's because it wasn't true socialism.

Don't be ridiculous. There are plenty of countries with much better safety nets than the U.S. The U.S. government is just especially dysfunctional.

> I am not saying that governments never do beneficial things. I am saying that governments, on net, will do worse than a free market would do.

I guess we just disagree about this.

> in many situations there may simply be no way of achieving an optimal result

If you take "optimal result" to mean "best possible result," then there is, by definition, always a way of achieving an optimal result.

You say "a free market does [calculation] fine," but it has obvious deficiencies that I have already remarked upon. As I have said before, the optimization problem can be solved on modern computers without the problems of the market. The inputs and outputs of individual processes are known in a market system, so logically this information can be centrally recorded for use by the planning process. If a production center doesn't produce output at exactly the expected rate, the expected rate can be adjusted.

About computing capacity: Maybe free market capacity scales exponentially (with the number of actors?) but I don't see how it could. If an economy of n actors has a "capacity" of e^n, the average capacity of an actor would be e^n/n, which is about the same as e^n. How could an individual actor have such capacity? Perhaps my analysis here is mistaken.

Regarding government intervention, let's look at an extreme example. Do you think that, during World War II, the U.S. should have structured its wartime economy around free market principles? Did it make things worse by not doing so?

About government planning for the future: First of all, social security gets gutted because the U.S. government is not a government of the people. Business interests have too much control (that is, more than no control at all.) You also say governments are shortsighted because of elections. Even if this is the case, this is not a necessary part of government. The governance model described in the book I linked is based on sortition rather than election. China's current system, while authoritarian, is also able to plan for the future.

It seems you agree that China investing in solar power is beneficial to it, even if you disagree on the reason. So you agree that, all else being equal, it is better for China to have invested in solar power than to not have done so. In this case, this is a clear example of a government acting in the market with a good outcome. This contradicts your previous point.

I'm not sure what you mean by "information channels". Wouldn't a factory mainly just need to communicate its inputs and outputs the computer or computer cluster doing the calculation? Similarly for distribution centers. In particular, would much more information need to be transmitted in a planned economy than in a market economy? Remember that, while there are millions of products in the economy, any given center of production or distribution is unlikely to use more than a few thousand.

I don't think the computation cost scales exponentially. If it did, the decentralized free market computer would not be able to accurately compute the economy. Paul Cockshott claims to have found a planning algorithm with O(n log n) complexity, which is very manageable.

The main problem with free markets is that they lead to extreme inequality and subsequent conflict. A planned economy could distribute the surplus much better.

I disagree that the government should withdraw from the market economy. The government can help alleviate the failures of the market. For one thing, the market is generally short-sighted, while governments can think more long-term. For example, it is my understanding that the Chinese government has invested a lot in solar panel technology and implementation. You would probably agree this is a good thing, given the severity of the climate crisis.

By the way, the following are some of what have informed my opinion here:

- https://www.haerdin.se/blog/2021/06/29/a-critique-of-economi...

- http://users.wfu.edu/cottrell/socialism_book/new_socialism.p...

Yes. However, using modern computing and communication technology, it would be possible to run a complex economy with calculations "in-kind". That is, most calculation could be done using the inputs and outputs of millions of processes. Such an economy could avoid the instability of our current economy with its cyclical booms and busts.

Another win for state economic planning.

The root problem is that this person is struggling to feed their family. If workers had a little more freedom, they wouldn't have to worry so much about finding work ASAP.

The suggestion isn't necessarily moralistic. It's just a way to bring about collective action. In a strike, workers are sacrificing their immediate benefit for greater benefit in the long term. Workers generally win concessions through collective action. It didn't work here because unions in the U.S. are weak. If workers were better organized, they would have stood a better chance. Well organized labor benefits society as a whole; just look at the Nordic countries.

Whoops. I guess that part of the forum is for logged-in users only.

Here's the text:

I've recently been ready about the labor theory of value used in classical and Marxian economics. I haven't studied it very long, but I think it basically has to do with calculating the embodied labor time of commodities. This isn't just the labor time directly put into creating a commodity. It also takes into account the embodied labor time of machines used during production. For example, if a machine has an embodied labor time of 1000 hours and can produce 1000 widgets over its lifetime (a very small amount, but whatever,) each widget's embodied labor time will be 1 hour beyond the labor directly put into its production, accounting for the depletion of the machine.

The Wood Economy

I tried applying the theory to a hypothetical economy in Minetest. This economy involves wooden axes, sticks, wooden plank nodes, and tree trunk nodes. The economy can be represented by a system of equations:

    A = 3W + 2S (An axe contains the embodied labor of 3 wooden plank nodes and 2 sticks)
    S = W/4 (A stick is made from a quarter of a wooden plank node)
    W = T/4 (A wooden plank node is made from a quarter of a tree trunk node)
    T = 1.6 + A/30 (A tree trunk node takes 1.6 seconds of direct labor to break, and a wooden axe has 30 uses, meaning 1/30 is used per tree trunk node)

Solving this system of equations gave me these results:

    A wooden axe has 1.442 seconds of embodied labor time.
    A stick has 0.103 seconds of embodied labor time.
    A wooden plank node has 0.412 seconds of embodied labor time.
    A tree trunk node has 1.648 seconds of embodied labor time.

The Stone Economy

For comparison, I also calculated an economy where stone axes and picks are used. Here is the system of equations:

    P = 3C + 2S (A stone pick takes 3 cobblestone and 2 sticks)
    A = 3C + 2S (Same with the axe)
    C = 1 + P/60 (Mining a cobblestone node takes 1 second and 1/60 of a stone pick)
    S = W/4 (Same as in the previous economy)
    W = T/4 (Same as in the previous economy)
    T = 1.3 + A/60 (Mining a tree trunk node takes 1.3 seconds and 1/60 of a stone axe)

The results are as follows:

    The stone pick and axe both have 3.336 seconds of embodied labor time.
    A cobblestone node has 1.056 seconds of embodied labor time.
    A stick has 0.084 seconds of embodied labor time.
    A wooden plank node has 0.339 seconds of embodied labor time.
    A tree trunk node has 1.356 seconds of embodied labor time.

As you can see from the embodied labor time of the tree trunk node, the more advanced stone economy is more efficient than the wood economy.

Conclusion

These calculations are hypothetical. For accuracy, you would need to measure the input and output of actual activities such as woodcutting. However, my results are still interesting to me.

Please tell me if I've made a mistake in my calculations.

IMO it would make more sense to just treat assignments as expressions, as is done in C-like languages. Maybe I'm just more accustomed to C-like languages, though.

I think that one thing that makes the statement confusing is that the first equals sign serves a purpose completely different from the second equals sign, but both of them are represented by the same character.

I think aliases are only used in interactive shells:

    $ sh -c 'command -v ls'
    /bin/ls

Unions can negotiate more effectively by banding together. For an example, see this article: https://mattbruenig.com/2021/09/20/when-mcdonalds-came-to-de...

> So how did deleting this make YouTube money?

I assume they remove "violent" videos to appease advertisers. In this case, they did not consider the value of the video being removed, instead prioritizing the safety of the content with respect to the advertisers.

An informed and empowered populace is a check against imperialism/colonization. Look at the opposition to the Vietnam war, for example. With the existence of the global internet, it has become much easier for citizens to track what their governments are doing. I think that we can decrease inter-country domination over time by pushing for more democracy and education worldwide.